The fairly small number of Hardy's poems that I read as an undergraduate have been among my favorites ever since. "The Darkling Thrush," for instance, is one that I probably think of as often as I think of any poetry, and I made it the first in the 52 Poems series that appeared here in 2018 (here). Yet even though my copy of this Selected Shorter Poems collection shows evidence that I bought it when I was still in my 20s, I somehow never got around to digging more deeply into his work until recently.

The appearance over the past year or so of several of his poems at Poems Ancient and Modern provided the push I apparently needed, making me conscious of how much good work I must be missing. And that was, and is, a lot--I say "is" because this is a pretty small sample of his work, and it seems reasonable to assume that it doesn't include all of his good work. There are fewer than a hundred poems here, out of the nearly one thousand he is said to have written. So I'll soon be buying a more extensive collection--the Norton Critical Edition, maybe, or the Oxford World Classics. 

Judging by this selection, Hardy has everything we want from a major lyric poet: fine craftsmanship with the irrepressible appeal of formal structure; sharp observation and reflection on subjects ranging from the small and everyday to the grand and cosmic; a wide emotional range, from the playful to the grim. And most of the poems don't get far from the rural English land and way of life that Hardy loved and of which he was very much a part. 

His forms are fairly strict but largely non-standard, apparently his own inventions. And he doesn't seem to use most of them more than once. There are a good many poems in ballad meter or something close to it (you know--"Twas in the merry month of May / When green buds all were swelling"). And there are a few sonnets. I speculate that he sometimes started out with a few lines that found an order of their own, and then stuck with it. I notice especially a sometimes jarring tendency toward lines of widely varying length. "Nature's Questioning," for instance, has a four-line stanza, with four, three, three, and six stresses respectively, rhymed ABBA. At a glance I don't think it occurs in another poem. In general his style is somewhat rough around the edges, nothing like the smooth flow of, for instance, Tennyson. Or Housman, with whose lyrics of rural life a very general sort of comparison may be made: you don't find the sort of elegantly polished and very quotable bits of wit in Hardy that you do in Housman.

John Wain, the editor of this collection, was a notable critical presence when I was a student, though I wouldn't be surprised if the academy has forgotten him now, the academy being what it is now. As he puts it in his excellent introduction to this volume:

To vary one's stanza restlessly from poem to poem, to switch from exceedingly long ones, is not experimentation.... It reminds us more of the work of a village craftsman who makes tables and chairs, beds and sofas, adapting the shape of each one to fit a different set of circumstances, but always using the same basic local materials.... His language is not elegant, his lines do not flow smoothly; when he sets himself a difficult metrical task and carries it out with a skill born of long practice, the result is never slick or varnished.

In accordance with the general impression that Hardy tends toward gloom, more of these poems are somber, if not bleak, than otherwise. The passage of time, regret, the vacancy left in places once inhabited by those now lying in the graveyard of the village church, including voices not only in and near the graves but in the grave itself, are frequent themes. Whether this tendency holds throughout Hardy's poetry I can't say until I've read more, but I suppose it would be a little surprising if it did not.

Love lost, or felt but never acted on, or simply outlived, turns up a lot. Some of these are in Hardy's persona, some in others, and of the former many  are made more affecting by knowledge that I would not have had if The Lamp had not published a review of a book called Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry. (Here's a link to the review, which may be subscriber-only.) Hardy married his wife Emma in 1870, when they were both 30. She died in 1912 and it was only after her death that he learned, through journals she left behind (including a notebook alarmingly titled "What I Think of My Husband"!)  that she had been very unhappy. A number of poems written in the following years are full of a combination of longing, regret, and guilt.

The poem which gives the above mentioned book its title, for instance, "The Voice," depicts something close to a haunting by Emma:

 Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...

This call seems to be something more than metaphorical. I think it's safe here to ignore the twentieth-century critical dogma that forbids us to assume that the speaker of what appears to be a personal poem is in fact the poet: this is clearly Thomas Hardy speaking of Emma Hardy. You can read the whole poem here. The way the final stanza overturns the structure is an example of what Wain says about Hardy's technique, and the effect is very potent. 

I suppose I had early on gotten the impression that Hardy was a novelist who wrote some excellent poems on the side. This is surely wrong; even setting aside the question of his stature as a poet (major? minor? classic?), it's clear that he himself didn't think of his work that way. He wrote poems "before he ever turned to fiction and long after he retired from it," according to Wain.

This collection is out of print, and I'm sure there are other good ones available which similarly put a judicious selection of Hardy's poetry into a handy volume. But this one is very handy indeed: physically small, but well-designed and comfortable to read. And there are the perceptive introduction and a relatively small but useful number of notes. If you're looking for something of this sort you can find plenty of used copies at places like Abebooks. Mine can't have been printed later than the early '70s and is still in pretty good shape physically, with not too much discoloration of the pages. 

I assumed that cover decoration was more or less just that, and more or less random, until I noticed the note on the back: that it's meant to be an illustration of "To Lizbie Browne." That poem is an instance of the lost-love lyric, but with a twist that I don't think I've ever seen before: the lament  of a man who as a boy had silently and shyly adored an older girl, but never ventured to speak to her. And now she probably doesn't even remember him:

So, Lizbie Browne,
When on a day
Men speak of me
As not, you'll say,
'And who was he?'--
Yes, Lizbie Browne

Technically it is another that serves as an example of what John Wain says of Hardy's craftsmanship. I think that phrase "as not" may require a note at some time in the future, or perhaps already does. I take it to be a shortening of "as like as not," which may not be as commonly used as it was. 

"To Lizbie Browne" is not available at the web site of The Poetry Foundation (i.e. Poetry magazine), but when I looked for it elsewhere I found this nice treat: Iain McGilchrist reading it. The text is included as well.

Dante's cosmology is intrinsically a stumbling block for the modern reader. Unless some truly astonishing revolution in scientific knowledge takes place, we are, and have been for centuries now, in a position to say that we know that his Ptolemaic system (with Christian modifications) of concentric spheres with earth at the center is incorrect. And so we have to suspend our disbelief. But that's not so very hard to do, because the scheme is straightforward, and, more importantly, it fits what everyone on earth can plainly see. It is not, as ignorant folk of our own time might suppose, something invented to support religious doctrines, but a product of close observation and mathematical skill. Ptolemy was a serious astronomer and mathematician and his system, according to Wikipedia, "included the only mathematically sound geocentric model of the Solar System."

In the Purgatorio, Dante has emerged from Hell into the actual physical world that we know. The mountain of Purgatory may not exist, but as an imaginative construct it is placed in the southern hemisphere of this planet, and its position worked out carefully. Dante demonstrates this in the opening of several cantos when he specifies the time of day by means of an elaborate picture of the position of the sun, moon, and planets, including references to various constellations and to Roman mythology. Personally I find most of these maddeningly complex, impossible to follow without help, and tiresome. For instance, Canto II (Longfellow's translation):

Already had the sun the horizon reached
    Whose circle of meridian covers o’er
    Jerusalem with its most lofty point,

And night that opposite to him revolves
    Was issuing forth from Ganges with the Scales
    That fall from out her hand when she exceedeth;

So that the white and the vermilion cheeks
    Of beautiful Aurora, where I was,
    By too great age were changing into orange.

You can get the idea that it's dawn there in Purgatory. But Dante is also informing us that it's sunset at Jerusalem and midnight at the Ganges, where the constellation Libra (the Scales) is visible (just rising, I think). You may not realize, as I would not have without notes, that full understanding of the image requires noting the fact that, as Peter Bondanella says in a note to his edition of the Longfellow translation:

The horizon of a location on earth may be described by a circle that is perpendicular to that point's meridian circle (the meridian circle is a circle passing through the point and the north and south poles).

And of course you need some knowledge of the constellations and their relationship to the seasons--the time is spring, and just past the equinox.

But this and all such constructs in the Purgatorio are astronomically accurate. The obvious conclusion of anyone walking around on the surface of the earth who has not been told otherwise is that the sun, moon, and stars circle the earth. It took a great deal of study and specialized equipment to prove otherwise, and the discovery leaves the accuracy of age-old observation intact as far as it goes. That people who lived before the Copernican revolution did not know that the facts behind the appearance were not as they seemed did not affect their ability to observe intently and accurately, more so than do any of us who aren't astronomers.

Dante's biology, on the other hand, is an altogether different story. In Canto 25 of the Purgatorio, Dante, who is now accompanied not only by Virgil but by another Roman poet, Statius, who was a Christian and, unlike Virgil, is in Purgatory as a pilgrim and not a visitor, asks a question which had also been bothering me: given that the souls in Purgatory do not have physical bodies, how is it that those they have just encountered, who are starving as their penance for gluttony, appear emaciated? For that matter, how does this whole mechanism of meeting and conversing with "souls" work? As part of his answer Statius begins to explain human reproduction:

The perfect blood, which never is drunk up
    Into the thirsty veins, and which remaineth
    Like food that from the table thou removest,

Takes in the heart for all the human members
    Virtue informative, as being that
    Which to be changed to them goes through the veins

Again digest, descends it where ’tis better
    Silent to be than say; and then drops thence
    Upon another’s blood in natural vase.

There one together with the other mingles,
    One to be passive meant, the other active
    By reason of the perfect place it springs from;

And being conjoined, begins to operate,
    Coagulating first, then vivifying
    What for its matter it had made consistent.

There's more. But somewhere in there I stopped reading and said something like "What the hell is he talking about?" As Longfellow's expression is often pretty convoluted, I keep Anthony Esolen's translation at hand while I'm reading. So I turned to it, and then to his note when the poetry proved little more intelligible, and was pleased find that he begins by remarking that this is "No one's  favorite canto." Esolen goes on to give a very sound theological explication and justification for the treatment of the soul-body question in this canto. But it doesn't make the details of the biology any more sound. I called this "Dante's biology," but of course he didn't make it up. It goes back to Aristotle, at least. 

I'm not going to reproduce the lengthy detailed explanation given by either Esolen or Bondanella. You don't care, and neither do I. A brief summary of what I've quoted is: there are different "grades" of blood in the body, and the more pure does not go out to nourish the rest of the body, but in the male is retained and becomes semen, which in the sexual act is mingled with female blood, and the combination turns into a body. 

Eventually the question about the bodies of these shades is answered: "...the intellect imprints the circumambient air with its own form, a body that conforms itself to the intellect's desires and suffering." (Esolen) It's very Thomistic, but Bondanella notes that it was invented by Dante and has no support in Church teaching, but is a necessary device for the whole premise of the poem--that Dante can converse with the souls he encounters. 

Well, it was a question that needed answering, however odd a detour the biology seemed. It didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the Purgatorio, which was greater than on my previous reading. I finished it a few days ago and I think it may prove to be my favorite of the three books. Unless something prevents me from reading at least two cantos per day, I should be able to carry out my plan of reading the Divine Comedy during Lent. 

A few years ago I finally read the entire Divine Comedy.

Oops. That was the way I originally started this post. Then I wondered whether "a few" was accurate, and how long it actually had been. And because I had written about it at the time I was able to find the answer. So here's the revised opening:

Nine years ago I finally read the entire Divine Comedy.

It's very hard for me to believe that it's been that long, but here's a post where I asked for recommendations for a translation. I was sure it had been five years at most.

I had previously read only the Inferno, in the translations of John Ciardi and Dorothy Sayers. This more recent time I ended up reading (and buying) Anthony Esolen's translation, which I liked and would recommend. Not only is it a good translation, it has, as one would expect from Esolen, insightful and reliable notes and commentary fully sympathetic to Dante's theology. 

While I was making up my mind about that I checked the local library to see and sample whatever translation or translations they had, and discovered the Inferno in Longfellow's translation, which I had not known existed. I didn't look at it closely, in part because I wanted an edition that included the Italian, as Esolen's and some others do, on facing pages. This I now scoff at--not at the thing, but at the use I made, or was unable to make, of it. What did I think I was going to do with the Italian, of which I don't even know enough to know how to pronounce any words except those that have migrated into English (pizza, cello)? I did have one or two moments when I seemed to catch a glimpse of beauty in the Italian, but mostly I just ignored it. The Italian text served only to double the number of pages required for the poem. 

But anyway: having an inclination to read Dante again, and perhaps as a result of reading several of Longfellow's poems at Poems Ancient and Modern over the past year or so, and thinking that maybe Longfellow's work in general deserves another look (as an undergraduate English major, I was a snob for English literature, and didn't think American lit deserved much attention), I went to the library and checked out the Longfellow Inferno. And now I'm sold on his translation. To jump ahead to my conclusion: I am enjoying this translation as poetry more than I had previous translations.

Or, I should say, on this edition, which is in the Barnes & Noble Classics series. The text is in the public domain, obviously, so in this day of cheap and easy publication anyone can throw the text into a file and publish it, either on paper or in electronic form. But this one is a serious work, with an introduction, extensive notes, and many other useful features by Peter Bondanella, a professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University and Julia Conaway Bondanella, professor of Italian at IU. And it's physically well-designed, and a pleasure to read. At first I thought the library's copy was just something they'd had lying around unread for decades, but no: it was first published, as best I can tell, in 2005. 

It's in three volumes, not surprisingly--the poem itself would fit easily into one, but the accompanying material takes up almost as much space as the poem. The volume of Inferno from our library is a hardback, and I hadn't read very far in it before I decided that I wanted to own it. At that point I encountered some confusion. The hardback, which by the way includes only Peter Bondanella as editor, is apparently out of print. I was able to find a copy in good condition at Abebooks, and a copy of Purgatorio on eBay. The bindings are a little different, and Purgatorio also includes Julia Bondanella as co-editor, so I don't know if there was an earlier uniform edition, or there was a subsequent edition which differs slightly. And as for Paradiso, I've so far not been able to find any evidence that it ever existed in hardback. Its paperback edition is the only one I can find at Barnes & Noble, so I'll have to give up and get it when I'm ready for it, which will be in another week or two--I'm currently on Canto X of Purgatorio, reading one to three cantos a day.

Enough of that--what about the translation itself? Why do I prefer it? Why prefer Longfellow's 19th century technique and diction to a capable contemporary one? Well, it has something to do with the way our language has developed over the past 150 years or so. The one word that comes first to mind when I try to describe that change is "lighter," followed by "thinner." Longfellow's English has a weight and substance that contemporary English doesn't. Just as important, obviously, is the fact that Longfellow was an extremely gifted poet (let's set aside whether the adjective "great" is appropriate). Anthony Esolen has written some good poetry, too, but he is not in Longfellow's class. And he doesn't have the same tools.

Here are a couple of comparisons. The two passages describe the same thing: the condition of souls in the outermost circle of the structure of Hell, where those who died innocently but without baptism dwell. (I'll set aside reservations and arguments about the doctrine and its current status.) The first is Dante speaking upon encountering the place. The second is Virgil explaining why he himself must be there. 

Inferno, Canto IV, Esolen:

As far as I could tell from listening, here
    there were no wails, but only sighs, that made
    a trembling in the everlasting air.

They rose from sorrow, without punishment,
    the sorrow of vast throngs of people there,
    of men and women and of infants too.

Longfellow:

There, as it seemed to me from listening,
    Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
    That tremble made the everlasting air.

And this arose from sorrow without torment,
    Which the crowds had, that many were and great,
    Of infants and of women and of men.

Purgatorio, Canto VII 25-30--Esolen:

Nothing I did but what I left undone
    condemns me to the losing of that sight
    of the high Sun you yearn for, all unknown

To me until too late. Below here lies
    a place saddened by darkness, not the pain
    of torment, and the souls lament in sighs,

No shrieks of woe.

Longfellow:

I by not doing, not by doing, lost
    The sight of that high sun which thou desirest,
    And which too late by me was recognized.

A place there is below not sad with torments,
    But darkness only, where the lamentations
    Have not the sound of wailing, but are sighs.

One must make up one's own mind, of course, and it's not a question of fact--I think we can assume both translations are faithful, and they certainly match each other--but of taste. To my taste Longfellow has a solid, majestic, even noble quality. Not to say that Esolen lacks those, but they seem to me more present in Longfellow. 

I'll forego a detailed examination of those lines, which after all are only a couple of dozen out of some 14,000. But I notice a couple of instances that might support my point:

"there were no wails, but only sighs"

vs.

"were lamentations none, but only sighs."

Not only does "lamentations" strike me as the more potent word, but the rhythm seems more forceful. This is a somewhat mysterious thing, as both are regular iambic. Part of the effect is that what I've quoted of Esolen there is tetrameter, while Longfellow's is pentameter. Notice that the complete thought or image includes a line break in Esolen's, while Longfellow's is one single strong rhythmic unit, almost hammer-like. In general I find Longfellow's verse to be more rhythmically potent, and even, more generally, more musical.

But this example also points to something which is likely to put off contemporary readers. Notice in the first example that the grammatical unit "there were" in this place is complete in what I quoted from Esolen. But in Longfellow's the two words are not adjacent. Longfellow's syntax is more complex, and this is a mild example. Sometimes it's downright knotty, and often part of the reason for that is his use of inversions and other ways of shuffling the conventional order of words for musical reasons. English is pretty dependent on word order, and often a poet (or translator), at least before the 20th century, changes it around very freely, so that the reader may be presented with a knot that he or she may or may not struggle to untie. I admit that I've several times consulted Esolen's translation to be sure I have correctly understood a passage in Longfellow. 

Here's a simple example, from Canto IX of Purgatorio, which happens to be the one I just read:

So fair a hatchment will not make for her
    The Viper marshalling the Milanese

In other words, "The Viper marshalling the Milanese will not make for her so fair a hatchment." But initially you may, as I did, take "hatchment" for the subject of the verb "make."

And: "hatchment"? It suggests to me a nest full of eggs, or chicks. Or perhaps snakes? This is another difficulty which pops up now and then with Longfellow: he uses a fair number of words which are no longer in common use, some of which are explained in footnotes, some of which I look up, and some of which I guess the meaning from context. "Hatchment," according to Professor(s) Bondanella, here means "ornament."

Here are a few words, previously unknown to me, that I've just recently encountered in Longfellow's translation: "incoronate," "disparts," "relucent," "indurate," "janitor." 

Janitor? That's hardly an unfamiliar word, but I certainly didn't know that it can mean something closer to "gatekeeper," derived, like "January," from the name of Janus, the Roman god who faced in two directions and was associated with (among many other things) gates, doors, and the like. It appears in Canto IX of Purgatorio, in which Dante and Virgil arrive at the entrance to Purgatory proper (after landing on the island and passing through the outskirts, "Antepurgatory"), and are welcomed by an angel. 

Again began the courteous janitor;
    “Come forward then unto these stairs of ours.”

All right, that's enough for a blog post. One last thing: Longfellow began his translation of Dante after suffering a horrendous personal catastrophe: his beloved second wife (married some years after the death of his first) was killed in a household fire which also seriously injured Longfellow and, not surprisingly, permanently devastated him emotionally. You can read about it at Wikipedia.

An 1868 portrait of Longfellow by Julia Margaret Cameron (from Wikimedia Commons)

Frances "Fanny" Appleton Longfellow, drawing by Samuel W. Rowse (Wikimedia Commons)

The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every time I think about the poem.

But I have carried on reading it in spite of that glitch.

