What I Read in June 2012

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women. This biography for young people, written in the 1930s, is accurate and insightful, if somewhat incomplete. No romance here, but a solid sense of Alcott’s accomplishment.

Sara Paretsky, Total Recall: A V. I. Warshawski Novel. The Chicago female private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Washshawski, meets schemers and crazies in this suspenseful novel of Holocaust victims, survivors, and the immoral insurance companies who rip them off.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low. Free at last, after 554 pages. Click here for my comment on the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with the structure of the French criminal justice system; the layout of the prisons and the courts (no corridor or staircase is omitted); the lawyers, magistrates, procurators, chaplains, turnkeys, police, detectives, detectives in disguise, spies, criminals — major, petty and demented. He puts forward some interesting theories about criminals. Instead of marijuana as an entry-level drug, we have the sex-obsessed man who steals a shawl for his girlfriend and goes on to a life of crime. It will be a long time before I persist to the end of another Balzac.

Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Housekeep Book. Peg understands. It’s not so much that I hate housekeeping. It’s not like war or mosquitoes — I do admit its necessity. It’s just that I have better things to think about, much less do. Written in 1962, the technology has changed somewhat, but the principles are as true as they ever were.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool. The risk pool is where you have to get your insurance when you have had so many accidents no insurance company will have you as a customer. In this early novel, Russo tells the story of Sam Hall — energetic and smart, but also uneducated, sometimes alcoholic and always a risk taker.

Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves. By five pages in I knew that I had read this one before, but it was all so pleasant that I just kept going. No surprises in this tale of a young woman who settles — temporarily? she is not sure — in an English village, but a lot of worthy characters and amusing incidents.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life. To tell of the life of Cleopatra, Schiff must also tell of Caesar and Pompey and Octavia and Mark Antony, especially Mark Mark Antony. The life is skillfully told in a book dense with history and rich with the images of ancient Egypt.

Peg Bracken, I Didn’t Come Here to Argue. The switch from Cleopatra to Peg Bracken is to go from queenly edicts in ancient Egypt to American middle class commentary. These diverse essays are a follow on to The I Hate To Housekeep Book (see above). A little dated, but a welcome diversion after Ptolemaic troubles.

Susan Cheever, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. Just the facts about Alcott’s life with personal commentary by the author of American Bloomsbury. Cheever sees Alcott within her world, not ours. I hope to have more comments on the book in July.

What I Read in May 2012

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Two teen-age boys are sent to the remote countryside during Mao’s cultural revolution. Their “re-education” there comes not from the hard work in field and mine, but from secretly reading the French classics which have been translated into Chinese. They also educate the little seamstress, but what she learns is not what they expect.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black. The classic French novel from 1830, read by me in translation. The story begins as a tale of poor but ambitious young man on the make, moves into high-flown romance and ends as melodrama.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Translated into Modern English by Nevill Coghill. I started this in a four-session class, where we only read selections, and then finished it on my own. It was a long slog, seemed like. I found many delightful patches, but as a whole it wearied me. I am not the person who can fully appreciate literature from this period.

Alison Lurie, Love and Friendship. After the heavy going in Stendahl and Chaucer, this light-weight academic social comedy was just the ticket. All is not well on the idyllic but isolated campus of Convers College, but then, why should it be?

Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. The long subtitle accurately describes this affectionate but honest account of John Cheever’s life. After reading Cheever’s published Journals and Blake Bailey’s detailed biography, I thought I knew all I needed — or wanted — to know of this teller of suburban tales. I knew too much. Susan Cheever does it better in this sympathetic telling of her father’s story.

The Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer), adapted by Seymour Chwast.  The whole thing is too long to read? You want a version more entertaining than Cliffs Notes? This graphic interpretation is probably right for you. It’s complete — all the tales and the prologues and the epilogues — but just the good parts, happily interpreted.

Patricia O’Brien, The Glory Cloak. In this historical novel, we meet and mingle real-life figures like Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton with fictional characters. The time is the Civil War, when Alcott served briefly as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Washington.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. It was not a quick trip from the Galapagos Islands to The Origin of Species and Darwin did not make the trip alone. He followed along behind Smith and Lamarck and Lyell and all the others who were trying to make sense of the discoveries of science.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low

That’s not my choice of a title, but the translator’s rendering of the French Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. I would have preferred the more literal Splendors and Miseries (misfortunes?) of Courtesans. “High and Low” implies a social or moral dimension the book has not shown so far. Reading this Balzac for my book group, I have finished parts 1 and 2 and am honor-bound not to read — or reveal — further until after our group discussion.

