Frankenstein

Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
© 1818 Mary Shelley
288 pages

"Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth."

An attempt to reach the North Pole is interrupted by the sight of eerie figures chasing one another upon the ice, and they have a tale of misery to recount.  The man rescued by the ship, Victor Frankenstein,  was an enthusiast of natural philosophy, and specifically the the power to create life.    Captain Walton of the polar exploration vessel had been yearning for the friendship of someone who wanted to probe nature's darkest mysteries, but Frankenstein's story proved to be one of warning rather than encouragement.  After relating his early fascination with occult figures and scientists alike, Frankenstein describes the horror he experienced when he succeeded in actually bringing a cobbled-together man to life, and how it pursued him across Europe, driven by despair and wrath at having been created.  The monster himself also appears in the story, both through Frankenstein's recollection -- the two have a confrontation in which the monster recounts his pitiful life thus far and charges Frankenstein with giving him a companion that he can flee into exile with -- and aboard the ship as the last, before he disappears in a wintry haze. 

I read Frankenstein in one sitting, which I hadn't expected to do.  The monsters of Halloween have never had a great appeal for me, so most of this -- besides the scientist making a man --  was completely new.  This Norton critical edition proved highly readable,  supported with annotations to explain period-specific references or vocabulary which now borders on archaic. There's no getting around this book being a warning about the reckless pursuit of knowledge at any cost;  beyond Frankenstein's attempt at creating life, which only resulted in a string of bloody murders and the destruction of both creature and creation,   there's also the frequently-mentioned destruction of native American societies, specifically Mexico and Peru, as a result of enthusiastic exploration.  Captain Walton himself proves to be someone who can learn from other's mistakes, as -- faced with hostile polar conditions that threaten his ship and crew -- he retreats to England.  There were certainly surprises here, like the description of the creature as "beautiful" -- save for his eyes. (I wonder if, given that eyes were regarded as windows to the soul, if repulsive eyes hinted at the beast's depravity or brutishness.)    

This Norton critical edition is particularly helpful in understanding the book. While I only read the story proper,  it also contains a short essay on different versions of the story -- one edit implies the monster dies, another leaves his future shrouded in a storm -- as well as period responses and related poetry. 

The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place
© 1971 Corrie ten Boom,  John and Elizabeth Sherrill
241 PAGES

You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance.

Psalms 32

When Corrie ten Boom turned in her family radio to the Nazi officials who had taken control of her town and her country and was asked if anyone else in the home had another set, she looked him square in the face and said "No".  As she departed, she shuddered -- not from the fear of encountering an agent of tyranny, but from how easy it was to lie.    The ten Booms were a deeply religious family whose watchmaking business opened and closed it day with the reading of Scripture, and even lying for the good did not come easy to the ten Boom sisters.  But it would have to, because as the Nazi consolidation of power in the Netherlands began, and their Jewish friends fell under duress, the tiny watchmaking-shop became the hiding place for a group of resistance fighters and Jewish citizens seeking refuge from the government.    It was last until late 1944, but even when the family had been seized by the SS and imprisoned in camps, there still remained one hiding place more.  The Hiding Place is both a wartime memoir and a work of Christian testimony, declaring and demonstrating that light can shine in the darkness.

From the beginning, the hiding place was not a great secret. The hidden compartment was physically well-concealed, but  no one could miss the sheer amount of people entering and exiting the building, and the neighbors had to ask (very quietly)  if they couldn't keep the Hanukkah singing down just a little bit.  The local police also knew, but had no interest in helping their grey-uniformed bosses in persecuting the innocents.   Someone did want to help the Germans, however,  as the family was betrayed and imprisoned. (Their wards, however, escaped notice!)  Eventually Corrie herself would travel to  Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp.  But that's where the memoir comes something else altogether, as the ten Boom sisters are isolated from one another and forced to rely on nothing but their faith to keep them sane -- and not just sane, but human.  The Gospel stories kept hope alive in the face of brutality -- and kept  them from sinking into despair and deadened souls. The camps destroyed many who survived, inflicting long-lasting psychological trauma, but ten Boom emerged from the war as a more fervent Christian missionary.   Remarkably, she and her sister refused to hate those who abused and humiliated them, and killed their father; they constantly expressed thanks for whatever small mercies they can see, and even when Corrie is being interrogated by an SS official, his skull-and-crossbones staring her down,  she urges him to turn away from the darkness and look to the light.   

In their darkest hours, the ten Boom sisters shared hope for the future -- dreams of what they would do when they were released.  They wanted to turn their home into a refuge for those who had been crippled by it. This was not new to the ten Booms: even during the war they sought to shelter and teach the mentally infirm, who were left without resources by the Nazis and threatened with euthanasia.    ten Boom shared a vision of having a place where former collaborators could redeem themselves  by serving those whom they'd previously oppressed. This, she admits, did not work out well: there were too many fights between both sides, each holding the other in resentment.  Even so, her shelter was one of the few places open to homeless former collaborators.   The ten Booms' refusal to give in to hate is utterly inspiring in a day when  spite and contempt saturate every political argument, when old hatreds are constantly given new life and the bleeding sores of politics never allowed to heal.

"It was a day for memories. A day for calling up the past. How could have guessed as we sat there -- to middle-aged spinsters and an old man -- that in place of memories we were about to be given adventure such as we had never dreamed of. Adventure and anguish, horror and heaven were just around the corner, and we did not know.
Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?

p. 12

The Gulag Archipelago: Volume III

Archipeleg GULag / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Volume III (of III)
© 1973, 1974 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
576 pages

Throughout The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has taken readers on a tour of the Soviet concentration camps,  where human beings were tortured, manipulated, and exploited to the hilt.  Now, in volume three, the journey has come to an end.  The bulk of volume three, “Katorga”,  focuses on the Siberian work camps that the Soviets resurrected to punish “Nazi collaborators”, a term loose enough to include anyone who remained in western Russia during the Nazi occupation.    Some two-thirds in,  the monstrous Stalin finally succumbs to the fate he’d inflicted on millions of others, but little changes in the gulag system. Solzhenitsyn then reviews his own release into “exile”, and finally his return to Soviet society.

