Fannie Hurst--Back Street (1931)

Another American book--it seems like about the fourth or fifth in a row--from that 1900-1940 period that thus far dominates this list. While I do love much of the literature of this period, after this one, I am ready for a little break from it, which it looks like I am going to get (towards of this, perhaps because it coincided with St Patrick's Day, I felt a craving for an Irish novel of the old kind, which sort of thing I have not read in a long time. I don't have any coming up however). Back Street is not a terrible book, and the premise of the story seems to me a good enough one, but it isn't great, it's quite a bit longer than it needs to be, it's depressing, and, compared to the best books of the period, it's rather drab and colorless.

I noted during the Sholem Asch post that the IWE list did not feature a lot of Jewish writers, and many of the ones it did seem to be rather obscure now. As with Gertrude Stein previously, I had not realized that Fannie Hurst was Jewish. Unlike in the Gertrude Stein book, there is an emphasis in Hurst on the distinction and line between Jews and gentiles, though in contrast to the what some might expect, this works decidedly to the advantage of the Jewish characters in her book, who mostly become wealthy and powerful, while the main ethnic German characters mostly stagnate or decline into shabbiness.


The IWE said of Back Street that it was "the only one (of Hurst's novels) that critics have treated as significant literature", though I don't think many do anymore. The only other title by this author that is recognizable even to me is Imitation of Life, which like Back Street, was adapted several times into notable movies, in particular the 1959 Douglas Sirk version (which I have seen recently but have not gotten around to writing up on the other blog yet). It also notes that "Fannie Hurst, born of a Jewish family in St. Louis, wrote Back Street with peculiar (sic) knowledge of the wholly similar German and upper-class Jewish communities of Cincinnati at the turn of the century". Kind of a peculiar sentence.


The first note I took was on page 48, when the young Kurt Shendler, who would later go on to become an automobile tycoon, unsuccessfully attempts to woo the heroine Ray:


"There's not a doubt in my mind that, let alone, you'll go down in the history of this town as one of its first crack business girls. But you're going to quit it and go down in the history of my life instead." The last part of this prophecy did not come to fruition. My comment was "male arrogance even among betas". Shendler's character was a little odd in that even after coming a millionaire many times over he remained fixated on Ray and never seems to have any other love interest, which I think is implausible.


On page 50 I wrote, "(The depiction of) melancholy nostalgia brought about by change is good (well-done). Refers to Ray's life after her father's death and the sale of his business to new ownership. I was experiencing a lot of similar emotions at the time.

I'm not going to gratuitously recount all of the social observations about marginalized groups in these books anymore. We all know what they are. Judging by this and the Imitation of Life movie that I saw alone without consulting her biography, this author was quite progressive for her era, if tame by present standards.


p. 252, a reference to the "One-Hoss Shay", a recent favorite from my reading of Holmes
.
As noted above, another between the wars look at the Midwest, following Lewis, Dreiser, Tarkington, et al, Cincinnati and Youngstown especially making rare appearances in literature, or at least literary-like books such as I read. I feel like this region's former strong presence in the national reading life has become underappreciated.


Note around 2/3rds of the way through: "Pace little slow, repetitive. Depressing, without Tolstoy quality mind to carry book (acknowledging that Anna Karenina or The Death of Ivan Ilych could be considered to be depressing). Lead character ultimately lacks agency of a kind (though she regards Hugo, Freda, etc, as hopeless in this regard).


Since I think this book is no longer well known, the plot involves a beautiful, rather languid young woman who ends up falling in love with and becoming the mistress of the eventual head of a major international bank, giving up everything else in her life. The title comes from the idea that she inhabits the "back streets" of her lover's life. He sets her up in a relatively shabby apartment in New York for example, in contrast with his Park Avenue mansion, and when he brings her to Europe she is relegated to a nondescript pension while the magnate and his family stay in the most lavish hotels. The mistress seems to be comparatively independent and resourceful in most situations apart from the banker but she has barely any ability to protest the most constricting and insensitive decisions he repeatedly makes for her, so it is difficult for me to develop any real feel for what she is supposed to be as a character.

p. 348 "She found herself committing the cardinal sin of wishing the passing of time."


p. 350 "He waved her back to her position on her knees on the floor. 'Stay that way. I like it.'"


Isolated like this it sounds like innuendo, and maybe it is, but in fact they are just talking, and I assume this is meant to illustrate the attitude of Saxel rather than to be titillating.


