Scenes & Thoughts From Life & Lit

"Can we play ball?"

 

This is what spring looks like. 

 

At least, it is what the month of March so often looks like here in northern Michigan, as the calendar announces spring in the midst of continued snow and ice. 

 

But a thaw brings its own troubles. Frozen mud ruts are jarring, but a slithery mud wallow can be much more difficult to navigate. And do we want the 70-degree temperatures in March that family in Minnesota and Illinois had recently? I should say not! Heaven forbid the “darling buds of May” be tempted to open any earlier and risk a killing frost!

Future Mudbath Here

Meanwhile, living in a book –

 

Published in 1859, the action of George Eliot's Adam Bede takes place in 1799 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, but world-historic events are not the author’s concern. We are told the time only because the narrator insists that “all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago,” and so, she says, we should not be surprised that Adam exhibits a touch of peasant superstition along with his keen intelligence or that “Hetty’s sphere of comparison was not large.” The novel's world is a circumscribed rural world of a bygone past but also includes the inner, infinitely complex worlds of the people who lived there in that time.

 

Reading Eliot's classic novel in the 21^st century, it is difficult to view it, as many did in 1859, as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Seduction, pregnancy, and infanticide do occur in the story, but hardly in “lewd” language. Of the seduction, we see only kisses and an arm around a waist, while the infant is more abandoned than murdered—criminal, yes, but neither violently nor without feeling—and between the seduction and the abandonment, the terrified flight of a young woman never before on her own in the world has her pregnancy named to us by the author only, circumspectly, as her “hidden dread.” There are no graphic scenes or language.

Winter continues.
Seasonal road season is not here yet.

Shocking readers was not George Eliot’s aim. Rather, she encouraged the enlargement of sympathy for our fellow creatures.

 

The story takes place at the turn of a century over 300 years ago. We see the faces of George Eliot’s characters as their own friends and families see them, and at the same time we feel the beating of their hearts as if those hearts were our own. Hopes, illusions, doubts and all the rest of the changing weather that passes through their souls we experience along with them as, along with what we see, there is what the author allows us to feel, which is more than we might for our own neighbors and friends whose hearts are hidden from us. As the omniscient narrator tells a story so universal that it might have taken place at any time in human history, we are introduced not only to people as they appear to each other but also to the inner lives of each. We see clearly the querulous, jealous mother-love of Lisbeth Bede, the near-worship of young Seth for his brother Adam, Adam’s hard and unforgiving judgment of those who lack his devotion to work, Hetty’s inability to feel sympathy for anyone’s feelings other than her own, and Dinah’s gentle saintliness that asks nothing for herself—and if Lisbeth and Seth and Adam, Hetty and Dinah were our neighbors we might stop with what we see and judge them by a single standard, much as does the voluble Mrs. Poyser, with her rock-ribbed sense that her view of things was the only right view. But granted access to their inner doubts, fears, and hopes, we share (if we are sympathetic readers) in the author’s sympathy for them all.

Weak sun trying its best to shine --

A friend and I were texting one recent morning about writers able to move readers to such sympathy. As I have long said of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you might be unable, in real life, to tolerate sitting next to one of her characters on a long bus ride, but thanks to her insights into that character’s experiences and the marks it has left on the soul, a reader understands the why behind, for example, someone’s maddening anger or overwrought sensibility. By contrast, no subtlety or great knowledge of hearts is required to create a fictional hero or villain, only the willingness to play God and divide the human race into the saved and the damned. “An author needs a vision of human nature and unusual writing skill to produce characters that truly reflect reality,” my friend noted. 

Vision, skill—I would add that it takes generosity of spirit on the part of the writer, a largeness of soul. And a reader willing to open her own heart and mind to the vision of such a writer cannot help but feel increased sympathy for mankind in general.

 

How can it be that I never read this novel before? To think that I might have missed it entirely! It will be part of my mission as a bookseller to urge its reading to others, though I realize that not all readers will find it as compelling as I did because Adam Bede presents a couple of possible stumbling blocks for 21^st-century readers. 

First, there is the dialect. Repetition and context aid in translation, however, and a reader quickly realizes that ‘mun’ stands for ‘must,’ ‘war’ for ‘were,’ and ‘nor’ for ‘than.’ Also, the dialect is stronger in some characters’ speech than in others and occurs not at all in the exposition, so screw up your courage and dive in!

 

A more general stumbling block for many would be the novel’s opening pace. The story begins slowly and builds slowly. We see country people at their work and at their worship, the author in no hurry to cut to the action, her paragraphs long and dense with description. While impatience on the part of a reader will be ill rewarded, I can promise that once things begin to happen there are plenty of sudden scene changes and increasing drama.

Ice moving out of Omena Bay at last!

With eyes on the forecast –

 

I’m back in my bookshop today, for the first time since—was it really Thursday, March 12? Almost two weeks ago?! That’s what the double whammy of a couple feet of snow plus a debilitating cold will do to the most determined and intrepid bookseller. But she is back among the living, friends, and happy to be here for you once more.

