Gertrude Stein--The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933)

Perhaps the most celebrated Americans in Paris book of them all, by the middle I was staying up late consuming baguettes and wine by the light of the stub of a candle babbling to my imaginary brilliant friends with even more fervency than usual. I enjoyed it very much, and was very into it. It is written as if it were a more or less true account of the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Evidently considerable portions of the book are not "true" or have been greatly embellished or whitewashed, though whether this is done to the point of being problematic I am not convinced. The point of literary and artistic production, which some people in our time seem to have forgotten, is to capture and fuse the all too fleeting highlights into an elevated sense of life, which is certainly accomplished here. Once I happened by accident to acquire an earlier draft of Boswell's Journey to the Hebrides that had been printed for the use of scholars and other curious parties. While it probably gave a more accurate sense of what the journey was really like on a day in, day out basis, it naturally lacked the high spirit and beauty of the published book that is what is of main interest to readers. Naturally a similar magic of time and place and character pervades this book as well.

I made a lot of notes on this book. Between the epigrammatic style and the characteristic anecdotes of many of the Notable and Great there is much material of the highest interest to me. So this will be a long posting.

As I moved through this I had occasion to do some internet searches about Gertrude Stein and other personages from the book, and I noted that a lot of the biographical sources pointedly identify her as a "Jewish-American writer". Once I saw that it struck me that of course she was, but I had had no conscience sense of it in reading the book because she never makes any reference to herself, or her parents or siblings or other relatives, as being Jewish or doing anything that might be considered explicitly characteristic of a Jewish identity. The only appearance of the word "Jew" in the book comes when Gertrude Stein remarks that a visitor to the house whose appearance she did not like "looks like a Jew", to which her interlocutor (Alfy Maurer, described as "an old habitué of the house") replies "he is worse than that," after which the matter is dropped.

The famous line(s) about Gertrude Stein conversing with the geniuses while Alice talked to the wives. There don't seem to have been any other women geniuses apart of course from Gertrude Stein.

p. 27 "Van Dongen (a painter) in these days was poor, he had a dutch wife who was a vegetarian and they lived on spinach. Van Dongen frequently escaped from the spinach to a joint in Montmartre

where the girls paid for his dinner and his drinks." I have to admit, I love the idea of this kind of life, absent the poverty. But if one has to be poor, Montmartre circa 1905 seems like the way to go.

p. 27 again, on a woman visitor to the house in these early years (Evelyn Thaw, "the heroine of the moment": "She was so blonde, so pale, so nothing, and Fernande (Picasso's live in companion at the time) would give a heavy sigh of admiration." I love that "so nothing" (!)

I had never heard the story about the infuriated public trying to scratch off the paint at one of Matisse's early exhibitions. That's insane.  

 

p. 35 "In those days (we are still in the 1903-1907 chapter. I will note when we move on in time.) you were always going up stairs and down stairs."

I suppose I should say something about the techniques of a) writing another person's autobiography and/or b) writing your own autobiography in the guise of another person. It is done really well here and works beguilingly. As a class of reader who favors execution over novelty, I would love to read other books after the same pattern if they were done as well.

p. 49 My note--We can skip Picasso on Americans. We won't learn anything.

p. 50 Or maybe not. "There was a type of american art student, male, that used very much to afflict him, he used to say no it is not her who will make the future glory of America."

p. 52 "Baltimore is famous for the delicate sensibilities and conscientiousness of its inhabitants." I had never heard nor noticed this. One's instinct is to take it as dated information, but I am slowly coming around to the belief that if you dig deep enough there is no dated information.

p. 60  Still in the 1903-1907 chapter, but a good observation looking somewhat ahead, to the future death of the poet and bon vivant Guillaume Apollinaire: "It was the moment just after the war when many things had changed and people naturally fell apart." The breakup over time of this great prewar Montmartre-based circle of young artistic people with Picasso at the center is one of the more poignant partts of the book, though the twin (narrative) excitements of World War I followed by the emergence of a second group of youthful artists in the 20s mitigates some of the effect of contemplating the fleetingness of almost all really meaningful social intercourse.  

p. 77 "Because Picasso is a spaniard and life is tragic and bitter and unhappy." 

