Thornton Wilder--The Cabala (1926)

While other young American writers and artists famously descended upon Paris in the years immediately following World War I, their Lost Generation contemporary Thornton Wilder (though I guess he later went to Paris too) spent a postwar year abroad in Rome (1920-21, pre-Mussolini), which had its own less celebrated scene of artistic people, expats, idle rich and fallen aristocrats, with the addition of high ranking officials of the Catholic church thrown into the pot. This became the setting for Wilder's first novel, The Cabala, which was well enough received at the time, and the IWE thought it important enough forty years later to include it in their list. It's short, it isn't a chore to read, it's not stupid, and some of the description of Roman expat life is interesting enough, but compared to the books by the other young men of the time whose fame have been more lasting, it is a bit starchy and overall lacking in the vim and literary bravado that most great writers, particularly when they are young men, display. Wilder was revealed after his death to have been (probably) a homosexual, which had not been publicly known when he was alive, and yes, his book does feel almost unnaturally buttoned up and repressed for an author who was still in his 20s at the time of publication. The episodes are rather slight, conveyed entirely through description, little is fleshed out in the way of character via dialogue or intimate scenes. Also the book strains to hard to seem sophisticated and knowing, to seem at home in and win approval from that world. It's a mistake--this is where the contrast with Hemingway, who debuted around the same time and writing about an analogous situation, really is vivid--the reader doesn't care, he doesn't care about the milieu without good writing and characters, and we don't have the latter and not enough of the former. But this is just criticism, I don't personally dislike the book, though I do wish it could have been better, and I can't in good faith recommend it to anybody who has other things in their life to do. But if you were trapped somewhere for a period of months with no internet and no other reading material but five or ten books, and this was one of them, it would be perfectly fine, and you might even appreciate it more than it is possible to do in our current environment. 

A few excerpts, to give a flavor of the story:

p. 13, description of the Cabala: "Each one of them has some prodigious gift, and together they're miles above the next social stratum below them. They're so wonderful that they're lonely...They sit off there in Tivoli getting what comfort they can from one another's excellence." 

p. 18 "The Spanish Ambassador and his wife wondered how on earth America could get on without a system of titles whereby one might unerrably recognize one's own people."

It's been a problem for me. 

p. 47 "He was hungry for hearing things praised."

I am somewhat like this, if it is sincere of course. Lately I feel like people have a tendency to fall over themselves praising things for political reasons or because they otherwise feel they are supposed to, not because they are genuinely moved. I hope I am not like that. I actually don't get really excited by that many things.

pp. 59-60 "Now listen: I have a son of sixteen. He is important because he is somebody. How you say?--he is a personage. We are of a very old house. Our family has been in the front of Italy, everyone in her triumph and in her trouble. You are not sympathetic to that kind of greatness in America, not?"

At the time I read this passage I was either finishing up or had just finished up Rob Roy, and the masculine energy and self confidence of (Sir) Walter Scott's writing in contrast to the strained attempts at erudition and sophistication which are predominant here probably cast this book in a more unfavorable light for me than I might have found it on another occasion.

p. 138 "She had met the Princess d'Espoli once and had ever since taken her as the type of person she would herself have been if she had been better-looking, thinner and had had more time to read."  

Why do these socially elite and supposedly brilliant Europeans want to hang out with the narrator, a young American is not especially interesting or appealing? That is never really explained or made clear in the book. Also do people--especially young people--do things like stay at palaces in the Roman countryside and spend the days roaming freely around the grounds anymore? They probably do, though you don't read much about this sort of thing anymore. 

p.177 "I have told you before, Samuele...that the hope of my life is to see a king reigning in France. How impossible such a thing seems now! No one knows it better than I. But everything I love most is improbable. And it is the fact that it seems so untimely that will help us most when we come to prepare the Divine Right of Kings as a dogma of the Church...Europe is dying." These are the kind of people the Cabala is made of. I think we are supposed to get by this point that they don't possess any real influence. 

European driving in the 1920s, when only rich people had cars and they mostly drove between their houses in town and their country estates. No worries about police, being monitored for drunk driving, headlights being out, etc. 

p. 185 The state of serious reading in 1926: "A pile of volumes lay on the table beside him: 'Appearance and Reality,' Spengler, 'The Golden Bough,' 'Ulysses,' Proust, Freud. Already their margins had begun to exhibit the spidery notations in green ink that indicated a closeness of attention that would embarrass all but the greatest authors."   

p. 188 "'Look, you have about you all the greatest books of the first quarter of my century...' 'And very stupid they are, too.'"

The book ends with the expostulation of the theory that the Greco-Roman gods did not entirely die when the worship of them faded (though their powers were much abated), but are continually reincarnated in the bodies of living people, including numerous members of the Cabala. One of the ladies suspects that the narrator may actually be the god Mercury, or what is left of him. On the steamer back to New York, the narrator is able to call up the ghost of Virgil and have a brief conversation with him (in Latin) on deck. Virgil acknowledges having seen Shakespeare and Milton in the afterlife, admitted the delusion he had been under in life that Rome and the House of Augustus would be eternal, and exhorted the narrator to die and be free of his body as quickly as possible. 

That's about what there is to it. 

While we are now finished, on this list, with Wilder the novelist, Our Town is still to come, though at my current pace probably at least twenty years away. Great motivation to try to live that long, though. 

The Challenge

A much smaller selection of entrants for this much shorter book. 

1. Sean Hannity--Live Free or Die...............................................................................23,250

2. Taylor R. Marshall--Infiltration.................................................................................3,898

3. Shannon Olsen--A Letter From Your Teacher on the First Day of School................3,525

4. The Miniaturist (S1 TV-2018)......................................................................................574

5. Euripides--Orestes........................................................................................................110

6. Gershom Scholem--Zohar: Book of Splendor..............................................................107

7. Alix Ohlin--Dual Citizens..............................................................................................72

8. Die America Die! The Illuminati's Plan, etc (movie?)..................................................56

9. Samuel G. White--Stanford White in Detail..................................................................52

10. Prayer M. Madueke--Dangerous Decrees to Destroy Your Destroyers.......................45

11. Mitchell Chefitz--The Seventh Telling.........................................................................33

12. Thornton Wilder--The Woman of Andros.....................................................................19

13. David Ariel--Kabbalah................................................................................................19

14. Yuval Harari--Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah..........................................11

15. Marietta McCarthy--The Philosopher's Table.............................................................11

16. Jody Myers--Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest............................................................6

The two big content generators in this Challenge were the word "cabala" and the phrase "America die". With a score of 6 making it into the field, and 56 getting you a home game in the first round, it's like going back to old times here. 

1st Round

#16 Myers over #1 Hannity. 

In spite of Hannity's being one of the most recognizable faces of Evil in America today, this was not an automatic advance for Myers, though I don't really want to read a Sean Hannity book. However upon looking into the matter, there was no reason for her not to win.   

#2 Marshall over #15 McCarthy

The Philosopher's Table is about cooking. It still would have won over Infiltration, which has the subtitle The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within, but the latter comes to the tourney armed with an upset. 

#14 Harari over #3 Olsen

#13 Ariel over #4 The Miniaturist

#12 Wilder over #5 Euripides

Too bad these two had to meet in the 1st round. The Woman of Andros is Wilder's third novel, short and set in ancient Greece, which sounds similar to the other two, though it didn't make it on the IWE list. I had it win here because I think it likely that Euripides (who I should read more of, for my personal education if nothing else, before I depart this existence) will turn up again, and he'll always have a chance to go deep in the tournament, unless he gets a strange draw like he did here. 

