Winesburg, Ohio
“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.” ― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
I first read this book when I was in high school and have read and reread it since then. From the beginning it struck me as a serious work of literature but only upon rereading it and reading more extensively authors who were influenced by Anderson have I become to appreciate his true greatness. Published in 1919 and sub-titled “A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-town Life,” Winesburg, Ohio exposed the desperation and loneliness of so many of the residents of a small, mid-American town.
Rather than a single, well-defined plot, Winesburg, Ohio has a loosely interconnected set of stories with overlapping time frame and characters. Only when the town itself is considered the "main character" can one speak of an overall plot. Using this approach, the traditional small town life of nineteenth-century America comes to an end; its hard but stable community is broken into the dynamic but impersonal atoms of twentieth-century American society.
It was among the first books to take on what would become a central theme in American literature. In these tales you see the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people. Here is an example of the beautiful prose of such isolation:
“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.”
Each of the tales shines a clear light on the character of an inhabitant and you come to know Winesburg almost as well as your own home town. Growing up in a small Midwestern town I never forgot the feeling this book gave me and the appreciation for the genius of Sherwood Anderson.
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Viking Critical Library.
From the Terrace
“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.” ― John O'Hara
From the Terrace is a massive novel. Covering a period from the protagonist’s birth in 1897 to the postwar 1940’s. it presents power struggles at the highest levels of business and government against a background of sexual intrigue and violent death.
Raymond Alfred Eaton, called Alfred, is born into the upper economic and social stratum of a small Pennsylvania town, Port Johnson. His father, Samuel Eaton, owns the local steel mill. Alfred is deeply suspicious of himself, largely because of an occurrence during his boyhood over which he had no control. His elder brother, William, was the favorite son and was destined to succeed his father as the first citizen of Port Johnson until he died of meningitis at fourteen. Alfred’s father never is able to show his surviving son the same attention he lavished upon William. Two additional events reinforce Alfred’s sense of himself as a sort of jinx to others. He quarrels with his first love, sixteen-year-old Victoria Dockwiler, forbidding her to go riding in a borrowed Stutz Bearcat. She defies him and is killed in a car crash. Alfred then begins an affair with a family friend, Norma Budd, seven years older than he. Norma is later the victim of a married lover, who kills first her and then himself. Although it is irrational for Alfred to think that he corrupted Norma, he feels vaguely responsible later for her death.
Alfred attends Princeton University until the United States enters World War I. He serves with distinction as a naval officer but does not return to Princeton after the war. Declining his father’s offer of a job at the mill he and Lex Thornton, his best friend , start an aircraft company together. Alfred meets eighteen-year-old Mary St. John at a party, and here begins the sort of sexual triangle typically found in O’Hara’s later novels.
Mary is engaged to Jim Roper, a pre-medical student. Alfred is strongly attracted to Mary, more sexually than romantically, and he succeeds in winning her away from Roper. Their marriage in the spring of 1920 corresponds exactly with the death of Alfred’s father. The marriage is not a happy one. Meanwhile, Alfred has happened upon a young boy who has fallen through the ice into a pond. Alfred saves the child from drowning, thus earning the gratitude of the boy’s grandfather, James MacHardie. MacHardie is a rich and powerful Wall Street banker. He offers Alfred a job in New York, which he takes becoming an immediate success in banking, but he soon learns that he has relinquished his freedom of action. The image of MacHardie and Company is not to be tarnished by the divorce of any of its executives, so Alfred must stay married to Mary. At this point Alfred's life slowly declines through troubles with a mistress and at his job. The story would be a tragedy if Alfred had any heroic qualities. He never learns how to live with himself or others and gradually is isolated.
As the novel ends, Alfred is recovering from an illness brought on by the travails of his public and private life. He is unable to find another position, having cut himself off from the business and government arenas in which he previously thrived. He is financially secure, but he is not yet fifty and has no prospects in business or social relationships. This novel is an excellent example of naturalism demonstrating the dissoluteness of the upper class. As usual in O’Hara’s fiction, the physical details are flawless. The clothing, architecture, technology, and language of the novel’s succeeding decades are authentic down to the minutest point. Yet, perhaps due to the myriad details, it ultimately was a bit of a slog to finish. John O'Hara is at his best in his short stories and short novels like the classic, Appointment in Samarra.
