FICTION REVIEWS: 'C'

The Plague, Albert Camus 

The truth is that everyone is bored and devotes himself to cultivating habits. 

           The setting is in French colonial Algeria, the city of Oran specifically. The story is told by a narrator, thus giving the author some distance — and a chance for a disclaimer. Hence, it is this narrator, not the author, who says that he intends to let the reader judge for himself. This is true enough for most of the novel. 

           The writing is heavily atmospheric and yet the Arab and Spanish “quarters” of the city’s population are only described in passing. (There is also a passing — and to my mind gratuitous — reference to an Arab killed on a beach.) Otherwise, insofar as there is a story, it is a description of how the plague operates in the city over time, not only on the population in general, but on a handful of characters.  

           Dr. Rieux, overworked to exhaustion, is an atheist who attends Fr. Paneloux’s sermons. M. Cottard, whose mood improves during the devastation, has a secret. Until the end, we learn most about Cottard in the past tense from Tarrou, a diarist, whose own story also takes a place in disjointed fashion. And I would add that if one is looking for them, there appear symbols or metaphors, not least of which is a performance of Orpheus, attended by the as-yet uninfected members of society and, of course, the metaphor of the plague itself.  

           As for the latter, the “message” — such as it is — is eventually given in two parts. First, as Tarrou is dying he concludes that every man carries plague with him and, without the utmost caution, risks infecting everyone else, leaving all of us bone weary and with death the only escape. “Can one be a saint without God?” he asks. Without answering, Rieux concludes that Tarrou’s steadiness — his “blood” — was “more vital than the soul.”  

           And finally the narrator, who is actually Dr. Rieux, returns to an observation that he periodically leaves amid the many searing scenes of pain, despair, loss, fatigue, and heroism already presented: Most of us really do not change permanently. When the distress is lifted, as a group we return to our normal banal lives and pleasures. 

           So The Plague is not edifying, nor is there any reason it has to be. It is a work of imagination and detail, possibly with a mild note of caution. I can say that I’m glad I read it.  

           Here is a sampling: 

“However bitter their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can truly be said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague they could account themselves privileged. . . . . [T]he egoism of love made them immune to the general distress and, if they thought of the plague, it was only in so far as it might threaten to make their separation eternal. Thus in the very heart of the epidemic they maintained a saving indifference which one was tempted to take for composure. Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side.” 

“It will also give this chronicle its character, which is intended to be that of a narrative made with good feelings — that is to say, feelings that are neither demonstrably bad nor overcharged with emotion in the ugly manner of a stage-play.” 

“The naked, somewhat contorted bodies were slid off into the pit almost side by side, then covered with a layer of quicklime and another of earth, the latter only a few inches deep, so as to leave space for subsequent consignments. On the following day the next of kin were asked to sign the register of burials, which showed the distinction that can be made between men and, for example, dogs; men’s deaths are checked and entered up.” 

“In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and indistinguishable, becoming a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.” 

“[Citizens] adapted themselves to the very conditions of the plague, all the more potent for its mediocrity. None of us was capable any longer of an exalted emotion; all had trite, monotonous feelings. . . . ‘[T]he plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only, but even of friendship. . . . [L]ove asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”  

“[A] loveless world is a dead world and always there comes an hour when one[DH1]  is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

Albert Camus, The Stranger –

The narrator of this novella is M. Meursault a detached and non-committal though observant young man living in French Algeria in the 1930s. He has no personality or ambition. He is about 30 years old and lives close to the ladder’s bottom rung. He is the stranger. The story opens as he dutifully travels from Algiers to the village where his mother has lived. She has died in a home where he had placed her when his ability to support her had been exhausted. He is uncertain of her age and unemotional about her death. Several times in the first pages he feels obliged to report that the timing of her death and the fact that he must take off work for her funeral are not his fault.

When he arrives, he sits at her coffin through the night in company with other residents of the home. They do not speak and are not permitted at the burial the following morning – “to spare their feelings.” Only a man who had become the dead woman’s “special friend,” does appear. He too does not speak to the narrator.

“He wore a soft felt hat with a pudding-basin crown and a very wide brim – he whisked it off the moment the coffin emerged from the doorway – trousers that concertina’d on his shoes, a black tie much too small for his high white double collar. Under a bulbous pimply nose, his lips were trembling. But what caught my attention most was his ears; pendulous, scarlet ears that showed up like blobs of sealing wax on the pallor of his cheeks and were framed in wisps of silky white hair.”

In the meager funeral cortege, the old man limps behind them in the searing heat, arriving late. They do not speak and the old man has a fainting fit.

Back in Algiers, Meursault undergoes several episodes, all without emotion – especially a loveless sexual relationship and the periodic meeting with an old man and his dog (fellow tenants) who mutually hate each other. Presently the dog escapes and the old man is devastated. Another tenant in the apartment house, a pimp named Raymond, asks for advice in handling his faithless Arab girlfriend. Mersault agrees with a shrug.

The devastating emotions felt by the people in these brief events is almost palpable to the reader, who will imagine them. But the narrator does not imagine them. He sees clearly and reports vividly, but does not feel at all.

While on a holiday to the beach, Mersault shoots and kills the girl’s brother who had been stalking them Raymond. The victim is given no individuality whatsoever. He doesn’t even speak. The scene’s interest is its lack of emotion and the day’s rising temperature:

“The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s funeral . . . . And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight. . . . . I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scaring my eyelashes and gouging into my eyeballs. . . . [A] fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift.”