The second volume of Gulag Archipelago is a prolonged review of the architecture of brutality , both physical and political,  used by the Soviet camps. Reading it was to see a human thrown on the rack and tortured, slowly, and only Solzhenitsyn’s  constant mocking of the authorities, and his stubborn efforts to look for the flickers of hope and grace in his fellow prisoners,  made the spectacle bearable.  In “Katorga”, Solzhenitsyn  also explores another avenue of relief: the constant attempts by prisoners to escape.  Although Siberian camps didn’t have as much physical infrastructure inhibiting escapes (sometimes as little as a wire fence),   their location – in sparsely populated wildernesses without reliable sources of food or fresh water  --  made a flight back to civilization nearly impossible.   Although Solzhenitsyn details many escape attempts, almost all of them end in a bitter return to the camp.  Typically, the escapees’ desperate attempts to obtain water or food create an increasingly chaotic trail of mistakes as they encounter more and more people. (Those who help escaped prisoners were threatened with 25 year gulag terms themselves, so only those with a bitter resentment of the government were willing to take the risk of trusting hungry strangers.)

In the final part of this third volume, Solzhenitsyn details the Soviet use of exile, which was a weapon used against  ordinary civilians as well as those accused of crimes: at the Soviet bureaucracy’s whim, whole populations might be ordered to desert their homes and move across the continent to settle an area that the bureaucracy deemed in need of warm bodies.  Many “exiles” were people who had been targeted for  their  skills or stature in smaller communities, like blacksmiths and millers – condemned as a classes for the abuses of a few. Although the shakeup after Stalin’s demise resulted in a few pardons, the Gulag system remained in place –- and books like Fear no Evil by Natan Sharansky fulfill Solzhenitsyn’s hope that future generations would continue  to expose the continuing system of  injustice that the Soviet state embodied, but which was expressed most transparently in its work camps.    Solzhenitsyn ends with an apology that the book is not edited or expanded more properly:  he was forced to rush it  out of his apartment after the government caught wind that he was writing something subversive. Considering the outstanding quality of the  text as-is, particularly given that it is a work in translation,  one wonders what the finished product might have looked like had Solzhenitsyn had the time he desired. (If he was like some authors, we’d never see it,  the desire for perfection forever pushing off the publication date.)

The Gulag Archipelago is a  warning for the ages about the horrors a government with the best of intentions can inflict on its own people, and a reminder that human beings are not fit to hold power over one another.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London
© 1933 George Orwell
224 pages

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

(A Christmas Carol)

In 1933, young George Orwell took a room in the warrens of Paris and was promptly rendered penniless when someone broke into his room and stole his savings. Struggling to find work teaching English, Orwell drifted into poverty, until he found himself back in England, living as a tramp. Or...did he?  Down and Out in Paris and London describes itself (in my edition) as a novel;   elsewhere, it is described as a memoir of Orwell's, one that took real events and made a proper story out of them.   Regardless,  Down and Out delivers a convincing picture of life in the dregs, both employed and not.

The story begins in Paris, where a struggling narrator links up with a Russian friend of his as they both try to avoid being thrown out of their penny flats. They try everything from the circus to  writing Communist propaganda, but most of these opportunities melt away as soon as they get close. (Orwell concludes that  the communists are swindlers; brother, you ain't see nothin' yet.)   At last they find work -- and plenty of it -- in the kitchens of a classy hotel, which is far from classy behind the servants' doors. There the scene is chaos, insults, heat, and staff wading their way around one another through floors wet with discarded lettuce leaves and oil.  Seventeen hours a day -- broken by a mid-afternoon break to relax in the bistros --  is not unusual.  This provides a secure existence until the two friends break away to help launch a Russian restaurant. It never ignites, and eventually Orwell drifts to England where he takes up tramping and tries various boarding houses and so on.

Most of this is strictly memoir, but Orwell pauses to reflect on what he is seeing from time to time. He notes, for instance, that the high class meals are an utter farce: if the gentlemen outside were to witness their food being prepared, they would hesitate to feed the result to their dogs -- what between the steaks being rescued from dustbins and the hair grease-tainted soup. The work was badly organized, Orwell wrote, highly inefficient, and he suspected motive at work. Keep the lower classes running hither and yon, and they wouldn't have time to get in trouble.  Similarly inefficient is the waste of human energy he sees in London:  the tramps spend their time on the move because they're only permitted to use a given relief house once, so they move from house to house. All of this time spent walking and waiting for hostels to open could be made more productive, Orwell muses, if lodging homes for the poor included some element of farming: those who stayed would work towards their own support.

Down and Out is utterly readable in the Orwell way and despite its subject is funny from time to time. One man is described as rather ambiguous, for he wore sidewhiskers and those were the mark of either an apache or an intellectual -- and no one knew how to place him.  In the Paris segment, when the narrator considers a job at the circus, the requirement include: cleaning up litter,  moving benches, and standing astride two chairs so that a lion might pass through one's legs. One of those things is not like the other.   Orwell captures a great many human stories, some of them curiosities of the time -- like the Russians who fled Stalinist Russia.  Part of his argument made a certain sense and others do not. He writes that beggars' labors should be considered as work, since they perform actions -- wailing a song, or drawing on the sidewalk -- that are responded to (albeit grudgingly) with money.  What's the difference between that and a man swinging a pick at the railroad, he asks -- they're both labor.  That would be the labor theory of value, which is of interest to middle schoolers who spend all day half-hardheartedly picking at their bedrooms and then claim they've worked all day at it.   The difference between a man paying to go to an Enrico Caruso concert and a man giving a dollar to a street yodeling is that he actually wants to listen to Caruso, and he wants to get away from the yodeler.  The London system does seem inefficient, but equally counterproductive is encouraging unemployed people to remain in one county forever through social support, when there are neither jobs nor the prospect of jobs in then near future. People used to move away when opportunities failed; now problems just fester.  It just goes to show that there are no solutions, merely trade-offs.

The Gulag Archipelago: Volume II

Archipeleg GULag / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Volume II (of III)
© 1973, 1974 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

679 pages

In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn used his own experience being arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to a work camp to review the origins of the Soviet police state, delving into its underpinnings of detention centers,  secret police, and transportation networks.  In volume two,  after a brief history of the Gulag system, he focuses on camp life – or rather, the slow death of Gulag existence, the death of both spirit and soul.  Particular sets of the damned have their own sections within the book – women, children, Communist diehards,  even the guards themselves. 

