Re-reads

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Waugh! He stated that he intended this first novel to be funny – nothing more. It’s a humor based on absurdity in characters and events. But it’s not silly or even far-fetched; it’s an intelligent humor. Our “hero” is Paul Pennyfeather, a name which pretty much defines his personality. He goes from a student at Oxford (he’s expelled for “indecent behavior”), to a master at a disreputable private school for boys in Wales, where one of the students, Peter Beste-Chetwynde, takes the hapless Paul under his wing and guides him on how to act and what to do (which is as little as possible). From there he progresses to the country estate of Peter’s widowed mother, the beautiful and fabulously rich Margot. She and Paul get engaged to be married, but that plan goes bust when Paul is arrested for human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, and he’s sent to prison for eight years. There’s a happy ending, of sorts. In none of these events is Paul guilty of any misdoing; he’s simply a bystander for more dynamic personalities. One character describes Life as big spinning wheel. Most people on the wheel flounder around under its momentum; some seek the center, where all is calm; others, like Margot, go to the very edge of the wheel, where the momentum is greatest, and hang on. Paul sits on the sidelines and watches. Nothing fazes him, not even prison (“. . . anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.”) That quote is my only attempt to replicate Waugh’s unique humor. Anyway, read this one, it’s a lark, a sparkling gem, and is written with a lovely simplicity. 5

The Way West – A. B. Guthrie

I have a reference guide to American literature, and I looked up Guthrie, only to find he wasn’t included. They had Zane Grey, but not Guthrie. I’m also aware that few people today have any interest in a novel about a trip by wagon train to Oregon in the 1840s. I consider both of these facts to be regrettable. It was an epic and important event in our country’s history, and a novelist who could so vividly recreate it should not be forgotten. Guthrie gives us the mechanics of how the trip works, the hardships endured, and – most important – the people who did the enduring. These people are a varied lot, and run the gamut of human nature. We get to know them, some more intimately than others, and when tragedies happen they have real emotional clout. I was impressed by the courage and grit and resourcefulness on display, by women as much as men. And I wondered if people today could endure and prevail such a physically and emotionally taxing journey. Someone from a prior novel by Guthrie – the equally excellent The Big Sky – plays a major role. Dick Summers is persuaded to leave his home in Springfield to lead the train. This former Mountain Man, now fifty, is impressive not only in his knowledge, but in his character. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, but people were different back then, mainly in their values. 5

A Good Man in Africa – William Boyd

For quite a long stretch I found this book to be entertaining. It tells of the misadventures of Morgan Leafy, a British official stationed in the West African county of Kinjanja. Boyd uses the third person, but we’re always in Morgan’s mind. It’s quite a messy mind. Much of the humor – it’s a comic (or, rather, farcical) novel – derives from the difference between how Morgan feels (which is often rage, exasperation, dislike, etc.) and how he speaks and acts (in a proper, acceptable manner). He gets immersed in predicaments romantic/sexual and political (involving a corrupt African vying for power in an upcoming election). This was Boyd’s first novel, and its authenticity of place derives from the fact that he grew up in West Africa. This adds to the book’s virtues. So I’m enjoying myself when, at the halfway point, annoyances began to set in. One involves the sex; all the attention to the needs of Morgan’s penis seemed imposed for cheap laughs. And the plot got so complicated that it became unwieldy; by the last third the book’s structure was tottering under the weight. Then totter some more as Boyd simply piled on more complications. Eventually I got to the point where I didn’t want to continue reading. Well, I did, to the unsatisfying and ridiculously chaotic end (in which nothing is resolved). How can I evaluate a novel for which I had initial admiration that soured so completely? Since my negativity was far greater than my pleasure, I have to relegate it to a Delete.