#6 Scholem over #11 Chefitz

I am not a great judge of the merits of Jewish theological books, but Gershom Scholem seems to be regarded as a scholar of some significance. 

#7 Ohlin over #10 Madueke

#9 White over #8 Die America Die

Quarterfinals

#2 Marshall over #16 Myers

Marshall has enough power/upset points to carry him past a second middling opponent, but he'll be on his own going forward. 

#6 Scholem over #14 Harari

#7 Ohlin over #13 Ariel

In a tournament like this, just appearing to be a somewhat regular, mainstream novel/memoir/travelogue/general interest title can be an advantage.

#12 Wilder over #9 White

The Stanford White book didn't get a ton of attention in this championship, and it doesn't seem to have been strictly mainstream/general interest, but the subject could, potentially, be interesting to me. 

Semifinals

#12 Wilder over #2 Marshall

Am I really going to go in for a third Thornton Wilder novel after not being wholeheartedly enamored of the first two, and the one that is supposed to be the worst of the group at that?

#6 Scholem over #7 Ohlin

Great matchup of names. This Zohar book is very short and seems like something it wouldn't kill me to acquire some familiarity with.

Championship

#6 Scholem over #12 Wilder

No, I am not going to go in for that third Wilder book in the end. A Challenge devoid of any real ironclad/lock. Scholem won the title as a #6 seed without having to topple a single higher ranked opponent.  

Thornton Wilder--The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

This was my first time reading this still popular and well-regarded little book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its 30 year old author and seems to have marked the peak of his career as a novelist, at least. My comments on it as I was reading it ran thus: 

It is a nice smooth read. Too much exposition though, not enough dialogue/characterization. Does feel somehow small, critic (Clifton Fadiman, quoted in an "about the author" segment in the back of the book) said it lacks ambition. It has some ambition, but does not teem with life in the sense of some of these other books. It is at the same time good, though, in its way. It is a book by a smart person who is still looking in at the world of art, culture, learning, from outside, and this is the closest he can approach to being somehow part of it (though he went to Yale and studied archaeology in Rome for a year as well, his writing does not seem to me to assume its own authority, but to still be making a pitch for acceptance from others who already have it). 

I seem to remember someone at St. John's writing his senior essay on this, and they obviously let him do it, though I am kind of surprised by that. Again, it is not that the book is not clever and well done, and an interesting exercise, necessarily artificial (it is set in Peru in 1714, and while the characters are well drawn as familiar types of the old Spanish literary world, they do not quite emerge as individuals with a life that transcends their functions in the story). I think most people who like literature would enjoy it if they are in the mood for something shorter and lighter than what you get if you generally stick to a solid diet of classics (you can easily read the whole book in a couple of hours). It just strikes me as something the faculty there would find pretty superficial and not great grist for thoughtful writing or discussion. 

The IWE introduction: "Thornton Wilder made his first great success with The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is very short, not 35,000 words--hardly a novel at all by most standards--but it ranks with such magnificent miniatures as A Christmas Carol and Of Mice and Men. It won a Pulitzer Prize."

The IWE people liked Wilder, who was still living at the time this list was made (he died in 1975). While contemporary luminaries who are more celebrated today like Waugh and Orwell and Wodehouse could only get one book into their Hall of Fame, Wilder appears three times. We'll be seeing him again.

There have been three major film versions, a 1929 MGM silent movie, a 1944 United Artists release, and a 2004 film featuring many recognizable actors, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Harvey Keitel, Robert DeNiro, Geraldine Chaplin, and more. None of them appear to have been spectacularly successful. 

p.16 "...the scientist Azuarius whose treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too exciting."

p. 17 "...he thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do), the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart."

p. 50 "Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well."

p. 86 "Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theaters in some Heaven whither Calderon had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth."

p. 92 "Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their house, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely-read could be said to know that they were unhappy."

Even these quotations that struck me at the time as worthy of noting are rather lackluster. I am being unduly hard on it though. I enjoyed it. I liked the vignettes. I was hoping that the priest would find somewhat more of a unifying theme with regard to the lives at the end, or at least a more interesting summation of the project. His character was not fleshed out/did not have a clear, strong purpose in the story. 

My book, which I will try to include a picture of, was a circa 1998 paperback Harper Perennial Classics edition that I picked up from my local public library's discard pile a couple of years ago, knowing that this was on the list. With most of these books I try to get a hardback copy from 1920-1960 or so for the reading, but given how short this was, and having the paperback already on hand, I didn't bother to do that with this one. There is a sticker on the front of my book indicating that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the 2002 selection for the communal Concord Reads program where, I presume, the community reads the book at the same time and they have groups where they talk about it. Of course I wouldn't participate in that. While I would like to find people to talk about books with, they have to be the right people (clever, preferably witty, some attractive women would be nice as well) in the right setting (while drinking). But I haven't anyone met anyone like this who will hang out with me in years, so I drink and talk to myself and occasionally write a blog post. 

The Challenge

1. Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When the Stakes are High.....................6,604

2. Roz Chast--Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant....................................1,662

3. Before I Fall (movie--2017).....................................................................................1,303

4. Miles Davis--Sketches of Spain (music album--1960)................................................916

5. Liaquat Ahmed--Lords of Finance..............................................................................732

6. Rosa Parks: Rosa Parks: My Story..............................................................................609

7. Goya's Ghosts (movie--2006)......................................................................................606

8. Helen Oyeyemi--Boy, Snow, Bird................................................................................574

9. Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski--The Worm at the Core.........................................220

10. Anna Malaika Tubbs--The Three Mothers.................................................................179

11. Alice Kirks--The Recipe to Win an Earl's Heart..........................................................93

12. Jenni Ferrari-Adler--Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant......................................72

13. Aimee Reid--You Are My Friend.................................................................................70

14. Raleigh Ruebens--The Best Friend..............................................................................49

15. Jo McNally--It Started at Christmas...........................................................................22

16. John Medici--Pleasant Avenue....................................................................................12

16. Moliere--The Imaginary Invalid..................................................................................12

That tie for 16th place necessitates a play in game.

Play-In Game

Moliere over Medici

The Medici book is a memoir about growing up in an Italian American immigrant family in postwar East Harlem. Not an entirely unenticing book, but one that had the misfortune to come up against a heavy hitter right off the bat in the tournament.

Round of 16

#16 Moliere over #1 Crucial Conversations

Crucial Conversations has sold 4 million copies and captured the top seed here by a nearly 5,000 point margin, but it doesn't have the game to take on a real contender.

#15 McNally over #2 Chast

Roz Chast has some juice in the publishing world but McNally comes in with an upset to propel her into the quarterfinals. 

#14 Ruebens over #3 Before I Fall

#4 Davis over #13 Reid

Usually music will fall to a book of any quality, and while this children's book about the late television icon Mr. Rogers may possess quality, I think Miles Davis can handle it comfortably in a first round matchup.

#12 Ferrari-Adler over #5 Ahmed

Despite the ridiculous attention-seeking title, I am going with Ferrari-Adler in this matchup of two works that are neither completely off-putting nor possess any special attraction to me because it is quite a bit shorter. I see on further review that the Eggplant book is a collection of humorous cooking essays by around 20 different writers, and Jenni Ferrari-Adler is the editor. Having noted in her biography that she graduated from Oberlin with an MFA from Michigan in conjunction with the title of her book I began to have all kinds of wild speculations, that she was kind of a babe and one of the party girls of the MFA scene that made going to graduate school actually worthwhile (though as my then future wife replied once when I talked about graduate school and going to parties, "people in graduate school are adults"), but then I checked myself. 

