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.