FICTION REVIEWS: 'U-Z'

Vergil, The Aeneid --

The problem with The Aeneid is that one really cannot read it without first having read The Iliad and The Odyssey. It may seem unfair to compare works written roughly 700 years apart, but the unfairness is mitigated by the obvious fact that Vergil invited the comparison. In any event, The Aeneid suffers by the association.

Justice Fleming, who says that this epic poem carries the aroma of Vergil's study, has it just about right. Homer is wild and savage, but Vergil is self-controlled and you can practically see him calculating his effects. As for the poet, Homer himself may be a myth like his characters; but Vergil is an historical personage. Most important, for all of its fantastic bulk, The Iliad in particular always seems to be a true story about a real war. But The Aeneid is a self-conscious making of a myth, containing obvious gestures to the Julian clan whose most conspicuous member was a contemporary of the poet.

The character Aeneas does not seem to me to be an identifiable person with individual characteristics like Homer's "wily Ulysses." Even Dr. Johnson confessed that for all its “wonderful things” — “the ships of the Trojans turned to sea-nymphs, the tree at Polydorus’s tomb dropping blood” — The Aeneid was never so interesting as The Odyssey. And yet for those who know Latin, The Aeneid is often considered perfection itself. It is poetry of the highest order, T.S. Eliot to Homer’s Whitman. If it is not read in Latin, I daresay it cannot be appreciated for its high qualities. Montaigne has a passage about Vergil and the lesser Latin writers which suggests something of what I have missed:

“For those worthy writers there was no need of keen and subtle conceits; their language is full and forcible, with natural and unfailing vigor . . . .There is nothing that signifies effort, nothing that drags; every part moves on at the same pace. Their writing is of a manly texture; they were not concerned about florid ornaments. It is not an effeminate eloquence and merely faultless: it is sinewy and solid, and does not so much please as it fills and entrances the mind, and entrances most the strongest minds. When I behold those noble modes of expression, so vivid, so profound, I do not say this is speaking rightly, I say it is thinking rightly. It is the vivacity of the imagination which exalts and inflates the words. It is the understanding that makes a man eloquent. To these, mere insight was one with language, and large conceptions with appropriate words.”

Thus although it was my high school English teacher who remarked that one cannot truly be civilized without having memorized some Shakespeare, it is to my Latin teacher that I am indebted for impressing on me these lines, which I will take to the grave:
Sate sanguine divum, Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno.

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop --

"Feather-footed through the ashy fen passes the questing vole." Does satire get better than this? Actually, it does. For foreign intrigue and satiric humor, Our Man In Havana is the ticket. As is common with Waugh, this little thing is piffle, with the usual nasty undercurrent.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence —

Taking Ethan Frome into account, I would say that Edith Wharton’s main concern as a novelist was less with high society as with the effect of custom and propriety on individual Americans in the 19th Century. Ethan Frome not only gave Wharton an opportunity to try out the theme in a milieu much distant from her customary world of American wealth, but also permitted her the freedom to develop the topic through starker, less cultured voices.

But in The Age of Innocence Wharton is illustrating her more familiar world of the very rich of New York society in “the Seventies.” As always, she is sympathetic to her characters (a quality always to be found among good authors), but never sacrifices her point. Among other things, this affection permits her the freedom of an occasional irony, the way a parent might make a wry observation about the dubious traits of a basically good child. Indeed, she calls upon irony so elegantly in the first pages of The Age of Innocence that we know immediately that wherever the story is to go, it will also be a commentary.

Since I do not write these reviews to be published, I feel free to stop when it pleases me just to quote a passage I like. And so before I was five pages into this novel, I was smiling over the opening scene in which the hero, Newland Archer – did Wharton and Henry James bid on the names of their characters? – comes in fashionably late to an opera sung by Christine Nilsson.