Now I am in the section "Gertrude Stein Before She Came to Paris". In the part where she talks about having been William James's favorite student in her college years I noted "real genius finds its like." Now I suspect this relationship may perhaps be one of the parts of the book that may been embellished, slightly or otherwise. A little embellishment of this sort does not really bother me if it improves the book.

That chapter was short, and I'm in the 1907-1914 chapter, which is probably the central one in the book.

p. 88 "Gertrude Stein insisted that no one could go to Assisi except on foot." I could still get to Assisi someday I suppose, though it isn't easy to see when that might happen, or what other options might pull me in a different direction if I ever do go anywhere again.

p. 91 "I always remember Picasso saying disgustedly apropos some germans who said they liked bull-fights, they would, he said angrily, they like bloodshed. To a spaniard it is not bloodshed, it is ritual." Ritual is deep and meaningful. People who don't have it are lacking in understanding.

p. 107 A very beautiful passage about the aftermath of a Montmartre party: "It was all very peaceful and about three o'clock in the morning we all went into the atelier where Salmon had been deposited and where we had left our hats and coats to get them to go home. There on the couch lay Salmon peacefully sleeping and surrounding him, half chewed, were a box of matches, a petit bleu and my yellow fantaisie. Imagine my feelings even at three o'clock in the morning. However, Salmon woke up very charming and very polite and we all went out into the street together. All of a sudden with a wild yell Salmon rushed down the hill." For some reason it was this particular memory that inspired me to write "I am dead inside" beside it in the margin.

Great photo of the celebrated duo at home.

p. 111 "I could perfectly understand Fernande's liking for Eve. As I said Fernande's great heroine was Evelyn Thaw, small and negative." I laughed.

p. 112 "And so Picasso left Montmartre never to return." Extremely poignant. The great spirit's time among this scene at least has passed.

p. 125 After the Italian futurists' big Paris show. "Jacques-Emile Blanche was terribly upset by it. We found him wandering tremblingly in the garden of the Tuileries and he said, it looks alright but is it. No it isn't, said Gertrude Stein. You do me good, said Jacques-Emile Blanche."

Now I've advanced to the chapter titled "The War." Whenever the opening scenes in the summer of 1914 appear in a novel written by someone with firsthand reminiscence of the time, whether in Russia, or France, or Austria, or anywhere else, it is always good, and always serves as a jolt to the book. The emotional upheaval of that initial embarking into war was obviously incredible, and one of the defining periods in the lives of everyone who lived through it.

p. 172 More name-dropping, as Picasso is hanging with the young Jean Cocteau! with whom he was heading to Italy. "One day Picasso came in and with him and leaning on his shoulder was a slim elegant youth." Oh yes. "Everybody was at the war, life in Montparnasse was not very gay...he too (Picasso) needed a change." Picasso and Cocteau would spend a lot of time together over the next 50 years, even appearing on celluloid together in Cocteau's 1960 film Orpheus Descending, which I was immediately recalled to when I came on this paragraph.

p. 187 (Driving through the north of France at the end of the war in the service of the American Fund For French Wounded) "Soon we came to the battle-fields and the lines of trenches for both sides. To anyone who did not see it as it was then it is impossible to imagine it. It was not terrifying it was strange." For what it's worth. Stein and Toklas, who lived until 1946 and 1967 respectively, also waited out World War II in France, though they moved out of Paris to the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region for the duration. Their friend Bernard Fay, who appears in the latter part of this book, became a high ranking official in the Vichy regime and seems to have arranged for the safety both of their persons and of Stein's art collection. In both written works and interviews that it doesn't seem to have been necessary to have made (she could have returned to America, at least before the occupation set in, for example) Stein made some incredibly naïve, tone-deaf, obtuse statements in praise of the collaborationist government. Considering all of this, her reputation doesn't seem to have taken that much of a hit, in that I think it's still considered O.K. to read about her and her scene in the happier times. Perhaps because she was a woman, and Jewish as well, her conduct during this period has been to some extent excused (on account of) her (being) comparatively powerless and not really understanding what was going on? Though given the resources she had access to, her American citizenship, and her fame in international high culture circles, I can't consider her to be that powerless. Maybe people feel that it doesn't matter, or that she really was a unique sort of genius and cannot be expected to experience moral crises and the like the same way that other people do. Picasso stayed in Paris during the occupation, which I had not realized, though he seems to have lain low and not exhibited any paintings during those years. Anecdotes on Wikipedia indicate that there was antagonism between him and the Germans. Of course everyone is in a different position relative to danger/power, etc in such times of turmoil, yet if we would be good we are expected to hold and behave with more or less the same attitude.

p. 189 "We once more returned to a changed Paris." After the war. I always in books and other art like the theme of how times change, the charm (? I can't read my note) if you are in it, and it is stimulating (and you are thinking?)