Even in jail, Mersault, who has of course admitted his crime, cannot see (and therefore does not lament) anything beyond what his senses present to him. Here is his face reflected in this dinner cup. Though held at different angles, the cup always showed “the same tense, mournful expression.”

The trial is only concerned with “mitigating circumstances” – as though such a character would even understand the concept. He is convicted and sentenced to death by decapitation. To the reader, the death penalty comes as the only tension in the book, though I don’t think it was intended. A man condemned to die is writing about his experiences. He must have survived, right? Well he apparently does not survive, because the concluding passages of the novel are nothing but the narrator’s bleak “ecstasy and rage” unleashed on a priest who comes to console him. And as the novel concludes, he summarizes:

“None of [the priest’s] certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. . . . I was sure of myself, sure about every-thing. . . . [T]hat certainty was something I could get my teeth into . . . . I’d been right, I was still right, I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it. . . . Nothing, nothing had the least importance . . . . [A] sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me . . . [which] had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses . . . . I laid my heart open to the benign indif-ference of the universe.”

For the French, this passes for philosophy and therefore is presumably guidance as to how we should live.

Willa Cather, My Antonia –

These days there appears to be something of a consensus that Willa Cather was a genuine novelist of the American West, specifically Nebraska, of the late 19th Century. But apart from portraying a strong sense of place, this novel at least is disappointing.

The narrator is an orphaned boy of about 10 who has been obliged to emigrate from his old Virginia home to the Nebraska plains to live with his grandparents at the same time that Eastern European immigrants have come their in their own migration of hardship and optimism. One such family is the Shemerdas, whose 14-year-old daughter supplies the title for the novel. Thus the novel has one notable feature in addition to the local color, by which I mean that the author is a woman telling a story told through the voice of a young man thinking back to his days as a boy. In these benighted days of political correctness, this would be considered gauche by the same philistines who criticized William Styron for having the effrontery to give us the Confessions of Nat Turner when his blood and background were not sufficiently authentic. Lucky for Cather, she lived too soon for such critical punctilios and safely published her novel about 1918.

But as a novel it is not fully realized. The first third of it bids fair to be another Little House on the Prairie until finally there is an unexpected suicide with the suggestion of a murder. This event unlocks some profounder considerations than the bitter hardships of rural life in these times, including an interesting religious conflict between the Catholic Bohemians and the Protestant Americans. Unfortunately, it comes to nothing and we fall back into episodic moments – sometimes little more than anecdotes – from the lives of the narrator and Antonia as they reach maturity. Such incidents are colorful and authentic – sometimes almost poetic, as in the recollection of a blood red sun setting behind a pitch black piece of farm machinery on the horizon – but in the context of this feeble novel they are often pointless and the ultimate feeling I came away with is that this novel is on a par with – but not superior to – Main Traveled Roads (q.v.).

The biggest disappointment is in the characterization. The title seems to suggest that we will enter the life of Antonia, or possibly the narrator who calls her “my” Antonia. But neither character has a personality worthy of our attention. They have no complexities, contradictions, or doubts, they do no evil and dream of little more than contentment which, God be praised, they achieve. My Antonia is an anecdotal history of two people who grew up and knew each other.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! –

This unengaging novel is more of an artifact than a work of literature. It was a novel of quality written about “the west” pretty much before that had been tried by others.

The story surrounds the first European settlers on the Nebraska prairie: Swedes, Bohemians, French, etc. (This is the area where Cather herself grew up and to which she returned after her literary life had begun in New York publishing circles.) The central character, Alexandra Bergson, is the strong daughter of the original Swedish settler in the area. She is stronger by far than the other characters and takes on a rather symbolic role in the novel. The story follows her life as the community grows and prospers. Something of an Earth mother to the others, she has uninvolving (to the reader) dreams about an Earth-father to illustrate the command which this forbidding but fruitful land holds over its inhabitants.

Had the subplot, which concerns the passion of a young college-educated Swedish boy for an unhappily married Bohemian girl, been the central focus, it might have generated comparisons to Tolstoy or Flaubert, but Cather had something else entirely on her mind and for all of the time period covered, the novel seems to end abruptly and, to me, without much call for meditation.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales –

"Another kind of lying is of born of mere delight in lying, for which delight they will fabricate a lylng tale and will adorn it with all circumstances, where all the groundwork of the tale is false."
The Parson’s Tale

Several years ago I found that with some effort I could get a general sense of these Canterbury Tales stories without taking a semester or two of Middle English poetry. Was something lost? No doubt about it. But I will always and only be an amateur reader, after all. And so once having essayed some of the more famous tales in the “original,” I have now more recently read through all The Canterbury Tales in a version using updated spellings (plus a few footnotes for unfamiliar words). This was entirely satisfying, not only because I enjoyed the second effort so much, but also because I could pat myself on the back for having previously made the first.

Characters. The characters in The Canterbury Tales are not refugees from an impending peril, but their stories have much of the mordant satire and parody of contemporary customs found in The Decameron. Of course, the group in The Decameron were acquaintances, and these Canterbury travelers are largely strangers to each other. That gives Chaucer more opportunity to permit some animosities to develop over the journey, adding a certain malicious dimension not found in Boccaccio.

