Somewhat forgotten today--I can only find one other blog post about it on an internet search--As the Earth Turns depicts a year (1932, to be precise) in the life of a Maine farming family. It was a great success in its time, finishing as the #2 best-selling novel in the United States for its year (behind only the previously-written-about-here Anthony Adverse!) and inspiring a film adaptation in the next one. It is of especial interest to me perhaps because it is set about 40 miles from where I live now (the author was born in Rochester, N.H. and lived most of her life just across the river in South Berwick, Maine, on which the town of Derwich in the book is presumably based) as well as a similar distance in the other direction from where I lived in Maine as a teenager. As with most of these IWE books, I liked it better than almost anything else I read, if not quite as enthusiastically as my encyclopedia's editors did. These extolled it as "very fine", said that it "richly deserves its great success" and that its "central character, Jen, is an admirable creation." It is a quiet book about ordinary things in particular lives, but it does evoke well the (somewhat incredibly)lost people and way of life that predominated in much of this part of the world eighty years ago--the childhood of my grandparents--and had not entirely disappeared even thirty years ago. But the reader who cares will get a sense of my thoughts and feelings about this book through the many notes I have taken on it which I must get to now.
p. 61 (keeping up my habit on holding off on note-taking until I start to get a feel for the book): "It was the spell the male on the farm had the power of casting over his women when occasion demanded it. The rooster swelled up, stretched his neck, and crowed, when he had done it. The bull threw back his head and roared." What exactly has been done to the men in our time? The absoluteness of the decline on all fronts cannot be explained as easily or contentedly as people seem to want it to be.
p.86 On a farmhouse restored for a soon-to-be-married couple: "Margaret would go inside the house and keep it, while Ed worked for her in the fields." Strict gender roles and the proper carrying out of them are taken very seriously in this book. Carroll is sympathetic towards those weaker or flightier souls who cannot maintain the necessary focus and energy or who are inclined towards a different kind of life. However those who live most in accordance with the ideal are the most exalted characters.
p.115 "Most people nowadays had no time to search the woods and nobody knew the herbs, which to use or where to find them, but went to drug stores, and likely paid a dollar for nothing half so good to clear the blood as thoroughwort." While accurately, and from Carroll's point of view probably lovingly drawn, I admit I find these unwaveringly hard-working and frugal old Yankees kind of tiresome and humorless.
p.195 "They interest me. I haven't had much chance to get used to people of another race. Come to think of it, until now there's never been anybody but Yankees around here, except the woodchoppers. That's unusual...You know, Jen, I've never even yet seen a negro in my life! Nor a Chinaman nor a Jap!" This is spoken by Olly. He is the educated one, who is in college. This extreme racial (or non-racial) dynamic was still the case here until very recently. Certainly it was that way when I lived in Maine in the 80s and even in the late 90s in New Hampshire seeing a nonwhite person more than once a week was still a rarity. The nonwhite population of these states even now are only around 5%, but that is a substantial increase from 0.2, which is what they were up to about twenty years ago.
p.196 More on this topic of non-Yankee people, referencing an exotic family of Poles that has settled in the neighborhood, the consideration of whom brought up the subject in the first place: "They plowed and planted and drove past the edge of the lane every day. Their baby had the croup and their children went to school with George's and the Forrests and the rest. There was nothing in that to make anybody think of Chinamen and negroes and give himself the shivers."
p. 219. On the patriarch and master Maine farmer of the story: "For Mark Shaw the country outside of Derwich was shut off by hills he could never see over, and the language there was one he could not use; unless the children were at home they were 'away', and more than that, switchboards, airports, colleges, bosses, salaries, courses, he could not grasp; thinking of it bewildered him."
p. 242 Romance, Yankee style: "He liked the sound of her voice. He liked the way her hair shone and her hands moved. He sat watching her. 'One man alone can't get ahead fast, though, on a place like mine that needs so much done to it.' 'Not fast,' Jen agreed."
Jen, who is nineteen and more or less has not stopped working and cooking and keeping the house in perfect order since her mother died when she was ten, is the heroine of the story. She came off to me in the reading as a grim, humorless, judgmental person giving off something of a lesbian vibe, though I really don't think homosexuality among these types of characters would have been on Carroll's radar in the early 1930s. I think we are supposed to think that she cooks and works endlessly out of love or effusive self-expression, but she seems to be more of an inflexible adherent to duty, for whom pleasure independent of that fulfillment does not even exist.
p. 246 Regarding the Polish boy who is determined to stay and make the farm work even when his parents have given it up (and who is in love with Jen): (Mark) "As I see it, it'll show what he is. What he does." (Jen) "Yes. It's a matter for judgment."
Obviously this sort of judgment is still cast now in other forms, but the severity here seems a bit much.
