Short stories are a difficult form and leave little room for error. In the American idiom, the best which I have read were written by Hemingway and Faulkner in the early 20th Century. But the stories of the 19th Century also had their merits.
In the 1890s, Hamilin Garland, whose field this also was, devoted his efforts to portraying American rural life in the upper midwest, chiefly Wisconsin, “telling about . . . their queer ways, so quaint and good.” At that time, something like 90% of American laborers were agricultural workers. These short stories are about them. None of the stories is a masterpiece of literature, but it must be said that they are all authentic and heartfelt. Garland knows this territory, where men were obliged to work incessantly, unremittingly, in the most demanding physical way from before dawn until well beyond sundown, not only in the beastly heat but also the bitter cold and snow, just to keep body and soul together to put food on the table for their families.
Mostly his characters are renters or on mortgages that can never be paid. They live far from town and often as not must walk even to see their neighbors. Their lives are a hopeless cycle, punctuated only infrequently by the age-old relief of courtship and neighborliness. And not to miss the point, these stories not only dwell on the men, beaten down by economic forces they don’t understand (truth be told, I’m not certain that Garland himself understands them), but their wives who work as hard and as long as they do, and only to stay no more than even. In a sharp but kind story called “A Day’s Pleasure,” a wife accompanies her husband to town just for some relief from the drudgery and is left to her own devices as soon as he arrives and turns to his work. The day passes interminably as she is left to her own devices, going from small store to small store, sitting to relieve her weariness, with no one to talk to and nothing to say.
“The grocer was familiar with these bedraggled and weary wives. He was accustomed to see them sit for hours in his big wooden chair, and nurse tired and fretful children. Their forlorn, aimless, pathetic wandering up and down the street was a daily occurrence . . . .”
In this story a kind woman, the wife of a local lawyer, recognizes the situation and invites the woman to tea for the afternoon. That is the story, and though uneventful in the way of story-telling, it is momentous in the farm woman’s life. It is, in fact, “a day’s pleasure.”
There is almost nothing that is funny or even mildly amusing in theses stories, except insofar as human foibles will always make us smile in the recognized courtship of young people and the spot-on dialog of an author who knows the rhythm of country speech. (I was particularly amused by “Uncle Ethan Ripley,” the tale of a farmer cozened into painting a patent medicine advertisement on the side of his newly-built barn.) This does not make Garland hostile to the country life. Virtually every story begins with – or at least makes a nod to – those seductive pleasures of nature and the country that will never be felt in the city. But the author sees them as exactly that – seductive – and inadequate to balance the grim and harsh logic of finance and education which are bewildering to the characters whose bitter lives are the subject of this set of stories.
No one I know these days has even heard of this book. I guess it's now just an artifact, but it's really too authentic to be forgotten.
Johannes Wolfgang Goethe, Faust –
Faust is a remarkable poem, perhaps even the most beautiful and technically proficient in the German language. I stipulate this because I cannot confirm it based on my reading of an English translation (by Bayard Taylor, in the 1870s, I believe). Indeed, even more than when I read the Aeneid, I felt the futility of reading poetry in translation when I attempted Faust in this way. Some of these things go better than others, of course. Virgil -- and Homer in particular -- have such strong narratives that their action and character development compensate for the lost subtleties and beauty of the original poetry. I imagine that Paradise Lost would translate that way into another language.
But Faust is even more remote to a lumpen reader like me than The Divine Comedy was. The poetry, at least in the rhymed translation I read, came out more like a nursery rhyme and the whole affair suffered even more from the fact that the piece is set up like a play, with “Acts” and specific locations for “scenes.” (I believe it is common to refer to this Faust as a “drama”, and for a subtitle, it is called “A Tragedy.”) The effect was the reverse of what we normally expect with such specificity: namely there was no concrete sense of place or character. There are scenes in “A Garden” in which “Fear” and “Hope” are the two main interlocutors, eventually overriden by “Prudence.” The reader finds characters striding across mountains, plains, skies, etc. There is no narrator to tell us what is happening or has happened in terms of the highly abstract plot. Everything must be grasped from the words spoken by the characters.
From time to time this is possible to detect without a strain and an explicit description of what is happening becomes vivid enough to compensate for the generally ethereal telling of the story. I am grateful, for example, that there are gnomes and witches on the Hartz Mountains on Walpurgisnacht because my mental picture of such beings permitted me to imagine their tone and menace. But for the most part it is an enormous amount of work simply to stay with the narrative. In Act II, for instance, “Pygmies” suddenly appear and introduce themselves thus:
Verily, here we sit securely; How it happened, is not clear, Ask not whence we came; for surely ‘Tis enough that we are here.
This is about as straightforward an example of the chaotic (and insouciant) appearance of characters as I can find – compared to countless occasions of anonymous people popping up, saying a line, and forever disappearing.
As far as the meaning of the narrative is concerned, the retrospective that Faust himself delivers in Act V provides a useful guideline:
"I only through the world have flown: Each appetite I seized as by the hair; What not sufficed me, forth I let it fare, And what escaped me, I let it go. I’ve only craved, accomplished my delight, Then wished a second time, and thus with might Stormed through my life: at first ‘twas grand, completely But now it moves most wisely and discreetly. The sphere of Earth is known enough to me; The view beyond is barred immutably . . . . Why needs he through Eternity to wend? He here acquires what he can apprehend. Thus let him wander down his earthly day; When spirits haunt, go quietly his way."
But to get to that coda, the reader himself must first “wend” through Eternity with Faust, beginning with the strongest section in the poem in which the doctor, we learn, seduces and abandons the girl, Margaret (Gretchen?), whose love for him permits her to be saved though she has destroyed their child. Thereafter (if that sketch is not enough to disqualify me totally from further comment), the piece becomes even more abstract. Perhaps the homunculus who later appears is the child. Perhaps not.
Among the metaphorical characters suddenly materializes Helen, recognizable from Homer, and my interest was aroused by her description of returning to Sparta following the Trojan War. But I must say that at least on a first reading, her unexpected emergence (though we have in the meantime abruptly moved from the Hartz Mountains to the Pharsallian Fields) seemed more than a bit odd. Then there is Mephistopheles, who pops up throughout the work. As usual, the devil is the most interesting character, although it might be more accurate to call him the most interesting “player.” Homer has a technique of putting gods into disguises which his characters don’t recognize while the reader is in on the trick. Mephistopheles duplicates this subterfuge on several occasions, bouncing the plot along in what I suppose are predestined directions. This makes for some amusing but artificial situations and also necessarily makes Mephistopheles both dangerous and compelling. But it is the poet, not Mephistopheles, who is the ultimate illusionist and this is why, as I said at the outset, the only legitimate way to approach and understand poetry is in the language it was written in.
Nokolai Gogol, Dead Souls[1]
The gloomy title and Russian origin gave me no advance warning that Dead Souls is a comic novel. And yet, to be taken seriously, it now occurs to me that every novel of quality with a comic premise must really be denominated a satire. So be it. Dead Souls, then, is a satire of Russian rural life in the first half of the 19th Century, something like the Russian equivalent of Mark Twain or Bret Harte.
The plot concerns Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, the main character, who has devised a scheme — never resolved — to travel about rural Russia with the objective of purchasing serfs who have died (dead souls). He is not buying the bodies, of course. Rather, he is trading on a peculiar Russian tax which levies a capitation on every landowner for each of his serfs. The good news is that the levy is not done annually, but only when the government needs money. Decades might go by before the czar is so impecunious to re-impose the tribute. But it can be expected that in the 15 years or so that have passed since the last time, the number of serfs on a large plantation who have died can reach a high number. And yet they must be counted for the tax before they can be stricken from the rolls. Chichikov offers to buy the dead ones before the next random capitation[2] and supposedly install them on land he will secure in a remote province and then mortgage them to the government.
Chichikov’s travels about rural western Russia suggest the architecture of The Pickwick Papers a decade or so later, in that the first half of the novel is an amusing series of encounters and confrontations with eccentric or mysterious landowners spread across the provincial landscape. Each episode comes as a separate adventure with colorful participants and leisurely descriptions of whatever the author felt appropriate to the moment — a sprawling ramshackle farmhouse, manners of the peasants, the internal thoughts of an inanimate object, suspicious or miserly or bombastic interlocutors, the irritating search for a missing object, etc. There is always a detailed, hedonistic description of a meal. If there is a plot in the background, it will sit there patiently until it is needed.
And a good plot requires patience in the writer — and always a love of detail. I offer, for example, the first three paragraphs of chapter seven wherein the author begins by musing on the elation felt by a lonely wayfarer on first catching sight of a familiar family scene. But wait. This then causes him to consider a bachelor’s lonely feelings in the same circumstance. And one thought leading to another, by these degrees we must recognize the parallel feelings of successful and unsuccessful writers, which as we do it, brings us seamlessly back to the plot. Well, the cards must be played carefully and slowly. And after all, why should we as readers even visit this remote Russia province if not to experience it as the author wishes us to?
Hence we have Gogol, obviously enjoying himself, taking his time to write out a scene in detail just because it suits him. Here is one from many I have selected at random:
“’Hey Proshka!’ A minute later someone could be heard running into the front hall in a flurry, pottering about there and thumping with his boots for a long time. Then the door finally opened and in came Proshka, a boy of about thirteen, in such big boots that he almost walked out of them as he stepped. Why Petroshka had such big boots can be learned at once: Plyushkin had for all his domestics, however many there were in the house, had only one pair of boots, which had always to be kept in the front hall. Anyone summoned to the squire’s quarters would usually do a barefoot dance across the whole yard, but, on coming into the front hall, would put on the boots and in that manner enter the room. On leaving the room, he would put the boots back in the front hall and set off again on his own soles. Someone looking out the window in the fall, especially when there begins to be a little frost in the mornings, would see all the domestics making such leaps as the most nimble dancer in the theater is scarcely able to bring off.”
Having written a paragraph like that, any writer who wasn’t starving would with satisfaction put his pencil away for the evening and sit down to a generous meal with a pleasant bottle of wine. And Chichikov? Having one more time concluded his own successful transaction,
“he slipped into bed and fell asleep soundly, deeply — fell asleep in the wondrous way that they alone sleep who are so fortunate as to know nothing of hemorrhoids, or fleas, or overly powerful mental abilities.”
I hope this gives a sense of how the writing in Dead Souls unfolds. I couldn’t find it bitter or snide or cynical, at least in Book Onre. That was the office of Voltaire.
And insofar as Dead Souls is a satire of rural Russians, the exaggerations are preponderantly amusing, never cruel. I offer this passage, a brief glance at Petersburg; even if it is intended to be ironic, it is irony suffused with patriotism. The author, imagines a night 20 degrees below zero and ““a witch-blizzard shrieking like a desperate demon.”
“[B]ut friendly is the light in a window somewhere high up, perhaps even on the fourth floor, in a cozy room, by the light of modest stearin candles, to the hum of a samovar, a heart and soul warming conversation goes on, a bright page from an inspired Russian poet such as God has bestowed upon his Russia is being read and a youth’s young heart flutters so ardently and loftily, as never happens in any other lands, even under splendid southern skies.”
I might add that there was not a prince or count anywhere to be seen. Chichikov, the minor town officials, and the peasantry fill the entire stage. Reading Dead Souls reminded me somewhat of one of those Breugel paintings of peasant revelry with plenty to look at but no essential focal point.
But then the author ends Book One. Without wishing to change anything I have already written up to now, I now report that he closes with the so-called backstory — and in a style quite a bit more cynical that what went before. Contrast this wry observation from Book Two with the earlier Petersburg picture:
“[I]n Moscow, and other cities, there are . . . wizards to be found, whose life is an inexplicable riddle. He seems to have spent everything, is up to his ears in debt, has no resources anywhere, and the dinner that is being given promises to be the last; and the diners think that by the next day the host will be dragged off to prison. Ten years pass after that. The wizard is still holding out in the world, is up to his ears in debt more than ever, and still gives a dinner in the same way, and everybody thinks it will be the last, and everybody is sure that the next day the host will be dragged off to prison. Only in Russia can one exist in such a way.”
In short, returning to my Breugel painting, the end of the first book obliges us to look more closely at the fray and at the sinners on holiday.
If we hadn’t already suspected it, our conceit of Chichikov as Mr. Pickwick is now no longer supportable. Rather we learn that he is actually a grifter, even a con man, adept at being amiable while remaining deliberately without family or close friends. Privately he is a miser, and when detected, clever enough to relocate periodically. But he is self-disciplined to a fault and savvy enough not to risk all on petty projects. His earlier great success was a large embezzlement at a customs office which eventually came to grief.
It was in the sequel of this setback that Chichikov hit upon the value of buying dead souls from impecunious landowners. Perhaps as readers we didn’t know that in those times insolvent land owners had begun to mortgage their property (serfs included) to the state. If Chichikov could “relocate” his souls to a remote province and attach them to the land[3], he would have a phantom collateral for a treasury loan of princely size
Thus we go to Book Two which picks up about a year later. It would make no sense to divide a novel into various “books” unless there were something distinct about each one. In Dead Souls the episodic story telling continues in a fashion, but in this part Chichikov now encounters more established, less eccentric plantation owners. Furthermore, his internal conversations with himself are made explicit and not particularly to his credit. Most importantly, it is obvious that Book Two was a problem for the author which remained unfinished and unresolved[4].
One approach would naturally have been Chichikov’s redemption. There is plenty in Book Two to suggest that that was Gogol’s intention. More than one passage permits one character or other to remark on sin’s universal presence in men, their ability to reconsider their ways, the goodness of Mother Russia, and God’s overarching presence. An example:
“Often unexpectedly, in some remote, forsaken backwater, some deserted desert, one meets a man whose warming conversation makes you forget the pathlessness of your paths, the homelessness of your nights, and the contemporary would full of people’s stupidity, of deceptions for deceiving man. Forever and always an evening spent in this way will vividly remain with you, and all that was and that took place then will be retained by the faithful memory: who was there, and who stood where, and what he was holding — the walls, the corners, and every trifle.”
