I'm back with some Calvino

The Nonexistent Knight (1959)

And

The Cloven Viscount (1952)

By Italo Calvino (1923-1985)

Finally, I finished a book that’s on my list. Now I know why this list built up on my shelf in the first place. Writers keep writing and publishers keep publishing and some books on my shelf just don’t hold my interest. (Sorry, Don Quixote, but once your story deviates from you as the central figure, it tires me.) After many sidetracks, I managed to pick a book of the shelf that’s on the list, and I stuck with it.

I’ve read Calvino before, first If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (which a friend recommended and I liked so-so, but enough to try another), then Invisible Cities (which I loved far more).

These are two novellas (I’d call them) collected in one volume. The Nonexistent Knight features a crusading armor powered solely by the will that lives within it and the people affected by this will. Fun story.

Favorite quote (because I an relate to it and because it’s good):

One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and all life is outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out another world, leap the gap. Maybe it’s better so. Maybe the time when one wrote with delight was neither a miracle nor grace but a sin, of idolatry, of pride.

The Cloven Viscount (does not rhyme with “discount” but you knew that) treats a character split in half by cannon fire, one half turning excessively bad, the other (initially thought lost, sorry to spoil a bit of it as much as the back cover spoils it) excessively good.

Neither story was as light as I had hoped, but both are inventive and playfully thought-provoking, so I consider them both winners.

Still, if you’ve never read Calvino, I’d recommend you start with Invisible Cities.

Ladies, Please

Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985)

Florence King

What a crazy confluence of influences on this Southern Lady. Between getting molded by her grandmother and hardened by her mother and coaxed along by her dad and floundering among various sexual adventures, Florence King presents an entertaining read.

I had started it before and couldn't get into it the first time because I was looking for a different kind of humor. Not in a degree of funniness or observational power, both of which are present here, but in the presentation. Many of the scenes seem to be a set-up for someone's witty remark at the end as a stinger. Once I'd resigned myself to that, it moved along nicely and turned out to be a fun read.

Here's the first and last sentences of the prologue (which don't giving away too much and yet give away everything).

There are ladies everywhere, but they enjoy generic recognition only in the South. [...] No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street.

Hank Cinq

King Henry the Fifth

by William Shakespeare (1599)

What fun. Between the chorus setting the scenes and Henry whipping his outnumbered army into a frenzy, the play is chock-full of memorable lines, stirring words, emotional nutrients and moral fiber.

As I'm putting this down here, I realize there's a bit of a correlation between the chorus constantly apologizing for having inadequate materials on stage and begging the audience to "piece out our imperfections with your thoughts" and Henry asking his outnumbered army to go "once more into the breach, dear friends, once more."

Also, because it's a(n) historical play, the outcome (I'm guessing) was known to the audience, so the play is really all about the spectacle, and it doesn't fall short.

Thumbs up.

As I Like It

William Shakespeare

As You Like It (1599)

It turns out, not so much.

I guess I'm just not much of a fan of the fantasy world of Arden, and the plot device of romantic partners masquerading as someone else and testing or proving a love. Or, in this case, the Yentl move of cross-dressing and wooing nevertheless.

I also remember not liking A Midsummer Night's Dream that much. But, hey, I still read 'em.

I'd love to get behind some of the stuff and it's probably fun to perform. (The Kenneth Branagh movie, though. Hm.)

Anyway, on a positive note, I'll leave with this, by Celia:

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!

(Dang, that man could write!)

Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens

In the Book Club Of My Mind, I often play the game of whom I might cast in which role if I were to make a movie of the book I’m reading.* In this case I’m not even sure who’d get top billing, so I checked out imdb and noticed that Sydney Carton seems to get it almost unanimously, save for the odd exception of Dr. Manette.

Obviously a movie has to emphasize individuals and personal relationships.

The novel, however, seems to emphasize the force of History (to be grand) or the Mob (to be bitter) and every character is in relationship to it, as are the two titular cities.

For those of you who have read it, I’ll just remind you of the names. Dr. Manette, Mr. Lorry, Lucie Manette, Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay (Evremonde), Mr. Cruncher, the Defarges, Miss Pross, Stryver, and other more minor characters. Right? None of them carry the action, per se.