Arbuthnot was a well-known figure in the intellectual circles in which Pope moved, and also physician and close personal friend of Pope--see his Wikipedia entry for more information. It was mainly in his capacity as friend and literary sympathizer that Pope addressed this poem to him. I should perhaps emphasize "sympathizer," because the poem is all about Pope, not Arbuthnot, and is basically a 419-line complaint. 

(I just noticed that though the poem is in heroic couplets, 419 is an odd number. Something is wrong here. Is there an unrhymed line in there somewhere? A triple rhyme? Or is the line numbering wrong? That seems unlikely, as I have the poem in an anthology and also in a Best of Pope volume, and the line count is the same in both. Perhaps I'll investigate further. Or perhaps not.)

What is Pope complaining about? Initially, the crowd of litterateurs of the second rank or lower who want something from him--his criticism, which will be followed by requests for his assistance; his influence with publishers or theater managers; sometimes also or instead, his money. 

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

They invade his residence at Twickenham:

All fly to Twit'nam, and in humble strain
Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain.

A long list of the pests, their particular entreaties, and Pope's unhappy and witty responses follows.  Who is worse, the critics who denounce his work, or the poets who want him to read theirs?

A dire dilemma! either way I’m sped,             [i.e. to the grave]
If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead.
Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I!
Who can’t be silent, and who will not lie.
To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace,
And to be grave, exceeds all power of face.
I sit with sad civility, I read
With honest anguish, and an aching head;

Less witty and more venomous is what follows: the settling of scores with literary enemies who have injured and insulted him. Some of these are explicitly named, some masked behind a classical reference, like this one:  

Let Sporus tremble—What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk...?

And that's only the beginning of a dozen or more lines vilifying Sporus. This is pretty harsh, whoever "Sporus" is meant to be, but downright vicious once you've been informed by a footnote that (1) Sporus was a boy, "Nero's favorite sexual partner" and (2) the reference was meant for Lord Hervey, confidante of Queen Caroline. I wonder that some sort of action, legal or other, was not taken against Pope; perhaps because there was too much truth in the characterization? (Here's Lord Hervey's Wikipedia entry, for context if not definite judgment.)

The contemporary non-academic reader--myself, for instance--is probably not very interested in the quarrels themselves, the personalities or the substance. Little of this would be of anything other than historical interest apart from the quality of the writing--the skill and power of expression, the virtuosic handling of the couplet, whether in epigrammatic pairs or sustained thought over a dozen or more lines. Only if one is interested enough in 18th century literature to be interested in Joseph Addison does one care that "Atticus," who gets twenty or so lines of snark for his domination and manipulation of a literary circle which did not include Pope, is Addison, who at one time had been Pope's friend. That information is not required for appreciation of the scorn in which Pope holds a critic who will

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

"Damn with faint praise," like many trenchant bits from Pope, has passed into broad usage. I find myself doing it more often than I would like, and have been on the unhappy receiving end of it a few times (though as far as I know never from malice, but rather kindness bordering on pity, which may feel worse). 

Pope's work is in many ways not what the average reader of our time would think of as "poetry." There is nothing romantic (in either sense) about it, no reaching for the sublime or transcendent, no metaphysics, no existential angst, no who-am-I-and-what's-it-all-about-anyway--no introspection, really, of the kind and degree that we begin to find in the poetry that came less than fifty years later.

The passions are certainly there, but are straightforward and down-to-earth--exasperation, indignation--directed at straightforward and down-to-earth causes: the passions of a satirist, in short, which Pope was above all else. What we have in him, as in other 18th century writers, is what was known as "wit," which was something deeper than what we now usually mean by the word: not a gift for clever humor, as in "witty," but  rather a combination of sharply intelligent observation with great skill of expression, as Pope himself explained it in "An Essay On Criticism":

True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd,

And "nature" was not, as we usually mean, the natural non-man-made world--"the environment," but the whole natural order of things, including human nature.

Denunciation of the bad is at least an implicit acknowledgement of the good. But only toward the end of the poem is there a turn toward an explicit defense of it, where Pope defends himself as a friend of virtue, honors his parents, praises Arbuthnot (finally!) and wishes him well--and not too soon, for Arbuthnot died within weeks of the Epistle's publication. 

After all that invective, let's have a touch of the poet's generosity, closing with a brilliant and touching expression of the position, the love, and the duty of child toward elderly parent:

O Friend! may each Domestick Bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing Melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender Office long engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age...

With, I think, a hint of the Resurrection. 

Peter Hitchens, writing in The Lamp a year or two ago, asserts that le Carré was "Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century." (I would provide a link to the piece, which is a review of a volume of le Carré's letters, but I'm pretty sure it's subscriber-only). I have too little acquaintance with contemporary fiction to have a respectable opinion on the matter, but Hitchens's view strikes me as entirely plausible.

I am, however, qualified to say that le Carré is a very, very good novelist, and one I've admired for a long time. I think my enthusiasm began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the early 1970s. But I was aware of his reputation before that: my father subscribed to a long-defunct men's magazine called True--or maybe TRUE--and a condensed version of le Carré's first big success, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold appeared there in 1964. I do remember noticing it, but as far as I recall I didn't read it, or if I did sample it I didn't get very far: I was sixteen and mainly read science fiction.

Tinker was a rare experience: an intricate and powerful page-turner of a narrative with subtle and profound exploration of character and theme. Moreover, for me and apparently many thousands of others, the "secret world," as le Carré refers to the people and practices of espionage, is in itself fascinating and even alluring--perhaps not a healthy thing. I read his earlier books, and over the next fifteen or twenty years others that followed Tinker. They were all worth reading, and they all had as both practical and metaphorical foundation the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union there was reason to wonder whether le Carré's work would continue to fascinate.

He continued to publish novels right up until his death in 2020. But the last one I bought, picked up secondhand years after its 1995 publication, was Our Game. And it sat unread on a shelf until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself looking at that bookcase with an eye toward freeing some space, asking myself if I really needed all those le Carré titles--nine of them--and what the chances were that I would ever re-read any except two or three of them. Specifically, shouldn't I just go ahead and put Our Game in the stack of things to donate to the Friends of the Library? But why not read it first? It's not very long, compared to some of his books.

To the book, then: the first thing an Anglophone Christian reader notices--the first thing I noticed, anyway--is that the narrator is named Timothy Cranmer. As le Carré's work is often religion-conscious (though not religious in any sense), that choice of last name seems unlikely to be insignificant: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was one of the leaders of the English schism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This Cranmer is a former member of the English espionage establishment, forced into retirement at the end of the Cold War because his career as an anti-Soviet spymaster constitutes a body of knowledge and a set of skills now "surplus to requirements," as the English say, for the role of the secret services in the new order. He is well-situated, having inherited a very nice country house and vineyard, supplemented by a goodly amount of money which we are given to understand is an under-the-table pension, or perhaps a theft, from the service--"the Office," as Cranmer calls it. And though he is surely at least fifty years old he has acquired a young, beautiful lover, Emma, who lives with him. Both she and Cranmer are somewhat familiar types in le Carré's world: the aging or aged and world-weary spy is almost a stock character, and a young, beautiful, and rather lost woman appears often.

Cranmer has spent much of his career "running" a double agent, Lawrence ("Larry") Pettifer. As  all readers of spy fiction know, with double agents there is always uneasiness, at minimum, about who the agent is really working for. Pettifer is a charismatic fellow, and he and Cranmer are close, in an almost romantic sort of way. They have remained close since their release from the Office into the everyday world, to which Pettifer is having trouble adjusting, and Pettifer is a frequent visitor, with obvious designs on Emma.

As the story opens, Emma has recently, and with little explanation, left Cranmer. And now Pettifer has disappeared. On a rainy Sunday night, when Pettifer has not been heard from for over a week, Cranmer receives a visit from two policemen who are pretty sure Cranmer must know something about Pettifer's disappearance, and suspect he may have had some hand in it. The Office is worried, too, and more than worried: Pettifer seems to have been involved with the theft of thirty-seven million pounds from the Russians.

This may all be connected to Ingushetia, which is a very small country in the Caucasus, located between South Ossetia to the west and Chechnya to the east, and the home of the Ingush people. I'm only mildly embarrassed to say that as far as I can recall I had never before heard of it. We all know of Chechnya, thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing and other events newsworthy in the West, and I had at least heard the names of North and South Ossetia. Like those, Ingushetia is part of the northernmost reach of the Islamic lands. With the end of the Soviet Union, and the consequent freedom of ancient enemies to go to war with each other, Ingushetia is (in the novel--I don't know about real life) under attack by Chechnya and Ossetia, with the permission and sometimes assistance of Russia. 

Pettifer's Soviet handler, Konstantin Checheyev (Cranmer's opposite on the Soviet side), who of course believes that Pettifer is his agent spying on the British, is not ethnically Russian, but Ingush. Ingushetia has just recently (the year is 1994) been half-freed from Russian/Soviet control, and Checheyev, like Cranmer and Pettifer, is not sure what he should be doing now. He has long resented a sort of glass ceiling for his ethnicity in the Soviet government, and doesn't think he has much of a place in Russia. And his native land is in trouble. It appears that he may be behind the theft of the thirty-seven million pounds, and that Pettifer is probably involved.

Does Pettifer's disappearance have something to do with the theft, with Checheyev, with the Ingush? Is he alive or dead? If dead, did Cranmer kill him? Cranmer has reason to think he may have--their relationship is difficult. If alive, where is he, and is Emma with him? 

Cranmer needs to know the answers, and in the process of seeking them finds himself pursued by the British police and by the Office. And the story of detective work, spycraft, and intrigue that follows is a good one, but a smaller one than many of his earlier works. It's smaller in word count, and it carries less resonance with the big questions: questions peculiar to our time, to the decayed and corrupt condition of the West, especially of England; to the Cold War and the moral dilemmas and psychological pressures involved in fighting it; and to the broader and more universal philosophical principles to which those point. The Cold War novels treat all those in more depth and with more power than does Our Game. And if le Carré is indeed a major novelist, which I'm inclined to think he is, it is those that most strongly make the case for him. But none of that means that this isn't a good story.

It follows that if you don't know le Carré's work, this is not the best place to start. For that purpose I would suggest either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The first is shorter, with a sharp dagger of a plot; the second is more expansive and more character-driven. I'm restraining the impulse to say more, in fact to say a great deal, about those and the related books. But aside from the fact that my topic here is only the one book, there's much too much to say in a brief review--there's material for a lengthy article, perhaps even a book, which very likely someone has written. 

What about that Cranmer business that I mentioned? Well, it strikes me that this new Cranmer resembles the old one in that he is in the process of making his exit from an institution which has defined his life and his world. What will become of him? Of it? What will take its place in his life? And what will be his place within that? Old Cranmer died for a new faith (though of course he insisted that it was the old one made pure). What will become of New Cranmer? It would be bad manners for me to say; you'll have to read the book to find out.

And should I keep my copy of Our Game? Well, I probably won't read it again, and I could make use of that shelf space for something more permanent. Probably it should go to the Friends of the Library. It would be a happy find for someone. 

Most of the poetry I read is from the 19th and 20th centuries. The tendency of the first is strongly in the direction of passion; of the second, of alienation and obscurity. Both tend to treat the experience of poetry, both as writer and reader, as a somewhat eccentric thing, very much off the track beaten by the society around it. After a certain amount of that, I sometimes have a yen for the solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense of the 18th century, which in general did not go in much for the sublime in poetry. Under that impulse I recently turned to Pope, of whose work I had not, as far as I recall, read a word since around 1972, in a college course in 18th century literature. 

I don't know why I picked An Essay on Man; it may not have been the best choice. It was written later in Pope's career, when he was in his forties--he only lived until his mid-fifties--after the mostly satirical works for which he is best known (I think--at any rate they are the ones I recall being included in high school textbooks). It is a philosophical poem, and I was left somewhat dissatisfied with both aspects. 

The form, standard for the time, is a very strict and demanding one: the heroic couplet, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Little variation in meter is considered acceptable. Rhyme was generally stretched no further than, for instance, "young" and "long" (and perhaps those were closer in pronunciation in Pope's time than in ours). Pope is a virtuoso of the device, which tends to have a playful quality, and so lends itself well to pithy aphoristic capsules of wit--in other words, to epigrams:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

Some of these, from the Essay and from other works by Pope, have passed into the common vocabulary: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing", from An Essay On Criticism--note the contraction preserving the meter. Someone has probably produced a volume called something like The Quotable Pope.

The form is less suited to sustained thought or narrative, maybe least suited of all to serious abstract philosophizing, which is more or less what this poem is. And it's roughly 1200 lines long. That's 600 rhymes, and I've been told that English is relatively poor in rhymes compared to some other languages; at any rate producing that many of them as part of a sustained discourse would obviously be a difficult feat. The expression here of a complex idea over a dozen (or two or three) couplets often requires a good deal of syntactic contortion and semantic compression, which is to say, sometimes, obscurity, at least for me. Often some observation is followed by multiple complicating illustrations and amplifications, so that more that once I found myself asking "Now, what was the subject of all these predicates?"

Through much of my reading of this work I made the mistake of doing it at bedtime, and sleepiness certainly made any obscurities worse. But sometimes even when I re-read a puzzling passage the next day, with a clearer head, I was still unsure of its meaning. Here's one example:

Abstract what others feel, what others think:
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink

The second line there is plain enough. But what about the first? The context is an assertion that happiness "subsist[s] not in the good of one, but all," and offers, by way of examples or proofs, persons who seem or wish to be self-sufficient, but are not. Is "abstract" a verb, so that the first line means "set aside what others feel, what others think"? Or is it an adjective: "what others feel, what others think, are abstractions"? Is the general sense that what others think and feel is irrelevant to the personal experience? Perhaps, but I'm still not sure. 

Other obscurities were the effect of references to persons or things or places that were unclear or unknown to me and perhaps to most people in our time. The edition I'm reading, a Best of Pope compiled in 1929 (almost a century ago!), the one I used in that long-ago class, has very few notes. Newer and more accommodating ones undoubtedly exist. 

Nevertheless there are long stretches that are greatly enjoyable in the way I had anticipated: cool, sharp, reasonable and reasoned, and, most essentially, poetically charming. Here's the whole section of which I quoted the beginning above:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

If you didn't enjoy that, don't bother with Pope.

Now, as to the philosophical success or failure of this philosophical work: as its verse exhibits the best of the 18th century style, its philosophy exhibits...well, perhaps not the worst, but certainly a fairly typical and fairly inadequate point of view. The (so-called) Enlightenment was at its height. Metaphysical truth was slighted or dismissed, and religion, where not attacked, as by Voltaire or Hume, was put into the background, as our culture entered the long period in which actual religious belief became an embarrassment and a difficulty, if not an impossibility. (We are still in that period, and perhaps beginning to pass out of it, but that's another topic.) I am not all that widely read, but to the extent that I'm acquainted with some of the major English literary figures of the time, there seems to be a tendency for them to be Christians engaged in a struggle, perhaps unacknowledged, to justify faith to an intellect thoroughly infiltrated, if not dominated, by the skepticism of the age.

Pope, Swift, and Johnson were all believers. Pope was a Catholic, which put him in a pretty difficult position, and might plausibly have led him to be pretty reticent on the subject of religion. But the other two were orthodox (as far as we know) Anglicans, Swift being in fact a clergyman. Yet my (limited) acquaintance with them leaves me thinking that their belief was more a matter of submissive will than of active faith, and that they were not eager to apply reason to it.

In their writings all tended to rely on what seems to me a very 18th century and not all that Christian idea of nature, or rather Nature. For some mysterious reason these lines from a poem by Swift have stuck in my mind since I read them in that class so many years ago:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true
            --"Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift"

That sense of Nature as the touchstone of all sound knowledge and reason is referred to throughout the Essay on Man. God is not absent from the picture, but is fairly remote--acknowledged and respected, but not much heard from, or spoken to. His revelation is in Nature, and since he orders all things rightly, we must conclude, as Pope tells us, twice (once early in the poem, again near the end), in capital letters: "WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." (Pope was well-off financially, and one is tempted to say "Sure, that's easy for you to say." But he had severe physical ailments that left him partially disabled from the age of twelve.) 

In principle this might amount to the same thing as trusting that God is in charge and that everything that is and everything that happens is ultimately in accord with his will. In context, and psychologically, it's more stoic than Christian, not too far in spirit from that popular saying of our time, "It is what it is."

There is no room for the Christian understanding of suffering, sacrificial or otherwise, no real sense of the Fall, no need of redemption. Whatever the consciously held beliefs of Pope or the others, the Deist conception of God seems predominant in many of their writings. And it really isn't adequate. So I guess this poem is, after all, precisely the 18th century voice I was seeking: strong in solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense, but not profound. At any rate the Romantics and the Modernists who followed knew something was missing, and went in search of it.  

Johnson had a perhaps more devastating critique: that Pope's philosophizing in An Essay on Man was no more than common sense, common both in the sense that it was plentiful and that it was ordinary. (Johnson was twenty years younger than Pope and outlived him by some forty years. His biography of Pope, from which the paragraphs below were taken, was published long after Pope's death.)

The Essay on Man was a work of great labour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope’s performances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned....

Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom he tells us much that every man knows, and much that he does not know himself; that we see but little, and that the order of the universe is beyond our comprehension, an opinion not very uncommon; and that there is a chain of subordinate beings “from infinite to nothing,” of which himself and his readers are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort which, without his help, he supposes unattainable, in the position “that though we are fools, yet God is wise.”

This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover? That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant; that we do not uphold the chain of existence; and that we could not make one another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more: that the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of other animals; that if the world be made for man, it may be said that man was made for geese.* To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new: that self-interest well understood will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power.

Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before, but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishment or such sweetness of melody.

*From the Essay:

While Man exclaims, "See all things for my use!"
"See man for mine!" replies a pampered goose.

There's a well-turned and playful couplet for you.

I've been putting off writing this post, even more than is accounted for by my normal level of procrastination. The reason, upon examination, was pretty simple: I didn't want to write it. And the reason for that was, similarly, more than is accounted for by my normal laziness: I didn't know what I wanted to say. And the reason for that was that I don't like the book as much as I had hoped and expected and indeed wanted to do, and am reluctant to damn with faint praise the work of a novelist whom I consider to be a great one--or, I have to admit, to put in the work of sorting out the good from the bad, what works and what doesn't work, in the novel.

This is a sequel to The Wild Orchid, in that it's a separate volume, but, as with the three volumes of Kristen Lavransdatter and the four of Olav Audunsson, the two are effectively a single story, the story of the life of Paul Selmer up to a point well into middle age. I wonder why it stopped there, instead of going on until the death of the protagonist, as in the other two novels. And I speculate that perhaps Undset herself may have recognized that the story was not succeeding in the way her massive medieval stories did. 

Paul seems to have been born around 1890. The Wild Orchid ends in 1914, with him in his twenties, recently married, with a baby and a successful business, and the Great War having just broken out. The Burning Bush begins two years later. Norway is not directly involved in the war, but it's having an adverse effect on his business. His marriage, which we could clearly see was going to have problems, is having them. Through the first book he was on an intellectual and spiritual trajectory which was clearly toward the Catholic Church, and I was mildly surprised that he did not get there. Part of the reason was an intense love affair which tended to push everything else, including his career, aside--he had expected to become an academic, but had given that up in part so that he could marry the girl, only to have the relationship end abruptly. 