Like books written on the Nazi concentration camps,  Gulag Archipelago is a catalogue of misery, one that lasted for decade after decade.  The monstrous architecture of oppression and humanity began not with the butcher Stalin, but with Lenin himself, as the first instances of forced labor occurred in the early 1920s. The seeds were sown by Marx, who urged that labor was the best response to criminality – ensuring that laggards and reactionaries earned their keep.   That keep was very little; Solzhenitsyn reports meager meals of gruel, largely, with an occasional feast in a roll of black bread.             Official Soviet ideology, which the prisoners were expected to express their conviction in, was that forced labor was also a corrective measure, making the condemned into good soviet citizens.  (The Soviets’ near coreligionists, the National Socialists, expressed that conviction in three words:  Arbeit Macht Frei.)

The easiest summation of Gulag life was that it was miserable in every way. Rations were meager and dismal;  physical shelter was poor, and the authorities denied their wards warm clothing. Those being punished for infractions inside the prison (for voicing dissent, making jokes about the authorities,  making neutral or positive remarks about capitalism or German equipment ) were even worse off. They might be stripped of clothing entirely and made to ‘rest’ in a damp earthen cell, even in the Siberian winter)   The guards were not the only enemies, as the authorities used prisoners against one another. Echoing his remark in volume I that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart,  Solzhenitsyn notes that “informers” were not a separate, malicious category of men, craven weasels who would do anything for a leg up.   Most were ordinary prisoners being manipulated by the guards,  either by the stick (families threatened) or by the carrot. Prisoners could be coaxed into complicity by being asked for more excusable tips, and then later, once their self-respect had been compromised already  they would be grilled for information on what prisoners were saying about Stalin, the guards, the Communist state, etc.  Solzhenitsyn wryly notes midway that while the Soviets had condemned imperial coercion by force, and capitalist coercion by hunger, in their Gulag system they used and perfected both. (One section early in the book compares 19th century serfdom favorably to the plight of the 'new' serfs of communist Russia.)

Although the  Gulag camps were officially designed for labor, not death – there were no Zyklon-B showers --  they were no less efficient at destroying life. In the winter,  the mortal remains of prisoners would be stacked up along buildings, the ground too hard for them to be buried in.  Not only were most of the prisoners on a near-starvation diet, but they were tasked with brutal work – digging canals and logging.  Solzhenitsyn estimated that the death toll in building the White Sea-Baltic canal to have been a quarter of a million people – and for no purpose at all, for the ‘canal’ was too shallow for most ships to transit. It had been done almost for the show of it, a charade of productivity to fulfill the claims of the Five Year Plan.   It is for this reason that we might borrow from the Bible: Hitler has killed his millions, but Stalin has killed his tens of millions.

Solzhenitsyn notes throughout the book that the best way to survive the camps was simply to vanish: don’t talk and don’t work when they’re not looking - -both because working hard for extra rations was counterproductive, and because if a prisoner finished their work they were rewarded with…more work.  Many people did seize what little pleasures they could: Solzhenitsyn records love affairs blooming in the camps before men and women were segregated, as people grasped at whatever affection they could find.  And there were a few guards, he admits, who would look the other way—even if for the most part they acted like dogs, watchful and servile.  Perhaps the most interesting set of characters to consider are the Communist prisoners – diehards and loyalists who were arrested because their zeal stepped on the authorities’ toes.  The system was a kleptocracy, Solzhenitsyn writes, corrupt from toe to head:  anyone placed in a position where they could clip off rations or resources from the unsuspecting (prisoners inside or Soviet subjects outside) would.  Those who believed in something earnestly, be they Orthodox Christians or orthodox communists,  kept disrupting the cozy pool of corruption.   Even in prison, however, the communist ‘loyalists’ insisted that the Party was still good: they had simply made an error, or perhaps local authorities had been compromised by the Germans.  One memorable section includes a mock conversation with a die-hard, who has a pat response to every probing question Solzhenitsyn puts to him about the State and its ideology.

As with the first volume, this book is more daunting for its size and contents than its writing. Solzhenitsyn's mood as a writer mocks the authorities and looks for the best he can find in his fellow prisoners, and the translation is perfectly simple. The third volume promises chronicles of escapes, and the death of Stalin. 

Dracula

Dracula
© 1897 Bram Stoker
416 pages

Every attorney has problematic clients,  but few can claim an actual monster. Such is the case with Count Dracula, as  young lawyer Jonathan Hawker discovers to his dismay and horror when he arrives at the mysterious count's manor in Transylvania.  The trip was just a bit of business --- finalizing the papers for the count's purchase of land in England.  But the Count is a man who the locals fear, who can command the beasts of the earth, and who is never around during the day.   Hawker quickly finds himself an effective prisoner, shut up in a foreboding castle full of locked doors and secrets, and when he stumbles through one into the other -- discovering that the Count is a vampire, who subsists on human blood --   Hawker realizes both he and the City of London are in peril.

For a century-old gothic thriller, Dracula stands up very well. It uses an unexpected format, its story rendered in the letters and diary entries of the participants, who occasionally pool their notes to get the bigger picture. This epistolary approach allows the reader to piece the story together, instead of having all the work done for us by the narrative.  (A good bit of the characters'  work is done by Dr. van Helsing, who has a tendency to lecture.)  Modern readers of vampires will recognize the creature here, but books like Twilight and In the Forests of the Night divorce the monster from his background. Stoker's vampire is a creature of Hell,  experiencing a corrupted and bastardized version of eternal life;   his association with the devil is not merely one of hyperbole, but real to the point that Dracula and his victims are completely disabled by the presence of a Eucharistic wafer. (Not included as vampire traits are a tendency to say "Bleh!" and an obsession with counting. Sesame Street lied to me!)

From its beginnings -- the dread-laden arrival in Transylvania, the creeping horror as Hawker and others piece together the truth -- until the chase at the end,  Dracula remains a very effective thriller.

Classics Club, Year III

Two years have passed since I declared I was taking the Classics Club challenge, and posted my own list of fifty classics to read.  I've since read 20 classics, which means I am on schedule -- just. Most of that was from my first year, as this past year I've only read 5.3 entries for the list.  My reading plans for the rest of this year should speed up the pace: I'm currently halfway through Dracula and plan on tackling Frankenstein later in October, and a few others are hovering nearby. I have volume II of the Gulag Archipelago at the ready, for instance.

Looking back at the past year, with my paltry handful of books, there's little that can be said:  volume  one of the Gulag Archipelago stands out, but I'm happiest to have gotten Canterbury Tales finished. It was just as intimidating as the Russians!

