Vintage Reading (3 page)

Good story—yet it accounts for barely a hundredth’s part of the novel’s power. Much more resides in the intensely wrought inner lives of the family members—poor, unsophisticated, country folk not given to expressing much in the way of finer feelings, yet each of whom is granted life through Faulkner’s artistry.

Anse, the father: Proud, stubbornly intent on hewing to his wife’s dying wishes—and also on getting a new set of teeth, to “get my mouth fixed where I could eat God’s own victuals as a man should.”

Cash, one of four sons, patient coffin maker, hewer of beveled edges, philosopher of wood and life: “The animal magnetism of a dead body,” he pronounces, in one of a numbered list of principles, “makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.”

Dewey Dell, the only daughter, seventeen and pregnant: “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”

Darl, the oldest son, whose eyes see more than the others, whose tangled brain ultimately hatches an act of mad impetuosity—the instrument for much of Faulkner’s literary virtuosity: As the brothers carry the coffin, “Cash begins to fall behind, hobbling to keep up, breathing harshly; then he is distanced and

Jewel carries the entire front end alone, so that, tilting as the path begins to slant, it begins to rush away from me and slip down the air like a sled upon invisible snow, smoothly evacuating atmosphere ...”

On one hand, Faulkner’s story confirms stereotypes—of ignorant rural folk, barely touched by civilization, victims of their own dumb pride, getting into one impossible, sometimes funny scrape after another—the Keystone Kops of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

And yet Faulkner undermines stereotypes, too, laying to rest the conceit that maybe such people are not quite so human as the rest of us, are less “interesting,” less rewarding of our attention. Their minds may not work like those of more educated people. But their sensibilities are no less rich.

And, in some ways, may be more so, their lives being so much closer to the growings and strainings and dyings of nature. Dewey Dell, alone in the night: “I feel the darkness rushing past my breast, past the cow; I begin to rush upon the darkness but the cow stops me and the darkness rushes on upon the sweet blast of her moaning breath, filled with wood and with silence.”

As I Lay Dying
is a simple story, of a simple family—told with elaborate fullness. Perspective shifts every few pages; each brief chapter has its own teller. Through the eyes of one character, the scene may be viewed as if through a cracked lens, distorted and obscured. Then, through another’s, it comes into clearer view, the lens is reconstructed—granting a sense of discovery that is one of the novel’s joys.

Faulkner is not easy reading. The scene shifts are one problem. Another is that he writes in what amounts to a foreign language, kin to standard English, but distant enough to sometimes make for heavy going: Anse tells how Vardaman, the youngest son, “comes around the house, bloody as a hog to his knees, and that ere fish chopped up with the axe like as not, or maybe throwed away for him to lie about the dog et it. Well, I reckon I ain’t no call to expect no more of him than of his mangrowed brothers.”

Yes, the dialect demands work, at least for Yankee readers. But it’s worth it, as conduit to a way of life, a consciousness, as exotic as that of Russian aristocracy, or a Chinese peasantry, and no less compelling.

____________

By Emily Bronte
First published in 1947

In this dark story of passion and revenge in rural nineteenth century England, not a single character gains our unmixed admiration.

Nelly, the housekeeper who narrates most of the story, is devious and expedient. Edgar, who ought to be the hero but isn’t, is insipid and milkblooded, his sister spoiled and silly. And these are the more agreeable residents of the drama. Compared to drunken Hindley or Bible-spouting old Joseph, they’re almost appealing. And compared to Heathcliff, they’re downright lovable.

Heathcliff towers over the Yorkshire moors like an avenging angel, a furious black cloud launching angry thunderbolts. “I have no pity!” he declares. “The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It’s a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.”

This is no ordinary villain, but one of singular passion and ferocity, a villain’s villain. Yet Emily Bronte’s considerable art lets us sympathize with him. Picked up off the Liverpool streets, Heathcliff—just “Heathcliff;” he has no other name—is raised on the family estate, Wuthering Heights. He is treated well while Earnshaw, the master of the house, yet lives. But upon his death, the boy comes under the cruel dominion of Earnshaw’s son, Hindley, who humiliates him.

Hindley’s sister Catherine, though, shows him kindness. The two become fast friends. The friendship ripens into love. But Catherine’s more conventional match to Edgar Linton, who lives across the moor at Thrushcross Grange—that’s the name, really!— frustrates Heathcliff’s love and completes
the hardening of his heart. The rest of the story relates Heathcliff’s deepening, mad passion for his childhood friend and his revenge on those he feels have wronged him.

“Wuthering,” we learn, is “a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in story weather... One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.” In this stark country, by turns indescribably lovely and savage, the action of the novel takes place. (From it, too, Emily Bronte herself never ventured far for long.)

It is lonely country, largely unpeopled, unsoftened by the civilizing influence of great towns, and the reader sometimes cringes at the emotional claustrophobia of it. From Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange and back again, sometimes to the moor between, the action alternates, always under Heathcliff’s malevolent spell. One gasps for fresher, happier air. The characters inhabit an unpolluted rural paradise; yet they’re as chained by human passion and weakness as men and women anywhere.

Maybe more so. As the town-bred visitor, Lockwood, observes: “The people in these regions... live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things.” There is less to dissipate consuming emotion and in such a setting the hate in dark Heathcliff can fester: “It’s odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me! Had I been born where laws are less strict, and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an evening’s entertainment.” “Those two,” be it noted, are his own son and his son’s future bride.

Deeply theatrical all this is, and Bronte’s musical prose is often borne along on cadences that verge on the Shakespearean. “Come to the glass and I’ll let you see what you should wish,” young Heathcliff is instructed. “Do you mark these two lines between your eyes? And those thick brows, that instead of rising arched, sink in the middle?... Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles.”

