Experiencing the Past

I’ve written about Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational novels a few times before. They can’t be considered classics or Great Books with a capital G and a capital B. But they get me thinking about history and large themes, and so, on the whole, I’ve enjoyed reading them and rereading them. The first of his books that I read was Sarum, which centers on the U.K. area around Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. I’m rereading it now and don’t like it quite as much this time, and I’m not sure why. I reread London a couple of years ago and loved it. Perhaps my problem lies in the fact that I’m listening to all 50 hours of Sarum in the car, an experience which has taken months. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of it being Rutherfurd’s first book, before he learned how not to lose the character trees in the historical forest.

But I liked Sarum enough the first time to read several of his other offerings, and I do remember what tickled my fancy so much fifteen or twenty years ago: I’m a sucker for novels that give a sense of a sweep of history, with characters having to deal with, in this case, Saxon invaders, the Plague, the reign of Bloody Mary, and other people and events I’ve read about in histories. C. S. Lewis tells us that what he calls a myth is the only way of getting the reader inside a world so as to feel what it’s like to see things, do things, and believe things beyond our ability to experience. Think about the difference between reading a clinical description of love and the experience of being in love. Huge, right? The shelves are full of descriptions of historical settings, but, without time machines, how can we experience any of those times with an intensity the lover feels? Through stories we can. I can read a history of the Wars of the Roses, but what was it like to live at the time, with neighbors and family taking different sides? Through Rutherfurd’s fictional account of the Wilsons and Shockleys of Salisbury, I can get a taste.

I also enjoy little mentions of things like the source of the name Charing Cross or Shakespeare visiting the town with a group of players. But herein lies the problem. Sometimes in Sarum there are too many mere mentions and not enough storytelling. And sometime the storytelling takes the form of dry narrative exposition rather than that of an interaction of characters. Take the chapter I’m in now, which covers the eighteenth century. We’re told at the beginning that Samuel Shockley lost all of his money in the South Sea Bubble, but then the details of the investments and the crash are all given in past-perfect narrative; we learn practically nothing about Samuel and don’t get inside the story of the ruin by seeing how it affected an individual. (When a novel presents me with more than a couple of sentences in a row in past-perfect tense, I start to get bored. Why is the book telling me about a previous event from the outside instead of placing me in the middle of it?) A little later in the chapter we learn (in the past perfect again) that Thomas Arne has written “Rule, Britannia”; but what was it like to sing that anthem? We learn narratively that the characters read Pope and Johnson and Voltaire, but we don’t experience a scene in which characters talk about this contemporary literature. Did they like it? Agree with it? Understand it? Without the experience, the mention of these authors just seems like name dropping.

OK. So much for me trying to change The Way Novels Are Written. Even if Sarum might have too much exposition, the parts that tell stories about characters do exactly what I want historical fiction to do. The chapter on the first century, for instance, gets me a sense of the experience, like no other book I remember, of what it felt like to live in a Roman outpost town. The chapter about the fifth century sets me down in the middle of a civilization that has a Roman legacy but that has largely accepted Christianity, although the Roman-British Christians in question debate the legitimacy of the theology of Pelagius. And debate it they do. Here Rutherfurd doesn’t just inform us that Pelagius had ideas and Augustine had other ideas; he gives us believable conversations between characters that show how diverging doctrine affected relationships. So maybe the novel isn’t a Great Book with a capital G and a capital B. But experiencing the life of a fifth-century citizen of Roman Britannia is kind of lower-case great.

Pede Poena Claudo

I'd never read it before, so it was wonderful finally to experience the original novel called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after knowing the story from so many versions, adaptations, spoofs, and cultural riffs. Stevenson is famous for a reason, and his eloquent narrative stays interesting, suspenseful, and insightful. The mystery of the story is maintained in a brilliant way, too: we first get the public story from the perspective of a lawyer acquainted with Jekyll, and then we get the inner explanation in a narrative written by Jekyll himself. Nobody needs for me to approve this book, but it's, oh! so good!