Short Stories
by Anton Chekhov
“As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man it seems cold and trivial.” ― Anton Chekhov
This collection contains only thirteen of the hundreds of stories written by Chekhov. It does not contain the longer stories like The Steppe of Ward No. 6, but it does include a judicious selection by the translator Elisaveta Fen.
Chekhov's stories portray individuals and their relations with each other in specific situations. These often demonstrate the results of difficult choices with sometimes devastating results. I particularly enjoyed stories like "Enemies", "Teacher of Literature", and "The Cross of Anna". Each of these were a little further developed than some of the briefer sketches.
"The Cross of Anna" tells of the loss of innocence of a young girl when she marries a pompous and boring middle-aged man, with the idea of helping her young motherless brothers and a weak father who is a drunkard. At first she is dominated by her older husband, but when noticed by the governor of the province at a charity ball she is launched into provincial society. Her enjoyment of the new pleasures this brings turns her head away from her family and leads her to despise and defy her husband. In response to her success with the governor he awards her husband the cross of Anna, which he wears on a ribbon around his neck. This is the source of the Russian idiom, 'Anna around his neck' describing an unwanted burden.
"Teacher of Literature" portrays a favorite Chekhovian theme -- the emptiness of material prosperity and the tedium of provincial life with the gradual erosion of the 'happiness' of a young man.
While "Enemies" is the story of a clash between classes with a relatively poor doctor juxtaposed with a wealthy landowner. Surprisingly Chekhov explicitly states the moral of the necessity for greater tolerance and understanding between different types of people at the end of the story.
The most notable aspect in my reading was the modern feeling that I encountered in reading Chekhov. These stories, while set in a very different place and time are still relevant in the twenty-first century. The irony and sometimes melancholy nature of the stories shapes the realism that is found throughout Chekhov..
New Grub Street
by George Gissing
“But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I--well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.” ― George Gissing, New Grub Street
New Grub Street presents in a realistic narrative, the contemporary working conditions of a new class, the professional author. George Gissing, born the son of a chemist in 1857, was as an author breaking important new ground, as well as responding to significant cultural change in the literary generation after Dickens and Thackeray. His naturalistic style provides an urban alternative to the rural novels of Thomas Hardy.
The eponymous hero of David Copperfield is also a writer, but Dickens focuses primarily, and in some detail, on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist. He does not delve into the gritty world and threadbare texture of Victorian literary life. This may be partly due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by changes in the culture of British education in the latter decades of the Victorian era. George Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which would permanently reshape the British literary landscape. Henceforth, high and low literary culture would increasingly diverge. This is one of the main themes in John Carey's important critical study The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is also the animating idea of New Grub Street.
Gissing was hardly alone in finding the role and conduct of the modern writer an urgent topic in late Victorian literary London. A year before New Grub Street, Henry James also published a novel, The Tragic Muse, about "the conflict between art and 'the world'", though James focused on painting and the stage more than literature. Even in our era with the internet revolution promoting another paradigm shift, Gissing's subject remains as topical as ever, and addresses timeless themes in the everyday life of the full-time, professional writer.
In New Grub Street, the narrative is set in the literary world with which Gissing himself was intimately familiar; the title refers to the London street that, in the eighteenth century world of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne, was synonymous with hack writing. By the 1890s, Grub Street no longer existed, though hack writing, of course, never goes away, with timeless imperatives. As one character puts it: "Our Grub Street of today is supplied with telegraphic communications, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy." (p 9)
The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace. "I speak," he says, "only of good, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar." Reardon will face continual difficulties while Milvain will flourish in literary London ("I write for the upper-middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness").
New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in the way it harks forward to the imminent new century with its portrait of the artist as an existential character making his solitary way in the world. For example Reardon ponders on memories of moments with his wife Amy on their honeymoon, remembering their voices:
"The voices seemed to be lingering still, in a sad, faint echo, so short a time it was since those words were uttered.
His own fault. A man has no business to fail; least of all can he expect others to have time to look back upon him or pity him if he sink under the stress of conflict. Those behind will trample over his body; they can't help it; they themselves are borne onwards by resistless pressure." (p 212)
The resistless pressure of life is ultimately too much for Gissing's sad protagonist. He is like the hero of Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's final novel; Jude Fawley is a working-class boy who dreams of becoming an Oxford scholar. Hardy's Jude is Reardon's West Country equivalent. While Gissing's natural world is depressing his literary depiction of it is brilliant - a truly great novel.