REMAINING CLASSICS:

1. The Aeneid, Virgil
2. The Histories, Herodotus
3. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
5. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
6. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
8. The Prince, Machiavelli 
9. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoeyesky
10. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
11. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
12. Dracula, Bram Stoker
13. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
14. The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Vol I, Vol II, Vol III)
15. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
16. The Vicar of Wakefield,  Oliver Goldsmith
17. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
18. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain 
19. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
20. The Federalist Papers, various
21. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
22. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
23. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
24. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
25. Moby-Dick,  Herman Melville
26. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
27. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
28. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
29. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
30. Invisible Man,  Ralph Ellison

The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I

Archipeleg GULag / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
Volume I (of III)
© 1973, 1974 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
660 pages

Such was my desire to read The Gulag Archipelago that when I found it on the shelf and observed that it was not one big book, but three big books, I didn't pause to reconsider.  It's not just an entry on a list for me; I've heard too much about the book and about its author to shy away.   Because it's a multi-volume work, each collecting several 'books', I will be posting about the volumes as I read them, and then attempting a general review at the very end.

Let's begin with the very obvious. The Gulag Archipelago is vast survey of the Soviet prison state -- a state within a state, an internal empire. Its property is not contiguous, but consists of islands of security buildings and camps connected by processing hubs and the roads themselves.  Solzhenitsyn was born the year of the revolution, and became an officer in the Russian army during the "Great Patriotic War".  Although strongly encouraged to apply for NKVD training, Solzhenitsyn demurred, increasingly uncomfortable with the morality of the state's actions. His timid research into the means and methods of the gulag system would grant him immediate first-hand evidence, as Solzhenitsyn himself was arrested and subjected to interrogation.

This is not merely a prison memoir. In his opening chapter, Solzhenitsyn renders a complete history of the Gulag system, with every wave of mass arrests chronicled in term. These arrests were not effected simply to purge out heretics to Soviet dogma, or to punish wicked peasants who resisted the seizure of their farms. Whenever the state encountered a problem --  failing infrastructure, ruined crops -- it found someone to blame it on.  Quickly given a label -- "limiter" for instance, for those who dared to suggest that rail lines only had so much carrying capacity, and that trebling loads would ruin the rails -- the traitors would then be dispatched away.  Problem solved! Another brand of  nogoodniks were the "wreckers", who were responsible every time machinery broke down. Sometimes, the wreckers were responsible even if they did precisely what they were told, like sowing seeds in the snow because Lysenko believed exposed seeds would increased their yield. (They rotted, instead.)

The book's opening chapters have incredible interest, some of it dark. Solzhenitsyn details all of the various methods of torture and interrogation he and his fellows were exposed to;  the methods were not meant so much to provoke truth as to elicit a confession, as official dogma made truth relative. So long as there was an angle to pursue, a faint argument to make,  a man could be hung with his own words. "Give us the man," said the state police, "and we'll make the case."  Particularly of interest is Solzhenitsyn's chapter on the "Bluecaps", the state police themselves, and his thoughts on good and evil.   It would be wonderful, he writes, if there were simply evil people, and we could separate them from the rest of us; but the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and who among us would cut out his own heart?   This isn't woolgathering on Solzhenitsyn's part, as he remembered his own moral compromises just as an officer of the army -- his easy arrogance, his thoughtless actions.   Later on in this volume, Solzhenitsyn chronicles the history of show trials and the developing legal codes that would allow official sanction for arresting and executing anyone whom the state saw fit.   In the last part, book two, he follows his own journey to the work camps themselves by writing about the transit camps and the elaborate transportation system; here, as more prisoners are mixed in together, we see spontaneous pecking orders, with the actual criminals (thieves and such) taking the best and sneering at the politicals.  This is quite the change from the Tsarist regime, in which politicals were a minor class of detainee who enjoyed far fewer restrictions than the criminals.  (Of course, the nature of prison-keeping changed from the Tsars:  when Russia was on the eve of evolution, the jailers were regarded with such contempt that gentlemen wouldn't even shake their hands. After the revolution, jailers were regarded with fear and trembling.)

A third of the way into this epic, I am already beginning to appreciate why Solzhenitsyn's work is regarded so highly;  the amount of information collected and ordered here is rendered to the reader in a very human voice,  one which recounts all this in sometimes comic, sometimes sad, disbelief.

Volume 2 will follow in September.

East of Eden

East of Eden
© 1952 John Steinbeck
580 pages

Why did Cain kill Abel?  East of Eden explores that question via a family saga, one that stretches across North America, spanning the continent as well as the generations;  a story that begins at the end of the Civil War ends only at the end of the Great War.  It's the story of two families and one individual, a woman who bares more resemblance to the apocryphal Lilith than to Eve. When I approached East of Eden, I did so only as a story about brothers; I had no idea that Steinbeck mixed in his own family history, let alone that he regarded the book as his magnum opus. Only time can tell if I will remember this story as vividly as I do that of the Joads ,in The Grapes of Wrath...but I wouldn't bet against it.

Readers who retain a familiarity with the Hebrew bible will remember that Genesis is essentially a family epic, particularly following the line of Abraham: he has a son, Isaac, who has two boys, who fight, and the victor thereof (Jacob) creates an entire litter of boys with more fighting ensuing, taking the family story to Egypt and back, until the family has become a nation.  East of Eden begins with a man and his two sons, who fight, and their story will take one brother not to Egypt but to the Salinas valley of California.  That brother, Adam Trask, wants to build a life and farm for himself in the west, but his ideals and dreams are shot when he himself is shot by a woman he shrouded with lies and hope: his wife.  Adam's sons grow up, bearing the names Aaron and Caleb,  and their own dram

East of Eden leaves a great deal to mull over.  There is a very obvious aspect of siblings vying for their father's affection;   Adam and Charles do this with their father, Cyrus, and  Adam's sons Aaron and Caleb echo it with him.  The homage to Genesis is deliberate, as several characters frequently ruminate over the meaning of the story in Genesis in which Cain grows distressed after his sacrifice to God is snubbed in favor of his brother's; that distress takes the form of murderous jealousy sentences later when Cain kills his brother and becomes an outcast, sojourning east of Eden.   Of particular interest is the fact that God "marked" Cain so that others would see him and not slay him-- saving judgment for God's own hand.  Several characters in East of Eden are 'marked', not through liver spots or birthmarks, but scarred through their own actions. These characters struggle with darkness; one is saturated by it, possessed by it -- and others  live in fear of themselves, wondering if they are doomed to persist in their vices. That question is the great theme of the book, the question of destiny: is our fate in our hands?  For the characters it all comes down to a single word, a word that fixates rabbis and Chinese wisemen and frustrated farmers alike.