This novel is a continuation of the story of young Lucien from the provinces, the poet and sometime journalist of Lost Illusions. That said, where is Lucien? He has disappeared into a world of found illusions where every character seems to have at least three names and two identities. The “splendors” of the title amount to conspicuous consumption based on sex. A bored aristocrat with enough money or a member of the nouveau riche, who by definition has plenty of money, displays it by keeping a courtesan in elegant and expensive circumstances. Her prestige in turn depends on the level of expenditure she can evoke. She also indirectly supports a band of jewelers, dressmakers, florists, servants, carriage horses and even a stray lover or two.

Love is dangerous in a profession where artifice is all. According to Lucien’s mentor, as he contemplates courtesan Esther’s love for Lucien:

All these angels turn into women again, sooner or later; and at moments all women are at once ape and child! two forms of life in which we encourage laughter at our cost, if only in boredom….”

All society, the legitimate as well as the marginal, is based on artifice and simulated emotions. In the marquis’ drawing room, participants react to the news of a dangerously ill family member:

A group of women was remarkable for the diverse attitudes each took from her manner of playing mock grief. In society, nobody is interested in suffering or misfortune, everything is talk.

Balzac doesn’t view women as adult human beings (whereas men apparently are), but still he thinks he can tell the difference between false love and real love.

When they [women] are all they say they are, when truly they are in love, they behave as Esther did, as children do, as true love does; Esther didn’t say a word, she lay with her face in the cushions and wept hot tears.

This sort of thing becomes wearisome. The love story is lightened however by Balzac’s evident delight in financial wheeling and dealing. Esther’s patron is a successful banker who does what bankers do.

Forcing the states of Europe to borrow at twenty or ten per cent, making up this ten or  twenty per cent from public funds, holding whole industries to ransom by monopolizing raw materials, throwing a line to some large speculator to pull him out of the water while one recovers his drowned enterprise, such pecuniary warfare constitutes the high politics of money.

So what else is new! Balzac’s grasp of the psychology of financial speculation is far more credible that his understanding of women in love.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I love this novel by Dai Sijie. Set in China, written in French and read by me in English translation, it is a story outside of place and language. Yet it takes its beauty and emotional impact from the specifics of place and the power of stories in our lives.

It is the cultural revolution in Mao’s China. The parents of two teen-age boys, once respected professionals, are now enemies of the people and so their sons are sent to the countryside for re-education through labor. The village on Phoenix Mountain is beyond the back of beyond. They are not abused there, but their life is hard. They are under surveillance, performing crude manual labor. The seamstress is the daughter of the local tailor, who serves several villages, traveling with his sewing machine. To obtain new clothes requires two days walk down the mountain to the market town to buy cloth, two days walk to return, and finally a date with the itinerant tailor. New clothes are a community event, as everyone gathers around to see the process and the product — what other entertainment do they have!

Much better entertainment is provided by stories. The boys recount the plots of movies they have seen.

I was overcome by stage freight and was reduced to a mechanical recitation of the setting of each scene. But here Luo’s genius for storytelling came into its own. He was sparing with his descriptions, but acted the part of each character in turn, adjusting his tone of voice and gestures accordingly. He took complete control of the narrative, keeping up the suspense, asking the listeners questions, making them respond and correcting their answers. By the time we, or rather he, reached the end of the story, in the allotted time, our audience was ecstatic.

How wonderful are these dramatic plots from Communist Chinese, North Korean or Albanian films!  But better yet, and enjoyed exclusively by these boys are the novels they find and steal. Translated from French to Chinese, the authors include Balzac, Dumas and Rolland, with a little Gogol and Melville thrown in. The narrator reads his first western novel, by Balzac.

Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all this life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.

The boys befriend — and are befriended by — the little seamstress. She had youth, beauty and spirit, but minimal education and no experience of other places. Through the boys, she meets Balzac also, and the consequences I leave for you to discover so that you can enjoy the book as much as I did. Short (only 184 pages and I wanted more), this novel does what the best-written novels do in any language. We are in a particular place, which we experience, meeting particular people, who are real, and learning some universal truths of human life.

