B List: Ellen Glasgow--Barren Ground....................................................168/526
C List: H. R. Ellis-Davidson--Gods and Myths of Northern Europe........194/251
New books this month. Time Must Have a Stop was published in 1944, but it is set, thus far at least, in the 20s. I don't have a great sense yet of what it is about, but it features clever, eccentric characters of a certain epoch of English history who have enviable literary educations, so I appreciate that. The big drama in the book at the moment concerns a teenage boy who is unsuccessfully lobbying his brilliant but inattentive father to get him some evening clothes. Just before this I read two noteworthy short stories for the "A" list, "The Bulgarian Poetess" by Updike, which at one time at least was one of his more celebrated and most frequently anthologized stories, and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", by the incomparable Flannery O'Connor. Updike reminds me of Graham Greene in the sense that he turned out a prodigious volume of professional writing over decades that seems as a rule to be worth reading for its own sake and contains its own interest almost independent of its subject matter. The premise of "The Bulgarian Poetess", in which an American writer briefly meets and is enchanted by the poet of the title at a conference behind the Iron Curtain to promote cultural understanding, which causes him to lament that they are not free to become better acquainted, seems rather quaint today, and is growing quainter by the hour, even though this was the world I grew up in until I was 19. Flannery O'Connor is one of the best writers of dialogue I have ever come across. It is artificial in the sense that almost no one ever talks like her characters do, or is capable of doing so, but the thoughts and conversations of those characters strikes one as what conversation, or writing, could attain if their practitioners always knew exactly what they wanted to say and what their purpose was in saying it. This is really one of the core principles of what literature is and why it is actually important, but I at least tend to lose sight of that.
I was looking forward to the Ellis-Davidson book, which is from 1964, a period whose scholarship in and interpretation of the humanities I have tended to trust for most of my life, though as that era grows ever more remote in time I am more able I think to see where their blind spots were at least even if I cannot wholly buy in yet to the more brashly asserted new developments and interpretations, where these exist. The book is in large part a survey in the style of Edith Hamilton, but less entertaining to read, drier, more academic, etc. I tend to doze off after 4 or 5 pages when I am reading it even though it is not uninteresting. I have largely given up trying to read late at night now because I can't stay awake, so this is happening in the afternoon. I don't fall asleep reading everything (yet), and I find that a good literary prose style is still able to engage me and keep me alert. But I suspect any denser philosophers and novelists are going to increasingly be a challenge for me.
I had been feeling healthier and somewhat more cautiously optimistic lately as the new school year started but I am a little off tonight.
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