Those Barren Leaves - Aldous Huxley

    1925; 329 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Classic Literature; High-Brow Literature; Satire; Humorous Fiction.  Overall Rating: 7½*/10.

 

    Hey, everybody, let’s head on over to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s place for dinner tonight.  She owns a lovely old villa located in picturesque Vezza, Italy.  Knowing Mrs. Aldwinkle, the food will be sumptuous.

 

    Be sure to dress for the occasion.  Formal wear is de rigueur.  All the other guests will be similarly attired.  After supper, Mrs. Aldwinkle will offer to take you on a tour of the villa.  Do not refuse her!  Think of it as the price you’re paying for the meal.

 

    And for goodness sake, put on some hoity-toity airs!  In your walk, in your talk, and above all, in your interactions with the other guests.  We’re dining with the upper crust of society.  The guest list includes Miss Thriplow, Mr. Calamy, Mr. Cardan, Mr. Falx, Lord Hovendon, and Mrs. Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene.

 

    A guy named Francis Chelifer will also be there.  He’s new to the group, and a writer.  I don’t know how he got invited to dinner.  Rumor has it Mrs. Aldwinkle fished him out of the ocean.

 

What’s To Like...

    Those Barren Leaves is an early novel by Aldous Huxley, his third to be exact.  It is set in some unspecified time between the two World Wars and is Huxley’s biting satire about the pretensions sported by the upper echelons of British society: the intellectuals, the cultured, the rich, the famous.  They will try to overwhelm you with their opinions on lofty things like art, music, religion, and politics.  In the end, however, they are revealed to be no happier than us commoners.

 

    There is no single protagonist.  We follow most of the entourage mentioned above as they experience, and occasionally contemplate, their sad lives.  Some are desperate for love, at least one is desperate for money, all are desperate for admiration be their peers.

 

    The book is written in “British English”, not American, so us Yanks are treated to strange spellings such as grammes, pretence, mediaeval, loth, and Tchekov.  Aldous Huxley also weaves some Italian, French, German, and even Latin vocabulary into the story.  In that last tongue, I learned the phrase “hinc illae lacrimae”, which translates literally into “hence those tears”, and more freely into “that’s what tears are for”.

 

    But Huxley’s mastery of the native tongue is what really shines through here – dozens upon dozens of rare, archaic, or even obsolete words that somehow fit flawlessly into the text.  A couple are listed below, here are just a few of the rest: capripede, Wordsworthian, Casanovesque, ogival, congeries, cachinnating, wamblingly, Sphingine, niffy, and one of my favorites, amphisbaena.

 

    I liked the literary nod to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which was published just three years earlier, as well as the discussion of the authorship of The Iliad.  Morris dancers and a popular board game called Halma were new to me, and I had no idea who Bossuet and Gene Stratton-Porter were.

 

    The book is divided into 5 parts, with a total of 42 chapters comprising 329 pages, which means the average length of a chapter is about 8 pages.  Most of it is written in the 3^rd-person point-of-view, but Part 2 and one chapter of Part 4 are in the 1^st-person, being excerpts from Francis Chelifer’s autobiography. Cussing was almost nonexistent, just two cases of “damned” in the first 50%.  Great writers don’t need cusswords.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Capripede (n.): one who has feet like that of a goat.

Others: Omphalokepsis (n.); and a zillion more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 34 ratings and 9 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.57/5 based on 710 ratings and 63 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “Alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a successful parasite.  I could have been a pretty effective flatterer, but unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work.  I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited.  But even if I could have been a buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that branch of parasitism.  You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore of offend your patrons."  (loc. 463)

 

    Chelifer shook his head modestly.  “I am afraid,” he answered, I’m singularly stoical about other people’s sufferings.”

    “Why do you always speak against yourself?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle earnestly.  “Why do you malign your own character?  You know you’re not what you pretend to be.  You pretend to be so much harder and dryer than you really are.  Why do you?”

    Chelifer smiled.  “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s to reestablish the universal average.”  (loc. 2822)

 

Kindle Details…

    Those Barren Leaves costs $2.99 at Amazon right now.  Several dozen other Aldous Huxley e-tomes are available, ranging in price from $2.99 to $13.49.  His most famous work, Brave New World, goes for $11.99, while my favorite, Ape and Essence, sells for $10.49.

 

We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us.  (loc. 266)

    I read and reviewed Aldous Huxley’s debut novel, Crome Yellow, a couple years ago.  It was published in 1921; the review is here.  The two books are similar in content, style, and weaknesses.

 

   The writing style in both is superlative, but both suffer from PWP Syndrome, “Plot, What Plot?”  The nice way of describing that is that Those Barren Leaves is character-driven.  The blunt way is to say that nothing happens.

 

    That also means there’s very little in the way of an ending.  None of our characters finds happiness. A couple of them are contemplating marriage, but it is a near certainty that those relationships won’t last.  One has turned to meditation to attain enlightenment, but thus far has achieved nothing.  Hinc illae lacrimae.

