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.

Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering (1924) is a mite difficult to classify. As the subtitle indicates, it is partly about ambling and meandering, both physically through the streets of London, and mentally wherever Machen’s mind takes him. It is sometimes put forward as a pioneering text of psychogeography. It has elements of memoir. It overlaps a little in its approach with two other London books that I like very much - H.V. Morton’s Ghosts of London (1939) (semi-forgotten bits of history tucked away in odd corners) and Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) (first-hand account of the back-street literary life). It has a proto-post-modernist side, since Machen writes at length about the writing of this very book, and the difficulties involved in deciding what it is going to be, and in executing the plan if there ever is a plan.

In any case, it is a short book, only 150 pages, and very much of a fun, refreshing, and unusual read.

Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "BOTDs (Born on this Dates) cheer me up. I like thinking about writers and other cultural figures who have made real contributions, it’s a nice thing, and “nice” is a quality that I ..."

I read a volume of all the major plays a few years back, and it was dazzling.

BOTDs (Born on this Dates) cheer me up. I like thinking about writers and other cultural figures who have made real contributions, it’s a nice thing, and “nice” is a quality that I have come to increasingly value, like a maiden aunt in a Barbara Pym novel. Nice, jolly, pleasant, agreeable, moderate (Aristotle!), those are all good words. Let me break out the tea set in my little cottage while I pat the dog’s head…

Anyway, today, October 16, is the shared birthday of three writers whose high status is not at all contested, two of them Nobel laureates: Günter Grass, Eugene O’Neill, and Oscar Wilde. I will think of them today and it will be cheering for sure.

Re: A Dance to the Music of Time, an amazingly high percentage of what Nicholas Jenkins reports is discovered by him at parties, especially ones that he wasn’t invited to.

Reading Powell underscores my sense of how tight the social scene centered on London was. Everyone knew everyone else, attended the same schools, was related through marriage or distant cousinhood. One practically needed a degree in genealogy in order to converse at those parties.

I will admit that there are moments when I become a little impatient, thinking that some of these social interactions are trivial (well, that’s true) and could not possibly be of interest to anyone outside that immediate circle. The moments pass, but I am still puzzled as to the “big picture”.

C.P. Snow and Simon Raven in their romans fleuves include more thematic material that is obviously NON-trivial and connected with a broader world of social and political developments. Powell up through the fourth volume of Dance only does this glancingly, almost so you might not even notice.

Sam wrote: "Patrick wrote: "^ Great thoughts, I completely concur. Yes, the metafictionalists and other brash young writers who emerged from the 1950s to the 1970s seem to have fallen out of favor, with the ex..."

Thank you, sir!

Teri-K wrote: "Patrick wrote: "Teri-K wrote: "Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they..."

Yes, I have read it twice too - once at university in the 1970s, and again just a few years ago.

My current Scott title in progress is Guy Mannering (first time). Great book!

Teri-K wrote: "Our local used bookstore was remoeling one day when I stepped in and tried to purchase a couple of very old hardbacks. They didn't know how much to charge me, so they gave them to me for free. The ..."

That was very nice of them! Waverley is a great favorite of mine.

I am always trying to fill in my gaps of “minor” 19th Century novelists, although I don’t really believe in “minor” - it makes a writer sound dismissible. Two of the books I have going right now by authors I haven’t read before overlap interestingly on the theme of inheritance, which could be a very big deal if a family had a fair amount of money. The Entail, by the Scottish writer and businessman John Galt (1779-1839), shapes up as tragic, with the ghastly character of the monomaniacal Laird, Claud Walkinshaw, dominating the proceedings. Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), is comical / adventurous in tone.

Interestingly, both Galt and Kingsley (brother of the more famous Charles) spent time in the colonies, Galt in Canada and Kingsley in Australia (where he set some of his novels). Galt’s son Alexander was one of the key figures in the founding of the Canadian Confederation.

In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy offers here one of the most disenchanted and anti-romantic novels predating Modernism – although discussing how is well-nigh impossible without major spoilers.

However, one dimension of the anti-romanticism that can be mentioned is the central character Elfride, who is the love focus for four men. Elfride may be pretty, she sure as hell ain’t charming. One reviewer at Goodreads aptly describes her as fickle and vapid, and honestly there can be few characters in all of 19th Century fiction who are THIS annoying.

Hence, although A Pair of Blue Eyes is a fascinating performance, I do have difficulty in seeing WHY all these men are so taken with Elfride. Is prettiness enough? *

* I will admit that as a gay male reader, enchanted love-object descriptions of young women in 19th Century novels often fly right past me unless the women have intelligence and character to match their looks. When they don’t - Elfride here, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Lorna Doone in the eponymous novel - well let’s just say that those passages are not my focus or my road into the story.