The Canterbury travelers have each come from their own parts of England to an inn in Southwark (which appears to have been a jumping off point), there to seek group travel on a routine pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas a Becket. (I found myself analogizing to 19th century Americans assembling in St. Louis as a prelude to setting out for Oregon.) Each of them is sketched in one way or another before starting his tale, and in many senses these prologues are the most interesting parts.

Several of them are substantial people, many whom we might call middle class for their time. There are monks, a friar, nuns, and a prioress, each of whom could be expected to make such a religious journey. Others (including the Wife of Bath) appear to have a trade that they could possibly ply on the road, and still others (the several court officers, for example) were probably in an enforced idle season. Though there are certainly some laborers (e.g. a cook, a sailor), the travelers are not beggars or peasants.

Many of them have traveled before, and far more widely than a simple trip to south England. The Knight has obviously been a Crusader: he has been to Egypt, Latvia, Russia, Spain, Algeria, etc. The Squire has traveled in Northern Europe. Even the bawdy Wife of Bath has been to Spain and Rome, and three times to Jerusalem. Furthermore, it seems they are not all completely strangers. The Summoner and the Pardoner – “I think,” the Narrator says of the Pardoner, “he was a gelding or a mare” – are riding as companions. Most of them seem to be reliably literate, particularly in the Bible and some in the law. The Physician and the Clerk are very well-read. None of them is an out-and-out rogue (it is a religious pilgrimage, after all).

Layers of Stories. Literature has many wonderful example of plays within plays, stories within stories, etc. Obviously the Canterbury Tales is in this tradition. Indeed, in its distinct and bumptious way, it builds on there being layers of story tellers – re-tellers of the tales of earlier authors. With Conrad, such an effect is hypnotic and faintly disorienting. In the Canterbury Tales, it just seems playful.

In any event, after reading for awhile, I realized that apart from the traveler-speakers themselves, there are three distinct people directing the story. First is Chaucer himself, of course. He keeps himself well in the background, though he cannot help being the English poet[1].

Next is the Narrator. He is probably not Chaucer, because after awhile he actually becomes a minor presence in the plot. (At the end, in fact, he seems to become the Parson, of whom I will have more to say in a moment.) Third, at the beginning we also meet the quondam affable “host” of the adventure, Harry Bailey. It is Harry Bailey who arranges the entire parade at the inn at Southwark. Throughout the journey he acts as master of ceremonies, calling on the various pilgrims when it is their turn to speak and mediating between them when they come to disagreement. Presumably he is under fee.

Dissension. The tension among the travelers which I mentioned above takes awhile to show itself. In part I think this may be because the work was unfinished and subject to reorganization. At the outset, we are led to believe that we will simply be entertained by a series of stories, several of which are indeed told without incident.

But then, when the Prioress has finished speaking early in the work, the host abruptly calls attention to the Narrator himself, as though he had just discovered him in the group, diffident and always looking toward the ground. We see a small, insignificant man (“this were a puppet in an arm’s embrace for any woman”) who needs some self-esteem. The host brings him forward in a kindly way, insisting that he go next.

Having thus been called attention to, the Narrator does not beg off this role, but he does begin apologetically by explaining that he really has no tale of his own to relate and instead commences with a “long rhyme I learned in years agone.” The effort, however – a tale of a knight, Sir Topas – is a failure, at least to the host. As a story, it does not seem to the reader less than what the others have ventured, but Harry Bailey does not see it that way at all. His mood changes abruptly and he cuts the Narrator off, saying that his rhymes are bad. Instead he suggests that the man turn to “the country verse[2], or tell a tale in prose . . . wherein there’s mirth or doctrine good and plain.”

And so he does, but not before first betraying a change in his own mood. The Narrator, that is, is offended in having been hindered in telling the story of Sir Topas, though he also welcomes this second offer. Now, cautioning the listeners that they must be alert because he will tell an old story in a different way, he thereupon begins his prose “Tale of Melibeus.” In fact, it is not a story so much as it is a scholastic recitation of pre-Christian authorities to argue a Christian message. (This foreshadows the closing segment.) A wealthy young man whose wife and daughter have been attacked while he is away from home consults among his neighbors about how to take his revenge. His loving wife, however, counsels forgiveness and passivity, quoting extensively from Seneca and the Hebrew Bible. The presentation is earnestly made, but is no more exciting than a treatise by Peter Abelard. This was a good story, the host allows, but he adds that it would hardly have been the advice of his own turbulent wife.

Pre-Christianity. The Narrator’s use of pre-Christian authorities in the “Tale of Melebius” is not the only occasion of this theme. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer seems to have in mind the contrast between modern times and the classical world. Although this is not explicit and he draws no morals as such, he does seem to find much to admire in antiquity.

The first tale, by the Knight, for example, is all chivalry and classic virtue: the history of the contending princes Arcite and Palamon in the Athens of Theseus. There are several wonderful scenes of pageantry, particularly the stirring arrival of two opposed armies of knights in Athens and later the magnificent funeral of Arcite. It ends with a scene of noble matrimony – and whatever conclusions may be drawn from a tale told during a Christian pilgrimage in which the outcome is effected not only by the gods, but also by the character of the actors.

Similarly, the Monk later retails several short stories of tragedy to illustrate the fickleness of fortune. His telling resembles a short encyclopedia of ancient and Biblical figures for whom the wheel turned, only two of whom (Pedro of Spain and Ugolino of Pisa) lived in Christian times. For his part, the Physician borrows from Titus Livy a story of the virtuous daughter of Virgilius: A corrupt judge contrives to order the girl taken from home and made his ward; rather than submit, the girl consents to have her father kill her and take her head to the judge, the result of which is that the criminal commits suicide.