 

    In the hands of a lesser writer, this would’ve been a complete waste of my reading time.  But thanks to Huxley’s writing skills, I still found this a witty and incisive read.  No, it’s not on the same level as Brave New World, which is where I suggest anyone new to this author should start, but fans of Aldous Huxley – and I am one of those – will still enjoy Those Barren Leaves.

 

    7½ Stars.  I try to read at least one highbrow novel each year.  That's a lofty goal, and some years I fail to reach it.  But I think Those Barren Leaves qualifies in this category, and I am going to check that goal off my 2022 bucket list.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

   1929; 291 pages.  Book 1 (of 2) in the “All Quiet on the Western Front” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; German Literature; War Fiction; World War 1.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    World War One.  The Great War.  The War to end all Wars.  What image comes into your head when you hear those phrases?

 

    Probably you envision American (or British, or French) soldiers, huddled in a long trench replete with pools of stagnant water, all wearing helmets and looking up at the camera with miserable eyes.

 

    Alternatively, you might picture those soldiers climbing out of the trench, rifles in hand, all wearing gas masks (there was no griping about constitutional rights back then), preparing to throw themselves across a mine-laden no-man’s land, knowing that many of them are about to die, and carried out to gain a couple of yards of meaningless muck.  Could life get any worse than this?

 

    Well, yeah.  You could be a German soldier, in a sopping-wet trench, with a gas mask on, in the same miserable conditions, but outmanned and outgunned, and having to face all those charging doughboys.

 

What’s To Like...

    When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front was an immediate hit in the United States despite the fact that the war had been over for more than a decade.  It was subsequently made into a movie twice, once in 1930, then again in 1979.  Although fictional, the book is based upon the author’s own front-line war experiences in 1917.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV, that of 19-year-old Paul Baumer, who, along with his fellow German soldiers tries to cope with horrendous battle conditions, heavy casualties, incompetent officers, well-meaning but clueless civilians, and the required blind loyalty to a futile cause.

 

    Despite being a translation (by A.W. Wheen) from the original German, the writing is powerful.  You can feel the terror and despair when the German lines are bombed or shelled: there is no escape from it; you just hope that the explosives don’t happen to fall on you.  Your life is in the hands of a few trusted comrades; when one of them dies it is crushing.  Duties such as guarding Russian prisoners-of-war are gut-wrenching because you can empathize more with those fellow sufferers than with your own military and political leaders. Even getting to go back to your hometown on leave doesn’t relieve the stress (PTSD hadn’t been discovered yet) because your family and friends cannot possibly  understands what you’re going through and you desperately don't want to talk about it.  

 

    The missions Paul goes on further emphasize his wretched situation.  Laying down barbed wire is a life-threatening affair, since it by definition means you’re on the front lines.  Going on patrol means risking getting separated from your comrades, being stuck in a shell hole in no man’s land, and praying that the next person that drops into your tiny shelter is a friend, not an enemy.  Keep your gas mask with you at all times, learn how to quickly yet properly put it on, and for heaven's sake, don't take it off too soon.

 

     There are a few blessed moments of brightness.  At one point Paul and his comrades manage to find some female companionship.  It involves considerable risk and some bartering (civilians trapped on the front lines are starving too), but provides a brief but much-needed relief from the fighting.  At another point, Paul, wounded and confined to a stretcher, is embarrassed as he tries to find a way to tell a cute nurse that he needs to take a leak.  I had to google an obscure reference to a salty quote from Goethe’s “Gotz von Berlichingen”, but it was surprisingly easy to find and made me chuckle.

 

     The ending is easy to anticipate, but it nevertheless left a lump in my throat.  Unfortunately for Paul, there aren’t any plot twists, and the final resolution almost brings a sense of relief.  The title reference doesn’t occur until the final page, and isn’t a direct translation: in German, it is “Im westen nichts neues” which literally means “Nothing new in the west”.  All Quiet on the Western Front is a standalone novel, although I learned there is a sequel.

 

Excerpts...

    Morning is come.  The explosions of mines mingles with the gun-fire.  That is the most dementing convulsion of all.  The whole region where they go up becomes one grave.

    The reliefs go out, the observers stagger in, covered with dirt, and trembling.  One lies down in silence in the corner and eats, the other, a reservist-reinforcement, sobs; twice he had been flung over the parapet by the blast of the explosions without getting any more than shell-shock.

    The recruits are eyeing him.  We must watch them, these things are catching, already some lips begin to quiver.  (pg. 105)

 

    “Almost all of us are simple folk.  And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks.  Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us?  No, it is merely the rulers.  I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us.  They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

    “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

    Kat shrugs his shoulders.  “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

    “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.  (pg. 207)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Importune (v.) : to harass (someone) persistently for or to do something.

