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 just returned to Goodreads Groups a couple of days ago after being away for a year because I needed to take care of some personal matters. I was immediately confused by the lack of email Notifications, and asked about it in another group, where I was assured that the changes are creating plenty of confusion for everyone, not just me! I see here that is the case. 🙂

I always was in the habit of cherry-picking the threads I wanted to follow by clicking “Notify me when people comment”, because I found that getting everything was Just Too Much. Nonetheless, it seems that a massive alteration such as what is happening is bound to create chaos.

Reading today in The Decameron, Third Day, in the excellent Penguin edition. Man, no one told us in high school how sexual certain classics were - Chaucer, Boccaccio, many Ancient Greek and Latin authors, and that’s not even getting into Asian texts. Decorous literature is very much a 19th Century thing; it’s not characteristic of literary history in general.

Anyone with a serious interest in literature and literary history should get a total kick out of Richard Altick’s 1950 study The Scholar Adventurers. Immensely informative and entertaining look at the byways of literary scholarship.

One of the delights of the Altick volume is a 13-page section of Bibliographic Notes. Any non-fiction book that contains especially good (end or foot)notes, (preferably annotated) bibliography, bibliographic notes or essay, etc, has my everlasting gratitude, because I really will comb through those for other materials I want to follow up on. Books are findable most of the time; journal articles are a bear (American colloquial for “difficult situation”). Fortunately I have JSTOR access through being a Yale alumni, that helps with some articles. I would like to collect old scholarly journals and such, but my financial resources are not unlimited. 😏

I am certain that I will order at least a dozen books mentioned in the Altick notes, not all immediately but eventually. Two other books I have recently found a wealth of follow-up in are Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (which has an impressive annotated Bibliography) and Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (killer endnotes).

The Beat Generation is one of my “things”. I just love reading about them. But between the Lucien Carr manslaughter situation, and William S. Burroughs killing Joan Vollmer, and Bill Cannastra getting himself decapitated, and Neal Cassady being Neal Cassady, I am thinking that JUST MAYBE it wouldn’t have been such a great idea to hang out with these people. Reading John Clellon Holmes’ Beat roman à clef Go: A Novel just now, really entertaining - from a distance.

Holmes was the cautious guy, the observer in the group. Probably for every thousand people who have read Kerouac’s On the Road, one has looked at Go - but in its way it is just as good, and it came out a good five years earlier.

When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern!

The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North...

“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”

Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.

* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.

Probably by now, anyone who reads my posts will have discerned that I have a soft spot for many books, obscurities and older classics, that probably not many people are drawn to nowadays (and that is putting it mildly). No matter, they have an enthusiast in me.

The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:

“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”

^ Absolutely, for inter-library loan to be possible, another library must possess the book, and $114.00 pricing is punitive for them, too. University libraries, the most likely owners, are often restrictive with respect to inter-library loans to public libraries.

Brazilian literature is under-rated in the English-reading world, I think, even though there have been many translations. For out-of-copyright older translations, I go to the Internet Archive or HathiTrust; for purchasing hard copies, I scan the listings at Bookfinder.

I am currently reading Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro.

That is wonderful that you have that family connection to Brazil!

I need to get back to the Greek tragedies. If you have never seen the film version of The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas, and Geneviève Bujold, I recommend it,

Midway through Emilia Pardo Bazán’s brilliant 1886 novel The House of Ulloa, a member of the decayed Galician landed gentry and his new bride visit an even grander and more decrepit family and mansion, and when the bride is offered seating in the alarming-looking drawing room, the worm- and insect-eaten ceremonial chair crumbles to dust beneath her.

Now this is the power of fiction in a nutshell. You should have heard my intake of breath. I might add that Spanish fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so neglected in the English-speaking world, abounds in moments of such force.

I have a bit of a problem now, though. Pardo Bazán wrote a sequel to this novel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza), which was translated and published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. There is no paperback or ebook. The list price of the hardcover is $114.00. Amazon has it new for $85.65; the cheapest price in the used book market appears to be $71.70.

Now I ask you, is this kind of punitive pricing any way to treat lovers of literature? I could see Bucknell slapping a $35.00 or even $45.00 price on the hardcover, with a paperback at 2/3 of that, but $114.00 is just ridiculous.

I am eager to read the sequel, but at these prices I simply don’t have access to it, and living outside the US, inter-library loan is not an option. I wish my reading in Spanish were up to tackling the original text, which I could have at a reasonable price, but I’m not quite that advanced.

Ah well, I guess the book just goes on my long “Challenges to Obtain” list.

Not all of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires are science-fictional in nature; many are straight adventures, such as The Archipelago on Fire aka Islands on Fire, about the Greek War of Independence, which I am reading in the excellent new translation by Chris Amies. As always with Verne, there is a lot of factuality, specifically geography, and I am really brushing up on my Greek islands, let me tell you. Quiz me on the Cyclades versus the Sporades, I’m ready.