Now we are in the postwar (1919-1932) period. Hemingway has shown up. While Hemingway may have been an unbearable jerk later in life when he became famous and was surrounded by sycophants if he was hanging out with anybody at all, he seems to been a very attractive person as a young man, with a charming, life of the party type of energy. I found in this part that I missed him when he wasn't there, and he seems to have been generally popular with the older as well as the younger writers. I even thought he made a pretty good joke (p.200): "(Hemingway) said, when you matriculate at the University of Chicago you write down just what accent you will have and they give it to you when you graduate."  

p. 212 Stein on the Hemingway era: "It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place."

p. 213 "Hemingway had then and has always (had) a very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities and good femmes de ménage and good food."

p. 238 "Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him (Paul Robeson, who was brought to the house) sing spirituals. They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them, she said. he did not answer...Gertrude Stein concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the african is not primitive, he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen." I assume these statements were based on some thought process which is not however explored or elaborated on further. So I can't really understand what is meant by them.

p. 246 "(our finnish servant) finds it difficult to understand why we are not more modern (with regard to modern conveniences, electricity, radiators, etc). Gertrude Stein says that if you are way ahead with your head you naturally are old fashioned and regular in your daily life." Of course I am comparatively old fashioned and regular in my daily life, so this appealed to me.

p. 251 "Bowles told Gertrude Stein and it pleased her that Copland said threateningly to him when as usual in the winter he was neither delightful nor sensible, if you do not work now when you are twenty when you are thirty. nobody will love you." I have lived that. It is true. I try very hard to impress the fact upon my children.

I did love this book but seeing as it has taken me almost three weeks to do this report I also am missing the old warhorse books that make up this list and I am looking forward to getting back to it.  



The Challenge

1. Edith Hamilton--Mythology................................................................647

2. Vampyr (movie-1932).........................................................................127

3. Harry Dolan--Very Bad Men...............................................................117

4. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him (movie)............................91

5. Laurie R. King--Mary Russell's War....................................................84

6. Gay Talese--The Voyeurs' Motel..........................................................75

7. Stephanie Powell Watts--No One is Coming to Save Us.....................62

8. Robert Sussman--The Myth of Race.....................................................60

9. Luke Timothy Johnson--The New Testamant: A Very Short Introduc.17

10. T. A. Belshaw--Out of Control...........................................................12

11. Glass Animals--Zaba (record)..............................................................5

12. The Good Immigrant (ed. Nikesh Shukla)...........................................5

13. Merry A. Foresta--Artists Unframed....................................................3

14. Al Jolson--"California Here I Come" (record).....................................2

15. The World of Matisse 1869-1954.........................................................2

16. History of Gambling in America..........................................................1

1st Round

#1 Hamilton over #16 History of Gambling

Hamilton is a past champion of the challenge, and I enjoyed her book very much and found it useful. There is no rule banning past champions from competing again if they qualify (only books from the IWE list itself are ineligible), though in general I will probably prevent them from winning unless there is no desirable competition.

#15 Matisse over #2 Vampyr

#3 Dolan over #14 Jolson



#4 Rigby over #13 Foresta




One of those dreaded allotted upsets.




#5 King over #12 Good Immigrant


The Good Immigrant appears to be a British anthology. There aren't any copies of it in any of my libraries.




#11 Glass Animals over #6 Talese




I was actually excited to see Talese qualify for the Challenge. Unfortunately the Glass Animals had a designated upset to burn, and they burned it here.




#7 Watts over #10 Belshaw




#8 Sussman over #9 Johnson


2nd Round


#1 Hamilton over #15 Matisse


I was inclined to choose the Matisse here, but Hamilton comes in with all kinds of backup advantages to push through the early rounds.