Meanwhile There Are Letters – Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald

This decade long correspondence began when Welty was sixty-one and Kenneth Millar (Ross MacDonald was his pseudonym) was fifty-five; it ended when Millar lapsed into dementia. It was an unlikely pairing: Welty was a Southern regional writer, very much in the literary sphere, and Millar was a crime novelist. But these two found a like soul in the other. So much so that this collection reads like a love fest (after only a few letters the word “love” appears in the closings, and is never thereafter absent). Here’s a sample of the tone from Welty: “. . . our spirits have traveled very near to each other and I believe sustained each other – This will go on, dear Ken – Our friendship blesses my life and I wish life could be longer for it.” Millar could be equally gushy. You soon know what to expect: praise of each other’s writing (way over-the-top, in my estimation), concern for the other’s health and happiness, and total agreement on all matters. A constant flow of this gets monotonous. The co-editors do some campaigning for a romantic attachment, but I didn’t buy into that (Welty never married; Millar’s wife of many years was a writer of popular mysteries). The two met only a few times, briefly, and the letters divulge very little of a personal nature. The editors add supplementary notes that depict grave difficulties in the Millar marriage (he never complains about Margaret to Welty). According to eyewitnesses (including Welty) when Ken’s Alzheimer’s incapacitated him, Margaret was uncaring and abusive. I think there’s a mystery in the dynamics of that marriage, and I’d like to know the wife’s version. Last note (which adds to the mystery). Welty kept all of Ken’s letters, but there were no copies of her letters to him – until a rare book dealer who had purchased Ken’s library and papers found them in the pool house of the Millar home (by then Margaret was deceased). Apparently Ken had hidden them there. . . .

Beast in View – Margaret Millar

Millar employs a pink herring, which is that Helen Clarvoe is being victimized by Evelyn Merrick, an old school friend. But Helen is obviously bonkers, and I (and probably every other reader) knew after the first chapter that she was suffering from a repression so deep that it manifested itself in a split personality. At the end, when this is revealed, the only one surprised is Helen. Despite there being no mystery to this mystery novel, it’s pervaded by a maliciousness that gives it an unsettling strength. As Evelyn, Helen engages in all manner of destructive activities. One is an offstage murder, but most of her attacks come via phone calls, and her main targets are her mother and brother, both of whom she despises. The mother is Millar’s strongest portrayal, but also notable is the homosexual brother (the abhorrence toward homosexuality is an interesting circa 1955 attitude). The weakest character is the fifty-something lawyer who attempts to unravel the “mystery.” When he expresses feelings of love for Helen it’s ludicrous; there’s not a scintilla of a reason provided for such an emotion to arise. Helen’s plight didn’t elicit any feelings of pity in me. Some people are so far gone that they cease to be human. They’re beasts.

When the Going Was Good - Evelyn Waugh

In his Introduction Waugh notes that “The following pages comprise all that I wish to preserve of the four travel books that I wrote between the years 1929 and 1935.” The last excerpt was written when he was thirty-two and employed as a war correspondent in Abyssinia (later renamed Ethiopia); the other four were done when he was in his mid to late twenties. This going off to remote and backward lands was a young man’s undertaking; as I read about the hardships Waugh endured I wondered what it was like when the going was bad. The impression that emerges on almost every page is one of chaos and squalor. Filthy accommodations, horrendous food, hordes of aggravating (or deadly) insects – and then there were the people with whom he was constantly struggling to accomplish any goal he had in mind. As I read the first four excerpts, I found that each page was interesting (and often amusing) but there was no context or continuity in experiences that could involve me, and the unflappable Waugh remained emotionally inaccessible. The final section, devoted to the war that was about to break out with Italy, had more of a sustained characterization and plot, but I found it to be less interesting (and the prose, which had been elegant, dropped down a notch). I think Waugh was tired of traveling. In the case of the previous books, he needed the money they brought in (the Brits love their travel books), but that was no longer true after Vile Bodies came out in 1930. One plus resulting from these exploits was that he used them in two of his novels: Black Mischief takes place in Africa, and the conclusion of A Handful of Dust in the Brazilian jungle. One could categorize the inexplicable people he encounters in Going as savages; but in his novels set entirely in England the savages are just sophisticated ones, and they’ll eat you alive.