I say the affair was "intense," but for the most part I didn't really get that sense of it. And that points toward what is, for me, the central problem with the novel (in which I include both volumes): it never really caught fire for me, and one important reason is that Paul always seemed to me a bit of a cold fish. We we are told that he is quite passionate in that first love, but to me he generally seemed a bit detached, a bit overly rational. The reader--this one anyway--seems to be looking at the affair from the middle distance: we see what's going on, but we aren't close to it. We don't really feel what Paul feels. Or at least I didn't. The same is true of the depiction of his marriage, though there is more justification for it there, as he has more or less blundered into marriage to a young woman whom he doesn't really love. And in general his family and other relationships seem marked by a certain coolness and distance. 

He does, fairly early in the second volume, make his way into the Catholic Church. And it becomes the center of his life even as it creates problems for him, especially with his wife and other family members: one in particular, a cousin named Ruth to whom he is close, laments that he seems to be lost to the family. His faith and his determination to live it as thoroughly and honestly as he can never seriously falter; I add "seriously" because he is tested, and given to understand how far short he still falls. 

I'm afraid I'm making this sound more negative than I would like. It is an interesting story, and I did enjoy it. I never had any sensation of having to force myself to continue. The situations that arise toward the end do become quite moving. Certain facts about the events of the first volume are revealed, showing them to have been tragic instead of merely ordinary difficulties and mistakes, and the occasion of vast regret.

But I can't describe this duology or evaluate it without having those two masterpieces standing beside it and making it look comparatively small. While the central drama of Paul's life may not have the tension and impact it should and no doubt was meant to--or that either Kristen's or Olav's have--there is a great deal along the way to interest the philosophically and religiously inclined reader. Much of that involves the fairly frequent more or less abstract discussions of the Catholic faith, and the not at all abstract bearing of that faith on the crisis of modern secular liberal civilization.

And lesser in both number and significance, but still interesting, are glimpses of the way the world looked from Norway in the early 20th century. Here is Paul's wife, on hearing that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was likely to cause a war: "Pooh! They have such heaps of archdukes down there that it can't matter so very much."

[There should be a picture of the book's cover here, but Typepad's image insertion feature isn't working. You can see it at Cluny Media's site.]

---

ADDENDUM, a day later

I've just re-read the chapter in which that "occasion of vast regret" occurs, and I see that I haven't really been fair to Paul, or to the book. It is very powerful, as well as profound. Paul at that point in his life is certainly no stranger to the deepest passions.

It occurred to me just now as I was typing it that I could quibble with the title of this anthology. The date refers to the lives of the poets included, not to the dating of the poems. The oldest of the poets, Paul Mariani, was born in 1940. So I doubt that any poem in the book was published before, say, 1965. But there was certainly Christian poetry published by American poets between 1940 and 1965 (and after, of course)--Robert Lowell's, for instance. So I could quibble, but I won't, because that would be petty and obnoxious. It's probably a scholarly convention and I'm revealing my ignorance. Please consider this as a pedantic clarification. Not to be confused with a quibble.

The title might come as a surprise to anyone without particular interest in both Christianity and poetry. That person might be unaware that the two have had anything much to do with each other over the past eighty years or so. And it certainly is true that most poetry that has met with any kind of positive reception in the literary world at large is either non- or anti-Christian, as is the case with literature in general. Another sort of person, one interested in poetry but not Christianity, might assume that the category of "Christian poetry" would include only or mainly devotional work, and probably not be very good. 

The first person would be mistaken, the second person very mistaken. These poets--and, implicitly, the editors--have all, consciously or instinctively, grasped the correct answer to the question, discussed to the point of being tiresome, "What is Catholic/Christian literature?" The answer is not "Christians writing about Christian things" but something closer to "the world seen through Christian eyes." In general this means that the eyes are those of a Christian, but even that isn't necessarily the case; they may belong to someone who is not Christian but is capable of seeing the world that way. Some of the poets here have a fairly loose connection to the faith: Andrew Hudgins, for instance, says "I'm not sure I would invite myself to the party" of Christian poets. But he has a poem called "Praying Drunk" which begins "Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk."

Many, perhaps most--I didn't attempt a tally--write from clear and definite belief. Some write explicitly about questions of faith, some about pretty much anything that concerns them. Robert B. Shaw, for instance, writes about "Things We Will Never Know":

What became of Krishna
the blue-point Siamese
strayed circa Nineteen
Fifty-five in Levittown

....

Why did Lester leave the Church

Why did his wife leave  him
Why didn't she leave him sooner
What made him drink like that
How much did the children know

Who built Stonehenge    Why

Notice the absence of question marks--these are not really questions, but items in the list named in the title. Only in the last of a dozen or so four-line stanzas does the poem hit us with one that affects us directly and personally, and, obliquely, hint at one of the Big Questions which Christianity poses to us all. 

Technically, the poems are all over the place. There are a good many poems in traditional forms, a good many in free verse. Some take what I think of as the typical approach of the contemporary lyric poem, which is a close look at some fairly small thing or event, usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly, suggesting some larger application or concern. Jeanne Murray Walker's "Little Blessing for My Floater" is one such. Some begin with a wider narrative or meditative scope, like David Middleton's "The Sunday School Lesson":

The room was full of thirteen-year-old boys
Unhappily constrained by polished shoes,
Bow ties, oiled hair, and orders against all noise,
And one eternal hour of Good News.

Some take on the big subjects directly, like Dana Gioia's "Prayer At Winter Solstice":

Blessed is the road the keeps us homeless.
Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way.

More than a few are funny, like Marilyn Nelson's "Incomplete Renunciation," which would have to be quoted in full for you to get it, and though it's only a dozen or so lines I probably shouldn't do that.

What they all have in common are skill, imagination, and a consciousness of the depth of the human condition. That is an echo of a definition of religion given long ago by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich: "the dimension of depth in human life" (quoted from memory, please excuse any inaccuracy). It's a very poor and inadequate definition of religion, but it's certainly an aspect of religious consciousness. And there's not a poem here which doesn't possess it.

I think my taste skews a bit toward the older poets, those within a decade or so of my own age. But it's only a skew; there are some fine poems here by younger and much younger poets. James Matthew Wilson, for instance, who is very prominent on the Catholic literary scene these days, was born in 1975, which though it makes him young in my eyes puts him well into middle age. The last half-dozen or so poets in the collection are the age of my children. This sort of thing has been disconcerting to me since people of their age began to take on significant roles in society, and continues to disconcert me as I slip further along into irrelevant old age. 

Lovely cover, too, don't you think?

Each poet's entry is preceded by a page or two of biography and excellent commentary by the editors. (Personally I prefer to read at least one of the poems, then the commentary.) These are not credited so I don't know which editor wrote which introduction, assuming one of them didn't do them all; I didn't notice any difference in style or approach among them, but then I wasn't looking for it. I am impressed by the amount of work that went into this collection: there are several dozen poets, and most of them have published multiple books. To have read all or most of these carefully enough to choose the poems and write the introductions was a massive labor, no doubt one of love.

Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix are both deeply knowledgeable, careful, and sensitive readers. Sally is an excellent poet (and fiction writer), as I noted here a couple of years ago, and also the co-proprietor, with Joseph Bottum, of the outstanding poetry Substack Poems Ancient and Modern. Michah Mattix is poetry editor of First Things and the author of a popular literary-cultural Substack called Prufrock. I have to admit that I don't read Prufrock, but it isn't because I doubt what seems to be a widely-held regard for it, but because it is, at least in part, a sort of clearing-house for items of literary interest, and I already feel that my reading attention is so painfully fragmented that I can't deal with another set of links. (I've gone so far as to install internet-blocking software on my computer to limit my ability to browse compulsively and shallowly when I'm supposed to be working.) 

So if you have much interest in the subject, you probably need this book. And while I'm at it, let me recommend Poems Ancient and Modern at least as strongly. Poetry is my chief literary interest now (a return to my teens and early twenties), so I do read every post, which is to say every poem, there, even though there is one every weekday, and I sometimes, or often, get behind. It's a continuing and pleasurable education, even for someone who has what is probably a more-than-usual acquaintance with poetry, beginning long ago with an undergraduate degree in English and several semesters of graduate work. What I just said about the team of Sally Thomas and Micah Mattix holds for Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum. Their tastes and knowledge are extremely wide-ranging, and they have featured a number of poets of whom I had next-to-no knowledge, and a few of whom I had never heard at all. Mehetabel Wesley Wright is one of these. You'll find both the poem and the biography at that link interesting: yes, she was related to John and Charles Wesley, as their elder sister. Unhappy marriages seem to have run in the family.

"Life is disappointing." That may be the only line of dialog from Yasujiru Uzo's Tokyo Story that has remained in my memory. I recall the film pretty well visually and dramatically, but there isn't a great deal of sharp and memorable dialog in it, at least when one is hearing the Japanese and reading subtitles. In the film, the remark is made by a young woman who has already seen many of her hopes crushed.

In suggesting that the line may be the theme of this novel, I'm not giving anything away; it appears in the first chapter, and is a relatively minor disappointment. But it seems to promise more such. The orchid of the title is a flower called "gymnadenia."  The protagonist of the novel, Paul Selmer, is a teenager in that opening chapter, and on a Sunday afternoon in spring he is helping his mother, Julie, with her garden.

"I'm so excited to see if anything will come of the gymnadenias I put in here last year--"

"Gymnadenia?" asked Paul. "Isn't that some kind of orchid?"

"Yes--white, with a sweet scent--I got some from Ringibu last year, from Halvdan. But you can't always be sure they'll come to anything."

Paul is filled with the promise of the flower:

Deep within him [Paul] had a feeling that the spring was something which was flowing over him, swelling from one second to the next, that it would wash over him and pass on.

"Gymadenia," he whispered softly.

A couple of months later, in July Paul returns from a trip of some weeks to find that the gymadenias have in fact done well, and his mother has put some in in his room.

There stood a little vase with some small green-looking flowers in it. Paul took it up. Frail stalks, with a few insignificant whitish little flowers growing up them. They had the faintest of scents....

He was frightfully disappointed. 

The novel is not as dreary or bleak as that might suggest, in fact it's not dreary at all, but it does deal with the inevitable failure of life to live up to hopes, and just generally to evade our expectations, for better and worse. 

 The first thing anyone who has read Undset's most famous works, the multi-volume novels of medieval Norway Kristen Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson (better known in English as The Master of Hestviken) will want to know is how this book compares to those. Not so very favorably, I would say. Which is not to say that this one isn't good, but it doesn't have the dramatic intensity and color of the medieval stories. That is in some degree a result of the difference between the active and harsh life of medieval Norway and the comparatively dull life of the early 20th century bourgeois.

It's a pretty straightforward story of the fairly ordinary life of Paul Selmer from adolescence until his early twenties. I don't recall that the exact date is mentioned, but the story seems to open around 1904, in what would be called in an English setting the Edwardian era. This would make Paul perhaps less than ten years younger than Undset herself, who was born in 1882, so we are seeing this period in Norway as she herself experienced it. Paul's parents are divorced, and I was a little surprised to find that the circumstance was not as unusual as I would have expected: within the first chapter or so Paul is comparing his situation to that of other children of divorce whom he knows. 

His mother is an interesting character, a thoroughly progressive woman who believes that marriage, religion, and in general the conventions of society are outworn customs to which one need not and indeed should not defer. Paul is surprised to learn that it was she, and not his father, who had initiated the divorce, and it seems to have been not because she had wanted to get out from under a tyrant, like Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, but just because the situation seemed too far less than perfect. Yet like many human engines of social destruction she is herself an honest and responsible person: she is not, like so many women of our time who have freed themselves from marriage etc., always pathetically in pursuit of romance. As far as we are told, she has simply lived quietly and pleasantly with her children, supporting the family with a small printing business. 

Paul has a great deal of respect and affection for Julie, and is more or less as disdainful of the old ways as she is. But he is as hard-headed a judge of her advanced beliefs as she has been of convention, and regards her general philosophy of independence and rationalism as shallow, or worse. And Paul's life, as far as we witness it here, becomes a critique not of the older bourgeois ways, but of the newer ones. He is a sort of character we encounter fairly often in 20th century literature: indifferent at best to the conventions of the preceding century, but seeing no clear alternative. He is not, however, a gloomy and alienated Prufrock type, but a lively and robust young man. He is disdainful, in what I think I can accurately call a Kierkegaardian manner, of the established Lutheran church. It is not, therefore, surprising that he becomes interested in the Catholic Church--not surprising to a reader of novels, I mean, though his type may have been pretty rare in real life.

He has a friend, a young woman named Randi (which struck me as slightly odd) who is a convert. He lives for a time in a rooming house run by a Catholic family. He becomes acquainted with a priest. When Julie and others of his family detect this interest, they are alarmed. There is a fair amount of conversation about religious matters, and it would not surprise me if some readers, especially those with no particular interest in the questions, would regard this is a novelistic flaw, a diversion from the story, and from more immediate matters of character and relationships. Well, perhaps some of these discussions are a bit too abstract or a bit too lengthy for fiction. But there is nothing more fundamentally human than the questions posed by religion. 

There is one very broad sense in which this book resembles the medieval novels: it's a story of love and marriage, and a study of Christian faith. The treatment of the latter is, obviously, quite a bit different, and has to be, because of the vast psychological difference between medieval faith and modern post-Christian skepticism. And Paul's love life, which occupies a good deal of the story, is not nearly as dramatic as Kristen's or Olav's. But in the most elemental way it is still the same human drama of choices and consequences. I'll leave out any details, so as to avoid revealing too much. But he does get married, rather far into the novel, and there are reasons to believe that its sequel, The Burning Bush, will reveal problems in the marriage which seem relatively mild cause for concern here. The Wild Orchid ends at the outbreak of World War I, with Paul having given up his earlier academic plans for a career running a company which sells household goods of various sorts. This is not the downfall that it might seem: he rather enjoys business and is good at it.

Another feature of The Wild Orchid which is not so much shared with the historical novels as identical to them is Undset's fascination with, and eye for, the natural world. I remember thinking, while reading one of the big books, that the way she described landscape, light, and weather seemed immensely fecund: always vivid, always detailed, never repetitive. She was, obviously, acutely sensitive to the smallest natural things and to the constantly varying conditions around them. The very first page of the book contains a long paragraph, so long that I don't want to transcribe it, in which Paul revels in the countryside he sees from a train. And these descriptions, always made with a sense of delight, are frequent. 

Both The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush were written in the early '30s, after Undset's conversion and after Kristen and Olav. I wonder if Undset believed that Paul's trajectory toward genuine religious belief would be common in the disillusioned times in which she was writing. She was disappointed in that, of course--or at least I assume that by the time of her death in 1949 she could see well enough that very few people were following her lead. So perhaps the remark from Tokyo Story proves applicable after all. The future, of course, as far as we have yet lived it, would belong to Julie, not to Paul.

The translation is by Arthur Chater, who also translated The Master of Hestviken. Chater was English, and so naturally his translation of 20th century Norwegian speech comes out sounding pretty English-y. I found this just a bit disconcerting at first: would a Norwegian in 1908 call someone a bounder? But that's of course completely irrational on my part.

The edition I read is a recent reprint from Cluny Media, and it's a pleasure to read: well-made and handsome. I'm currently reading, also in their reprint, The Burning Bush, and will report on it in due course.

The moment I saw the cover of this book I wanted to read it. 

It isn't just that she's a pretty girl, or even that she seems miraculously suspended in space. Presumably she's jumping on a trampoline, and the image we see is only a bare instant in one of those jumps, frozen by the camera. The power of the image is in the look on her face, that her eyes seem to be on or searching for something in the far distance, and that she seems to be not just suspended but ascending. Or levitating. Maybe that's it--it's like those medieval saints who were said to levitate. 

Did the novel live up to the promise of that picture? Well, not really. But that only shows the power described in the old saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. That's generally true but almost necessarily true if the words are an attempt to describe, or provide an equivalent of, the picture.  How could words, no matter how brilliantly chosen and placed, do just what that image does? Words must be read in sequence, over some period of time, while the image has its effect in an instant, and this is a picture of an instant.

More to the point, is it a good novel? Yes, it is. 

I can't help associating the girl in the picture with a crucial character in the novel, who hardly appears at all but is very significant. Her name is Hannah, and she and the narrator, who is in his middle or late thirties, had been childhood friends. (It's mentioned in passing that she did in fact have a trampoline.) As they entered their teens he fell in love with her, but never had a chance to do anything about it because she died suddenly of an unsuspected brain aneurysm on New Year's Eve of 1995, just shy of her fourteenth birthday. On that night he might have made, in fact had more or less intended to make, some kind of approach or declaration to her. But he chose, instead of going to the New Year's Eve party at her house, to play Dungeons and Dragons with friends (and drink beer, his first experience of drunkenness). 

The novel opens in 2017, and the first-person narrator has not thought much about Hannah for many years. Then the sight of honey locust trees on an October evening sparks his sudden recollection of the night of her death:  

...my mind without warning or apparent cause [was] seized by the memory that despite every reason to be by her side I spent the night that my childhood love Hannah died far away from her, playing a game of fantasy and getting drunk.

This sudden surge of memory is the catalyst for a series of recollections amounting to a review of his whole life since adolescence, and to events which lead to major upsets in his marriage and his life in general. 

The narrator is, we are told, a writer of fantasy novels, but I admit I was never quite convinced of that--I mean, convinced that he had actually written popular fantasy. Certainly he is extremely interested in fantasy, but the interest seems more that of a reader and a thinker than of a practitioner. I would in fact describe him first as an intellectual, but a polymath, not a specialist: very widely read, very much preoccupied with ideas, having a useful knowledge of multiple languages, a cellist accomplished enough to play Bach's cello suites, and a composer of music, at least in his student days.

And this is a very cerebral novel. It's almost the exact opposite of the last book I wrote about here, Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. That novel, though not lacking in thought, and implying much more, is primarily a story of action, often very robust (to say the very least) physical action. This one, though not lacking in physical action, is primarily one of thought, often fairly abstract thought. And whereas the main body of Soldier is one continual sequential narrative, Absolute Music is a sort of mosaic of memories of different times and places, moving among the latter in a connected but not sequential fashion, though always within the framework of the events following that moment in 2017. 

This sometimes leads to memories within memories, a technique which I found somewhat confusing at times. I've just glanced back at a section which begins from the point of view of 2017, looks back into 2001, and from there into 1989. As these recollections are often, or usually, accompanied by some more or less abstract philosophical or theological reflection, it is easy--or at least it was easy for me--to lose track of where and when we are.

And I could have done with less explicit philosophizing, though the complaint is a little unfair, as that is clearly the nature of the narrator. But though it may be at times a little confusing to me, the novel itself is not confused. It's in fact pretty tightly structured. Its structure is based on that of Bach's cello suites, a conscious and explicit decision by the narrator, who refers to the narrative as "suites." There are six of these, one for each of the cello suites. And each suite is divided into seven parts, corresponding to the dances, or pseudo-dances, of Bach's work: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, two Minuets or Bourrees or Gavottes, Gigue. I would be surprised if there is not some significant relationship of the "dances" of the novel's suites to Bach's, but I did not make the effort of figuring it out. (And I don't know the cello suites so well that the relationship is obvious.) And I'm pretty sure that themes and ideas are worked into the novel as musical themes are worked into a symphony or other substantial work, though, again, I did not attempt to dig them out and analyze them. 