Teri-K wrote: "Laurie wrote: "Patrick wrote: "One of Ours turned out to be, by a considerable margin, the least satisfactory of Willa Cather’s novels that I’ve read. I had to laugh when I came across one Goodread..."

Very true. I don’t set much store by prizes, awards, Top Tens, and such. So subjective and political.

The Landlord at Lion’s Head is one of the least-known novels ever published in the Signet Classics series, not even among the most recognizable William Dean Howells titles (The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Modern Instance). It is a powerful study of a young “alpha male” type, Jeff Durgin – amoral, practical, shrewd, but not born into name or money, and not possessed of any striking intellectual gifts that would enable him to become a successful lawyer, doctor, or such. He is therefore powerfully handicapped in the 19th Century world, despite being handsome and self-possessed. But this doesn’t anger him; he is always confident that he will “find a way”. I was reminded of Trollope’s similarly situated Phineas Finn, and both men angle forward by playing off their sexual magnetism, not giving a second thought if this involves “making love” to several women in the same time-frame.

Howells contrasts Durgin with a fastidious older artist, Westover (often taken to be a Howells self-portrait). I can’t say as I’d be friends with either man – Durgin is too shallow and brutish, Westover a passive priss. But their relationship fuels the novel effectively. The settings in rural New Hampshire (where the Durgin family inn is located, hence the book’s title) and urban Boston (especially Harvard, which Jeff uneasily attends) are also tellingly contrasted. A sharp and compelling novel overall. I am a big Howells fan.

One of Ours turned out to be, by a considerable margin, the least satisfactory of Willa Cather’s novels that I’ve read. I had to laugh when I came across one Goodreads review that characterized the protagonist Claude Wheeler as “a mopey, discontented bore”. Up to a point, I sympathized with his vague desires to escape the Nebraska farm life he was born into, but that vagueness and indirection wear on one after a while. Make up your mind, Claude! Like Vance Weston in Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed, Claude doesn’t make any good decisions, and again like Vance, his marriage decision is the worst - although at least Vance was starry-eyed for his bride; Claude drifts indifferently into wedding a frigid young religious woman who won’t allow him to touch her. Those chapters were painful. I seem to be reading about a lot of hasty bad marriages lately. 🤔

Anyway, I perfectly well know that Claude’s hundreds of pages of dissatisfaction and frustration are a set-up for his eventually finding meaning when he packs off to World War I. But imagining war was simply not in Cather’s wheelhouse. She undertook to do it because she was wrestling with the death in battle of her cousin Grosvenor Cather, who “could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action”, and who was the model for Claude Wheeler. I accept that this was material she felt impelled to work on, but I don’t think she pulled off what she was trying for. Writing a long novel about a consistently miserable character is maybe not the best way to engage the reader, and capping it off with an account of wartime that seems distant and unreal and completely outside the author’s experience (because it was) makes matters worse. Hemingway HATED those chapters, and I can’t say he was wrong to do so.

So while I am glad I read the book, as a completist and a Catherite, it was rather a let-down. And guess what? This is the novel she won the Pulitzer for. Go figure.

Fun story: I recently (June) adopted a pair of bonded kittens, boy and girl, from the local government animal agency here in Tlaxcala, Bienestar Animal. I became aware of the agency when they had their weekly Friday adoption fair in the parking lot at the local Wal-Mart, and I happened to be passing through. I didn’t take any animals that day, but I visited their facility the following week. They always have plenty of vaccinated and vet-reviewed animals available, and when they showed me this pair of two-month-old gray-and-white kittens which they didn’t want to separate, I was a goner. Subsequent sterilizations are free - indeed, any animal you bring in on a Monday morning, they will sterilize on the spot - so I returned for that in August, and they both came through it very well. 

I named them Tom and Sophie (Mexican versions Tomás and Sofía) after Tom Jones, in Henry Fielding’s 18th Century novel of the same name, and his sweetheart Sophia Western. Also thinking of Beatrix Potter’s Tom Kitten. I was tempting fate with the naming of Tom, and sure enough, he takes after both his namesakes and is a charming scamp and a rogue, with an ability to get into trouble that I haven’t experienced since my orange tabby Lucy was young. Tom will climb to the highest shelf and promptly knock everything down. He also has massive zoomie energy. Sophie joins in with him, but on her own she is much more demure - again, exactly like her namesake. 

So the count is now 12, four dogs and eight indoor cats, Lord help me. But actually the care is not difficult at all. What takes a bit more energy on my part is to be emotionally available to all of them. 

Savita wrote: "Thank you so much for your helpful comments , Sara , BlueFlower and Ben . Sara , when I have ticked on the Notify me when people comment box , then will the particular comments ' notifications ap..."