The Priest’s story is given in the style of Aesop, telling of a clever anthropomorphic rooster. The Manciple’s tale, also reminiscent of Aesop and Ovid, relates the story of Phoebus, an admirable man, who keeps a white crow. The crow one day observes Phoebus’s wife commit adultery with a disreputable man. He reports the deed to the outraged Phoebus who kills the wife but immediately repents, angrily plucking the crow of all its white feathers and eternally condemning all future crows to black. The lesson: gossip true or false must be avoided.

Even the Franklin, whose story is far more contemporary, betrays more than a tincture of paganism. He tells of the knight of Brittany who, obliged to go to England in pursuit of his mission, leaves behind his distraught lady. With many references to astrology and the pre-Christian gods, the story relates the agony of a local and forlorn young man, who has always worshiped the abandoned wife (who is indifferent to him). So now he prays to Apollo for some means to enjoy her and is successful in persuading her to make a dismissive promise that he will succeed only if he should move all rocks from Brittany’s coast. The miracle is accomplished, however, by a wizard under fee to the young man. In the sequel, however, both husband’s and wife’s nobility awakens the equal nobility of the apparently victorious youth – and he relents, as does the wizard of his unpaid fee.

Marriage. As can be seen, many of the tales also provide a view of the man-woman relationship. And although they are often bawdy, they frequently return to observations about the state of marriage, and not always ironically. Perhaps the most prominent among them is the portrayal of the Wife of Bath. I agree with anyone else who has read Canterbury Tales that of all of the characters, she – gap-toothed and deaf in both ears – is the most vivid.

The wife is no youngster, having survived five husbands.

The remedies of love she knew, perchance,
For of that art she’d learned the old, old dance.

But the commentator to one version I read who compares her to Molly Bloom may have got it a bit wrong. True, she is a bawd, but it is also evident that she is well read (at least in the Bible) and shrewd. For example, although she also frankly describes herself as what we would currently call a “gold-digger” – and in her younger days may have been a medieval “trophy bride” – she is impatient and dismissive of cliched descriptions of women. Her time with men was not wasted and her chief story – that of a knight in the time of King Arthur – emphasizes the marital benefits of giving the woman a free hand:

“Jesus to send
Meek husbands and young ones and fresh in bed . . . .
And I pray Jesus to cut short the lives
Of those who’ll not be governed by their wives . . . .”

In a similar vein, the Clerk’s tale purports to be a re-telling of a story by Petrarch. It is presented in stanzas. We are given the tale of Griselda of Italy, a fairy tale of a humble peasant girl unexpectedly selected by a marquis for his bride and whose children he takes from her to test her love. This is cruelty, but all are reunited in the end. So the message is “virtuous patience,” delivered it seems without modern irony – until an epilogue addressed to all wives counsels against such a course.

The Merchant, who speaks next, also plays the marriage theme. He has been married just two months and has not enjoyed from his wife anything approaching the virtue of Griselda. And yet he begins with a realistic and appreciative evaluation of wives which any well-married man would understand.

“They are so true and therewithal so wise
Wherefore, if you will do as do the wise,
Then aye as women counsel be your deed.”

He then turns to his tale, also set in northern Italy, which concerns an older man named January who in his later years determines to take a young wife. The tale, having begun as a general peaen to the virtues of having a wife, January announces his reasons for preferring a young woman to occupy that station – in which he is supported by one of his brothers. His other brother, however, expresses doubt about this decision. (But recalling that the Wife of Bath is no doubt listening, the Narrator says he will skip over the details of this argument.) This second brother’s advice is ignored, and so January weds the young May, causing grief and enmity in January’s also young domestic servant Damian who loves the girl. The two young people thereupon deceive January, but so successfully that he continues in the ignorance that is bliss.

The Lawyers’s story also uses a poem in stanzas with an epic marital theme. He tells of Constance, the Christian daughter of a Roman Emperor, who is unwillingly betrothed to a Muslim prince in Syria, betrayed because of her religion, and set upon the sea, eventually to land in England. There, she is again married to a monarch, again betrayed for her faith, and again set on the sea, this time with her infant son. Fate takes her back to Rome where she is reunited with her father and eventually with her English husband, and remains a credit to Christianity and feminine steadfastness.

Hypocrisy. Although the Canterbury Tales aren’t told by highwaymen and scoundrels, Chaucer does betray a recurring bitterness about deception and the misuse of people’s good will. The Pardoner’s tale, as an example, is one of the most interesting parts of the book because of the hypocritical personality of the Pardoner himself. This traveler is something like modern Hollywood’s stereotype of a Southern rural preacher. When the group clamors for a moral story, he begins by frankly conceding himself a “vicious” man all of whose sermons are drawn from the adage that cupidity is the root of all evil. He is always successful, he confesses, in raising contributions from his listeners. And having now warned the Canterbury travelers, he then sets about that very task, using a cautionary story of a few immature libertines who have thoughtlessly given themselves to taverns, whores, gambling, and praise of the devil before they suffer a just reward. His story is a great success and he closes with his customary appeal for alms. It actually works – before the host, who may be feeling that his business will be sullied – offers to unman him. The Knight then patches things up and they move on.