What I appreciated most about East of Eden,  is that every character save the sociopath was conflicted. The "good", doted-on brothers frequently made mistakes, and their failures provoke the plot as much as the failures of the ''Cains'. Of course, this is a character-driven drama;  relationships here are all-important.  This was definitely a novel to savor..

Related:
Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner. Another family epic set in the West..

The Canterbury Tales

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

*ahem*

If you've ever glanced at my Classics Club list, you'll see Canterbury Tales sitting there, and I've regarded it as one of the tougher ones on my list -- in the same tier as the Russians,  April is the ideal month for reading the Tales, in part because it's set during April ("Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote ..."),  but mostly because April is a month I've dedicated to England for the past several years.  With its girth in mind, I began early, on March 1st.   (That marked the first day of Lent, and I was amused by the thought of reading about a pilgrimage during a time inspired by pilgrimage.)

I will note from the beginning that I did not read the tales in Chaucer's original English. My library, happily, has a 900+ page volume that presents a column of Chaucer alongside one of 'modern' English, and it was the modern English which I largely read. I often compared the two columns, reading as much as I could of Chaucer before having to take a peek at the meaning of words, and I saw enough to realize -- based on the fact that certain words were suppose to rhyme - -that Chaucerian English really did sound much different from ours.

I assume most people are aware of the general premise of The Canterbury Tales, but just in case: a large group of people on pilgrimage to Canterbury (intent on honoring Thomas a Becket) converge on an inn. Since they're all headed the same way, they decide to engage in a little friendly competition: each person will spin a couple of tales there and back again, and when they all return to the inn they will decide who gave the best story, and all pitch in to give that person a free meal.  Such is the General Prologue,  after which various personalities step forward to give a story. The stories vary in length and in mood, as do the storytellers; some are noblemen, like Knights; others are commoners,  some are women, some are members of religious orders.  Some of the stories are noble, some tragic, some sad, and some very silly.

Rather than reviewing Chaucer (rather like reviewing Homer!), I want to share a couple of general comments and then recap some of the more memorable stories from the first half of the Tales, when I was still taking notes.  I was surprised by the varied settings of the stories; some are set as far afield as Russia, Syria, and Greece. As with The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, there are grievances aplenty against the landed nobility, including the church.  Lastly, while I've heard much about the medieval cult of courtly love, I never appreciated how fantastically silly medievals were for romance until I read through some of this preposterous goings-on.

And now, recaps of a few more memorable tales, complete with a moral:


Knight's Tale:  Two cousins imprisoned together fall in love with the same woman, and are violently jealous even though they're in a tower and there is zero chance of them courting her.    Naturally one escapes and the other is pardoned, and upon pursuing the girl they meet in a field and start fighting. Who should discover them but the king who imprisoned them in the first place, who -- persuaded by the girl, who turns out to be his sister -- allows them to meet one year hence, with their respective armies, and enter into trial by combat to see who shall win her hand.

The moral:   Finders keepers.

The Miller's Tale:  One woman is pursued by two men while still married to a third. The story involves two occasions of rear ends being kissed by mistake.

The moral: Wait until daylight to kiss people.

The Clerk's Tale:  A King is pressed by his people to marry and decides to marry a beautiful and virtuous peasant.  Despite her character, wisdom, and beauty, the King is constantly suspicious of her and inflicts a series of Job-like tests upon her which amount to (1) making her believe he's killed her children,  (2) making her believe he's going to annul their union and marry someone less controversial, and (3) having her PLAN THE NEW WIFE'S WEDDING.   When the wedding guests arrive, and lo! The "bride" is actually her long-lost daughter, with long-lost son in tow,  everyone enjoys a happily-ever-after moment. (Instead of "What the heck, Dad? moment.)

The moral:   What seems like psychopathic behavior may, in twenty years, turn out to be  a convoluted plan with a happy ending.  So uh, have patience.

The Wife of Bath: After entirely too much information about her five husbands, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a Knight who raped a woman and was brought on trial to the King's court, whereupon the Queen gave him one year to  solve the question: What do women want?   Having queried high and low to no avail, the Knight resignedly begins returning to the court to meet his death, only to chance upon a horribly disfigured old woman who will give him the answer if he promises to anything she wants.   He gives the answer to the Queen and is promptly confronted by the old woman, who bids him marry her.   He resists by recounting her faults (poverty, age, etc);  she rebuts them by praising poverty, age, etc, and finally he relents to marrying her.  She then asks him:  would he rather she be old and faithful, or young and tempting to others?   He leaves the matter to her, and  she -- happy that he has ceded his judgement to hers -- decides to become both young and faithful. (Oh,  and the answer to 'what do women want?' is 'to be in charge'.)  Hurrah for...resignation...?

The moral:   Rape is evil, but if you find a witch who wants a husband, you might get away with it.

Middle English prologue read at 1:14

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility
© 1811 Jane Austen
409 pages

Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Marianne and Elinor,  who are left to live on a fixed income after their father perished and the law forced him to leave all of his money to their stepbrother – with the promise that said stepbrother would support the sisters. Unfortunately for the ladies, said stepbrother has  all the moral backbone  of a worm, and his “support” – after taking over their home – was the promise to send fish or game when they were in season.      The sisters and their mother, made to feel like outsiders in their own home, take up residence in the country for a long spell of talking, playing music,  talking, dancing, painting, talking, walking,  and worrying.   Far from their old home they find new friends, each with their own promise and limitations – and this being an Austen novel, romance is in the air.  Both Marianne and Elinor have beaus who prove or seem inconstant, but the two women respond to their social anxiety in very different ways.  Marianne is a leaf from the Romantic  era,  full of intense passion, surging hither and yon like tides crashing on a beach;  Elinor is more reserved, more pragmatic. She feels quite intensely, but she is the image of the expression that still waters run deep –  the picture of self-government, It is she, not her mother or sister, who truly manages the house, and who cares for her sister then things go off the deep end.  Another opposing pair are Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby; one is rooted in honor, the other in self-love.

 Sense and Sensibility defeated me the first time I attempted to read it (one year ago), in part because I only tried it because of its Classic status. The story didn’t interest me, but – having recently watched the film for my Read of England celebration --  I approached the novel this time with genuine appreciation and interest in the story, particularly my appreciation for several of the characters. One of the best moments of the novel is when Elinor expresses admiration for a fellow whose behavior seems to deny her happiness. As much as it pains her, she can look beyond it and see its virtue. Otherwise,  Marianne and her beaus steal the show completely, I think, as Book-Ferrars is largely absent and appears only to stand awkwardly in a corner, mumbling his apologies before he wanders off again.

