Vintage Reading (2 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
The brutal truth, dear reader, is that I chose these books for my benefit, not yours— because I wanted to learn something; or venture to an old time, or new place; or because circumstances awakened me to the merits of some long-dead author; or in a few cases because a book just happened to cross my desk or catch my eye. Typically, my choices reflected the whim of the moment, and so include vintage books that might not make every top ten list of immortal classics, but to which I nonetheless turned for literary, emotional, or intellectual sustenance at the time.
Is this, I wonder, so wrong a way to direct one’s reading? Maybe that seat-of-the-pants hunch about what to read next makes as much sense as leaving it to nagging shoulds-and-oughts. A friend gave me an old leather-bound copy of Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
; it sat on a shelf for months until I was ready for it—and then, suddenly, I was. Some books mentioned to me a hundred times left me unmoved; then, the 101st, I’d pounce upon it. So it was, for example, with
The Federalist Papers
.
From the beginning, I was determined to free my choices from chains of class and category. I wanted neither to flee from intellectually formidable territory nor dismiss lighter, more popular works just because they were popular; neither to exclude familiar names just because they were familiar, nor omit the unknown and idiosyncratic. Readers will find here mixed together not only fiction and nonfiction but an epic poem, a short story collection, a book from the bible, even a reference work or two. I did, however, exclude plays; Shakespeare and Beckett are primarily theatrical experiences, not for reading. And this being Vintage Reading, I’ve included only books that have had time to age; readers will find here nothing more recent than the early 1960s.
I hope readers will bring to my attention favorites of their own they’d like
me to know about. But I hope they will not introduce them to me as books I’ve unaccountably “left out”; I’ve left out
thousands
, many of which I hope to some day read. To me, it is no source of regret, as I’ve heard some say, but rather of anticipation, that so much great reading awaits me. I’ve still not read
War and Peace
, nor Macaulay’s
History of England
, nor Plutarch’s
Lives
; I will some day. I have, though, recently read
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
, and just last week— for the first time, at age 51—
Jane Eyre
, which I enjoyed greatly.
The eighty books I’ve written about for
Vintage Reading
include, by my count, 38 American authors, five German or Austrian, five French, two Italian, and twenty-two British. Thirty-three are fiction, the rest nonfiction. Forty-seven first appeared after 1900, fifteen in the nineteenth century, eight in the previous three centuries, one in the early Christian era, nine in antiquity. Ten were penned by women, at least half a dozen by homosexuals, none by Hispanic authors, two by Afro-Americans. Eight have an Asian setting or “Eastern” flavor, four raise identifiably Jewish themes or subjects. One takes place on Mars. Books by tyrants, knaves, curmudgeons, and misanthropes number at least five. In a spirit of usefulness, I dutifully transmit the results of these calculations. I leave to others to figure out what they mean.
On Every List of Literary Classics
As I Lay Dying
— William Faulkner
The Portrait of a Lady
— Henry James
Look Homeward, Angel
— Thomas Wolfe
Wuthering Heights
— Emily Bronte
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
— Lewis Carroll
Pride and Prejudice
— Jane Austen
A Passage to India
— E. M. Forster
Madame Bovary
— Gustave Flaubert
_________________________________
A sadly unadventurous grouping?
The truth is, the dozen novels here would land on almost anyone’s list of admired classics. Oliver, Madame Bovary, White Rabbit, Kim, and the other characters who appear in them are by now almost no longer fictional; they live in our collective imagination. We encounter them, third hand, in the movies and plays most of these novels have inspired. But how much better to meet them personally, within the warm embrace of print, in the way Dickens and Flaubert intended us to meet them?
____________
By Thomas Wolfe
First published in 1929
This is a Great American Novel.
Nothing about it is small. From its sheer length to its soaring, sometimes overswollen language, to its magnificent characters, to a romantic publishing history awash in the glow of a famous editor (Maxwell Perkins), to the towering narcissistic personality of its author,
Look Homeward Angel
is, and always was, a Literary Event.