So. We have an elaborately woven picture of a man's mind and life, including the intimate presences of friends, family, lovers, and wives--two of the latter. And places: I would be culpably negligent if I failed to mention the important role which place and love of place have in this novel. Much of it is set in Cincinnati, and I have to admit that I had not thought of Cincinnati as a place inspiring deep affection and study. But I believe it here. In saying that the novel is cerebral I don't mean to imply that it is indifferent to the physical, which is portrayed vividly. Those honey locusts in the opening pages, for instance, are described in detail, not only those specific trees at that moment, but the species at large.

What does this picture portray? What is most significant in it? This is a complex novel and that's not a question to which I would attempt to give a full answer in a blog-length review, or in fact without reading the book a second time, which I may do--I think it would be worth re-reading. It is a startlingly full book, though it isn't quite 300 pages long; it's crammed with incident and thought and people and places. It would take me another thousand words just to name the characters and their relationships. One of the blurbs on the back cover emphasizes its focus on the elemental human relationship, man and woman. And that's a fair reading. But I think these few sentences, which occur near the end of the book, are closer to the heart of it:

It seemed to me in that dim midday that only in the pure music I had long since renounced, the absolute music that reaches into the world behind the world, can the artist master time, set a time signature at will and free of words. But even that was an illusion, wasn't it? For only in performance...only then is the composer's time realized, only then--in time.

I wanted to believe that singing in my veins and sinews from one autumn to the next there had been many kinds of music that made up one great music. Who then was the composer, and for whom did he compose?

*

With A Soldier of the Great War still fresh in my mind, it occurs to me that the experience of reading it, a mostly straightforward linear narrative, provides something closer to the experience of music than does the musically organized Absolute Music. Like music, a story as such is experienced in time, and moreover it is, you might say, a simulation of time: it depicts events, which by definition exist in the stream of time and therefore in the only sequence of which we have knowledge and experience, the only one we can truly call sequence, the one we call chronological, They may not be presented in that order, but if the result is to be a story in any useful sense of the term, it must at least be susceptible of that ordering. In a non-linear narrative, at least one in which the non-linearity is the norm and not an occasional effect, we see temporally disconnected pieces of the story. There is no continual flow, and we can only grasp the story as a story after we've received all the pieces, i.e. out of time. Some assembly required. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and may be very effective artistically. But it is a different sort of experience from the elemental one of hearing a story. 

I would subtitle this "Another LP From the Closet," except that since we moved in 2022 my LPs are no longer stuffed inconveniently into a closet, but are now out on shelves in full view and easily accessible. Metaphorically the subtitle is still applicable, as I thought of it as referring to pop/rock/whatever LPs that I have owned for many years--since the '60s, some of them--but haven't listened to in this century, perhaps not since the 1970s.   

This is one that I can't recall having heard since the early '70s. It was released in 1969, and I once spent several weeks of isolation and idleness with only a few books and records, of which this was one, and so heard it a lot. Of those few records, there were at least a couple that I didn't like at all, further limiting my choice. That was when I first heard Grand Funk Railroad, and couldn't understand why they were so popular. The music resembled superficially some of the hard rock bands of the late '60s--they were a trio like Cream, or the Jimi Hendrix Experience--but to my ears they just sounded thin and colorless. They became a sort of sign for me that the '60s were ending.

But I liked Your Saving Grace very much. One look at the cover tells you that the '60s were certainly not over for the Steve Miller Band. Well, they weren't over for anybody in 1969, obviously. But you know what I mean.

It's an eclectic album, if you want to be generous, or a jumble, if you don't. I think the band's personnel were somewhat in flux at the time. There are several pretty straightforward bluesy rock songs, more blues than rock--this was definitely not an entry in the "hard rock" contest that was currently being won by Led Zeppelin--and Grand Funk Railroad. The instrumentation is light and supple, almost jazzy, with a strong acoustic element. But it was two songs that were not rock at all that I most liked. One was a slow dreamy treatment of the folk hymn "Motherless Children," a bit "psychedelic" in that it included some electronic effects.

The other was "Baby's House," which prompts some non-musical reflection. Today's cultural-political left owes a great deal to the twin forces of rebellion in the '60s, the hippie counter-culture and the Marxist left. There was a lot of overlap between them, in the end a fusion, but they weren't always identical. There was always in the hippie culture an emphasis on the natural, seen as a healthy alternative to industrial civilization. And for at least some hippies that included a very healthy regard for having children as a good and natural thing. That's often forgotten now that the left has coalesced into something that is grimly and loudly committed to  abortion as the essential right guaranteeing the unlimited personal freedom which was also a hippie ideal. 

As testimony that it wasn't all always and altogether that way, "Baby's House" is an open and to my mind beautiful celebration of love and fertility. The house of the title is both the place where the woman lives and the womb in which the life of her child begins. The piece is long for a pop song--right around eight minutes--and the arrangement is certainly unusual. It's mostly twelve-string guitar, piano, and organ. Drums come in at a couple of points for drama, but are silent through most of the track. I think I hear bass guitar in that long fade-out. Much of the credit for the arrangement sure goes to keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, famous for his session work with many artists. He's also given songwriting credit along with Miller.

I can't think of anything comparable in the pop music of the time. I suppose it must have been occasioned by events in Steve Miller's own life, but have no idea whether that's actually the case or not. And as for our time--well, let me know if you know of anything as naively romantic and life-affirming. 

What do I think of the album now? Well, I still like it, but, as I said of R.E.M.'s Murmur a few weeks ago, it doesn't move me as it once did. I'll repeat what I said about Murmur: hearing it again "was a bit like running into someone who had been at one time a good friend but whom you haven't seen for a long time, and realizing that you don't really have a lot to say to each other anymore. Nothing especially negative, no hostility, just a certain distance."

But "Baby's House" and "Motherless Children" are worth coming back to now and again, as is the final and title track.

I hardly know what to say about this novel. I can say that I did not know what to expect of it, but must immediately contradict that remark by saying that it was not what I expected. Whatever else those very vague expectations may have been, they did not include the combination of realist and visionary qualities that the book actually possesses.

In 1964, just outside of Rome, late in the afternoon of August 9th, a 74-year-old man and a 19-year-old boy find themselves thrown together by a need and desire to walk 70 kilometers (over 40 miles). The old man, Alessandro, is the title character, the soldier. Alessandro is a professor "of aesthetics." I'm not sure exactly what that means in practice--a sort of generalist of the arts, a critic without boundaries, and a theorizer, I suppose. The boy, Nicolo, works in a factory making airplane propellers and is vastly ignorant. He doesn't even know that the Great War, the First World War, happened, and is curious about it. The old man doesn't really want to talk about it, except in general historical terms. 

Alessandro alternately encourages the boy, berates him for his ignorance and naivete, or provokes him with cryptic remarks. When Nicolo, piqued at Alessandro's refusal to answer a question about the war, points out that he wasn't "the only one ever to be in a war," Alessandro replies:

"I know, but I survived. That puts me on a lower plane."

"A lower plane?"

"Lower than those who perished. It was their war, not mine."

And he goes on to expand on that remark in a way which only confuses Nicolo.

I found Alessandro a bit annoying, a bit sententious, and for the first hundred pages or so thought I wasn't going to like the book very much: am I going to have 700-plus pages of this old man philosophizing and reminiscing? The conversation takes place amid vivid descriptions of the landscape and the changing light, but no amount of beauty in the setting would keep it from getting tiresome after a few hundred pages.

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but the phrase "the joy of being alive" has always bothered me a bit.  I'm not sure why this is so, because I am very familiar with the sensation and grateful for it. Perhaps the reason is only that it's something of a cliché, and so no longer really communicates what it says. Or--now that I think about it--maybe it's because I think of it as the voice of someone who has no reason not to be very happy with his circumstances, and if he did have such a reason would probably sing a different tune. At any rate I receive it somewhat cynically. And I thought this book was going to be all about The Joy of Being Alive and The Wisdom of Experience, and that I wasn't going to care much for it. And in fact those descriptors are justified, or at least justifiable, but, being clichés and rather vapid, they would do more harm than good as a commentary.

At a pause in their journey Alessandro's memory makes an excursion into his childhood, to a curious incident involving an Austrian princess at a ski lodge in the Alps. Then, as day breaks after the long night's trek:

The sun rose on the left and turned the glossy leaves of the poplars into a blinding haze of light too bright to behold until the wind coursed through the trees and they began to bend and sway, softening the glare.

Alessandro felt the world take fire. His heart repaired to the past and he barely touched the ground as he walked between trees that now were shimmering in the dawn. No matter that distant thunder is muted and slow, it comes through the air more clearly. After half a century and more, he was going to take one last look. He no longer cared what it might do to him. He just wanted to go back. And he did. 

(I cannot help inserting here that I either don't understand or don't believe that remark about distant thunder, but never mind.)

That's the end of the first of ten fairly lengthy chapters. The next one, "Race to the Sea," won me over, and had me reading the rest of the book eagerly and with great enjoyment. Alessandro's initial return is to his youth, probably around 1908 or so. He is the son of a fairly affluent Roman family, well off but not aristocratic. He is an expert rider with a very fine horse. He learns mountaineering. He's in love with a neighbor girl, and one summer day encounters her as she is about to ride to the seashore. He wants to go with her, but he isn't ready, and she leaves without him. Starting out a half-hour later, he races to get there before her; that's the race of the chapter's title. 

I have been on horseback maybe half a dozen times in my life, for no more than an hour each time, and never at any pace faster than a slow trot (or is canter the right term?). So although (or because?) I have absolutely no experience of wild horseback rides, I found the account of this one exhilarating. At that point I was fully drawn into the narrative, and continued so until it was over. The middle eight of the ten chapters tell the story of Alessandro's youth, his years in the war, and some of the aftermath. The last chapter returns to Alessandro and Nicolo, nearing the end of their long walk.

When I say "the story" I mean to include all the resonances of that term. This is a story in the grand mode, almost the epic mode, except that it is also very naturalistic. It's difficult to believe that the novel was written by someone in his mid-30s who had not (as far as I know*) experienced war, or indeed many of the physical situations described. Both Alessandro's horsemanship and his mountaineering skills prove to be important in his survival of the war. 

Alessandro is a hero, and his heroism--which consists not only of courage, but also of skill and resourcefulness--sometimes strains credulity. But this does not come at the cost of any downplaying of the ugly madness of war, still less any glorification of it. The heroics, and certain other features, such as a number of highly improbable coincidences (one involving that childhood encounter with the Austrian princess), near-miraculous escapes, and moments of implausible good luck, make the book one which can fairly be categorized as a romance: a tale of great adventures with a more or less happy ending for the hero.

I said the story is naturalistic, and it is in its details. At the same time, the coincidences and the supreme good luck sometimes give the story a little of the flavor of magic realism. It could be called whimsy, but that suggests lightness. The whimsy is that of the pagan gods, "who kill us for their sport." (That's from Lear, I think.) There is at the center of many plot turns a mad dwarf who exercises an extraordinary influence on events. He is real, but his actions and his ravings suggest that there is something other than the natural at work. At times it seems that madness is the only plausible explanation of the war, in which some are carried through great danger by courage and luck, only to be undone by something outside their control, perhaps accident or mere coincidence, or, in one case, a soldier's misunderstanding of an order. 

There is a semi-mystical sense of time, fate, and order operating in a meaningful pattern. There is a definite religiosity without any very specific content beyond an enormous sense of wonder and a confidence that beauty means something, and is not just an accident. Countering the madness and influence of the dwarf is a painting by Giorgione, La Tempesta, The Tempest (click here for what I hope is a pretty good reproduction). It is an enigmatic picture, and Alessandro is mildly obsessed with it, seeing some mysteriously ordering principle embodied in it. The principle is mysterious, and the order it produces is mysterious, very often seeming to be no order at all, perhaps more promised than realized. The story is not a tragedy, but it includes a great deal of sorrow. 

I suggest that you read it. I don't think you'll be sorry. 

---

* The few biographical notes that I've read say that Helprin served in the Israeli Defense Forces, but do not mention any combat experience.

By the way, the author is not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the journalist.

Nobody could keep up with all the declared National or International Such-And-Such Days, or Weeks, or Months. But I happened to notice this one, and I took "book" quite literally: as referring not to the content of a book, the words and the ideas or stories or pictures and whatever else may be the abstract thing that is "the book" as distinct from any physical thing that incarnates the book, but an actual material object. 

(Pedantically, I don't say "physical or electronic," because the workings of the latter are just as physical as paper, though they are invisible. This gets in my way sometimes when I want to differentiate with a word or maybe two a paper from an electronic book, or a CD or LP from an MP3.)

Love of the physical book is the reason I'm currently reading this one:

I haven't had it for very long and have already forgotten where I got it. Perhaps at an open-air used-book stall in D.C. the last time I was there; at any rate it was either cheap or free. And I did not need it. I've had a copy of Frost's complete poetry, published after his death and so including In the Clearing, which was his last book, published when he was eighty-eight, for many years and could have read these poems at any time. In fact I have never done much more than scratch the surface of his work, knowing a dozen or two of his best poems very well and hundreds of others not at all. 

But I started reading this one a week or so ago because I wanted to handle the book itself. I think I can say with some confidence that this would be a very bad place to begin one's reading of Frost. It is not, so far, a very good book. It's an odd one, or at least it contains a lot of poems that strike me as very odd, and not so very good. There is, for instance, a poem called "Kitty Hawk" which is fifteen pages of irregularly rhymed three-beat lines, which I have to say was a bit of a trial, and which left me a bit puzzled. The puzzlement may have more to do with the fact that I was reading it in bed and started falling asleep partway through my first reading than with the poem itself (which I did finish the next night), but I'm not much inclined to put more effort into it.

I've read most of it now, and there are a few gems, including one you may remember (I do) from the classroom, "In A Glass of Cider." But on the whole there's just not much here of what makes Frost so highly and rightly regarded. (See this entry at Poems Ancient and Modern for an instance of just how technically skilled he could be while maintaining a very American conversational voice.)

Some great part of my enjoyment of the book is the sort of physical book it is, I mean even apart from its physicality. It's not that I'm any sort of collector or connoisseur--a slightly embarrassing number of my books are library discards, and look it. But I have a particular weakness for books that were published between, say, 1920 and 1960 (1962 in this case): books that constituted adult reading when I was a child and adolescent. And the physical condition of the book doesn't really matter that much. The attraction is a form of nostalgia, containing, I suppose, the memory of something which at the time represented to me maturity and intelligence, a world of which I wanted to be a part. I'm fairly sure I didn't think any such thing at the age of fifteen or so, but it was present as a vague sense of wanting to be a substantial sort of person. To be a grown-up. There's an ideal which seems pretty close to vanishing from our culture. And maybe that knowledge, too, figures into the nostalgia.

And then there are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote for John F. Kennedy's inauguration, greeting

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

Frost did not live to see the savage response of history to that hope, though he did live a few months past Kennedy's assassination, which was a pretty good first serving of what was to come. 

Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Jessica Hooten Wilson's attempt to salvage the novel of the same name on which Flannery O'Connor was working at her death. Last month I attended the Global Catholic Literature Project's online seminar/discussion of the book, so I have read it and listened to a good deal of talk about it, including an extensive introductory lecture by Dr. Wilson.

It was clearly a labor of great devotion to O'Connor on on her part. And it's not a criticism of her, or of the other presenters and participants in that seminar, to say that it confirmed my suspicion that there's really not that much to the book, because O'Connor didn't leave that much to work with. If the novel had been anywhere near completion, "unfinished" in the same way as, for instance, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, someone would long ago have published it. The publisher's prominent blurb on the cover, "The Unfinished Novel In Print For the First Time," is misleading at best. The actual subtitle is much more accurate: "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At a Work In Progress." 

It seems that O'Connor left only draft fragments, and apparently there are multiple versions of many of them. Wilson has selected and arranged these to provide an incomplete skeleton of what would presumably have been early chapters of the book, providing characters and a situation. Where the story might have gone from there can, obviously, only be a matter of speculation. The book is only 182 pages long, not including footnotes, and, without actually counting, I'm guessing that only about half of the words are O'Connor's. The rest are Wilson's commentary and her "presumptuous attempt to end the novel." (I'm not going to comment on that, because I never had enough sense of what the story might have been to judge of whether her ending was plausible.)

The main characters are mostly familiar O'Connor types:  a bookish young man along the lines of Asbury in "The Enduring Chill"; his father, a somewhat brutish hick partly incapacitated by a stroke; his extremely practical mother, who now runs the farm and is outraged by her son's idleness. And there's a character who's a new type, of whom more in a moment. It appears that O'Connor was trying to go in a new direction, one striking indication of which is that unlike the violent conversions, or at least collisions with grace, in her other work, this one--which is that of the young man, Walter--takes place early on (or so I thought--it isn't really clear), and rather quietly and abruptly (as far as we can tell). On the basis of what we have here it doesn't strike me as very convincing. That's hardly fair, but the brief scene describing it is all I have to go on.

Walter has a peculiar pastime: he writes letters, more or less as pranks, to people whose names he encounters in the news and elsewhere, usually because they annoy him. Then, depending on the response, he may play with them--for instance by praising a poet whose work he actually detests. But:

Whenever one of his correspondents, from being a caricature, turned into a human being, pathetic, undemanding, full of ridiculous encroaching love, Walter wrote DECEASED across the letter he had just received and put it back in the mail.

One such victim is a young woman, Oona Gibbs, a left-wing activist/dreamer, writer for a radical New York magazine. (I immediately thought of Myrna Minkoff in A Confederacy of Dunces, a character of whom O'Connor would not have known, since she didn't appear in print until 19180.) Walter imagines her as an early '60s bohemian sort:

Oona Gibbs would wear sandals and a peasant skirt and be a veteran of Mississippi jails.

He could visualize the whole lot of them, the whole pack of lean, hungry-eyed young people, moving from place to place on the scent of injustice. The very thought of them generated a peculiar fury in him, even though, as far as the moral issues were concerned, he was more or less on their side.

I thought the name "Oona" an odd and possibly poor choice, wondering if it was invented. But it is indeed a name in actual use, having originated with an Irish word for "lamb." (Eugene O'Neill had a daughter named Oona; she married Charlie Chaplin.) That etymology suggests, in light of what we learn about Oona, that it was carefully chosen. 

We don't see Walter's first letter to her, in which he apparently presents himself as being enthusiastic about her ideals. She responds with a wildly gushing letter, full of the excitement of her own liberation and the thought that she has found a kindred spirit. A sample:

I've broken through the ceiling of everything that suffocated me--conventions, manners, religion--and have suddenly like breaking into outer space, understood that nothing matters but that you be open to everything and everybody. For the first time in my life, I'm afraid of nothing.

Well, that sure sounds like the sort of revolution of consciousness for which there was so much enthusiasm among some in the '60s. Walter is repulsed, and apparently decides to put her to the test. He replies that as much as he appreciates her offer of friendship: 

...I don't believe you can give that friendship to me, and I'll tell you why.... Miss Oona Gibbs, I am a Negro!

