C-List: Rushdie--The Ground Beneath Her Feet.......564/575
Not much to report. I have been plowing through the two volumes listed here for several months now, finally approaching end of both. A big recap of the Allen awaits in probably 2-3 weeks. I have spent a lot of time with this book and I feel a good deal of affection for it. When the end comes I will be ready to part with it, because I am pretty sure the themes and characters will be fully exhausted, but I don't mind the riding out to that end.
I couldn't quite finish the Rushdie in time for this month's report. It's one of those books that in the end I don't feel is really particularly great but about which I'm still a little worried about having missed something elementary to any understanding of literary greatness, which is often my experience with modern books. As I have been noting all along, it has a certain amount of virtuosity, but compared even to Anthony Adverse, its scenes and characters, with the exception of the early chapters in Bombay, lack for me any sense of solidity, or heaviness, which is a style of book that I guess I like. It moves all over the world, has major historical events as a backdrop anyway, and features a constantly revolving cast of high-flying eccentrics, but it never quite enters into the belly of these various worlds and theaters of action the way that the classics of this type of literature do.
My relationship with the A-List is kind of a mess right now. The last thing in it I read was Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, which I had difficulty getting into, though usually I am a pretty stout admirer of old Bysshe's poems. My head has not been in it.
It's a day early because the 6th is a Saturday and I am not sure whether I will have any computer time or not.
A List: Between books. Recently "finished" Les Fleurs du Mal. B List: Allen--Anthony Adverse....................................569/1,224 C List: Rushdie--The Ground Beneath Her Feet.............314/575
I put the quotations around "finished" for Fleurs du Mal because I got lazier as it went on and stopped, first, writing out all of my translations, and then by the end I was not bothering to look up words, or keep looking them up, since some of them kept appearing over and over again and I could not remember/keep straight what they meant. The A list, though it gave me at one time a pretty good foundation in English literature at least, has not been working for me in a long time, and perhaps at some point I will abandon it. I am otherwise so generally dismal and sluggish though in the hours when I do this reading that it is not evident that I will attack whatever replaces it with any more vigor or enthusiasm.
The B List is where I get most of my literary enjoyment these days, even when the books are not Great. However it takes me back to one of the more hopeful and fervid interests of my youth, which has a much-needed positive effect on my overall mood and state of mind. I have to admit that there are a lot of things I like about Anthony Adverse, though it is still longer than it needs to be and it is definitely a book to read either before age 18 or after 45, and the after 45 only if you have gone as far as you are ever likely to go with real literature. There are also political incorrectness issues. The book features a great diversity of national and racial origin among its characters, though stereotypes and the traditional negation in books written by western men of the sexual potency of their non-western counterparts are the rule, even when the exotic is otherwise portrayed as a good or admirable fellow by European standards (Natty Bumppo syndrome). The hero of course is a fair-haired Anglo-Celtic type. At the point of the narrative that I have reached Anthony is in Africa making good money in the slave trade. He does have a French monk with him who is setting up as potentially being a sort of conscience and who I suspect will turn Anthony away from this perfidious practice, but having already shipped out fourteen cargoes to Havana, the come-to-Jesus moment will be coming a little late to endear him to modern audiences.
I like the more swashbuckling aspects of the book, its generally good-natured admiration of high-spirited and thriving masculinity, albeit often at the expense of others. These old books are at least as judgmental of masculine failure and inferiority as contemporary books are, but the measure one feels to be taken of himself is less personal, due in part to the changing moral circumstances among other things. I also find it interesting to consider the various problems that arise, such as, how to gain control of the ship with various enemies plotting against me. I am not good in coming up with solutions or even sniffing out what bigger actions the various observable little actions portend. It is important to be able to react thus in real time however. (I have more to say about this but I am running out of time).
The C List book I only read a little each day, with the idea of getting a taste of the more current world scene, which is why I favor shorter books for it when possible. The Rushdie book is meandering quite a bit as it goes on. That he has a considerable amount of talent is apparent, at times, and it is worth reading for those times. But the control over the material is not always as tight and focused as you get used to reading classics.