#6 Parks over #11 Kirks

#10 Tubbs over #7 Goya's Ghosts

#8 Oyeyemi over #9 The Worm at the Core 

The Worm at the Core is a psychology book about the fear of death. Oyeyemi was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2014.

Super 8

#16 Moliere over #4 Davis

#6 Parks over #15 McNally

#8 Oyeyemi over #14 Ruebens

#12 Ferrari-Adler over #10 Tubbs

The only really close game in this round--Davis hung around Moliere most of the game but the Frenchman pulled away in the closing minutes--Tubbs's book is about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. The Eggplant book sounded more fun.

Final Four

#16 Moliere over #6 Parks

#8 Oyeyemi over #12 Ferrari-Adler

Both of these games ended up not being very close.

Championship

#8 Oyeyemi over #16 Moliere

I mulled over this one for a while. By the ordinary parameters of tournament competition, with upsets not in play, Moliere would have won here. His book is shorter, older, written in a foreign language (that counts for a slight advantage), and he is overall the more celebrated author. However, I have had several books of this type (modern, written by, to put it bluntly, an author who is not white) come up lately and advance through a couple of rounds only to get tripped up in the semi-final or final. So I decided that this time I would go in favor of the more contemporary book.  

Gertrude Atherton--Black Oxen (1923)

Uploading pictures from the phone. I'm not expert at it yet.

This is, I'm thinking, one of the more currently obscure titles we've had come up on this list to date. It's yet another in the parade of American novels of the (19)20s, but it belongs to that part of the 20s that is perhaps especially forgotten now. Gertrude Atherton seems to have been a pretty popular author at the time, but she pre-dated the Lost Generation with whom that decade is largely associated now by 30-40 years. She was the same age as Theodore Roosevelt, four years older than Edith Wharton (whose old New York aristocrats appear to be the same crowd Atherton is writing about at an even later point of their development), she had thirteen years on Theodore Dreiser, who was practically considered a fossil himself at the time, 27 on Sinclair Lewis, and 41 on Hemingway. While I found a lot in this worth taking notes/commenting on, it's probably one of my least favorite so far of these IWE books. I didn't dislike it, but the main characters, who are supposed to be so brilliant, as well as the more distinguished of their companions, I found rather flat, and their dialogue tedious, which brought down the book as a whole. The IWE intro states that it "is no work of art but its characters are interesting." The premise of the story is that a 58 year old woman who had been a great beauty in her youth as well as one of the most sophisticated women in Europe gets some kind of endocrine treatment which rejuvenates her and makes her physically 28 years old again (though she is sterile), but still with her 58 year old mind, and what results when this circumstance is discovered by the New York society that she has returned to for a brief sojourn to attend to some financial interests. The idea is kind of clever but as often happens the execution does not follow through on the potential with equal cleverness.

I took so many notes on this that I'll need to prune some, but some of the passages from this seemingly lost world, once so prominent in the cultural imagination, are fascinating to me.

p.7 "All New York men of the old regime, no matter what their individuality may have been twenty years earlier, look so much alike as they approach sixty, and more particularly after they have passed it...Their moustaches and what little hair they have left turns the same shade of well-bred white. Their fine old Nordic faces are generally lean and flat of cheek, their expression calm, assured, not always smug."

This author employs the kind of extensive physiological and sartorial description, with very specific class or racial connotations (people have Norman or Saxon or Tyrolean, etc, characteristics rather than "English" or "German") that modern authors have largely dispensed with.

p. 37 "My one temptation to enter Society here would be the hope of forming a relief organization--drive, do you call it?--for the starving children of Austria. Russian children are not the only pitiable objects in Europe, and after all, the children of civilized countries are of more value to the future of the world."

This is not the last direct assertion assuming the superiority of the peoples of Northern European descent.

p. 44 "The whole country has gone crazy over youth. The most astonishingly bad books create a furore because from end-to-end they glorify post-war youth at its worst, and the stage is almost as bad"..."Yes, but they are still behind the European novelists, who find women interesting at any  age, and their intelligent readers agree with them." Clavering, the 34 year old newspaper critic/budding playwright, is supposed to be the bright coming man, most eligible bachelor in New York Society character. He is in fact more than a bit of a stuffed shirt.

One does get a nice dose of the charm of old New York, especially early in the book, such as the Madison Square scene (pp. 31-33), the leafy, lamplit, almost clean (by the standards of my lifetime) streets. "A light fall of snow lay on the grass and benches, the statues and trees of the Square. Motors were flashing and honking below and over on Fifth Avenue...Black masses were pouring toward the subways. Life!...The arcade of Madison Square Garden was already packed with men and he knew that a triple line reached down  Twenty-Sixth Street to Fourth Avenue. There was to be a prize fight tonight and the men had stood there since noon, buying apples and peanuts from peddlers." and etc.

   

Antique book barns and large multilevel stores that didn't do a lot of curating used to have walls of forgotten books from the 20s with covers like these. I think this is the first one of the type I have actually owned and read.

p. 65 Still rattling on about the rival post World War I/Lost Generation novels. "More clichés. The world was rotten to the core and the human race so filthy the wonder was that any writer would handle it with tongs. But they plunged to their necks...There had been reactions after the Civil war, but on a higher plane. The population had not been maculated by inferior races."

p.78 "After all, it had been a middle-aged man's war. Not a single military reputation had been made by any one of the millions of young fighters, despite promotions, citations, and medals. Statesmen and military men long past their youth would alone be mentioned in history."

p. 89 "Otherwise he was one of the 'black Claverings.' Northumbrian in origin and claiming descent from the Bretwaldes, overlords of Britain, the Claverings were almost as fair as their Anglian ancestors, but once in every two or three generations a completely dark member appeared, resurgence of the ancient Briton; sometimes associated with the high stature of the stronger Nordic race, occasionally--particularly among the women--almost squat." OK. Do the most respectable kinds of white Americans, especially women, still have this mentality for fine, esoteric racial consciousness? I feel like we are supposed to think there is at least some important class of them who do, but if that is the case, it seems like they would find modern society to be completely unendurable, and there is no evidence that this is a common complaint among anyone respectable or well-bred.

p. 91 "Do you think that romance is impossible in New York?' she asked irresistibly." New York has always seemed to me to be one of the few places left where romance is possible at all.

The style of writing is antiquated for its time, and does not feel "of" it. This is a problem that I think has always afflicted me as well. But since the better exemplars of the modernist style have proven so enduring, it was especially noticeable in a writer of the 1920s.

p. 124 "If the flapper should adopt a coat of arms no doubt it would be a cocktail rampant with three cigarettes argent on a field de rouge."

The flapper character is supposed to be a satire and is presented as ridiculous, but the most bearable interludes of the story were when she showed up. I thought the plot was being set up for her to marry the stiff Clavering at the end, or at least clean up her behavior a little, but after one last naughty appearance with about 100 pages left in the book, she never came back.

p. 128 Talking about the "Sophisticates" now--I'm not sure if they are supposed to be based on the Algonquin Round Table crowd or not, but I liked them too. "But their most solemn causeries were upon the vital theme of The American Reputation in Letters." I feel like this was still a big deal in my youth in the 80s. I have the sense that most of the younger generation, not having been brought up or persuaded by anyone to treat the great literatures of Europe with the degree of reverence that once prevailed here, do not view this as a pressing question in the same manner.

p. 132 Comparison of c.1920 New York with, of all places, Vienna. "...this marvelously wealthy and prosperous city where the poor were kept out of sight, at least, where all the men were whole and where one never saw a gaunt woman's appealing eyes, or emaciated ragged children." Really? What would Howard Zinn and his acolytes say to this?