Others: Perambulator (n., British); Dixie (n.); Baldaquin (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 6,049 ratings and 1,996 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 386,474 ratings and 12,221 reviews.

 

“We are losing the war because we can salute too well.”  (pg. 39)

    There’s not much to quibble about in All Quiet on the Western Front.  The tone is dark and grim, yet has very few cusswords: I counted only four “damns” through the first quarter of the book, proving once again that great writers can get their message across with only a paucity of vulgarity.

 

    The translation is from German to "English", not  "American", so I occasionally encountered weird things like bathing-drawers, lorries, nerve-centres, and a carcase.  Yet distances were given in miles, not metres, so maybe the translation was into Canadian.

    Also, please be advised that horses played a major role in World War One, and inevitably suffered major casualties as well. 

 

    All Quiet on the Western Front conveys a sobering message about the horrors of war and the need to resort to it only as a last resort.  The fact that we witness this through the eyes of an enemy soldier just makes it all that more powerful.  It is easy to see why this book became an instant classic.

 

    9 Stars.  Reading All Quiet on the Western Front enables me to reach my yearly goals for reading both “Highbrow Literature” (at least one per annum) and “Banned Books” (also at least one per annum).  The latter one is a bit of a stretch, since the countries that banned it were Nazi Germany (for the rather obvious reason of portraying the Fatherland in a bad light); and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy (all of which objected to its “anti-war” theme).  AFAIK, it was not banned here in the US.

Rabbit, Run - John Updike

   1960; 255 pages.  Book 1 (out of 5) in the “Rabbit” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; Americana.  Overall Rating : 5½*/10.

 

    He’s only 26 years old, and already Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom feels like his life is in a rut.  It wasn’t always this way; just a few short years ago he was the star of his high school basketball team, setting a local scoring record not once, but twice.

 

    But those days are gone, and now he finds himself both a husband and a father.  Lately his wife Janice bores him.  He loves his 2½-year old son, but taking care of a toddler is a lot of stress.  And now Janice is pregnant again, so he’s about relive the joys of raising a newborn.

 

    His job bores him even more.  His career consists of making the rounds to demonstrate a device called a “MagiPeel Peeler”, with which you too can experience the bliss that comes from paring vegetables and fruit.  Yawn.

 

    Harry can feel it, there’s a better life out there somewhere, waiting for him.  He just has to go find it.  But how can he do that, what with a wife, soon-to-be two kids, and a dead-end job tying him down?

 

    Run!  Rabbit, run!

 

What’s To Like...

    Rabbit, Run was published in 1960, is arguably John Updike’s most famous novel, and was such an immediate hit that he developed it into a 5-book series.  This book’s been on my TBR shelf for quite a while; I decided to read it after learning that its fictional setting – the city of Brewer – is patterned after Reading, Pennsylvania, birthplace to both the author and myself.

 

    It was fun to experience life in 1959 America again.  Diners had jukeboxes that cost you a dime per song; smoking in a hospital waiting room was normal; you could fill your car’s gas tank at the local Esso or Amoco station for $3.90; and enjoy the night’s cool breeze by hand-cranking down the car window.  “Gay” in those days meant “merry”, and you could buy a brand new paperback novel for 35 cents.  Indeed, the price printed on the paperback that I read, a 1962 issue, was “60¢”.

 

    Brewer/Reading is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and that means both shoo fly pie and fosnachts get mentioned.  On Rabbit’s first “run”, he takes the very real “Route 222” to get away, and considers going to nearby places such as Pottstown, West Chester, Bird in Hand, Paradise, Mascot, and (my personal favorite) Intercourse, all of which do exist in southeastern Pennsylvania.

 

    Harry of course is the central character, but several secondary ones get a lot of personal attention as well, including his wife, son, high school basketball coach, fallback lover, and an Episcopalian minister.  The book’s theme reminds me of another highbrow novel I read a couple years ago, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (set in the 1920’s and reviewed here).  In both books, the protagonist becomes jaded with living the great American lifestyle, and seeks alternatives.

 

    If you like anti-heroes, Harry’s your guy.  He thinks he’s irresistible to women (and in fairness, sometimes it seems like he is), he flees from his wife and son on the spur of the moment, everything is always somebody else’s fault, and at one point he flirts with the minister’s wife by slapping her on her fanny.  He’s not very likeable, yet there is a certain charismatic optimism about him.

 

    The ending is good, but not great.  Harry hasn’t improved one bit and about all you can say is that he’s now resolved to start thinking about resolving the issues in his life.  I’m guessing that sets up the next book in the series, at least I hope so.

 

Excerpts...

    The door is locked.  In fitting the little key into the lock his hand trembles, pulsing with unusual exertion, and the metal scratches.  But when he opens the door he sees his wife sitting in an armchair with an Old-fashioned, watching television turned down low.

    “You’re here,” he says.  “What’s the door locked for?”