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.
This is the third Eugene O'Neill play thus far in the IWE list, and there are many more to come, I think there are around ten altogether. It is also another American play of the 20s and 30s, another Pulitzer Prize winner--the third so far in the drama alone!--and of course O'Neill was a Nobel Laureate as well, all of which is in keeping with some of the already established themes running through this great list. I had had for some reason the impression that Anna Christie had been his breakout play, but in fact he had already won another Pulitzer Prize two years earlier for Beyond the Horizon and that was followed up by The Emperor Jones before Anna was produced as well. This play struck me in reading as generally less interesting and more dated, in a negative sense, than the two O'Neill plays I have previously read for this project, with which I was impressed. This is one of the works of his that features a more brutish and not especially appealing class of character in whom it is difficult for the earnest, well-meaning, socially aspirant reader of the modern day to find much hope of development. Still, I did not dislike the experience of going through it. O'Neill does give a certain quality of darkness and heaviness of detail to the atmosphere of this older America that has a ring of authenticity in it to me and that other authors do not hit at in quite the same way.
It is strange to me for some reason to imagine an America where heavily accented Swedish and other Scandinavian immigrants make up a not inconsiderable segment of the society, yet many books from this 1880-1930 period attest that this was a vivid part of the national scene in those years. No doubt one of the reasons that this literary era does appeal to me so much, even down to its secondary works, is that it is when people of my general ethnic type, Irish/German/Baltic Sea area, were most ascendant and more culturally vital than they seem to be at present. A lot of characters in books from this time, perhaps because their physical characteristics and responses to various stimuli are simply described better than they are by modern writers, seem much more akin to me than most contemporary people, let alone literary characters, do. It is not a major consideration, and it not something I really picked up on until I started reading more of these books again over the past couple of years. I was often struck by how many characters had blue eyes. I have seen it put forth that around 50% of Americans were blue eyed in 1900 as opposed to only 16% today. This is the kind of fact that one isn't supposed to find interest or meaningful, I guess, though I think it is interesting at least. The circumstance that I think it interesting implies that I probably find it meaningful too, but I am not going to begin to speculate on the form that might take here, because I have not really thought about it very much. Perhaps one of these books will prod me to have some further thought about this later on.
While the plots are not exactly identical, some of the similarities between Anna Christie and the 1928 Josef Von Sternberg silent film The Docks of New York seem too striking to be coincidental. Both feature a fallen blonde and a ship's stoker of almost inhuman physical strength who get involved with each other. Both have as a major setting a rough seaman's bar on the New York waterfront. One has a bartender named Johnny-the-Priest, the other has a preacher type among the bar's cast of characters named Hymn-Book-Harry. Docks of New York is officially an adaptation of a short story by another writer named John Monk Saunders. There is not a lot of biographical information on Saunders, though he was married for eleven years to King Kong star Fay Wray (!--she played the girl--writers, how you have fallen!), and hanged himself at age 42. He sounds to me like he has alcoholic written all over him, though I cannot find confirmation of this, which would have made channeling the literary spirit, as well as output, of Eugene O'Neill somewhat easier.