Dear Theo – Vincent Van Gogh (letters edited by Irving and Jean Stone)

Irving Stone had written a fictionalized account of the life of Van Gogh – Lust for Life – which had been a best seller. Three years later he published this selection of letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother. The word “selection” is important. In his Preface Stone recounts how he and his wife pruned down the 1670 pages of letters he had at his disposal to the 572 pages that make up this volume. The result of that pruning is far from a complete and accurate picture of Vincent, nor of his relationship with Theo. If you want to learn more about that issue, you can click on my essay, “Reading Other People’s Mail.” In this review I’ll address what Stone chose to give us, for what he selected was, no doubt, truly the words Vincent wrote – how could he have altered that? – so they do show a side to the man. I was surprised by what a very good writer Van Gogh was; he was able to express his emotions both forcefully and with restraint (an approach employed by the best novelists). He was quite intelligent and was a reader – Zola, Hugo, Dickens, etc. When painting became his consuming passion, it was a learn-as-you-go proposition; he could view his work critically, and he strived to get better; even at the end of his life he considered only a small number of his canvasses to be successes. He was opinionated as to what art should concern itself with; for him it was nature, humble subjects, and, above all, the transference of feeling. The majority of words in this book have to do with the technical side of painting, such as the treatment of colors. Van Gogh led a troubled existence, but he found deep pleasure in his love of natural beauty and in the act of creating art. Though these letters evoke sadness, they also have a radiance about them. This may have been what Stone was striving for.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
I’m an ardent admirer of Waugh, but this book, his magnus opus, is a mistake. How does it differ from the seven earlier works that I hold in high esteem? For beginners, in the prose. Waugh’s beautiful sentences are self-consciously ornamental; when he reverts to the stringent economy of his old style (as in Charles Ryder’s stay with his craftily malicious father), the novel rises to excellence; in fact, it succeeds in all sections in which Charles is an observer. Detachment was Waugh’s strength. But in Brideshead he taps into his intimate emotions (he uses a first person narrator, which he had never done before). He begins by recreating a paradisaical Oxford and Charles’s friendship with the “madly charming” Sebastian Flyte (who carries around a life-size Teddy Bear named Aloysius). The young men are inseparable and do gay things together. I use “gay” with a double meaning; since Waugh has the two sunbath together in the nude, I wondered why he didn’t take the step of making their relationship a physical one. Charles writes of Sebastian: “He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality that in extreme youth sings aloud for love . . .” In this book there’s much talk of love (Charles thinks that “to know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom”). But – going back to Waugh’s strengths – he excelled at depicting hapless characters being cruelly manipulated, or monsters of selfishness doing the manipulating. Love is precisely what he’s unable to make credible in Brideshead. Sebastian is one of a number of people who are discarded. As the disastrous Book Two begins ten years have passed, and Charles is returning from the jungles of South America. He’s married but loathes his wife and cares not one whit for his two children. When he encounters Sebastian’s sister, the beautiful and tragic Julia, an empyreal love springs up between them. The gauzy, rhapsodic prose in which it’s described is, at times, laughable. He and Julia part over some religious mumbo-jumbo concerning the operation of divine grace. As with the discarded characters, this seemed like a convenient way to avoid dealing with the mundaneness of a long-term commitment. I find it significant that, early in the book, there’s a nine page monologue in which a homosexual character unloads on Sebastian and Julia and their mother; he goes beyond cattiness and into the truly vicious. The point is, it’s a brilliant sequence that showcases Waugh at his best. It surprises me that so many people buy into what’s false in this novel: its elegiac romance.

King Solomon’s Ring - Konrad Lorenz (German)
In describing the behavior of a wide variety of creatures, Lorenz draws some parallels (and comparisons) to how our species acts. Regarding our highly-touted capacity to love, long before they mate male and female jackdaws form alliances that have every indication of being romantic; these continue, unabated, for the rest of their lives (which can last as long as human lives). As for the gory aspects of the natural world, I was surprised by the ferocity of “harmless” vegetarians. Lorenz states that the “roe-buck is the most malevolent beast I know”; if given the opportunity he’ll methodically slit the bellies of does and fawns. And when Lorenz makes the mistake of putting two doves in the same cage (for the purpose of mating), one of these symbols of peace eviscerates the other. His conclusion is that, in nature, both deer and doves can flee from an attack; when confinement makes escape impossible the stronger is free to inflict carnage. Vegetarians haven’t developed the social inhibitions that predators have. A raven or wolf cannot harm one of their own kind who assumes a submissive stance; if this prohibition didn’t exist the survival of those species would be in jeopardy. Man, it seems, is not similarly inhibited. Lorenz’s line drawings are more lively than his prose, which is a bit plodding. Still, his enthusiasm for his life’s work is always evident.