    She looks to one side of him with vague dark eyes reddened by the friction of watching.  “It just locked itself.”  (pg. 10)

 

    “The boy’s taken his truck,” he tells Mrs. Springer.

    “Well let him get it himself,” she says.  “He must learn.  I can’t be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they have been at it like that all afternoon.”

    “Billy.”  The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles’ male voice.  “Give it back.”  Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately.  “Now, please.”  Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.  (pg. 128)

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4*/5, based on 413 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.58*/5, based on 52,620 ratings and 3,256 reviews.

 

“It’s a strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”  (pg. 108 )

    I found an unexpected number of nits to pick with Rabbit, Run.

 

    For starters, John Updike’s writing style is both unusual and difficult.  The sentences are often long, descriptive passages abound, chapters are nonexistent, even paragraph breaks are rare, and there are only three dividing spots, coming at pages 7, 114, and 221.  The present tense is deliberately overused for the sake of presenting Harry’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts.  Despite all this, John Updike’s skill at writing makes the reading bearable; lesser writers are not encouraged to emulate him.

 

    None of the plot threads get tied up.  Who will Harry go back to: Janice, Lucy, or Ruth?  Or maybe all the above?  How well will Jack Eccles’ Christian faith hold up through all of this?  Will Marty Tothero recover from his stroke?  Or next time will Rabbit run farther and longer than he’s ever run before?

 

    Again, I’m assuming these things will be dealt with in the subsequent books in the series.  But the fact that there are four more books makes me fear that nothing is going to get resolved very quickly.

 

    5½ Stars.  So why was Rabbit, Run such a mega-hit when it came out in 1960?  I suspect it was due to the fact that it has a bunch of cussing and fairly-explicit sexual situations in it, which was rare for a highbrow novel written towards the end of the Eisenhower era.  Back then there was no such thing as an R-rated movie and the Rolling Stones were forced to change the lyrics of their hit to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  But by the end of the decade the musical Hair would have full frontal nudity and California's Haight-Ashbury area would be celebrating its “Summer of Love”.  The times they were a-changin’.

Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley

   1921; 183 pages.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Social Satire; English Literature.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    It was two hours cut completely out of Denis Stone’s life.  And that was just the ride on the train, from London to Camlet-on-the-Water.  After that there was still a bicycle ride to Crome itself.

    He could have done a lot of other, more productive things with his time, but the social obligation beckoned and one does not lightly turn down an invitation to spend a couple weeks with the Wimbush’s at their manor in Crome.  Besides, there will be other guests there as well, and as an up-and-coming poet – with one collection of his poems already in print – Denis can't afford to miss any opportunity to hobnob with the Upper Crust.

    And admittedly he does find it gratifying to impress them with witty conversation sprinkled with his prodigious vocabulary, including a chance to give his opinions on the finer subjects of the Arts – Poetry, Music, the latest books, and what have you.

    There’s only one drawback.  While he’s expounding on all these highbrow topics, he also has to listen to everybody else give their views on these things.  And to be honest, Denis finds any opinions other his own to be just plain boring.

What’s To Like...

    Crome Yellow was first published in 1921 and is the debut novel of Aldous Huxley.  It chronicles the conversations and interactions of a group of high-class guests at Crome manor.  For the most part we follow Denis, the protagonist, but occasionally cut away to some of the others.

    The story is a scathing satire of the lives and conversations of the glitterati during the early 1920s.  The characters are said to be based on real people, and the Wikipedia article (the link is here) mentions a few, the only one of which I recognize being Bertrand Russell.  In addition to our poet Denis, the cast includes the well-to-do hosts, an artist, a writer, a handsome womanizer, and several women looking for beaus with suitable quantities of breeding and money.

    The writing is superb, which is surprising given that this was Huxley’s first novel.  The insight into the snobbery of each character is amazing, since the author was still in his 20s.  Each character strives to be the pithiest and hog the conversations, and their efforts, while pompous and attention-seeking, do contain pearls of wisdom.  Huxley explores their pretentious spiels in all sorts of areas: Art, Architecture, Eccentricity, Writing, Socializing, Privies (huh?), Books, Poetry, Music Appreciation, Love, Religion, Nature, and even Vocabulary.

    Spiritualism was popular at that time, and Huxley has some incisive things t say about that.  Ditto for the Fundamentalists, embodied in the character of Mr. Bodiham, who spouts out “Last Days” sermons.  Our characters often lapse into French (such as “le galbe evase de ses hanches”, which I had to look up and means “the curve flares from her hips”), the language of culture, in order to impress their audience, and Huxley’s examples of flowery-but-inane poetry are sheer genius.

    The vocabulary in English is a wordsmith’s delight as well, with Huxley using words like ratiocination, pullulation, vailed, argal, floaters, tractates, empyrean, and the ones listed below.  I had no idea what the Malthusian League, coconut shies were, and who Tschuplitski was.  The first two are real (and in Wikipedia), the last one is fictitious.  And if you ever wondered where the proper place for a privy is in a mansion, you’ll find your answer here.