I truly was not anticipating the twist explaining the mystery of the Madame Zattiany character (that she had undergone rejuvenation).

These illustrations are stills from the 1924 silent film of the book, about which I will write more later.

Chapter 28, New York intellectual/arts/theater party, circa 1920. Pretty ridiculous--a lot of self-conscious eccentricity and zany antics, though the women I found kind of appealing. Suzan Forbes?

"Miss Forbes was a tiny creature, wholly feminine in appearance...her really brilliant and initiative mind...Miss Forbes was not pretty, but she had an expressive original little face and her manners were charming...It was doubtful if she had ever been aggressive in manner or rude in her life; although she never hesitated to give utterance to the extremest of her opinions or to maintain them to the bitter end...She lit a cigarette as the music finished and pinched it into a holder nearly as long as her face. But even smoking never interfered with her pleasant, rather deprecatory, smile"...etc.

This arts scene of course is entirely white, but it's also (seemingly) entirely gentile white, which besides being unfathomable in any era pretty much after this one probably accounts for the un-self-conscious goofiness, which I don't think characters in circles like this have anymore.

p. 167 "I was very beautiful, I entertained magnificently, I was called the best-dressed woman in Paris, I was besieged by men--men who were a good deal more difficult to manage than chivalrous Americans, particularly as I was now married and the natural prey of the hunter...I learned to play the subtle and absorbing game of men and women as it is played to perfection in the older civilizations." Madame Zattiany. I admit I find people like this a little hard to take.

p. 174 Madame Zattiany again: "I thought that...I had lived too much and too hard, that my memory was overburdened and my sense of the futility and meaninglessness of life too overwhelming. (LOL emoji here)

p. 180 If rejuvenation such as Madame Zattiany's were to become widespread: "The threat of overpopulation--for man's architectonic powers were restored if not women's; to say nothing of his prolonged sojourn--would at last rouse the law-makers to the imperious necessity of eugenics, birth control, sterilization of the unfit, and the expulsion of undesirable races." The thought of eugenics frequently burst through the surface of many an WASP upper class mind in this era.

p. 213 "...he wondered if any woman, save in brief moments, could rival the ecstasy of mental creation. That rotten spot in the brain, dislocation of particles, whatever it was that enabled a few men to do what the countless millions never dreamed of attempting, or attempt only to fail, was, through its very abnormality, productive of a higher and more sustained delight, a more complete annihilation of prosaic life, than any mere function bestowed on all men alike." My God Clavering. What a stiff you are.

The literary world as depicted in this book would indicate that women were quite prominent in it at this time as writers, as I have noted before on this site, looking at the awarding of major prizes, best-seller lists and the like. There was a major shift in the 1940s and 1950s coinciding, in my opinion, with the arrival in the United States from Europe of so many deeply, almost severely learned intellectual refugees who exerted such a great influence, particularly through the universities, over what was to be considered worthwhile literature over the ensuing half-century, that had as one effect the downgrading or sidelining of much of the kind of women's writing that had garnered some recognition in the 20s. Having read some of those books for this list I wouldn't say that in most instances this downgrading or forgetting was not to some extent merited in individual cases, but I think a lot of people have the idea that women were entirely excluded from major writing and publishing opportunities before very recent times, and that does not appear to be quite true, especially during the 1910-1940 or so period, at least in the United States.

p. 230 "The world is equally astonished--and resentful--at every new discovery, but in a short time accepts it as a commonplace. The layman resents all new ideas, but the adjustment of the human mind to the inevitable is common even among savages." Is it so? I have the impression that many primitive (so-called) societies withered and died when exposed to modernity.



p. 299 "...I am not a victim of that ancient myth that two people who love each other can be happy anywhere. Environment is half the battle--for the super-civilized, at all events."

p. 301 "And there was no doubt that if you were on top, a personality, New York was the most enchanting place in the world to live in, just as it must be the most unsatisfactory for the poor and insignificant." L.O.L.

p. 315 Prince Hohenhauer, Madame Zattiany's longtime old lover, turns up in America. "He was as straight and thin as ever, his fine head erect, without haughtiness; his dark eyes under their heavy lids had the same eagle glance. he was still, she concluded dispassionately, the handsomest man she had ever seen, even for an Austrian, the handsomest race on earth..." I went on a bit of a rant as this point--I've had enough of this superior prince who is going to rule Austria, save it, make it a great and powerful republic, etc. Hasn't this guy's class just overseen the most disastrous war in human history that killed millions and brought down most of the ancient governments and ruling families in Europe? It was when they started complaining about/ridiculing the décor in a hotel in a small town in the Adirondacks that I lost it.

p. 346 "If we had met in Vienna it would never have claimed me at all. In New York one may be serious in the romantic manner when one is temporarily free from care, but seriousness is of another and a portentous quality over there." O.K., but we can concede that New York is in fact a highly romantic city after all. It is one tangible regret of mine to have never had a New York romance. I can imagine it so vividly. 

As noted above, this book almost immediately inspired a movie version, 58 minutes of which can be seen on various channels on YouTube, the Eastman restoration (which is only the first 22 minutes though) being the highest quality one I have found. The final reel of the movie is apparently missing, and no one alive that we know of--not Martin Scorcese, not Peter Bogdanovich, not anyone--has seen it. The most recognizable star of this movie to most people today would be, I assume, Clara Bow, who played Janet the flapper--like me, the filmmakers recognized that this was the liveliest character in the story, and she really is pretty sexy, her eyes especially are more than usually expressive and kind of mesmerizing. Madame Zattiany was played by Corinne Griffith, whom I had never heard of, though she was really beautiful and had a substantial career in the silent era, though only around 10 of the 58 films she made have survived--she strikes me as having been somewhat comparable to Gene Tierney in the way she is written about. She was later married to Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, now notorious for his racism, and is credited with writing the lyrics to the team's celebrated fight song, "Hail to the Redskins" which is still played by the team band after every touchdown. Conway Tearle is an appropriately stiff Clavering. Alan Hale, Sr, who played Little John in the 1938 classic Robin Hood (and was the father of the skipper on Gilligan's Island) played Hohenhauer, but I assume most of his screen time comes in the lost final reel, for in the extant part he is only shown for about 5 seconds embarking from his ship onto American soil. The photo at the top of the page as well as the one directly above this paragraph at Dinwiddie's mountain lodge also evidently depict some of the lost parts of the movie, since I did not see these in the sections available online. The part of the film that I could see I thought was pretty good, even though it is difficult to watch a silent movie without music and the quality of the non-restored portion was not great. I'm always quite fascinated by film versions of books I have read that came out almost contemporaneously with the books (though this one was never remade later), I feel that they are always much closer to the spirit of the original story. The sets in this were not as lavish as I imagined the rooms and houses in the book to be, but we are still in the infancy of film history.    

The New and Improved Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

I did finally those long-contemplated tweaks to the system, and they did produce quite a few more competitors that are somewhat mass market, though the quality of the finalists does not look incredible. We will see how the tournament plays out however.

1. Robert Munsch--I Love You Forever.....................................................................10,060

2. The Ghost & Mrs Muir (movie-1947)...............................................................…..1,916

3. Philippa Gregory--The Last Tudor..........................................................................1,222

4. Dream Theater--The Astonishing (music album)................................................….1,221

5. Bill Bryson--The Body.............................................................................................1,184

6. Yangsze Choo--The Ghost Bride...........................................................................….798

7. Danielle Steel--A Good Woman...........................................................................…...633

8. Dream Theater--Distance Over Time (music album)..........................................…...620

9. Elizabeth Lev--The Tigress of Forli...........................................................................286

10. W. Michael Gear--People of the Wolf..................................................................….244

11. Linda Yellin--What Nora Knew............................................................................…130

12. W. Michael & Kathleen Gear--Sun Born...............................................................….93

13. Joanna Shupe--The Harlot Countess.....................................................................…..93

14. Maroon 5--"Memories" (song)...........................................................................…….65

15. Catherine the Great (TV-2019)..............................................................................….64

16. Catherine Chung--The Tenth Muse.....................................................................…….51

17. Lauren Slater--Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir...........................................................51

Play-in game still needed with the tie for 16th place.