One area where I did feel the book to resonate a little was in its generational relation to me, especially when I thought Fannie Hurst was born in 1889, as printed in the IWE, though everything on the internet places her in 1885. The difference is not that great, though 1889 would put her right in the middle of the Lost Generation, which corresponds exactly with my birth position (1970) in the middle of the so-called Generation X, and these two generations are of course supposed to be correlated in the cycle. This is a long way of saying that this strikes me as being Generation-X like in its character, being rather gloomy, pessimistic, resigned, not much given to genuine indignation in the way that the neighboring generations on either side seem to be. I still don't think it's a great book, but I can feel the mood that infuses it.


Towards the end after Saxel dies basically from overindulgence in unhealthy food and the now-abandoned Ray is aging: "God this book is depressing." Excerpt from pages 403-4:


"Dentistry had become so terribly expensive...One dentist in Louisville diagnosed her trouble as pyorrhea and advised a period of three months treatment before estimating the amount of salvaging work that might then be done...the price of even the preliminary treatments mounted into the hundreds...At first this was repelling and not to be considered, but after months of the considerable odds and ends of dentists' bills, for just temporary reliefs...she surrendered, and two weeks later, with a temporary 'set' in her mouth, began the long period of attempting to adjust the rigid plates to her healing gums...It was horrible."

I worry about my own situation endlessly, but in this world people in old age are selling off possessions to buy chicken feet and cabbage. Maybe it would not take much to get me there without my wife and family, but I hope I have assembled a capable enough support group to stave off such an ugly fate.


I was unable to find an older hardcover edition of this online that appealed to me, so I ended up reading it in a "Vintage Movie Classics" paperback, which series actually includes a few other books on this list (Alice Adams, Cimarron).


The Challenge


1. John Steinbeck--East of Eden...........................................................1,719
2. Jeffrey Eugenides--The Marriage Plot................................................737
3. The Young Pope (TV show).................................................................525
4. Death Race (movie-2008)....................................................................354
5. Guy de Maupassant--Bel Ami.................................................................53
6. Ken Ham & A. Charles Ware--One Race, One Blood...........................31
7. Dave Donelson--Heart of Diamonds......................................................17
8. Cheryl Mendelson--Love, Work, Children.............................................12
9. Alexandre Dumas--The War of Women...................................................4
10. Thalia Field--Experimental Animals......................................................4
11. Richard Crockatt--Einstein & Twentieth-Century Politics....................1
12. James Bell Pettigrew--Design in Nature, etc.........................................0
13. Litteratura Norteamericana...................................................................0




The field features three IWE list authors (Steinbeck, de Maupassant, and Dumas) with books that did not make the cut for the master list.


1st Round


#13 Litteratura Norteamericana over #4 Death Race
#5 de Maupassant over #12 Pettigrew
#11 Crockatt over #6 Ham & Ware


A lot of Einstein books seem to pop up on this list. I read one of them last year. Ham and Ware appear to be pop Christian writers of some kind. At first glance I would have to say their book is unfortunately titled. Even if they are advancing the idea that we are all one in Jesus, it immediately conjures up images of white supremacists and other undesirable elements.


#10 Field over #7 Donelson


Donelson looks like a dreaded genre book.


#8 Mendelson over #9 Dumas


Mendelson gets an upset.

2nd Round

#1 Steinbeck over #13 Litteratura Norteamericana
#2 Eugenides over #11 Crockatt


The Eugenides here is a Pulitzer Prize winner.


#10 Field over #3 The Young Pope
#5 de Maupassant over #8 Mendelson


Mendelson comes up short in a bid to take down two 19th century titans of French literature back to back.


Final Four


#1 Steinbeck over #10 Field
#5 de Maupassant over #2 Eugenides


I gave Eugenides a chance to go toe to toe here, but de Maupassant's book is older, shorter, and foreign, if we count French classics as foreign, and Eugenides has no upset cards to play so he loses in a good game.


Championship


#1 Steinbeck over #5 de Maupassant


Steinbeck does have an upset card to play, and he needed it here, since East of Eden is even longer than The Marriage Plot. Believe it or not, I have never read Steinbeck before. His most famous books are on all my lists, but none of them have come up yet.