Recent decades have been good ones for English-reading Verne fans, with many untranslated works appearing for the first time, and new authoritative translations of the more famous works replacing older abridged, expurgated, or inaccurate ones. There are some of the novels, though, that you have to dig up in the old 19th Century versions because that is still all that exists. But Verne was prolific, we are lucky to now have just about everything in English, one way or another.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was the first adult novel I ever read, in the summer between second and third grades. I became such a Verne fanatic that my mom special-ordered I.O. Evans’ Jules Verne and His Work for me, since our town library didn’t have it.

^ He left Weir of Hermiston unfinished, said to be his most mature work and one that I need to read.

^ Happy to assist! Treasure Island and Kidnapped are irresistible adventure novels. I read the first as a kid and again since then, was hooked immediately.

^ Treasure Island and Kidnapped are both very entertaining books to start with. And of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!

Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is struck by the fact that he simply could not stay in one place for long. He was constantly on the move at a time when travel was far more arduous than it is today. Some of that travel was to generate material for books, but a lot of it was intended for recuperation (spa towns, places with better weather, and so on).

It is hardly a deep insight to suggest that his chances of improving health would have been far better if he had just stayed somewhere, anywhere, instead of frenziedly pursuing well-being like a chimera. Yet this elementary point seems to have been ignored / resisted by both RLS and the people around him. Stevenson was obviously intelligent, a great writer, and heroic in his summoning of what little energy he had; but the need for novelty functioned in him self-destructively, like a substance abuse problem. One waits in the letters for a glimmer of realization: “Maybe I should just calm down.” It doesn’t come.

Emu wrote: "Just started Anne Bronte : The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"

There is this idea that Anne Brontë slides into literary history on her sisters' frock-ends (as it were). But if she were not a Brontë, we would have re-discovered her by now. She is not a lesser version of her sisters. Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are excellent novels, and the latter in particular is a daring performance.

AB does a spectacularly convincing job of narrating half of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from the male perspective of Gilbert Markham. This is one of the best cross-gender voicings in all of literature. (Side note: I’m very much in favor of “appropriation”. 🙂 )

George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, and indeed The Borough (1810), which I am reading just now, embodies those characteristics. 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.

* Matthew Arnold’s famed essay sequence Culture and Anarchy offers similarly difficult passages for anyone but a specialized religious historian.

^ Now that is the “farther reaches” of the Trollope oeuvre! Excellent! 🙂

^ It is available as an ebook on Scribd, which I’ll take this chance to hawk since honestly, the $8.99 I spend for my monthly subscription is the best money I spend every month. So often I want to read something, even a little off the beaten track of popularity, and sure enough, it is available at Scribd.

The Canadian Thomas Murtha (1902-1973) never got a collection published during his lifetime, and his best work was buried in old magazines (some quite obscure), one anthology, and in his manuscript papers. His family spearheaded a re-launch of his writing, Short Stories by Thomas Murtha (1980).

It’s a terrific book. These stories of quiet desperation in 1920s/1930s Canada make an unusually unified impression, demonstrating that Murtha truly had a voice of his own. The hitherto unpublished stories are every bit as good as the previously published ones. The introduction (by Murtha’s son) is very informative.

There must be many similar story writers who have not received even this much posthumous justice. Novels at least are almost always BOOKS, with a physical dignity and potential findability. A great short story hidden in an old magazine - that is another level of obscurity.

It is possibly too much to hope that any of Murtha's several unpublished novels might see the light of day, but his stories can now form a permanent part of Canadian literary history.

I just love the unrushed fullness of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, so characteristic of fiction of the era both literary and popular, what people would now call “slow” because they’ve been conditioned by film and television. I’m currently well into the second volume, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan.

The street attitudes and language are absolutely reflective of the time and place depicted, early 20th Century Chicago, which would seem too obvious to even mention EXCEPT that many reviewers come off as shocked, SHOCKED, that books written in the past are OF that past. I used to argue with people about this, now I try to ignore. * The most heinous stuff in Studs Lonigan belongs to the characters rather than Farrell himself, but even if it did belong to him, I could easily deal with that. Being a historicist and all, I prefer my past full-strength. 🙂

* I find that this is delicate territory in almost all online groups. As a Burkean conservative who does not subscribe to the contemporary progressive agenda, I have to tread carefully - every day there are comments I decide against making, because it would look like picking a fight - but on the other hand, I don’t want to completely muzzle myself either. It’s not always the easiest place to be.

Timothy M. Aluko’s One Man One Matchet (1964) is a very sharp novel of pre-independence Nigerian village politics. Aluko had been a civil administrator, so he knew whereof he spoke. He also was a trained engineer - not the most usual background for a novelist.

Aluko purposefully only reveals the year, 1949, well into the book. So there was 11 years yet to go before independence, which I am sure felt like a LONG time in the living of it. The characters in the novel who are most anxious to throw off the British yoke will not be satisfied anytime soon, and that knowledge really affects one’s reading of the second half of the book.

“Matchet”, by the way, is a variant form of “machete”.

I really like the Heinemann African Writers series, and pick up volumes whenever I can.