As with Margaret Landon, whom I wrote about around this time last year, when Gladys Hasty Carroll died in York, Maine on April 1, 1999 at the age of 94, I was probably in the vicinity, as that is only about 55 miles or so from here and we go to the beach there at least 3-4 times every summer. I don't know what I did that day, as it was a Thursday, and I was off on Thursdays in those days, but my wife would have had to work, so I was probably home, and I probably spent most of the day writing, as that was before my children were born and that was when I making whatever push I could be said to have made in that area. It is sad, other than the children very little has changed in my personal life since 1999. I was already married then, I lived in the same house and already had the same job that I have now. I have become smarter about some things I am sure but so has everyone else. My expression is not much more incisive or arresting than it was then, and my writing at least has declined a lot.
p. 278 "Jen and her father stood by with pleasant faces, non-committal. They had neither time nor money for a fair, nor wish to mix themselves with crowds and noise and skin-games going on." Continuing the theme that work is the only way to get/earn anything in this life. George, the brother who is inept at running his farm and is forever in debt and various financial distresses who blew off a day of work to spend money he didn't have at the fair, is the forerunner of the helpless modern man so familiar to us.
p.312-313 George again. "As a boy he had once shot a deer and this one triumph teased his memory in the fall until he left everything to try again, though deer were few and his aim not of the best." Times have changed. With regard to the deer population I mean.
The writing gets a bit mawkish at the end.
With all of the emphasis in the book on making sure young people hit their teenage years ready to work and otherwise pull their weight I realized that aside from the setting of the book taking place in a farm community the overall demographic situation, which was that that prevailed in most times and places, required young people to be ready to assume mature roles at young ages with an urgency that simply does not exist today, where most people in their twenties are superfluous to the economy and the organization of society. There are very few people in this book who are much over sixty. Mark Shaw, who is the patriarch and village elder of the book, is identified as being fifty-two. In any event they are outnumbered by a factor of five or six by the under-thirties, as was generally the case in reality, whereas with us there are actually more people alive in the 50-70 age cohorts than in those from 30-50, and about equal to those currently in their 20s. The point being that all the lamenting about young people failing to take on the markers and responsibilities of full blown adults is tied in with there not being any real necessity, and less room, for them to seriously do this given the current distribution of population and economic resources/power among various age groups.
As noted above, this will be our last old American book for at least a little while, as none of the next five items on the list fit this description, though they all look to be pretty short (2 plays and 3 poems), so maybe I'll be back in this genre before the end of the summer. I haven't looked beyond these next five for now.
Last year at this time I was very emotional and probably mildly depressed. For some reason my oldest child's graduating from 8th grade and my oldest daughter's finishing preschool were a very great deal to me. My second son, who has also gone to the school for 8 years, is graduating from it next week, and it does not seem to be arousing the same cathartic emotion in anyone, including me, though I still think of it as a big deal, and it has been as huge a part of his life as it was for his brother. For whatever reason I seem to be calmer and in a better overall frame of mind this year, despite the election and the impending decline/collapse of everything that is supposed to be following upon it.
The Challenge
Once again a very small field despite what I thought was a strong group of keywords. I begin to suspect that the Internets have figured out my scheme.
1. A Douglas Stone--Einstein and the Quantum......................................................78
2. Lisa Miller--The Spiritual Child...........................................................................63
3. John A. Farrell--Richard Nixon: The Life............................................................47
4. Ryan Berg--No House to Call My Home..............................................................20
5. Ben Jonson--Bartholomew Fair.............................................................................5
6. Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery............................................................................4
7. A Violin's Life: Music For the Lipinski Stradivari (record)...................................3
8. Kelsey Neilson--Coolibah Creek...........................................................................2
9. Dario Castello--Sonate: Concertate in Stil Moderno, Libra Primo (record).........2
10. Craig Morrison, PhD--American Popular Music: Rock n' Roll...........................1
Qualifying Round
#10 Morrison over #7 A Violin's Life
A mild upset in that I didn't expect any libraries to carry a copy of the Morrison book. But one did.
#9 Castello over #8 Neilson.
The Castello appears to be a distinguished record.
Quarterfinals
#1 Stone over #10 Morrison
#2 Miller over #9 Castello
#3 Farrell over #6 Mrs Beaton
#5 Jonson over #4 Berg
The surprise here was that Berg couldn't break into any libraries.
Semifinals
#1 Stone over #5 Jonson
Two reasons for this choice, despite the Jonson being much shorter and probably the greater work of literature: In the first place I have already read a lot of things like Jonson, including several works by Johnson himself for this list. Second, one of the main purposes of the creation of the Challenge was to get more popular non-fiction into my routine, and I seem to have been getting away from that as late. In short the Stone is the sort of book I invented this game for.
#2 Miller over #3 Farrell
It came down to 374 pages versus 737.
Championship
#1 Stone over #2 Miller
Stone seems a more likely candidate to hold my interest. A pretty clean tournament this time. The two books in the final were evenly matched in terms of size and publication dates. It is probably a bland generalist of book but I am kind of in the mood for something like that. (addendum--as noted in the monthly update, I am already well into this book, which is not bland nor especially generalist, unless the knowledge of math and physics somewhat above the usual high school level is more widespread than we have been led to believe. I have enjoyed it, though it requires a lot of effort (for me) to try to keep up with the scientific concepts as best as I can, and I am kind of exhausted by it.
The author discusses the book. I should watch it myself.
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