The details of the story are extra good, too. Jekyll's original purpose was to give his base desires (unstated in the narration, but promiscuous sex is implied) unlimited rein with the ability to hide back in the safe persona of the respectable doctor, and he concocts a potion to bring out the unrestrained Mr Hyde. But (1) Jekyll begins to feel remorse when Hyde turns violent, and (2) Hyde starts turning up spontaneously and a draught is now needed to get Dr Jekyll back. So sins indulged acquire power and return with a force that we cannot escape. In biblical terms, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. In Aristotelian terms, vices and virtues are habits and become, when strengthened enough, second nature.

As a bonus, I read a Stevenson short story called “The Body-Snatcher.” Here a pair of men have a business involving grave-robbing for the purpose of providing bodies for anatomy classes, but one night one of the partners kills a man in order to increase the company's stock on hand. The very last word of the story introduces a supernatural element. The effect is shocking, both for the characters and for the reader realizing that the genre of literature he's reading has just changed at the last second. But that single word again offers the moral that “sins follow after,” or as the narration puts it, quoting Horace, punishment comes "pede claudo": on limping foot, i.e. slowly but surely.

Will the Real Silas Lapham Please Stand Up?

I need to write a post soon about Miss Engler’s list of books. Miss Engler was a substitute teacher in Hazelwood schools in the 1970s. One day she handed out a mimeographed list of books she thought young people should read. I’m 99.9% sure that I’m the only student who ever paid any attention to that list, but it served as my canon for a couple of decades – replacing the list of titles adapted for Classics Illustrated! I must admit that my ragged copy still has several titles not underlined. Amazingly, though, after fifty years, I ticked off two more books from Miss Engler’s list in just the last few weeks: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. More about Jekyll and Hyde next time.

Silas Lapham was apparently a widely known, widely read American novel in the 1880s. Today, I’m sure few people have heard of it. (It did not appear in Classics Illustrated.) It’s a mystery to me why Howells and this novel aren’t more widely known. Miss Engler, you and I may be the only ones who remember!

Howells wanted to be and was considered a novelist of Realism. If you want to know more about that movement, read The Rise of Silas Lapham, not only for the benefit of the example but also because the characters outline the tenets of Realism by talking about novels and they way they ought to be. Some characters in the story have been reading a novel in which one girl leaves her attraction to a young fellow unfulfilled in deference to another girl (her sister, maybe?), and the Laphams and their friends complain that this novel they’re reading gets overly romantic and overly emotional by setting up the first girl as a heroine because she willingly suffers. I don’t know if the book the characters read was a real book, but Howells determines to show us the realistic way this plot should be depicted: the Lapham daughters find themselves both attracted to the same eligible bachelor, and one feels that her happiness is less important than her sister’s pain. Yes, these things happen, Howells tells us, but no one earns a halo. Far from being a case of heroism, the self-sacrificing Lapham sister causes a problem for the whole family, and a minister explains her that her choice is causing three people to suffer. She eventually relents but meets a new obstacle in The Fall of Silas Lapham. (Of course, it had to happen!)

I don’t know if Howells would have appreciated my reaction to that part of the plot. He thought overly emotional novels were unrealistic and therefore inferior, but I found this story very interesting precisely because of the complex emotions of the characters involved. I definitely see that the lens he applied to life differed from that of previous generations of writers, and in the portions less about the daughters and more about their father’s paint business, the novel reminded me of Babbitt. But this is still a Babbitt of the Victorian era without the cynicism and sense of loss of Sinclair Lewis’s time. I’m sure that 140 years of perspective helps make this clearer to me than it might have been to Howells.

One thing I’m not at all clear on, though, is the nature of Lapham’s business dilemmas. I looked up reviews after finishing the book hoping someone would explain to me his options near the end of the book as he was deciding what to do with his paint venture once his fortunes began to drop. I got no help understanding the peculiar terms and practices of mergers in nineteenth-century America, but I was surprised to discover that many readers think Lapham struggles morally during this crisis. On the contrary, I saw him as an extremely moral man whose struggles involved something more interesting (in my view) than a choice between being honest and making more money: Lapham’s biggest problem has to do with balancing his ethical business choices and his duty to take his wife’s views into account. It doesn’t look to me like a crisis of morality but a crisis of epistemology: Lapham will certainly do the right thing, but how can he be sure that his understanding points to the ethical path more unerringly than his wife’s does? If you read this book, let me know what you think!