Great book, great final scene. Of course much depends on strange coincidences, but who isn’t willing to accept some of these in exchange for the fine writing.

(That said, Dickens isn’t the best subway reading, so I’ve had to spend quite a few end-of-chapter moments standing on the platform after getting off the train just to make sure I got the gist of the chapter I was on.)

My favorite melancholic line is by Mr. Jarvis Lorry, talking about his youth, “when […] my faults were not confirmed in me.”

The quote in context:

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a few moments, said:

“I should like to ask you: -- Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very long ago?”

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry [who admitted to being 78 years old] answered:

“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

* For what it’s worth, my usually jokey suggestion of Keanu Reeves in the main role is not too bad here, since the character needs some otherworldly distance. And that actress who plays Lizzy’s older sister in the newer Pride and Prejudice (I looked it up: Rosamund Pike) would be a good Lucie. Dr. Manette? Peter O’Toole. And my dear Mr. Lorry, not sure yet. Oh: Ed Asner.

No Humbug

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens (1843)

I’m guessing you all know the story and have probably seen it in various adaptations but might not have read it yet. I hadn’t either; good thing we have this list.

Every time I read Dickens, I regret that I don’t have more time to read him more, and I feel bad whenever my attention drifts because, as far as I can tell, all of his passages are rewarding if you only pay attention.

The guy just seems to love to churn our words, but more than merely churn, he makes them bubble and froth. This is from the last part of A Christmas Carol:

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious!

Recently, my kids and I saw the new animated film version of this story. Though I think that Scrooge was miscast and that the Ghosts ought to have been played/voiced by different people, I was impressed by how creepy the movie was and how much it honored the ghost story as a scary visitation from the beyond and not just as a means for time travel. Thinking about the Present (as a gift as well as a point in time) in its relation to the other times is, after all, the point:

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!

Wilde and Crazy Guy

Oscar Wilde

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

De Profundis (1897)

If I were overly harsh, I'd say that the true crime Oscar Wilde was guilty of wasn't "somdomizing" (as his accuser, the Marquess of Queensberry wrote) a young man (the Marquess' son, Lord Alfred Douglas), but that he couldn't self-edit in gaol ("jail" to us - and Reading is pronounced "redding," but you knew that).

In other words, these two works are a bit unfocused and meandering. It appears that Wilde meant to edit De Profundis for publication, but the ballad is as it stands, a bit odd in its relation of form to content. The ballad is a ballad without real plot - which is, I guess, what prison life was for Wilde. The plot was an internal one of self-forgiveness and learning the redemptive power of tears.

De Profundis puts it better, but it takes a long time to get to the wonderful passages about Sorrow:

Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow.

Pleasure for the beautiful body, but Pain for the beautiful Soul.

and the analysis of Christ as artist:

He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation.

[...] Christ is the most supreme of Individualists. [...] one only realises one's soul by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all external possessions be they good or evil.

But all this is wrapped in long diatribes on the sins of the addressee of the eighty-plus-tightly-written-page letter, Lord Alfred Douglas. All I can say after having read about all of this kid's selfish and nasty behaviour is, Dang, he must have been really hot.

(To sum up: I'm glad I read them, but I only recommend the middle part of De Profundis. You're better off with the Happy Prince stories, the plays, or The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I will probably reread soon even though it's not on my list, making me fall even further behind.)

Babbittry Explored

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

I have the feeling Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair have the Schubert/Schumann problem: similar names, similar job, similar times. Knowing what little I do about Upton Sinclair, I’d say he’s the Schumann because what I’ve heard about him makes him sound like a bit more of a heavy hitter (Schumann couldn’t orchestrate lightly if they held a blunderbuss to his frontal lobe) than the bantamweight Sinclair Lewis.

Lewis darts and flies around and delivers deft stings with his adjectives and adverbs. Hardly ever have I seen them so smartly chosen.

Babbitt “made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”

That “nimble” is great, especially because Babbitt “was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless on the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic;…”

I LOVE that he is “extremely married.” And the little bit of story that finally emerges centers on this married-ness.