#17 Slater over #16 Chung

Probably would have chosen Slater here anyway, but she is a bonus competitor here.

1st Round

#17 Slater over #1 Munsch

The Munsch book is a children's book.

#2 Ghost & Mrs Muir over #15 Catherine the Great

#3 Gregory over #14 Maroon 5

#13 Shupe over #4 Dream Theater

#5 Bryson over #12 Gears

Bryson is a past winner of the contest and while the extent of his success is puzzling to me, he is tolerably light reading late at night. Also I really do not like modern genre books at all.

#11 Yellin over #6 Choo

A tight call. Yellin is listed in the category of "Women's Divorce Fiction", which still appeal to me more than "Ghost Fiction", all else being equal.

#10 Gear over #7 Steele

#9 Lev over #8 Dream Theater

Clara Bow, you are a fox.

Quarterfinals

#17 Slater over #2 Ghost & Mrs Muir

Because books have to win. I am going to watch this movie though.

#13 Shupe over #3 Gregory

Shupe has an upset to use.

#11 Yellin over #5 Bryson

So does Yellin.

#10 Gear over #9 Lev

All of the upsets have been used up. But are there any decent books left?

Semifinals

#17 Slater over #10 Gear

It's a lot shorter.

#11 Yellin over #13 Shupe

Shupe looks basically to be almost a Harlequin romance.

Championship

#17 Slater over #11 Yellin

Either would have been OK I guess. Slater's book has the Penguin imprimatur, which makes it look more serious, though the Yellin looks a little more fun. I'm so far behind on the Challenge books, who knows when I will get there anyway.

Gertrude Atherton in her younger days.



Eugene O'Neill--Beyond the Horizon (1920)

This is the fourth Eugene O'Neill play to come up, and I am still only in volume 3 (of the IWE list). However there are only four more over the last seventeen volumes, so I am halfway through with him already. Beyond the Horizon is the one of earliest date among these works, all of which were produced between 1920 and 1933. The IWE introduction is animated, so I'll print it in more or less its entirety.


"This was O'Neill's first big success. It won the Pulitzer Prize in the year it was produced. O'Neill was never more effective dramatically; his scenes rise to breathtaking peaks, fall into breathing-spell valleys, and finally, almost imperceptibly, lead into the subdued tone of an ending that is the more effective by its contrast."


I am assuming that this play, perhaps more than others on this program, needs to be seen performed. Reading it is fine in its way, it generates plenty of nostalgic feeling for me, especially as the geographical and cultural world that O'Neill inhabits is as close to that of my own as almost any of the writers on this list, though I do not experience the emotional swings as violently as the playgoer who wrote this summary seems to have. The plot has a lot in common with the famous movie It's a Wonderful Life, if every turn in the story had resulted in complete disaster--the main character forgoes an opportunity to go on a voyage to stay home and get married and the wife ends up detesting him; the brother does leave the farm for a promising opportunity, has a massive fight with the father and ends up never speaking to him again; the father dies and the son that stayed behind runs the family concern into the ground, with the accompanying poverty and bankruptcy; the doomed couple has a child and the child dies; and on and on. It's relentlessly grim, to be truthful, though I can believe that nothing quite like it had been seen on the American stage when it first appeared.


Act I, Scene II: Robert's uncle, the ship captain, when Robert tells him he won't be going on the journey:


"I'm ashamed of you, Robert, to go lettin' a little huggin' and kissin' in the dark spile your chances to  make a man out o' yourself."


Once people in a Eugene O'Neill play start being negative (which usually happens in the first few pages) you know things are not going to turn out happily.


Act II, Scene I, stage directions--things have already gone severely downhill:


"MRS ATKINS is in her wheel chair. She is a thin, pale-faced, unintelligent-looking woman of about forty-eight, with hard, bright eyes. A victim of partial paralysis for many years, condemned to be pushed from day to day of her life in a wheel chair, she has developed the selfish, irritable nature of the chronic invalid."

She is of course younger than I am now, though people got old, or were old, early back then. In the literary worlds of the past, fifty is a venerable age at the very least. There aren't many people at all hanging around who are much older than that.


Later in the same scene, Ruth the disappointed wife unloads on Robert:


"...living with a man like you--having to suffer all the time because you've never been man enough to work and do things like other people. But no! You never own up to that. You think you're so much better than other folks, with your college education, where you never learned a thing, and always reading your stupid books instead of working...If I could have seen how you were in your true self--like you are now--I'd have killed myself before I'd have married you! I was sorry for it before we'd been together a month. I knew what you were really like--when it was too late."


My wife could talk to me like this, but, thankfully, she does not.


While I grasp that there is an element of theatrical effect involved, the extreme aging and complete physical decline of the young couple in Act III--by which time they would have been 31 and 28 or so at the most--strikes a 21st century sensibility as almost too exaggerated. Though these kinds of bad marriages, especially among the non-privileged classes who largely eschew them now, really did seem to kill people at this time.

It is worth noting (again) that many O'Neill characters are not terribly intelligent or sophisticated in comparison with their fellows in the literary canon. The characters in this play are not the outright inarticulate brutes that populate some of this author's other work, but Ruth and her mother at least seem kind of dull-minded. My impression is that women in general are not depicted as terribly dynamic, intellectually or otherwise, across all of the O'Neill plays, which would not be uncharacteristic of the male writers of his generation. His dialogue is a mix of outbursts of raw emotion with elaborate speeches articulating the characters' sense of their own doom. I suspect that because of the influence of this style on subsequent generations of American film and theatrical writing, it does not always occur to us that it is kind of strange.


This was the 3rd play, along with Ah Wilderness! and All God's Chillun Got Wings, in volume 342 of the Modern Library, and I have now done all three of them for this program, the whole book. It will sit up on the shelf now until the end of my days, perhaps never to be pulled down again. It isn't in very good shape. The cover is still attached in both the front and back, but not by much. It came from the Library of Trenton High School in Trenton, Michigan. Judging by the penciled in notes in the margins, it was once in the possession of someone who played Mrs Miller in a production of Ah Wilderness!. Now I am wallowing in nostalgia for the half-baked mental universe of my youth. The season contributes to that, evoking as it does fall afternoons in the library and the hopefulness of the new school that not only has not yet died in October, but seems to be just on the point of ripening..But I will stop.

  
The Challenge


A pretty lousy one.


1. Donald McCaig--Ruth's Journey...…………………………………….311
2. Robyn Carr--The Best of Us...…………………………………………283
3. Daylight (movie--1996)………………………………………………..207
4. Robert Marasco--Burnt Offerings...…………………………………….94
5. Kendall Taylor--Sometimes Madness is Wisdom...……………………..11
6. John Chamberlain--The Roots of Capitalism...…………………………..1
7. Patricia D'Antonio--Nursing With a Message...………………………….1
8. Sebastian Howley--Deathbed...…………………………………………..1
9. S. D. Lowendowski--Snapped...………………………………………….1
10. Louis Boudin--A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru...………………..0


Sparsely Attended Wednesday Night Games


#7 D'Antonio over #10 Boudin


The second straight Challenge for which Boudin has qualified. It makes me feel like my wholly innocuous searches are being tampered with.


