Louisa May Alcott, Moods

Moods was Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, written and published before Little Women. Alcott had published stories and sketches by that time and wanted to make her mark as a novelist. She was never happy with the version published in 1864 and reissued it, heavily revised, in 1882. My comments here are based on the first version, and my edition of the novel also includes an Introduction by Sarah Elbert which is very helpful in understanding what Alcott was trying to accomplish and why she was so frustrated with the published result.

I was frustrated also, feeling that Alcott could do much better than this somewhat confused novel. She appears to be combining two stories: a romantic tale similar to the Gothic “blood and thunder” productions that had put food on the Alcott table during some very lean years and a proto-feminist account of the development of a willful and impulsive young woman. This young woman, Sylvia, meets and loses the one man she could have truly loved. The author is discrete, but I think their mutual attraction was sexual because the otherwise eminently satisfactory man Sylvia does marry never measures up: she finally tells him he must be a friend rather than a lover. One loses patience with this, as Henry James did in his review which is also included in the American Women Writers edition:

The two most striking facts with regard to “Moods” are the author’s ignorance of human nature, and her self-confidence in spite of of this ignorance. Miss Alcott doubtless knows men and women well enough to deal successfully with their every-day virtues and temptations, but not well enough to handle great dramatic passions.

These are cruel words, but there is something is what he says. The opening chapter especially, with its evocation of the beautiful tropical beauty whose character does not measure up to the hero’s demands is full of improbable posturing.

For once in your life you shall hear the truth as plain as words can make it. You shall see me at my best as at my worst; you shall know what I have learned to find in you; shall look back into the life behind us, forward into the life before us, and if there be any candor in you I will wring from you an acknowledgement that you have led me into an unrighteousness compact. Unrighteous because you have deceived me in yourself, appealed to the baser, not the nobler instincts in me, and on such a foundation there can be no abiding happiness.

No woman should marry a man who talks like that.

As I read, I was able to look past the love triangle to find something much more interesting: this book heavily prefigures the themes of Little Women. We have a girl entering into womanhood with little idea of what she wants to do with herself. The family is wealthy (unlike the struggling Marches) so she has no need to work. She has a practical older sister and a shallow rival (the tropical beauty). It is terribly important for her to grow up.

“I am so young, you know; when I am a woman grown I can give you a woman’s love; now it is a girl’s, you say. Wait for me, Geoffrey, a little longer, for indeed ti do my best to be all you would have me.”

For lack of proper guidance, she agrees to her mistaken marriage.

A wise and tender mother would have divined her nameless needs, answered her vague desires, and through the medium of the most omnipotent affection given to humanity, have made her what she might have been. But Sylvia had never known mother-love, for her life came through death; and the only legacy bequeathed her was a slight hold upon existence, a ceaseless craving for affections….

Since Sylvia’s mother died at birth, her older sister is entirely conventional and her father is damaged goods emotionally (he married for money), she is a victim of her moods. She needs a Marmee and does, in fact, find one late in the book, too late to save her.

The long dialog in which cousin Faith Dane lays out the right course of action to Sylvia, her husband and her lover, is as improbable as the opening chapter of the book. Yet there are echoes. Through renunciation and suffering, we develop character. The hero renounces the beautiful fiancee who did not measure up, Sylvia renounces her husband, the lovers renounce each other. It is all very noble and also subject to rather inflated writing.

It is fascinating how these same themes are transformed into a believable story only four years later in Little Women. Again, we have a family with divergent personalities who manage to pull together, without the fantasy of great wealth. Jo is moody and impulsive but her rebellion is guided by a wise mother. She renounces the man who would not be right for her and directs her energies to her need for self expression and to the economic struggle. The high-flown language (“the most omnipotent affection given to humanity”) and inverted sentences are smoothed out in favor of shorter, more direct expression. Although Alcott objected to writing a book for girls, the publisher did her a favor, focusing her attention away from demon lovers and onto the real-life problems of growing up female.

Hemingway at Midnight: A Moveable Feast

I’ve only seen a few movies in my life I thought were perfect. Everything was just right, I was totally in the experience and would not change a thing. Right up there with The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, I now put Midnight in Paris, the new Woodie Allen film about a writer who is transported back to the 1920s, where he meets Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Picasso and many others. You can stop making movies now, Woodie. You have reached the peak.