It takes a while for the story to emerge since the novel is largely a portrait of this upper-middle-class Republican in an industrial several-hundred-thousand inhabitant city named Zenith.

The benefit is that you could excerpt any chapter of the novel and read it as a vignette and you’d be just fine. The downside is that, once you set down the book mid-read, you don’t always have a great incentive to pick it up again. Especially since one of the points is that this kind of character isn’t really likeable.

Still, you get highly enjoyable chapters of (the chapter titles are mine): Babbitt at the Office; Babbitt and his Car; Babbitt at the Club; Babbitt Holds a Dinner Party; Babbitt Gets Away for an Extended Vacation; Babbitt on the Train; etc. And the chapters are all fun in their own way.

Let’s see if I can’t find some more fun adjectives. Ah:

Fricasseed chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream

Signed it, in his correct flowing business-college hand,

Vaguely frightened

Notorious freelance preacher

All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to know,

Mrs. McKelvey was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and honest.

There. I’m done.

Two plays

Since they're plays, they're quick to get through, which is why I've put so many on my list. Like for many of you, other reading keeps butting into my list reading.

But there you go, two more down.

Kasimir und Karoline, by Oedoen von Horvath (1932) and

The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1777).

Both are on my list because I've read other works by the same authors.

Horvath gets assigned in high school in Germany, the novel Jugend ohne Gott. He seems to have made his living as a playwright, though, so I chose the one that includes my dad's middle name in the title - as good a reason as any, I think.

I picked up Sheridan to read The Rivals, which is where Madam Malaprop - the namesake of malapropisms - makes her appearance. I liked it, so I figured I'd read another.

I like Horvath's novels more, but, then again, I didn't see this staged, and I definitely didn't see it staged in Germany in 1932, which may have changed my interest. - It included a joke about women always going to the bathroom together, though. Now I wonder when this observation was first made in print. Maybe it's already on the walls of Lasceaux.

Sheridan is full of cutesy witticisms, so it's fun to leaf through.

My favorite line is by Lady Teazle to her husband, early in the play:

Authority! No, to be sure: if you wanted authority over me, you sould have adopted me and not married me. I am sure you were old enough.

Zing!

A Big One Taken Down

I finally knocked another book off my list: An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor, Bennett Cerf, ed. (1954).

How did a book like this come to be a “gap” in my reading? Two things: first, I’ve read Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor and E.B. and Katharine White’s Subtreasury of American Humor, both of which have turned me on to writers I hadn’t heard of (or simply ignored) before; second, it was among the books my mom took home from her parent’s house after they died, so I thought it might give some insight into my Grandpa (though, in retrospect, it didn’t look well-read). So, when I saw a copy of the book in a used-book store, I picked it up and never read it and finally put it on the “gaps” list to get around to it.

Nearly 700 pages later, I’m not sure it was a worthwhile gap. Maybe if I hadn’t read the other anthologies first, but as it is, Roy Blount’s anthology made me question Cerf’s chapter on “The South” (the book is subdivided first into regions and then into genres) and the Whites’ anthology had already introduced me to the better writers in the collection.

Benchley, Twain, and Perelman are still the cream of the crop for written humor pieces as far as I’m concerned. I love Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is excerpted here (as it was in the Whites’ book). The nicest surprise was an excerpt from Donald Moffat’s A Villa in Brittany (which I’ve already ordered from ABE books), mostly because of the way he translates the French to English. For example, when a car is about to get a ticket:

What is it that it has, Mr. the Agent? She is to me, the carriage.

Still makes me snicker.

And, for good measure, some Benchley:

People lie in bed and send out to the wine-shops for the native drink, which is known as wheero. All that is necessary to do with this drink is to place it in an open saucer on the window sill and inhale deeply from across the room. In about eight seconds the top of the inhaler’s head rises slowly and in a dignified manner until it reaches the ceiling where it floats, bumping gently up and down. The teeth then drop out and arrange themselves on the floor to spell “Portage High School, 1930,” the eyes roll upward and backward, and a strange odor of burning rubber fills the room. This is followed by an unaccountable feeling of intense lassitude.