The Uncoupling - Meg Wolitzer
A spell comes over the women of a New Jersey suburb: they’re unable to respond sexually to their husbands and boyfriends. The characters are faculty members and students at a high school where the new drama teacher is putting on a production of Lysistrata. The most attention is given to Dory and Robby Lang, a couple who enjoy, after many years of marriage, a robust sex life; the plot revolves around the repercussions when a coldness inexplicably descends on Dory. What are not developed (at least not by the midway point, when I called it quits) are the questions raised in the premise. Is the supernatural at work? Does the Greek play (in which women stop having sex with men until they end a war) have relevance, and, if so, what are the women of Stellar Plains protesting? To account for my growing distaste, I briefly entertained the possibility that Wolitzer was making some radical points: that the Lang’s happy but conventional marriage is vapid, and that, from a certain perspective, intimate physical contact is repugnant. But, as the trivialities accumulated, it became clear that I was giving her too much credit. The Uncoupling is no more than boring rote work that leans heavily on a lot of sex talk. I had again wasted my precious time on a modern American novel.

Tartuffe - Moliere (French)
Fun, but great literature? I’d say no; this is a lightweight comedy. Still, if I was in the audience in seventeenth century France I’d have left the theater with a satisfied smile. It’s a misrepresentation to say that Moliere was exposing religious hypocrisy. Tartuffe isn’t a hypocrite; he’s a con man. Though others recognize this, from the outset Orgon is so captivated by Tartuffe that he tries to force his daughter to marry him and gives him all his money. The real problem is Orgon’s gullibility; but, since we never learn how and why he became ensnared, he just seems dumb. The liveliest character in this lively play is Dorine (a maid who definitely doesn’t know her place). The ending has a deus ex machina: a wise and benevolent King Louis XIV saves the day; I guess Moliere needed to pay homage to power. Lastly, the translation is by the poet Richard Wilbur. Moliere must have written in rhymed couplets, because that’s what we get. In his introduction Wilbur writes that “contemporary audiences are quite willing to put up with rhymed verse on the stage.” This phrasing suggest that he’s not sold on the matter, and it’s true that one tends to be distracted by the ingenuity needed to find words that conveniently fit. On the other hand, think of how children delight in rhymes; humans are drawn to it.

Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
Maybe, after four excellent novels that used the same general approach, Waugh had grown weary. On the same page he has a character stand up twice without bothering to sit him down in between. This gaffe is one example of a general lack of care. Waugh trots out the old tricks, but they’re unanimated, spiritless. The only feeling pushing this book along is a tired and cynical meanness. He uses his typically muted main character, but this one is so vague as to be without personality – just a disembodied voice answering in monosyllables. However, Waugh gathers his forces at the end and shows how good he can be. There’s a wonderful comic scene followed by a sad and beautiful denouement that evokes an almost palpable feeling of loss.

Auto-da-Fe - Elias Canetti (German)
A great novel, but an unpleasant and difficult experience. Canetti went his own way in writing it; the book is like nothing else. Crowded prose, twisting as it follows convoluted thoughts. The four major characters are grotesques, and, since we’re in their minds, we become intimate. But all are warped, repugnant; it’s exhausting to be with them. This is a black look at humanity, but I think what Canetti reveals is valid: people live with delusions and will keep them no matter what; people do not relate to one another, to the point where they can’t even communicate; greed is the primary human motivator. All this is presented with a venomous humor. Some scenes have a power that is unequaled – such as the death of the dwarf; an amazing scene. *

Young Hearts Crying - Richard Yates
A man and a woman have their faults, weaknesses and self-deceptions revealed to them. I’ve read five books in which Yates has done this. He’s effective because he works with the commonplace – we see ourselves in these characters, so the exposure is discomfiting (Yates can make you wince when a character does something humiliating or stupid). Also, Yates’ prose serves only to reveal character; he’s stripped it down to that alone, and its unadorned directness is commendable. That said, I didn’t like this book. Michael is so unappealing that the necessary empathy with the reader is missing. Everybody talks in the same way, even using the same quirks of real speech. Secondary characters serve merely to expose the weaknesses of the main ones. Lastly, when an author creates a child, and the parents ignore her for a hundred pages, the reader feels a lack in both the characters and the author. Not that this book is a bust; the ending was strong, and I still believe in the authenticity of Yates’ vision of life.