I Auden to Make a Bad Pun on This Poet’s Name

For the second post in a row, I begin to write with trepidation, with concern that I am Not Up To The Task. I just completed reading a few hundred pages of Auden’s poetry; I enjoyed it, and I want to say something about it in these posts. But I see my stats, and I know that my piece on Shelley’s “A Summer Evening Churchyard” is one of my most popular posts. I hope that people come to it – and I imagine that some people even recommend it – because it helps them read the poem. I definitely know that if my 25-year-old self could have read that post, he would have been grateful.

But I’m not sure I know how to help anyone read Auden. I’m constantly doubtful of my ability to help anyone walking with me on the dusty American road toward the enjoyment of poetry. (The roads to that goal in England are all lush and lined with hedgerows and thorn trees and other delights that make learning poetry easier and more fun, I’m sure.) but with Auden, the task seems doubly daunting. His poetry is cryptic, the meter is sometimes loose, and the language isn’t filled with the rhymes and the grammatical inversions and the luscious archaic words that immediately signify Poetry to my slow brain. At first I didn’t like not knowing what Auden was talking about:

    How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
            Tombs of the sorceror shatter
        And their guardian megalopods
            Come after you pitter-patter?

Huh?

But then I started thinking of the poems as songs. “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold.” “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night.” “When no one else would come, Shilo, you always came.” “Koo koo ja-joob.” I like all those lyrics without fully understanding them. Shifting my thinking freed me to enjoy watching Auden write the way he wanted to write about the things he liked writing about without always having to understand.

And it’s not like I didn’t understand anything. Auden’s overriding themes seem to me to be (1) that all the noble and loving actions we see in the world are done by sinners, and (2) that every event that seems important to us – an act of love, a great journey. a death – makes no difference to the stars, to the birds, or even to the loving, sinning fellow who lives a couple of blocks away. I get it, and I agree with it, and, whaddayaknow, reading a few hundred pages of difficult poetry saying this gets the message through with a depth that cannot come across in any easier way.

Now I want to have a go at talking through a poem a bit, but the poem I chose doesn’t really fit those themes. In fact, “We Too Had Known Golden Hours,” one of the last poems I read in my Auden frenzy of the last two weeks, gave me a new perspective on everything else I had read by Auden.

    We, too, had known golden hours
    When body and soul were in tune,
    Had danced with our true loves
    By the light of a full moon,
    And sat with the wise and good
    As tongues grew witty and gay
    Over some noble dish
    Out of Escoffier;
    Had felt the intrusive glory
    Which tears reserve apart,
    And would in the old grand manner
    Have sung from a resonant heart.
    But, pawed-at and gossiped-over
    By the promiscuous crowd,
    Concocted by editors
    Into spells to befuddle the crowd,
    All words like Peace and Love,
    All sane affirmative speech,
    Had been soiled, profaned, debased
    To a horrid mechanical screech.
    No civil style survived
    That pandaemonioum
    But the wry, the sotto-voce,
    Ironic and monochrome:
    And where should we find shelter
    For joy or mere content
    When little was left standing
    But the suburb of dissent?

Auden began his career in the late 1920s. As a general trend, intellectuals and artists in this modern period, disillusioned by the war of the trenches and worldwide economic depression, broke from the sentimentality and belief in progress that characterized much of nineteenth-century western culture. Painted representations of the human figure, those of women especially, became angular and ugly. Composers presented listeners with successions of unresolved dissonances. Authors rejected traditional forms of morality and searched in their stories for ways to survive in a world that had been, they supposed, proven meaningless. I don’t condemn these artistic movements; I merely point out that they greatly emphasized the ugly, the empty, the aimless, the relative, the confusing, the painful, and the broken side of life.

But Auden says in 1950, after over twenty years of publishing his modern poetry, that he has experienced absolute goodness, truth, and beauty in his life but didn’t always feel free to report it. Faulkner would never tell us that a “body and soul were in tune” (a nice musical metaphor, by the way, that goes back at least two thousand years). Stravinsky never wrote a ballet in which true lovers “danced . . . by the light of a full moon.” Picasso’s people were never “wise and good.” O’Neill eschewed dialog that was “witty and gay.” But Auden says that these things happened to him. He says he felt an “intrusive glory,” i.e. a light from beyond, i.e. transcendent goodness. And he says that these beautiful moments broke down his normal human reserve and prompted him to “sing from a resonant heart.” That word “resonant” suggests again a tuning, a synchronicity of the human soul with the transcendent glory.