Another one down

BUtterfield 8, John O’Hara (1935)

I feel about John O’Hara the way I feel abut Joan Didion. Every little bit of writing is exemplary. As in, if you want to write in a way that lets the reader’s intelligence work in your favor while offering honest and biting observations, you’d do well to emulate them. But on the whole, the aftertaste is a tad bitter.

Still, a very worthwhile gap-filler because the writing is very good and makes you feel smart for having caught on to the subtle insights, making you think they’re your own.

The “biographical note” to my edition quotes Lionel Trilling:

The work of no other writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.

I concur, though I can’t verify the “work of no other writer” bit.

I cite the “biographical note” (not the more entertaining “introduction” by Fran Lebowitz) because I feel it’s missing a potentially interesting tidbit, namely the news story that inspired the novel.* Meaning I’m too lazy to hunt it down my self but not too lazy to read it in the notes to a book I already have on hand.

Oh, well. With the Trilling quote on hand, here’s a quote from the book, picked more or less randomly (i.e., making sure the random element doesn’t give away any important details):

“You mean he’s peculiar?”

“Huh. Peculiar. Listen, darling, do you know why I like you? I do like you. Do you know why? You’re just a plain ordinary everyday man. You think you’re something pretty hot and sophisticated because you’re unfaithful to your wife. Well, I could tell you things about this rotten God damn dirty town that – ugh. I know a man that was almost elected— Well, I guess I better shut up. I know too much for my age. But I like you, Liggett, because you want me the way I want to be wanted, and not with fancy variations. Let’s get out of here, it’s too damn effete.”

Fwiw, the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor is quite good, though tamer than the book.

*If there are any college professors on hand, I’d recommend a syllabus of books inspired by news stories atop of which list would be Lord Jim, I think. – Feel free to add your trivia knowledge in the comments.

To the barricades, or at least away from war

Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder

(Mother Courage and Her Children)

First performed in Zurich in 1939 for an audience of pacifist and anti-fascist German expatriates, the play is a praise song of sending children to their deaths.
Of course not.
What do you expect from Brecht?
The setting is the 30-Year war (17th Century, Europeans killing each other in order to decide which cut of clerical dress represents a more direct line to God).
The characters are not one-, but two-dimensional. The mother (I first heard of Niobe in this context: look her up and impress your friends!) is also a war-profiteering capitalist; the cook is also a womanizer; the preacher is also a coward; the grown children she loses have less depth: Strong, Honest, and Innocent.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Brecht. And slogans like

Peace is sloppy, only war creates order.

Or

Wherever there are great virtues, it only proves that something is rotten.

Always find a willing audience in me.
There was also a bit where the preacher said that Jesus first multiplied the loaves and the wine and then taught brotherly love because it’s easier to love your neighbor on a full stomach. All classic Brechtian ideas.
A worthwhile read, but it doesn’t oust the Three-Penny Opera as my favorite.

Glengarry Glen Ross Review

Ya gotta love reading plays.
I just need to make a note to myself not to expect quite so much from the dialogue in a novel. (Ah, what the hell, let’s just say many novels fall short in the dialogue department.)
For example:

A: You haven’t talked to him.
M: No. What do you mean? Have I talked to him
about this? (Pause.)
A: Yes. I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just…
M: No, we’re just…
A: We’re just “talking” about it.
M: We’re just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea.
A: As an idea.
M: Yes.
A: We’re not actually talking about it.
M: No.
A: Talking about it as a…
M. No.

But of course they are talking about it as more than an idea. (What “it” is you’ll just have to find out by reading – or watching.)
Because of course we’re never just talking about what our words denote.
The play was first performed in 1983, so the parallels to our time seem worth pointing out: it deals with desperate real-estate salesmen at a point when the market is drying up.
At first I thought it was an updated “Death of a Salesman,” but it turned out to be more fun than just that. The first act is made up of three scenes that get interwoven nicely in the second act (which is one scene).
I’ll leave you with this:

And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear.

In true irony, this turns out to be a sales pitch. Good stuff.

Lucky Jim, Lucky Reader

I’ve seen this book on several lists, so I won’t say too much yet and see if there might be some discussion later.
My favorite moment is probably a little throwaway line:

[…] an unlit building with a painted sign, faintly visible, reading Car’s for hire – Batesons – Repair’s.