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“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” ― Émile Zola
Emile Zola died on the night of September 28-29, 1902. His Nana gave literature a famous femme fatale (and gave Zola international censure). It tells the story of a music hall actress-prostitute who prospers by learning to be as rapacious as the rest of society. The men line up to throw their fortunes or their lives at her feet; she accepts all manner of payment, and gives little in return:
“Me marry you! Lovely! If such an idea had been tormenting me, I should have found a husband long ago! And he’d have been a man worth twenty of you my pippin! I’ve had heaps of proposals…. It’s a chorus they all sing. I can’t be nice but they forthwith begin yelling, ‘Will you marry me? Will you marry me?’… D’you think I’m built that way? Just look at me a bit! Why I shouldn’t be Nana any longer if I fastened a man on behind! And, besides, it’s too foul.”
In Nana we have a fictional character who was inspired by a real life, an operetta singer, who becomes the heroine of a steamy romance and along with other demimondaines as the Second Empire is about to expire. I enjoyed the realistic presentation of the light opera scenes with Zola's detail description of the performance of La blonde Vénus, a fictional operetta modeled after Offenbach's La belle Hélène, in which Nana is cast as the lead. Nana unfortunately leads a life not atypical for paramours (see La Traviata) and yet, the realistic portrayal of Parisian society raises this novel above the typical story. In this installment of the series known as "Les Rougon-Macquart" Zola again achieves artistic brilliance with his naturalistic portrayal of real life. I read this book as part of a "Literary Cityscapes" class at the University of Chicago. The focus of the class was on novels in which Paris was an important factor, becoming a character as in Nana.
At the right, Édouard Manet's 1882 well-known painting "A Bar at the
Folies-Bergère" depicts a bar-girl, one of the demimondaines, standing before a mirror.
Nana by Emile Zola. Penguin Classics, 1973 (1880)
An American Tragedy
"Indeed, it was now as though from the depths of some lower or higher world never before guessed or plumbed by him... a region other where than in life or death and peopled by creatures otherwise than himself... there had now suddenly appeared, as the genie at the accidental rubbing of Aladdin’s lamp - as the spirit emerging as smoke from the mystic jar in the net of the fisherman - the very substance of some leering and diabolic wish or wisdom concealed in his own nature, and that now abhorrent and yet compelling, leering and yet intriguing, friendly and yet cruel, offered him a choice between an evil which threatened to destroy him (and against his deepest opposition) and a second evil which, however it might disgust or sear or terrify, still provided for freedom and success and love." (482-483)
- Clyde Griffiths is a young man with ambition. From the start of this novel when he is a young boy from a poor but devout family he is both on the run and doomed. In over his head with problems that stick to him like honey he leaves Kansas City and arrives in New York, and before long he is in love with a rich girl, but it's a poor girl he has gotten pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at his uncle's factory. One day he takes Roberta canoeing on a lake with the intention of killing her. From there his fate is sealed and doom is once again on the horizon. But by then Dreiser has made plain that Clyde's fate was long before sealed by a brutal and cynical society.
- The usual criticism of Dreiser is that, line for line, he's the weakest of the great American novelists. And it's true that he takes a journalist's approach to writing, joining workmanlike sentences one to the other. His prose is repetitive at times, but he slowly builds a powerful network of words, sentences and paragraphs with a natural vitality flowing through them. The first time I read this novel I was still in high school during my Dreiser and Hardy phase. Hardy wears better over the years, but both remain powerful for the attentive reader.
It was only later that I saw the famous film made from the novel. There's nothing quite like young, tragic love. And George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun" understands this perfectly. By adapting Theodore Dreiser's masterful novel "An American Tragedy" with two of the most heart-stoppingly beautiful people in cinema (Montgomery Clift and Taylor), Stevens immediately puts the viewer in the lovers' corner, no matter what they do. But it isn't just their looks that make you swoon; it's the chemistry and fragile performances. The film is pure Hollywood romance with the rough edges of doom softened a bit, but still present.
A GoodReads Update