#3 Dolan over #11 Glass Animals




#8 Sussman over #4 Rigby


#5 King over #7 Watts


This was a real battle, as these books are similar both in length and date of publication. King has a slight edge in all of the distinguishing categories however--1 year older, 22 more reviews, 71 pages shorter, etc.

Final Four


#1 Hamilton over #8 Sussman


If Hamilton had not already won the championship she would have easily carried off the title here. The Sussman looked interesting, though for some reason I thought it dated from the 50s, which would have made it more interesting. It actually was published in 2014, which causes me to be a little distrustful of it, as it would to be making an argument for a position that all respectable people, and most scientists as well, already seem to accept as fact.


#3 Dolan over #5 King


Dolan seems to be another murder book. I want to minimize those as much as possible since they quickly become repetitive, to me. The King, however, is a similar kind of book, and Dolan comes in with an upset card that he hasn't needed in the first two rounds against musical acts.


Championship


#3 Dolan over #1 Hamilton


I decided to see how the tournament played out and to have Hamilton drop the final unless the opponent was impossible. Dolan is not quite impossible and he is the survivor from the other side of the draw, so he gets an improbable victory.

 The Winner. Born: Rome, N.Y. Colgate University. Age uncertain.

July Update

A List--Baudelaire--Les Fleurs du Mal...131/229


B List--Hervey Allen--Anthony Adverse...68/1,224


C List--Salman Rushie--The Ground Beneath her Feet...87/575


I am reading Baudelaire in (or from) French, for what it is worth. My favorite insight so far that I can fruitfully apply to my own life is that our own personal Paris, the Paris of our youth, and probably that of any great city that means something to us, is always dead and gone by the time we are thirty-five, if not thirty.


Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville
Change plus vite, helas! que le Coeur d'un mortel);


It is becoming evident to me that my primary obstacle to finishing the "B" list before I shuffle off the old coil here is that its lineup is heavier than I realized on 1,000+ page books, one after another after another, leavened with the occasional 2,500 page trilogy. I like reading these large books, especially if they are good, of course, and I suppose I feel a certain pleasure at coming to the end of something that took a month or two to finish that I don't feel in finishing something shorter, though this is silly from any kind of serious or intellectual standpoint. It is going to be hard for me to make much headway towards getting on pace to finish the whole list prior to entering my 80s for a while though.


Anthony Adverse is a category of book that I suspect may be the weakness of the IWE list, giant, mega-selling (loosely) historical fiction from the 30s and 40s, of which Gone With the Wind is the primary exemplar, though it actually is not on the list.  Forever Amber is on the list however, as is So Red the Rose and I am not sure if there is anything else from this school, but there is probably something I am forgetting. I am guessing whoever was in charge of creating the IWE canon had a fondness for these books dating from youth that he or she was not able to put by. Adverse is not completely unreadable to me, and it has the elements of what could be an interesting book in places, but it isn't literature, and if I were younger and still had hopes of developing into a serious person, I would feel that I should be reading something else. It's the kind of book where the amusing lines are things like (when the hero's mistress offers to sell her jewelry for him) "One can take a man's wife and remain a gentleman, but taking his jewels would not do". The women characters are all straight clichés from the romantic school and are beyond redemption, the pace is slow, the descriptions are probably overdone...all that said, I am looking forward to going home and reading my ten pages before bed, so strong is the nostalgia and romanticism of the List with me as to overrule any sense of taste.


The Rushdie book is not Anna Karenina, I suppose, and I don't remember it being lauded as a great book when it came out (in long-ago 1999), though maybe it was and I missed it, but so far I find I am liking it. I am already nostalgic for 1950s Bombay, something I never thought about before taking up this book. There have been a few episodes where the narrative appeared to be tottering dangerously close to the edge of magic realism, but it pulled back just enough to remain in the realm of literary fictional plausibility. So far so good on this one.


I don't have time to do pictures this month. Maybe I'll put a literary girlie picture up tomorrow or something.