So why have his poems up until this time always emphasized that any love or goodness comes from a severely flawed human being and radiates to meet a universally indifferent world? Because “crowds” and “editors” (the public and the profession) have made all language about absolute goodness sound cheap. He has been forced to write in the idiom that his readers will accept. He cannot be good-hearted, only “wry”; he cannot be sincere, only “ironic”; he cannot shine the intrusive glory through a prism and show its colors but must instead stick with the “monochrome” grays of modernism. Ultimately he feels stuck in the “suburb of dissent,” and, after learning of his friendship with Charles Williams, I can’t help thinking that the City his peers excluded him from is Williams’s City of “exchange and coinherence” [https://exlibrismagnis.blogspot.com/2018/10/dante-charles-williams-and-echoes-of.html], the sacred community of harmony, wisdom, and glory.

I was planning to say something about diction and meter and figures of speech, but I’ve said too much already. I’ll just end by noting that I have recently found that Google searches no longer find my posts. I found the link for the post about Williams and the City by using a Bing search.

Saluting John Wemmick

For weeks now, I’ve been intending to write today’s post as a companion to the post of November 23, 2010, in which I salute one of my favorite comic characters from the Dickens cornucopia of great comic characters. But I just reread “Saluting Captain Cuttle” and have amazed myself at – please allow me a slight, immodest indulgence – how well I did in writing it. Truly to write a parallel piece, I would again today have to seek for the right poietic frame of mind and hope for it to appear. Were I in fact in the right poietic frame of mind, I would phrase it this way: I would say that I must needs call upon the Muses and humbly take whatever boon they decide to grant me. Indeed, I believe I have used the word “poietic” instead of “creative” in order to encourage their generosity.

Alas, I am only in a slightly elevated blogging frame of mind, and will simply have to do my workmanlike best. But salute John Wemmick I must, so here we go!

First of all, there are two Mr. Wemmicks; that is, Mr. Wemmick has two sides or aspects to him. “Walworth is one place, and this office is another,” he says when Pip asks him for personal advice. John Wemmick, clerk of the law office of Mr. Jaggers, adopts his employer’s legal morality and sees clients as neither good nor evil but merely as defendants who deserve the strongest case that can be made in court and then receive either favorable or unfavorable verdicts. He scolds potential witnesses for even suggesting that they might bend the truth but cares not at all whether what they say straightforwardly be truth or lie so long as it is defensible in itself and beneficial to the client’s case. He visits former clients in prison, not apparently in the enactment of Christian virtue, but rather in hopes of receiving small presentations of “portable property” from the condemned. He wears several rings obtained in this way and one cameo brooch. He admires the casts of the death masks of two former clients whose faces have been distorted as a result of hanging, smiling on the sculptures as if they were tokens of departed friends. He tells Pip he would be better to throw his money off a bridge than give it to a friend in need because at least then he would know where it had gone.

Why he befriends Pip, we are not told. But clearly even the office Wemmick sees that Pip, in spite of his failings, has potential. It might be that he can sense that Pip has a heart for his fellow man, especially the downtrodden. (Perhaps he has heard in some way of little Pip’s kindness to the convict among the graves one Christmas morning several years ago. But that would be a coincidence, and Dickens never indulges in coincidences, does he?) Whatever the reason, befriend Pip he does, and asks him to dine with him at his home in Walworth.