Greta Garbo (who played in a lot of the film versions of the books on this list that have become somewhat obscure)
For the execution of this reading, I turn to a trusty old 1950 Modern Library edition of three of Eugene O'Neill's plays, with an introduction by Lionel Trilling. Unlike modern introductions by scholarly editors that batter the reader's will to live under an assault of critical theory and erudition of obscure books and characters and movements (real erudition is simply knowing everything, or nearly everything, central to the varied subjects that the ideal university graduate is supposed to know but most never get around to actually learning; obscurities are by definition not essential, and therefore do not display erudition, unless they can be demonstrated to somehow be essential), Trilling in a few broad sentences acknowledges what difficulties the general reader of 1950 (i.e., me) will find in a conventional reading of the play as play ("...its central incident--the regeneration of a cynical prostitute--is now timeworn and not especially interesting in itself, and the virtues of its poetic language are surely questionable"), and explains in clear and simple language why the show was important in its time, in a way that enhances at least my active interest in reading it ("(O'Neill's) Style, indeed, was sufficient content...all constituted a denial of the neat proprieties, all spoke of a life more colorful and terrible than the American theatre had ever thought of representing." Speaking of the zeitgeist of the 1920s: "It was a movement of cultural protest, against the business civilization of America, against philistinism, puritanism and vulgarity... Essentially a revolt of the conscious middle class against its own sterile complacency, it offered the promise of a regenerative cultural life.")
Long (9 minute) clip from the 1923 film version of Anna Christie, starring Blanche Sweet.
The Challenge
Another challenge that is all over the place and produces very few 'real' books.
1. Safe Haven (movie)............................................................1,454
2. Patrick Leigh Farmer--A Time of Gifts..................................190
3. Salman Rushdie--The Ground Beneath Her Feet.................142
4. Samanthe Beck--Best Man With Benefits..............................133
5. Berenstain Bears--God Bless Our Country.............................54
6. Jasper Ridley--Brief History of the Tudor Age........................23
7. ed. Peter Haining--The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings....14
8. C. Lee McKenzie--Sudden Secrets..........................................13
9. Jan Wahl--Humphrey's Bear......................................................7
10. Sam Llewellyn--Clawhammer.................................................1
11. Nicholas Karolides--Literature Suppressed on Political Grou.1
12. Anastasia--Master of the Universe: Memoirs Book 1..............1
13. Eugene O'Neill--The First Man................................................0
14. Mary Ellen Snodgrass--Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature.....0
15. Victoria Tan--So This is Death.................................................0
16. The Hopeline--Understanding Self-Worth...............................0
Round of 16
#1 Safe Haven over #16 Hopeline.
I am not sure that the Hopeline book actually exists.
#2 Farmer over #15 Tan.
Tan may not be an actual book either. The Farmer meanwhile seem to be something of a minor classic.
#3 Rushdie over #14 Snodgrass.
I have never read anything by Rushdie. He should be able to comfortably advance over an obscure academic exercise, especially in the first round.
#13 O'Neill over #4 Beck
One of O'Neill's lesser remembered plays evidently, though it is probably possible to find a copy of it. I may even have a copy of it in one of my various collections.
#5 Berenstain Bears over #12 Anastasia
The Berenstain Bears are players in the publishing world. They'll beat anything the relationship of which to a traditional book is foggy to me.
#6 Ridley over #11 Karolides
Based on nothing, other than that it sounds more interesting.
#10 Llewellyn over #7 Mammoth Book of Hauntings.
#8 McKenzie over #9 Wahl.
Teen trash over blah-looking children's book.
Performance of Anna Christie in what I imagine to be modern dress.
Round of 8
#13 O'Neill over #1 Safe Haven
#2 Farmer over #10 Llewellyn
#3 Rushdie over #8 McKenzie
#6 Ridley over #5 Berenstain Bears
This round was pretty clear cut. The Llewellyn book might be good, but my curiosity is aroused too greatly by the Farmer.
Final 4
#13 O'Neill over #2 Farmer
There is not a copy of the Farmer book anywhere in a library in the State of New Hampshire, even though it has received the what I thought to be imprimatur of the New York Review of Books reprint series.
#3 Rushdie over #6 Ridley
No one is holding the Ridley book either. A disappointing Final Four.
Championship
#3 Rushdie over #13 O'Neill
At 575 pages the Rushdie book is a little long, and by the ordinary rules of the challenge would not win here. However, he has appeared in the Challenge several times already without winning, and we read so much O'Neill in this program--nine or ten plays I am guessing--that while I am curious to read one of his lesser known works, I feel an obligation to take on some modern novels from time to time in the course of this game.