Henry James--The American (1877)

Henry James makes his first appearance on the IWE list, which however only includes three or four of his books, and none of the longer, more difficult later ones. I have read numerous Henry James books--I think eleven--for my other list, including this one and the three notoriously dense and subtle ones that formed the capstone of his career and are now widely considered to be his masterpieces. The American, an early work, probably his first that is considered important, which I have recorded as reading previously in March, 2002, and The Turn of the Screw I remember as being the two I liked best. Of the three later books, The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors I cannot say I was ever really able to get into to the extent that the books mean anything to me. The Golden Bowl, which I read last of these three and a couple of years after the others, I was able to hang in with much better, though I still was not able to come away with a sense of why all of these fine nuances and minutely shades of meaning among this particular set of characters were supposed to matter as much as they presumably did. For the man, especially if he is a man of the quivering lipped, concave chested race of readers, who aspires to be admitted into the ranks of people who know anything about literature and whose mere acts of reading and thinking contribute to its ongoing vitality like those who prune and water do for a garden, understanding what Henry James is about and taking a proper adult joy in it is, if not mandatory, one of the surer ways to access the inner rooms of this intellectual fraternity. Here is my own history with the Master, with a brief observation on each book, by which my progress towards the state of Henry James connoiseurship can be measured:

Turn of the Screw--also read around 2002, liked the story, seemed more vivid, thoughts and impressions of characters more pertinent than in some of the other books.

The Wings of the Dove--August, 1995. I don't think I made heads or tails of it at the time.

The Ambassadors--August, 1996. My understanding did not improve much during that year.

The Bostonians--April, 2002. An earlier (1886) book, more readable, New England setting, I don't remember being blown away by it, but it wasn't bad. Learned about the term "Boston marriage". Also on the IWE list.

The Golden Bowl--May, 2002 (there was a question on the GRE literature exam, the source of my "A" list, for which the five answer choices were all Henry James novels. I got to this question obviously in 2002). See above.

The Portrait of a Lady--September, 1998. The early James masterpiece. Made no impression on me.

What Maisie Knew--June, 2002. I found a note I made on this, dated June 8, 2002:

"James is an extreme (though comparatively lucid) specimen of the cerebral, super-precise author. We can see that truly nothing makes its way onto the page without its *entire* purpose, mode of expression, point of view, etc., diligently thought out and accounted for. The question with me is always, how accurate--how naturalistic, in the end, are these characters, who are rather unlike anyone else in the whole of literature, though the technique and the philosophy behind it are very sound, logical, and even (at times) exquisite."

Nothing much stands out in my memory with regard to Maisie, other than that it was a characteristic Henry James novel of the late middle period, the sort of book (a lesser known but still considered good work by a celebrated author) that I often feel an exaggerated affection for while I am reading it, even if I recall very little of it in after years.

So I guess I have only read eight Henry James books, not the eleven I claimed earlier. And none in the last thirteen years. It really does not seem that long. At this rate I guess I'll be dead before I know it.

I do wonder sometimes with Henry James whether I would be able to tell that he was good if all of the most firmly situated experts did not constantly assure the world that he was. I think I might if I was handed one of his more conventional efforts, but there is some doubt there.

As noted above, I counted The American as one of my two favorite Henry James novels during this earlier period, so I was not unhappy to take it up again. The Marquis de Bellegarde and his mother are two of my favorite characters in literature, at least as far as being memorably drawn goes. They inform my idea of one extreme that aristocratic hauteur can reach. Valentin is more of a recognizable type, I suppose, but it is a lively depiction. For the others, it is well-established that in Henry James the ruling idea of a book is paramount, and that the role of the characters is to serve the idea. He was happy here in that the idea represented by the two most severe of the Bellegardes was so strongly impressed upon him as a living force that it could be embodied in two characters. Madame de Cintre and Newman are less convincing. Claire is supposed to be the most enchanting and exquisitely refined woman that can be imagined, though other than her conversation's being impenetrably correct and controlled at all times, she does not display a lot of personal agency or give much indication of having anything resembling passion for anything in her life. As to Newman it seems decidedly unlikely that a man who had amassed a colossal fortune in mineral extraction and railroads and other industries by the age of 35 would suddenly develop a Henry James-like interest in getting away from all of that money-making and lounging around Paris for a couple of years trying to ingratiate himself with a cloistered and decayed family clinging to its ancient nobility that at the time in which the book was set has no recognized rank or political authority in the eyes of the French state. But as noted, these kinds of incongruities are sometimes the price of admission to the undoubtedly unique world of Henry James.

I wanted to run a few of my favorite quotations from the book, most concerning my main man the Marquis Urbain de Bellegarde:

"He was 'distinguished' to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously..."