March 2018

A List: Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit..................606/841
B List: Fannie Hurst, Back Street......................286/464
C List: Harry Dolan, Very Bad Men..................332/412


My reading pace slowed a little this month because I was not feeling that great in the early part of it and then I went on vacation, after which I have been feeling much better. I hope it lasts. Also I have been sluggish since I don't really love any of these books. Dickens is one of my all time favorites and Chuzzlewit is good in parts, but I find some of the subplots either hard to follow or not commanding my attention in the manner of his better work. The minds of the authors of genre books, at least that they reveal, just aren't interesting enough to me. Yet whenever you make inquiries into being a professional author it seems like that style of writing is what is pushed on you to try to cultivate. I suppose one cannot learn by practice to write like Tolstoy or Proust, but you would think there would be more interest in encouraging people to try to develop in something like that direction, since the endless repetitions of these genre books is so insubstantial.


On my way back from Florida I stopped off, as I always do, in Annapolis and Philadelphia, my long-ago stomping grounds. For the first time in many years I thought how pleasant it might be for me at least to live in these places again, at least in February and March, which are relatively warmer and more lively. If I ever had the time and were still in good enough health to do so, I might like to come down to Annapolis for a few weeks during the winter and attend some of the lectures and concerts they have at the college and go to the library and so on. It might help combat the annual depression and fixation on my children growing old and my own death. Strangely I don't have a lot of sad nostalgia with regard to my college, perhaps because it doesn't seem to have changed that much since I was there, certainly compared with just about everything else. Being back there usually makes me feel happier and more optimistic than is usual with me. I was very happy to be back in Philadelphia as well. Since my mother sold her house a few years back and moved into an apartment we have largely stopped going down as there is nowhere for all of us to stay anymore for more than a single night. It seems a great deal must have changed there but almost all of the people I grew up with are still around, albeit they are getting ever older, though the older people still seem to get on fine. The younger generations, the under 40s, who I don't know as well, seem to have more problems, but that may be a matter of perception and the circumstance that the consequences of anything bad that happens today seem to be so exaggerated. Certainly my 50 and 60 something relatives partook of behaviors in the 1970s that would be considered alarming now to say the least, yet they were permitted to recover and progress in their lives...

Sinclair Lewis--Babbitt (1922)

It seems to have just gotten harder to steal pictures.

From the IWE's introductory comments:

"Main Street was Sinclair Lewis's first and biggest success on the subject of small-town quasi-culture, but Babbitt, which came two years later, was a better book on the same subject. If it is not Lewis's best novel (a rank that is usually accorded to Arrowsmith or Dodsworth), it is not far from it."

I haven't read Main Street (which is also on this program) since I was in high school and I haven't any sense at this point how it compares to Babbitt (or whether it even matters anymore), but I did just read Arrowsmith and wrote about it here within the last year, and while that did strike me as the more accomplished book from the literary standpoint, there was, somewhat to my surprise, much in Babbitt that I found poignant--the trip to Maine with Paul, especially the poker, and then the return trip the next year without him got to me the most, but there were numerous episodes that struck deeper than I would have expected them to throughout the book. While Babbitt's personality and business-oriented outlook on life are decidedly unlike mine, he is the same age that I am or have recently been--46, 47, 48--and a lot of the impulses and disaffections he has upon reaching this stage of life ring true to me (Lewis himself was only 36-37 when this was published). I didn't make as many notes as I wish I had now, in part because I was quite engaged by it, in other part because I have been really more than usually depressed this winter, and while these old books are often a great comfort to me in such times, I still didn't have much energy for writing thoughts down. While certainly Lewis would never have intended his novel to induce nostalgia, it ends up having something of that effect, to me at least, because the world of 1920s America still retains some vividness for me. I suspect even such sense as I have for it must be increasingly lost to younger people though.

I'm tempted to write more about my depression, but I might do something that alludes to it on the other blog after I finish this.

I made my first note on page 164, a sentence about a civic convention that I found funny:

"The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch...informed God that the real-estate men were here now."



This was set in, if not the absolute heyday of train travel, still a dynamic period for it. The description of the brand new station at Zenith is clearly intended to be satirical, but from the vantage point of our own era of transportation it sounds rather nice:

"It was a new and enormous waiting-room, with marble pilasters, and frescoes depicting the exploration of the Chaloosa River Valley by Pere Emile Fauthoux in 1740. The benches were shelves of ponderous mahogany; the news-stand a marble kiosk with a brass grill."

There is a suggestive undertone throughout the book as well that electricity, plumbing, appliances and other modern wonders are perhaps not appropriate for the masses, as of course most middle-aged people at least in 1922 would have grown up without them. When this novel first came out and for the fifty-sixty years afterwards when it enjoyed some fame, it was primary noted for its satire, but that is now the most dated, heavy-handed aspect of it. It has other, much more subtle, redeeming qualities though.