    The grammar is an odd combination of English spelling coupled with American punctuation.  That might sound strange, but it worked perfectly for me.  The book is short – 183 pages – and divided into 30 chapters.  It’s a quick and relatively easy read, with not a lot characters to keep track of.  The reason for the “Yellow” in the book’s title is never explained, but there is a pigment called “Chrome Yellow”, so maybe Huxley was just playing around with words.  This e-book I read (with the book cover shown above) is the Public Domain version, which means it is always a free download at Amazon.

Kewlest New Word ...

Carminative (adj.) : relieving flatulence.

Others: Cantatrice (n.); Dipsomaniac (n.); Hamadryad (n.); Lich-gate (n.);  Divagate (v.); Supererogatory (adj.).  There were a bunch more.

Excerpts...

    They waited, with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to speak.  After a long and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as, “Have you ever been hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?”  When the answer was in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan would nod several times, saying, “I was afraid so.  Everything is still to come, still to come, though it can’t be very far off now.”  (loc. 2071)

    “The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate.  As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.  At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in the future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.  The proper study of mankind is books.”  (loc. 2236)

Kindle Details…

    As mentioned above, this particular e-book of Crome Yellow is always free at Amazon.  There are other versions, which range in price from $0.99 to $5.99.  But why pay for something when you can get it at no cost?

“Well, here I am.  I’ve come with incredulous speed.”  Ivor’s vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic.  (loc. 1168 )

    There are a couple nits to pick.  There seemed to be a fair amount of “scanning typos”, which is probably inevitable in a Public Domain effort.  Another round of proofreading would take care of that.  The “N-word” appears a couple times.  Yes, I recognize that was the word Huxley originally used and nobody found it offensive back in 1921.  I’m not saying it should be deleted, but it still grates my nerves every time I come across it while reading.

    More seriously, the story suffers from the PWP syndrome (“Plot? What plot?”).  People talk, Denis muses a lot, but nothing ever really happens.  I thought maybe it was just me who was bothered by this, but the Wikipedia article mentions other critics who felt the same way.  When there’s no plot, that means there’s nothing to resolve in the ending.  Denis ends his stay at Crome and goes home, a little older but not a bit wiser, and without anything having changed.

    Yet the writing skills of Aldous Huxley outweigh all this, and the book somehow kept me entertained from beginning to end.  So, nine stars for the writing, seven stars for the lack of plot; and take the average of the two.  Your rating could be a bit lower, as I’m known to be an Aldous Huxley fan.

    8 Stars.  I had my “Aldous Huxley phase” way back in my 20s.  As expected, Brave New World blew me away, then Ape and Essence, surprisingly, turned out to be even better.  After that I read Island, which was so-so at best, followed lastly by After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which I found to be awful and ended my fascination with Huxley novels.  But all that was more than 40 years ago, and I’m thinking it may be time to reread some of those.

Slabs of the Sunburnt West - Carl Sandburg

   1922; 75 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : American Poetry; ; 20^th Century Poetry; Highbrow Literature.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

    2019 is drawing to a close, and it’s time to read my once-a-year poetry book.  This year, I've decided to go with something from a 20^th-century American poet.  Somebody serious, highbrow, and whom I’ve never read/reviewed before.

    That eliminates Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, which I read decades ago.  And Dr. Seuss.  Neither of those qualify as “serious.  Ditto for Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, the latter known as “The Poet of the Proletariat”.  They’re both fantastic, but calling them “highbrow” is a bit of a stretch.  and I’ve used them for my poetry goals in previous years.

    Off the top of my head, I can only think of two poets for this undertaking – Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.  We were forced to read some of Robert Frost’s stuff in high school – “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both…” - and all that.  Sheesh, that stuff stays etched in my brain.

    That leaves Mr. Sandburg, and I can’t quote any of his poetry by heart.  So let’s find something short and sweet, and see if I can broaden my poetic horizons.  Like his 75-page-long book, Slabs of the Sunburnt West.

What’s To Like...

    Slabs of the Sunburnt West consists of 32 poems covering a scant 75 pages, and published in 1922, a couple of years after Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) won his first (of three) Pulitzer Prizes for his book of poems “Cornhuskers”.  Sandburg is noted for his stark portrayals of America in his day, particularly the Midwest which was his stomping ground for most of his life.

    I didn’t see any overarching theme in Slabs of the Sunburnt West.  The poems vary in both length and tone, and literary devices such as rhyming and meter are not used.  The longest entry was 15 pages,  quite a few of them were a half-page in length.  The book can be an incredibly fast read, so if you have a book report due tomorrow and you haven’t even started to read one, you can impress your English teacher by choosing this one.