Wilson suggests, very plausibly, that this device may have been suggested to O'Connor by Black Like Me, a book in which the writer, John Howard Griffin, blackened his face and traveled the South to see what the experience of being black was really like. O'Connor does mention the book and the writer in her letters, so we know she was aware of it.

Thrilled, Oona resolves to hurry down to Georgia and meet this person on whom she can exercise all her fascination for the downtrodden and exotic. She writes to Walter that she is coming, and he tries to warn her off by claiming he has hepatitis: "VERY DANGEROUS. Do not come." But she is already on her way:

She was even then only sixty miles away, speeding forward as deadly and innocent as a flame in her little red automobile.

Now, that sentence is a real Flannery O'Connor gem, the most striking in the book for me. But those brilliant touches are relatively few here. And I'm skeptical that that the novel would have been successful. The premise is outlandish, but not in a way that strikes me as plausible--especially if, as seems the case, the execution was to go in a direction more serious than comic. That seems to have been meant to include a love story.

One reason for my skepticism is that, on the basis of the work we have, O'Connor's range was limited. I think most people who love her work acknowledge that her range is deep but narrow. One obvious possibility--obvious to me, anyway--is that these limits were fundamental: that is, not just the effect of her illness and truncated life, but an intrinsic limitation of her gifts. I find it a little difficult to imagine her writing a serious love story. I find it much easier to imagine her making wild comedy of the collision of Oona and Walter. 

It's Wilson's view, a very plausible one, that O'Connor was trying, or planning to try, to take on some of the social questions of the time (the mid-1960s), specifically the racial problem. We would like to think that, had she lived, she would have, one way or another, covered new ground: different situations, different characters, different concerns. Wilson seems to believe that these fragments represent just such a movement. It's certainly plausible; let's grant that it was indeed O'Connor's intention. As I say, I'm a little skeptical that it would have been successful. But I have just re-read a longish section in which Oona is introduced, and it strikes me now as being much better than I had thought. If I had written this review without taking a second look at the book, I would have said "Don't bother." But I did take that look, and now I find myself feeling a little sad that there won't ever be any more of it. I almost said "I hope I'll be proved wrong."

No, there isn't much here, and if you're not an O'Connor enthusiast I would still say "Don't bother." But if you are, and I mean an enthusiast not only for her fiction but for her letters, her thought, her whole persona, it's worth your while.

One thing that I don't consider to be worth much of anybody's attention is picking at the question of O'Connor's views on race, on which Wilson spends too much time. Considering the intellectual and ethical wreck that is current academic-progressive thinking on race, I just don't have any patience for it. And there's a certain resemblance here to the nice folks who were scandalized by O'Connor's work and wanted her to write "something uplifting." I think I said what I want to say about that some weeks ago, in this post: A Note On Flannery O'Connor And Race

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As I mentioned in the previous (but one) post, I've been wanting to re-read Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, which I first read almost exactly eleven years ago. Since it concerns the Antichrist and the end of the world, the subject matter seems even more timely now than it did then. I wrote about it at the time--click here to read that post--and for the most part what I said there still applies after this reading. But I enjoyed it much more, and think it's a better book, this time.

Some part of this upgrade, so to speak, may be due to the fact that I read an actual printed book this time, the nicely printed and bound one from Cluny Media, rather than a Kindle version. I just don't much like reading anything more than a couple of thousand words on an electronic device. And some part may be due to my having given it more attention this time. Whatever the reason, I found it more involving on every level than I did before. I didn't find the lack of narrative drama that I complained about before, and I found myself more involved with the characters than before. In particular the story of one character, Mabel Brand, wife of a major political leader, is quite moving. I can't say much more about that without giving too much away. It's still not a great work from the literary point of view, but it's a good one, a better one than I thought on first reading.

I still find--I'll try to keep this vague--that some parts of the actual spiritual and physical collision of Christ and Antichrist are vaguely depicted, which is not a surprising flaw in such an attempt. And the extent to which Benson imagines the 21st century Catholic Church to be more or less the same as it was in his time remains a striking feature--not necessarily a defect, just strikingly not what has actually happened. Which is true of most of his imagined 20th century history. And almost ludicrously, he envisions the establishment of a new compulsory secular worship as requiring the assistance of an apostate priest who designs ceremonies as elaborate and minutely choreographed as a High Mass in the Vatican in Benson's time. If that is to be the way things go at the actual end, it must be a long way off yet. (The apostate priest, by the way, is named Francis, which amused me.)

The story, as I mentioned, is also more timely, which makes it more interesting. The idea of a compulsory secular worship is not as far-fetched as it was only eleven years ago, with corporations and governments and universities making life difficult for anyone who does not actively join in the celebration of "Pride" (!).  And moves by the federal government in the past few years to put some Christians under surveillance as potential terrorists make the persecution described in the book much more easily imagined. 

Note: I feel obliged to say that I don't think the word "persecution" is accurate as applied to Christians in this country right now. We may see the potential for it, but it isn't here now, and to claim that it is here is the mistake we refer to as "crying wolf." 

And, just for the record, I do believe--in fact I think it's obvious, in fact I think it would be difficult and foolish to deny--that the spirit of Antichrist is very much active in Western culture right now. Whether this means we actually might be near the end of the world is not a question on which I have anything like a definite opinion--not for public expression, and not even in my own mind. 

NOTE: the Cluny edition is a hardback and thus on the expensive side. But as of this writing it and many other titles are going for 20% off, which makes this one $26.36 vs. $32.95. I don't know how long this will be the case. You'll see the discount applied in your cart before you check out.

UPDATE: THE SALE IS OVER NOW.

Cluny Media is a publisher whose main line of business is the reprinting of Catholic classics, or classics which are in some way connected to and compatible with the Catholic tradition. And when I say reprinting I don't mean a sloppy scan of an old book run through a print-on-demand process. I mean very high-quality work. Here's how they describe their enterprise:

Our publishing philosophy is simple: A book, from cover to cover, should be an artifact, a work of art. Because our business is primarily to take the old and make it new, this philosophy demands a particular, careful process. Unlike the facsimile “republications” of other, similarly motivated publishers, Cluny editions are restorations. The restorative spirit especially animates the production and design elements of the publishing process.

Their "About Us" page goes into more detail about what they do, and why and how they do it. It's worth reading. And supporting. 

Over the past four or five months I've bought several of their books, and can vouch for their quality: Caryl Houselander's Letters, Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, and no less than five of Sigrid Undset's works that aren't gigantic novels set in medieval Norway.

This mini-binge began with my desire to re-read Lord of the World. I had read it ten years ago in one of those free Kindle editions which are not well formatted, which meant that it had two strikes against it before I even started reading: strike one was the fact that it was on the Kindle, as I don't like reading anything substantial on an electronic device anyway. I felt like I'd somehow missed something. The topic--the Antichrist and the Apocalypse--has been on my mind, and I wanted to read an actual on-paper edition this time. I shopped around and was led to the Cluny site, which led to the purchase of that book and then the others. 

I can pretty confidently say that you'll be impressed with their list (click here), and pleased with the quality of the books. And I'm going to make one specific recommendation, of a title I was very surprised to see: Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. 

I was surprised because I would have assumed it's still under copyright, and that whoever owns the copyright would not readily allow anyone else to publish an edition. It was first published in 1928, so maybe the copyright has expired. In any case it's a very good and very funny novel, my favorite of his comic novels. And isn't that cover great?

I'll mention another title which I was a little surprised, and very pleased, to see: the three-volume A History of the Church by Philip Hughes. I'm not in the market for this set, because I own it, in a Sheed & Ward edition of the 1930s and '40s, and I have a strong attachment to it. Back around 1980, when I was seriously considering leaving the Episcopal Church for Rome, I wanted to read something substantial about the history of the Church. Somehow I decided on this one--I have absolutely no memory now of how that came about--and went to some trouble to get hold of it from an out-of-print books dealer. It did its job, and I proceeded. 

It's very well-written, as you would expect of an educated Catholic priest of his time (1895-1967). Contemporary historians would probably consider that it goes way too easy on the Church--"triumphalist," they might say, or worse. There's something to that. But I thought it was very fair to the opponents of the Church, and unsparing of the Church's own failings, though it doesn't dwell on the shocking.

And it ends with Luther. The three volumes were originally to be titled The World In Which the Church Was Founded, The Church and the World It Created, and The Church and the Christian World's Revolt Against It. That basic plan was carried out, but I just noticed, in a footnote to the third volume, that it was intended only as "the first half of this third part." I don't know what the story of that is. But Hughes did later publish A Popular History of the Reformation, also available from Cluny. I have a copy but have never read it.

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There's a new online poetry magazine: New Verse Review. It's published on Substack, which is very much the thing these days. I recognize several of the names associated with it, especially Sally Thomas, whose book of poems I praised here. I like the fact that the new publication not only favors metrical verse but narrative, and, I assume, longer lyric poems. Modern poetry tends to focus on a single epiphanic moment, and I'm in favor of stretching out a bit. Provided, obviously, that that doesn't mean making a not-very-interesting poem even less so by making it longer.

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There's a new anthology of Rene Girard's writing: All Desire is A Desire For Being. That's a quote from Girard, and it knocked me out. It's something I've been trying to get at in a poem I've been working on (a longish poem, coincidentally), so I immediately wanted to read the book. I've only read one Girard work, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, and I don't think that sentence occurs in it. The anthology was assembled and edited by Cynthia Haven, who knew Girard personally, knows his work, and has published a biography of him, Evolution of Desire. Here's an article in Church Life Journal, "We Do Not Come In Peace," which seems to be meant as a sort of introduction to the anthology.

The first three of these were audiobooks, listened to on several lengthy trips over the past few months.

Tony Hillerman: The Fallen Man

As you probably know, Tony Hillerman wrote a series of detective novels set in the Southwest, mostly on the Navajo Nation, in the area known as the Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet. I like them a lot, and I'm not sure exactly why. I mean, they're very good, but as detective novels go they're not extraordinarily so. I think it has something to do with a fascination, going back to childhood and Western movies and TV shows, with the landscape of the Southwest. 

After the first book or two, the crime-solvers are Navajo members of the Navajo Tribal Police, beginning with Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, later adding Leaphorn's subordinate, Jim Chee, and the stories often involve Navajo culture and its interactions with mainstream "white" America. One of the pleasures of the series is that the main characters develop in time. They age, their relationship to each other changes, their positions in the police force change, new characters appear, but previous ones sometimes remain in one way or another. This is the twelfth of eighteen books in the series, and it finds Leaphorn in retirement, and Chee taking on the central detecting role, frequently consulting Leaphorn. And it involves the fading of Janet Pete, Jim's fiancé, and the arrival of a young female police officer, Bernadette Manuelito, who will be increasingly important. 

That broader story emerged as a patchwork for me, because I didn't read them in order. I haven't actually read many of them; they have, rather, been my first choice when I wanted an audio book to listen to on a long drive. For the most part the choice was determined by whatever the local library had on hand in audio format at the moment when I wanted one, going all the way back to those dim years when "audio book" meant Books On Tape. It would be fun to go back and read them, on paper, in their right order. That sounds like a good project for retirement, but now that I am officially retired, I don't want to devote that much time to them, with so many better works yet unread. 

I don't consider this one of Hillerman's best, but in my experience they're all worth reading. Perhaps part of the reason is that Navajo ways play a lesser role here than in some of the others, making Fallen Man a bit less distinctive. The story opens with two rock climbers on the justly famous Shiprock. One of them takes a very risky look over the edge of the ledge they're standing on, and sees, far below, the skeletal remains of a man in climbing gear. He turns out to be a young man who had disappeared several years earlier just before his thirtieth birthday, when he would have come into full ownership of the family's substantial property. That becomes, of course, a complex story involving the land, lots of money, and far-away financial interests. There's a subplot involving cattle rustling, and I've already forgotten whether it's connected to the murder case. Perhaps only in that Officer Manuelito, investigating the rustling, notices some things that prove significant to the other matter.

Not the best place to start with Hillerman, but certainly a good read. 

I have been a little disappointed in the last few Hillerman audio books that I've listened to. It seemed that the narrator was somehow not as engaging as I expected. Eventually I realized that I had been accustomed to the narration of George Guidall, whereas the newer ones are by Christian Baskous. There was something about Guidall's voice, a dry and wry quality, that seemed to fit the books better than Baskous's. I think I'll see if the library has any of the older Guidall ones. 

Ann Cleeves: White Nights and Red Bones 

These are the next two novels in the series set in the Shetland Islands with Detective Jimmy Perez as the central character. I wrote about the first one, Raven Black, back around the turn of the year, in this post. Of these two, I liked Red Bones better. Much of the plot of White Nights never really quite made sense to me. My fault, possibly. (The title refers to the summer nights which at Shetland's latitude never get entirely dark.) I didn't find the characters all that interesting, either. It begins with a bizarre incident in which a man attending an art exhibition has an emotional breakdown in front of a particular painting, and is later found dead, an apparent suicide, but of course...well, this is a detective novel. That sounds kind of promising, doesn't it? Like I said, maybe my lack of response was just me. Or maybe the book needed to be read, not listened to.

Red Bones was more engaging. It revolves around an archaeological dig almost in someone's front yard. The dig sounds interesting in itself, the site being that of a wealthy medieval merchant's home. We get a glimpse only, but an intriguing one, of the world that the merchant would have inhabited. The students doing the digging are sympathetic characters, one of them a serious student, another more of a playgirl. Guess which one becomes a murder victim. (You probably guessed wrong.) Some human remains are found in the dig. Guess when the death took place. 

Here, from Ann Cleeves's web site, are some remarks about the use of this novel as the basis of the first season of the Shetland TV series (see my post at the link two paragraphs above for more remarks on that):

Red Bones, the third instalment of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Quartet, is set in spring: a time of rebirth and celebration. And a time of death... for April is the cruelest month.

Perhaps that's why Red Bones was chosen as the basis for Shetland, a new two-part crime drama set in Scotland and starring Douglas Henshall. A special Shetland preview on November 21st was well received by the local audience, and Ann Cleeves gave it her approval too: "It's great," she said. "It's not faithful to the book but it's faithful to the atmosphere and spirit of the book. It's important that it's a good piece of TV rather than stick rigidly to the book."

I agree, Ms. Cleeves. I note, by the way, that the first novel in this series was set in winter, the second in summer, the third in spring. I haven't checked to see whether the fourth is set in autumn. (UPDATE: it is, and also the title is two words consisting of an adjective which is the name of a color and a noun: Blue Lightning.)

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast

This is one I read, in the beat-up old paperback which I bought long ago. I have most of the Archer novels, and they are, as a group, the most unsightly books on our shelves. Which seems appropriate. 

I said a good deal about Ross Macdonald in one of the 52 Authors posts, so I don't need to repeat my general opinion of and enthusiasm for his work. This novel is not his best, but since I like all of his Lew Archer novels, that's only a mild criticism. As with the Hillerman book above, I would not recommend this as the best place to start if you don't know the author's work. It's a relatively early one, and some of the later ones are better--this one appeared in 1956. But then the very first one, The Moving Target, is one of his best. 

It's a fairly typical Macdonald story: sad people who have seen their hopes thwarted--sometimes by their own foolish decisions, sometimes by the actions of others, sometimes by fortune--do things that make them even sadder, or dead. Archer moves among them, stern but compassionate. 

Something that bothered me, and which has bothered me in crime dramas generally, is the protagonist's impossible resilience and recovery after violence. The action of this book takes place over a few days. If my memory is correct, Archer receives at least two very brutal beatings which leave him unconscious. That he bounces back from these within hours and continues to work on the case, barely eating or sleeping, is implausible. .

One notable feature of this book is its bitter contempt for the movie industry. Macdonald seemed to share that with Raymond Chandler. Hollywood and Las Vegas form what you might call an axis of evil for him. In this conversation Archer is eavesdropping on a couple, a young woman, her profile "young and pretty and smooth as glass," and an older man, "an aging clown I'd seen in twenty movies":

"You said you'd catch me if I fell," she said.

"I was feeling stronger then."

"You said you'd marry me if it ever happened."

"You got more sense than to take me seriously. I'm two years behind on alimony now."

"You're very romantic, aren't you?"

"That's putting it mildly, sweetheart. I got some sense of responsibility, though. I'll do what I can for you, give you a telephone number. And you can tell him to send the bill to me."

"I don't want your dirty telephone number. I don't want your dirty money."

"Be reasonable. Think of it like it was a tumor or something--that is, if it really exists. Another drink?"

"Make mine prussic acid," she said dully.

The real import of this exchange didn't hit me until I'd read a few sentences into the next paragraph. If that guy lived into the '60s and '70s he probably had lots more fun of this sort. Sometimes it just amazes me that moviemakers consider themselves in a position to give moral lectures to the world. 

This is a very ugly cover, and only partly fitting. The diving girl is justifiable because one of the young female characters is a competition diver. I presume she did not dive naked, though. I guess that red curvy thing is a boxing glove, which is fitting enough. 

Both are from the BBC, naturally, and are serials made for television, each running roughly eight hours in total. The first was made in 1985, the second in 2005. Both are worth seeing, but all in all I think the second is superior and the best choice if you're only going to watch one.

The 1985 one, like the Dombey and Son dramatization I mentioned recently, took me back to Sunday evenings in the '70s and '80s watching PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. Comparing those with more recent similar efforts, you can sort of see the improvements in technology and, probably, financing. Visually, for instance, Bleak House 1985 is often less sharp, clear, and bright than Bleak House 2005. (I think I'll refer to them just as "1985" and "2005" for the rest of this post.) This is especially true in outdoor scenes, especially in London, where it actually is effective: the creators apparently wanted to portray the city as extremely dim and murky (which is certainly consistent with the book), and they succeeded. The slum called Tom-All-Alone's is nightmarish, as such places probably were in reality.

The two are pretty different cinematographically, and I don't know how much of the difference is technological and how much a stylistic choice. I recall, watching 2005 when it was originally released (almost twenty years ago!), thinking that the way the faces of characters often filled the screen almost entirely was a little annoying, reducing or almost eliminating a sense of the space in which they existed. But on this viewing I didn't really notice that, which makes me think it's a change in style to which I've become accustomed in other works. There was one small but irritating thing in 2005 which I think was a sort of fashionable device at the time, perhaps, and I hope, out of fashion now. That's a way of doing transitions with a literal bang. We're switching from London to Bleak House, say: wide shot of house BANG; quick cut less wide shot of house BANG; quick cut to closer shot of house BANG. Then on into the actual scene. After maybe half the episodes I got used to it, but I did wonder why someone thought it was a good idea. Maybe appropriate in some kind of noisy hyperactive contemporary movie, but for Dickens?

Changes in acting style are also apparent. In general the approach in 1985 is a little broader and more blunt. It seems, on one level, more acted, or stagey, while 2005 is perhaps more subtle--but then I don't know enough about acting to talk about it intelligently in a general way, so I would do better to compare specific characters. 