Prohibition made forty-five year olds have to act surreptitiously like teenagers. This is at the hotel at the realtors' convention:

"At half-past seven they sat in their room, with Elbert Wing and two up-state delegates. Their coats were off, their vests open, their faces red, their voices emphatic. They were finishing a bottle of corrosive bootlegged whisky and imploring the bell-boy, 'Say, son, can you get us some more of this embalming fluid?'"

The quest for illicit booze did make some of the forty-something women more festive though than perhaps they would otherwise have been inclined to be.

I didn't note what page I was on, but at one point I wrote, 'Still interesting, but hard to see where book is going between Paul (spoiler alert--Paul goes to jail for shooting his wife, non-fatally), Babbitt's midlife crisis, return to Maine, etc. Never clear why Babbitt loves Paul so much, more seemingly even than his own family.'

p. 339 "Their life was dominated by the suburban bacchanalia of alcohol, nicotine, gasoline, and kisses."

I liked this sentence.

p. 391 I'm not really in the right frame of mind to make political pronouncements, but I thought this sentence about The Good Citizens' League, accepting a membership in which marks the end of Babbitt's identity crisis and his firm return to sound business principles and all the rest of it, was too obviously pertinent to the present not to recognize it:

"All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary."

Absolute equality of wealth will obviously always be problematic given the different natures of people, especially in large societies, though perhaps there could be somewhat more of it than there is at present. And there doesn't seem to be much danger nowadays of the working classes forming any kind of a threat to the established order, so that keeping them in their place is not as much of a labor-intensive-task as it may once have been, but the gist is familiar.  



I have not elaborated much on what I think it is that this book gets right that makes it as affecting to me as it was, but I think it is the way that one's life (often) feels as it is becoming stalled in the 40s, especially the late 40s, when I think it really hits you that if you aren't declining already, or at least not too much, that that might start accelerating noticeably at any time. In some ways of course I stopped going forward a long time ago, but the continuous adding of children over the years kind of masked that and gave me a sense, certainly that I was still relatively young and had a long future ahead of me, but that my experience, life force, or whatever, was still expanding. But all of a sudden I feel disturbingly old and vulnerable, and I'm wondering what I was thinking having another baby at age 45, as beautiful and delightful an addition to the human community as she is. I feel like I'll be lucky to see her get her through high school and college, and making it to her 30th birthday seems like a longshot. For that matter I could really go at almost any time. I know that was always the case but up until two months ago I had no real consciousness of that, it was not real to me. Anyway, a lot of the better part of this book is about this creeping sense of the genuine futility of one's existence and how to keep moving forward. Paul of course was pointedly unable to do this.

No uploadable pictures of the book anywhere. I'll have to get my own camera working again.

For a relatively famous book there aren't a lot of attractive editions of it available on the market. There was an evidently limited run Modern Library edition in the 50s but I couldn't find any copies of this online. There was one advertised that I tried to order but I was sent a 1960s era Signet paperback or something like it instead. I ended up getting a bland gray Harcourt Brace edition from the 50s which matches my copy of Main Street.

The Challenge

1. Rebecca Skloot--The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks..............................5,819

2. Kate Turabian--A Manual For Writers of Research Papers, Theses, etc.......752

3. Ruth Rendell--The Girl Next Door.................................................................423

4. Gloria Steinem--Marilyn................................................................................231

5. The Reverend William J. Barber II--The Third Reconstruction.....................110

6. Praxis II Middle Scholl English Language Arts...............................................44

7. Natalie Babbitt--The Eyes of the Amaryllis......................................................33

8. The Wise Owl Guide to...(DSST): Here's to Our Health..................................12

9. DSST Principles of Statistics Exam....................................................................9

10. Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats (eds. McIntyre & Nette)............3

11. Victor Hugo--William Shakespeare..................................................................0

12. Isabel Burton--The Life of Captain Sir Richard Burton....................................0

Once again a complete field of 16 eludes us. The top four seeds--all women, incidentally--receive first round byes.

1st Round

#5 Barber over #12 Burton

While Sir Richard Burton is an interesting subject, the 1893 biography of him by his wife doesn't seem to have earned a reprint anytime in the last 100 years and no one carries a copy of it.