On their way to the Walworth home, office John Wemmick begins to fade, and smiles begin to show on Wemmick’s odd face that appear warmer than the smiles directed toward the death heads. He talks about ways in which he can assist Pip in giving financial aid to his friend anonymously. When they arrive at the Walworth home, Wemmick delights in showing Pip how to lower the drawbridge that crosses the small ditch that surrounds the property, a ditch that could be leapt easily with a single step. Pip notices crenellations on the house and a cannon on a tower. Walworth Wemmick has fully arrived and gives Pip a tour of his “castle garden.” Before they go inside, Wemmick asks Pip if he has any objection to an Aged Parent. Pip of course saying he has none, they step in to find the Aged Parent stoking the fire. John addresses him as “Aged Parent” and “Aged P.” Walworth Wemmick’s delight begins to mount as five o’clock approaches, at which time he climbs the tower and fires the cannon. The Aged P cries out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” I don’t know if there is a more hilarious, eccentric, or beautiful portrait of love in all of Dickens’s works than this of a hard-nosed law clerk who leaves the office behind him and builds a castle in the suburbs just so he can fire a cannon and give his deaf father the joy of hearing something once a day.

John Wemmick has a wooden face. His mouth is so straight and stiff, Dickens constantly makes references to its being a “post-office,” by which I suppose he means a mail slot. When I read about Wemmick, I try to think of the little door on the mailbox that allows you to put letters in without being able to reach your hand in to take any out, but I usually end up departing from the author’s metaphor and picturing Wemmick as a nutcracker. He has a lady caller named Miss Skiffins (perfect name) who also has a wooden face. One imagines the couple someday begetting a whole mantleful of little nutcrackers. Before they are married, John makes repeated slow and deliberate attempts to put his arm around Miss Skiffins’s waist, each attempt thwarted by Miss Skiffins's removing his arm, equally slowly and deliberately, and placing it on the table. I’ve given too much away already, so I won’t tell you how John delivers his wedding invitation to Pip, but it is priceless.

John Wemmick, I, too, had a job I tried (but usually failed) to leave behind each night. I don’t have a castle, but I have a few castles in the air, and on every one, I fire a cannon to salute you!

With a Title Like Great Expectations, How Could You Think It Would End Happily?

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I’m usually in the middle of reading a Dickens novel on his birthday, and 2024 is no exception: I’m currently enjoying Great Expectations for, I think, the fourth time. My wife likes several of Dickens’s novels but hate Great Expectations. For many people, this is the Dickens book they had to read in some English class, and so they hate it. But I can’t help it; I love it!

For my wife, I think that everything about Miss Havisham is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed, and I suspect that the same is true for a lot of other people. To be fair to my wife, who isn’t here to defend herself and doesn’t have her own blog, she might simply say that Miss Havisham is too unpleasant to read about. So let me respond to the other, totally hypothetical people who hold that she is overdone and disgusting and too tragic to be believed. To begin with, many things in Victorian literature seem overdone: a crazy wife kept secretly in an attic comes to mind. But I believe that Victorians lived more dramatically than we do, that angry women truly stomped their feet and that orating men posed and used lofty language that often got away from them. And that some jilted women lived as recluses. Check this recent-ish article claiming that one particular jilted recluse may indeed have been the real-life inspiration for Miss Havisham. 

But I should also point out that Miss Havisham is a character in a book, with every right to memorable excess. And after all, she’s no more over-the-top than Scrooge or the hunchback of Notre Dame or Captain Nemo, and every bit as absolutely unforgettable. And she’s there for a purpose. We all know people who hold on perpetually to anger directed at some given person. And we see in the house in which Miss Havisham lives the representation of the life that results from her never-ending grudge: no sunlight ever enters, and spiders cover the uneaten wedding cake. She serves as the physical representation of the soul that Pip could shape for himself if he continues forever his determination to be a gentleman and his rejection of his brother-in-law, who is by his admission the kindest man he ever knew.

Dickens was, to put it mildly, in a bad mood when he wrote Great Expectations. His marriage had just fallen apart (remember the spiders and the wedding cake?), and he was in no frame of mind to write a book with a happy ending. You know that The Man Who Invented Christmas is off his usual game within the first few chapters of GE, when the family dinner that gets ruined – by tar-water in the brandy and by the sudden intrusion of a band of soldiers – is a Christmas dinner. And the book goes on gloomily from there. Dickens wrote this novel in first-person narrative, with Pip admitting in his confessional account the deepest flaws of any Dickens hero. And, in Dickens’s original ending, Pip enjoys nothing of the typical Victorian hero’s happy ending: he doesn’t get the money, and he doesn’t get the girl. (Dickens's friend John Forster convinced him that his public would feel cheated by a tragic resolution, and so our author rewrote the last page before publication. If you read this book be sure to read the original ending: it’s the only one that makes any sense.)