Incidentally, this experience tested a theory of a friend of mine. He claims that if a person watches the movie first, then reads the book, he will enjoy them both; if he reads the movie, and then watches the movie, he will only complain about how much the movie left out or added.

1995 trailer, with actors such as Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet. Hugh Laurie also appears.

Classics Club Spin Challenge

On Friday, the administrators of the Classics Club challenge are going to post a random number from one to twenty. Those of us enrolled in the Classics Club Challenge( reading fifty classics of our choosing within five years) have been asked to list twenty of the books left on our to-read list.  We are then challenged to read that number on our list which matches the random number posted on Friday.

Here below are my twenty possibilities!

1. The Aeneid, Virgil
2. The Histories, Herodotus
3. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
5. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
6. The Prince, Machiavelli 
7. The Seven-Storey Mountain,  Thomas Merton
8. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
9. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
10. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
11. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
12. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
13. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
14. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
15. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
16. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
17. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
18. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
19. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
20. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy

I'm working on one of these presently, so perhaps I'll get wildly lucky and get it.  I am doing well on my challenge,  staying right on target: I'm hovering at the 50% mark with two and a half years left.   

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
© 1969 Maya Angelou
304 pages

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography in the form of a novel, following a young woman’s coming of age as she journeys from a small town in the South to the big city – and then there and back again.  Functionally abandoned by her parents, and constantly worried about her status as not only an awkward and homely girl from a family full of photogenic frames and faces, but being a racial outcast, Maguerite makes her way by a loving grandmother and brother and books aplenty. I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings largely out of peer pressure, since it is always mentioned in the hallowed company of books like The Scarlet Letter and Tom Sawyer, hailed as essential American and Southern literature.

Racism dominates Caged Bird just as the wilderness fills the reader’s experience in The Last of the Mohicans;  Angelou writes that segregation was so complete in Stamps, Arkansas that she hardly ever saw a white person.  In her younger years , Stamps’ white citizenry were phantoms who she scarcely regarded as human.  They were cold and distant authority figures, or ‘powhitetrash’ wretches who behaved like little barbarians yet expected the blacks of Stamps to defer to them.  On the rare occasions that Marguerite and her family entered the white side of Stamps to buy goods unavailable in their own neighborhoods, they ran the risk of being refused service – as happened with a dentist.

This book remains controversial because of several scenes of sexual violence, which I approached with some trepidation – intending to skim over them, if need be. There are three scenes like this within the same chapter, and Angelou renders them in a way to convey a child’s confusion and detachment – the sort of detachment one adopts while at the dentist, or in preparation for a surgery, a self-defense against panic. Following these scenes, Marguerite enters a mute period in which she reads more devotedly than ever, before finding a positive vision of womanhood in her community to guide her out of the darkness.

In her path to womanhood, Marguerite was provided with several examples, strong in their own way.   Central to her life is her grandmother, “Momma”, who operates a general store that is also the community center for Stamp’s black community.  While the store never makes them wealthy,  the family’s frugality and Momma’ adaptability allow them to weather even the Depression in mild comfort, lending money even to white business owners – including the dentist who considers his obligation merely fiscal, and refuses to budge from his policy of not treating blacks.    Momma and her family provide a safe haven for the main character and her brother, a haven not found when they visit or live with their parents.   Marguerite’s mother is beautiful and independent, but her world is full of violence; when Marguerite is raped, it is at the hand of one of her mother’s beaus. Her father, too, is handsome but not altogether reliable;  when he takes Marguerite to Mexico to buy supplies,  his drunken revelries force Maguerite as a young teenager to attempt driving for the first time in literal terra incognita – a mountainous descent in rural Mexico.   A third example for Marguerite is the mysterious Mrs. Flowers, who has a regal bearing and a full library, both of which inspire Maguerite to better things. For the most part, she takes those lessons to heart -- fighting a protracted campaign to become a streetcar conductor, the first black woman to enter the service. Yet at the end, she decides to have sex with a boy to determine that she is not a lesbian, promptly becomes pregnant, and after the delivery of her boy, the novel ends. It's as if a story of King David ended abruptly with his having Uriah killed so he could cover his petty lust with Bathsheba.  I know the person of Maguerite -- Maya Angelou -- went on to greatness, but as a novel by itself, it's a weird way to end things.

Up from Slavery

Up From Slavery
© 1901 Booker T. Washington
332 pages

Up from Slavery is an hopeful reflection by Booker T. Washington on the future of black Americans and the American nation, as he reflects on the thirty-odd years since the abolition of slavery at the time of his writing.  But this is no mere memoir of slavery and reconstruction, for Washington's life as a teacher and founder of the Tuskegee Institute gives him a perspective on education; particularly, what sort of education most befits the cultivation of liberated men and women.  Washington's ideal education, put into practice at the Tuskegee Institute, is 'holistic' in that it places as much value on the practical -- trade skills, agriculture -- as it does book learning. It is moral and social, teaching self-ownership and self-sacrifice,   Although Washington craved knowing how to read even as a child, and his drive for self-improvement was such that he worked his way across a span of a hundred miles to attend school at the Hampton Institute,  he did not see book-learning as a magical solution to the problems of his fellow freedmen.  Some had taken earnestly to the veneer of education, but shared the same disdain towards work that had poisoned the plantation elite.  When he was asked to head the fledgling school for blacks anxious to  uplift themselves, he stressed the dignity of labor, the sense of ownership; he joined students in creating bricks, hewing wood, building the physical structure  of the school.  In this same vein, their practical skills built themselves, gave them the realization that they were capable of producing a good work that they and others could use and value. It is on that foundation that book-learning can rest, and so his students followed a Benedictine schedule of "pray and work", or in his case "study, work, and pray" -- occupied from 5:30 'til 10:00 pm.