I saw the movie while I was reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his episodic memoir of the years when Hemingway was poor and living on the cheap in Paris while he learned to be a writer. In the book at that time, I was somewhere between Ezra Pound and the opium and the trip Hemingway made with Fitzgerald to retrieve his car. Fitzgerald missed the train they were to take together. Hemingway went on alone. When Fitzgerald arrived by a later train, he reproached Hemingway. “It was a very comfortable train and we might just as well have come down together.”

In the movie Midnight in Paris, writer Woodie Allen satirizes Hemingway’s philosophical voice perfectly, about how the writing should be simple and good and true. Here is a philosophical sample from A Moveable Feast.

If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them.

Now that you’ve seen the movie, read the book. I promise you the rest of the story about the trip with Fitzgerald will not disappoint.

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts

I am reading books by and about Louisa May Alcott in preparation for a course next year. This joint biography, subtitled “The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” gave me a new appreciation of Bronson Alcott. His daughter, the author of Little Women, I already admired, but I previously had a different view of Bronson. I saw him as a light-weight, a failed philosopher who ducked out of the responsibilities of life.

Bronson was a true original, a self-taught educator and idealist who pursued the development of his own character above all other demands.

More often than not, Bronson Alcott tended to live more in his ideas than in his skin. At many of the moments when others are likely to feel most alive to the world of sense, Bronson seems to have been only contingently present, like an accidental, gossamer visitor to a ponderously material world.

The aesthetic and sometimes irresponsible Bronson set high ideals for his children, but put no bread on the table. He didn’t think it was important. Louisa admired her father, but did not emulate him. She was very much alive to  the world’s possibilities and determined to make her mark in it, as well as to provide her family with a stable income. As a young girl,

Louisa’s life was already assuming the contours that were to characterize it for the next twenty-five years or more: an almost impossible dissonant combination of superior intellectual opportunities and frightful worldly deprivation.

Her response to childhood poverty and family debt was years of determined hard work, but that is not the entire story of the relationship as Matteson develops it. As they aged and Louisa succeeded as a popular author, Bronson admired her accomplishments and even had some modest success himself with his late books, his conversations tours, and Concord School of Philosophy. He outlived Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and represented them to a world that was rapidly moving on to other concepts, different goals.

God Dies by the Nile

I wanted to like this book, one of the books for discussion at Feminist Classics, but I just couldn’t warm to it. In this novel Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi depicts the miseries of peasant life. The focus is on Zakeya and her brother and is set within the confines of a peasant village. The contrast is strong between the lives of the workers and the powerful. The powerful are the Mayor and the Chief of the Village Guard and, sometimes, but not secure in their positions, the Sheikh and the local barber.

I found the language of the book unappealing. This is a translation, so perhaps what seems stilted and repetitious in English is poetic in Arabic. The burning disk of the sun makes too many appearances. Certain adjectives grate on the understanding. Zakeya’s face is described as “bloodless” (pale?) and only a few sentences later the face of the buffalo is also bloodless, a confusing image. There may be a sense of the original Arabic word which relates the face of the woman and the face of the buffalo better than the English equivalent does. Time shifts are sudden and unexplained and some references to he or she are unclear.

I find this novel more of a protest against the injustice of Egyptian society than a feminist tract. There is not much to choose between the abuse of men and women in the story; each is abused in accordance with his or her gender. Men are murdered and falsely accused of murder. Women are deceived and seduced and cast out. Being male does not save the “son of fornication and sin” from death at the hands of the mob.

The tone of the book reminds me of some of the early novels of Pearl Buck, like The Good Earth. An educated woman who has lived in the culture (Pearl Buck grew up in China, the daughter of missionaries) tries to depict the lives of people she perceives as abused. Because she has observed the peasant class but is not one of them, her interpretation of their thought processes is somewhat simplistic.

The powerful in the village think the people are unable to understand their situation:

The Chief of the Village Guard hastened to refute this possibility. ‘No, absolutely not. Suspicion requires that a man be endowed with a brain that can think. But these peasants! They have no brain, and when they do have one, it’s like the brain of a buffalo.

The author does little to show that she thinks the peasants understand matters any more than the Chief does. The villagers know who is good and who is bad and do not trust authority, but theirs is not a reasoned reaction.

Instinctively they felt that Kafrawi was not a killer, or a criminal. They hated the policeman and his dogs, hated all policemen, all officers, all representatives of authority and the government. It was the hidden ancient hatred of peasants for their government.

The hatred is hidden, for they are obsequious when confronted by authority, superstitious and violent when aroused.