#8 Howley over #9 Lowendowski

The Thursday Quadruple Header


Noon Tip-Off


#7 D'Antonio over #2 Carr


The D'Antonio book is extremely short.


2:30 pm


#6 Chamberlain over #3 Daylight


Evening Session 7 pm


#8 Howley over #1 McCaig


Upset


9:30 pm Nightcap


#4 Marasco over #5 Taylor


The Taylor book is about F Scott Fitzgerald's marriage, and is the only entry in this group that is the kind of book I would normally be interested in. But I am so far behind on this list that I am going to be looking for shorter books for a few sessions here if it can be helped.


Friday Prime Time Doubleheader


7pm


#4 Marasco over #8 Howley


No prayer for Howley. The Marasco book appears to be a genre novel, but it was published in 1973, at least, which might make it of interest to me.


9pm


#7 D'Antonio over #6 Chamberlain


Championship Saturday Night


#7 D'Antonio over #4 Marasco

The D'Antonio book is only 145 pages, so even if it is terrible, the agony won't last long.

Percival Christopher Wren--Beau Geste (1924)

It is frequently observed (and almost as frequently disputed) that men in our time are something quite different from what they were formerly. I tend to be in the camp that believes some fairly drastic changes have occurred, due both to alterations in mode of life as well as biochemical influences. While a fantastical and somewhat out-of-date fiction even by the standards of its own day, Beau Geste, the huge best-seller of the 1920s, is animated nonetheless by infectious qualities of male spiritedness, camaraderie, acceptance of the possibility of death and craving for adventure, and a general attitude of celebration of the possibilities of upper class European manhood. The IWE felt compelled to note that "Wren was by no means a good writer" even as they were championing his book, and it is true that he lacks a smooth style or incisive insights or other literary qualities of that sort, but I found the book to be unique and interesting in many places. Even the construction of it is rather bizarre in that the first 80 pages involve a stereotypically suave and jaunty French officer relating a mysterious escapade in the desert to an old English chum of equal social and military rank, at which point the narrative finally shifts to the Geste brothers, the protagonists of the book, with the two characters who opened the book not seen again except for a few cameo appearances. And even within the brothers' story, the title character Beau, while the leader of the group and possessed of the most heroic qualities, is not really the central figure around whom most of the narrative is centered, that being John, the younger brother, who narrates the entire second portion of the book and whose movements we always remain with even during lengthy periods when Michael, or Beau, is offstage.

But as I said, there is much that is attractively lively in the book, and compared to most of the works on this program, it was a very fast read: it took me about 2 weeks to get through 418 pages, which is a pace I have not approached since before I had children.


At one point I thought I was going to get through this one with very sparse notes but I ended up filling a page with them.


From page 9, a sample sentence:


"And then as I wearily light a wretched cigarette babbling I know not what of a wretched Arab goum--they are always dying of fatigue, these fellows, if they have hurried a few miles--on a dying camel, who cries at the gate that he is from Zinferneuf, and that there is siege and massacre, battle, murder, and sudden death."


I assure you, I would have thought this just as wretched as everyone else does fifteen or twenty years ago.


p. 40 "Duty to my country came before my duty to these fellows, and I must not allow any pity for their probable fate to come between my and my duty as a French officer."


Do we argue so viciously now because we are all strangers pitted one against the other? The camaraderie of class/school/profession, when it takes hold, seems stronger in old books than anything of the sort that we know now.


p. 125 "'I've let Augustus take the blame all this time', she sobbed" "'Didn't notice him taking any,' observed Digby. 'Must be a secret blame-taker, I suppose.'"


When running away to join the French Foreign Legion the narrator raises money for the adventure by going to a Jewish pawnbroker, the portrait of whom is predictably unflattering. The IWE summarizer observed that "among other things" Wren's "effort to render American conversation was ludicrous even for an Englishman" though this was pointedly the only ludicrous rendition of conversation that was pointed out.


p. 155 "'I gotter live, ain't I?' he replied, in a piteous voice, to my cruel look." "Forbearing to observe 'Je ne vois pas la necessite', I laid my stick and gloves on the counter..."

p. 157 "Personally, I would always rather travel first class and miss my meals, than travel third and enjoy three good ones, on a day's journey. Nor is this in the least due to paltry exclusiveness and despicable snobbishness. It is merely that I would rather spend the money on a comfortable seat, a pleasant compartment, and freedom from crowding, than on food with cramped circumstances."


p. 175 "He was of a type of Frenchman that I do not like (there are several of them)..."


This drew an LOL from me.


p. 193 "I liked him less and less as the evening wore on, and I liked him least when he climbed on the zinc-covered counter and sang an absolutely vile song, wholly devoid of humour or of anything else but offence. I am bound to admit, however, that it was very well-received by the audience."


Another chuckle.


p. 197 " A huge greasy creature, grossly fat, filthily dirty in clothes and person, and with a face that was his misfortune, emerged from the cooking-house. he eyed us with sourest contempt."


Wren allows the reader to indulge his natural dislike of ugly, stupid people with terrible personalities.


To put the life of the no longer very well known Wren into some context, he was born in South London in 1875 and lived until 1941. His father was a schoolmaster, and he received a Master's degree from St Catherine's Society, described by Wikipedia as a non-collegiate institution for poorer students. He worked for the Indian Education Service from 1903 to 1917. He was appointed a reserve officer in East Africa for less than a year during the First World War. His supposed service in the French Foreign Legion, out of which experience this book and many of his other top-selling literary productions were thought to have sprung, appears never to have been confirmed. He appears to have begun publishing his adventure novels around 1914. He cut a preternaturally dashing figure in the few photographs of him that are known.

p. 208 "It struck me that community of habits, tastes, customs, and outlook form a stronger bond of sympathy than community of race; and that men of the same social caste and different nationality were much more attracted to each other than men of the same nationality and different caste..." The proto-globalism of the French Foreign Legion.


p.213 "'But why bother about the Americans? They are uncultivated people.' 'We're going to cultivate them,' punned Michael."


p. 234 "We made rapid progress and, after a time, made a point of talking Arabic to each other. It is an easy language to learn,  especially in a country where it is spoken." I have no idea whether this is true or not. In my life I don't know any Anglophones who have learned to speak it. It is of course necessary to the plot that the Geste brothers learn it.


p. 250 Another sample passage of the rip-roaring, swashbuckling variety: "Possibly we were going to take part in some complicated scheme of conquest, extending French dominion to Lake Tchad or Timbuktu. Possibly we were about to invade and conquer Morocco once and for all...We were keen, we were picked men, and nobody went sick or fell out. Had he done so, he would have died an unpleasant death, in which thirst, Arabs, and hyenas would have been involved."


p. 253 "I should have liked to admire him as much as I admired his military skill, and ability as a commander, and I began to understand how soldiers love a good leader when it is possible to do so." Well put, and an important idea to remember.


p. 289 "'Do you swear it by the name of God? By your faith in Christ? By your love of the Blessed Virgin? And by your hope for the intercession of the Holy Saints?' asked Bolidar." "'Not in the least,' replied Michael. 'I merely say it. I have not got a diamond--'Word of an Englishman.'" We had to have something like this get in at some point. It is humorous but not ironic or arch or any of that. I appreciate it.


p. 337 John to Beau when they are the last two men in the fortress alive as it is being besieged. "...it's been a great lark." Beau is an attractive character, but as noted above, not fleshed out or very deep, or even particularly prominent on a page by page basis in the story.

p. 364 "I did my best to make it a real 'Viking's Funeral' for him, just like we used to have at home. Just like he used to want it. My chief regret was that I had no Union Jack to drape over him."