#11 Hugo over #6 Praxis

#7 Babbitt over #10 Girl Gangs, etc

The Girl Gangs book, the subtitle of which is Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture 1950-1980 looks somewhat interesting, but no one has it.

#8 Wise Owl Guide over #9 DSST Principles

Round of 8

#11 Hugo over #1 Skloot

The Hugo book is only available in a couple of academic libraries, but they do have it. As I am currently weary of the kinds of contemporary writers that my game keeps turning up, the 19th century European giant had a decided psychological advantage.

#2 Turabian over #8 Wise Owl Guide

#7 Babbitt over #3 Rendell

Rendell is a straight genre book. I'm not exactly sure what this Babbitt is, but it looks like it might be more soulful. It's also older, dating I believe from 1977.

#4 Steinem over #5 Barber

Kind of a toss-up that the higher seed wins by a hair.

Final Four

#11 Hugo over #2 Turabian

#4 Steinem over #7 Babbitt

The Steinem would probably be something different and more interesting. A ho-hum final four.

Championship

#4 Steinem over #11 Hugo

The Steinem book is in my library, and it's also pretty short. I might have been inclined to go with Hugo anyway because my intellect is in such decay, but I will give this a try.



Author List Volume XIII

Eric Knight (1897-1943) Lassie Come-Home (1940) Born: Menston, Yorkshire, England (plaque at village library). Buried: Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, Lemay, Missouri.








John C. Winston (1856-1920) Born: Darlington, Indiana. Buried: d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1920. College: Haverford.




Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) Born: 31 Baker Street, Marylebone, London, England. Pompeii, Campania, Italy. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England. College: Trinity Hall (Cambridge)


James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) The Last of the Mohicans (1826) Born: 457 High Street, Burlington, New Jersey. (*****(7-16-02)***** Buried: Christ Episcopal Churchyard, Cooperstown, Otsego, New York.  Fenimore Art Museum, 5798 NY-80, Cooperstown, Otsego, New York. Farmer's Museum, Lake Road, Cooperstown, Otsego, New York. College: Yale


John Phillips Marquand (1893-1960) The Late George Apley (1937) Born: Wilmington, Delaware. Buried: Sawyer Hill Burying Ground, Newburyport, Essex, Massachusetts. College: Harvard


Victor Hugo (1802-1885) Notre Dame de Paris (1831), Les Miserables (1862) Born: Besancon, Franche-Comte, France. Buried: Pantheon, 5eme, Paris, France. Maison de Victor Hugo, 6 Place des Vosges, 4eme, Paris, France. Hautville House, 38 Rue Hautville, St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands, England. Musee Litteraire Victor Hugo, 37 Rue de la Gare, Vianden, Luxembourg.


Napoleon III (1808-1873) Born: 17 Rue Lafitte, 9eme, Paris, France Buried: St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, England. Napoleon III Apartment, Musee du Louvre, 1ere, Paris, France. Chateau de Pierrefonds, Pierrefonds, Picardie, France.


Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Leviathan (1651) Born: Westport, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England.  Buried: St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall, Derbyshire, England. College: Magdalen Hall (now Hertford) (Oxford).


Clarence Day, Jr (1874-1935) Life With Father (1935) Born: New York, New York. Buried: Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York. College: Yale.


Clarence Day, Sr (1844-1927) Born: New York, New York. Buried: Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.


Russel Crouse (1893-1966) Born: Findlay, Ohio. d. New York, New York. ashes scattered (?)


Howard Lindsay (1889-1968) Born: Waterford, Saratoga, New York. College: Harvard










Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952) Liliom (1909) Born: Jozsef Boulevard 83 (?), Budapest, Hungary. Buried: Linden Hill Methodist Cemetery, Ridgewood, Queens, New York. Paul Street Boys Monument, Prater Utca 11, Budapest, Hungary.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) Born: 141 York Street, Cheetham, Manchester, Lancashire, England. Buried: Roslyn Cemetery, Greenvale, Nassau, New York.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) Little Women (1868) Born: 5427 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Buried: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts. Orchard House, 399 Lexington Road, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) Look Homeward, Angel (1929) Born: 92 Woodfin Street, Asheville, North Carolina. Buried: Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina. Thomas Wolfe Memorial, 52 N Market Street, Asheville, North Carolina. College: North Carolina

Max Perkins (1884-1947) Born: New York, New York. Buried: Lakeview Cemetery, New Canaan, Connecticut. Snapdragon Inn, 26 Main Street, Windsor, Vermont. College: Harvard

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) Looking Backward (1888) Born: Chicopee, Hampden, Massachusetts. Buried: Fairview Cemetery, Chicopee, Hampden, Massachusetts. Edward Bellamy House, 91-93 Church Street, Chicopee, Hampden, Massachusetts. The Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California. College: Union.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) The N----- of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900) Born: Berdychiv, Ukraine. Buried: Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, Kent, England. Museum of Joseph Conrad, Voikova Street, Berdychiv, Ukraine. "Joseph Conrad" (ship), Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut.