    My favorite poems in the bunch, in order of appearance, are:

And So Today (pg. 20)

Moon Riders (pg. 34)

At The Gates of Tombs (pg. 37)

Gypsy Mother (pg. 41)

Improved Farm Land (pg. 63)

Slabs of the Sunburnt West (pg. 67)

    “And So Today” chronicles Carl Sandburg’s thoughts on the dedication of the (first) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and I found it particularly powerful.  “Improved Farm Land” laments the deforestation of the Midwest to make room for acres upon acres of cornfields.  And I learned to origin of the city name “Chicago” by reading the first poem, "The Windy City".

    In general, I preferred the longer poems, and the few that had a whimsical air to them.  The poem that resonated the most with me was the titular “Slabs of the Sunburnt West”, reading as if Sandburg was observing the far west for the first time, from the window of a train.  It would’ve been a lot more brown and less green than his native Illinois, similar to how I felt when my family moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona when I finished high school.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Teameoes (n., plural) : Who knows?  Googling didn’t give any definition for this word.  Methinks Mr. Sandburg made it up.

Excerpts...

And so today – they lay him away

The boy nobody knows the name of-

The buck private – the unknown soldier –

The doughboy who dug under and died

When they told him to – that’s him.

If he picked himself and said, “I am ready to die,”

If he gave his name and said, “My country, take me,”

Then the baskets of roses to-day are for the Boy,

The flowers, the songs, the steamboat whistles,

The proclamations of the honorable orators,

They are all for the Boy – that’s him.

(pg. 21, from “And So Today”)

Brancusi, you will not put a want ad in the papers telling

God it will be to his advantage to come around and see

You; you will not grow gabby and spill God earfuls of

Prayer; you will not get fresh and familiar as if God

Is a next-door neighbor and you have counted His shirts

On a clothes line; you will go stammering, stuttering, and

Mumbling or you will be silent as a mouse in a church

Garret when the pipe organ is pouring ocean waves on

The sunlit rocks of ocean shores; if God is saving a corner

For any battling bag of bones, there will be one for you,

There will be one for you, Brancusi.

(pg. 53; from “Brancusi”)

Civilizations are set up and knocked down

The same as pins in a bowling alley.
(pg. 37, from “At The Gates of Tombs”)

    Poetry is not my favorite reading genre and when I do tackle it, I greatly prefer for the lines to rhyme and have meter.  Therefore Slabs of the Sunburnt West was a bit of a slog for me.  A couple of the entries, such as “Hell on the Wabash” (pg. 64) didn’t even seem like they qualified to be called poetic.  I employed my usual strategy for books of poems: reading only a couple of them at any given sitting.

    Overall, for me there were a half-dozen fantastic poems interspersed among a lot of ones that didn’t do much for me.  Still, if I have to read high-falutin’ poetry by an upstanding 20^th-century American poet, I’d choose Sandburg over Frost any day.

    6 Stars.  Carl Sandburg lived till the ripe old age of 89, garnering three Pulitzers (two for Poetry, one for History), before passing away in 1967, when I was 17.  If you look up this book at Amazon, you’ll find zero reviews for it.  At Goodreads, it has 14 ratings and one review.  It seems as if America has pretty much forgotten one of its foremost writers.  And I find that kind of sad.

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

   1850; 190 pages, not counting the 40-page Introduction called “The Custom House”.  New Author? : Yes.  Complete Title: “The Scarlet Letter: A Romance”.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Classic Literature; Romance; Historical Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    The Puritan colony in Massachusetts is caught in a moral dilemma.  What should they do about one of their citizens who has fallen into sin?  Hester Prynne recently gave birth to a baby girl.  Unfortunately, it was out of wedlock, and scripture condemns that.  Even worse, Hester refuses to say who the father is.  That's a sure sign that she hasn’t repented.

    All the Puritans agree that Hester needs to be disciplined, but exactly what would be appropriate?  Execution by stoning seems a bit extreme.  One of the colony’s older matrons has suggested branding Hester on the forehead, but that seems like geezer jealousy showing through.

    Still, something must be done to prevent the fine upstanding citizens of Boston from being led astray by Hester’s waywardness.  The last thing the godly settlement needs is for more illegitimate babies to start popping out.

    So let’s force Hester to embroider a big red “A” on the garment covering her bodice.  And let’s tell every good citizen to shun her like she has a contagious disease.  Which is kind of the truth anyway.

    Now we just have to figure out what to do with the child.

What’s To Like...

    The Scarlet Letter is, as everyone who’s ever taken a high school English Lit class, the epitome of American highbrow literature.  It was a smash hit when Nathaniel Hawthorne published it in 1850, undoubtedly helped in no small way (according to Wikipedia) by being one of the first books to be mass-produced in America.

