Dear Readers,
Please update your bookmarks. This blog is moving to a new address: Read, Ramble.
My reviews of the books under consideration for the Man Asian Literary Prize will still be posted here for the next month, until after the announcement of the winner in March.
Cheers,
Fay
Is it asking for trouble to say I loved a book that Ernest Hemingway ridiculed? Probably, but
Willa Cather’s novel about a Midwestern American farm boy who ships out to the World War I battlefields of France, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Hemingway, who was an ambulance driver in Italy in 1918, said she copied her battle scenes from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, Birth of a Nation.
With all due respect to Hemingway, he does seem to be laughing at Cather as a girly wannabe in the war novel genre. Since only about three battle scenes occur late in the novel, and the hero does not enlist until the story is over halfway told, Hemingway’s snide remark seems unfairly dismissive of the novel as a whole. He had not yet published his first novel in 1923; could jealousy have been a factor in his comment? I must admit that some soldiers’ behavior in the battle scenes appears unrealistic at times, but the overall choreography of these scenes, the representation of a village sniper attack or men going over the top of a trench, do not challenge credulity. Cather’s narrative voice, her evocation of youthful energy and aspirations and frustrations, her memoriam to the young soldiers who died in WWI–these qualities add up to a classic American novel.
Our hero grows up on a prosperous Nebraska farm and attends college for a few years before his father orders him back to the family farm. Today’s urban readers may think it a chore to take seriously the rural setting of the novel’s first half, but readers who appreciated Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, also set on the Great Plains, should give One of Ours a chance. The two writers are stylistically similar. James Wood includes both writers in comments about “Literary Calvinism” in American fiction, and before you roll your eyes and turn away, Dear Reader, consider the other writers Wood includes in this style: Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, Ulysses S. Grant in his Memoirs, Mark Twain and, amusingly in this context, Hemingway. His simplicity of style–and perhaps attitude–marks him for inclusion on this list of writers, although his spare sentences are nothing like those of Robinson and Cather, who appear lush by comparison. Both are notable for the rhythm of their language, especially on the level of the paragraph or long passage.
Simon's Reading Challenge at Stuck in a Book
One of Ours pays tribute to the WWI generation in a coming-of-age story, a nuanced character study, and is not–as some of her contemporaries said–a pro-war novel. She has not a jingoistic bone in her body, and she takes care to remind readers of the cynicism of some soldiers who fought and returned home, also mentioning the men who could not adjust to their post-war civilian environment. The book celebrates the lives of all the young American men, including Cather’s cousin, who died in France during World War I, who they were, what they might have been, their sacrifice. With over four million U.S. soldiers having served in the costly war, it is no wonder American readers of literary fiction responded to the book about a young man who dies for what he believes in. The novel does not, however, appear on bestseller lists for 1922-23.
I’ll close with a paragraph from the novel. It shows both the quality of Cather’s prose and some typical content. She uses dialog to good effect throughout the book, but her representation of the young man’s inner life drives the novel.
Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him. He had been unable to conceal his discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,—the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it!
“The Clod and the Pebble” by William Blake
From Songs of Experience (1794)
“Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
Congratulations to the fabulous North African blues band Tinariwen on winning this year’s Grammy award for Best World Music Album. If you have a Spotify subscription, listen to the entire album there: Tassili.
The most interesting blog post I read this week was Amitav Ghosh’s February 6th commentary on the relationship between writers and readers, which he expanded into a discussion of threats to free expression. He begins by saying that he does not attend the Jaipur Literary Festival, the largest litfest in the Asia-Pacific region, and then explains why not. He resists the kind of performance art demanded of writers to promote their books, regarding it as a kind of circus sideshow detrimental to artistic integrity and autonomy.
Aside from his thought-provoking comments on that topic, a couple of other points stand out. While repressive governments are still the greatest threat to writers’ free expression in China, North Korea and Syria, Ghosh says, in the rest of the world governments do not pose the biggest problem.
Elsewhere threats to free speech today come mainly from private and sectional interests – fundamentalist groups, identity-based organizations, political extremists, corporations and so on. These may be ‘non-state actors’ but they can be very effective in limiting the freedom of speech. It might even be said that in India they have succeeded in shrinking the space for free expression to a point where it is not much broader than in China.
To say that India is not much better off than China in terms of free speech is a shocking claim. Amitav Ghosh’s novel River of Smoke , the second novel in his Ibis Trilogy, has been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize to be announced on March 15th, and I am hoping to get my review posted in the next week or so. Meanwhile, see my post on Sea of Poppies, the first book of the Ibis Trilogy.
The book I discussed yesterday, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, qualifies for A Classics Challenge 2012, and here are my responses to this month’s prompts at November’s Autumn.
Find a portrait or photograph that closely embodies how you imagine them.
What phrases has the author used to introduce this character? In the first paragraph, these words set the tone: happy, “memory of past sorrow,” torment, passion, suffering. Werther runs on high feeling.