[A]n unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

But this novel does not deal with “the musical world,” it deals with the intersection of New York mores compared to those of the old world, represented in the person of Ellen Olenska, about whom I will say more in a moment.

Archer, “a quiet and self-controlled young man [for whom] conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature,” is probably in his early to mid-20s. He has recently become engaged – in the subtle New York fashion of the time – to May Welland, whom Archer has just noticed across the house entering an opera box with Mme Olenska, her cousin, about 30 years old. (Ellen, long an expatriate American, and Archer had known each other as children.) Archer’s engagement to the younger May portends a union of the two great social families of the city. Their engagement and later marriage offers the novel’s theme in miniature: family duty under pressure. May is an attractive girl throughout the novel, but Newland knows that she is the “terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in.”

Meantime, Ellen’s entrance has caused a stir in the house, because this public appearance has been made notwithstanding her association with a European scandal, significant in New York’s “atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies.” Wharton quickly makes it clear that every prominent New York family has a “regrettable” background, if only it were known, “[b]ut folly is often justified of her children as wisdom.” May and Ellen, for example, are the granddaughters of the redoubtable Mrs. Manson Mingott, whose father may have been a scoundrel from Staten Island.

“Granny” Mingott presides over a formidable 1830s mansion which she has built on Fifth Avenue above 40th Street at a time when that address is still remote from society. But Mrs. Mingott is not intimidated by New York society; she leads it in her idiosyncratic fashion of engagement, indifference, and parsimony. This striking personality, whom Wharton clearly loves, is given ample treatment in the opening chapters, to suggest, I surmise, the eccentric appeal that her granddaughter Ellen will also radiate. But whether I am right or wrong, who can resist Wharton’s sketch of this grand dame:

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her . . . into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. . . . A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

Mrs. Mingott, however, issimply the most honest, in her way, of this rigid but changing New York society. Having heard of Ellen’s earlier rejection by the rest of New York’s grandees because of her flight from her villainous Polish husband, Mrs. Mingott contrives to have the city’s premier family schedule their own reception for her, knowing that the rest of their set cannot afford to decline the invitation.
While at this gathering, Ellen, in her careless and exotic European manner, thereupon casually invites (instructs, actually) her old playmate, Archer, to visit her the following day at her Bohemian house on what today is the lower west side of Manhattan. Their ensuing conversation moves the plot, of course, but what struck me about it was Wharton’s way of again suggesting Ellen’s intoxicating mixture of European Bohemianism and American ingenuousness. As Archer frets about New York conventions, Ellen “lean[ed] back, folding her arms behind her head.” She is puzzled and dubious by the demands of New York fashion and yet speaks movingly of her own need for guidance and friendship. She then lights a cigarette (!) and for Archer, “New York seemed much farther off than Samarkand.”

At this juncture I should say of Newland, that he is worthy of his given name. He is not simply bewitched by Ellen because of her foreignness, but is genuinely puzzled by New York society’s reluctance to encounter her just because of a scandal which is not her fault. Perhaps this is a feature of nouveau riche (i.e. American) life: the fear of conspicuousness because of what it may suggest of the families of all its members. And not to be delicate about it, the scandal is that Ellen, having discovered that her husband had felt free to patronize “harlots,” decamped with the assistance of her “secretary” with whom she was still living in Switzerland a year later. “Well, why not?” thinks Newland. “Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t?” And so when Newland looks at his uncurious fiancé May, he sees in contrast and in some doubt an “artificial product.”

Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defenses of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted . . . .

What Archer really wants is obviously a society of artists, and in particular “fellows who wrote.” He shuns “the innocence that seals the mind against the imagination and the heart against experience.” But Archer, alas, is also a lawyer, a junior partner in the firm which Mme Olenska has engaged to secure her divorce.