It might get missed because it goes without comment, but in today’s blogoriffic world, the misplaced apostrophes would probably appear accompanied by several LOL’s.
Back to the book. A fun read. Anyone who has a chance to sit back take a little time with it over a few evenings is a lucky reader, indeed. Jacket copies invariably include comparisons to Wodehouse. But Amis’s plot and characters matter a bit more than Wodehouse’s, so the book seems a slow starter, in order to accommodate a certain build-up.
As a former grad student, the college setting makes sense, as does this bit about an article Dixon (the titular fortunate James) wrote:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.

I’m looking forward to tossing out some questions to others who have read it. Or, to be more honest in the vein that Amis seems to call for: I’m looking forward to attempt to impress you with the groped-at meanings I’ve forced on a work that primarily aims at entertainment.

Cheer Up, Phil (a review)

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

The proof of hope lies in disappointment.
That’s the most positive spin I can give these poems. Don’t get me wrong; they’re great. But don’t look to Larkin for uplift. Look to him for honesty, insight, and formal play. The formal play makes it hard for me to give you representative lines since the lines are, after all, connected by rhyme, punctuation, and placement. I'll see what I can do, though.

[Here’s my story of getting to Larkin. It seems that a year ago every pseudo-intellectual started misquoting Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” because McEwan’s Chesil Beach is about a kind of sexual awakening at the referred-to time. “Blah, blah sexual intercourse began blah blah 1963 blah blah Chatterley ban blah blah Beatles LP.” I meant to look up the actual poem but didn’t get around to it. Then I started reading Kingsley Amis and picked up Lucky Jim and huh, looky here, it’s dedicated to Larkin. Then I noticed that all of Larkin’s poems fit on less than 200 pages and there we are.]

As a reader of his work, I hit my stride in Larkin's mid-thirties – I’m not bold enough to say that it’s when he hit his stride as a writer – with The Less Deceived. A "random" sampling of titles will give you a flavor of his subjects. Poems include: Next, Please; Going; Wants; Maiden Name; Born Yesterday; Whatever Happened?; No Road -- you get the drift.

Here’s a bit of “Maiden Name”:

…
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
…

Or, how about only the rhyme words of “Maiden Name”:

Disused; face; grace; confused; cannot be; beauty; used;;
No one; scattered through; prize or two; ribbon; wholly; slowly; gone;;
Then; young; among; again; faithfulness; meaning less; laden.

Great stuff.
If you don’t care for a whole book of poems, I highly recommend “Church Going,” “High Windows,” and “The Trees” (“Their greenness is a kind of grief.”)

[Depending on my speed on bigger novels, I reserve the right to count this reading as four books, since The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows each originally appeared as a separate volume. And now I’m off to start Lucky Jim.]

Liver Exercises and Willie Voltaire

In the spirit of sharing, here are two of my favorite little moments in The Great Gatsby.
The oddest line for the contemporary reader is probably

-- intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. (91)

But Chapter IV, in which he describes the Long Island crowd, is filled with great nuggets as well. For example:

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew in Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all. (61-2)

Great Gatsby

Did you remember that Tom and Daisy had a kid?
Pammy is her name. She’s three.
It’s odd, the things you notice when you reread a classic. I’m now convinced that the only reason the book is assigned to high school kids is its length. For example,

A) If I didn’t have kids of my own, I don’t think I’d have noticed the kid, since the Buchanans don’t seem to, either. I would have noticed Tom breaking his mistress’s nose for mentioning his wife, though. It, too, came as a surprise to me on the reread (am I really such an inattentive first-time reader?).

B) If I hadn’t moved to New York after living in Chicago and Minneapolis, some of the West vs. East would have been greeted with a “whatever.” Makes sense now, though.

C) If I hadn’t passed my thirtieth birthday a while ago, I would have rolled my eyes at this observation:

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” (177)

Which is part of this theme:

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (59)
…
“You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. (154)

Put Gatsby on your list of 100 books to read five years from now. It’ll be worth it (again). I’m sure I’ll be picking up recommendations from all of you, too.