The Friar’s story, which develops the same theme, also makes use of the uneasy relationship that emerges among some of the travelers. The Friar has developed something of an animosity toward the Pardoner’s companion, the Summoner. A summoner is evidently something like a modern process server (with the added tincture of a private informer) and with the same dubious reputation (“a runner up and down with summonses for fornication”). The Friar’s story is therefore about a summoner who makes his money as a blackmailer. While traveling the country, this summoner happily falls in with one of the same occupation. They talk as colleagues until the second man reveals that he is actually a devil. In short order, he takes the first man straight to hell.

In retaliation, Chaucer’s Summoner immediately responds with his own tale of a friar, pointing out in passing (and with resentment) how a friar’s own needs are daily and comfortably supplied by the less fortunate in return for the friar’s supposed surety of prayer. His description draws strongly on a latent animosity between friars and monks, the latter of whom “swim in rich possession.”

With no introduction by the host, the “Second Nun” then tells the story of St. Cecilia, a martyr of the early Roman Christians. But suddenly, and before her story can be told, the group is caught up by a rider and his yeoman, riding hard and strangely dressed. Only the yeoman speaks, identifying his master as an alchemist (a “slippery” science). His lord, he says, takes people’s gold on the unmet promise that he can double it.

Exposed, the alchemist abruptly flees, leaving the yeoman to tell his story, which turns out to be remarkably sympathetic considering the young man’s relief to be rid of his master. He gives an impressive list of the costly elements that the old man used to perform the operation – all to no avail – which he always did at the encouragement of greedy men. In fact, the litany is so long that we can admire the meticulousness of the alchemist’s efforts and feel a sad pity at the ultimate futility of it all. It is like the later tales of eccentric and impoverished, but always optimistic, prospectors for gold in a barren land.

“ . . . . for had they but a sheet
With which to wrap themselves about at night,
And a coarse cloak to walk in by daylight,
They’d sell them both and spend it on this craft;
They can withhold naught til there’s nothing left.”

Then, however, the servant tells a tale of another “philosopher” – not the master who has fled – giving the details of how he bilks a naive and greedy priest. It is much like any fraud or magic trick. In other words the alchemist sets up his trick in advance – in this case arranging for several silver pellets which he has already secreted to be cast into the water of a crucible during a fire. When the priest sees the “magic” work two or three times and believes he knows how it is done, he pays some serious money for the procedure, promising in advance to keep it secret.

Authenticity. Many of the Canterbury tales are rough and bawdy. Chaucer was a satirist with a wonderful eye for detail. By this I don’t only mean such things as the wart on the miller’s nose. I mean incidental things that give the story’s framework an authenticity as a whole – like the Reeve (I picture Ichabod Crane) who always took up the rear of the troop. Even from the rear, the Reeve has been able to hear to the Miller’s tale, a smutty story set in contemporary England, the butt of which is a carpenter. For some reason this irritates him and he therefore contrives his own short tale, one of revenge taken on a dishonest miller, similar in baseness to the Miller’s tale itself.

The Sailor’s tale of a marital deceit in France is also in questionable taste, and right out of the Decameron. If it has larger significance than just a case of a scoundrel who succeeds in both an embezzlement and a seduction, I missed it. The cuckolded husband, the faithless wife, the treacherous monk – these seem like they must have been stable characters in Medieval life. (In a different way, there is also a depressing tradition contained in the Prioress’s story of the saintly child killed by Jews in an English country town.)

Structure. Finally I want to remark on the way this work was put together. Of course The Canterbury Tales was never completed, and so it is probably best not to make too much of its organization, which appears to have been in flux. As it has come down to us, for example, the work ends as the sun is setting on the first day of the trip. At this point, the Parson, speaking in prose, wraps up the last (and longest) presentation in a lengthy and somewhat tedious sermon. The group has not yet even made it to Canterbury.

By then, several stories have been interrupted or left unfinished and some of them have never even begun. The Prologue, for example, had suggested that we would get stories from the Weaver, the Dyer, an Arras-Maker, a “First” Nun, and a Plowman. But none of them is heard from. The Cook’s tale is no more than a page in length and cut off without conclusion. Most disappointing to me is the incomplete story told by the Knight’s son, the Squire, a “lover and lusty bachelor.” He has begun a magical and complex tale of an exemplary Tartar king confronted by a warrior “upon a steed of brass.” It promises to be something from Sheherazade, but it never gets off the ground – and it permits me to imagine that it would have had all of the dignity and spectacle of the Knight’s tale.

But what I kept coming back to was the closing segment by the Parson. In the Prologue, the Narrator has given the Parson the most respectful description: “rich in holy thought and work,” “patient in adverse times.”

“There is no better priest, I trow.
He has no thirst for pomp or reverence,
But Christ’s own lore, and
His apostles twelve He taught, but first he followed it himselve.”

Furthermore, I think it is significant that even when the Parson speaks, it is in prose. Harry Bailey has already pronounced prose as a fine vehicle for “doctrine good and plain.” And indeed, the Parson’s presentation is all doctrine and not a tale at all.

In the closing narrative, the Parson begins with a strong statement in favor of penitence, strongly reminiscent of the scholastic approach of Thomas Aquinas: argument and logic. Then he gives an earnest and heartfelt sermon in favor of contrition. As he goes on, however, from time to time he becomes something of a scold. He mentions “folk of low degree” – and I imagined a glance at Harry Bailey – “as those that keep and run hostelries” who are wont to “sustain the thievery of their servants.” He also implicitly takes issue with Aristotle, suggesting that bodily health actually contributes to sin.