There were at least two other occasions in the book where someone--I believe all of the persons thus described were Bellegardes--possessed a quality to the tips of his fingernails.

"His manners seemed to indicate a fine nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions of a thoroughly superior cast."

"If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while someone else was committing it."

"His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde..."

"'We all know what Mozart is,' said the marquis; 'our impressions don't date from this evening. Mozart is youth, freshness, brilliancy, facility--a little too great facility, perhaps. But the execution is here and there deplorably rough.'"

This next one describes the follies of some highly sophisticated and intelligent Parisians who find themselves forced to settle down in a rustic inn in a nondescript Swiss village for a couple of days:

"At last the bishop's nephew came in with a toilet in which an ingenious attempt at harmony with the peculiar situation was visible, and with a gravity tempered by a decent deference to the best breakfast that the Croix Helvetique had ever set forth. Valentin's servant...had been lending a light Parisian hand in the kitchen. The two Frenchmen did their best to prove that if circumstances might overshadow, they could not really obscure the national talent for conversation..."

"Monsieur de Bellegarde appeared to have nothing more to suggest; but he continued to stand there, rigid and elegant, as a man who believed that his mere personal presence had an argumentative value."

Newman's vulgar American friend, Mr Tristram, on Paris:

"You know it's really the only place for a white man to live."

While we are still waiting for our first French book on the IWE list, this is the first one that is at least nominally set in Paris, though the peculiar flavor of Henry James's Paris is a bit of a departure from the way I usually experience that city, both through art and in actual life. Still, as I am undertaking this entire list as something of a farewell tour of all my youthful ideas and aspirations, perhaps ultimately even to life itself as I once imagined it, anytime the list brings us to Paris as the primary setting of a book, it is a momentous occasion.

As I read through these books I am making a collection of all of them, trying to get older hardback copies from the 1930-1970 era if I don't have them already. I am not looking for anything rare or unique. I like the Modern Library and other popular sets, for example, and any copy I generally find attractive will do. For The American however I decided to stick with the circa 2000 Penguin paperback edition I bought when I read it back 2002, as I had felt at the time it was a good reading edition, the notes were aimed at someone who was around my basic level of education and so on. It also contains the original 1877 text of the book; James evidently re-wrote a substantial amount of it thirty years afterwards and some editions of the book have that version of it, though the consensus seems to be that the 1877 version is the better one, and as the 1907 version presumably incorporates more of the opaque later James style, I am sure it is the one I would prefer in any event. This sort of thing, of there being two or more versions of a famous book, occurs more often then I had realized. The edition of Brideshead Revisited that I read a few years back for example I realize now was actually the 'corrected' 1959 version heavily re-written by Waugh, though I think the original 1945 publication is the one that most people are thinking of when they praise it. It is something I have learned to be on the lookout for.

Henry James at age 17?

Off-topic, and I don't want to go to much into it at this time because I want to finish this post, but I read something the other day where another novelist-critic, someone who could I suppose be considered a literary insider in some segment of the literary world that still possesses an identifiable enclosure, opined that The Canon was dead, dead, dead, that it would be impossible to define one from the mass of words that is being published nowadays and so on in that vein. I never use the term 'Canon' myself as this was never used at my school--they believed in Great Books, but the number of unassailable Great Books was really very small, limited to around ten or fifteen maximum even from the greatest centuries, only a minority of which were works of imaginative literature, of which a minority of these were prose fiction. I suppose it is possible that the Great Books in this sense are dead, though I have the confidence at least that if a genuine one does turn up, and passes one full time through the generational cycle--usually around eighty years--we should be able to recognize it at such. The Canon as I understand it is has a little bit broader membership and sort of includes everyone who has a claim to importance over some stretch of literary history. Similar to the Baseball Hall of Fame, it has an inner ring of the Real Greats (Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Dante, Tolstoy, etc) whose membership is not merely a given, but without whom the entire enterprise would be pointless, but there are also contentious arguments at the fringes about whether certain people really belong in or not (Highpockets Kelly, Dave Bancroft, Alice Walker, Norman Mailer). Henry James is solidly in the Canon, though (unlike his brother) seemingly not an inner ring Great Book, in baseball terms about the Three Finger Brown or Eddie Matthews level, a clearly superior and even unique player who amassed impressive statistics over a period of years in a highly relevant environment. Anyway, while there is a class of the most advanced writers and readers who pooh-pooh the idea of the Canon, and has been far as I can tell for most of literary history (I am reminded of Susan Sontag's constant referencing of writers that even the assiduous middle class reader of literary reviews would never have heard of as obviously the best and most important in the world), the lower tiers of the scholarly and reading public will for the foreseeable future I am pretty sure require something of the kind to take form, and thus certain books or writings from our era will by some consensus attain to canon-like status.    