No, these characters hardly speak as we imagine people—even English gentry of a century and a half ago—to speak. And such high-flown language coupled with, perhaps, overdrawn characters, offer the parodist a rich vein of material.

So, why read it today? When first published (under the authorship of one “Currer Bell”) in 1847, few did. It and
Jane Eyre
, by Emily’s sister Charlotte, both appeared in the same year. But it was to the latter that the English reading public flocked. “To enter fully into the spirit” of
Wuthering Heights
, one critic has noted, “the reader needs to face a truth more disquieting than the surface verisimilitude of
Jane Eyre.
The Victorian public was not ready to face this truth.”

Are we? That goodness not allowed to grow can mutate unto evil, and that behind great cruelty may once have dwelt great love, is the essential, brutal lesson of
Wuthering Heights
.

____________

By Rudyard Kipling
First published in 1901

Kim’s father, a hard-drinking, opium-smoking member of His Majesty’s Army in India, dies when he is still a child. His mother long dead of cholera, he grows up with British blood and an Indian soul in the streets of Lahore. As the story opens, he meets an ancient lama while sitting outside the city’s antiquities museum.

The lama has embarked on a quest for the river sprung from Buddha’s arrow: “Whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.” The boy, too, is on a personal quest—for what he grows up hearing called a red bull on a green field, the insignia of his father’s Irish regiment. The two take up with one another and set out upon the Grand Trunk Road that stretches across India. Kim becomes the lama’s
chela
, or disciple—washes his feet, begs for him.

But Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim
is no tale of spiritual questing. Attached to the lama though he is, Kim remains a sharp-eyed denizen of back alley and bazaar. Indeed, so abruptly does the novel deposit us in the distant and exotic East, that we’re taken aback when we realize that it actually qualifies as that familiar literary genre, the spy-adventure story. For Kim, we learn, is in the service of Mahbub Ali, horse trader and spy; he is to play a central role in a major undercover operation, in a war with five native kings, and in international intrigue involving the Russians and the French.

As for the lama, for all his talk about the Wheel of Life and the River of the Arrow, you never really know whether he’s a genuinely spiritual figure, a sly old codger or slightly daft.

Suffusing the story, of course, is India in the days of the Raj, of crowded
bazaars, and grimly third-class railway coaches. We come upon isolated huts in the foothills of the Himalayas; upon a marriage procession, with “music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust.”

Kim
must have seemed exotic indeed to British readers of the turn of the century. For American readers, twice removed by time, place and sensibilities, it’s twice exotic—and sometimes twice hard. You often have the uneasy sense that you’re getting by, but only barely, in a foreign language, missing every fourth word.

Kipling was born in Bombay of British parents and lived much of his early life in India; to him
England
was exotic. He wrote, at age 37: “I am slowly discovering England, which is the most wonderful foreign land I have ever been in.” So in
Kim
, he imparts the experience of inhabiting what to him was home, but which to us is foreign. We confront names and places, like Ferozepore, Umballa, and Mian Mir; a plethora of words, like
chela, sepoy
and
naik
.

Most alien of all are speech patterns foreign to our ears, where Kipling represents the vernacular through odd constructions and archaic language. Thus, one conversation comes out like this:

“Two men wait thy coming behind the horse-trucks,” Kim warns Mahbub. “They will shoot thee at thy lying down, because there is a price on thy head. I heard, sleeping near the horses.”

“Didst thou see them?... Hold still, Sire of Devils?” This furiously to the horse.

“No.”

“Was one dressed belike as a faquir?”

“One said to the other, ‘What manner of faquir art thou, to shiver at a little watching?”

The effect is plainly intentional, for speech among British officers, for example, gives us a sudden rush of ease and familiarity, as in overhearing wisps of American English in a foreign airport.

Like much of Tom Wolfe’s work in our day,
Kim
is a novel of surfaces,
full of dress, talk, action. We are insiders, as it were, to the busy public life of the Grand Trunk Road—yet outsiders to the internal lives of the characters. Even interior monologues leave us inhabiting the outskirts of mind and heart, not the center of the soul. Mahbub Aki remains a mystery. The lama is a mystery. Kim is a mystery.

India is a mystery.

Kim
does not satisfy our appetite for the East, so much as whet it.

____________

By Lewis Carroll
First appeared in 1865

Prim little girl meets hyperactive White Rabbit and chases him down a rabbit hole. She drinks various potions, grows larger and smaller. Meets inquisitorial caterpillar, baby-nursing duchess, grinning Cheshire cat. Attends tea party with assortment of insane guests. Plays croquet with King and Queen, using live flamingo as croquet mallet...

These are some of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, and all that’s wrong with Lewis Carroll’s inspired dream story is that it ends too soon. Even this fault, though, has a remedy: Seven years after its first appearance came a sequel,
Through the Looking Glass
, that some feel actually improved on the original.

The Alice stories have been psychoanalyzed, plumbed for hidden political and religious messages, even probed for roots in their creator’s affinity for mathematics and logic. But no tired theorizing can explain their enduring appeal to generations of children and adults. They are endlessly inventive. Their characters are unforgettable. They are, simply, great fun. As one critic has pointed out, Lewis Carroll “did not send Alice down the rabbit hole on a summer’s afternoon for the benefit of a future generation of Freudians, but rather for the present pleasure of three Victorian children.”

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematician, author of a number of scholarly treatises. He was a deacon in the Church of England. He was an ardent and accomplished photographer—in one critic’s view, “the best photographer of children in the 19th century.” Yet today we remember him for none of this. For in 1862, he and an adult friend went on a boat trip upriver
from Oxford with three children—10-year-old Alice Liddell being one of them—during which he told the story that turned into
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Three years later, it was published under a pseudonym, Lewis Carroll.