And yet there also seems to have been an alternate — or perhaps concurrent— solution in Gogol’s mind. It is not followed up on at all, but toward the end of the book we catch a fleeting glimpse of a tax collector. He appears only that one time, has no name, and says nothing. But I surmise that if we were to learn that the erratic capitation is suddenly and unexpectedly underway — i.e. before Chichikov has relocated his dead souls — his plan will have failed. Sic transit gloria mundi.
One way or the other, by the end of the novel, one begins to wonder if the grim title Dead Souls might really have been intended in a double way.
[1]
My selection of books to review is idiosyncratic. For the most part, I select
titles with reputations seasoned enough to have survived several generations and
the whips of critics. So I rarely start any reading entirely ignorant of what
is to come. On the other hand, once I have decided on the next book, I
studiously avoid reading anything about it so that, for better or worse, my
impressions at the end are mine alone. I’ve put this note here because it
applies exactly to my state of mind on reading Dead Souls.
[2]
I forced myself to banish all thoughts of the Daley family in Chicago on
election day.
[3]
Apparently every serf must be attached to identifiable land.
[4]
This section of the book is studded with translator footnotes explaining that sentences
have been left unfinished, that manuscript pages have been lost, and that the
names of some characters have been changed.
William Golding, The Lord of the Flies --
The version of this book that I read was encumbered at the end of each chapter with Golding's remarks on what I had just read. I assume this was intended as an assist to youthful readers, but for me it had the effect of taking me off the island into reality each time disbelief had been suspended. (This was unfortunate because suspension of disbelief is essential to the plot of this novel -- boys stranded on a coral island who revert to savagery. Golding wisely never permits the reader to reflect on how his boys got there and instead concentrates intently on their inexorable movement to primitivism.) On the other hand, without Golding's comments I would never have known that "Lord of the Flies," which is the name the author gives to a totem made of a pig's head that the boys set up after a hunt, is the rough English translation of the Hebrew "Beelzebub."
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield --
English novels of the 18th Century always seem to be "rollicking" -- one thinks of Fielding -- and this novel is no exception, really. There is a difference, however. The story is so simple and sweet that the satire does not bite and the naughtiness, such as it is, is not so much embraced by the author as it is employed by him in passing as a plot device. To me, reading The Vicar of Wakefield is much like watching an old Frank Capra movie from a couple of generations ago: it works completely because it is an authentic artifact of the age, and it could never be duplicated today except as a cheap copy. This does not make it art, but it does make it genuine.
The version of this book that I read was encumbered at the end of each chapter with Golding's remarks on what I had just read. I assume this was intended as an assist to youthful readers, but for me it had the effect of taking me off the island into reality each time disbelief had been suspended. (This was unfortunate because suspension of disbelief is essential to the plot of this novel -- boys stranded on a coral island who revert to savagery. Golding wisely never permits the reader to reflect on how his boys got there and instead concentrates intently on their inexorable movement to primitivism.) On the other hand, without Golding's comments I would never have known that "Lord of the Flies," which is the name the author gives to a totem made of a pig's head that the boys set up after a hunt, is the rough English translation of the Hebrew "Beelzebub."
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield --
English novels of the 18th Century always seem to be "rollicking" -- one thinks of Fielding -- and this novel is no exception, really. There is a difference, however. The story is so simple and sweet that the satire does not bite and the naughtiness, such as it is, is not so much embraced by the author as it is employed by him in passing as a plot device. To me, reading The Vicar of Wakefield is much like watching an old Frank Capra movie from a couple of generations ago: it works completely because it is an authentic artifact of the age, and it could never be duplicated today except as a cheap copy. This does not make it art, but it does make it genuine.
Robert Graves, The Siege Of Troy --
Ostensibly done for "boys and girls," this is a chronological stitching together of the numerous Greek and Roman myths (not least The Iliad) concerning the gods and heros in the struggle for Helen and the city of Priam. Graves says in his introduction that he was surprised how much the various sources he drew upon agreed in their details. For my part, I may as well be one of Graves's "boys and girls," because there is much there I didn't know and was unlikely to learn in another year's reading.
Robert Graves, Greek Gods and Heros --
Unlike The Siege of Troy, this short amalgam is definitely for kids. Indeed, most of the Greek myths that didn't make it into the epic poems or plays are in themselves children's fairy tales. Myths are fine, but countryfolk only become nations when they have poets.
Robert Graves, The Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad --
But for the fact that he seems to have liked the things that I like, I am not much of a Graves fan. I accept the fact that he must have been a great scholar of the classics and obviously knew his Greek and Latin. And so I suppose I must accept his middlebrow view of the Iliad. But I can't, and since he himself chose to give it this somber title, perhaps he can't either. (The title, I believe, derives from the first words of the poem.) For lack of a better word, what I found disconcerting was the casualness of Graves's translation. It is impossible to get the feeling that these were the sons of gods, and gods themselves, playing out this preordained horror. I assume that this is because Graves was still re-living his own less noble conflict, World War I.
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter –
There is a sub-genre of fiction which is consciously placed in the backwaters. I am not referring to fiction set in the provinces, which has been a staple as far back as Cervantes and probably before. What I am referring to seems to have been invented by Conrad. It is not merely men on the frontier, but beyond it. In other words, the manners of rustics, squires, or country clergy – often more real in Austen or Eliot than their Dickensian city cousins – are always a part of the world of civilization and conventions. But Conrad tested the social compact from the other direction. I don’t really think it has been done as well since; perhaps it is too easy to slide into pulp. But the efforts that I have seen that are serious are pretty much confined in my reading to V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene. (I suppose that Faulkner’s efforts in Absalom, Absalom also carry some of the hallmarks.)
In this novel, Greene’s Englishmen are a pitiful collection of minor functionaries in an unnamed west African colony during World War II. The chief character is Henry Scobie, the assistant police commissioner, for whom the loneliness and isolation have become almost welcome[1]. He has been there 15 years with his odd and desperately lonely wife, Louise, whom he does not love but whom he protects dutifully, ritualistically. They are Catholic, a fact which was significant to Greene the writer, although I never felt he was personally sincere about it. (It was not enough for Greene to hate America; to the end, he respected and lionized the loathsome – and Godless – Soviet Union.) Over the years, Scobie has stripped away from his external life all but the essential. Even his wife’s photograph in his office has been put away because, after all, she has joined him in this posting and there is no reason for its display. He keeps a factual diary devoid of any commentary. But for the gin, there appear to be only two concrete things which he has not parted with: a pair of rusted handcuffs on his office wall and a broken rosary in the drawer. These, plus the vultures which periodically descend with a noise on the tin roof, are the symbols of a life which has become a torment to its owner. He loves God, but it is not a comfort to him and so the novel’s recurring question is what is love? what is comfort?
Scobie is, in fact, a good man, and his story is the record of how he becomes literally damned. It is a remarkable piece of writing, not surprisingly more revelatory on the second reading than on the first. Scobie does not plunge into the darkness. His initial minor sins are committed with good intentions, efforts to ameliorate the complexities he has hoped to avoid. In describing this process, Greene gives Scobie a tempter, a Syrian merchant, who is so sympathetically (but ambiguously) described that it is a shock when at the end it cannot be doubted that he is the villain others have suspected.
Relatively early in the novel there is a Conradian moment. Scobie’s duties require him to travel to a remote town in the colony where a young police commissioner has committed suicide, the irredeemable Catholic sin. In the night-long auto ride which he must take to the site with his servant, they cross the border over a Styx-like river. Scobie falls into sleep and dreams that a serpent has wound up his arm. (A footnote: I find it difficult to curb myself when I read anything resembling metaphor; metaphors do not mean that I am reading an allegory.) I will have more to add later.
Endnotes
1. How I wish Greene had chosen any name but “Scobie” for his protagonist; I cannot get out of my head Durrell’s hilariously comic transvestite sailor from The Alexandria Quartet.
Graham Greene, Our Man In Havana –
The remarkable change of tone midway through this book -- from amusingly comic to perilously sardonic -- was no doubt intended by the author as illustrative of the slippery and dangerous business of spying. Point taken, but so what? The novel ultimately has the feel of something written for money, without any of the weight detectable, for instance, in The Power and the Glory. Once things get serious, the book has no more significance than any New York Times Magazine article on the Cold War, etc., etc.
There is, of course, an enduring irony in the book that the author never intended. He wrote it, no doubt, to cast aspersions on the corrupt regime of Fulgensio Batista. But Batista was soon gone and Havana thereupon fell under the unspeakably grim regime of Fidel Castro. Greene was in the middle of his leftward journey by then and I have no doubt that the record is full of his praises for Castro. But the point is that the Batista regime was at least colorful enough to lend itself to a semi-comic satire; there was never anything funny about Fidel.
Graham Greene, The Quiet American --
It is not pleasant to admit that Greene delivers some arresting insights in the course of this short novel about a middle-aged British journalist feeling his mortality in 1950s Saigon. The observations are insights, however, because they concern people, not because they fortify Greene's condescending view of contemporary politics or American diplomacy. Greene is too good a writer to let his condescension get in the way of his story, which in this case uses Indochina as his chosen backwater. But while he may have contempt for Fowler, the narrator, Greene would otherwise seem to be Fowler's alter ego, and I will supply the contempt for Greene myself. (I recall Greene, later in his life, making some typically asinine statement that he would prefer to die in the Soviet Union over California because there was more justice there; alas, he only got as far as his home on Lake Geneva before the grim reaper cancelled his passport.)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure --
This novel, which essentially put Hardy out of the fiction business, is not my favorite -- but not because of its alleged lack of moral character. (It was called "Jude the Obscene" by some.) But I disfavor it for similarly wrong reasons, namely I am so uncomfortable with the character Arabella that I find it unpleasant to continue reading. Since Hardy intended the character to be distasteful, this merely represents how successful he can be with his art -- and what a small-minded reader I can be.
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge --
Although not one of Hardy's best, The Mayor of Casterbridge still has most of the elements that make him a great writer. What continues to amaze me is how he can take an unlikely, often incredible, situation and construct a fascinating and dour plot about it. The narrow stage, rustic players, and Hardy's care not to provide a comfortable ending all seem to make it work. A detail I particularly like: the passing references in this fictional Wessex setting to farmers named Everdene and Boldwood who, of course, are major characters in another of Hardy’s Wessex novels. (Faulkner elaborated this technique to perfection in the early 20th Century.)
Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native --
Alas, my wife objected to the name of a Corona del Mar restaurant called The Quiet Woman, and didn't really change her mind when I pointed out the reference to this novel. This century (the 20th) is no more ready for Hardy than the last one was, though for different reasons.
But Hardy was an artist of the first rank. I get an indescribable chill whenever I read his description of the Guy Fawkes Day ritual on Egdon Heath as a pagan celebration. Taking a leaf from Nabokov's detective manual, I believe I have figured out that the novel takes place in either 1844 or 1849. I suppose this shouldn't matter, but with Hardy, everything matters.
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd --
A novel featuring madness and a murder can't exactly be called optimistic, but for Hardy this may be the most optimistic of his great novels. (Under the Greenwood Tree does not count as a great novel.) The interplay of five characters is an intriguing variation of the eternal triangle and Hardy always finds a familiar problem in the remotest corners of Wessex. The fatal anonymous valentine may seem something of an artifice (though to me it is off-beat enough to be entirely credible), but who will argue with the verisimilitude of a 40-year-old man obsessed upon receiving one?
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles --
I guess one of the reasons I love Hardy is that there is always a concreteness to his abstractions. In this case, the abstract idea is that modernity is always a corruption of what came before, and what came before was never pretty. Here, for example, "Darbyfield" is a corruption of the old name of D'Urberville. And Hardy, always flirting with the pagan, begins the novel with the neighborhood girls in a spring Maypole dance with a flavor of pre-Christian England and ends it upon sunrise at Stonehenge. I think Hardy knows his characters, too. Justice Fleming once dismissed this story as unbelievable because in one scene Tess deliberately hides her fine shoes in a hedge before she is to meet her husband's father (a narrow Protestant minister, naturally). Mack thought no one would do that. But Tess would do that, as Hardy completely understood. The novel, by the way, underscores how grim the life of agricultural workers was in the last century, including their absolute reliance on foot travel. (See Main Traveled Roads.)
Thomas Hardy, Under The Greenwood Tree --
I read this novella twice, looking for the dark pessimistic pagan who wrote Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. He is completely missing and so is the wonderful four- and five-character Hardy plot. About the only thing that interested me in this tale of young love in four seasons was the Christmastime introduction of one of the characters as a silhouette at the window listening to the carolers -- a cozy first draft of Eustacia Vye's dramatic appearance against the sky on Guy Fawkes night at the beginning of The Return of the Native.
Nathaniel Hawthorne - THE SCARLET LETTER -
“[a]s when a man gives the hide of a great ox, a bullock,
Drenched first in deep fat, to all his people to stretch out;
The people take it from him and stand in a circle about it
And pull, and presently the moisture goes and the fat sinks
In with so many pulling, and the bull’s hide is stretched out level.”
8. Not always, though. When Glaucon meets Diomedes in battle he takes about 65 lines to introduce himself and give his genealogy. Diomedes takes another 20 lines to respond.
9. But the anger of Achilles must not be dismissed as simply juvenile. After all, it was the argument over a girl which provoked the Trojan War in the first place, a point which Achilles makes to Odysseus. That particular scene, by the way, I have persuaded myself was the inspiration for a portion of Shakespeare’s trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. Odysseus delivers Agamemnon’s message that if Achilles returns to the battlefield he will not only get Briseus back but he will be also rewarded with ten talents of gold, seven citadels, twelve race horses, seven accomplished slave women, the spoils of Troy, etc., etc. Achilles responds:
“He cheated me and he did me hurt. . . . Not if he gave me ten times as much, and twenty times over as he possesses now, not if more should come to him from elsewhere, . . . . not even so would Agamemnon have his way with my spirit until he had made good to me all this heartrending insolence.”