The Challenge

I am disappointed that Henry James gave us such an incredibly weak challenge. Ten movies made the field. The movies are supposed to be like the teams from lower level leagues that are mainly in the tournament to allow the books to advance. In the pre-tournament era we were only getting two or three movies per Challenge, now the last two have been movie heavy. I am leaving them in for now because the score required to qualify for this tournament is 34, and books with fewer than 34 reviews are generally not readily available or well-known anyway, and of the books which turned up for this challenge, the only one that piqued my interest at all was a food memoir that had only three reviews and was not available at a single library in my entire state. So I had to accept a complete dud of a tournament.

1. Dan Brown--The Da Vinci Code..........................5,486
2. Godzilla (2014 movie)..........................................3,764
3. Melancholia (movie)................................................867
4. Robin Hood (2010 movie)........................................865
5. Out of the Furnace (movie)......................................672
6. Diana Gabaldon--Lord John & the Private Matter...385
7. Rebel Without a Cause (movie)................................357
8. Sklya Madi--Too Consumed (Book 2)......................206
9. A Late Quartet (movie).............................................195
10. Summer Stock (movie)............................................153
11. Scent of Green Papaya (movie)..............................140
12. Patricia D'Eddy--A Shift in the Water.....................116
13. Skyla Madi--Forever Consumed (Book 3)..............112
14. Game of Death (recent movie)..................................38
15. Suzanne Wright--Consumed: Deep in Your Veins....36
16. Liz & Dick (movie)....................................................34

1st Round

#16 Liz & Dick over #1 Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code had finished first in one of the pre-tournament challenges, and I read a little bit of it, thinking that as it was so popular there must be something to it. In truth though it is really, like so many of these genre books that sell zillions of copies, stupefyingly boring. The characters are all ridiculously wealthy people at the top of their fields who have degrees from the best universities, clothes from the most elite tailors, world class private art collections, and yet they are incapable of expressing a thought or response to life that possesses any interest or spark of ingenuity.

I have decided not to make any rules around banning past winners from being eligible for future challenges. The only books that are ineligible for the challenge are those on the IWE list.

#15 Suzanne Wright over #2 Godzilla

Book over movie.

#3 Melancholia over #14 Game of Death

The pseudo-art movie over the high explosive modern action film

#13 Skyla Madi over #4 Robin Hood

#12 Patricia Eddy over #5 Out of the Furnace

#6 Diana Gabaldon over #11 Scent of Green Papaya

I am giving the books a wide path here.

#10 Summer Stock over #7 Rebel Without a Cause

Summer Stock is a few years older, and I have never seen it.

#8 Skyla Madi over #9 A Late Quartet

Elite 8

#3 Melancholia over #16 Liz & Dick

The pseudo-art movie over a TV biopic I have no desire to see.

#6 Gabaldon over #15 Wright

Gabaldon basically wins because her book exists in public libraries, and Wright's does not.

#8 Madi over #13 Madi

In the battle of two books from the same series I give the precedent to the one first in order (as well as the higher seed).

#12 Eddy over #10 Summer Stock

Final Four

#12 Eddy over #3 Melancholia

#6 Gabaldon over #8 Madi

Gabaldon is the only book left in the field that exists in libraries near me.

Championship

#6 Gabaldon over #12 Eddy

An embarrassingly easy championship for Gabaldon.

I have adhered to protocol and at least taken Lord John and the Private Matter out of the library. Set in 1757 London, the action opens with Lord John, hidden from view, observing a syphilis sore on the penis of the man to whom his cousin is betrothed. It soon becomes apparent that Lord John is highly familiar with eighteenth-century London's pulsating gay scene. Also his mother throws a dinner party at which Samuel Johnson is a guest and Lord John and his gay friends sneer at the Doctor as a tiresome, blustering buffoon. Hopefully we will get a better winner next time.