R. D. Blackmore (1825-1900) Lorna Doone (1869) Born: Old Rectory, Longworth, Oxfordshire, England. Buried: Teddington Cemetery, Teddington, Middlesex (London), England. Doone Valley, Exmoor National Park, Somerset, England. College: Exeter (Oxford)

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) Born and Buried: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 4079 Albany Post Road, Hyde Park, Dutchess, New York. (This is quite a complex, including 3 houses, the library, grounds, etc.  Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, 1850 West Basin Drive SW, Washington, District of Columbia. Franklin D Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island, New York, New York. Franklin D. Roosevelt Boardwalk and Beach, Staten Island, Richmond, New York. College: Harvard.

Macbeth (1005-1057) Buried: St Oran's Cemetery, Iona, Argyll and Bute, Scotland.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) Madame Bovary (1857) Born: Musee Flaubert et d'Histoire de la Medecine, 51 Rue de Lecat, Rouen, Normandie, France (*****6-26-99*****) Buried: Rouen Cemetery, Rouen, Normandie, France (*****6-26-99*****) Pont Gustave Flaubert, Rouen, Normandie, France.

Charlotte Underwood (1914-1978)

Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) Born: Rue Brauhauban, Tarbes, Guyenne & Gascony, France. Buried: Cimitiere de Montmarte, 18eme, Paris, Ile, France.

Frans Sillanpaa (1888-1964) The Maid Silja (1931) Born: Hameenkyro, Finland. Buried: Hameenkyro Vanha Hautausmaa, Hameenkyro, Finland. College: Helsinki. 

Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) The Maid's Tragedy (1610) Born: Manor House, Grace-Dieu, Thringstone, Leicestershire, England. Buried: Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England. College: Pembroke (Oxford)

John Fletcher (1579-1625) The Maid's Tragedy (1610) Born: Ancient Rectory, Rye, Sussex, England. Buried: Southwark Cathedral, Southwark, London, England. College: Corpus Christi (Cambridge)

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) Born: Baltimore, Maryland. Buried: Loudon Park Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland. H. L. Mencken House, 1524 Rollins Street, Baltimore, Maryland (not currently open).

Charles Laughton (1899-1962) Born: The Victoria Hotel, Westborough, Scarborough, Yorkshire, England. Buried: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California.

Agnes Moorehead (1900-1974) Born: Clinton, Worcester, Massachusetts. Buried: Dayton Memorial Park, Dayton, Ohio. College: Muskingum.

Sir Cedric Hardwicke (1893-1964) Born: Lye, Worcestershire, England. Buried: Golders Green Crematorium, Golders Green, London, England. College: Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Charles Boyer (1899-1978) Born: Figeac, Lot, Quercy, France. Buried: Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, Los Angeles, California. Kasbah des Oudaias, Rabat, Morocco. College: Sorbonne

Tyrone Power (1914-1958) Born: Cincinnati, Ohio. Buried: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.

                                                                                                                                                   





February 2018

A List: Dickens--Martin Chuzzlewit.................................420/841
B List: Between books
C List: Harry Dolan--Very Bad Men.................................178/412


Going kind of leisurely through Martin Chuzzlewit. Parts of it I like, they are more or less characteristic Dickens in their humor, romance, high-spiritedness and so on, but then there are other parts--namely those with the undertaker and Mrs Gamp and that scene--that aren't making much of an impression on me. This is also on the IWE list, albeit probably 20 years away. Not so clear anymore that I'm going to make it that long. Nonetheless I expect to read it again and more closely, so I am getting what I can out of this reading and not sweating over it too much.


Harry Dolan is a writer in the crime genre. His books are praised, but I don't know if I'm going to finish this one. This kind of writing is too lacking in any sort of distinct or interesting voice for me. There's no kick to it, no poignancy, no absorption in the story. I don't think there will be too many more books of this kind anyway.