I did make a note around this point asking What is this book about? but I am sure I was overthinking the question because it is about the romance of young male blossoming, adventure, daring, and death, a subject which, in this kind of treatment anyway, does not seem to be of much positive interest to the contemporary gatekeepers of the culture. It is of interest to me, however!


p. 368 "I greatly feared that our deeds of homicide and arson had raised us higher in the estimation of these good men than any number of pious acts and gentle words could ever have done."


I thought it was also noteworthy that it was not treated as terribly important that the high-spirited and eminently sharp and capable Beau should survive the adventure and return home to found a family line and take up a leading role in the affairs of his country. This is the role of his less immediately dynamic brothers, though the whole family was plenty resourceful and insouciant on their own.


Beau Geste has been adapted for numerous major movie and T.V. productions. The first was a silent version in 1926 starring Ronald Colman. My copy of the book was a companion to the release of this film and includes several still photographs from it among its pages. Another major Hollywood version came out in 1939, starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and Robert Preston, with direction by William Wellman. Hollywood did another remake in 1966 without big stars, although future TV legend Telly Savalas appeared as the sadistic commander. It then received an 8-episode BBC treatment in 1982, which appears to be the last attempt at bringing these characters and their times and adventures to the screen. There was also a spoof released in 1977 called The Last Remake of Beau Geste which included Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones, and Ann-Margret among the cast, which indicates to me that the story was still well-known at that time.

My edition of the book ends with six pages of hype about the 1926 film. One note of interest to me was that a comparison of this production was made to "probably the finest picture ever produced, 'The Big Parade.'" (King Vidor-1925). This was a World War I drama that was a huge hit and is still highly regarded, and while I may have heard of the title, anything else about it has eluded my awareness up to now.


The Challenge


A rather strange and mostly obscure selection of contenders for this book.


1. Nora Roberts--Of Blood and Bone..........................................................................................658
2. Coughlin, Kuhlman & Davis--Shooter: Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper...246
3. Paul Theroux--The Great Railway Bazaar..............................................................................153
4. Frederic S. Durbin--A Green and Ancient Light........................................................................52
5. Alison Green--Ask a Manager...................................................................................................45
6. Rachel Manija Brown & Sherwood Smith--Stranger................................................................32
7. Russell Sullivan--Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times......................................................28
8. Allan Abbass--Reaching Through Resistance: Advanced Psychotherapy Techniques.............27
9. Letters Never Meant to be Read, Volume I.................................................................................19
10. Services and Prayers for the Church of England......................................................................4
11. Tia Lee--Vermilion Whispers.....................................................................................................4
12. Calameo--The History of Rome, Part I......................................................................................0
13. Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa--Tuareg...........................................................................................0
14. Joseph Jordania--Tigers, Lions and Humans.............................................................................0
15. Fiona Price--Re-Inventing Liberty..............................................................................................0
16. Samuel W. Duffield--The Latin Hymn-Writers and Their Hymns.............................................0


1st Round


#1 Roberts over #16 Duffield


No library presence for Duffield.


#2 Shooter over #15 Price


Same fate for Price


#3 Theroux over #14 Jordania


I have actually read the Theroux book some years back and even written about it on my home blog. There was a period back in the pre-Challenge days when I would read one of Theroux's travel books every summer, usually while sitting at my children's swimming lessons. I read this one, the sequel trip across Asia 30 years later in which some countries from the earlier trip had to be avoided due to political changes (while others closed off in 1974 were now open), the one going around the perimeter of England, the one about riding the train from Boston straight through to Argentina, the one making a full circuit of the Mediterranean Sea...I enjoyed all of these books.


#4 Durbin over #13 Vasquez-Figueroa
#5 Green over #12 Calameo


There is no point in advancing books that have no evident existence either in libraries or even on Amazon.


#6 Brown/Smith over #11 Lee
#7 Sullivan over #10 Services and Prayers
#8 Abbass over #9 Letters


Neither of the books in the 8-9 game are available in libraries.

Round of 8


#8 Abbass over #1 Roberts


Technically an upset, but I wouldn't have wanted to read the Roberts book anyway.


#2 Shooter over #7 Sullivan


Another upset, albeit a mild one. I don't think a sports-themed book has prevailed in the Challenge yet.


#3 Theroux over #6 Brown/Smith
#4 Durbin over #5 Green


This one was a toss-up, very little to differentiate the two contestants. I was not fired up to read either of these books.


Final Four


#2 Shooter over #8 Abbass
#3 Theroux over #4 Durbin


Championship


#2 Shooter over #3 Theroux


I would have gone with Theroux if I hadn't read it already. I probably should read something about the modern American military anyway.

Ellen Glasgow--Barren Ground (1925)

"Ellen Glasgow's reputation" says the IWE introduction, "was already good and her novels many, but the publication of Barren Ground in 1926 (?) was what chiefly made it clear that she was a major novelist. Mrs Glasgow wrote not about her own upper-class circles--though later she proved she could do so with equal success--but about the rural people of the countryside near her native Richmond, Virginia. Like fine poetry or music Barren Ground in its writing reflects the temperament of the action depicted, dull or emotional or brisk as the case may be." The "Note on the Author" in the circa 1936 Modern Library edition I had is somewhat more pointed and colorful:


"The proud South at first resented and then acclaimed one of its aristocratic daughters for her revolt against the sentimental tradition of her environment. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Ellen Glasgow had all the advantages of education and leisure of the privileged. After taking her degree and winning a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Virginia, Miss Glasgow began her career as an author with the publication of an anonymous novel in 1897. In open defiance of the genteel prejudice against women expressing themselves on such controversial subjects as politics, Miss Glasgow staked her reputation and social position on a novel published under her own name. The Voice of the People was an instantaneous success. Since its appearance one novel has followed another and Miss Glasgow's reputation has grown steadily. Today she ranks as one of the leading women novelists of the country..."

I don't know why the IWE refers to her as "Mrs" while the Modern Library uses "Miss".




Taking into consideration her former status, what I perceive to be the general desire for female writers of the past to be more appreciated, and the circumstance that Barren Ground at least is a book of considerable literary quality that even apart from having a quite empowered heroine for its time offers much of value to the national literary landscape, it is perhaps surprising that Ellen Glasgow is not more remembered. I suspect her handling of race, while not overtly mean-spirited or to me obtrusively offensive given her generation and the atmosphere in which she lived, is not adequate to the requirements of our era. Her overall attitude in this area struck me as having some similarity to Faulkner's (which I hear criticized as well), but of course without his subtlety and force to mitigate some of the more obvious objections to be made. This subject will inevitably come up several times during this report.


Remarkably, I cannot recall ever having read a novel set in Virginia before this, which especially stands out to me because I have lived in that state (though it is my least favorite place that I have lived). I suppose I have read some D.C.-set books where one of the characters lived in Arlington or worked at the Pentagon or a Civil War book where some of the camp or battle scenes took place there, but this is the first I can think of with a domestic setting, extensive description of nature and seasons and local society over a period of many years and so forth. I took a lot of notes on it.


p.5 "...the greater number arrived, as they remained, 'good people,' a comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of the phrase, 'a good family.' The good families of the state have preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have preserved nothing except themselves."

(Early on) This book is part "The Waltons", part As the Earth Turns, with a hint of Faulkner.