Somewhere in the future will be more blue skies.

Without the blue snow!

And now? Will I take spring break next week along with everyone else in Northport, the public school and our hardworking friends at New Bohemian Café? Is there a road trip in my near future? Or will I stay put and be a destination for someone else? Much depends on the weather, my friends, as is so often the case in our extraliterary lives, but I am here this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for sure, March 25-27, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., so stop by if the spirit moves you. 

And someday soon Sunny will be rolling in clover!

Thomas Wolfe Fatigue

My rule for including a book on my “Books Read” list for any given year is that I have to read the whole thing. If it’s on my list, I read it from beginning to end. That doesn’t mean I read every book I pick up from beginning to end, but it does mean I try not to waste much time on books that aren’t worth reading in their entirety.

Earning that listing right (my own rule) might seem like enough reason for me to plow ahead with Of Time and the River, though at page 511 of the 912-page book I was beginning to long for the end. But I like to have at least one additional reason, because otherwise I begin to have doubts, coming because I remember a why-we-are-in-Vietnam argument that went, “We have to stay and keep fighting because it’s already cost us so much.” My Thomas Wolfe reading correlative might be, “I’ve spent so much time on the book that I have to [double my investment to] reach the end.” Not a great comparison, since it’s only time, not lives, at stake, and only my own time, and the end of the book is in sight, whereas, for year after year, no one could not say that about the war. But I do think I need more reason to keep reading a book than having already read a lot of it.

So what’s my supplementary reason for battling on through Thomas Wolfe fatigue? Maybe I should first say something about what’s brought on the fatigue, and I’ll introduce it with a question: How does Thomas Wolfe portray character?

The main character in Of Time and the River, Eugene Gant (from Look Homeward, Angel), is so intensely autobiographical it’s embarrassing. Wolfe spares us none of young Gant’s overwrought emotions, and we are privy not only to every sensation but also to every judgment that Gant makes about other characters, almost as if in reading the book we have the experience of inhabiting his mind and body. Other characters are portrayed very differently, which makes sense, since the story is told from Gene’s point of view, albeit in the third person. Of course Wolfe/Gant, with access to Eugene’s insides, could only know other characters from the outside – from their appearances, speech, and behavior. I get that.

But the extreme lack of sympathy shown for other characters, especially those with different ethnic backgrounds – is it only the characters, or is it also the author’s, or was it the way the author felt when younger but got over as he matured? Negroes (frequently referred to with the more vulgar N-term) and Jews, Greeks to a lesser extent, are “oily” and “primitive,” with features of face and hair and body exaggerated and dwelt on at great length. Women, of any age, are generally either seductive or repulsive – sometimes, paradoxically, both! Is it only Gant, or was it Wolfe, too, who looked on other human beings not only as separate from himself but almost as members of another species? All others in this book, it seems, are Others, examined and described with the glittering, objective, curious but at the same time repelled eye of a boy collecting insects and pinning them, still wriggling, to his collecting board. This would be off--putting at any time, but at the end of an election cycle marked by statements of prejudice, hatred, and fear, it's downright sickening.

Sickening. Tiresome. Sad. Maddening. You just want to slap the egocentric, self-dramatizing young genius (already a legend in his own mind) upside the head and remind him that he, too, is a human being, seen from the outside by other people! How about putting that gigantic imagination to work to try to understand other people’s situations? That’s what I mean by Thomas Wolfe fatigue.

So you’re probably wondering, why go on at all? What on earth can justify my spending more time in Wolfe’s world?

“I love the language,” a friend of mine frequently says of a book she’s just read. And while there’s plenty of Wolfe’s language I don’t love, there are other passages, long and lyrical, which absolutely soar. Overwritten, maybe, from the postmodern point of view (certainly often emotionally overwrought), but when he leaves characters behind and pens hymns to land and trees, to rivers, to cities and towns, to trains and night, to time – all manner of general experiential topics having nothing to do with individuals or plot – then I want nothing more than for a friend to interrupt my reading just long enough for me to say, “Wait! Listen to this!” And then I’d begin to read aloud.

The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the pockets of the earth. By night it drinks strange time, dark time. By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time’s dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come. 

 They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And forever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.

In these passages, repetition of words and phrases, so very annoying (and at times disgusting) when a character is described over and over with the same objectifying words and phrase -- these descriptive passages not involving other human beings are poetry, song. Wolfe can go on for pages like this, and when he does I feel the wind in my hair as the horses of the sea carry me across the water, and I ride through the night in the train, peering through the window at passing scenes. Oh, then Thomas Wolfe is glorious!

So there you have it. In the early pages of the book, I was thinking of recommending the novel to others in our Ulysses Reading Circle. I have abandoned that thought. I will, however, finish my own reading Of Time and the River, and I believe it will have been time well spent.

On the other hand, will I re-read it someday or pick up another novel by Thomas Wolfe? Not likely. By the time I get to the last page of this one, I will have been well immunized.