It's been a tough winter. After going through a period last year where I feel like I was happy, I have had a lot of anxiety because of that stupid kidney stone. I'm embarrassed to say that even though I am over it and feel fine, I am convinced that now that something has happened to me, the floodgates must be open and I am going to be imminently overwhelmed with medical problems that will prevent me from ever living my old normal life again. I am avoiding any further medical attention now that the immediate crisis has passed, because if you let them look hard enough they will convince you there is something wrong with you. I imagine now that I was impossibly happy my whole life before all of this happened (which obviously is not true) and that I will never be able to be happy again (which may be true). If I can hang on for 2 and a half weeks I am going to go to Florida, which is a trip I need desperately, as I haven't even been farther than Massachusetts since this time last year, and I've never gone this long without taking some road trip since I moved up here. I am counting a lot on this trip to restore me somewhat to feeling like my old self again, which probably is unrealistic, but maybe it will once I get there. There are still people older than me who are very active and travel and do all kinds of things. There should be hope.

  

Henry James--The Awkward Age (1899)

The literary editors of the Illustrated World Encyclopedia write in their introduction to this book that "To the student of the novel almost no novel can be more important than The Awkward Age." This book is widely considered to belong to the transitional phase of James's later career that culminated in the three final masterpieces of the first half-decade of the twentieth century, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. It seems to me after reading it that it can be characterized pretty safely with this group, all of which I have at least read through, with varying degrees of success, The Golden Bowl being the one I would consider to have been the most satisfactory experience, in that it is the one I found the least wearying to get through. Given my longtime aspirations to be acceptably well-versed in literature above any other area of study, these great late Henry James novels have always been something of an obstacle to my satisfaction on this point. I have been convinced by enough of those Who Really Know of the importance, masterful construction, and, perhaps rarest of all, the highly satisfying mature intelligence at work in them, that to not be fully immersed in the experience of all of these qualities in the course of one's reading is to be dogged by a persistent sense of failure that one is ultimately unable to overcome. It is like keeping up in a difficult course at school. The determination may be there at the beginning and the persistence may not flag entirely, but once you lose the thread in any part there is no keeping up and it is impossible to fully rejoin the pursuit with any degree of mastery because everything significant in the story is dependent on and follows precisely from the various difficult and opaque scenes that have accumulated before it.

Keeping in mind that James's high seriousness and maturity are the qualities his fans admire above all, I nonetheless felt compelled to make a note that this was an actual paragraph in the book (p.91):


"The old man had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of sitting down again. Mr Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his lips a kind of ejaculation--'I say!'"


p. 96 Another classic Henry James sentence:


"Poor Mitchy's face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda's were not heedful of it."


The prominent blogger Tyler Cowen once opined that Dostoevsky had become tiresome to read in our time because his concerns were not our concerns (though I don't think I personally qualify as part of the collective "our" referenced here). I often find myself having to ask "Are Henry James's?"


p. 173 On the salon-like atmosphere at Mrs Brookenham's:


"The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house--and heaven knows they're right--with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. Most English talk is like a quadrille in a sentry box. You'll tell me we go further in Italy, and I won't deny it, but in Italy we have the common-sense not to have little girls in the room."


It certainly seems as if our time is suffering for a lack of "intellectual elbow-room".


p. 281 "The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little "Oh!" by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could afterwards in the least have named. Neither would have endeavoured to fix an indecency of which each doubtless had been but too capable."


My comment on the above passage: "Subtle, oh yes, but at some point you wouldn't mind seeing a neutron bomb detonated in the middle of these people."


p. 309 "Edward's gloom on this was not yet blankness, yet it was dense."


I am groaning at this point.

As I have mentioned somewhere in these blogs, I was afflicted by a kidney stone around the middle of this book, and the accompanying abdominal pain made it impossible to read for several days until I was put on some opioid pain medicine, which I actually found to be a great aid to concentration on the book during the days I was on it leading up to my operation. I don't know what it says for Henry James however that the optimal conditions for enjoying his later work in the 21st century may be to be hopped up on painkillers and largely confined to bed for the better part of a week.


I have not generally found editions of most Henry James novels from my preferred 1920-1970 period to be especially thrilling, so I opted to go with a fairly recent (1993) reprint from the Everyman series. This included a 25 page introduction by Cynthia Ozick which I read about a page of before determining that I was not going to find it helpful to understanding the book any more than I actually did.


By completing this I have now come to the end of the literary classics selection for volume 2 of the encyclopedia, as well as finally coming to the end of the "A" titles. It took slightly more than four years to accomplish this, though the "As" do represent about 10% of the entire list. I am still on pace to not finish the entire list until I am 83 however, so eventually I am going to have to pick it up a little. I believe once my children are older--I still have a two year old at the moment--that I will be able to do that.