Like any male of my age, I am an admirer of Emma Peel Diana Rigg, and so it pains me a little to say that she did not make as powerful a Lady Dedlock as Gillian Anderson, whom I had of course enjoyed as Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files, but whose ability as a more serious actress I had doubted. The big difference is that Gillian Anderson does icy very, very well, while Diana Rigg--whether by nature or by actor and director choice I don't know--is warmer and more openly vulnerable. I vaguely recall from my first viewing of 2005 that I thought Anderson's performance was a little weak compared to the others, and that her English accent seemed somewhat forced and not entirely real. Well, I didn't feel that way this time. A little stiff, maybe, is the worse I would say about the accent. I was very critical of it in her more recent portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, as well as in the crime drama The Fall in 2013. I don't know what to make of that--surely her accent didn't get less authentic over the past twenty years or so, as she has lived in England for much of that time (and lived there for a significant portion of her childhood). But anyway, applause to Scully Anderson for this performance.

Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn in 2005 is surely the ultimate. And I'm pedantic enough that when I use the word "ultimate" I mean it pretty literally. (I'm always annoyed when I see an advertisement for something like "the ultimate PC," something which will be more or less obsolete and certainly surpassed within months.) Not ultimate as in chronologically final, but ultimate in the sense of unsurpassable. I suppose someone someday might prove me wrong, but I just can't imagine a more convincing and effective portrayal of Tulkinghorn, nor one more in keeping with the character as he's portrayed in the book. The Tulkinghorn in 1985, Peter Vaughan, is fine, just not in the same league for mystery, menace, and intelligence.

Anna Maxwell Martin, as Esther Summerson in 2005, also seems more convincing to me than 1985's Suzanne Burden. And so on--as I look over both cast lists, I think 2005 takes first place in most instances. There are a couple of characters who don't seem all that effective in either one. Sir Leicester Dedlok doesn't have the mountainous snobbery and pomposity I imagine, but maybe what I imagine is impossible. Nor does either fully convey to me the noble generosity of his reaction to the family's crisis. I somehow think John Jarndyce should be more colorful than he is portrayed, but again, that may be my misreading, or at least eccentric reading. Slimy little Guppy is good in both. 

Anyone who watches as many British crime dramas as I do will immediately recognize Phil Davis as Smallweed in 2005, also a noticeably superior portrayal to 1985's. He's often played similar characters, irascible, hostile, and creepy.  

I won't bother picking over the choices each version makes in tailoring the narrative for this length and format. I did quarrel with some, but I don't recall thinking that they were unjustifiable. It must be a difficult task.

Here's the, or a, trailer. Not an especially good one, in my opinion. Notice that they say "Charles Dance vs. Lady Dedlok." I didn't realize he was that well known. You can hear the end of one of those BANGs as it begins. 

Having read a bit more about the unpublished Flannery O'Connor work mentioned in this post, I'm getting the impression that much of the discussion about it, and possibly the book itself, are focused on Flannery O'Connor's views on race. 

This interview with the book's editor, Jessica Hooten Wilson, by a couple of slightly obtuse Georgia Public Radio guys, is an instance. I'm sure they're smart guys who went to college and all, but this is the way they see the world:

Orlando Montoya: So I'd like to think that this story would have become Flannery's statement on race, that she might have come down on the right side, and that it would have clarified a lot of our doubts about Flannery and race. But it's also possible that she could have just ended up making some other point.

Peter Biello: Like, well, what other point?

Orlando Montoya: Religious.

Peter Biello: Oh, okay.

Orlando Montoya: A religious point. I mean, her entire body of work is just oozing, as you said, with this Catholic sense of the world. And so there's a reason Catholics just love Flannery. And to me, when I read Flannery and this story's no exception, there's just a lot of judgment, from everyone to everyone. And so that's why I kind of find her kind of difficult. Her pages are just dripping with judgment, this Catholic sense that there's going to be a reckoning and you better be on the right side. And these fragments are no different.

Oh, okay.

They're creatures of their time and culture who don't see their own as clearly as O'Connor did hers. And they are, in a limited way, admirers of her work. At least the one guy understands that the Catholic viewpoint is not just accidental to the stories. But to view the very glancing connection between O'Connor's views on race as more interesting and important than the theological-philosophical foundations of her work is indicative of a very defective understanding of it (and possibly of art in general, but never mind that now).

Moreover, the clear implication here is that the Catholic aspect is something at least mildly negative, which certainly indicates a view of the work that is seriously limited at best. We have to put up with her weird religious obsession, they seem to suggest, but we can hope that she might, in keeping with our expectations of what constitutes progress, have set that stuff aside and talked about what we think is important, i.e. race, come down on "the right side" of the matter, and "clarified a lot of our doubts." (What does that mean, exactly? Remove our doubts, I suppose. "Clarified" could mean either confirmed or contradicted.) And if she didn't? Well, clearly our doubts must remain; Flannery O'Connor is "problematic." 

It's especially wrong-headed, downright ludicrous, for a 21st century progressive to complain of an excess of judgment, when the more zealous among them rarely stop judging everything and everyone in Western civilization, apart from themselves and the present moment, as inadequate if not evil. And let us note, too, that it is often precisely the harsh, stubborn, and ignorant judgmentalism of her characters that is seen to be under the judgment of God.

I sometimes wish I could be transported several hundred years into the future so I could participate in the establishment of the judgement of "history" on our own time. The confidence that we are on its "right side" is probably going to be one of the more risible things about us. Our culture has rightly rejected blatant anti-black racism, but influential sectors of it have embraced a long list of other absurd and harmful views, not least of which is another form of racism, in which white people are considered to be indelibly stamped with something called "whiteness," an ontological stain with which they are born and which can never be erased, and which requires perpetual acts of penance. Penance, not atonement, because atonement is impossible, except perhaps by civilizational suicide. (The parodic resemblance to Christianity has often been noted; it's one of the most visible motifs of post-Christianity.)

I've been annoyed for a long time by the treatment of "racist" as a binary condition rather than a thing, like any other single human vice or virtue, that exists in degrees. If that label can be stuck on a person, it works pretty much like the old death's head symbol for poison: you're either racist or not, poisonous or not, and sensible people will keep away. Real people, real hearts and minds, of course don't function that way. One can have mild and even harmless prejudices against people of another race or culture without being guilty of any serious moral wrong. A few years ago the writer Paul Elie published an article called "How Racist Was Flannery O'Connor?" I didn't read it, though it was recommended to me, because I disliked the "When did you stop beating your wife?" tactic of the title: in a culture where anything and anyone who can be plausibly tagged with the word "racist" is to be condemned without reservation or nuance, it seemed a poisoning of the well. (This tactic has been overused to the point where it may not be effective anymore. I noticed a few years ago that many of the taggers have switched to "white supremacist.")

The truth is that race is just not a very significant aspect of O'Connor's work, which deals above all with universal questions, posed by means of an extraordinary skill in evoking those questions within a very specific, concrete, and limited place, time, and culture. Whatever racism she was personally guilty of is pretty mild stuff (and if you don't think it was mild you've led a sheltered life). She seems to have granted the basic rightness of the civil rights cause, which a serious racist of the time would not have done.

In that interview Jessica Hooten Wilson says, in defense of O'Connor's treatment of black people in her work, that

...she only knew how two Black people would talk when a white woman was in the room...

Well, of course. And she recognized that that was the situation. I think she mentions in one of her letters that she understands that what she sees--what any white person in the segregated South would see--in black people is often a carefully mannered façade, and she didn't feel able to write from within the consciousness on the other side of that façade. Call that an artistic limitation if you want to, but it's not a sin.

Although she was my parents' age, I grew up in the same segregated rural Southern world that she did. I was in high school when the passage of the Civil Rights Act began the process of putting an end to that world. It is a personal and living memory for me, not something I've read about. And I can testify that when she does picture, in her work, black people as seen by white people, the two so near and yet so distant, she is very accurate. Do the people who worry so much about her opinion of black people not notice that she doesn't think very highly of white people either?

Examination of conscience is much more easy, pleasant, and rewarding when the conscience being examined is someone else's. Those who want to put Flannery O'Connor on trial would do better to read, or re-read, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own."

In case you're interested, this is the next GCL seminar.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I didn't even know this book was being released. Moreover, now that I've heard of it and looked around for a bit for information about it, I am not sure I even want to read it. 

Why not? Well, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even rise to the level of "unfinished novel," as the book's cover calls it, but is rather just a parcel of sketches and drafts of scenes. The book's subtitle is more modest: "A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress." The Collected Stories includes a very short one called "Why Do the Heathen Rage?" which seems to be one of these sketches, and it can hardly be called a story at all--some characters are introduced, a stage is set, but that's about all.

Still, my experience with these seminars makes me willing to give it a try. It's not very expensive--$65 before May 10, $75 after. It consists of four 90-minute sessions on consecutive Monday nights beginning June 3. You can register at this link. It isn't mentioned in that announcement, but in the past the cost of these seminars has included a copy of the book or books to be discussed. 

UPDATE: You do get a copy of the book, either paper or electronic, though if you register late electronic may be the only way you can get it in time for the first session. 

Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. In stating that, I'm supposing that those reading this might not already be aware of it. That supposition in turn is based on another: that there are a considerable number of people like me who read a lot but aren't necessarily aware of who wins the Nobel and other big prizes every year. 

For my part, I just don't give much thought to those prizes, or, as a rule, to the writers who receive them. This is not any sort of contrarian snobbery. I don't look down on them; in fact I feel a vague and slight sense of shame about my ignorance. It's true that I don't assume that Nobel winners are necessarily the best the world has to offer, but neither do I assume that they aren't. Most of them are probably excellent. It's just that for the most part my literary interests don't take me in the direction of contemporary writing. 

Those interests do, however, take me very much in the direction of writing by Catholics, contemporary and otherwise, and that's how Fosse came to my attention: he is a fairly recent Catholic convert, in spite of being Norwegian. I don't really mean for that last bit to be funny. The Nordic countries went thoroughly Protestant as soon as they had a chance, then even further and faster into secularism than the rest of Europe, and Catholics there have been not just scarce but rare. Still, I wouldn't have gotten around to reading Fosse if it hadn't been made convenient by an online seminar produced by the Global Catholic Literature Project of the Collegium Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, in partnership with Dappled Things magazine. I've taken a couple of these and found them interesting and helpful.

Fosse has published an enormous amount and I would have had no idea where to start with his work. The seminar made the choice for me: two novellas, A Shining and Aliss At the Fire. There were four Zoom sessions taking place on four consecutive Monday nights in March, two each for each of the novels.

It was perhaps a mistake to take the seminar, as I was more interested in other writers at the moment--for instance, Dickens--and had other things going on, including a week-long trip that made me miss the last session. So I didn't really give either the works or the seminar itself as much attention as they deserved. Moreover, the works are rather mysterious, and despite the vigorous efforts of the excellent presenters (who, I must say, made me feel rather stupid with the intelligence and depth of their analysis) I still have only a vague idea of their meaning, and even, in Aliss, of what actually happens. Therefore I am not going to attempt to discuss them in much depth, and am writing this post mainly to point them out and suggest that you may want to investigate them yourself.

A Shining is the simpler of the two. It's even, in a sense, straightforward. I'll give you a lengthy quote from the opening which will give you the flavor of it: 

I was taking a drive. It was nice. It felt good to be moving. I didn't know where I was going. I was just driving. Boredom had taken hold of me--usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do. So I just did something. I got in my car and drove and when I got somewhere I could turn right or left I turned right, and at the next place I could turn right or left I turned left, and so on. I kept driving like that. Eventually I'd driven a long way up a forest road where the ruts gradually got so deep that I felt like the car was getting stuck. I just kept driving, until the car got totally stuck. I tried to reverse but I couldn't, so I stopped the car. I was sitting in the car. Yes, well, now I'm here, I thought, now I'm sitting here, and I felt empty as if the boredom had turned into emptiness. Or maybe into a kind of anxiety, because I felt something like fear as I sat there empty, looking straight ahead as if into a void. Into nothingness. What am I talking about, I thought. There's the forest in front of me, it's just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest.

And it goes on like that. There are no paragraph breaks in its 74 pages. The man begins to walk into the forest. Night falls. It's very cold. He walks a long way, and he encounters a mysterious entity, the Shining of the title. He encounters several people, including his parents, and a man in black, as mysterious as the Shining. And there is what I will call a consummation at the end. The novella can be taken as a mystical or theological allegory (a dark wood and all that), but until I've read it again, which I do intend to do, I don't want to say anything more definite.

Publisher: Transit Books

Aliss At the Fire is a bit longer and considerably more complex. And puzzling. And as it happens it occupied the last two sessions of the seminar, when I was distracted for one and absent for the other (though I was able to watch a video of the session later). But I think this much is accurate: the people and events are fixed in place but not in time. The place is an old house near the sea, by (in?) a fjord, and its immediate surroundings. Over this place time is sort of...smeared. The place is inhabited by at least four or five people, all members of one family, going back several generations.

The point of view shifts without notice or acknowledgment. The books opens with an "I" who is watching someone--a woman named Signe--in a room in the house. Almost immediately the point of view shifts to Signe's, in third person: "She watches...she thinks...she sees..." Among the things she sees is her husband, Asle. After a few dozen pages there is a sort of pivot and the point of view becomes Asle's. Signe sees Asle and herself at different points in their life together. Asle sees Signe, his great-great-grandmother, Aliss, and several people from the intervening generations. There have been at least two deaths, untimely and deeply lamented, apparently by drowning in the fjord. The overall effect is of a connection, very deep and very much alive, among the persons along the timeline, as if to demonstrate Faulkner's "the past is never dead; it is not even past."

I don't think the "I" reappears until the last line, and if there is any explanation of him or her I missed it (which is possible). I'm tempted to quote that line. But it would be a species of spoiler, so I won't. 

Browsing through the book just now, I noticed that there seemed to be, typographically, no sentences. The narrative goes on for many pages with no punctuation except commas and question marks, and with paragraphs only used to indicate spoken dialog. I was going to say that there are no periods in the book at all, but there are a few. On page 41, more than a third of the way through the book, Asle is seeing his great-great-grandmother, Aliss, roasting a sheep's head at a fire near the shore.

...she moves the sheep's head back and forth, back and forth in the flames. That's Aliss, he thinks, and he sees it, he knows it. That's Aliss at the fire.

Unless I've missed one, that period after "flames" is the first one in the book. There are a few more in that passage, very very few after. No doubt that means something, but I don't know what.

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Giving these books a little attention for the writing of this post has made me see that they deserve more attention than I gave them during the seminar, and are probably better than I gave them credit for. I plan to re-read them fairly soon. 

When my wife and I moved to a new house in the fall of 2022, we tried to get rid of some of the books that were overflowing, in a very unsightly way, our shelves. That meant books that we had already read and didn't want to re-read, or had not read and most likely never would read, and duplicates. Among the latter were two copies of Bleak House. One was a small, beat-up, and generally undistinguished paperback. The other was a hardback, in perfect condition, of a good size, and nicely printed. 

So that was an easy decision: out went the paperback. 

But six weeks or so ago, when I finally began to satisfy my desire to re-read Bleak House for the first time in roughly fifty years and took up the hardback, I noticed something odd. I had just finished Dombey and Son, which runs to some 900 pages. I was fairly sure that Bleak House was at least comparable in length. But this copy had slightly under 600 pages, though it was printed in a typeface of reasonable size and with comfortable margins. Closer examination discovered this brief and inconspicuous note on the title page: "Arranged for Modern Reading."

The fact that I strongly suspect the internet to be a net harm to society doesn't prevent me from using it and appreciating the fact that it gives me instant access to vast quantities of information. I took a quick look at the Project Gutenberg edition of Bleak House and saw that at least one whole chapter was missing from my copy. Then I poked around for information about this particular edition, published by The Literary Guild, which is a book-of-the-month style enterprise, perhaps meant to be classier. And I found that it is indeed abridged. It is, as I said, a handsome production, with illustrations by Edward Gorey (which may be enough reason for me to keep it). But abridgment of such a novel is unacceptable, indeed a sin, if meant for adult readers.

So I checked out a copy from the local library: the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition, the illustrations being the originals by "Phiz." I hadn't gotten very far in it before I realized that I wanted to buy my own copy. But the OID is out of print, replaced, apparently, by the edition included in the Oxford World's Classics series. That seemed promising. I was also interested in the Norton Critical Edition, which I've found to be very good, and, having just been reading the Wordsworth NCE, I wanted the paraphernalia of notes, background, and criticism. (I thought it was out of print, as Amazon only offered used copies. But I find now that it apparently is very much alive. At any rate I found an inexpensive used copy in good condition.)

I ended up buying both and would recommend either. Quality and size of typeface are increasingly important to me in my old age, as my vision seems to get a bit worse every year. (And it's not something that can be solved with the right glasses; if I live long enough I'll probably need cataract surgery). Both these are very readable. Norton is still using the typeface they've been using since at least the Norton Anthologies which were my textbooks in the mid-'60s, or at least a very similar one. It's remarkably clear as well as compact.

I'm telling you all this because I hadn't quite realized how much detail I was skimming past and ignoring in reading Dickens without notes.  He assumes we know something about London geography, about the Chancery courts, about details of life in his time which have had little or no presence in ours for the past century and more. There are many words and phrases that are unintelligible to us, or to me at least, and I venture to say most of us. I hadn't realized how often I contented myself with getting the general drift of a sentence or paragraph and moving on without knowing exactly what had been referred to.

Here, for instance, opening the NCE at random, I find this footnote:

1. A ship that is laid up and out of commission, although still afloat.

The note is attached to this sentence in the text:

The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-fastened, brazened-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing Clippers are laid up in ordinary.

Without the note, you haven't completely missed the sense as long as you get the general idea that the ships are not proceeding. But you certainly miss some precision and some flavor. 

Both the NCE and the OWC have such notes, footnotes in the NCE and endnotes in the OWC. I prefer footnotes to the constant page-turning required by endnotes. And I prefer the NCE overall. It has much more supplementary material. Some of that doesn't interest me, including 65 pages of textual notes giving every detail of variation between manuscripts of the novel, almost all of them trivial. But there are also, for instance, selections from documents of the time that go into disgusting detail about the filth of some parts of London in the 1840s, and a section devoted to tracking down real-life sources for some of the characters. I did not know that the detestable freeloader Skimpole is, by Dickens's own assertion, a portrait of Leigh Hunt, though I don't know that Dickens thought Hunt behaved detestably. 

Both editions include the Phiz illustrations, but the NCE doesn't have them all. And I wonder about the reproduction of some of them in both. Night scenes are more or less black smears, with little detail visible. But maybe that's my old eyes. Also, the maps are better in the OWC. 

Before I started writing this, I should have gone back to the 52 Authors series and read Stu's entry on Dickens, which is quite good (click here). And I see in the comments this one from me:

Bleak House is one I really want to re-read (in addition to reading for the first time the 60% or so of the novels that I haven't read at all). I read it in my 20s and thought it was great. I have a feeling I'd like it even more now.

Well, that certainly turned out to be true. I enjoyed Bleak House even more than the other Dickens novels I've read or re-read recently: Dombey And Son, Great Expectations, and, perhaps stretching "recently" a bit, David Copperfield. Everything I said about Dickens's work in general in my post about Dombey and Son a few weeks ago applies with even more force to Bleak House. As of now, it's my favorite, and as I very much liked the others that puts it pretty much in the stratosphere of my literary rankings. Now, with a necessarily somewhat smaller number of years remaining before me than I had in my 20s, and with so many books yet unread, I still may revisit this one. That says a lot about the sheer enjoyment I had in it.