Finally, the title God Dies by the Nile conveys that, although the people constantly evoke Allah, it is the mayor who controls their lives. The Sheikh says,

They don’t have faith in God nor do they worry their heads about what will happen either in this world, or in the next. In their hearts they don’t fear God. What they really fear is the Mayor. He holds their daily bread in his hands and if we wants, he can deprive them of it.

Allah is eternal. They Mayor can die by the Nile.

Theodore Dreiser, The Financier

Is force necessary in order to achieve in life? Yes, as Theodore Dreiser depicts it in The Financier. A young man on the make sees it like this:

Again, it was so very evident, in so many ways, that force was the answer–great mental and physical force. Why, these giants of commerce and money could do as they pleased in this life, and did. He had already had ample local evidence of it in more than one direction. Worse–the little guardians of so-called law and morality, the newspapers, the preachers, the police, and the public moralists generally, so loud in their denunciation of evil in humble places, were cowards all when it came to corruption in high ones. They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally fallen and they could so so without danger to themselves.

So Frank Cowperwood found matters in Philadelphia in the 1870s as he made and lost his fortune and then made it again, hurt and then helped by the panics which shook the financial markets in those years. This novel is comparable to books like Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and Conrad’s Nostromo in its depiction of what an energetic and resourceful man may do to gain his ends. This is not some abstract universe. The details of the financial markets and their interface with political power are described in detail. Morality consists in knowing what one can safely do without getting caught. If “everybody” does it, then everybody is safe enough until some outside event, like the Chicago fire or the failure of a great railroad enterprise, takes everyone down. Then the political power may well look for a scapegoat.

Cowperwood is Darwinian in his view of the system. If it survives and flourishes, then he and his family, his wife and his mistress will all benefit. It is smart to build alliances, but every loyalty is limited to, again, what works in  your own interest.

Morality and immorality? He never considered them. But strength and weakness–oh, yes! If you had strength you could protect yourself always and be something. If you were weak–pass quickly to the rear and get out of the range of the guns. He was strong, and he knew it, and somehow he alway believed in his star.

Dreiser is clear eyed in presenting this model financier. We see him at his work, in his family, with his mistress and, when events turn against him, in prison. He does not change. He still believes in his star and his own powers. The strength of the book, I believe, does not derive from Cowperwood’s character, but from the author’s reportorial skill. We learn the details of the market manipulations, we hear the politicians decide who to support, and we experience the petty humiliations of prison life. It’s the real world and Cowperwood is real to us because he is embedded within it.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

I was led to this book by reading novels/memoirs set during World War I, “the Great War.” First, there was Robert Graves’ account in Good-bye to All That, followed by Pat Barker’s trilogy — Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road.

Paul Fussell’s view is a broad one, but the modern memory of the Great War which he describes is a literary memory. He traces it from the developing modern sensibility in the years just before the war through to its impact in the subsequent years, for example, as echoed in the poems of T. S. Eliot and the novels of World War II. The most compelling part for me, however, was his comparison of the literary accounts of the war itself, with detailed analyses of the books by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

At the beginning, the war was seen as a mixture of a noble cause and a great adventure. Now we would have no such certainty.

But the Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant.

This was true of the literary officers who marched off to experience the realities of trench warfare, with its mud, its irrational violence, and its rats. How to express what no one could understand who had not experienced it, what they did not understand themselves? They grasped for literary models. Fussell explained the structure of a military day in the trenches, which began with stand-to at sunrise and ended with stand-down at sunset.

One of the remarkable intersections between life and literature during the war occurred when it was found that Flanders and Picardy abounded in the two species long the property of symbolic literary pastoral — larks and nightingales. The one now became associated with stand-to at dawn, the other with stand-to in the evening.

He goes on to observe that there were other birds in France — just as there were other flowers than the roses and poppies so frequently mentioned — but these were the birds and flowers of traditional English literature.

Fussell ranges through many examples in novels, poetry, plays and memoirs, and I wish I were better read in his many references. When he writes of a book I do know, I find his commentary to be very acute.

No one has ever denied the brilliance of Good-Bye to All That, and no one has ever been bored by it. Its brilliance and compelling energy reside in its strucural invention and in its perpetual resourcefulness in imposing the patterns of farce and comedy onto the blank horrors or meaningless vacancies of experience.

Our response to Graves and the others is a response to their literary expression of their very real experiences.