What I Read in October, 2010

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One. Wicked and funny on the subject of death and funerals and the expatriate Brits in Hollywood. Written 60 years ago, it is still pertinent with regard to American funerary practices — I’m not so sure about the practices of the expatriate Brits.

Anita Shreve, A Wedding in December. When life seems too full of unresolvable complications (see Nostromo below), it is good to read some Anita Shreve or Jane Smiley. Life is not easy, but I know this world. This is a high school reunion story. Two classmates marry 27 years after their first romance together. Cancer, divorce, stepchildren, middle age.

Janet Brunett Grossman, Greek and Roman Sculpture in Stone. This convenient illustrated reference book is related to my Greek Ancient Arts project. One of my lectures will be about the development and range of Greek sculpture. Reading this book has increased my respect for the technology they developed, as well as the incomparable beauty of the results.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. What do you read after you read Alice in Wonderland? Yes, you do. Somehow this time the joke began to wear a little thin, but I still love both books.

I have read and posted comments on the following books:

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Part III: An Inventor’s Tribulations. Finished this very long Balzac. Free at last!

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Ngaio Marsh, Final Curtain

Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Lost Illusions: An Inventor’s Tribulations

The final part of Balzac’s Lost Illusions is entitled An Inventor’s Tribulations. Balzac packs in so much incident that it might be entitled An Inventor’s Tribulations and Lucien’s Further Foolishness and Eve’s Nobility and How to Make Cheap Paper and How to Waste a Great Deal of Money and How to Get into Trouble with the Law.

If Balzac contains it all — the world and its industries and its social classes and its myriads of characters — then why do I become so impatient to finish and to leave that world? I conclude, sadly, that is is because I don’t really like Balzac. His character is persistently misanthropic. Dickens has characters who are bad actors and Trollope and George Eliot do also, but theirs is a scene in which some people are good and justice may prevail, after some sad lessons have been learned. Balzac is at his best when his villains are seen straight on, with no hope for redemption. He puts these words in the mouth of his most perceptive character.

Society, Madame, by a strange turn of whimsy, is full of indulgence towards young men of such a nature: it takes a liking to them and lets itself be captivated by the tinsel of their surface qualities. It demands nothing of them, condones all their faults, accords them the prerogatives due only to mature characters and sees only their advantageous points: in fact it makes spoilt children of them. On the other hand, it shows unbounded severity to people of rounded and forceful character.

And it is true. David, the persistent and honorable inventor, and Eve, his intelligent and warm-hearted wife, are rewarded by a happy ending, a life of comfortable obscurity. Lucien, that egotistical and destructive “genius,” is reserved for a promising future in the next novel.

What I Read in September, 2010

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic. Russo does marriage and the academic life. These are different people from the sometimes frayed inhabitants of Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool, better educated and more self aware. Somehow I just cannot like them as much.

Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe. Mattie is divorced, full or responsibilities for two generations and a dog (and later an iguana), and slightly crazy with it all. We follow her life day by day and month to month. The details of her life are enthralling, but somehow I did not get the big picture here.

I have read and posted comments on the following books:

Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illlusions – Part 1: Two Poets
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions – Part 2: A Great Man in Embryo

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

Anna Quindlen, Rise and Shine

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Anna Quindlen, Rise and Shine

Anna Quindlen’s novel about two sisters in New York City was going to be some light relief as I paused two-thirds of the way through a long Balzac. It is much better than “relief.” It is a delightful experience and an interesting contrast to  Lost Illusions, as Quindlen’s two sisters lose many of their illusions.

One of the New York sisters is a popular and wealthy TV anchor of a morning program (Rise and Shine!), while the other one has tried several careers and is now a social worker. Quindlen paints a funny but sad picture of celebrity New York, the movers and the shakers and the wannabees. Balzac paints a pained picture of celebrity Paris of the 1820s, and his humor is decidedly a bitter one.

Although I enjoyed the scenes of celebrity life in New York, what makes the book stand out are the scenes in the Bronx where the non-celebrity sister runs a woman’s shelter. At a parenting session, she leads a discussion of corporal punishment.

“But does it work” I asked. My handbook says that I’m supposed to  use the Socratic method….

“With boys it works. The girls don’t need it,” said Maria.

“By the time they need it they too old to do it,” said another woman. “They give you this evil look. Hit you back, maybe.”

“Girls are hard,” said a woman who had three daughters and sent them back to live with her mother in South Carolina the moment they began to menstruate. Maybe they don’t have sex down south.