But as he continues, it becomes more apparent that it is not really the Parson who is speaking, or even the Narrator, but Chaucer himself. I have decided this because the entire final segment – which is an disquisition on each of the deadly sins – completely dispenses with the conceit of a traveler’s story which has formed the entire outline of the preceding work. Instead, it is a self-consciously a written essay, specifically referring to its “paragraphs” and at the end even looking back on itself as a “treatise.”

So my personal feeling is that Cuaucer had written the Parson’s segment – possibly before any of the others – to mine for inspiration for the Canterbury Tales. The tales themselves, written afterwards, were to be exemplars of this summation. Had Chaucer finished The Canterbury Tales, I suspect that the Parson’s (the Narrator’s) segment would have been eliminated.

ENDNOTES

1. Here he is more than a century before Shakespeare, peeking into The Knight’s Tale:

“The busy lark, the herald of the day,
Salutes now in her song the morning grey;
And fiery Phoebus rises up so bright
That all the east is laughing with the light,
And with his streamers dries, among the greves,
The silver droplets hanging on the leaves.”

It’s not Romeo and it’s not Horatio, but it’s wonderful in its own right.

2. I think this may refer to iambic pentameter, which most of the others use. The Narrator’s tale of Sir Topas is in what seems to me a more difficult rhyme scheme: A, A, B, C, C, B.

3. In an aside, this hypocrite gives a vivid description of the debasement of drunkenness:

(“[w]hen man so guzzles of the white and red,/
That of his own throat makes he his privy/. . . .
At either end of you foul is the sound.”)

John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle --

If I recall correctly, Galsworthy wrote in an introduction to The Forsyte Saga that he hoped he had not been presumptuous by applying the word "saga" to his tale of a few generations of Forsytes. Cheever may have had this in mind when he chose "chronicle" for his single volume of the history of the New England Wapshots. (A second volume appeared later, however.)

Anyway, "presumptuous" is not a word I would use to describe this poignant and alienated story of a family's decline. The main characters are Leander Wapshot and his two sons, Moses and Coverly, neither of whom seems to match the Wapshots of the past, but each of whom is struggling a human fight for his own individuality. To me, the saddest scene occurs when Leander, having through mischance publicly wrecked his ferry boat, his livelihood, must endure his wife's turning it into a "gift shoppe," completely oblivious to his humiliation. "I want to be esteemed," he says twice to the hired lady, the only one who even notices.

Cheever is no Hardy, but his notion of "Wapshot" being a corruption of an ancient Norman name does recall the doomed Tess of the D'Urbervilles. It's hard for me to describe what keeps The Wapshot Chronicle from being a special novel to cherish. The premise of the little home town being the source of the family's love is not offensive and there is certainly enough humor (e.g. the maiden aunt in the closet at the time that Moses seduces a visitor is quick but hilarious). Maybe it's because Cheever is better with scenes than anything else. Or maybe the lack of a single protagonist prevents the reader from being anything but an audience. It occurs to me that the latter is one of the chief problems of the first-rate Twentieth Century novels. The best of them are experimental and innovative, but often detached in some way. They are frequently more a way of looking at the story than participating in it.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness --

Heart of Darkness is a study on the inadequacy of communication and on the horrid darkness and silence to which we are annealed by words. It is also suggestively about faith which supervenes both.

The story begins at evening on the deck of a cruising yawl anchored in the Thames. There is a feeling of enervation among the four on deck who appear to have had a reunion, at least in that they all share “the bond of the sea.” The sky grows increasingly dark until it appears that the sun has been “stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” Three of those on deck are emissaries of what is the modern world: the ostensible narrator, the Director of Companies, and a lawyer. The fourth, as always, is Marlow. The mood is desultory. As the narrator reflects to himself how the placid river evokes “the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames,” Marlow, seated in a posture which makes him look like “an idol,” suddenly speaks in quite a different vein, but as though he were picking up the conversation that had not actually begun aloud: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

He imagines a Roman soldier, a civilized young man with a future, posted to Britannia in its savage state.

“‘Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also destestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

As a boy, Marlow says, he had dreamed of the blank places on the map. Now they have begun to be filed in. (The story is set in the 1890s.) And what was once white space of mystery – he means the Congo, though it is never specifically identified in the book – was now a place of darkness with only a river drawn in, looking like a snake. And Marlow, wanderer of the seven seas, once contrived to get himself appointed skipper of a freshwater steamboat bringing ivory down the river from the remotest regions. Heart of Darkness is his telling of that tale, and it should not be lost sight of that he tells it literally out of the darkness that has enveloped the ship where his audience sits.

He begins with an unsettling glimpse of his job interview (in the “sepulcral city”) at the European offices of the company where two silent women are knitting black wool, wisely but indifferently glancing at the young job applicants who obviously never return. He tells of his listless journey along the edge of Africa to his post.

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.”

They pass a French man-o-war incomprehensibly firing shells “into a continent” because a camp of native enemies is rumored to be in the jungle. At his desolate dropping off point, Marlow encounters native “criminals” in a chain gang, “and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.” There is no law here. Marlow has decided that he is less going to the center of a continent than to the center of the world.

This is the principal theme of the novel: there are brutal, irrational, unspeakable things at the center. They are not even evil, they are beyond evil. If it is said to be nature, it bears no resemblance to anything Rousseau imagined. This is not paradise; but it is where we came from and where we are at risk of returning. In a grove Marlow discovers other natives, not criminals or slaves, who had been brought to this place as workers. They are dying of sickness. A white man appears, the company’s chief accountant, dressed as though he were at work back in Europe. He has been here three years and has taught a reluctant native woman how to launder his linen. (“This man had truly accomplished something.”)