    The main themes of the book are sin, guilt, and religious hypocrisy.  The fact that these were major topics in mid-19^th century was a pleasant surprise to me, and of course, Hawthorne is further pointing out that they were equally prevalent in the Puritan days, when America was in the habit of burning people, especially women, at the stake in the belief that they were witches.  I enjoyed The Scarlet Letter from a historical fiction angle as well.  Hawthorne’s world in the 1840’s was quite different from mine, and his portrayal of Massachusetts life 200 years before that was equally eye-opening.

    I knew the rudiments of the storyline going in, but ran across a lot of events and characters that were unfamiliar to me.  I wasn’t aware of Hawthorne’s complex character development of Hester’s daughter, Pearl.  Roger Chillingworth was totally new to me, as was Mistress Hibbins, who I found to be very intriguing.  Yes, this is fiction, but how could a “freethinker” like her survive, and even thrive, in a Puritan settlement?

    The writing is masterful, complex, and at times difficult to grasp.  Reading Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way a couple weeks ago (reviewed here) was a good way to “get in shape” for Hawthorne.  The book was a lot shorter than I’d always assumed, just 24 chapters covering the 190 pages of the main story, plus a 40-page introduction by Hawthorne which I skimmed briefly, then skipped.  There are some footnotes, presumably added by the modern-day publishing house's editor, to help you with the archaic terms.  But they aren’t “Discworldian” witty, so I mostly ignored them.  You have very few characters to keep track of, and the only setting is Boston in the years 1642-1649.

    The ending (Chapter 23) is dynamic, and includes a bit of a plot twist, which was another pleasant surprise.  Chapter 24 is essentially an epilogue, and I thought it was powerful too.  There’s also a romance angle of course, but not to where male readers will be tempted to quit the book.  And the book isn’t meant to be a mystery either; the identity of Pearl’s father is revealed about halfway through.

Kewlest New Word ...

Nugatory (adj.) : of no value or importance; useless or futile

Others: Contumaciously (adv.); Irrefragable (adj.); and a bunch of archaic words as well.

Excerpts...

    “Worthy Sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform.  “Pious Master Dimmesdale, can this be you?  Well, well, indeed!  We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after!  We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.  Come, good Sir, and my dear friend, I pray you, let me lead you home!”  (pg. 142)

    Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart.  (pg. 162.  One sentence, 12 commas, 2 semicolons, and a period)

“Be true!  Be true!  Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”  (pg. 231, and cited by the author as the moral of this story)

    Hawthorne’s writing style, although excellent, takes some getting used to.  Like Proust, he goes batshit crazy with commas, an example of which is given in the excerpts, above.  He also seems obsessed with the words “tremulous” and “preternaturally”.  If you decide to read The Scarlet Letter on your Kindle, it would be interesting to see just how frequently these two words appear.  I read it in paperback, so couldn’t check on this.

    Hawthorne also uses a lot of “period” vocabulary and spellings, such as: trode, betokened, fain, betwixt, subtile, adown, bedizen, clew, plash, agone, veriest, cumber, gayety, betimes, ledst, animadversion, galliard, practicable, and tost.  I’m not sure how much of this is 19^th-century lingo, and how much is from the 17^th century.  I note that of those 19 words, spellchecker is okay with all but six of them.  Maybe I’m just vocabulary-deficient.

    7½ Stars.  I’ve been meaning to tackle The Scarlet Letter since last Christmas, when my son pointed out that it is a much shorter novel than I thought.  Serendipitously, when I discovered a local “Free Little Library” in our neighborhood a couple months ago this was one of the few books it contained.  I took it as a cosmic omen.

    One other note.  The Goodreads rating for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is 3.39.  The Goodreads rating for E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey is 3.67.  This tells you something about the literary tastes and sophistication of 21^st-century American readers.

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust

   1913; 456 pages.  Volume 1 (out of 7) of Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, aka Search of Lost Time (French title: Á la recherché du temps perdu).  New Author? : Yes.  Translator: C.K. Scott-Moncrieff.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; French Literature; Romance; Fictional Memoirs.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    A question: What’s your earliest recollection from your childhood?  How old were you at the time?  More importantly, what made the event stick forever in your mind?

    Another question: Does a certain song, or painting, or maybe an aroma, or even some particular landmark; ever repeatedly trigger a emotional response in your memory about something in your past?  Perhaps making you recall something like your first love or a long-departed pet, but maybe just something pleasurable, like your first taste of ice cream or pizza?

    If neither of those questions evokes a reaction in your mind, you probably should skip Swann’s Way.  Ditto if you can’t be happy with any book where you have to go searching for the storyline.

    But if these questions make eerie sense to you, and bring back long-buried memories (or short-buried ones, for that matter), then this book just might leave a major mark on your subconscious.

What’s To Like...

    Swann’s Way is a fictional memoir (is that an oxymoron?) and just the first of seven volumes in Marcel Proust’s opus Remembrance of Things Past.  It took him 14 years (1913-1927) to complete it, although to be fair, the devastating effect of World War One (1914-1918) on Proust’s native France was a delaying factor.