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham –
The inventive opening of this novel has the main character – a nouveau tycoon in 1870s Boston – being interviewed for a mini-biography by a magazine reporter. Although not quite so clever as the fortune teller incident in The Heart of the Matter or the tarot card reader of A Dance to the Music of Time, it was a non-artificial method of giving background to the story while simultaneously introducing the reader to the “backstory” of the main character. Indeed, although I chose to read this novel almost entirely as an act of duty because I thought of it as an artifact from mid-American literature, it continued to surprise me with its subtlety, notwithstanding a fairly old-fashioned, but all-American plot.
In the earlier part of the 19th Century, Silas Lapham’s late father had fortuitously discovered a considerable mineral paint deposit on the family’s scrub farm in northern Vermont. Although the father had died without being able to exploit the find, his adult son Silas, with filial devotion, has done so. Following his equally dutiful service in the Civil War (he is called the “Colonel” by his family), Silas has set up the company in Boston and become wealthier than most of the city’s original Brahmin stock, selling paint, it appears, to half the world. And yet he and his wife, live with no ostentation in a somewhat faded Boston neighborhood with their two daughters. He is a stolid, reliable, and decent merchant, with a good deal of money.
Since the time frame is about the same as that in Anna Karenina, I found myself thinking about that novel’s passing uses of genre settings, particularly the vivid depiction of the skating party early in the novel. Here the picturesque scene (which Howells included to illustrate a facet of his main character’s personality and not for the reason I cite it) is a snowy suburban street clogged with sleigh traffic during what appears to be the evening commute hour.
Henry James would obviously do much more than Howells with the inevitable encounter of the Lapham’s beautiful younger daughter, Irene, with Tom Corey, scion of an ancient Boston family, but Howells was no amateur in this business. For one thing, he is clear that the girl is no intellect and he makes it equally obvious that the young man – vaguely called “sweet” by all who meet him – is himself little more than honest and respectable. For that matter, Tom’s aristocratic parents are also no stereotypes. In particular, his father is a manque artist and genteel slacker, though well-seasoned in the Boston thing. A dinner party at the Corey home which the Laphams nervously agree to accept provides the environment in which to draw out the contrasts between the two families – as well as to reveal the fact that Tom is actually in love with the other Lapham daughter.
This would be fertile ground for television comedy, but Howells is still at work on his plot and so the humor is no more than latent. Without enumerating the various details of this particular dinner episode, I was reminded that when an author has his own characters speak of novels it is always worthwhile to pay attention: it’s both a window on the character and a mirror on the author himself. Here, for example, the conversation twice turns to contemporary fiction, giving one character the opportunity to comment disapprovingly on centering any novel on the unfolding of a love story between two lovely but callow youths. Hence this novel is not "The Rise of Irene Lapham," and for that matter it is also worthwhile reflecting that the rise of her father has already been achieved before the first word has been read. But the title itself bears contemplation. It could be ironic, since the story line actually tells us of the ruin of Silas’s fortune. I am more inclined to think, however, that it was intended just as it sounds, because in the unfolding tale of financial catastrophe, although the main character is badly beaten down by events and people, his own character emerges stronger. He does rise, even as he falls.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days — Decades ago when I was reading Brideshead Revisited I came across a passage which seemed to be Waugh's summary of what was really going on in the novel. I wanted to remember that I had discovered it and maybe had got the point.
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris –
First published in the early 1830s, this lurid tale of Paris in the 1480s is hardly a great novel, but it did capture my attention for long stretches. In the United States the book is known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no doubt because of the vivid film of that name starring Charles Laughton. But that title does a disservice to the novel, because it appears to make the hunchback, Quasimodo, the main character, which he certainly is not in the book.
The story centers about Esmeralda, the Gypsy girl, who is loved in varying ways by three men: the bell-ringer Quasimodo, Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers, a self-centered soldier, and Claude Frollo, archdeacon of the cathedral. By far the most interesting character is Frollo, a tortured priest and alchemist who is probably in his late 30s (rather old in the 15th Century). It was he who years before the story begins had adopted the abandoned and hideously deformed infant Quasimodo and given him a chance to live when he would otherwise have certainly died. Frollo himself was an orphan and his first act of responsibility, also taken before the novel begins, was in respect to his much younger brother Jehan whose education and upbringing he arranged for when their parents died. And yet Frollo is cold as stone, seen by several of the characters actually to be the servant of the devil. It is certain that his love for Esmeralda is more a hellish obsession than any unrequited romantic passion. But this is why the character is so compelling. He is far too real (albeit in some puzzling Gallic way) to be considered metaphorical but not so recognizable as his much younger cousin, Javert, another obsessed soul from a later novel.
The same has to be said about another principal “character” in the book, the cathedral itself, which the author periodically anthropomorphizes. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that architecture, and Notre Dame in particular, was Hugo’s chief motivation in writing this book. Admittedly, he overdoes it in the same way that his digressions in Les Miserables can become distracting, but to my mind Hugo’s best writing, not subtle, is his setting of a scene. Here is what we get when first introduced to Quasimodo:
“We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose, that horse-shoe mouth, that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart; of those straggling teeth, with breeches here and there like the battlements of a fortress; of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole – that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. . . . His large head, all bristling with red hair, between his shoulders an enormous hump, to which he had a corresponding projection in front, a framework of thighs and legs so strangely gone astray that they could touch one another only at the knees, and when viewed in front looked like two pairs of sickles brought together at the handles, sprawling feet, monstrous hands . . . .”
Quasimodo lived in the cathedral like a snail in a magnificent shell. Not always seen, he could be glimpsed when ringing its bells. In ancient Egypt, Hugo says, he would have been taken for the temple god; “[t]he Middle Ages believed him to be its demon; he was in fact its soul.” Soon after describing the wretched bell ringer, Hugo ventures one of his sad reflections on the structure itself whose defilement, he says, has been more or less ceaseless since it was first erected -- and “fashion has done more mischief than revolutions.”
“It has audaciously fitted into the wounds of Gothic architecture its wretched gewgaws of a day, its marble ribbons, its metal pompons, a very leprosy of ovolos, volutes, and entournements, of draperies, garlands, and fringes, of stone flames, brazen clouds, fleshy Cupids, and chubby cherubim, which we find beginning to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and making it expire two centuries after, tortured and convulsed, in the boudoir of Madame Dubarry.”
And since it is essential to his plot (and close to his heart in any event), Hugo repeatedly gives us the flavor of the medieval city of Paris. Here is one intoxicating example:
“[L]ook at the sky through that surprising forest of spires, towers, and steees; . . . make its outline float in a wintry mist clinging to its innumerable chimneys; plunge it in deep night, and observe the fantastic play of the darkness and the lights in that gloomy labyrinth of buildings; cast upon it a ray of moonlight, showing it in glimmering vagueness, with its towers lifting their great heads from that foggy sea; or draw that dark veil aside, cast into shade the thousand sharp angles of its spires and its gables, and exhibit it all fantastically indented upon the glowing western sky at sunset . . . . [A]scend, on the morning of some great holiday . . . to some elevated point from which your eye can command the whole capital, and attend the awakening of the chimes. . . . At first you hear only scattered tinklings, going from church to church . . . . Then, all on a sudden, behold – for there are moments when the ear itself seems to see – behold, ascending at the same moment, from every steeple, a column of sound, as it were, a cloud of harmony . . . . [B]y degrees, as they expand, they mingle, unite, are lost in each other, and confounded in one magnificent concert. Then it is all one mass of sonorous vibrations, incessantly sent forth from the innumerable steeples, floating, undulating, bounding, and eddying, over the town and extending far beyond the horizon . . . .”
This goes on and on and on. Yes, it is too much; I have only suggested it slightly; but I never found it tedious. Like one of the minor characters in the book, Hugo simply has “moments of selfish, exclusive, and supreme enjoyment, in which the artist sees nothing in the world but his art.” Every descriptive passage, if unrelentingly detailed, is delivered robustly and enthusiastically by an author who had never heard the word “existentialism” uttered and who never read the rarified prose of The New Yorker.
And speaking of that magazine, I have no doubt that it must have published at one time or another some reflection on the thesis “Printing shall overthrow Architecture,” just the subject of one more lengthy but delightful digression in Hugo’s novel.
Today I idly decided that perhaps I should again visit The Scarlet Letter, which I had read more than 60 years ago under pedagogical orders in high school. Naturally at that time copies of the book had been handed out to all of us and they were surely subject to return within a few weeks.
The Custom House. So for today’s reading I have had to repair to a copy of the novel which I got from a friend who deals in used books. Its battered condition suggests that it is about as old as I am. My point, however, is this. I immediately discovered that the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, opened The Scarlet Letter with a lengthy foreword written in the first person, describing how he came to write the novel. He gives this discursive piece a separate title, “The Custom House,” which purports to be an autobiographical sketch chiefly describing a job he held in the 1840s in Salem, Massachusetts.
That was a surprise. But why was this digression blocking my way? Reading such an irrelevancy had surely not been part of my high school assignment. And even if in the 1950s “The Custom House” had appeared in the copy circulated by the Montgomery County Maryland School Board -- which I very much doubt – I would surely have totally ignored it and gone to the main task, beginning with the next chapter.
But this time, with some impatience, I determined to read “The Custom House,” the result of which is that I am now reporting that it was a good decision. Much of it consists of random descriptions of Old Salem (the author’s birthplace), some charming observations about the people he worked with there, and a glancing digression touching on the early Plymouth colony. But then the author relates how he found, in a forgotten attic of the custom house building, some ancient papers wrapped inside a fabric capital “A.” The novel, he then explains, is his fanciful cobbling together of the alleged facts recited in these foolscap wrapping papers.
Suddenly Daniel DeFoe came to my mind. His Journal of the Plague Year is also told in the first person and I remember having persuaded myself for too long that DeFoe and his narrator were one and the same. Another lesson forgotten. The narrator of “The Custom House” never identifies himself as Nathaniel Hawthorne, only as “the Surveyor.” The story is a work of fiction.
The Ambience. Throughout the novel, always present is the silent and somewhat mysterious ancient forest surrounding the small community. From the beginning this atmosphere is part of the novel. And contributing to the mood, within this community itself
“[t]he generation next to the early immigrants wore that blackest shade of Puritanism and so darkened the national visage with it that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn the forgotten art of gayiety.”
The people of the town are credulous of demons and witches. One of them – the governor’s sister – was even believed by them to be a witch[1].
The Characters.
Hester Prynne. In the initial description of Hester Prynne, an unmarried girl, she is standing stoically on the pillory in Boston’s market square with an infant in her arms. Her face of “marble quietude” was like a mask “or rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s features.” Hawthorne compares her to the Madonna.
Within moments, however, a man appears on the fringe of the crowd. And as he gazes at her, a more primeval metaphor is introduced: “[a] writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them . . .” This, we learn, was Hester’s former husband in England, Roger Chillingworth who, for a time, remains silently in the background.
Regarding Hester’s extremity, the narrator remarks that this young woman could certainly have avoided her present and future infamy by simply having taken her fatherless child and returned to England where she was born, or at least decamping into other distant colonial settlements
“But her sin, the ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into [her] wild and dreary but life-long home.”
This passage, like many which appear thereafter, introduces a consideration which then regularly recurs in the novel. By this I mean the Scarlet Letter places certain familiar human predicaments and misfortunes in the context of a doctrinaire society located in a wild and very new world, governed, but not yet fully understood, by even by its residents. In short, I submit that the struggles and fate of Hester Prynne and the other principal characters of the novel, are not so much given by the author as a judgment or message regarding their behavior, but more in the nature of a consideration about how those struggles will be informed by and resolved in the evolving environment of what would eventually become a new nation.
Self-reliant, Hester Prynne determines to be a local martyr and remains living in a small cottage distant from the town, surviving on the sale of her needlework, which -- like the scarlet “A” which she herself fashioned and is obliged to wear – is vivid, meticulously done, and hypocritically favored for purchase by the Puritan gentry of the neighborhood. The novel goes on to cover the seven years following Hester’s appearance on the scaffold.
She is never depicted as the image of the wronged maiden. Rather, on the scaffold, it was
“as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside and can no longer make itself seen or felt . . . .”
As for the scarlet letter itself,
“its effect upon her gave it an influence beyond the daily humiliation which she suffered: it seemed to give her “a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.’”
. . . .
[I]t “had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself”
“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers – stern and wild ones – and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
Roger Chillingworth. Roger Chillingworth, the man who silently appeared on the fringes of Hester’s humiliation on the scaffold, is obviously intended by the author to be the devil’s apprentice. He is identified as a mysterious physician of considerable knowledge, who had been Hester’s husband back in England, albeit under another name unknown in Massachusetts. Although his arrival in Boston had gone unexplained, the community itself simply explained it away by unlikely surmises based on his erudition; his apparent indifference to their own spiritual tenets also goes unremarked. Later, he and Hester eventually cross paths, but each chooses never to acknowledge their connection openly.
Arthur Dimmesdale. To the reader (but unsuspected by the colonial residents), this young divine had been Hester’s partner in sin. Like Chillingworth, he had been educated in England. He is revered by his congregation but is secretly tormented by his unrevealed transgression which is manifested in his perilous physical health.
“[T]his very burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs and received their pain unto itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.”
Dimmesdale, a weak, unhealthy, and ethereal man who is perpetually depicted as always placing his hand over his heart to cover his own unseen scarlet letter, is tormented by his unrevealed sin, his silent public dissimulation, and the resulting curse that he has caused to be put on Hester. Combined, these defects, mixed with his erudition, have placed him wholly out of place in this primitive New World wilderness. He concludes that these elements would place him – an “exemplary man” -- at home in a more civilized society. And yet his earnestness and obvious aesthetic purity have made him a model of virtuous rectitude and admiration even in this tiny community precariously situated on the edge of an unexplored continent.