Though it was supposed to be proper for them [New York’s men of society] to have an occupation, the crude fact of moneymaking was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.
(Indeed, at one point, it is suggested by one of Archer’s“clever” friends that he enter politics, a suggestion that causes him to laugh out loud, since “everyone in polite circles” knew that was impossible. But this was more than a joke for Wharton: she was anticipating the imminent emergence of the Roosevelt family.)

Archer argues Ellen out of the divorce, though strictly on grounds of the negative appearance it would give in New York. He then departs abruptly for Florida where May is vacationing with her parents to urge her that they marry immediately. When she promises to think it over, he returns to New York to find himself horrified at the appearance of Ellen’s fantastic aunt who proposes that Ellen return to her husband. This is the catalyst for Archer’s abrupt declaration of love to Ellen. It is reciprocal, but impossible, of course, and Archer returns home that evening to find May’s note that she has secured her parents’ permission for their early marriage. This closes the first book of the novel.

Book Two is the conclusion. Back in America from his European honeymoon, Archer impulsively travels to Boston to encounter the peripatetic Ellen, who (unknown to him) has been subtly excluded from her New York family’s most intimate circle, while continuing to enjoy their indirect financial support. May, he realizes has been part of this tacit conspiracy, although it is doubtful that anything has ever been said. May continues to show a look of “indestructible youthfulness” making made her seem “neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and dull.” Meantime, Ellen shows a much greater appreciation of the way things are. Although she continues vulnerable to the man she loves, she leaves him to know that if he becomes even slightly importunate she will be obliged to return to her European husband (just as the Mingotts et al. believe is proper), with all the attendant abominations and temptations that she has fled. She is clear with him: she must stay in America but they must be apart. The realization suddenly comes to him:

“[T]o all of them [the family] he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’ vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything . . . .”
‘What a life for you! – “ he groaned. ‘Oh – as long as its’ a part of yours.’ ‘And mine a part of yours?’ She nodded. ‘And that’s to be all – for either of us?’ Well, that is all, isn’t it?’

As one character says, Ellen “is an American. And if you’re an American of her kind . . . . things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take – become unthinkable, simply unthinkable.” So unthinkable, in fact, that when the husband of another member of the clan, a bounder named Beaufort whose name had been vaguely linked with Ellen, genuinely goes bankrupt, the family is dumbfounded when his innocent wife has the effrontery, notwithstanding her ties to them, to ask that they cover for her husband’s indiscretions. In New York that wouldn’t be done and the wife is to go down with the husband.

But all is saved as finally Ellen returns to Paris (we are left only to imagine the sacrifice) and Newland and May become parents. The last chapter is in the nature of an epilogue. Archer, a widower, is now in his late 50s. His son Dallas is engaged to Fanny, Beaufort’s beautiful and possibly illegitimate daughter. Father and son travel to Paris before the marriage at the boy’s urging, thinking that it will rejuvenate his father. Dallas is of the new American generation and too young for discretion. He too, it seems, knows of Ellen and urges his father to meet her after all these years. “Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric. Wasn’t she – once – your Fanny?” And so Archer is suddenly obliged to deal “all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.” Outside Ellen’s Parisian apartment, while Dallas goes to keep the appointment, he sits on a park bench and thinks of
[t]he theaters she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners.

Presently, a man-servant “came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters” and Archer rises silently to return to his quarters. For all of their striving for a new world, Ellen and Newland, like May and Newland, still live in the subtler world of the earlier generation. They have communicated, but indirectly.

Edith Wharton, House of Mirth --

This novel carries a very strong sense of authenticity when it describes the idles of the nouveau -- and not so nouveau -- riche of turn of the century New York. A wise friend of mine says that it is also a chillingly accurate depiction of the predicament encountered by women of that day, shackled by conventions and expectations that would not be tolerated 100 years later. I'm not so sure. Wharton is a talent not only because she is accurate but also because she individualizes her characters. In other words, not only can we visualize in detail the looks of Lily Bart, we also understand her as a real -- and flawed -- person. Otherwise, Wharton is such a consummate analyst that she always sacrifices a bit on the emotional side of her novels.