Washington was a surprising author in many ways -- opening this memoir up with a joke, and offering insights that I would have never expected. For instance, his writing indicates not a trace of hostility towards the old elite, but rather pity and sympathy ;  his time spent among the wealthy and 'noble', in both America and in England, squelched any notion of viewing them as the enemy.  (If the reader wants to be cynical, he can conclude that Washington is dwelling most on those people like Carnegie who wanted to do some good with their wealth, and putting out of mind the less noble-minded.)   I didn't expect Washington to be as wary of reconstruction as he indicated; he voices suspicion that blacks placed into electoral office were being put there simply out of vengeance against the old aristocrats, and that this would create more racial strife.   On first reading, the Booker T. Washington of Up from Slavery reads rather like saint, a Gandhi-esque figure who endures all things because he hopes and works towards the redemption and progress of all humanity.  I suspect I should read more about Washington to get a better view of the man, but I'm highly partial to his worldview here,  his disdain for the multitude in the cities who "live by their wits" and who would have profited themselves more had they grown up on the land,   living with both body and mind.  His optimism was, alas, misplaced in some respects as the Klan -- which he dismisses as a dead thing which no one would tolerate 'now' -- was reborn with greater power in the 1920s.   His fear that looking to the government for every thing would create a new servility has unfortunately been realized...not just in blacks, but in all of us.   Even so, if illiterate slaves like Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington could  in their respective youths realize a hunger to conduct themselves like men, sovereign actors in their own lives, there's hope for us all.

Classics Club: Year I

Twenty-sixteen was my first full year in the Classics Club challenge, and I'm off to a good start. Virtually everything came from my American Lit and English Lit specials in April, June, and July, though.

2015:
Emma, Jane Austen (12/29/2015)

2016
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke (2/12/16)
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (3/2/2016)
The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan (3/13/2016)
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (3/26/2016)
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (4/1/2016)
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (4/3/2016)
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (6/27/2016)
White Fang, Jack London (6/29/2016)
O Pioneers!  Willa Cather (7/1/2016)
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (7/6/2016)
Inferno, Dante (7/16/2016)
The Epic of Gilgamesh,  trans/ Danny P. Jackson (12/2/2016)
The Aeneid (prose trans. A.J. Church 12/4/2016, verse trans. Robert Fitzgerald pending)

I don't have a specific plan for 2017. While I'd like to proceed chronologically from this point (and I have The Histories checked out), in truth I will probably read randomly from my list. 

Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh
© 1997 verse translation by Danny P. Jackson
116 pages

When I threw in with the Classics Club, I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh had to be  on there. The oldest known recorded story? How could it be missed?  I've had intentions of reading it since encountering an excerpt of its Flood narrative in high school world literature, and have even listened to recitations of the drama. For those who have never encountered it: Gilgamesh is a king whose subjects behold him in fear and trembling. So potent is he that he gets away with nicking people's wives on their wedding night. It's good to be the king, no? The people of Uruk plea to the gods for relief from the king, and in response they send him...a bro.  A wild man named Enkidu, who alone is Gilgamesh's match for sheer manliness. He is utterly untamed, in tune with the animals and such, until a priestess seduces him with her feminine wiles (and by this translation, she literally jumps him). Abandoned by his  four-legged friends in the forest, Enkidu goes to meet Gilgamesh, whose reputation precedes him. After a good brawl to shake hands with,  these two men of power start taking down monsters and cutting down trees. They attract the rage of some of the gods -- especially that of Ishtar, who attempts to seduce Gilgamesh but is forcefully refused by him delivering a list of all the men she's  used and destroyed --   and Enkidu dies, deflating Gilgamesh's sails. Having previously been blithe about death, Gilgamesh is now hit with its reality, and goes to seek out the only man who cheated death, Utnapishtim, he who survived the Great Flood.  Utnapishtim attempts to dissuade him from the immortality quest, but then clues him in on a secret plant -- one which is promptly stolen by a snake. Gilgamesh resigns himself to making the best of life that he can, and that's' that. (Unless you count the last chapter, which involves Enkidu and a brief visit to the Netherworld.)

Anyone who has read Genesis will see shared aspects and perhaps dimly remember that Abraham originally hailed from the city of Ur, just down the river from the site of Uruk. Most obvious is the Flood story, of course, but so is the snake costing man the secret of immortal life. I found it interesting when I first heard this story that Enkidu's knowledge of woman immediately ruptured his 'one with nature' status.  In Genesis, Adam and Eve aren't said to 'know' each other until they've been severed from their own natural paradise and put to work as farmers, but there's still a tenuous link between sexuality and alienation from the natural world.   I faintly remember reading that  the agricultural Sumerian religious rites involved sex (see the priestess as a reminder), so perhaps that's the connection: he who would control nature cannot be at home in it, and Enkidu does start learning about farming from the priestess after they leave.   Other, more distant similarities can be found between Gilgamesh and other ancient stories:  Gilgamesh's refusal of a divine seducer, for instance, brings to mind Circe and Odysseus.

Not included in this translation are the 20 new lines discovered a couple of years ago in Iraq, which add a bit to the Enkidu and Gilgamesh adventures. Apparently they meet monkeys in the forest, and the wild beast Humbaba is presented a forest-king who is entertained. That might explain why Humbaba appears like a man in so much Sumerian art, though that could be laziness or something else.  I'm glad this is the translation of Gilgamesh my library has:  it's rendered in verse in approachable English, and features 20 illustrations that invoke woodcuts.

Related

• The Epic of Gilgamesh audio drama, produced by A Podcast History of Our World
• Beowulf -- another story of a man fighting dragons and yearning for immortality

Inferno

Inferno
created 14th century Dante Alighieri
translated © 2002 Anthony Esolen
528 pages

If Dante's Inferno is to be believed, Hell is mostly populated by Italians.  The first piece in the Divine Comedy, Inferno takes the reader down into the depths of the infernal abyss,  through ring after ring of the damned. Fire is the exception, not the rule down here;  Hell is a vast geography of misery.  The ground is rocky and steep, the air filled with cold and lashing rain, or noxious fumes.  The reader, taking Dante's place as he wanders off the straight roads of life into the wilderness, is guided through Hell in safety by Virgil -- the greatest of all classical poets.

 Inferno contains two things in abundance:  classical allusions and Italian politics.  The world of the Inferno is peopled by characters, beasts, and places that draw on the rich vocabulary of the classical tradition. We see here not only the 'virtuous pagans' hanging around a medieval version of the Asphodel Plains, denied entry into paradise but not damned either, but more than a few heroes of the canon. Odysseus is here, condemned as a liar -- and so is Brutus, a traitor in the gnawing maw of an angry devil.  My original intent was to read the Inferno as part of a series of medieval history and medieval literature -- and considering the amount of Florentine politics here, that may have been helpful. Dante can't so much as move without tripping over a corrupt pope, an exposed friend, or some hapless Florentine giving a  dire warning about impending civil war. (And I do mean tripping -- people are stuck into the ground head first, or trapped in a frozen river with only their heads exposed..) The ranks of the traitors are especially Italian-rich. A little familiarity with medieval cosmology helps in understanding the text -- the idea that the universe is a series of spheres, each level nesting inside the other.  Dante also displays an intriguing imagination, creating poetic punishments. (Schismatics who create division within the church or society are themselves divided with an axe to the head.) At the bottom of the pit is a frozen wasteland, with the greatest of traitors entrapped by darkness and ice. The artic winds that create the ice are created by Satan's wings, constantly beating in his eternal attempt to rise.