Pearl. Although the plot of this novel is always driven by the unfolding relationship between Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth, Hawthorne deliberately uses the child Pearl to entrench its theme and its insistently melancholy atmosphere. The child is said to be beautiful, but otherworldly, and a natural imp.
“There was fire in her and throughout her; . . . the very brightest jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.”
As the author puts it, by her mother’s own intention, she was “the scarlet letter in another form.”
The Story. In the seven years following the introductory scene on the pillory, Hawthorne includes various relevant incidents, including how Chillingworth ingratiates himself into Rev. Dimmesdale’s confidence. The signal event, however, chiefly describes a chance forest meeting between Hester and Dimmesdale while Pearl is playing in the background in mottled sunshine. After an awkward opening conversation, the two confront their past and make vague plans for the future, including a return to England. This is later thwarted when they learn that Chillingworth has arranged to be on the same ship.
And so in this way the conclusion is set up. During a public holiday in the infant Boston, the tortured and dying Rev. Dimmesdale mounts the same scaffold where Hester had been humiliated. He makes an ambiguous public confession of his transgression and then he dies. It is not a Christ-like death. Indeed the narrator seems content to regard the entire matter as little more than an example of every man’s inevitable “sin-stained” nature.
So for me, The Scarlet Letter remains a creditable novel. I am dubious, however, that in these times it is even assigned in American high schools. Modern “teen novels” are surely now more popular in that they wrestle with contemporary problems which may shock the parents. But high school students would still be able to follow it, unlock its vocabulary, and strain under the old-fashioned style. And yet my strong impression is that modern educators (whose own education I fear is defective) have determined that the challenge of reading such an antique story would be boring or lost on teenagers. I surely hope I am wrong.
I have no category for “Epic Poems,” so I put this recollection of The Iliad under “Fiction.” And although I will have nothing of value to say except to myself, there are a few things which I want to put down, if for no other reason than to get past them the next time I pick up The Iliad.
Myth. First, it occurred to me that reference books always give helpful but confounding alternatives of the myth I am searching for. In other words, these ancient variations mean that Homer, the Greek playwrights, Ovid, etc. took on a peculiar challenge in their writing. Before they did their work, the myths were indefinable, contradictory, Protean stories without an author, less specific even than our own personal gossamer dreams -- which at least have something like a known parent. Yes, the myth was known, but in various ways.
When the poet retells a myth, however, he changes its substance. He creates a fixed story. Homer, Hesiod, Vergil, et al. have made choices. They have mapped the story, pegged it to the ground as it were, made it permanent. There is now a logic. Traditional questions will still be raised, of course, but the author accepts accountability for the answer. He has a voice[1].
Demigod vs. Demigod. The Homeric voice in particular is so distinct in The Iliad that remarking on it is really unnecessary. But I do have an observation about one story which this poet actually tells to a notable anticlimax, putting aside the muscular finality of his bloody tale. I refer to the confrontation of Achilles and Aeneas toward the end of the poem, before Hektor is killed.
Homer has added to the accepted myth. Obviously he did not know of Vergil 800 years later. He never heard of Rome and how it was founded by Aeneas, who had escaped Achilles’s wrath and survived as a refugee from Troy. What was known to Homer was that Achilles must kill Hektor. It is at the center of the story. Aeneas therefore could not be Achilles’s nemesis, though it otherwise would be logical. I think perhaps it was Homer, then, who must have added the detail that Achilles had intimidated Aeneas in days before the Trojan war, chasing him down a mountainside until he escaped.
Otherwise these two champions – Achilles and Aeneas -- would be the obvious antagonists of The Iliad. Each of them was born of an immortal mother and a mortal father. In some stories Peleus actually took Thetis, a nereiad, against her will while Aphrodite, a full fledged goddess, performed a similar office on Anchises. Their provenance being similar, Aeneas’s was surely far the more impressive bloodline, his father Anchises being at least comparable to Peleus[2]. In literary terms, Aeneas would have been the natural mythic victor over Achilles. But since this cannot be, at the last minute Homer has him enveloped by Poseidon’s mist and transported to a safer place on the battlefield to fight another day.
And this is still to miss the main point, meaning that The Iliad is far less about Hektor falling to Achilles than it is the general story of Achilles’s uncontrolled anger, indeed his fury. That is the decisive quality that sets Achilles apart from Aeneas. Aeneas is brave and honorable, but Achilles is possessed[3]. And therefore Achilles’s great antagonist and greatest battle is with neither Aeneas nor Hektor. It is with a minor god, Skamandros. In fact, this clash between god and demigod – probably invented by Homer -- becomes really quite necessary to a satisfying story since we already know that Hektor is fated to go down and eventually does so without much ado.
War. Reading The Iliad again after many years brought home to me that nothing else I have read which is about war is less tendentious. That is to say, although The Iliad is about war, it is actually about “a” war. In this war, both armies are essentially reluctant, neither of them fighting for glory and both fighting for no good reason other than someone else’s honor[4]. But the war is fated, and so they persevere with a tenacious and supervening sense of honor. The Iliad is not a polemic for one side or another nor yet is it a politically correct lamentation about war’s obvious horrors[5]. True, the particular cause of this war and how it motivates the players is never far from the surface, but reading Homer, one is obliged to draw his own conclusions about the combatants, regardless of the inevitable outcome.
Another point – that men at war die at random, graphically and painfully, whether honorably or not -- being reiterated in The Iliad beyond any reasonable inventory, permits us to consider additional subjects – the manner of ancient war, for instance, and the author’s literary choices.
Considering first how wars were fought in this epoch, it is obvious that men who are fleet of foot have a distinct advantage, not least of whom is Achilles. Swiftness is an advantage both in pursuing and in being pursued. Hektor’s defeat at Achilles’s hands, for example, is the culmination of his exemplary flight once he realizes he will be overcome. There appears to be no particular ignominy in flight any more than a wild beast overmatched by an opponent fleeing to fight another day. Among the heroes whom we see escaping are, at various times, Odysseus and Aeneas.
Next, on each side, the champions come to battle mostly in chariots, each with a driver. Their weapons are bronze and the most lethal is the spear. A man’s sword appears to have been his backup weapon, for use only when he has been obliged to dismount, sometimes for defense, often for the coup de grace. And then, in the latter case, the opponent having been vanquished, he is routinely stripped of his armor and weapons which, unlike the unfortunate dead soldier himself, live to fight on another day in possession of the victor. The bow and arrow, meantime, seem to have had a lesser status than spear and sword, and pace Apollo, soldiers skilled in that particular art seem to be held in little higher status than a mere sniper[6].
Turning to the literature, the Homeric similies are so ubiquitous that without them The Iliad would be a much shorter and entirely different story. This movement, or this flight, or this oration, Homer says, is familiar, something we have seen in our lives or can imagine. This incident of war is as terrifying as a suddenly flooded river or a night stampede of animals worried by a lion, as recognizable as a wheeling flight of birds, as commonplace as the threshing room chaff blown across the floor. This is war. It is sudden death, torment of unseen danger, waves of movement. It is a natural part of life[7].
Virtually no noble combatant dies in The Iliad without Homer recording his name and patrimony -- which is usually already known to his opponent[8]. In a tale of heroes, of course, this is to be expected in some part. Great protagonists must kill great antagonists, and specificity is the key to verisimilitude. But if that sort of verisimilitude were the single objective, it would be overdone here. Scores of men appear only to have their deaths recorded at the hands of a famous character, often with no remark about their own prowess or valor. But they are most often given names, a father, and a place of birth, without which they would still be the faceless cannon fodder of every war, no names, no past, of no significance except they died.
War must be dismally anonymous for the soldier about to die. Men who bear arms surely feel the need to be remembered, and I sense that need was also important for Homer. The Iliad will often leave a trace of regret in anonymous death, though never enough to impede the story. The destruction of Sarpedon, for example, though hardly anonymous, is an incident of a noble Trojan guest whose sense of honor and nobility compels him to fight on that side, though his country’s stake in the outcome is minimal. If you wish to draw a lesson, draw it, but the war moves on and Sarpedon is both noble and dead.
Honor. If Sarpedon illustrates the utmost in what would be expected of a royal Greek guest, Hektor (“shepherd of the people”) is the beau ideal of a man. The generals and heroes were obviously expected to be on the front lines and Hektor is obsessed by this. He will not play defense, though Troy was certainly built for that, but instead leads his troops outside the walls with little objective except his own sense of duty and the possible burning of the Greek ships. Strategy and tactics play little part for him or anyone else save Polydoros, and the success or failure of one outstanding man is most often the reason for whether the day can be counted a good one.
In ancient war, perhaps this convention was uncontroversial, but it nevertheless underscores the remarkable spectacle of Achilles, the greatest hero, spitefully withdrawing from combat for what seems to be a trivial quarrel. Achilles doesn’t even have the medieval excuse of chivalric love, since the dispute is only about his personal status. He has been denigrated by Agamemnon who has claimed as his own Achilles’s captive girl once he himself had been obliged to surrender his own woman for reasons of state.
Fate. Not that Homer was arguing the status of women in a benighted world. This is a war story through and through: many things are accepted, including the field marshal’s right to claim the spoils of war even from his best general. But as Homer portrays it, the incident – which begins the poem -- has thrown everyone, including the gods, into a heightened state of confusion. When I say “heightened,” I mean that throughout the story it is tacitly and occasionally specifically understood that Troy is fated lose, mainly as the natural consequence of the terrible ferocity of this unnatural warrior and demigod. And so when Achilles withdraws to sulk over this supposed insult, it upsets the predestined course of things[9].
And so for three quarters of the poem, the war goes on without the Achaeans’ preeminent hero. This gives each of the episodes its own poignancy, because Achilles’s sense of honor, so unlike what we see in Hektor, is also nevertheless balanced against the knowledge that the Greeks will win, Hektor will be killed, Troy will be sacked, families will die. And when a moment of illusory hope arises – perhaps Menelaos and Paris will solve the entire dispute in single combat -- it is chilling that Athena and Apollo, the divine sister and brother who have taken opposite sides,
. . . . assuming the likeness of birds, of vultures, settled
Aloft the great oak tree of their father Zeus of the aegis,
Taking their ease and watching these men . . . .
I felt the same grim sadness when the Trojans, elated after a successful day driving the Greeks back to their ships, light their campfires fires at Hektor’s bidding. In a mirror image of Henry V’s St. Crispian’s speech, the Trojan leader foresees Greeks retreating home to show their wounds as an emblem of their defeat. Then Hektor orders
“… ‘let the heralds Zeus loves give orders about the city
For the boys who are in their first youth and the grey-browed elders
To take stations on the god-founded bastions that circle the city;
And as for the women, have our wives, each one in her own house,
kindle a great fire; . . . .
For in good hope I pray to Zeus and the other immortals that we may drive from our place these dogs’ . . . .
So Hektor spoke among them, and the Trojans shouted approval. . . .
So with hearts made high these sat night-long by the outworks
Of battle, and their watchfires blazed numerous about them. . . . .
A thousand fires were burning the in the plain, and beside each
One sat fifty men in the flare of the burning firelight.”
As a reader, imagining any battlefield has always proved a problem to me. The best military histories are inevitably furnished with maps, arrows, and primary colors. This version of The Iliad was not so equipped. We know the basics, of course: A beach crammed with black ships, a nearby river, and a dusty plain crawling with scavenging dogs, overlooked by a walled city with a massive gate. The ships are protected by a manmade wall and a broad ditch. Several ships have been hauled up as far as the plain,
“for wide as it was, the seashore was not big enough to make room
for all the ships and the people also were straitened; and therefore
they had hauled them up in depth, and filled the long edge
of the whole seacoast, all that the two capes compassed between them”
The city which “beetles” over the scene is “windy” Ilion with “wide ways,” but as readers we almost never go inside.
The Translation. It may be foolish for me to conclude on one more subject I know nothing about, but I have to say that I couldn’t help but be impressed with this translation by Richmond Lattimore. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are a dozen or so available versions of The Iliad and anything that has a publisher behind it probably has much to commend it. But it is a very long piece of work and to suggest, as Lattimore does, the original metre while keeping the go-ahead style of the poem must have been extremely difficult.
One thing that brought this home to me was entirely unexpected. Books 12 and 13 were largely missing from the paperback I was reading, a binding error, I think. So to bridge that gap I went to the Robert Graves translation which I also had on my shelf. Well, I had once upon a time read that Graves version in its entirety some years ago, and my chief memory – fortified by this episode -- is that he sees the entire tale as a huge satire, too devilishly clever to be read as a serious story.
I will not argue with Robert Graves, and perhaps after many more readings the bumptiousness of this grim story will suggest itself. But for now Lattimore’s approach makes far more sense to me. This tale did not come down to us through the eons because it was an inside joke. For the Greeks, if it was anything else, it was the essential part of their patrimony, a story which told them who they were, and with no sugar coating. This is no small achievement, and many lands have far less in their historical memory. And so if Lattimore can be faulted for occasionally having selected the wrong word or image, or decided not to make it explicit that Nestor is loquacious or Hera a minx, I would understand. But for having chosen the wrong tone or having been too studious about the details, the burden, I think, would have to be on the critic. For me, Richmond Lattimore’s translation is one of restraint and dignity.
ENDNOTES
On the battlefield, the gods go in disguises, even from each other. E.g. Athena joins Diomedes in an assault on Ares.
In battle, the gods are not even invincible (though one should always bet on the god). Athena drives Diomedes’s spear right into Ares’s belly. Even Aphrodite, at one point ventures into the fray and is wounded. She cannot die, but her indignation at the unexpected pain is comic.