Someone, and I think it was T.S. Eliot, said that Shakespeare gives us the breadth of the medieval world, and Dante the depth. A similar thought has occurred to me while reading Bleak House and Dombey And Son: that a division, an assignment of responsibility you might say, could be made between Dickens and Dostoevsky with respect to what I think of as the early maturity of modern man in the 19th century. Dostoevsky is the great prober of the spiritual (and therefore psychological) displacement of that new man. An old friend of mine once observed that most of Dostoevsky's people seem to him to be "just barely sane," and in their extremities of thought and behavior they show us what is only implied and latent in most people. As representatives of their times, they are narrow but deep. The most important of them are intellectuals or semi-intellectuals  or very eccentric in some way connected with the modern crisis. Dostoevsky is almost as much philosopher/theologian as novelist. And he is certainly Dante-esque at least to the extent of presenting an Inferno, with glimpses of Purgatory. 

Dickens, on the other hand, is almost pure novelist, purely a creator of stories and characters, and he gives us an extraordinary range of characters who are ordinary people in the sense that they are mainly interested in going about the everyday business of their not especially reflective lives, whether that business is an aristocrat's concern with maintaining the order and prestige of his little empire or a pauper's desperate attempt to keep off starvation and other miseries. And in doing this Dickens demonstrates the great Christian truth that there are no ordinary people. 

And I don't know of anyone except Shakespeare to whom he can be compared in both those respects, i.e. stories and characters (at least not in English literature--I don't know enough of others to say). Bleak House is in fact a somewhat polemical work, but to the extent that ideas play a role in it they are pretty down-to-earth, not philosophical: an attack on the Chancery courts of the time, and to a lesser degree a sort of exposé of the conditions of the London poor. (Chancery courts were very roughly comparable to what we would call civil law, concerned with contracts of all sorts, including, as in Bleak House, inheritance.) The stakes in a high-stakes lawsuit could be entirely devoured by costs, to the ruin of the suitors and, according to Dickens, the amusement of lawyers and judges. Dickens himself had a pretty unpleasant experience with Chancery, when he attempted to get some money out of people who had printed unauthorized editions of his work. 

Suppose for a moment that those were his primary motives, that Dickens thought, "I really hate Chancery, and I'm really angry at the way lack of decent sanitation forces the poor to live in filth and disease. I think I'll write a novel making these points." It's not a plausible conjecture, because there are too many things in the work that aren't part of any such focus. But just suppose. What he actually produced is no more reducible to a social justice pamphlet than The Brothers Karamazov is reducible to a philosophical one. I don't know that he could have written mere propaganda, at least not in fiction. I think his creative energy would have prevented that; the sense of energy at work is one of the striking characteristics of his work in general, and especially in this one.

The sheer fecundity of invention in plot and character is astonishing. It seems the fecundity of nature, which (to use the conventional attribution of agency) is not content to make a single bird, or even a single type of songbird fit to thrive in the southeastern U.S., but produces millions in the first case, hundreds in the second. So it is with Dickens's characters, who have a distinct "inscape," to use the peculiar term invented by Hopkins which seems to mean an essential self-ness. As Rob G pointed out in a comment recently, Dickens somehow even manages to give every character a distinctive voice. (Surely there are scholarly papers and/or books about that.)

The comparison to Shakespeare extends to the language. Prose, obviously, is more diffuse than poetry, and does not as readily provide the brief quotation that sticks in the memory in part because of its music. But, again, the fecundity is astonishing. Stephen Gill, in his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition, cites many

passages of amazing complexity and depth, allusive, syntactically agile, multi-faceted, whose exploitation of the poetic resources of the language and the devices of rhetoric offer pleasures as rewarding as any in English fiction.

And, with due allowance for the essential difference, is often as rewarding as poetry.

The plot has distinct elements of the mystery story, including the appearance of a police detective who, though he isn't prominent until quite late in the story, is a very striking character who could easily have ranked with Sherlock Holmes, had Dickens been engaged in that sort of project. This makes me mourn the fact that he didn't live to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I have always been hesitant to read because of the inevitable disappointment.

One does have to contend with Dickens's sentimental and melodramatic streak. But even as I type that I am thinking that those terms are pretty elastic, and one person's sentimentality may be another's honest emotion. As with Florence in Dombey And Son, the central female character, Esther Summerson, is somewhat too good to be true. But she is more vivid to me than Florence because a very large part of the book is a first-person narrative by her, and so we have more knowledge of her. The narrative structure of the book is unusual in that respect--part omniscient third-person, part first-person and very limited. Moreover, the third-person narrative is entirely in the present tense, while Esther's is a sort of journal, past tense. 

As has often been remarked, by C.S. Lewis among others if my memory is correct, the characteristic virtues and vices of one historical period often balance those of another. One such virtue that is represented over and over again in Bleak House, and which is little seen and honored in our time, is nobility. Bu that I mean an iron determination to behave with honor, courage, and generosity, to say and do what is true and right and just without regard for one's own preference, ego, and interest. As far as I can tell it is rarely seen in our popular culture, and almost never among our public figures. (Try looking for it in either of our current presidential candidates.) The actual behavior of our politicians may be in practice no different from the reality of Dickens's time, but the fact that the sense of nobility was understood and admired then, while having pretty much vanished in our own time, says something bad about our culture, and good about that of Dickens. As has also often been remarked, nobility is at least as likely to be found among the lowly as among the high, something which Dickens is fond of illustrating. Also, though it is perhaps one of the more masculine virtues, as likely to be found in women as in men.

I read The Prelude in a Norton Critical Edition collection, Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose. Like all the excellent NCEs, this volume includes a selection of criticism from Wordsworth's own time to ours, or nearly--that depends on what you're willing to encompass in "our time." I was following my usual practice of avoiding talk about the work before reading the work itself. But about halfway through the poem I had to sneak a look at the few pages of Matthew Arnold's criticism included, taken from his preface to a Wordsworth edition. I did this because I had, back in my brief days as a graduate student in English, read a certain amount of Arnold and tended to agree with his critical judgments. And I was not enjoying The Prelude, nor admiring it, as much as I expected to, and wondered whether Arnold had anything to say about it, and, if he did, whether I was going to find myself in uneasy disagreement with him, or supported and pleased by his agreement. 

It proved to be the latter, at least to this extent: 

The Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best work.

I will lay out my prejudices, negative and positive. First, as far as I can recall I hadn't read any Wordsworth since I was an undergraduate more than fifty years ago. At the time, the early Romantics were not, in general, my favorites, with the major exception of Keats. I liked Wordsworth's short lyrics, but the famous and more lengthy "Tintern Abbey" and "Intimations of Immortality" were pretty far short of knockouts. It seemed then that Wordsworth at length was not likely to be as good as Wordsworth in brief. I suppose there were some selections from The Prelude in my sophomore English textbook, and I suppose I probably read them, but I don't remember them at all.

On the other hand, I like the premise of The Prelude: a sort of autobiography in verse. In general (again) the decline of the long poem has been part of the general decline of poetry over the past century or two. By "decline" there I mean specifically the way the word "poetry" has come to mean primarily "lyric poetry"--works of from a few lines to a few pages, and a fairly brief expression of, usually, some personal feeling or insight. The verse drama and the narrative poem of scope comparable to that of the novel are no longer an important part of literary culture, though there are the occasional, and occasionally successful, instances. The Prelude interested me as an attempt to bring something like the personal sensibility of the lyric into a work of ten thousand or so lines (thirteen "books" running between 500 and 1000 lines each). 

If you didn't major in English in college you may not recall (from your required English class(es)) that around 1800 Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge sought to revolutionize English poetry in reaction to what they viewed as the excessive artificiality of most poetry of the time--Pope, for instance. They criticized the elaborate diction and at least implicitly the critical, somewhat detached, somewhat rationalistic approach of that poetry. (See Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" for a good not-too-long example.) In a sort of manifesto, the polemical preface to their joint publication Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth stated their aim

...to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men....

The "common life" they had in mind was often the truly common, the life of farmers and villagers, not aristocrats, far from wealth, fashion, and London. This produced lyrics like Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems (the first line of this one is its title):

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

So much, then, for the state of play. To go straight to the outcome and summarize my reaction: I like the parts of The Prelude where Wordsworth sticks most closely to the ideals expressed in that preface. But there are long stretches where he departs from them, and those I often found dull, or worse.

Several months have passed since I finished reading the poem last fall. In preparation for writing this, I picked it up again and browsed. The opening lines are excellent. The verse is a clear stream, the appeal to the senses and experience direct and persuasive: Wordsworth is enjoying his return to the countryside after a sojourn in London, which he does not love, and the freedom he is about to enjoy for the pursuit of his poetic vocation. But pretty quickly a troublesome sign appears: a lengthy praise of his own creative ambition, which he elevates to a sacred calling:

...to the open fields I told
A prophecy: poetic numbers came
Spontaneously, and clothed in priestly robes
My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem
For holy services....

I have always disliked, and now detest, the tendency, which began or at least gained prominence with the Romantics, to cast the artist, or rather The Artist, as a quasi-religious figure, set apart from ordinary people by his genius. Eric Gill is generally and justly condemned these days for his sexual abuse of his daughters. That doesn't mean that everything he said was wrong, though, and he was never more right than when he said "The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist."

And The Prelude is full of that sort of thing, and not as general observation but as part of Wordsworth's account of himself,  contemplating the progress of his efforts not just to write but to fulfill a rather grandiose mission which is all bound up with his philosophy. I don't think I can describe the latter, and anyway I don't want to bother. He and Coleridge had lofty and somewhat abstract ideas about mind and imagination that I always found somewhat vaporous, and in conflict with their preference for concrete language and experience in poetry. His diction in those parts also tends, perhaps inevitably, toward the vague and the pompous. The long section, spanning two books, in which he describes his experiences in France at the beginning of the Revolution might have been a vivid story, but lapses often into abstraction and detachment: "I thought this, and I thought that," not necessarily memorably expressed. 

What I find worthy of being called great in The Prelude is the recounting of experiences which are distinctly of the physical world: not mental, not ideas. The relation of those experiences is more potent than his talk about them. I'm regretting now that I didn't make notes, or mark passages in the book, because I can't readily put my finger now on one particularly vivid story of his youthful wandering in the countryside where he grew up: this one involves rowing at night, and feeling something uncanny in the way the crags which, because he is rowing away from them and thus facing toward them, seem to grow taller as his distance reveals more of them. 

When I finished reading The Prelude I turned to some of the sonnets and other shorter poems that I remembered liking long ago. They are even better than I remembered, and are the solid foundation of his reputation. I doubt that I'll ever read the entirety of The Prelude again, but I'll certainly go back to those. There are many that would be new to me, and almost certainly some gems among them.

I was going to mention this in the post about Dombey and Son, but it was already rather long: my pleasure in reading the novel was enhanced by the nature of the physical object which contains it. A few years ago I came into possession of several Dickens volumes which, along with a lot of other books, would otherwise have gone to Goodwill (it's a longish story, not important to tell). I didn't look at them very closely at the time, and there wasn't space for them on our shelves, so they went into a closet and didn't come out again until the fall of 2022, when we moved to a new house. Before the move we culled our book collection fairly severely, getting rid of everything that we had read and didn't expect to read again, or figured we would never read. 

I considered getting rid of these, but on finally taking a good look at them realized they were treasures. They are part of a complete Dickens published by Scribner's ("Charles Scribner's Sons") in 1911. And I very much wish I had the whole set. If you want one, Abebooks currently has it available for $500. Which is really a pretty reasonable price, around $14 per volume. When I put it that way, it's actually sort of tempting....

Here are the nine volumes in their new home. The white spots seem to be paint, the work of some sloppy painter of who knows how long ago. It's lamentable that I only have volume one of The Old Curiosity Shop. 

Here are a couple of sample pages from Dombey and Son. The illustrations are the original ones by "Phiz," Hablot Knight Browne, and they're delightful. 

Reading these is a physical pleasure. Splitting the novels into two volumes of four or five hundred pages makes for very comfortable handling and reading, in a typeface and size that are easy on the eyes (an increasing consideration for me), and margins that don't make the pages seem crowded. And because they were printed with real movable type you can actually feel the impressions on the paper: a slight but genuine pleasure. 

I'm not a bibliophile, not any sort of collector. A book doesn't have to have any particular charm or excellence for me to like it. It just needs to be a physical book. Too many of mine are really pretty poor physical specimens, bought used or picked up from library discard shelves. Sometimes these are pretty dilapidated, having permanent marks of their library career, sometimes in the form of those rather ugly library bindings, or defaced by the underlining or highlighting of a student (though more than a few instances of the latter will prevent me from getting the book in the first place). But when I read anything longer than, say, a blog post, I want a book, a book made of paper. 

I know a lot of people find reading on a Kindle or similar device perfectly acceptable, with various convenience factors actually making the electronic device more appealing than a book. But I think I can safely say that I never will do that. I've tried it, and I just don't much like it. I could go into more detail about that, but "I don't like it" is sufficient. It's not just my age, as I know several people of similar age, including my wife, who have made the transition. I have a Kindle Fire but only use it to read journalism and similar stuff online. I once tried reading one of those public domain electronic versions of The Pickwick Papers on the Kindle and abandoned it after fifty pages or so. I look forward to reading the Pickwick you can see in the photo above. 

I do like one thing about a book in electronic form: the ability to search for words and phrases. I have electronic copies, obtained from Project Gutenberg, of both Dombey and Son and Bleak House on my computer, and have used them as, for instance, I did yesterday, to refresh my memory about who Gridley is in Bleak House. But I wouldn't sit and read the novels that way, unless I had no other choice. Which may be the situation someday, but not in my lifetime. 

On re-reading my post about Great Expectations, I note that I more or less assumed that the reader knows the story, which means that there was a certain level of spoilage in the post. Although it doesn't go into any detail, it does reveal the final condition of the two main characters. I am not going to do that here, so I will be a little vague.

The Dombey with whom this story is concerned is Son. The first Dombey is disposed of in a few sentences, and Son Dombey is already in middle age, with a wife and a daughter and a son who is in the process of being born when the story opens. Dombey and Son is one of the great houses in London's business world; there's even a suggestion that it may be the greatest. Dombey the Second is immensely proud of this, and it is his greatest wish that it continue with future Dombeys rotating through the firm's name. These would of course have to be male; apart from the generally very separate roles of the sexes at the time (or for that matter most times and places), they would, obviously, have to be male in order for the name to remain the same. As there is no question of a daughter succeeding to that headship, Dombey has no interest in his daughter, Florence, who is about six years old when the story opens. "No interest" is putting it mildly, as being the highest point to which his fatherly heart rises. Active contempt is increasingly the case.

And those are the mainsprings of the story, which runs to roughly a thousand pages in the edition I have. As the son, Paul, is being born, the wife, Fanny, is dying, in spite of the motivational speech--"You must make an effort"--given to her by her sister-in-law. Or perhaps it was the motivational speech that delivered the last blow to her will to live, already (so it is suggested) half-crushed by living among Dombeys. Certainly the death occurs in immediate succession to the speech. 

Little Paul is an odd and sickly child. He loves and is loved by Florence. Florence lives partly for him and partly in perpetual desperate hope of being loved by her father, who begins implacably indifferent to her and grows hostile as Paul fails to develop as his father assumes that he will, in fact can hardly imagine that he will not. Mr. Dombey has the royal pride of a pharoah or the Sun King. 

This pride, of course, is not going to lead him to a happy place. It blinds him not only to the love of a daughter whom everyone else can see is an angel, but to the presence within his circle of an Iago, a secret flattering enemy who works toward his destruction. 

If you knew anything about Dickens at all you would suppose, even without looking at the book, that this is going to be a long and complex and often very sad story. And it is, taking place over a period of roughly fifteen years and involving a great many characters. The Wikipedia page for the novel lists a round 50 of them (49 if you don't count Diogenes the dog). Many of these of course have fairly small roles, but every one is rendered with Dickens's astonishing ability to create a portrait with only a few strokes. And the names--did he really just keep an eye out for useful ones, or did he invent some of them? Peps, Pilkins, Pilcher, Pipchin, Toodle, Toots, Tox, Nipper, Gills, Cuttle, Blitherstone, Skettles....

I'm sorry to say, though, that Florence herself is a partial exception to this success, though she is, more than Dombey himself, the center of the story. I mentioned that she seems an angel, and that's the problem. She is so pure, so sweet, so self-effacing, so entirely without fault or resentment, as to seem not quite real, not quite a really living person in the way that other characters are. I don't think this is so much a failure in portraiture, a failure in execution, as a result of a choice made at a level above that, the choice of the kind of person Dickens has imagined. 

The sentimentality of that portrait is not in general an anomaly in the novel. One expects a fair amount of that from Dickens, along with melodrama and implausible coincidences that would be ridiculous in other hands. I accept them as conventions of the times, and they don't diminish--well, not very much--the irresistible power of the language and the narrative. I found myself at times thinking of Shakespeare's astonishing fluency. A descriptive imaginative power far beyond the reach of most writers hardly ever stops and is brought to bear on both great and small moments. In the first paragraph, Dombey is sitting in a room with newborn Son, who

..lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

This doom-laden figure constitutes the second paragraph: 

On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.

And in the third:

Son, with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly.

No sentimentality or far-fetched coincidence can diminish the appeal of such writing.

The sentimentality is often transcended. I'm thinking particularly of the death of one character--no, make that two: the death of Fanny Dombey is handled briefly and with great poignancy. The other is protracted, and has the character drifting slowly out of this life and into another in a way that borders on the mystical. If, or more likely when, this novel fades in my memory into a blur from which only certain scenes stand out clearly, this will be one of those scenes.

Dickens's well-known concern with the wretched plight of the 19th-century urban poor is very present, often with the most furious sarcasm directed at the hypocrisy and indifference of the upper classes. The cast of characters range from those at the bottom who are barely surviving, and that only in constant physical discomfort or worse, to those near the top who are unable to conceive that it is not part of the fabric of nature that those who are below them should serve and honor them. The anger is plain and potent. That much would be, presumably is, applauded by our contemporaries who are advocates for "social justice." But it's strikingly different in that it has no visible ideological component at all. There is nothing abstract about it. Whatever ideas Dickens may have had about changing the situation are not presented. The persons involved are persons with conscience and the ability to act--what we call nowadays "agency." The basic structures of society may seem like the laws of the universe to them, but there is nothing in the way of their behaving well within those boundaries. Some do, and some don't, and it is a clear illustration of Solzhenitsyn's famous statement that the line between good and evil is within every heart. 

I wondered, as I've wondered before without doing anything to turn wondering into knowledge, what Dickens's religious beliefs were. The established church certainly comes off pretty badly, and self-righteous religiosity, though not a prominent element, gets a few knocks here and there. But there is more than one passage where a deep regard for some bedrock of the faith is evidenced:

Harriet complied and read—read the eternal book for all the weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth—read the blessed history, in which the blind lame palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride, indifference, or sophistry, through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce—read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow.

Dickens himself seems to have felt that compassion and interest. 

Why "thing"? I couldn't decide on the right word. Calling it a "journal" or "publication" doesn't seem quite accurate, though the former would do. Neither does calling it a "site," as it's one of a great many...things...at Substack.com. It is in fact a Substack entity. Somehow referring to a specific Substack, as simply that: "a Substack," as in Rod Dreher's Substack, bothers me. It's a bit like hearing people say "We ate McDonald's last night."