Not sure about the app, which I find difficult to use, but the notifications should appear with the number of current ones superimposed on the bell in the top bar of the web-pages. Although that system occasionally glitches too. I believe the emails may be gone for good.

I am making my way though Paul Mariani’s gargantuan biography of William Carlos Williams, A New World Naked.

I like WCW’s work very much, and he is an especially meaningful figure for me because he lived right across the Passaic River from my boyhood home. My mom the nurse worked under Dr. Williams at Passaic General Hospital in the Fifties, and my pediatrician, Dr. Albert Hagofsky, was a colleague of his; their offices were only a few blocks apart. Hence I am well-disposed towards Williams, and always thought of him as a nice guy.

But the biography, perhaps unsurprisingly, undercuts that. I was frankly horrified by an incident in Williams’ late 30s when, frustrated by his lack of recognition at that point, he wrote and published a big old hatchet piece in which he attacked basically every other poet and critic in America, including many close friends, as lacking in talent and principles. Many colleagues took a long time to forgive him, and some never did. He was not a kid; he was a medical doctor, for goodness sake (“Do no harm”); he was bitter and angling for attention. The incident puts him in a terrible light.

On the more amusing side, it is fun to read of Williams’ uneasy rapprochement with Wallace Stevens, whom he reasonably enough considered as his chief rival; and his unwillingness for a long time to engage with the alarmingly talented upstart Hart Crane. Aficionados of choice literary gossip will find a lot here.

Because I read a lot of books “at once”, I can make fun juxtapositions. For example, at the moment I am reading both the first volume of Anaïs Nin’s Diaries (the 1966 edition) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I’m only just started on the Miller, but well into the Nin, which is impressing me greatly. I put off trying Nin for years because I thought she wouldn’t appeal to me, but I was flat wrong. Terrific writer. Admittedly, the l’amour fou angle in the Anaïs-Henry-June triangle kind of sails past me because it is foreign to my sensibility and life experiences - I have never been into big old passion * - but that is only one strand of the Diaries.

* I recently read a chapter of John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance that is all mystically revelatory sex - the earth moved, the mystery of life was revealed, etc - and as with the similar passages in D.H. Lawrence, I felt way outside the text. From my POV, orgasm is nice and all, and that’s about it. I have never thought to freight it with such significance.

^ Great thoughts, I completely concur. Yes, the metafictionalists and other brash young writers who emerged from the 1950s to the 1970s seem to have fallen out of favor, with the exception of Pynchon who has a certain pop culture notoriety. I feel bad because I didn’t keep up with Pynchon or Barth either, after my college years, and I should go back to that well.

Robert Coover has passed at age 92. This one hits me because I studied his work as an undergraduate at Yale. I designed an independent study class in the American Studies major for myself, reading through much of the work of the brash young (mega)novelists: Coover, Pynchon, Barth, Gass, Gaddis.

For Coover newbies, I have a suggestion. Two, actually. The Universal Baseball Association (1968) is a dazzling early novel (and perfectly accessible even if you don’t know a thing about baseball). Pricksongs & Descants (1969) is an excellent story collection from the same time.

The Public Burning (1977), Coover’s huge, phantasmagoric, and scabrous novel about Nixon, is unforgettable but best tackled after those shorter works, I think. A very timely book in this election season.

I feel guilty (as I so often do) about not having kept up with Coover’s later work. I think that he suffered a diminution of attention because, to put it mildly, he was not afraid of sexual themes, and would venture into near-pornography. If he were French, no one would care, but in the US, that is still kind of a no-no.

Perhaps I can make amends by now reading Coover’s first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), which I never got to, and its juggernaut 1,005-page sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014). This set is ALSO timely, dealing as it does with a cult.

Just finished the first of six volumes of George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead, 1963), including Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Man of Destiny, and Buoyant Billions.

One’s chances of seeing even Shaw’s most famous plays in adequate stage productions these days is slight. Heartbreak House, for example, requires 10 top-notch actors: Not cheap or easy to assemble.

So reading is the way to go, but even among confirmed readers of the classics, plays (outside of Shakespeare) don’t seem to get the attention they merit. It is too bad. Shaw is hardly just dialogue - his stage directions are exquisite and enable one to readily visualize a production.

The same thought occurs to me as I read each of these Shaw plays, and indeed when I read almost ANY classic play: Where would the audience for this be found today? Because the demands on the audience are pretty intense: A rapt level of attention, an intense sensitivity to verbal nuance, a high level of cultural literacy and sophistication, the willingness to work for the art instead of just letting it wash over you. 

^ Thank you! It is good to be back.