Plot? The plot is that Eugene Gant is born and grows up, period. This is a coming-of-age novel, one relating Eugene’s rich inner experience while growing up in a small southern city—“Altamont”—in the early years of the century. “A Story of the Buried Life,” Wolfe subtitled it.
Eugene, set apart early from his brothers and sisters as the family scholar, inwardly thrills to the glories of the
Iliad
and of Shakespeare, dreams of maidens and warriors, virtue and purity. He feels confined and out of place in Altamont—“Oh, lost!” is Wolfe’s refrain—but he is rescued from a life of unremembered dailiness by Mrs. Leonard, a kindly teacher and intellectual mentor.
Eugene’s mother, Eliza Gant: No paragon of sweetness, she. Her mind forever clicking to a calculus of real estate deals, she sees Altamont as a gridwork of future roads and rising land prices. Her boardinghouse takes in everyone from part-time prostitutes to dying consumptives.
Eugene’s father, Oliver Gant: A great human hulk of a man that American literature will not soon forget, if only for his rolling diatribes, sometimes drunken and sometimes not, that thunder down and across the pages, lamenting his life, cursing his fate or his foes. As, for example, in this performance,
delivered to hapless draymen who have dared to sprawl on the steps in front of his shop:
“You are the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile. You lousy, goodfor-nothing bums: You have brought me to the verge of starvation, you have frightened away the little business that might have put bread in my mouth, and kept the wolf from my door. By God, I hate you, for you stink a mile off. You low degenerates, you accursed reprobates; you would steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes, as you have from mine, fearful, awful, and bloodthirsty mountain grills that you are!”
And the setting for this Great American Novel, this would-be well-spring of the American character? Why Asheville, N.C., of all places, here named Altamont. Asheville
equals
Altamont?
If normally it’s dangerous to term a novel autobiographical and proceed to search out exact correspondences between the author’s fiction and his life, here they are indisputable. Thomas Wolfe’s father was a stonecutter, his mother the proprietress of a boarding house; so is Eugene Gant’s. Wolfe was precocious, well-read beyond his years, by all accounts a prodigy. So is Eugene Gant. Wolfe attended the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Eugene the state university at Pulpit Hill.
Altamont is so unambiguously Asheville that following the book’s appearance, Wolfe was sued for what amounted to malicious gossip. One woman wrote him that though she disapproved of lynching in general, she would not lift a hand were he dragged across the public square and strung from the nearest limb. For it was not the Asheville of its boosters that Wolfe described, but of pinch-mouthed landladies, and raging drunken brawls, and cross-racial “Niggertown” liaisons.
Today, half a century later, readers can experience Wolfe’s Asheville in great outpourings of sentiment and grandiloquence, in riotous paragraphs that careen down the pages: Eugene “heard the ghostly ticking of his life; his powerful clairvoyance, the wild Scotch gift of Eliza, burned inward across the phantom years, plucking out the ghostly shadows of a million gleams of light—a little station by the rails at dawn, the road cleft through the pineland
seen at twilight, a smoky cabin-light below the trestles, a boy who ran among the bounding calves, a wisp-haired slattern, with snuff-sticked mouth, framed in a door... “
Often it goes on for paragraph after paragraph like this, seemingly out of control, as if the author were determined to purge his soul, through language, of every thought, feeling or experience that was ever his. Any freshman composition teacher would edit it ruthlessly.
Still, Wolfe’s great, rambling paragraphs stand in rough proportion to the job he sets them to do. His whole “project”— and if great dams, bridges and pipelines come to mind, that is not inappropriate—is animated by an ambitiousness of scale, a sense of its own importance, that wins us over by its sheer audacity. The writer takes his work dead seriously—the more so, no doubt, because his subject is so unabashedly himself.