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country –

Undine Spragg is even less attractive than Emma Bovary, though I suppose it can be said that she is a bit smarter and certainly more calculating. She is also far less tragic because she essentially lacks love and imagination. In this novel Wharton again poaches on Henry James territory, telling the tale of a small town American girl of surpassing beauty whose charms and ambition take her to Europe in the 1890s to marry (among others) an impoverished French aristocrat to the exclusion of her countrymen and family. The novel, though well-constructed, is not brilliant. Its theme is in the title, illustrating the rude customs, not only of the American outback, but of New York City as compared to the declining Europe.

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel –

Thank God for Maxwell Perkins. The edition of Look Homeward, Angel which I read actually contained a forward by Perkins in which he confirms the unkept secret that he did some editing -- though he insists that all that really happened is that Wolfe would simply take the portions that Perkins would delete and insert them into some later novel. Nothing was really lost. O lost! How much Perkins blue-pencilled I don’t know, but chances are it was a lot because Wolfe obviously couldn’t stop writing. In fact, an anecdote Perkins repeats in the forward tells of Wolfe, possibly drunk, wandering the streets of New York late one night, shouting gleefully, “I wrote 10,000 words today!” About half of those words were no doubt adjectives.

I am not critical of adjectives and adverbs and I think that Ernest Hemingway did literature no favors in his pared-down journalistic style. But they can be abused. When a descriptive mot juste is part of the fabric of the writing, there can be nothing more thrilling, or evocative, or in Nabokov’s case more funny. Henry James will often put out two or three alternate adjectives, tentatively almost, to tease out his meaning.

But deftness is not Wolfe’s style. For him, earth moving equipment is mightier than the pen. I suspect he saw himself as having unleashed an unabashed, sprawling, undisciplined O tempora! O mores! Yes, he uses apostrophes. In fact, they litter the landscape. At first, I was inclined to think of this in terms of the blurb writers: “lush, gothic” language like Tennessee Williams. But as the novel dragged on and on, my enthusiasm waned and, by the end, the whole project seemed tedious and – if I haven’t made this clear yet – overwritten.

The story covers two generations of the Gant family of North Carolina, specifically the theatrical, self-dramatizing father, W.O. Gant, who sees himself as a modern Lear, and then his youngest son Eugene. Let us say that Eugene is Wolfe’s alter ego and that the novel in part is one of those coming-of-age projects, sculpting the personality of the protagonist out of the hard rock of familial experiences and personalities. That’s not to say that Look Homeward Angel is biography, because I have no knowledge of Wolfe’s biography beyond what Perkins may have vouchsafed in his introduction. It does, however, permit Wolfe to trot out some colorful characters and painful scenes, although for me they seem more episodic than revelatory. Next to W.O. himself, the most vivid character is Eugene’s mother, a humorless skinflint who is as likely to make a penny-ante land deal than nurse her dying son. And then that dying son, Ben, begins to emerge as a symbol of something or other, perhaps a lost soul – O lost! – towards the end of the story.

Well, you have to end every story eventually, and so did Wolfe. Thus in the last chapter, the dead Ben reappears to Eugene for some sort of epiphany and the novel is over. In a novel of this length and energy there are bound to be some excellent passages, and I don’t mind conceding that virtue to Look Homeward Angel. But for better or worse, when you end the story with such an embarrassing conclusion, you risk, let us say, retrospective infection. The reader might come to the conclusion that the whole enterprise was just so much crap.

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full –

To my surprise, I was not far into this lengthy novel before I found myself wishing that Maxwell Perkins were still around to do for Tom what he supposedly did for Thomas. One particular area where the book needs a closer reappraisal is in Wolfe’s uncomfortably awkward efforts to give the reader information by having his characters recite to each other gobs of local lore which they probably – or surely – already know.

