Patrick’s Comments

Patrick’s comments from the Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) group.

Note: Patrick is not currently a member of this group.

I feel that if I express my appreciation in writing for the books that I have read - and I feel appreciation for the vast majority of them - then I am putting out positive energy, which may do someone else good and certainly does me an enormous amount of good. People who only or mostly write about what upsets them, and I understand that it’s a temptation these days, can become the victims of their own negative energy, having no effect whatsoever on their targets, but re-absorbing and multiplying the negativity in their own bone marrow. I don’t want to be that person, so I try to go the other way.

I’ve read Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s short first novel Falkland twice (many years apart * ) and have been meaning to read more by him. While I was perusing Herbert W. Tompkins’ Highways and Byways in Hertfordshire (1902), I came across an extended reference to the scholar-murderer Eugene Aram and Bulwer’s novel about him. (Tompkins always brings up locally-related literature.) So I picked up the novel at Project Gutenberg and am several chapters in; it’s very promising. EBL gets a bum rap but was a consummately professional writer.

*Now that I’m returning to many writers in retirement after long hiatuses, I usually first re-read what I had read by them before, in order to refresh my recollections and old impressions.

In Progress: Raintree County (1948) is a joy to read, and certainly a Great American Novel and monument of Midwestern fiction. I’m tempted to think that the book is more famous than it actually is, because I’ve read John Leggett’s wonderful joint biography of Ross Lockridge and Tom Heggen, and I’m well up on the granular literary history of that period.

Put aside all thoughts (if you have any) of the disastrous 1957 film adaptation. That movie was made as if no one involved had read the 1,000+ page book (and indeed, the director admitted that he hadn’t even opened it).

The adaptation was doomed from the beginning because this is a book with a complicated temporal structure and Joycean language in an American tone; it doesn’t scream “Hollywood”. Nonetheless, MGM had awarded Lockridge a hefty prize even before the book’s publication, contingent on some cutting to the huge manuscript, in addition to the excisions that publisher Houghton Mifflin and the Book of the Month Club were already demanding. (The manuscript still exists at Harvard, and I wish the Lockridge family would authorize a published restoration.)

Lockridge felt sullied by all the negotiations and believed he had compromised his creation; he gassed himself just as the novel was hitting the top of the bestseller lists.

The novel was forthrightly and scandalously erotic for the Forties. I give Ross Lockridge enormous credit for that delightful and bounding frankness. As someone once said, none of us got here without a sexual act. 😏

Very interesting comments about Paradise Lost! I try to read texts like Paradise Lost, and The Divine Comedy, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, as if they did NOT connect to anything in my childhood, as if they were the Iliad or the Ramayana, embodying a completely foreign and unfamiliar belief system. I need that critical distance.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that since I don’t respond positively to ANY religious belief system, including supposedly benign ones such as Buddhism and indigenous religions, I have some problem with belief system literature overall. The magnitude of the problem varies with the work, of course.

The Inferno is an interesting case. I agree with the received view that it is the strongest, most vivid section of The Divine Comedy, but that is partly because the theology is so decidedly unattractive - the glee that Dante takes in devising suitably baroque punishments for sinners and people he dislikes is off-putting. I took it as a sort of Seventies horror movie.

Purgatorio and Paradiso are more uplifting, of course, but the theology becomes so increasingly convoluted that I was spending most of my time in the OUP notes.

Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil interested me as a political novel, but like the other of his that I have read (his first, Vivian Gray, quite entertaining), it seems uncertain what it wants to be; the political, satirical, religious, gritty-realistic, and uplifting elements mix very uneasily. Supposedly they are all linked through the thesis of “The Two Nations”, the rich and the poor, but not too effectively in my view.

Certainly however there is plenty of fascinating material for those well-versed in the era, and I do recommend the novel on that basis to readers of that type. My bigger problem is actually the titular heroine, who never seemed real or interesting to me. I try to be careful not to back-impose our gender politics on a different time, but drippy is drippy. I have the same problem with Lorna Doone, a novel that I like very much except for Lorna herself, oy vey. Too pretty and “perfect”. With Sybil, the descriptive word that seems to come up is “angelic”, a type of characterization that I dislike, but from the point of view of technique she is just way too obviously symbolic (purity, ennobled poverty, etc).

I won’t get into the novel’s resolution except to say that it is frightfully convenient and represents Disraeli trying to have his situation (things are horrible out there, true enough) and deny it too (but look at my happy ending!). Dickens was better at this.

A mixed bag altogether.

Keep up the good work, May! We need more university students starting on the literary journey.

I am reading Crime and Punishment right now, in the recent Nicolas Pasternak Slater translation for OUP.

Steven Purvis / Jeff Hulbert, Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone - One key takeaway here is that if hadn’t been Burgess et al, it could easily have been others, because everything in Britain was based on the old boys’ / Oxbridge network, with minimal background checking, and this made the entire system very porous indeed. This despite the fact in Burgess’s case that he obviously carried on in a “quite extraordinarily dissolute and indiscreet” manner, dropping red flags in his path like confetti.

Rora wrote: "Patrick wrote: "I’m a little under the weather with a mild flu, hence my reduced posting today. Not that anyone probably minds! 🙂 ]
."

Hope you feel better soon Patrick"

Thank you! Probably a couple days more.