And yet, he was still Charles Dickens, and the Ghost of Christmas Present couldn’t keep his horn of good will from sprinkling cheer here and there on the pages of Great Expectations. One early breakthrough has the irrepressible Joe Gargery forgiving an escaped convict for stealing food from his house. “God knows you’re welcome to it,” says Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.” At this the convict represses a sob. Generosity, forgiveness, and repentance. What could be more beautiful and uplifting?

Then there’s the hilariously ludicrous Mr. Wopsle, who reads in church as if he is acting Shakespeare and later acts Shakespeare as if he were a ten-year-old in a bad school pageant. And there’s Herbert Pocket, who stays cheery, identifies himself as an insurer of international trade even though he hasn’t been able to find the capital to start the business, loves his Clara with all the letters of the alphabet, and proves to be a faithful, helpful friend to Pip in his darkest hours. And then there’s . . .

Oh, but the best will have to wait for another post.

Augustine’s Careful Method

I’m just finishing books XI-XV, the culmination of Augustine’s On the Trinity. I had in mind some things to say in today’s post, but then, just now, I read what I wrote three years ago on this blog about books VI-X, and my plan for today’s post almost completely changed. For one thing, I think I did a pretty good job in 2021, and I’m glad I don’t have to say anything more today about things like semiotics, which I had originally planned to do.

(OK, I’ll say one thing about semiotics. Augustine’s various triads – thing in the world, image of that thing in our eyes, attention that trains the eye on the thing, for instance – and his explanation of the way a sign becomes the signified in a chain – thing in the world, image in the eye of the thing, memory of the image in the eye, present imagination of the memory, thought about the image in the mind’s eye, judgment of that thought, etc. – reminded me a lot of Charles Peirce. But I recently read my notes on my notes about Peirce (yes, another chain of signs) which said that the system was so complex, I couldn’t make sense of my notes. So I’m relieved that I don’t have to go back and try to figure out Peirce just to write something today about Augustine. So now you know why the one thing I want to say about semiotics explains why I don’t want to say anything about semiotics.)

Back to the main thread now. The most interesting thing to me now about my post from three years ago is that I said then that I didn’t buy Augustine’s answer to his question, How can we love the Trinity without understanding the Trinity? I had completely forgotten my dissatisfaction. In the last five books, Augustine methodically moves step by step toward explaining his answer, and, not remembering that he had already given his answer in a previous book, I found it reasonable this time. The prose is dense and difficult to read, even for a guy who likes to read old books. But sometimes methodical explanations require dense prose, and clearly that density is effective, since, having slogged through it, I understand Augustine’s point now, when I didn’t buy it three years ago after he had merely stated it.

Here is Augustine’s point. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God is in three Persons but one Substance: a mindbender, to be sure. But we are to love God, and how can we love anyone or anything we don’t understand? Well, we love other things that we don’t know yet because we see cause to assume a likeness to something that we do know and love. “If your brother is anything like you, I’m sure we’ll be great friends.” So surely we must be able to love the divine Trinity because we know and love something like a trinity that exists in the created world, and the trinity that we know and love is in the mind knowing itself: there we have the mind as known, the mind as knower, and the mind as will that focuses the attention on itself. The three aspects (it is difficult to decide on the noun to use) correspond to the three faculties of the mind: memory, understanding, and will. And all three, while distinct in concept, lie in the one substance of the mind.

Now that’s not just the answer: it is the answer as well as an explanation for it of sorts. But that answer, for me anyway, isn’t really persuasive until one reads Augustine’s careful search through all other possible analogous trinities and his account of the reasons they don’t work.

Reading is such an adventure! I had no idea of the story that would unfold when, ten years ago, I decided to scatter the books of On the Trinity through my ten-year plan and to devote the intervening years to other works by Augustine. Reading can be hard. It’s difficult to find the time, and it gets harder and harder for me to focus with my failing eyes and my wandering attention. But learning feels good, and that’s one reason I do it and a big reason I do it by a geeky, embarrassing schedule.