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.
The Portrait of a Lady
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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.
As I Lay Dying
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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.
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.
Wuthering Heights
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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.
Kim
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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.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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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...
Vintage Reading Page 2