FOOTNOTES
1. He has also taken a notable step away from anthropology to literature – surely an improvement.
2. But Achilles was also the great-grandson of Zeus, as he reminds Asteropaios before he kills him.
3. I once heard a lecturer describe Aeneas – he was speaking of The Aenead -- as one of literature’s more boring heroes. That would never be said of the murderous Achilles, who is a gigantic, awesome war machine.
4. The Trojans must defend, of course, but they know that for Menelaus it is a war of justice. For their part, they certainly do not fight for Paris for whom everyone, even Helen, seems to have varying degrees of contempt. Similarly the coalition of Greek armies are only present by virtue of an ancient oath to the House of Atreus. And although it is not part of The Iliad, all Greeks would know that Odysseus had attempted to avoid service by feigning madness and that Achilles actually disguised himself as a woman for the same purpose.
5. The personification of war, Ares, is however a different matter. He does not appear as often as his fellow gods and surprisingly his influence is limited. His sister Athena is particularly dismissive of him as a blood-encrusted meathead and Zeus himself holds him in little regard.
6. At least in some sources it was an arrow shot by Paris, of all mean soldiers, which felled Achilles. The Iliad foreshadows this when from an ambush Paris inflicts a similarly insignificant injury to the foot of Diomedes, who sneers at him for inflicting such a painful but petty wound.
7. If you’re interested in glimpses of daily life, the similies can also be illuminating. The soldiers fight over Patroklos’s body
Myth. First, it occurred to me that reference books always give helpful but confounding alternatives of the myth I am searching for. In other words, these ancient variations mean that Homer, the Greek playwrights, Ovid, etc. took on a peculiar challenge in their writing. Before they did their work, the myths were indefinable, contradictory, Protean stories without an author, less specific even than our own personal gossamer dreams -- which at least have something like a known parent. Yes, the myth was known, but in various ways.
When the poet retells a myth, however, he changes its substance. He creates a fixed story. Homer, Hesiod, Vergil, et al. have made choices. They have mapped the story, pegged it to the ground as it were, made it permanent. There is now a logic. Traditional questions will still be raised, of course, but the author accepts accountability for the answer. He has a voice[1].
Demigod vs. Demigod. The Homeric voice in particular is so distinct in The Iliad that remarking on it is really unnecessary. But I do have an observation about one story which this poet actually tells to a notable anticlimax, putting aside the muscular finality of his bloody tale. I refer to the confrontation of Achilles and Aeneas toward the end of the poem, before Hektor is killed.
Homer has added to the accepted myth. Obviously he did not know of Vergil 800 years later. He never heard of Rome and how it was founded by Aeneas, who had escaped Achilles’s wrath and survived as a refugee from Troy. What was known to Homer was that Achilles must kill Hektor. It is at the center of the story. Aeneas therefore could not be Achilles’s nemesis, though it otherwise would be logical. I think perhaps it was Homer, then, who must have added the detail that Achilles had intimidated Aeneas in days before the Trojan war, chasing him down a mountainside until he escaped.
Otherwise these two champions – Achilles and Aeneas -- would be the obvious antagonists of The Iliad. Each of them was born of an immortal mother and a mortal father. In some stories Peleus actually took Thetis, a nereiad, against her will while Aphrodite, a full fledged goddess, performed a similar office on Anchises. Their provenance being similar, Aeneas’s was surely far the more impressive bloodline, his father Anchises being at least comparable to Peleus[2]. In literary terms, Aeneas would have been the natural mythic victor over Achilles. But since this cannot be, at the last minute Homer has him enveloped by Poseidon’s mist and transported to a safer place on the battlefield to fight another day.
And this is still to miss the main point, meaning that The Iliad is far less about Hektor falling to Achilles than it is the general story of Achilles’s uncontrolled anger, indeed his fury. That is the decisive quality that sets Achilles apart from Aeneas. Aeneas is brave and honorable, but Achilles is possessed[3]. And therefore Achilles’s great antagonist and greatest battle is with neither Aeneas nor Hektor. It is with a minor god, Skamandros. In fact, this clash between god and demigod – probably invented by Homer -- becomes really quite necessary to a satisfying story since we already know that Hektor is fated to go down and eventually does so without much ado.
War. Reading The Iliad again after many years brought home to me that nothing else I have read which is about war is less tendentious. That is to say, although The Iliad is about war, it is actually about “a” war. In this war, both armies are essentially reluctant, neither of them fighting for glory and both fighting for no good reason other than someone else’s honor[4]. But the war is fated, and so they persevere with a tenacious and supervening sense of honor. The Iliad is not a polemic for one side or another nor yet is it a politically correct lamentation about war’s obvious horrors[5]. True, the particular cause of this war and how it motivates the players is never far from the surface, but reading Homer, one is obliged to draw his own conclusions about the combatants, regardless of the inevitable outcome.
Another point – that men at war die at random, graphically and painfully, whether honorably or not -- being reiterated in The Iliad beyond any reasonable inventory, permits us to consider additional subjects – the manner of ancient war, for instance, and the author’s literary choices.
Considering first how wars were fought in this epoch, it is obvious that men who are fleet of foot have a distinct advantage, not least of whom is Achilles. Swiftness is an advantage both in pursuing and in being pursued. Hektor’s defeat at Achilles’s hands, for example, is the culmination of his exemplary flight once he realizes he will be overcome. There appears to be no particular ignominy in flight any more than a wild beast overmatched by an opponent fleeing to fight another day. Among the heroes whom we see escaping are, at various times, Odysseus and Aeneas.
Next, on each side, the champions come to battle mostly in chariots, each with a driver. Their weapons are bronze and the most lethal is the spear. A man’s sword appears to have been his backup weapon, for use only when he has been obliged to dismount, sometimes for defense, often for the coup de grace. And then, in the latter case, the opponent having been vanquished, he is routinely stripped of his armor and weapons which, unlike the unfortunate dead soldier himself, live to fight on another day in possession of the victor. The bow and arrow, meantime, seem to have had a lesser status than spear and sword, and pace Apollo, soldiers skilled in that particular art seem to be held in little higher status than a mere sniper[6].
Turning to the literature, the Homeric similies are so ubiquitous that without them The Iliad would be a much shorter and entirely different story. This movement, or this flight, or this oration, Homer says, is familiar, something we have seen in our lives or can imagine. This incident of war is as terrifying as a suddenly flooded river or a night stampede of animals worried by a lion, as recognizable as a wheeling flight of birds, as commonplace as the threshing room chaff blown across the floor. This is war. It is sudden death, torment of unseen danger, waves of movement. It is a natural part of life[7].
Virtually no noble combatant dies in The Iliad without Homer recording his name and patrimony -- which is usually already known to his opponent[8]. In a tale of heroes, of course, this is to be expected in some part. Great protagonists must kill great antagonists, and specificity is the key to verisimilitude. But if that sort of verisimilitude were the single objective, it would be overdone here. Scores of men appear only to have their deaths recorded at the hands of a famous character, often with no remark about their own prowess or valor. But they are most often given names, a father, and a place of birth, without which they would still be the faceless cannon fodder of every war, no names, no past, of no significance except they died.
War must be dismally anonymous for the soldier about to die. Men who bear arms surely feel the need to be remembered, and I sense that need was also important for Homer. The Iliad will often leave a trace of regret in anonymous death, though never enough to impede the story. The destruction of Sarpedon, for example, though hardly anonymous, is an incident of a noble Trojan guest whose sense of honor and nobility compels him to fight on that side, though his country’s stake in the outcome is minimal. If you wish to draw a lesson, draw it, but the war moves on and Sarpedon is both noble and dead.
Honor. If Sarpedon illustrates the utmost in what would be expected of a royal Greek guest, Hektor (“shepherd of the people”) is the beau ideal of a man. The generals and heroes were obviously expected to be on the front lines and Hektor is obsessed by this. He will not play defense, though Troy was certainly built for that, but instead leads his troops outside the walls with little objective except his own sense of duty and the possible burning of the Greek ships. Strategy and tactics play little part for him or anyone else save Polydoros, and the success or failure of one outstanding man is most often the reason for whether the day can be counted a good one.
In ancient war, perhaps this convention was uncontroversial, but it nevertheless underscores the remarkable spectacle of Achilles, the greatest hero, spitefully withdrawing from combat for what seems to be a trivial quarrel. Achilles doesn’t even have the medieval excuse of chivalric love, since the dispute is only about his personal status. He has been denigrated by Agamemnon who has claimed as his own Achilles’s captive girl once he himself had been obliged to surrender his own woman for reasons of state.
Fate. Not that Homer was arguing the status of women in a benighted world. This is a war story through and through: many things are accepted, including the field marshal’s right to claim the spoils of war even from his best general. But as Homer portrays it, the incident – which begins the poem -- has thrown everyone, including the gods, into a heightened state of confusion. When I say “heightened,” I mean that throughout the story it is tacitly and occasionally specifically understood that Troy is fated lose, mainly as the natural consequence of the terrible ferocity of this unnatural warrior and demigod. And so when Achilles withdraws to sulk over this supposed insult, it upsets the predestined course of things[9].
And so for three quarters of the poem, the war goes on without the Achaeans’ preeminent hero. This gives each of the episodes its own poignancy, because Achilles’s sense of honor, so unlike what we see in Hektor, is also nevertheless balanced against the knowledge that the Greeks will win, Hektor will be killed, Troy will be sacked, families will die. And when a moment of illusory hope arises – perhaps Menelaos and Paris will solve the entire dispute in single combat -- it is chilling that Athena and Apollo, the divine sister and brother who have taken opposite sides,
. . . . assuming the likeness of birds, of vultures, settled
Aloft the great oak tree of their father Zeus of the aegis,
Taking their ease and watching these men . . . .
I felt the same grim sadness when the Trojans, elated after a successful day driving the Greeks back to their ships, light their campfires fires at Hektor’s bidding. In a mirror image of Henry V’s St. Crispian’s speech, the Trojan leader foresees Greeks retreating home to show their wounds as an emblem of their defeat. Then Hektor orders
“… ‘let the heralds Zeus loves give orders about the city
For the boys who are in their first youth and the grey-browed elders
To take stations on the god-founded bastions that circle the city;
And as for the women, have our wives, each one in her own house,
kindle a great fire; . . . .
For in good hope I pray to Zeus and the other immortals that we may drive from our place these dogs’ . . . .
So Hektor spoke among them, and the Trojans shouted approval. . . .
So with hearts made high these sat night-long by the outworks
Of battle, and their watchfires blazed numerous about them. . . . .
A thousand fires were burning the in the plain, and beside each
One sat fifty men in the flare of the burning firelight.”
As a reader, imagining any battlefield has always proved a problem to me. The best military histories are inevitably furnished with maps, arrows, and primary colors. This version of The Iliad was not so equipped. We know the basics, of course: A beach crammed with black ships, a nearby river, and a dusty plain crawling with scavenging dogs, overlooked by a walled city with a massive gate. The ships are protected by a manmade wall and a broad ditch. Several ships have been hauled up as far as the plain,
“for wide as it was, the seashore was not big enough to make room
for all the ships and the people also were straitened; and therefore
they had hauled them up in depth, and filled the long edge
of the whole seacoast, all that the two capes compassed between them”
The city which “beetles” over the scene is “windy” Ilion with “wide ways,” but as readers we almost never go inside.
The Translation. It may be foolish for me to conclude on one more subject I know nothing about, but I have to say that I couldn’t help but be impressed with this translation by Richmond Lattimore. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are a dozen or so available versions of The Iliad and anything that has a publisher behind it probably has much to commend it. But it is a very long piece of work and to suggest, as Lattimore does, the original metre while keeping the go-ahead style of the poem must have been extremely difficult.
One thing that brought this home to me was entirely unexpected. Books 12 and 13 were largely missing from the paperback I was reading, a binding error, I think. So to bridge that gap I went to the Robert Graves translation which I also had on my shelf. Well, I had once upon a time read that Graves version in its entirety some years ago, and my chief memory – fortified by this episode -- is that he sees the entire tale as a huge satire, too devilishly clever to be read as a serious story.
I will not argue with Robert Graves, and perhaps after many more readings the bumptiousness of this grim story will suggest itself. But for now Lattimore’s approach makes far more sense to me. This tale did not come down to us through the eons because it was an inside joke. For the Greeks, if it was anything else, it was the essential part of their patrimony, a story which told them who they were, and with no sugar coating. This is no small achievement, and many lands have far less in their historical memory. And so if Lattimore can be faulted for occasionally having selected the wrong word or image, or decided not to make it explicit that Nestor is loquacious or Hera a minx, I would understand. But for having chosen the wrong tone or having been too studious about the details, the burden, I think, would have to be on the critic. For me, Richmond Lattimore’s translation is one of restraint and dignity.
ENDNOTES
On the battlefield, the gods go in disguises, even from each other. E.g. Athena joins Diomedes in an assault on Ares.
In battle, the gods are not even invincible (though one should always bet on the god). Athena drives Diomedes’s spear right into Ares’s belly. Even Aphrodite, at one point ventures into the fray and is wounded. She cannot die, but her indignation at the unexpected pain is comic.
FOOTNOTES
1. He has also taken a notable step away from anthropology to literature – surely an improvement.
2. But Achilles was also the great-grandson of Zeus, as he reminds Asteropaios before he kills him.
3. I once heard a lecturer describe Aeneas – he was speaking of The Aenead -- as one of literature’s more boring heroes. That would never be said of the murderous Achilles, who is a gigantic, awesome war machine.
4. The Trojans must defend, of course, but they know that for Menelaus it is a war of justice. For their part, they certainly do not fight for Paris for whom everyone, even Helen, seems to have varying degrees of contempt. Similarly the coalition of Greek armies are only present by virtue of an ancient oath to the House of Atreus. And although it is not part of The Iliad, all Greeks would know that Odysseus had attempted to avoid service by feigning madness and that Achilles actually disguised himself as a woman for the same purpose.