After hiking up the river for days with an unruly native party, Marlow comes to the village where his steamer is located. The boat has sunk and he must deal with the station manager. In the man’s room, where they have an awkward conversation, Marlow sees a somber sketch of a woman “draped and blindfolded, and carrying a lighted torch.” It had been done by Mr. Kurtz, the remarkable Chief of the Inner Station much farther up river. The man describes Kurtz in almost supernatural terms: “He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil [sic] knows what else.” More surprisingly, the man sees Marlow as Kurtz’s co-adjutor. “You are of the new gang – the gang of virtue.”

And if I haven’t made it clear enough already, it is always worthwhile to remark on Conrad’s hypnotic delivery. Here he makes his intentions explicit through Marlow’s words (though the very idea of having a narrator within another narrator’s story is clue enough). At this time, he says, Kurtz

“was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that co-mingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, the notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams . . . .”

And irrationality. The farther up the river one went, the less sense things made. Marlow certainly hadn’t yet left aside his practicality. He could easily float the boat if he had had rivets, of which there had been tons at the drop-off station down the river. Even Kurtz would see the utility of bringing them up river to float the boat. And yet all that was ever delivered were senseless geegaws to trade for ivory.

Part I of the story ends with the arrival of a “secret” expedition of buccaneers, intent on little more than theft. Marlow is contemptuous of them, and in his description of what is missing (as well as present) in them, can be intimated what will be found in Kurtz: their discourse “was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.” This cannot be said of Kurtz. He will have all of these qualities.

Part II takes us a step deeper, as Marlow continues to move up the river, feeling as though he is treading on a

prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance[1], to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.

(This is exactly what we will see has become of Kurtz.) Marlow says that he has now been compelled to put aside all memories, which is another step in his putting aside of civilization. Presently the little steamer comes to a clearing where, pinned to a pile of fuel, is a note saying, first, that it is to be used in the voyage further up the river, and second that it would be dangerous to travel on. Night falls with a “frenzied” silence. Toward dawn there are unworldly, mournful shrieks in the jungle and the light morning reveals them to be surrounded by a fog, the edges of the boat itself obscured as though it were dissolving, just two feet of misty water on either side.

“The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.”

They inch up the river and suddenly (and silently, of course) are showered with arrows. Naturally It is an emergency, but Marlow again also senses something mournful and reluctant in the crisis. It was not an attack, he says. Instead, he feels it as an attempt at a “repulse,” not even defensive but “undertaken under the stress of desperation.” It occurs to Marlow that this must mean that Kurtz’s station is also under attack and that Kurtz himself must be dead and that Marlow will never be able to talk to him. Suddenly he realizes that talking to Kurtz had been his objective.

“The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
”
I first read this passage as referring to Kurtz. But we haven’t yet met Kurtz. And now on re-reading I see that the sentence has as its main object, not Kurtz, but “the gift of expression.” Kurtz is said to have the gift, of course, but obviously the gift is also Marlow’s – and by derivation, Conrad’s. And as with my footnote just above, I ask Who has made this gift? Furthermore, it then became clear to me that for Conrad, silence, as much as darkness, was a feature of where they were and what was to be comprehended. Civilization is light and explanation. Darkness is terrifying; silence is the same. When light and discourse are gone, “you must fall back on your innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.” Kurtz, we finally, learn, did not have that capacity.

I should also say that our meeting with Kurtz is not the dramatic moment we have been led to expect. In fact, our first actual exposure to him comes almost immediately after this last passage, when we are suddenly at Kurtz’s post and Marlow describes him almost in passing and in the past tense as having pointed with pride to his piles of ivory and other possessions. And we are told that, quite contrary to what Marlow had supposed, the people who surround Kurtz don’t want him to go.

We move into Part III in which Marlow’s guide becomes the young Russian (Conrad?) who had accidently left behind an ancient book on the sailor’s art at the last post. His inarticulate praise of Kurtz perversely reveals an obsessively venal man – by now we have begun to suspect this – so much so that Marlow says, “Why! he’s mad.” And Marlow trains his glass on Kurtz’s ruined house to discover that the knobs on the fence posts are actually human heads. (We have already been told that Kurtz’s own head is bald like the ivory that he covets.) Still we have yet to meet Kurtz, and yet he is already dethroned. His “methods” have “ruined the district.” He lacked “restraint.” He was “hollow at the core.”

And then he suddenly appears – albeit still at a distance – borne on a stretcher by a group of men who appear “as though they had come from the ground.” This wraith-like Kurtz is not ridiculous, but not what we had expected either. He looks down his stretcher at the newly-opened letters that have been brought up to him on the steamer and this man who is said to talk so wondrously can be heard to say, prosaically, “I am glad.” In the distance moves “a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.” She is magnificent and savage and silent.

“Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out of the earth . . . .” (Emphasis mine.)

(Like a photographic negative, this picture is exactly mirrored at the end of the story in a gesture by Kurtz’s “intended” who, however, in a darkening room stands out as “smooth and white, . . . illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.”)