Cape Cod displays Thoreau in a genial mode, quite down-to-earth, less windy-philosophical than, say, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The fact that he was writing at least some of the chapters for magazine publication possibly reined in his more high-flown tendencies; in any case, this is a really charming and companionable account of Thoreau’s walking tour on the Cape.

[I’m a little under the weather with a mild flu, hence my reduced posting today. Not that anyone probably minds! 🙂 ]

Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lol

I just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood..."

The same here. I’m currently reading Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo.

Compton Mackenzie’s huge Bildungsroman Sinister Street (1913-14) is often compared to his good friend Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), and indeed, the two authors were working on their tomes in the same time-frame; I wonder if they compared notes? The two novels share the qualities of absolute vividness and unhurriedness; if you become impatient easily, I would suggest you look elsewhere. Young Michael and Stella Fane grow so slowly, you might as well be marking the inches on your own door-frame. They are the illegitimate children of a society lady, although they aren’t informed of their birth circumstances for a long while.

I am just arriving at Michael’s Oxford years now. It is striking how many intellectual enthusiasms he passes through during his teen years - superficially, to be sure, but at least he HAS them; his mind is developing richly.

As long as this book is (800+ pages in my old Penguin edition), when you get to the end, you are not done; there are three sequels! The entire series is in the 2,000-page range.

Teri-K wrote: "Ennui - that sounds like a fascinating story! lol

I just started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. I've not read this one before, but I've loved his Robin Hood since I was young, and have re..."

I haven’t read Pyle since I was a kid, and I should. 🙂

I have been meaning to read Maria Edgeworth for years now, and really don’t know what took me so long, since Castle Rackrent (1800) is quite short and you can knock it off in a few hours. Anyway, I finally did read it and was quite entertained; I especially liked the fact that it is NOT about a romance, but about a family and a house, and how they run out of money, which is a theme that 19th Century writers became uncomfortable with and tended to avoid. Now on to the unfortunately titled Ennui, also included in the Penguin volume I picked up.

I loved Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I am halfway through No More Parades, the second novel in the Parade’s End tetralogy, and of course am not in a position to make any full assessment. It is a landmark and I am happy to be reading it. However, I do have some interim comments that may come off as negative.

As a High Modernist, Ford may be compared to Dorothy Richardson. Their writing lacks the surface appeal of a Joyce or Woolf, who seem practically glittering and pop-cultural by comparison. Ford and Richardson can also frustrate the casual reader by spending 25 pages on a seeming triviality and then have something obviously major occur between chapters, to emerge only through glancing references later.

Those who are expecting Parade’s End to be a “melodramatic war novel”: Not. You’ll have to get your war novel elsewhere. The war is just context here.

I may be in a minority, but I do not think that Christopher Tietjens (“the last Tory”) is an attractive protagonist, what with his excessively high self-regard and his inability to get out of his own head. He lacks empathy for others and his judgments of them are meaningless. He has no sense of humor whatsoever. (Olivia Manning’s Guy Pringle is his temperamental successor, although their politics differ.)

Tietjens’ ghastly wife Sylvia is much worse even. What brought this couple together in the first place is not immediately apparent to say the least. 🤔

So I’m making it sound pretty bad, but really this series is for the committed “literary” reader, and once that is accepted, it can start to yield what it has to yield. * At the 37.5% mark, I am very interested to see where Ford takes things.

* Parade’s End had the mixed benefit, like Manning’s Fortunes of War and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, of becoming a BBC mini-series. I will wager that 75% or more of those who bought the Ford and Scott books as a result of their viewing didn’t get very far. Manning undoubtedly fared better because her novels are very readable and direct in their approach.

George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, on good display in The Borough (1810). The rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter give the book an easy readable “swing”. As usual, the sections about the religious controversies of the day are the least penetrable. The sections pertaining to the village and the seaside are wonderful, and the latter famously provides the basis for Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.

Wreade1872 wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Wreade1872 wrote: "Finally finished Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to..."

Thanks! I’ll take a look.

Wreade1872 wrote: "Finally finished Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. A thousand pages, not sure who i'd recommend it to but i quite enjoyed it. [4/5]"

I have been hoping to get to this for a long time. Maybe soon.

Halfway through Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, and I must say, it has really grown on me. The biggest reason I am finding it so companionable is that Edwin Clayhanger is likable, very likable, unlike a LOT of protagonists in a LOT of novels I have been reading lately. One roots for Edwin. His dynamic with his frustrating father Darius is reminiscent of similar situations in other late Victorian / Edwardian novels (The Way of All Flesh) and memoirs (Father and Son). The dominant model of fatherhood at the time was obviously the pits; one wonders how anyone made it to adulthood unscathed. But Edwin, although he doesn’t win every battle, appears to be winning the war, and good for him.

Rora wrote: "Re-reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and also re-reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs"

Mansfield Park is my favorite Austen, most definitely.

Thomas Love Peacock (BOTD 1785-1866) is one of the 19th Century authors that I have been meaning to get to for EONS. I recently finished Nightmare Abbey, which like most of his conversation-novels is quite short, and am almost done with Crotchet Castle. I was immediately reminded of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, which preceded Peacock and, then unpublished, can’t have been an influence. But there is certainly an affinity.

The dialogue in such Shaw plays as Heartbreak House has a somewhat Peacockian flavor, too.

Peacock’s writings are an instance where you really need the notes to penetrate a lot of the references. His characters are often barely disguised versions of notable figures such as Coleridge; he has a lot of fun with them.