5. The personification of war, Ares, is however a different matter. He does not appear as often as his fellow gods and surprisingly his influence is limited. His sister Athena is particularly dismissive of him as a blood-encrusted meathead and Zeus himself holds him in little regard.
6. At least in some sources it was an arrow shot by Paris, of all mean soldiers, which felled Achilles. The Iliad foreshadows this when from an ambush Paris inflicts a similarly insignificant injury to the foot of Diomedes, who sneers at him for inflicting such a painful but petty wound.
7. If you’re interested in glimpses of daily life, the similies can also be illuminating. The soldiers fight over Patroklos’s body
“[a]s when a man gives the hide of a great ox, a bullock,
Drenched first in deep fat, to all his people to stretch out;
The people take it from him and stand in a circle about it
And pull, and presently the moisture goes and the fat sinks
In with so many pulling, and the bull’s hide is stretched out level.”
8. Not always, though. When Glaucon meets Diomedes in battle he takes about 65 lines to introduce himself and give his genealogy. Diomedes takes another 20 lines to respond.
9. But the anger of Achilles must not be dismissed as simply juvenile. After all, it was the argument over a girl which provoked the Trojan War in the first place, a point which Achilles makes to Odysseus. That particular scene, by the way, I have persuaded myself was the inspiration for a portion of Shakespeare’s trial scene in The Merchant of Venice. Odysseus delivers Agamemnon’s message that if Achilles returns to the battlefield he will not only get Briseus back but he will be also rewarded with ten talents of gold, seven citadels, twelve race horses, seven accomplished slave women, the spoils of Troy, etc., etc. Achilles responds:
“He cheated me and he did me hurt. . . . Not if he gave me ten times as much, and twenty times over as he possesses now, not if more should come to him from elsewhere, . . . . not even so would Agamemnon have his way with my spirit until he had made good to me all this heartrending insolence.”
Homer, The Odyssey
Once a storyteller knows what he intends to say and why, then he must decide how to tell his tale. His tools – particularly chronology, point of view, and incident-- are actually more than tools: they eventually become co-editors. Each one, taken up, will have a profound effect on the final result.
Once a storyteller knows what he intends to say and why, then he must decide how to tell his tale. His tools – particularly chronology, point of view, and incident-- are actually more than tools: they eventually become co-editors. Each one, taken up, will have a profound effect on the final result.
Since this is not headline news, it should not have surprised me to find that these elements had obviously been considered by the poet who composed The Odyssey. I have read The Odyssey several times over the decades, but only on my most recent effort did it first strike me (reinforcing my belief in the value of re-reading a great book) that because these choices are vital, they are also ancient.
The Odyssey tells the interrelated tales of three people – Odysseus, his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachus. Their family story deliberately recalls the far more unsettling events of the House of Atreus -- Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra, and their son Orestes. Furthermore, because the stories of Odysseus's family members necessarily overlap in time, they also inevitably interfere with both the author's as well as the reader's natural instinct for chronology, not to mention the demands of the narrative voice which the poet has chosen. The opening lines of the poem alert us that we will be obliged to navigate these choices – as well as the intervention of fate or chance, by which I mean of the gods, particularly Athena and Poseidon.
The Background. Every reader knows that Odysseus has gone missing since the end of the Trojan War. The war itself had lasted 10 years and another 10 have now passed without any word. This infinitely clever and indispensable warrior has not simply failed to return home to Ithaca with his troops; he seems to have fallen off the edge of the Earth. There have been no reports even of his death.
Perhaps this was to be expected. Ithaca was at the far western reaches of Greece. I imagine that a trip to Ithaca from Troy was comparable to one "around the horn" in the early 19th[1]. Indeed apart from Odysseus himself there does not appear to have been much to commend Ithaca. At one point Telemachus remarks, Century. Greeks of that time must have seen Ithaca as just a rude outpost on the edges of the wilderness
"At home we have no level runs or meadows,
But highland, goat land . . . .
Grasses and pasture land are hard to come by
Upon the islands tilted in the sea,
And Ithaca is the island of them all."[2]
The poem begins by solving part of the mystery of the hero's disappearance within the first 20 lines: but for Odysseus himself, his entire contingent is dead. Not only that, they died because of their own foolishness. Having cast themselves for succor on the island of the lord of the sun, they devoured his cattle and were predictably destroyed. One question is thus immediately answered, and more importantly, a thematic warning has been delivered. There are accepted rules among civilized people relating to guests and hosts. A violation is of utmost gravity; to Odysseus's men of Ithaca it meant death.
Penelope. During Odysseus's 20-year absence, Penelope has never remarried and never ceased to trust in the return of her extraordinary husband even though when he left for Troy, he had warned her that his return was very doubtful.
"Here then you must attend to everything.
My parents in our house will be a care for you
As they are now, or more, when I am gone.
Wait for the beard to darken our boy's cheek;
then marry whom you will, and move away."
She has never considered this. Within the first 20 lines of The Odyssey Penelope's confidence and patience – in fact her resolve to wait for her lord's return – is contrasted with the House of Atreus. King Agamemnon returned home in regular course, we are expressly reminded, and was promptly murdered by Clytemnestra and her paramour.
Penelope has no paramour. But for three years she has become besieged by suitors whom she stoically endures with the utmost Greek comity. These coarse young men have invited themselves to live at her court and, long past welcome, they are conspicuously eating up her wealth with every meal and seducing her handmaidens to pass the times[3]. Late in the poem Telemachus estimates that the number of suitors and their retainers exceeds 100, and it is not difficult to imagine their riotous behavior. They are the first iteration of Lear's knights.
Within the confines of appropriate feminine behavior, Penelope has kept them at bay using a stratagem worthy of her own missing husband: weaving (and nocturnally unraveling) a supposed funeral shroud for her aging father-in-law[4], and requiring its completion before she will select a husband. She appears to have succeeded at this ruse for a prolonged time[5]. But it is obvious that she is beaten down and she later even confesses to Odysseus (when he is still in disguise) that her own parents have urged her to marry and end the ordeal[6].
Telemachus. Telemachus would be about 20 years old -- in Greek warrior culture the age of a man and soldier. Physically, he obviously resembles Odysseus, but this young man, born of such admirable parents, seems an unformed boy, unsure of himself, revering a father he surely does not remember and whose death he cannot proclaim. (If he could proclaim it,that would seem to involve construction of a funeral mound and attendant obsequies, inappropriate under current circumstances.) Although technically "eligible" himself to be king if Odysseus's death were confirmed [7], Telemachus is intimidated by the raft of suitors who have come to court his mother, none of them, it would appear, more than a few years older than he. At least he realizes that he is an impediment to them and that if they chose, they could kill him. And when the suitors shamelessly urge Telemachus to end the uncertainty by simply compelling his mother to make a selection among them, he is at least wise enough to refuse and not incite the furies[8].
Taking up his cause, Athena in disguise urges Telemachus on to his own adventure. Thus he secretly slips away from Ithaca, travels to the Peloponnese, and visits first Nestor and then Menelaus, inquiring of each about his father's fate[9]. Both of these potentates treat him with exemplary Greek politesse -- quite in contrast to the fantastical encounters suffered by Odysseus, as we are soon to learn[10]. And yet, although they have stories of their own to tell, they cannot enlighten the young man about his father. For his part, Telemachus conducts himself with an innate dignity and filial piety and returns to Ithaca with a more fully rounded sense of his responsibilities[11].
Only much later do we learn that Telemachus had reached Sparta just after Odysseus had finally returned to Ithaca. The older man arrived home just as the other slipped away. Only when he is back on Ithaca and having encountered his father does Telemachus mature in the expected way. It happens on the night when the suitors are unable to manage Odysseus's old bow in a contest. Before the revelers have even made the attempt, the young man has taken the bow and is about to string it himself when he senses that his father, still in disguise, wishes him to give up the attempt. He does. (One hero at a time.)
"Blast and damn it! Must I be a milksop
All my life? Half-grown, all thumbs,
No strength or knack at arms, to defend myself
If someone picks a fight with me."
But Telemachus then supervises the suitors in their own failed attempts with the bow. This presents opportunity for the disguised Odysseus to seize the weapon himself and pass the proposed test of strength with the encouragement of the still-unknowing Penelope. Telemachus now steps forward and peremptorily banishes his mother before the feat is accomplished. "Tend your spindle," he tells her.
"Tend your loom. . . .
This question of the bow will be for men to settle,
Most of all for me. I am master here."
The Suitors. Although including some delegates from neighboring islands, in the main the suitors appear to be the sons of Ithacan grandees. Their entire situation is at least rowdy. In fact, they are more than merely presumptuous; they are obviously menacing the general population[12]. The direct application which they have recently pressed upon Penelope is culturally unconventional because none of them has bothered even to make formal application to her father for marriage. (Probably this was because Odysseus is not officially known to be dead, but there is also a suggestion that we are looking at a deplorable example of the coarseness of the modern Greek generation.) They are taking gross advantage of Penelope's traditional Greek hospitality and daring anyone to do anything about it. One of them, Leokritos, even suggests that if Odysseus were to return, they would simply kill him.
Furthermore, the suitors' behavior cannot only be attributed to Ithaca's western isolation. Even in Phaeacia[13], the uncharted non-Greek island where Odysseus is ultimately thrown up after his escape from Calypso and where he fears meeting savages, we learn that princess Nausicaa, still unmarried, has been courteously courted in acceptable fashion by that land's noblest young men.
Once Odysseus returns to Ithaca and the spotlight returns to the suitors, they become somewhat differentiated. Several – Antinoos, and Eurymachos in particular –take the lead as spokesmen and tormentors of the disguised Odysseus. Another, Leodes, hangs back and seems embarrassed by the boldness of the others.
Odysseus's Chronology. Odysseus is not to be seen as a favored hero. True, the poet routinely describes him as a "great mariner" and "great tactician," but he is doomed to a life of toil. Even his protectress Athena sees him more as an admirable and formidable pet – something like a sentient tiger -- than a human being. She seems most contented when he is on display against great odds. He never disappoints her.
Only about a quarter of The Odyssey is taken up with the hero's adventures between his departure from Troy and his landing in Phaeacia. In the order that he endured them (and leaving out the Wandering Rocks, which is not an adventure at all), the adventures occurred as follows:
1. Troy
2. Cicones
3. The Lotus Eaters
4. Cyclops
5. Aeolus
6. The Lestrygonians
7. Circe
8. Hades
9. Sirens
10. Scylla and Charybdis
11. Thrinacia (Sun God's Island)
12. Ogygia (Calypso's island)
13. Phaeacians
Most of these encounters are actually quite brief and furthermore we do not read of them in that chronological order. In fact, in the poem's opening lines we overhear the gods discussing Odysseus's current situation which is located toward the end of that list -- i.e. that as the only survivor of the sun god's ire, he is now living on a remote island as a captive of Calypso. Then looking backward we also learn that his situation has been caused by the wrath of Poseidon, because at some earlier time Odysseus seems to have blinded a cyclops named Polyphemos.
The facts are not elaborated at this point. The Homeric audience may already have been familiar with these earlier elements of the story, of course. If not, however, having started at this juncture, i.e. toward the end of the hero's ordeal, the poet gives himself the opportunity to entertain that audience with a non-linear narrative. Moreover, even if the early story was strictly born of Homer's imagination, proceeding in this way puts it in the category of an adventure tale, leaving still undecided the fates of Telemachus and Penelope.
In any event, of these episodes the one which is first described in The Odyssey is also the longest of the hero's ordeals (if we wish to call it that) as love prisoner of Calypso[14]. And even that passes over his apparent eight-year captivity. As readers, we only arrive as the goddess is given the word from Olympus to free him. Once this is done, then comes his harrowing adventure alone on the sea, ending in his boat being lost in a storm and the man swimming for his life before being roughly thrown up on Phaeacia. Only after a day and night's interlude as an unnamed stranger on this island is Odysseus obliged to identify himself to King Alcinoos and to relate his adventures in chronological order – and in the past tense[15].
His adventures as a traveler have ended at Phaeacia. After two or three days, his mariner hosts deliver him home, depositing him on a deserted Ithacan beach while he is lost in sleep. By itself, this could have been a sweet and just conclusion[16].
Remarks on the Adventures. Episodic stories of Greek heroes obviously did not begin with Odysseus. At various points The Odyssey itself makes references to both Jason[17] and to Heracles. But surely The Odyssey is different in that the hero's mythical-seeming adventures in the western sea are only a small part of the epic. Moreover, as I have said, two of the 13 incidents I have listed above – Circe and Calypso -- cover nine of the 10 years dealt with by the poem. The others are described most briefly.
The encounter with the Cicones, for example, is dealt with in a short 30 lines of the poem. I take it seriously, however, because it puts Odysseus in a bad light, particularly given the theme of what should be the guest-host relationship among civilized people. In short, Odysseus and his men quite obviously decided on some outright piracy a day or two after leaving Troy. There is nothing fantastical about this incident. They took an established community by surprise, plundered its homes, raped the women, got drunk, and ultimately were lucky to escape with their lives. It is decidedly unheroic.
The next encounter – with the Lotus eaters – is even shorter, about 20 lines. In fact Odysseus does not even bother to describe the Lotus eaters themselves except to report that they offered no challenge. He only allows that the "honeyed" lotus of the region was to be avoided, because eating it induced a torpor. And so leaving this land to Tennyson, Odysseus then traveled on with his men to the far more challenging adventure of the Cyclopes, a story told at length and in detail. It is the longest of the adventures in the Odyssey save for the climax back in Ithaca.
More than any other beings encountered by Odysseus, the cyclopes least resemble civilized men[18]. They are the opposite of what it means to be Greek. They lack the most fundamental social mores.