“Boys hard, too,” said the mother of sons.

“But are there better ways to make them mind than to hit them? And are you teaching them that violence is acceptable when you do?”

“See, you misunderstanding, Miz Fitz, because violence is one thing and giving them a tap, that’s a whole ‘nother thing,” said Charisse. “We not talking about beating the children…. But swatting is different than beating. Swatting just the flat hand, just saying, listen up there, you in trouble now.”

Both writers show the contrast between the well-off and those who are struggling just to exist. Lucien, Balzac’s young man on the rise, sees the various levels of society, but does not judge them as do the sisters in Rise and Shine in New York. Lucien never seems to doubt that the system he finds so hard to penetrate is good and acceptable and worth the trouble. The sisters are not so sure. They don’t desire the system to continue, but they also don’t doubt that it will.

Lost Illusions: A Great Man in Embryo

The long middle section of Honoré de Balzac’s long and complex novel, Lost Illusions, is entitled A Great Man in Embryo. Ambitious young “poet and genius”, Lucien borrows money from his family and goes to Paris to seek his fortune. He seeks it at several different levels: with his original provincial connections who quickly dump him, with a high-minded group of artists who live in poverty, as a journalist in the service of various political factions, and as an aspiring aristocrat. Along the way he makes some effective enemies and loves — and loses — his first mistress, a young actress.

Balzac must have been one tough cookie! Whatever the occupation, whatever the milieu, he tells you all about it, and with great authority and a total mastery of detail. When Lucien turns to journalism, it is clear that his moral position has deteriorated. First he learns to use his wit to liven up his copy and impress the reader. Then he is instructed how to praise and blame the same piece of work.

‘You’ll begin by saying it’s a fine work: after that you can enjoy yourself saying what you like about it. The public will say: “This critic isn’t jealous, he’ll certainly be impartial.” From then on it will regard your criticism as conscientious. Having thus acquired your reader’s esteem, you’ll regret to have to cast blame on the system which such books are going to inaugurate in French literature.

So it is today. The book reviewer tells you solemnly that the book has many merits, but the writer should have written a different book (the one the reviewer had in mind) or is a victim of social forces he does not control. It must be understood that –

My dear boy, in literature, every idea has its front and reverse side, and no one can presume to state which side is which. Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are two-sided. Janus is the tutelary deity of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

I hope to keep it always in mind that God is triangular.

Balzac is writing in the 1830s about a period perhaps 15 years previous. For the modern reader, the details of the publishers’ rackets and the journalists’ tricks are entertaining, but one can drown in the various political factions and the ins and outs of aristocratic favor. In the end, two things count: money and connections. Without them, one has only illusions to lose.

Lost Illusions: The Two Poets

Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac has space in its 682 pages (Penguin Classics) for a lot of illusions. Balzac published in it three sections between 1837 and 1843. I plan to comment as I finish each section.

The opening section, Two Poets, is set in a provincial town in France in the post-Napoleonic period. The two “poets” are not literally poets, but young men aspiring to do some great work. One is realistic about his prospects; the other, young Lucien, hopes to achieve great things through the influence of the well-connected. Balzac is very hard on provincial life and those who live it, being careful to depict the struggles at various social levels. Perhaps you can imagine what Middlemarch would be life if George Eliot has been a cynic rather than a humanist.

I was particularly struck by Balzac’s rendering of the girl who, as a woman, becomes Madame de Bargeton and Lucien’s patroness. Her birth is good, her fortune is adequate and his misfortune is to have been educated.

The Abbé imbued his pupil with his own spirit of inquiry and readiness to pass judgement; and it did not occur to him that qualities essential to a man can become defects in a woman destined to the humble occupation of wife and mother. Although he constantly reminded his pupil that additional graciousness and modesty should go with more extensive knowledge, Mademoiselle de Negrepelisse acquired an excellent opinion of herself and conceived a study contempt for humanity at large.

Her father decides that the remedy for such a young woman is marriage.

Like many fathers, he resolved to marry off his daughter, less for her own sake than for his own peace of mind.

The result is a provincial salon to which Lucien is admitted at his peril. Lucien’s character also requires close examination. In the provincial setting he is intelligent, but also selfish and falsely confident, a confidence encouraged by family members who should have known better. Their sacrifices on his behalf sadden the reader, for they also have defects in their educations — and a willingness to accept Lucien’s pretensions at face value.