Narcissistic? Sure. But then, Wolfe himself was large; he was six-footsix. So is his story.
____________
By Henry James
First published in 1881
Everybody, in this long, leisurely novel of expatriate American life in late 19th century Europe, loves Isabel Archer.
For starters, there’s Caspar Goodwood, a Boston cotton mill owner with “a face like a grey February sky”—fixed, humorless, literal. There’s Lord Warburton, prototype of English landed gentry, wealthy beyond measure, gracious and good, but muddled when it comes to women. There’s Isabel’s sickly cousin Ralph, master of irony, but the most brotherly to Isabel of any of them. And finally, the icily intelligent Gilbert Osmond, an aesthete who, never before moved to do anything in particular with his life, troubles himself to woo Isabel only at the urging of a former lover—the poised, serene, but endlessly calculating Madame Merle.
What a cast! And each of them sophisticated and many-layered, with not a straightforward bone in their bodies. Even silly, scatterbrained Countess Gemini, Osmond’s sister, proves more complex than she seems, in the end serving up dark revelations to poor innocent Isabel.
They all love Isabel Archer, and no wonder; there’s much to love. She’s charming, unspoiled yet spirited, with a head full of fine ideas and great expectations. Lifted up from provincial Albany, N.Y. by her dry, acid-tongued Aunt Lydia, she’s deposited at the English country home of her aunt’s husband. There, in the glow of an English garden, Isabel first meets Europe, and the men and women who will fill her life for the story’s next six years.
Isabel wishes to taste life without marriage getting in the way. She fears isolating herself, she declares, “from the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer.” At one point, she rejects in the space of
a week two marriage proposals, at least one of them a “brilliant” match by the standards of the day. “I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live,” she tells one ardent suitor. What propels us through the novel’s dense thicket of Jamesian prose is the wish to know how faithfully Isabel will cling to her convictions, whether any of her suitors will win her and what will become of her.
This is a novel you can put down; novels in 1881 had no television with which to compete, and this one’s sentences wander as if you had all day to wander with them. In taking stock of her ruined marriage after its first fond beginnings, for example, Isabel finds that what she’d hoped would be “the infinite vista of a multiplied life” has turned into a dark alley; “Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to be below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, [her marriage] led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.” Vintage James, all 71 words of it. His paragraphs sometimes leave a whole two-page spread black with type.
But if
Portrait’s
paragraphs are long, its insights into motivation and character are correspondingly deep. This is, indeed, a “portrait” which darkens and deepens as Isabel, the innocent American caught up in the malevolent spell of Europe discards the blinders of naivete. “Don’t try to be good,” Countess Gemini advises her. “Be a little wicked, feel a little wicked, for once in your life.” Beneath the outward charm of these upper crust lives sizzles a cauldron of mistrust, jealousy and revenge, intricate plots, and hidden pasts, and plain cruelty.
All
The Portrait of a Lady
lacks is sex. In a novel which otherwise so richly evokes personality, its absence is striking. How, one wonders, does the intimate life of Isabel and her husband reveal, if at all, early signs of the descending coldness? We see occasional hints of something other than conversational repartee between Osmond and his old lover, say; or Isabel’s rough-hewn newspaper friend and her traveling companion. But there’s only
a single impetuous and passionate kiss in the whole book, and this after some 500 pages. To a modern reader, it seems unnatural and archaic, a sad casualty of its times.
All the rest of this dense psychological portrait, however, seems as fresh and alive as dinner with one’s most interesting friend, at her most enthralling.
____________
By William Faulkner
First published in 1930
How to articulate the strangled voices of the inarticulate?
William Faulkner does it in
As I Lay Dying
.
In it, he writes of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s tragedyburdened trek across back country Mississippi to bury her. The Bundrens bear washed out bridges, the drowning of their mules, fire, the duplicity of townspeople, and their own ignorance, while all the while Addie’s corpse smolders under the southern sun and buzzards hover overhead.