All right, clearly this is just one of my little quirks. Setting that quirk aside, with an effort, I am referring to a Substack written by Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum, and it's called Poems Ancient and Modern. (I think that should be italicized, like the name of a magazine.) And it's about poetry. The two authors are themselves poets and impressively knowledgeable and perceptive about poetry. You may recognize Bottum's name as a conservative politics-and-culture writer. I have not read any of his poetry. Sally Thomas is the author of Motherland, a book of poems which came out a couple of years ago and which I love; you can read my remarks about it here.

Every weekday they publish a poem, most old enough to be in the public domain, with a sharp-eyed and informative preface. So far--and "so far" is only two weeks--the range is very great, from the obscure to the famous, from the comic to the serious. Within those ten days we've had little-known poems by little-known poets, well-known poems by well-known poets, and little-known poems by well-known poets. I don't as yet see a well-known poem by a little-known poet but I'm sure that will come. 

I can pretty well guarantee that the commentaries will show you something you might not otherwise have considered about the poems, and very likely add to your general knowledge in some way. If you have much interest in poetry, you should probably do yourself a favor and subscribe. My understanding is that a free subscription allows you to read the posts, while a paid one allows you to join the comments as well. Not to mention supporting something very worthwhile. 

I do have one reservation: a post every weekday is a little much for me. Each one demands a significant degree of attention and of course time, at least more than one would likely give to some internet item of equal length, and with many other things in my life to which I want or must give time and attention, I don't necessarily want to give that much every day to a poem of someone else's choosing, however worthwhile it may be. I am, for instance, just now, on Saturday afternoon catching up with the past week.

Here's the link again: Poems Ancient and Modern

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In case you've ever wondered, I have considered switching to Substack. It's a very nice platform, and might at least potentially attract more readers (though perhaps lose some as well). But if nothing else the lack (as far as I can tell) of a means to import the twenty years of this blog into Substack puts an end to the idea. The only thing that would make me switch to another platform now would be Typepad shutting down, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be a very far-fetched possibility, as it is much less popular than, for instance, WordPress, and no longer accepts new accounts. 

I just did a search for "are blogs obsolete" and got a lot of hits for stories which seemed to answer "no" quite insistently. Well, good, but who cares anyway? I'm pretty obsolete myself. 

My wife and I listened to an audio version of this book on an overnight trip a couple of weeks ago. I picked it from one of several options she gave me (ordinarily she's the one who locates the book and downloads it to her phone) because it is the first of eight novels in a series set in the Shetland Islands, and we've been watching the TV series Shetland, which is based on those books, since it began about then years ago. (I note in passing that this series is only one of several by Ann Cleeves, which come up to a total of several dozen novels, of which the ones I've read are lengthy and complex. I don't understand that level of inventiveness. Granted, Cleeves was born in 1954 and has been at this for a long time. But still.)

We both like the series a great deal, and I recommend it if for no other reason than the gorgeous cinematography of Shetland. So I was curious about the novels. This one is good, an excellent detective story with a complex plot and interesting characters and setting. However, though I am not a connoisseur of detective fiction, and so am subject to correction, I think this one cheats a bit according to what I take to be the traditional rules of the genre. And I can't say any more than that without committing spoilage. 

I was going to remark that Cleeves is not an especially poetic stylist; that is, I didn't find her prose, as a listening experience, noticeably enjoyable for itself. But then I thought that might be unfair: one doesn't, or at least I don't, have the opportunity to savor the language of an audio book, and this is especially true if one is driving a car, as I was for most of this. In that situation I can only try to follow the narrative.

Perhaps if I read her on the page I would have a different view. I tested that conjecture by going to Amazon and reading a few excerpts; it is correct. Here is the opening, poached from Amazon's sample: 

Twenty past one in the morning on New Year’s Day. Magnus knew the time because of the fat clock, his mother’s clock, which squatted on the shelf over the fire. In the corner the raven in the wicker cage muttered and croaked in its sleep. Magnus waited. The room was prepared for visitors, the fire banked with peat and on the table a bottle of whisky and the ginger cake he’d bought in Safeway’s the last time he was in Lerwick. He could feel himself dozing but he didn’t want to go to bed in case someone should call at the house. If there was a light at the window someone might come, full of laughter and drams and stories. For eight years nobody had visited to wish him happy new year, but still he waited just in case.

Outside it was completely silent. There was no sound of wind. In Shetland, when there was no wind it was shocking. People strained their ears and wondered what was missing. Earlier in the day there had been a dusting of snow, then with dusk this was covered by a sheen of frost, every crystal flashing and hard as diamond in the last of the light, and even when it got dark, in the beam from the lighthouse. The cold was another reason for Magnus staying where he was. In the bedroom the ice would be thick on the inside of the window and the sheets would feel chill and damp.

He must have slept. If he’d been awake he’d have heard them coming because there was nothing quiet in their approach. They weren’t creeping up on him. He’d have heard their laughter and the stumbling, seen the wild swaying of the torch beam through the uncurtained window. He was woken by the banging on the door. He came to with a start, knowing he’d been in the middle of a nightmare, but not sure of the details.

‘Come in,’ he shouted. ‘Come in, come in.’ He struggled to his feet, stiff and aching. They must already be in the storm porch. He heard the hiss of their whispers.

The door was pushed open, letting in a blast of freezing air and two young girls, who were as gaudy and brightly coloured as exotic birds. He saw they were drunk.

Magnus is a recluse, not exactly mentally retarded but not very bright, and quite eccentric. He is one of the people who will be suspected of murdering one of the girls. And I'll leave the plot at that. It is, as I mentioned, pretty complex, and involves in a great deal of the history of the main characters. I'll probably read the next one, at least, to watch their further development. 

Of course I already had, from the series, some sense of their personalities and background. Naturally I was constantly comparing the book to the series--favorably for the most part. And a few days later we (re)watched the Shetland episodes which are based on this book. Naturally there are major differences, and in general I thought they were justifiable, though I wondered if some of them were necessary or smart. I've often thought it would be interesting to sit in on the deliberations of directors and writers developing a dramatization of a novel. It must be a pretty difficult thing. The necessity of putting everything into action and dialogue would force some changes, obviously. And others might be dictated by practical necessity.

One striking change, though not an important one, is that the main detective, Jimmy Perez, is played by an actor who is the visual opposite of the book's Perez. He is not, as the name might suggest, an imported Spaniard, but a native Shetlander whose ancestry goes back generations. The name is attributed by family lore to a sailor of the Spanish Armada who was shipwrecked on one of the Shetland islands, married a native, and never went home. And in the book his complexion and hair are dark. But Perez in the series is played by a very blond and fair-skinned actor, Douglas Henshall. Plausibility is addressed by a remark that the current Perez must have inherited his appearance from the maternal line of that first marriage.

I assume that change was a simple result of the choice among available actors. Another, which is more substantial and which I would have liked to see in the series, is the switch of the series from winter to summer, which significantly changes the atmosphere (no pun intended)--consider the opening quoted above, which is very much determined by the season and even by the particular night. It also eliminates a fairly large piece of furniture from the story: a sort of Viking Mardi Gras festival, Up Helly Aa, pronounced something like UP-ayly-AH, accents on the first and last syllables. (If you don't already know, look at a map and you'll see why Shetland has a Viking connection.) Much of the story involves this festival, and a general winteriness, and I speculate that the change was due to practical constraints of filming.

There was something a bit disappointing in this audiobook. The narrator seems to be English, and apart from dialogue reads in an English accent. I think all the actors in the TV series are actual Scots, and I missed that in the reading. Even in the dialogue, I think the narrator is sometimes a little off.  He pronounces the name of the city of Lerwick, for instance, exactly as it's spelled: Ler-wick, "Ler" rhyming with "there." Whereas in the series it's something like "Lerrick," rhyming with "derrick." Or even "Lerrig." Or  something closer to "Layrig." I have learned, beginning some years ago when I listened to an audiobook of one of M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth mysteries, read by a woman who was either Scottish or very skilled at sounding that way, that I very much like the Scottish accent, especially in a woman. And I would have preferred the woman who did the M.C. Beaton book (possibly Davina Porter, but I'm not sure, as I'm not even sure what the title of the book was), or someone like her. (Beaton's career, by the way, makes Cleeves look like a slacker.)

And there's one thing entirely missing from the book that I like very much about the series:  Detective Sergeant Alison McIntosh, known as "Tosh," played by Alison O'Donnell. She is pretty much my favorite character in the series, because I am delighted every time she speaks. And also by a facial expression she uses from time to time, a sort of grimace in which one side of her mouth turns up and the other down; my wife suggested that she might have been cast specifically to make that face. Perhaps she appears in the later books. You can catch a few glimpses of her in this trailer for the current season, which does not include Perez, because of the departure of Douglas Henshall. I learned from something I came across while looking for a suitable clip that there was a Team Tosh composed of viewers who wanted Tosh to be promoted to Perez's position. Had I known about it, I would have signed up.

I think it's been almost thirty years now since I discovered that the works of P.G. Wodehouse are a wonderful anti-depressant, producing a bubbling levity which I have previously described as feeling the way champagne looks. This effect, though, is sadly brief, and I've been a little concerned that, as with alcohol, steady use might reduce it, so I don't read Wodehouse all that often. 

I'm speaking mainly of the Jeeves and Wooster books, of which there are, I think, fourteen; it's a little difficult to fix the number because the U.S. and U.K. editions differ somewhat. Not wanting to go through them too quickly, I haven't read them all. Certainly they will continue to be delightful on re-reading--I've read Joy In the Morning and Code of the Woosters at least twice. But the happy shock of the first encounter with an especially funny bit can't be repeated. 

Lately, however, I've been thinking that this careful husbandry could be a mistake: being pretty old now, I might, if I'm too dilatory, die or be incapacitated with some of the novels still unread. And that would be very regrettable.

So it was time for another, and Ring For Jeeves was the next one in the approximately chronological order in which I've been reading them. Somewhat to my surprise, it doesn't seem to me to be quite up to the usual mark. When I noticed the publication date--1953--I speculated that this slight lessening in quality--and it is fairly slight--may have had something to do with Wodehouse's situation at the time. World War II had left him somewhat disgraced. Stranded in France in 1940, he had made several broadcasts at the behest of the Nazis, and although they were humorous and not political in content they caused Wodehouse to be reviled as a Nazi collaborator, which naturally cast a shadow over the following years. He had begun the previous Jeeves and Wooster novel, The Mating Season, in 1942, though it was not published until 1949. Ring For Jeeves seems to be the first one written entirely after the war. 

It seems to have been an experiment: it is the only novel to include Jeeves but not Bertie Wooster. Perhaps--this is pure speculation--Wodehouse thought the pattern had become a little stale, and wanted to vary it. The novel takes note of its actual situation in time in a way that I don't recall others doing. There is explicit mention that the time is the early 1950s. Television is acknowledged to exist, and even figures slightly in the action, though it remains offstage.

The plot involves the high taxation of the wealthy and the general leveling which were occurring at the time. Bertie is absent because he is at a school in which the aristocracy are taught the rudiments of taking care of themselves in the new order. Jeeves is in the employ of William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester, pronounced "Roaster."  The Earl, who for most of the book is referred to simply as Bill, is the inheritor of a vast and dilapidated mansion, Rowcester Abbey, which he cannot afford to keep up, and which he is desperate to sell. His sister Monica believes she has a likely buyer, a twice-widowed, rich, and still beautiful American woman, who, as the story opens, is on her way to view the place. But there are complications. Of course. And of course they're zany.

In a desperate move to get hold of some cash so that he can marry the young neighbor Jill Wyvvern--one of Wodehouse's delightful down-to-earth and pretty "girls"--Bill has gone into the bookmaking business, at the suggestion and under the direction of Jeeves. Calling himself Honest Patch Perkins, he frequents the race tracks in disguise:  

...in addition to wearing a very loud check coat with bulging voluminous pockets and a crimson tie with blue horseshoes on it which smote the beholder like a blow, he had a large black patch over his left eye and on his upper lip a ginger moustache of the outsize or soupstrainer type.

He seems to have been doing all right until a bet went against him at spectacularly long odds, leaving him owing three thousand pounds, which he does not have, to a Captain C.G. Brabazon-Biggar, a fierce White Hunter stereotype who has spent some large part of his life Out East, with, for some reason, a particular emphasis on Kuala Lumpur. The Captain is also on his way to Rowcester Abbey, in hot pursuit of Honest Patch. And it turns out that both he and Bill have had previous involvement with the rich and beautiful widow. 

Naturally it all gets more and more complicated, with more and more elaborate stratagems and deceptions and narrow escapes when the stratagems go wrong. But it all works out in the end. And Jeeves will be returning to Bertie, who is no longer at the school, under circumstances which I would enjoy relating but must refrain from doing so, for the sake of your enjoyment, on the presumption that you haven't read the book. 

I hope it isn't because I've become jaded that this book seems to sparkle less than others. Bertie's absence is part of that; though Bill is a somewhat similar character, he lacks Bertie's effervescent goofiness. And this makes him less effective as a foil for Jeeves. Perhaps as a consequence, Jeeves himself seems to me a bit overdone. His circumlocutions and literary quotations become at times obtrusive, a little too frequent and lengthy. And I felt that the winding up of the plot threads was a bit rushed. Still, less than the best Wodehouse is very, very good. 

In my limited experience the Blandings books are just as good as the Jeeves and Wooster ones, so I have several of those to look forward to as well. I've only read one novel that was part of neither series, Picadilly Jim, and although it was enjoyable it was not in the class with the others. 

The rich widow is interested in psychical research, and is thrilled by the family lore which holds that an old family ghost, Lady Agatha, wife of Sir Caradoc the Crusader, is sometimes seen in the chapel (ruined, naturally).

Louise Perry, a British woman whom I'll describe for lack of a better word as a journalist, has recently published a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I have not read it, and probably won't, not because I don't think it would be worthwhile but because I have other priorities for my reading. She has also published something which I have read: in First Things, a profound reflection on the significance of the sexual revolution (click here to read it) with the somewhat surprising title of "We Are Repaganizing."

I call it surprising because Perry is not a Christian (though First Things of course is a Christian publication), and the essay is a practical defense of Christian sexual ethics. That is, it does not appeal to certain moral principles because they are Christian, but because they produced, over the centuries, a moral revolution, or at least a shift, which Perry approves. She makes points which have been made repeatedly over the past century or two by Christians, but are generally not only not accepted but not even comprehensible to the modern secular mind. For instance, there is the point about abortion and infanticide:

It was the arrival of Christianity that disrupted the Romans’ favored methods of keeping reproduction in check, with laws against infanticide, and then abortion, imposed by Christian emperors from the late fourth century. Christians have always been unusually vehement in their disapproval of the killing of infants, whether born or unborn, and their legal regime prevailed until the mid-twentieth century when we experienced a religious shift that will probably be understood by future historians as a Second Reformation.

(The comparison to the Reformation is not very apt, but let that go.)

And the one about the status and treatment of women:

Paul’s prohibition of (to use the Greek term) porneia—that is, illicit sexual activity, including prostitution—upended an ethical system in which male access to the female body was unquestioned and unquestionable. Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex, who could—for the first time—demand sexual continence of men. Feminism is not opposed to Christianity: It is its descendant.

In general, as the title of the piece suggests, she sees modern Western culture as in the process of returning to something like the fundamental assumptions of those Romans who saw no reason why an unwanted infant should not be disposed of. (In passing: it's unusual and refreshing to hear a non-Christian use the word "pagan" in a negative sense.)

It's a somewhat lengthy (for online reading) and very rich statement, and I don't want to leave the impression that those snippets are sufficient. You really should read the whole thing, so here's the link again. One of its themes is the connection between sex and reproduction. The sexual revolution has pretty much destroyed the general sense of that connection. In that it's of a piece with many of our technological triumphs--and it is made possible and sustained by one of those triumphs--which have encouraged us to think that physical reality is not something by which we need be overly constrained. 

In this context I often remember a moment from the 1980s when I worked for a large technology company. Though I tried not to make a show of it, my co-workers knew that I was a Catholic and a "social conservative," as the unsatisfactory term has it. One co-worker who was somewhat younger than I questioned my opposition to abortion. "Why," he asked, "shouldn't I be able to have sex whenever I want to?"--and, implicitly, without caring about pregnancy. He wasn't attacking me. He was genuinely puzzled as to why there should be any limit on his sexual desires. He had completely absorbed the attitude of the sexual revolution--which, I must say, is the more or less natural attitude of the human male. The triumph of the sexual revolution is the extension of that attitude to the female. 

The most basic answer to his question, obviously, is not "Because it's wrong," much less "Because Christianity teaches that it's wrong," but "Because that's not the way sex works." In the normal course of things, there is some fairly strong probability that normal sex will result in conception. And if you aren't prepared to deal with that, you ought not to be engaging in the act. As Garrison Keillor has one of his Lake Woebegon characters say, "If you didn't want to go to Minneapolis, why did  you get on the bus?"

Most people--most women, anyway--in the industrialized world today do prepare to deal with it by means of contraception. But if they don't prepare, or if the plan fails, abortion is the absolutely necessary recourse, the "Plan B," which is the grimly appropriate term for abortifacient drugs. "Just get rid of it." One of the things Louise Perry does in the First Things piece, and presumably in her book, is to investigate that reality with an honesty and clarity rare for non-religious thinkers. Her treatment of abortion is especially strong, mainly by being especially honest.

If the sexual revolution is to be rolled back, if we are to stop thinking as my co-worker of 35  years ago thought, women will have to lead the way. Even setting aside the nature of the male, a man speaking out against that mentality is regarded by many men as a prude and a spoilsport, and by women as an agent of The Patriarchy who wants to return them to The Dark Ages. Or the 1950s, which is about as far back as many people can now stretch their imaginations. 

Here's a thought experiment; I call it that because there is no chance of it ever actual being anything more than a thought. Suppose there were a law requiring that every pornographic film be followed by a scene of a woman giving birth--a realistic scene. I am tempted to answer my own obvious questions about how such a thing could be implemented, but since it is only a thought experiment I'll leave it at that. 

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Louise Perry was also a participant in a debate staged by The Free Press: "Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?" I've been meaning to mention The Free Press for a while. It was founded by a disgruntled New York Times writer, Bari Weiss. She is what was until fairly recently a more or less conventional liberal, but was appalled by the closed-minded and authoritarian progressives who were effectively controlling the Times. I'm not sure whether she left the Times entirely of her own volition or was pushed out, but at any rate she left, and The Free Press began as a Substack called "Honestly." That pretty much sums up her sense of her mission: to stand up for journalistic honesty in both reporting and opinion. In today's climate, that requires an unusual independence of mind, and The Free Press shows that. Its basic orientation is still what I would describe as formerly-conventional secular liberalism (Weiss is legally married to a woman). Obviously I have many disagreements with that mind-set, but the publication is genuinely open-minded and publishes all sorts of people and views. I subscribe to it in spite of those disagreements because I haven't entirely given up hope that our classical liberal order can be salvaged, and this is a worthwhile effort.

If it's not subscriber-only, you can watch the debate at the Free Press site: click here. The video seems to be hosted there, not on YouTube. I just watched the first couple of minutes which sort of disheartened me: it consists of news clips from the '70s and '80s featuring various unpleasant feminists.