Sexuality in old books is (generally speaking) normal. Conventional love affairs, etc, of a brief duration in which the intensity is even more vanishingly fleeting. Instances of women being highly promiscuous, incest, etc, are understood, or at least presumed, to be unusual. Less anxiety for bourgeois readers, which perhaps they need once in a while.


p.43 "Mrs Oakley looked down on the 'poor white' class, though she had married into it...He had made her a good husband; it was not his fault that he could never get on; everything from the start had been against him; and he had always done the best that he could." I hope my wife doesn't read this passage, lest some truths hit too close to home.


p. 81 "Until yesterday Dorinda had regarded the monotonous routine of the store as one of the dreary, though doubtless beneficial, designs of an inscrutable Providence." That "though doubtless beneficial" is a good piece of characterization.


The use of black dialect throughout here is probably such as to be offensive. Glasgow is not a comic writer, so she is going for realism, not humor. I have seen it done worse, but perhaps we don't need quite so much of it to make the point. On the other hand, is there no value in her having made some record of it? Assuming it is accurate. One presumes that she lived among people like these characters, and that their speech was distinct from that common among the whites, and also she was a conscientious writer of well above average literary skill, so "accuracy" insofar as she is presenting her own interpretation of what she heard, does not seem to me to be problematic and would certainly be in accord with literary custom.

Like many older books, this took around 100 pages to get going. My sense is that consensus opinion today holds that that is too long even for supposedly great books and demands way too much of a person's time to be worthwhile in the modern world. I would dispute that of course, because I like what I take to be the expansive effects of leisurely book-reading on my own mind mostly, though I don't think the trend of even smarter younger people moving away from this practice is really benefiting their cognitive development. Such knowledge as they acquire seems to me to be confined with narrower channels into which more reading perhaps would have allowed more air and a more comprehensive vision.


Old books have two main kinds of pregnancy dilemmas. Either the boy is too low status to avoid a forced marriage/have the problem taken care of, or he is too high status to be forced into marriage (from the girl's point of view). We have the second type of that sad story here.


p. 274 "She wished he wouldn't say 'ni**ers.' That scornful label was already archaic, except among the poorest of the 'poor white class' at Pedlar's Mill." This is somewhat progressive, I suppose, but then a few pages later (281-2) there is the somewhat ubiquitous white author denial/avoidance/whitewashing passage that has become mostly inexcusable in our days:


"Like her mother, she was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the negroes; she would always know how to keep on friendly terms with that immature but not ungenerous race. Slavery in Queen Elizabeth County had rested more lightly than elsewhere...It was true that the coloured people about Pedlar's Mill were as industrious and as prosperous as any in the South, and that, within what their white neighbours called reasonable bounds, there was, at the end of the nineteenth century, little prejudice against them...As for the negroes themselves, they lived contentedly enough as inferiors though not dependents."

My copy, alas, did not have this groovy dust jacket.


p. 324 "Mrs. Oakley was a pious and God-fearing woman, whose daily life was lived beneath the ominous shadow of the wrath to come; yet she had deliberately perjured herself in order that a worthless boy might escape the punishment which she knew he deserved." It is my observation that women authors are much more likely, if not to directly refer to certain male characters in such withering terms as "worthless", "inferior", "cowardly", etc, to develop them at greater length and detail before passing down these oracular judgments, which I find gives them a certain sting whose impression lasts longer than the introduction of such characters in male authors, whose purpose more frequently is merely to give the hero someone to defeat or otherwise display his own overwhelming superiority in contrast with, and whose existence or behavior is otherwise of little significance.


p. 326 "The Lord helps good sleepers." I hope so.


p. 365 "She had seen enough of the world to know that you took your husband...where you found him, and she was troubled by few illusions about marriage."


p. 371 "That, she had learned, was the hidden sting of success; it rubbed old sores with the salt of regret until they were raw again."


p. 372 "Yes, that's the trouble about getting comforts. We always remember that other people went without them. I've got the carpets now that Rose Emily wanted." I like this last quote, there seems to me to be something in it. The two previous I am not as convinced of, but in the context of the book I thought what it revealed about its character's point of view was interesting.

p. 443 "It had never seemed possible to her that Nathan could die. He had not mattered enough for that." This is the main character's husband, whom she married at a rather mature age, 38 or so. It is implied in the book that sexual consummation in this marriage was never achieved. The character, Dorinda, had given herself to a lover at age 20 and been jilted, and the plot of the book is essentially the long grind through the rest of her life to renounce passion and love overcome this setback and the exhausted, narrow life of her rural community to become successful and gain a measure of revenge on her onetime lover, who eventually descends into alcoholism and poverty. This aspect of a woman who determines to get along without dependence on or emotional connection to males or to be weighed down by children was actually rather timely given the recent outpouring of female anger and disgust with much of masculine society that has become so prominent in the culture.


p. 511 "I've seen so many people die," she thought, and then, "In fifty years many people must die." I only note this because this is the point of life that I am at now.


p. 521 "Youth can never know the worst, she understood, because the worst that one can know is the end of expectancy."


Dorinda's struggle with love, both getting over the jilting of her early life and her refusal to engage with it at all in the remainder of the book, I thought was too much. Several times the reader is assured that she has overcome any bitterness or desire for it that she may have had once and for all, but the supposedly suppressed feelings seem to be aroused too easily and too often for this to be wholly credible.






The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge


1. Toni Morrison--The Bluest Eye......................................................1,234
2. William James--The Varieties of Religious Experience....................311
3. Taxi (movie--2004)............................................................................289
4. Winston Graham--Poldark: The Black Moon....................................279
5. D. C. Cab (movie)..............................................................................165
6. Eric Weiner--The Geography of Genius............................................158
7. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam--Wings of Fire..................................................114
8. J.L. Langley--The Tin Star.................................................................109
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne--The Blithedale Romance.................................58
10. Rebecca Morris--A Murder in My Hometown...................................38
11. The Thundermans: Adventures in Supersitting (Vol. 1, Ep. 1)(TV)..30
12. Dara Berger--How to Prevent Autism................................................26
13. 1,001 Wines You Must Try Before You Die (ed. Beckett)..................21
14. Taxicab Confessions (TV Series).........................................................6
15. Reynolds Price--Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides.................5
16. Marco Polo New York Guide...............................................................3

First Round


#1 Morrison over #16 Marco Polo New York


Not that I don't love travel guides.


#2 James over #15 Price


I don't know what is supposed to be going on with the Price book.


#14 Taxicab Confessions over #3 Taxi


One of the magic words that was used to call up contestants for this tournament was "cab". Taxicab Confessions, while I don't think it is supposed to be particularly good, sounds more interesting than Taxi, which is rated as dreadful despite the appearance of Gisele Bundchen, the wife of Tom Brady of Ted movies fame.


#4 Graham over #13 1,001 Wines


The Poldark books are evidently popular reading, and literarily respectable enough to get the BBC adaptation treatment. I believe my wife has seen the TV series.


#12 Berger over #5 D. C. Cab


This book sounds like a crock, but even that isn't enough to lose to a legendarily bad movie.


#6 Weiner over #11 The Thundermans
#10 Morris over #7 Kalam


Neither of these books is carried by a single library in my state, and neither of them has a title that excites me.


#9 Hawthorne over #8 Langley


Elite Eight


#1 Morrison over #14 Taxicab Confessions


#2 James over #12 Berger


#4 Graham over #10 Morris


#9 Hawthorne over #6 Weiner


This one was a decent contest following three routs.


Final Four


#1 Morrison over #9 Hawthorne


The game of the tournament. I figure it is time I read something by Toni Morrison, and her first book would seem to be a logical starting point for that.


#2 James over #4 Graham


I have mixed feelings about whether I would like the Poldark books or not. Maybe it could win in a different field.


Championship


#1 Morrison over #2 James