What are your first impressions of them? The first paragraph establishes Werther as a shallow young man prone to self-justification and exaggeration. Goethe announces his ironic view of the character in the opening passage, although the irony has escaped the notice of many readers who accept the young man’s self-evaluation as reported in his letters. W carries on about trifling with the affections of a girl for his amusement and then vows not to dwell on “every petty vexation which fortune may disperse.” So coping with the unhappiness he has created is a “petty vexation.” His extreme emotionalism leads him into a quagmire of suffering until he can face his self-inflicted troubles no longer.
How has the character changed? Werther’s youthful restlessness becomes morbid. He expresses intense feeling from the beginning, but frustration over a married woman who will never be more than his friend magnifies into life-or-death significance for him.
Has your opinion of them altered? Some of the early passages genuinely convey the earnestness of a sensitive youth and have a certain charm, but he seems full of himself, in a not very appealing way, on page one and that never changes. It gets worse when his hypocrisy and self-deception become more pronounced.
Are there aspects of their character you aspire to? No.
What are their strengths and faults? Readers who were touched by Werther responded to his emotional intensity and what they saw as his deep longing for meaning through romantic love. His hyper-sensitivity was admired, and he aspired to live on a higher spiritual plain than the average run of men. Although the reader must pity him, I thought his pretensions were a lot of bosh. There are indications that Goethe also took a somewhat jaundiced view of his character’s mental life, even though the novel is partly autobiographical. Of course, a whole generation of youth did not see him that way. They responded to his individualism and passion.
Do you find them believable? Yes, unfortunately.
Would you want to meet them? No, thank you.
The world probably does not need another review of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), one of the foundational documents of the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature. My comments here are directed at readers unfamiliar with the book or who have an impression of it as an unmitigated wallow in pre-Romantic manic depression.
Despite the powerful writing, I cannot recommend it except as a kind of freak show of literary history. I am delighted to have finally read it, because the stereotyping of Romantic literature as something ridiculous is probably based on a too-easy association of all Romantics with the over-the-top sentiment of the Sturm und Drang writers.
The story follows a young man on his sojourn away from home, where he appears to be fleeing a romantic adventure that got out of hand when he was caught between two sisters who both adored him, by his own account. He falls hard for a woman who is engaged to another man and tries for the remainder of the novel to recover from his passionate, impossible love. At several points in the story he appears to forget Charlotte completely, as his fancy turns to some other attractive maidens, but he reports his devotion to Lotte as if these other attractions were not distracting him.
Werther, a dabbler of a painter and reader of mawkish poetry, takes a position with an ambassador whom he finds overly punctilious in demanding well-written reports. Poor, poor Werther! Life is so unfair! The novel’s epistolary structure serves the purpose of displaying Werther’s innermost thoughts and feelings, as he writes to his friend Wilhelm back home. Werther muses on the sunsets, flowers, his love for Charlotte, the meaning of life and himself. He dallies with attractive young women and pursues aristocrats, while claiming a spiritual affinity with the peasantry.
In these contrasts of intention and action lie Goethe’s ironic portrait of his young hero, although legions of readers have read the book as an unambiguous manifesto of sensibility. I do not see how anyone, now or then, could take the character at his own face value. You would think no reader could miss the irony Goethe embeds in all that sincerity and despair, but clearly many readers took their Werther straight up. Young people of the late 18th C. emulated Werther’s dress, associating the high-strung young man with a break from convention, and seeing the novel as a statement of personal independence and freedom for their generation. Many young European men of the day adopted Werther’s blue jacket and yellow pants, as shown below.
The novella lives up to its reputation for wretched excess. This is the most emotionally overwrought character I’ve come across in literary fiction, and his literary progeny are fairly easy to identify. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is said to be influenced by Werther, not in repeating the character so much as inhaling the atmosphere of suffering that brings Werther to its bloody conclusion. Up until this book, the highest pitch of unbridled feeling I had come across in fiction had been in the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins and to a lesser extent Dickens. I wonder if a direct line of influence could be traced from Sturm und Drang to those Victorian authors. Braddon wrote delicious trash, whereas Goethe presumed a seriousness of purpose even when satirizing his own lead character.
The Sorrows of Young Werther was an important novel and had a significant impact on literary history. I’m just not sure today’s readers would find it all that engaging either as literary fiction or as a pleasure read. The pattern for the self-indulgent young man of high sensibility, Werther has become something of a jokey image of manhood. Goethe himself, I am convinced, did not view his creation as an admirable character at the time he wrote the book. As an older writer, he did not look approvingly at the novel he wrote as a young man, and he had nothing good to say about the rising generation of Romantics.
The Sorrows of Young Werther (German, 1774).
I read the Thomas Carlyle and R.D. Boylan translation in the Dover Thrift Editions (2002), which includes an 1827 introduction by Carlyle.
88 pages.
ISBN: 0-486-424553