When the year's young in season, 
and the spray washes the sun beams in Aquarius
and the nights dwindle south toward half a day
When the frost  paints a copy on the ground
of her white sister's snowy image, but
Her feather's sharpness doesn't last for long [...]   (Canto 24)

 Esolen errs on the side of accuracy rather than rhyme with his translation,  but he does achieve a certain lyric quality and uses footnotes judiciously, creating a text neither confusing nor cluttered. Esolen's appendices are unusually rich, containing textually similar lines from The Aenid, text from the non-canonical "Vision of St. Paul", which describes different  degrees of punishments for sinners, and theological writings from Aquinas and Boniface that would have informed Dante's view.  More extensive notes follow the end of Canto XXXIV, but of course that's not the end of the story -- it continues on the mount of Purgatory.

The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage
© 1895 Stephen Crane
170 pgs

Stephen Crane practically introduced Civil War historical fiction, writing this tale set during a war that was ended six years before his birth. The Red Badge of Courage is the account of a young soldier's baptism by fire when he eagerly joins Lincoln's war against the south, wondering -- as the day of battle draws near, caught in the grips of nervous anticipation -- if he can really pull it off. Will he be a daring soldier, or cower in the face of the enemy? He seems to survive his first brush with the southerners, but when they launch a second attack, an unexpected one, his inner reserve melts, and he flees the line for the safety of the wilderness. There he encounters the dead and dying, sees a friend fall before his very eyes, and responds by ashamedly returning to his regiment, where he distinguishes himself in action against the enemy, losing himself to a kind of battle madness. Crane's tale combines vivid descriptions of the landscape and battle -- the literary depiction of the enemy's fires reflected in a dark river at night is especially haunting -- with inane and repetitive dialogue. It is a pity Crane didn't live long to refine his craft.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop
© 1927 Willa Cather
297 pages

Poor New Mexico -- so far from God, so close to the United States. The Pope can't help the tide of American -- and very Protestant -- settlement that is sure to follow Polk's war against Mexico, but the church in the southwest can be strengthened. To that end he dispatches Jean-Marie Latour to Santa Fe, there to serve as bishop.  Aided by his faithful friend, Joseph Vaillant,  Latour tarries with the people of New Mexico for decades before being buried by a doting multitude.  Cather combines beautiful descriptions of the landscape -- especially of the Sangre de Cristo mountains -- with lovely little stories about the bishop growing to know and love his new parishioners. Theirs is a world of danger, of ferocious storms, unforgiving heat,  occasional Apache raids, and plenty of brigands. Worse yet, the Americans are coming, and as they continue gaining land at Mexico's expense, the bishop's province grows, stretching from the Rockies to Mexico. He complains, good-naturedly, that it is hard for a poor bishop on a mule to keep pace with the march of history, with thousands of square miles of responsibility placed under his care.

The bishop and his companion compel interest for their gentleness; while he has come to restore discipline in a land where the priests have taken to siring families instead of nurturing the family of the church, he does not rush in where angels fear to tread. He realizes he is in a wholly new environment, and sees in the Indians -- the Apache, the Hopi, the Pueblo, and other peoples who were never reached by Spanish missionaries or forgot them -- a civilization with wisdom and conviction as deep as his.  He is awed by the ancientness of the land and the people upon it,  When he is wronged, as he is by a schismatic priest who refuses to accept oversight, he is still quick to forgive.  The sheer abundance of tenderness here, as generously proportioned as the western skies, make it a perfectly lovely read -- and all the more when Cather's brilliant descriptive writing is taken into account, creating an image of the Southwest with beauty that penetrates even the viewers' bones.

White Fang

White Fang
© 1906 Jack London
pp. 1- 101, Tales of the North.

"An' right here I want to remark,' Bill went on, 'that that animal's familiarity with camp-fires is suspicious an' immoral.'
'It knows for certain more'n a self-respectin' wolf ought to know,' Henry agreed

White Fang revisits  the theme of the Wild versus civilization from The Call of the Wild and reverses it.  Whereas in Call a soft California dog was thrown into the Alaskan wilderness and forced to call upon his instincts to survive, finding joy running with wolves after his master is killed,  in White Fang a dog/wolf hybrid is lured from the wild into the camps of man.  First published in Outing Magazine,  the story begins with two men being tracked by an eerie creature, a she-wolf who understands man. It is she who will give birth to a cub, and rear him in a wilderness of even-more dangerous predators like the Canadian lynx,  and it is her own youth spent in an Indian camp that will first introduce the cub to man.  Three-quarters wolf, there is virtually nothing of the dog in him, only a respect for Man's strength and a willingness to submit to it in exchange for shelter and food.  Yet there is more to man's relationship with wolves and dogs than sheer animal dominance.

 Here again London touches on Nietzsche's superman myth, and again rejects it; just as  he did in The Sea Wolf and Martin Eden.   White Fang is shaped by fear, hunger, and rejection to be a creature mighty in strength, desperately cunning, and comfortable only in solitude. He knows one law: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, intimidate or cower. Every memory of tenderness, either from his cub days or his early adoption by an Yukon native, is erased after he falls into the captivity of dog-fighters.  Yet he is not lost; just as Wolf Larsen was defeated by a man who combined wild strength with moral courage, so too is White Fang's savagery tamed by persistent and intelligently guided affection,  care that teaches him other laws -- care that reignite the what little of the dog exists within him.  Considering that The Call of the Wild was my first novel, and that every single thing I've read by Jack London has proven unforgettable, it's hard to believe White Fang has taken me this long to read. It combines adventure with a narrative that speculates on how a dog might, in coming of age, grow to understand the world. The writing is winsome as usual, dramatic and - occasionally, unexpectedly - with flashes of laughter. (London has given me a most excellent insult -- "If you don't mind me saying, you're seventeen kinds of damn fool, all of them different, and then some!")

Related:
The Sea-Wolf, Jack London.