This is not to say that the details of Atlanta’s local geography, history, demographics, etc. are irrelevant to the plot of A Man in Full. After all, this is Tom Wolfe, and such things are the grist of his work, and that includes certain sociological observations which Wolfe believes to be true and on which much of his plot turns. In fact, when Wolfe is at his best, which is quite often, it is in giving prolonged scenes of painfully well-observed verisimilitude.

But there are times when one gets the impression that the scene was preserved essentially because it was so good, rather than from any particular contribution to the plot. I take as an example, the fascinating, raw, but totally irrelevant (even in a symbolic sense), depiction of a stallion at stud at the main character’s “plantation.” It doesn’t advance the plot; it does virtually nothing to explain the characters. It is just Wolfe telling us, “By the way, if you didn’t know it, this is how they do these things.”

As for plot itself, this one isn’t bad (though not great) and like most good authors Wolfe uses it as the frame for his wider observations about contemporary society. But perhaps I am too much a part of that contemporary society, because as deep I am able to get with it is “What fools these mortals be.”

What we have is Charlie Croker, former Georgia Tech football hero and modern Atlanta real estate developer (in a red neck key), whose empire is on the brink of bankruptcy. The debt, over half a billion dollars, will test the loyalty of Charlie’s new trophy bride, as well as the careers of certain bank officers who were happy to make the loans in better times. All gets intertwined with the alleged rape of a white Georgia debutante (and daughter of Charlie’s wealthy neighbor) by Georgia Tech’s current football hero, who is black with an attitude, as well as the journey of Conrad Hensley, a laid-off Croker employee in Oakland whose life is entirely changed by events which he initially believes to have been beyond his control.

But on close examination, the plot is not convincing. A major character, Roger White, an urbane black lawyer, is hired to defend the football hero and his solution is to persuade Charlie to make a public statement in favor of the boy. Somehow this will solve everything. The leverage which White uses against Charlie to perform this betrayal of his friend is to promise that he will get the bank to back off collection of its gigantic loan to Charlie, presumably because it sees the wisdom of preventing race riots when the rape charges are made public.

Not only have I dealt with banks – none of which for a moment would think of walking away from a half billion dollar debt -- I have also dealt with bank shareholders and their lawyers who would not hesitate to use any such forbearance for their own malign purposes. Anyway, Roger’s role is never plausibly explained. Even if we assume that he was hired and paid by Georgia Tech (and this is never made clear), the unidentified patron has already retained a prominent and well-spoken black lawyer from another firm. Wolfe is absolutely sophisticated enough to appreciate these unexplained questions (not to mention the absurdity of even discussing any undocumented forbearance on a gigantic loan collection).

And so when we come to the climax, the best I can say of it is that Wolfe does not permit it to become as illogical as the characters themselves have appeared to expect. But in fact it is not a climax at all, it is an anticlimax. It is like the stud scene I mentioned above. When it is all over, the spectators, transfixed and breathless from what they have just witnessed, are nevertheless unable to say anything to themselves except, “Why?” A very long novel, A Man in Full is ultimately a shaggy dog story.

Richard Wright, Native Son –

Richard Wright deliberately made his protagonist a genuine criminal and angry young man. Bigger Thomas, a 20-year old black man in Chicago in the late 1930s, is not hounded into crime. He is a minor criminal whose fear and resentment of white society – which the author expects the reader to understand without demonstration – make him sullen and erratically angry. He is able, but hardly willing, to play the subservient black boy when his mother pressures him to take a job as a driver for a rich family, and he certainly is not grateful for the family’s awkward gestures toward equality.

Almost immediately upon his taking the job, the family’s college-age daughter and her secret Communist boyfriend virtually dragoon Bigger into slumming with them in his own part of town, culminating in his being obliged to take them to a Negro restaurant and dining at table with them. Although they are completely unaware of it, he is made a spectacle in front of his own people. And not to miss the point, he is acutely aware that a black man in certain circumstances – particularly in the company of a white girl – is in extreme danger. And although Bigger, though miserable and confused, is not enraged by this, neither is he introspective. This is also a good choice by the author. It is just beyond Bigger’s experience to extricate himself from minor intrigues of privileged white youngsters. He is a victim even of their best intentions.