"[T]hey have no muster and no meeting,
No consultation or old tribal ways,
But each one dwells in his own mountain cave
Dealing out rough justice to wife and child,
Indifferent to what the others do."
Odysseus is also disdainful about their agricultural ignorance and obvious indifference to improving their situation in an otherwise congenial land.
His ordeal with Polyphemos lasts several days during which Odysseus and some of his men are held prisoner in the beast's cave. Although the monster rips several of them apart and eats them in sight of the others, Odysseus tells the story almost matter-of-factly, working his way to the moment when he shows own cleverness in engineering the escape. The devoured men are unnamed – as are those who later suffer a similar death at the hands of the Lestrigonians, another brief tale.
Being one of Odysseus's crew members was obviously a thankless as well as dangerous job. Only two of them are ever given personalities: first Elpenor, a drunken half-wit who accidentally kills himself when he falls off a roof, and the other a cautious sub-captain named Eurylokos, who is actually the hero's kinsman. Eurylokos is first mentioned when he leads an expedition to Circe's island home, where he prudently escapes the fate of his comrades whom she has turned into swine. After reporting the calamity to Odysseus, Eurylokos chides the remaining crew for following the leader back to the witch's home:
"Is it a devil's work
You long for? Will you go to Circe's hall?
Swine, wolves, and lions she will make us all . . . .
Remember those the Cyclops held, remember
Shipmates who made that visit with Odysseus!
The daring man! They died for his foolishness!"
But Odysseus subdues Circe with the advice of Hermes, and a year with her having passed[19], she then sends him and his men to the ends of the world by the ocean sea where he must encounter the shades of Hades.
This lengthy episode begins with the hero meeting a blind man, the dead sage Tiresias, who predicts that Odysseus will finally die "a seaborne death soft as the hand of mist" when he is finally "wearied out with rich old age, your country folk in blessed peace around you." He also meets and speaks with Achilles (see below) and others, before returning to Circe who again guides him on this way.
In the second encounter with Circe the story is given somewhat in advance. Circe offers a vivid description of what is to come: floating rocks, the dangers of sailing by the sirens and past Scylla and Charybdis, and what must be avoided when reaching Thrinacia, the Island of the Sun. During this narration, she must pause to chide Odysseus. He has interrupted to ask for advice on how to slay these enemies. His mission, she points out with some asperity, should be to pass on to safety.
"Must you have battle in your heart forever?
The bloody toil of combat? Old contender,
Will you not yield to the immortal gods?"[20]
But of course she does give the famous advice about lashing himself to the mast while sailing past the sirens and hewing to Scylla's shore rather than risk complete destruction from Charybdis. Less successful, as we already know, will be her counsel not to transgress the hospitality of the sun god.
These descriptions come to pass almost immediately. (The sirens' enticing song – fewer than 30 lines and only heard by Odysseus, of course – turns out to be a promise that they will tell the story of the Trojan War, a triumph Odysseus is always happy to relive.) As the mariners approach Scylla, Odysseus, a natural leader, walks the length of his ship personally encouraging each terrified rower. But to no effect. When they gaze across the water at Charybdis, whom they have labored to avoid, Scylla suddenly strikes from her side of the strait and devours six men. Odysseus says that their shrieking caused more pity in him than any he had yet suffered – as though he were a man for whom pity is a prominent characteristic.
We already know that the entire crew of Odysseus will never escape from Thrinacia, even having been forewarned of the consequences if they kill the cattle on the sun god's island. If we are meant to be judgmental, however, it is very difficult. They have obviously exhausted their supplies and are starving. But our empathy is hardly strained. Homer gives these anonymous men only a few more lines of the poem, just enough to put out to sea following the crime where Zeus then destroys them in a hellish storm, only Odysseus surviving to be thrown up on Calypso's island.
Do we believe any of these stories? After all, they are chiefly told by Odysseus himself to the Phaeacians (and us), and we know that the old rascal is anything but trustworthy. We have also repeatedly seen that unknown travelers will routinely dissemble to new hosts to earn their trust and a safe night's sleep – an observation underlined again back in Ithaca when Odysseus (in disguise) spins a tale to his own swineherd about his life as a captive in Egypt for seven years, followed by another year as a Phonecian slave. For verisimilitude he even throws in a rumor he has heard about himself, the hero of Ithaca.
Filling Out The Iliad. Incidents which are not told in the Iliad are allocated as needed in various places of the Odyssey. Scholars say that both The Iliad and The Odyssey are dated well after the Trojan War -- probably hundreds of years later. In that period, there must have been countless variations of the story. Assuming that Homer was a real person, therefore, it is easy also to assume that The Iliad predates The Odyssey, because the latter supplements so much of what the former has not told us[21].
First, we learn from Nestor's rambling tale to Telemachus that Poseidon was not the only god whose enmity was at work in the aftermath. Athena herself was so enraged against the House of Atreus that the dissention she stirred up turned what should have been the victorious armies' triumphant departure into a disorganized withdrawal plagued with recrimination. For example, and more significant for the current story, Odysseus, whose fleet initially departed with Nestor's, seems to have turned back to join Agamemnon while Nestor and Menelaus continued on. This is why Nestor could not help Telemachus learn the later fate of Odysseus and therefore why Telemachus and Peisistratos (Nestor's son) ventured north to Lacedaemon to learn more from Menelaus[22].
When they arrive there, Helen herself first picks up to story -- although since it is Helen, her self-serving and vapid version must be regarded with suspicion. During the siege, she tells Telemachus, Odysseus once slipped into Troy on a reconnaissance mission disguised as a beggar. Only she recognized him, she says, and, presumably for old time's sake, aided his escape. Here Menelaus feels compelled to interrupt his wife, reminding her that it was also she who, when the wooden horse was later drawn in to the city, imitated the voices of the wives of the principal Greek soldiers in case they were somehow hidden inside, in the hope that they might betray themselves. It almost worked; but Odysseus, he adds, figured out the ruse and stifled those who would have given away the game.
Menelaus then continues the story – and to his own credit. On departing Troy (presumably with Helen) he was blown through the eastern Mediterranean to several distant ports. They were eventually stranded on an island where he captured the god Proteus whom he forced to reveal the way back home. (Menelaus is clever enough, but this adventure is pale beside what we later learn of Odysseus in the western Mediterranean.) In the course of his compelled testimony, Proteus also disclosed to Menelaus both the death of "Little" Ajax (by Poseidon, naturally) and Odysseus's current imprisonment by Calypso, his penultimate trial. Hearing this, Telemachus now has something concrete to go on.
And yet we now suddenly move well off the timeline. This is where the poet tells us that the gods have ordered Calypso to release Odysseus from her island, Odysseus's penultimate stop on his adventures. Homer now uses the past tense to tell his hero's departure from this goddess, his turbulent voyage and shipwreck, his rough landing on Phaeacia, and his unexpectedly cordial discovery and welcome by Nausicaa. The following evening, at the welcoming feast prepared by King Alcinoos, Demodokos, another blind poet, sings Odysseus's own Trojan story back to him. Of course it makes him weep: An old general, admiral, and raider who had been at the center of Greece's defining, colossal story must now listen to it in the guise of an unnamed shipwreck indebted to the kindness of strangers. With emotion, he says to the singer, "You shared it, one would say, or heard it all." He insists on hearing again about the wooden horse.
And so Odysseus finally yields and tells his entire history to the Phaeacians. At last it comes out chronologically and in the past tense. Of course this also means it occurs in The Odyssey quite a bit before he comes to his visit to Hades. When Odysseus does come to that part of his tale, Homer again chooses to bring us additional information about the Trojan War. He includes, for example, Odysseus's report that he actually left the battlefield when Achilles had been killed to bring the dead demigod's son Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) to Troy where he then distinguished himself as a warrior worthy of his father.
Reconquest of Ithaca. The final third of The Odyssey describes the reunion of Odysseus with his wife and son on Ithaca, the killing of the suitors, and the probable reestablishment of the hero's dominion of his realm. This portion, related in the third person, puts us back in the hands of the poet. And yet upon coming to the portions which relate the assistance provided by the faithful swineherd Eumaios, the poet pauses several times for an unfamiliar apostrophe -- "O my swineherd!" as though the storyteller is really Odysseus himself. And so who is Homer, after all?
If that is to be imponderable, at least we learn that Eumaios, now an old man, when a toddler had actually been purchased as a slave by Laertes. With something like nostalgia, he relates his family history to the disguised Odysseus – who must have already known some of it – giving a bitter tale of what life must have been in the epoch when Homer wrote. His mother, a Phoenician from Sidon, had been kidnapped and sold to an island king west of Ithaca where the boy was born. Two or three years later, Phoenician sailors who had come to the island to trade, persuaded the woman to escape with them, taking with her her child (and a few treasures from the palace). But she died at sea a few days later and the sailors then sold the boy to Laertes when they put in at Ithaca.
But for its compelling detail, I don't know why this story appears. It is not really a theme of The Odyssey. Time and again we have glimpsed the Greek scorn for -- or at least indifference to -- pity. Of course, pity was a recognizable and powerful emotion. Several times in Homer a person (or even a god) will kneel in abject defeat and cling in supplication to the legs of the one who has the advantage of him, occasionally with success. And yet pity plays almost no role in this ancient tale of fate and strength.
Once back in Ithaca, for example, the disguised Odysseus recognizes the worth of the suitor Amphinomos, who briefly befriends him while he is still unknown. Nevertheless, this young nobleman is acting a pre-ordained part which will presently end in his death at the hands of Telemachus as part of the culminating massacre. When the time arrives, Odysseus, his son, and two devoted slaves kill each suitor in a spasm of violence right in the palace which they have desecrated. From a defiled place of licentiousness, the palace becomes a charnel house, running blood. The job complete, every collaborating slave girl then is then compelled to clean up the mess, following which Odysseus coolly orders their summary execution too.
The Reunion. Only now does the husband reveal himself to his wife. In the upper reaches of the compound, Penelope has slept throughout the slaughter, unaware of what has happened and still ignorant of Odysseus's disguise as a vagrant beggarman. Her nurse (who had previously recognized him) now bursts into her chamber, tells her all, and carries her to her husband. Confused but entirely self-possessed, the queen is both regal and skeptical. Her appearance in the hall becomes a dramatic, tense, and silent tableau:
"Crossing the doorsill she sat down at once
In firelight, against the nearest wall,
across the room from the lord Odysseus.
There
leaning against a pillar, sat the man
and never lifted up his eyes, but only waited
for what his wife would say when she had seen him.
And she, for a long time, sat deathly still . . . ."
Conclusion. This is not the end, although it should be. In fact, the end is unfinished.
Those who believe that Homer himself is a myth also seem to believe that The Odyssey had many contributors from the oral tradition – bards who over the years would add portions to the main body, extending and prolonging the story for their own purposes. This could be plausible. Traditionally the reunion scene I just recounted, for instance, would introduce the expected denouement. That it does not is a flaw and it closes the story on an unsatisfying note.
Because instead, when the morning dawns, the people of Ithaca are not pleased to hear of the death of so many of their young men. Rumors of a revolt are afoot, And yet Odysseus and Telemachus have left Penelope in this uncertain and volatile environment to visit Laertes at his distant upcountry farm (once again opening the conversation as though the hero were simply a foreign traveler, only giving up the pretence when the old man is about to collapse). By all evidence, another adventure is about to commence, and Tiresias's comforting prediction of this turbulent man's soft seaborne death is long forgotten.
ENDNOTES
1. This probably also accounts for the rough behavior of the suitors
2. Much later Athena makes a similar observation: "No one would use this ground for training horses, it is too broken, has no breadth of meadow." (But she is speaking to Odysseus, and so her remarks are leavened with genuine nostalgia; as usual he responds with a tall tale, for she is in disguise.) And in fairness I must also note that in the concluding portions of the epic the swineherd seems to feel that Ithaca is as rich as the richest kingdoms on the mainland – and he also points out that every traveler will have a questionable tale to tell if it will get him lodging for an evening
3. By itself, paying suit to Penelope does not seem to have been out of order; the offense seems to be pressing the point to the disadvantage of the marriage object
4. The shroud would appear to be another inviolable custom
5. She also embarrasses the suitors to give her gifts.
6. Penelope is also a conventional mother, terrified when her only child Telemachus surreptitiously leaves Ithaca in search of news about his father.
7. It appears from the text that "eligibility" does not amount to a certainty. Moreover, Odysseus's father Laertes is himself still alive living in the countryside. Surely he was not deposed, for he is obviously revered. Why is he not now the recognized ruler in his son's absence?
8. One of many references to the House of Atreus.
9. On reaching Pylos, Telemachus finds Nestor and his subjects about to offer a huge sacrifice to Poseidon, his father's tormentor. Of course, he doesn't know that and joins in the ceremony -- along with Athena (disguised as Mentor).
10. It seems to be outré for a host to ask information about a traveler's identity before an appropriate passage of time. Much later, Odysseus and the Phaeacian king Alcinoos do not approach the subject even on the day after their first meeting. Odysseus only gives the first hint of who he is under the later pressure of athletic games.
11. Homer does not stress the adventure of Telemachus's two-day overland chariot trip from Pylos to Menelaus, accompanied only by Nestor's son Peisistratus who is of his age – but imagination tells us that there surely would have been something exciting about this.
12. Toward the beginning of the poem, Mentor, the old man whom Odysseus had charged in his absence to guard his house, chides the Ithacan community for its timidity in the face of the suitors.
13. I think scholars have agreed that it is modern Corfu.
14. His second-longest episode is an entire year on Circe's island, where she too took him as a lover.
15. I have noted that in The Odyssey (and perhaps Greece of this time) it is rare for a traveler to be candid about his history. Later, while still in disguise, Odysseus even deflects Penelope's inquiries about his identity, finally being reduced to telling her that he is Aithon, the second son of Deukalion of Crete.