At this moment we hear Kurtz’s voice from behind a curtain, arguing -- imperiously but defensively -- about nothing more than ivory with the officious manager who has accompanied Marlow on the mission to Kurtz. The manager emerges and dissembles a sadness about Kurtz’s illness and an unfeeling apology about his superior’s deplorable “methods.” And when Marlow inexplicably comes to the defense, the manager turns his back on him, making clear that Marlow and Kurtz have been linked again, but this time not as members of the “gang of virtue.” Now it is Marlow who is “unsound.” “Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.”

For the balance of the book I would struggle with the meaning of this passage. In part I found it when Marlow later finds himself going from an instant of “sheer, blank fright, pure abstract terror” to “the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger” which actually pacified him. I think it is also to be understood in reference to Kurtz’s manuscript which Marlow has found, his closely written report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow says it is “eloquent, vibrating with eloquence.” Its opening sentence begins with the argument that

“we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity’ . . . . The peroration . . . gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence.”

And then scrawled at the foot of the last page, “Exterminate all the brutes!”

So when the people of the interior do rebel and Marlow in his escape comes across Kurtz who is doing the same (“on all fours”!), the terror of his position was that he then had to deal with a being “to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low.” Marlow expressly makes his choice: “I did not betray Mr. Kurtz – it was ordered that I should never betray him – it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

So what to make of Kurtz -- and by derivation Marlow and Conrad? This is a difficult problem to untangle because Marlow, whom we trust so much for the details of the story, and who is undoubtedly one of literature’s most observant and well-spoken characters, tells us in his words what we need to know but at the same time he also does not appear really to understand what Conrad understands. Thus to Marlow Kurtz’s final words, “The horror!” represent a triumph:

“It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond . . . . ”

But I do not think the conclusion is the same for Conrad. In fact a few pages later he has Marlow acknowledge that it was actually “a moment of triumph for the wilderness.” He agrees that Kurtz is a cosmopolitan man, but without God. And because he is “hollow” inside, and because his eloquence and civilization were not enough in the way of defense, the wilderness has awakened in Kurtz “forgotten and brutal instincts” and “the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.” His transient virtues were simply swallowed in the silence. His soul “knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear” and so although he struggled for the upper hand to the end,

“[t]he wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now – images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression.”

And so I end with the words chosen by T.S. Eliot to commence his own reflection on “hollow” men: “Mista Kurtz – he dead.”

Endnotes

1. The “first of men” do not inherit from other men, of course.

Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative --

Although this effort is more short story than it is novel, it is every bit as wonderful as everything else Conrad wrote. As usual, it is a narration within a narration, the interior narrator being Marlow, reflecting this time on his own youth. Specifically, he recalls his first "command" as a second mate, piloting a lifeboat to safety after his bark the Judea sinks at sea with a burning cargo of coal. No conflict is resolved, really, but the story is symmetrical in its Conradian way. The real captain is an older man on his first command, doggedly persisting in his mission through the very end of the disaster and beyond. The young Marlow is counterpoint. But there is also another old man: the older Marlow who is spinning this tale at, we assume, about the same age as the original captain.

Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether --

Twice as long as Youth, this novella tells of the end of the life of an aging sea captain. His wonderful and independent career -- as ship owner as well as captain -- having ended in a comfortable retirement, Whalley's grown daughter is suddenly faced with bankruptcy and he must return to work. For the first time in decades he must work for another, an unappealing ship's engineer who has purchased a vessel with his winnings from a lottery. Although Whalley retains his rights as captain, he is otherwise a junior partner in the enterprise.

A genuine concern for what is going to happen keeps the plot of interest through the end, but it is always Conrad's mesmerizing language that holds my special attention. On top of his central metaphors and suggested analogies, Conrad's similes come more plentifully and effortlessly than any other writer I know of. And the environment is always a silent witness to his stories. In a grand sense, Conrad is as three-dimensional a writer as there ever was. Perhaps this came from spending so much of his life at sea where the horizon is distant and circular, the sky is deep, and the ocean a personality, and all of them must be scrutinized carefully for subtle changes that portend the future. Whatever the reason, inanimate things are forever standing guard over Conrad's stories, commenting in impenetrable and subtle ways.


James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans --

Cooper was certainly the first American novelist of any consequence. (Irving was a man of letters, but not a novelist.) His use of the local scenery, history, and personality types is also attractive. But then comes the style, particularly the dialogue. If people in the 18th and 19th Centuries (even the Indians) actually spoke the way Cooper makes them speak, then we might even welcome the grotesqueries of the "information age." This also presents another formidable problem for our time: while The Last of the Mohicans should be a boys' book, it is nearly impenetrable for a modern 13-year-old.







Steven Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, --

Justice Fleming once told me that he had read this novel with high hopes because it had been described to him as the best and most realistic tale of a soldier's life. But Mack is an infantry veteran, and he came away sorely disappointed with the book. Happily, that story tells more about Mack as a reader than Crane as a writer. On the other hand, my own feelings about the novel have little to do with the reality of its depiction of combat or of a soldier's life. Crane obviously was writing on a different level, though I do not pretend to have understood it. The protagonist is a "youth" named Henry Fleming whose spiritual evolution the novel reveals, often symbolically. In the course of the book (which only covers a day or two) he encounters three soldiers, the first a dead man in a forest "cathedral," the second Jim Conklin, a Christ figure who essentially dies in Henry's arms, and the third, "the tattered man," whose rejected attentions bring Henry through the battle. The battle, incidentally, is apparently Chambersburg (or maybe Wilderness), given a fleeting reference to "the plank road."