Bigger’s critical crime, committed in a faint Othello-like setting, is an accidental killing, manslaughter in today’s criminal terms: later that same night, events place him in the drunken girl’s bedroom where he inadvertently smothers her while trying to keep her quiet when her symbolically blind mother walks in. His subsequent efforts to avoid detection – including a barbarous disposal of her body – take him deeper into criminality. First, he manipulates the circumstantial evidence to put the blame on the boyfriend. Then he contrives a foolish ransom note to the girl’s parents. A day or so later he becomes a genuine murderer.

If this evokes the Leopold and Loeb killings in Chicago, it does not appear to be an accident, since those two are periodically mentioned by the characters[1]. But L&L actually planned to murder (also without any plausible motive, however) while Bigger is put in a different context. His first killing is an accident. And although the second murder is calculated, it is not a token of his self-described superiority. It is the act of a frightened thug.

But the deeper L&L connection, if it was intended, is the supposed connection between killing and freedom. The young man’s monosyllabic sullenness and resentment portray an irredeemable criminal. And yet he discovers that his criminal acts – which set him even further apart from lawful society, a white society – have somehow given him an identity. This is a theme, probably intended as the author’s fire bell warning to his readership. Fortunately for the novel, Bigger’s sense of freedom does not refresh or redeem him, but the warning does not redeem the novel, either.
The first two-thirds of Native Son effectively delivers its message about the black/white divide – the major theme – without preaching it. But then the novel unravels because the author could not keep control of the message. I do not refer here to procedural outrages of the police and prosecution once Bigger is identified and captured. Such legal abuses may have been entirely common in that day. Moreover, unlikely details – e.g. the Communist boyfriend’s implausible forgiveness of Bigger’s efforts to blame the murder on him – could be overlooked if the overall delivery were superior.

But the unforgivable failure is when the novelist almost completely abandons Bigger Thomas as an individual. Instead, he becomes a device – in fact two devices – for the purposes of a message.

First, there is Bigger’s own resigned epiphany at the very end, portraying him as an unalloyed, unapologetic emblem of frustrated black men, insoluble to the white population. The identity and freedom which he has stumbled upon through his criminality, though unintelligible to me, by itself, would have some novelistic integrity if it were more than emblematic .

But it is emblematic. Unforgivably, Wright then makes Bigger a reference for the aggrieved Negro population in general by means of the heartfelt closing argument to the court delivered by his wearied Communist defense lawyer. If this presentation, which turns out to have missed the point of the young man’s rage, had even a hint of irony it would have served the novel better. But there is none of that. It is relentlessly earnest. (Like most closings I have heard at trial, it is self-consciously rhetorical; I can imagine Bigger himself sitting in the court, his life in the balance, his mind wandering.) The lawyer’s motives are decent – as are those of other white characters –– but he cannot genuinely understand the depth of his client’s feelings or situation.

And so for two-thirds of the novel, the events have a plausible, though convenient, verisimilitude, good enough for a thoughtful book. But the closing is not emotionally credible. In large part this is because of the somewhat antique Communist element that Wright has selected. It seems that Wright intends that readers should conclude that Communists, like the dead girl’s boyfriend, are well-meaning but hopeless idealists. And Bigger’s final gesture of solidarity is a painful and false note.

ENDNOTES 1. At the end of the book, Bigger’s defense lawyer takes a strategy much like the one taken by Darrow in the L&L case. He abjures an insanity defense (to avoid a jury) and pleads his client guilty so that he might raise a sociological defense of environmental conditions to avoid a death penalty. But Darrow succeeded.