The Challenge


1. Joe Hill--Twentieth Century Ghosts...........................................................474
2. Father Jonathan Morris--The Promise........................................................146
3. Michelle Paige Holmes--Yesterday's Promise...........................................116
4. Arthur Conan Doyle--The Return of Sherlock Holmes................................88
5. Petra ten-doesschate Chu--Nineteenth Century European Art....................28
6. Steven Levingston--Kennedy and King.......................................................26
7. Elizabeth Bowen--The Hotel.........................................................................7
8. Henry C Dethloff & John A. Adams--Texas Aggies Go to War...................1
9. Genderuwo (movie).......................................................................................0
10. Eric Harrison & Kendall Johnson--Critical Companion to Henry James...0
11. Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer (ed. Harding).....................0
12. Miss Desirable--A Little Bit of Taani...........................................................0


1st Round


#5 Chu over #12 Desirable


I'm not sure if Desirable is an actual book or not.


#6 Levingston over #11 Henry James's Europe
#7 Bowen over #10 Harrison and Johnson


It's tough to earn a win coming in with 0 points against any kind of remotely serious book.


#9 Genderuwo over #8 Dethloff and Adams


Genderuwo is a 2007 Indonesian film that is all accounts quite dismal, but it has an upset on reserve in its account for this tournament.

Final 8


#1 Hill over #9 Genderuwo
#7 Bowen over #2 Morris


Father Morris is a regular contributor to Fox News, mainly as an authority on religious matters. He is also a campus minister at Columbia University, for what it's worth. Bowen's book, though not exceptionally well known, at least in this country, seems to be considered to have literary value. A handsome edition of it was published by the University of Chicago press in 2012.


#3 Holmes over #6 Levingston


None of Holmes's books are carried by any libraries, presumably because she is a romance novelist. But she had an upset coming in the tournament.


#4 Doyle over #5 Chu


The literary blue blood Doyle prevails over the game art expert in a well-played match.


Final Four


#1 Hill over #7 Bowen


The 45 year old author Joe Hill, a native of Bangor, Maine, seems to be the relatively incognito son of mega best-selling author Stephen King. My inclination would have been to favor Bowen's neglected-but-in-some-quarters-respected novel here but those designated upsets come into play.


#4 Doyle over #3 Holmes


Amusing coincidence in the name of Doyle's opponent.


Championship


#1 Hill over #4 Doyle


In overtime. Doyle does have at least two books on the official list, The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet, so he will not be neglected. The main purpose of the whole "C" list being to expose myself to more contemporary or neglected literature and authors where plausible, Hill seems plausible enough to get the victory here.

January 2018

A List: Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.............................157/841
B List: Between books at present
C List: Knausgaard, Volume 4..................................................464/502


Still trying to finish a report for the B list.


This is a new Dickens for me, and so far it seems to me a worthy enough addition to his oeuvre. The humor and the ingenious hyperbolic sentences and descriptions are as prominent and entertaining as ever. I don't know whether it is because I am too distracted when I read these A-list books or not but I am having a little trouble getting immersed enough to keep the thread of the plot and the various relationships and romantic interests straight. This may also be the reason however why this particular book is not usually considered with the top rank of Dickens's novels, as it otherwise shares what I usually find to be their best characteristics.


When I was reading the Henry James that absorbed so much of my mental energy I largely put Knausgaard aside for several weeks. However on picking him up again in the interval between B books I have been able to come near to finishing it pretty quickly. My opinion on him is consistent with what I have written elsewhere. He is interesting enough and smart enough that I keep reading him, obviously, though the action is really quite commonplace and doesn't lead to anything Important or mind-changing, which I suppose is what we are supposed to be looking for. This volume centers on Knausgaard's teenage years, and at 18 he has still not successfully completed coitus with a woman, but he has been in bed naked with a lot of women, five or six at least, and made out with several more. He was definitely part of the sensual world with opportunities bursting upon him at seemingly every turn. (I was not. I was not. I was not. I was not. I was not. I wa.........)


I probably won't be getting to volume 5 for a while now, as I have 3 C-list books waiting in the queue, plus I got a modern book for Christmas that I intend to try to read in the Knausgaard spot, i.e., when I come to a point where I have finished a C-list book without the next one lined up.


Pictures?

Out of time this month.