16. Did Shakespeare, who had wonderful things to say about sleep, ever mention this passage?
17. Odysseus's father Laertes had been an Argonaut.
18. In Fitzgerald's translation, Polyphemos is a "caveman.
19. Throughout The Odyssey, there is a suggestion that the good guest never takes his leave until the civilized host permits it – while simultaneously showering the traveler with gifts.
20. Good advice for any soldier. There is a time when it is prudent to avoid combat.
21. In fact the first line of The Odyssey tells us, though we hardly need to be told, that Troy did eventually fall to the Greeks.
22. In his recollections to Telemachus, Nestor did not even mention Achilles whose death is only described at the very end of The Odyssey. And yet on entering Hades, the shades of the suitors overhear Agamemnon tell how only Nestor had been able to inspirit the Achaeans against giving up the fight when they learned of the hero's death. This passage also describes the 17 days and nights of mourning preceding Achilles's death and great funeral pyre.
The inventive opening of this novel has the main character – a nouveau tycoon in 1870s Boston – being interviewed for a mini-biography by a magazine reporter. Although not quite so clever as the fortune teller incident in The Heart of the Matter or the tarot card reader of A Dance to the Music of Time, it was a non-artificial method of giving background to the story while simultaneously introducing the reader to the “backstory” of the main character. Indeed, although I chose to read this novel almost entirely as an act of duty because I thought of it as an artifact from mid-American literature, it continued to surprise me with its subtlety, notwithstanding a fairly old-fashioned, but all-American plot.
In the earlier part of the 19th Century, Silas Lapham’s late father had fortuitously discovered a considerable mineral paint deposit on the family’s scrub farm in northern Vermont. Although the father had died without being able to exploit the find, his adult son Silas, with filial devotion, has done so. Following his equally dutiful service in the Civil War (he is called the “Colonel” by his family), Silas has set up the company in Boston and become wealthier than most of the city’s original Brahmin stock, selling paint, it appears, to half the world. And yet he and his wife, live with no ostentation in a somewhat faded Boston neighborhood with their two daughters. He is a stolid, reliable, and decent merchant, with a good deal of money.
Since the time frame is about the same as that in Anna Karenina, I found myself thinking about that novel’s passing uses of genre settings, particularly the vivid depiction of the skating party early in the novel. Here the picturesque scene (which Howells included to illustrate a facet of his main character’s personality and not for the reason I cite it) is a snowy suburban street clogged with sleigh traffic during what appears to be the evening commute hour.
"From the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which thousands of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines, between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. Here and there a burly mounted policeman . . . jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the course, and keeping it all under the eye of the law. . . . [Lapham’s] mare . . . shot to the end of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to interfere with trotting like that.”
Henry James would obviously do much more than Howells with the inevitable encounter of the Lapham’s beautiful younger daughter, Irene, with Tom Corey, scion of an ancient Boston family, but Howells was no amateur in this business. For one thing, he is clear that the girl is no intellect and he makes it equally obvious that the young man – vaguely called “sweet” by all who meet him – is himself little more than honest and respectable. For that matter, Tom’s aristocratic parents are also no stereotypes. In particular, his father is a manque artist and genteel slacker, though well-seasoned in the Boston thing. A dinner party at the Corey home which the Laphams nervously agree to accept provides the environment in which to draw out the contrasts between the two families – as well as to reveal the fact that Tom is actually in love with the other Lapham daughter.
This would be fertile ground for television comedy, but Howells is still at work on his plot and so the humor is no more than latent. Without enumerating the various details of this particular dinner episode, I was reminded that when an author has his own characters speak of novels it is always worthwhile to pay attention: it’s both a window on the character and a mirror on the author himself. Here, for example, the conversation twice turns to contemporary fiction, giving one character the opportunity to comment disapprovingly on centering any novel on the unfolding of a love story between two lovely but callow youths. Hence this novel is not "The Rise of Irene Lapham," and for that matter it is also worthwhile reflecting that the rise of her father has already been achieved before the first word has been read. But the title itself bears contemplation. It could be ironic, since the story line actually tells us of the ruin of Silas’s fortune. I am more inclined to think, however, that it was intended just as it sounds, because in the unfolding tale of financial catastrophe, although the main character is badly beaten down by events and people, his own character emerges stronger. He does rise, even as he falls.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days — Decades ago when I was reading Brideshead Revisited I came across a passage which seemed to be Waugh's summary of what was really going on in the novel. I wanted to remember that I had discovered it and maybe had got the point.
It was then that I began keeping these notes and selected my memento mori, "The Grim Reaper Waits by the Library Door." That was because it had become immediately obvious that time was my enemy. This would be an adult project, undertaken pretty late in my life. I was never going to understand — much less finish — the significant books. So at most I wanted a record of how I had tried, how far I had got. Vaguely, the project was to memorialize a triumphant moment or two when I felt I had seen what the author intended. More specifically, the idea was to read the books that had passed the test of time — the "classics." Why fret over that which time had relegated to the second rate when there was so much of supposed value that I hadn't touched?
Well, time has not entirely been on the side of quality. Some books are known for other reasons. Not long ago, for example, I read Uncle Tom's Cabin. I had no great expectations, but the novel had value and I am not sorry for having made the effort. It brought me in contact with earlier literary conventions, an ardent sense of conviction, and — unexpectedly — a case for Methodism which I had only previously seen in George Eliot. With Tom Brown's School Days I looked forward to nothing more, and have not been disappointed.
To begin, it is evocative prose — not poetic really, not elevated — but homely and nostalgic and with such perfect detail that you can almost smell the pastures and roads of old pre-industrial England. And so, as with the best nostalgia, the writing also notes the old with a certain wistfulness that those things that seem to have evaporated in favor of new things, like the local hill with a local name, now excavated and modified to accommodate an exciting new railroad. The book begins in this tone with just a touch of Gray's Elegy, and no anger.
Schooldays is related by an intelligent, observant narrator of late middle age. He is obviously educated as well as he needs to be, though born in "the vale" in the rural west country of England, probably in the earlier decades of the 19th Century. (The novel was published in 1857.) He is wisely sympathetic to the contemporary scene that he has chosen to describe, but he shares his observations with a keen, wistful memory of the customs from which that scene has evolved. In this he differs from Dickens, Hardy, and even Eliot in tone, each of whom will describe a rustic scene, but with an eye always on the plot. Schooldays is not much for symbols — or for plot, as far as that goes.
Every now and then our narrator becomes a bit didactic. In speaking of Tom's days at Rugby School, he offers this diffident observation:
"The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. . . . Were I a private schoolmaster, I should say, let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest."
And then we have the description of the football match of the youngsters upon Tom's arrival:
"[T]hen follows rush upon rush, and scrimmage upon scrimmage, the ball now driven through into the Schoolhouse quarters, and now into the School goal . . . . You say you don't see much in it all; nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball, which seems to excite them all to a great fury, as a red rag does a bull. My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be men and the balls iron . . . .
". . . . This is worth living for; the whole sum of school-boy existence gathered up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a half-hour worth a year of common life."
On weekend mornings in this 21st Century, I walk past the organized soccer games of the neighborhood pre-teen children in our nearby sports park. It is exactly the same, the only difference being the sideline gathering of parents, preschool siblings, and end of game snacks.
I am reluctant to offer too much quotation, but still on the day of arrival, as Tom's companion eagerly points out to him certain boys and locations of local lore, the author Hughes also submits a homely but familiar observation which has been made so many times in other ways:
"It will be the same with you . . . . Two or three years more or less, and then the steadily advancing, blessed wave will pass over your names as it has passed over ours. Nevertheless play your games and do your work manfully — see only that that be done, and let the remembrance take care of itself."
Tom Brown's Schooldays is now an artifact of a different time. As an older person now myself, I am not embarrassed to say that it also comes to us from a better time, a time when it was not naïve or outre to have a sense of what is proper and upright. This is not merely to say that young people were then expected to develop an internal sense of discipline. They were also expected to submit to an external discipline if they fell short in their development — hence the brief but critical passages which refer periodically and reverentially to Dr. Thomas Arnold the great Rugby headmaster during the time in question.
The novel does not hector, but it is aimed at the boys now at Rugby whose better angels the author Hughes is determined to summon. In the hero, Tom Brown there is an implicit sense of mid-Victorian English rectitude and obligation. He will soon grow into a stout fellow, but one not entirely congruent with either the refractory tom Sawyer or a feral nobility of Huckleberry Finn. the three of them are cousins, of course, yet I fear that Tom Brown is likely to die in the Crimea, as surely as Tom and Huck will suffer the agony of Shiloh or the Wilderness.
The novel does not hector, but it is aimed at the boys now at Rugby whose better angels the author Hughes is determined to summon. In the hero, Tom Brown there is an implicit sense of mid-Victorian English rectitude and obligation. He will soon grow into a stout fellow, but one not entirely congruent with either the refractory tom Sawyer or a feral nobility of Huckleberry Finn. the three of them are cousins, of course, yet I fear that Tom Brown is likely to die in the Crimea, as surely as Tom and Huck will suffer the agony of Shiloh or the Wilderness.
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris –
First published in the early 1830s, this lurid tale of Paris in the 1480s is hardly a great novel, but it did capture my attention for long stretches. In the United States the book is known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, no doubt because of the vivid film of that name starring Charles Laughton. But that title does a disservice to the novel, because it appears to make the hunchback, Quasimodo, the main character, which he certainly is not in the book.
The story centers about Esmeralda, the Gypsy girl, who is loved in varying ways by three men: the bell-ringer Quasimodo, Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers, a self-centered soldier, and Claude Frollo, archdeacon of the cathedral. By far the most interesting character is Frollo, a tortured priest and alchemist who is probably in his late 30s (rather old in the 15th Century). It was he who years before the story begins had adopted the abandoned and hideously deformed infant Quasimodo and given him a chance to live when he would otherwise have certainly died. Frollo himself was an orphan and his first act of responsibility, also taken before the novel begins, was in respect to his much younger brother Jehan whose education and upbringing he arranged for when their parents died. And yet Frollo is cold as stone, seen by several of the characters actually to be the servant of the devil. It is certain that his love for Esmeralda is more a hellish obsession than any unrequited romantic passion. But this is why the character is so compelling. He is far too real (albeit in some puzzling Gallic way) to be considered metaphorical but not so recognizable as his much younger cousin, Javert, another obsessed soul from a later novel.
The same has to be said about another principal “character” in the book, the cathedral itself, which the author periodically anthropomorphizes. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that architecture, and Notre Dame in particular, was Hugo’s chief motivation in writing this book. Admittedly, he overdoes it in the same way that his digressions in Les Miserables can become distracting, but to my mind Hugo’s best writing, not subtle, is his setting of a scene. Here is what we get when first introduced to Quasimodo:
“We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose, that horse-shoe mouth, that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart; of those straggling teeth, with breeches here and there like the battlements of a fortress; of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole – that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. . . . His large head, all bristling with red hair, between his shoulders an enormous hump, to which he had a corresponding projection in front, a framework of thighs and legs so strangely gone astray that they could touch one another only at the knees, and when viewed in front looked like two pairs of sickles brought together at the handles, sprawling feet, monstrous hands . . . .”
Quasimodo lived in the cathedral like a snail in a magnificent shell. Not always seen, he could be glimpsed when ringing its bells. In ancient Egypt, Hugo says, he would have been taken for the temple god; “[t]he Middle Ages believed him to be its demon; he was in fact its soul.” Soon after describing the wretched bell ringer, Hugo ventures one of his sad reflections on the structure itself whose defilement, he says, has been more or less ceaseless since it was first erected -- and “fashion has done more mischief than revolutions.”
“It has audaciously fitted into the wounds of Gothic architecture its wretched gewgaws of a day, its marble ribbons, its metal pompons, a very leprosy of ovolos, volutes, and entournements, of draperies, garlands, and fringes, of stone flames, brazen clouds, fleshy Cupids, and chubby cherubim, which we find beginning to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and making it expire two centuries after, tortured and convulsed, in the boudoir of Madame Dubarry.”
And since it is essential to his plot (and close to his heart in any event), Hugo repeatedly gives us the flavor of the medieval city of Paris. Here is one intoxicating example:
“[L]ook at the sky through that surprising forest of spires, towers, and steees; . . . make its outline float in a wintry mist clinging to its innumerable chimneys; plunge it in deep night, and observe the fantastic play of the darkness and the lights in that gloomy labyrinth of buildings; cast upon it a ray of moonlight, showing it in glimmering vagueness, with its towers lifting their great heads from that foggy sea; or draw that dark veil aside, cast into shade the thousand sharp angles of its spires and its gables, and exhibit it all fantastically indented upon the glowing western sky at sunset . . . . [A]scend, on the morning of some great holiday . . . to some elevated point from which your eye can command the whole capital, and attend the awakening of the chimes. . . . At first you hear only scattered tinklings, going from church to church . . . . Then, all on a sudden, behold – for there are moments when the ear itself seems to see – behold, ascending at the same moment, from every steeple, a column of sound, as it were, a cloud of harmony . . . . [B]y degrees, as they expand, they mingle, unite, are lost in each other, and confounded in one magnificent concert. Then it is all one mass of sonorous vibrations, incessantly sent forth from the innumerable steeples, floating, undulating, bounding, and eddying, over the town and extending far beyond the horizon . . . .”
This goes on and on and on. Yes, it is too much; I have only suggested it slightly; but I never found it tedious. Like one of the minor characters in the book, Hugo simply has “moments of selfish, exclusive, and supreme enjoyment, in which the artist sees nothing in the world but his art.” Every descriptive passage, if unrelentingly detailed, is delivered robustly and enthusiastically by an author who had never heard the word “existentialism” uttered and who never read the rarified prose of The New Yorker.
And speaking of that magazine, I have no doubt that it must have published at one time or another some reflection on the thesis “Printing shall overthrow Architecture,” just the subject of one more lengthy but delightful digression in Hugo’s novel.
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