    Swann’s Way is divided into four sections, namely:

    Part 1: Overture (1%).  The narrator describes some of his childhood memories, including how he loved to have his mom kiss him goodnight and/or read to him.

    Part 2: Combray (11%).  Memories when he is slightly older, including going to church, visiting his Aunt Octave, taking walks in the countryside around Combray, and espying his first love, Gilberte.

    Part 3: Swann In Love (44%).  Mostly about Swann’s affair with Odette, including his doting on her, his jealousy, and his fears that she’s unfaithful.  The longest section, and a “novel within a novel”, it ties in with the narrator’s memoir by the fact that Gilberte is the Swanns' daughter.

    Part 4: Place-Names: The Name (90%).  The way the names of places (Balbec, Florence, Venice, et. al.) evoke images in the mind, even if one has never been there.  The narrator laments about how things have changed in the world since he was a child.

    Marcel Proust explores a slew of themes in Swann’s Way.  You can read about them in Wikipedia, but for me, the main ones were:

    A. The rigid social castes of 1910’s French society.  One simply did not associate with anyone from a lower social level.

    B. The aforementioned triggering of memories and emotions by music, a room’s décor, art, or even a cup of tea.

    C. The self-delusion that inevitably plagues anyone that’s hopelessly in love with another who’s far less committed to the relationship.

    I enjoyed visiting a time-&-place much different from ours.  There are gas heaters to warm your bedroom at night, a dessert of coffee-&-pistachio-ice, stereoscopes for viewing, alpaca coats to wear, an omnibus to get around town, fishing for minnows with a glass jar, and paying a penny to rent a chair in the park.

    Marcel Proust keeps you challenged with numerous references to art, music, literature, and even French history.  I had to look a bunch of things up, including the Merovingian kingdom, some guy called “Golo”, an lesser-known composer named Clapisson, and a malady called aphasia.  I was perplexed at first, but then chuckled at Swann’s/Odette’s little euphemism, “doing a cattleya”.

    The book was, of course, originally written in French, and this particular version was then translated into 1920’s English, not present-day American, so buildings have storeys, things are shewed, meagre, or savoury, people are skilful, and something may take for ever, or get done to-day.  At one point one of the characters becomes fascinated by figures-of-speech, with examples such as “whole hog” and “burning one’s boats”.  I am curious as to what those were in the original French.

    There is an instance of gay romance, which impressed me for any novel written in the 1910’s.  But according to Wikipedia, Proust himself was gay, which makes this less surprising, albeit only slightly so.  I did appreciate the importance that the narrator attaches to the pastime of reading books, especially highbrow ones.

    Oh yeah, one last thing.  The author’s last name is properly pronounced “Proost”, not “Prowst”.  I’ve been saying it wrong all these years.

Kewlest New Word ...

Jackanapes (n., slang) : an impertinent person (close to being archaic)

Others: Bioscope (n.); Viaticum (n.); Chevying (v.); Counterpane (n.) Crapulous (adj.); Trefoil (n.).

Kindle Details...

    The “public domain” version of Swann’s Way is always free at Amazon, and naturally, that’s the one I read.  You can buy an “illustrated” version for $7.99, or even the “graphic novel” version for $9.45.  Alternatively, you can buy the “complete” book (all seven volumes of it), which is 3000+ pages long.  Good luck with getting through that.   

Excerpts...

    “To think that, only yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth for the season, I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly little places the King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us.  However, she didn’t seem particularly keen; she hasn’t said yes or no yet.  Let’s hope that she’ll refuse.  Good God!  Think of listening to Wagner for a fortnight on end with her, who takes about as much interest in music as a fish does in little apples; it will be fun!”  (loc. 5150)

    But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which – in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her – he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things.  (loc. 6545.  One sentence, eleven commas, two dashes, one semicolon, one apostrophe, and one period.)

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, and dirty sluts in plenty,

Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses, when the heart is one-and-twenty.  (loc. 2064)

    Frankly, Swann’s Way was a difficult read for me, filled with flowery words, incredibly long and complex sentences that are saturated with punctuation (especially commas) and a plethora of clauses.  The second excerpt, above, is a typical example of this.  Quite often, by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I had no idea how it started.

    Everything is stream-of-consciousness, written in the 1^st-person POV by an unidentified narrator.  There are no chapters, just the four long sections; so it’s up to the reader to find a convenient place to stop.  It was difficult to keep from skimming, and reading it when sleepy was impossible.

    To boot, this Public Domain version was generated by scanning the pages of a “real” book, and nobody bothered to proofread the result.  So there are numerous scanner "oopsies".  “Mlle. Swann” becomes “Mile Swan”.  “Françoise” becomes “Franchise”.  “Ile de France” becomes “He de France”, etc,  And any smudge of fleck of dust becomes whatever letter the scanner thinks it most closely resembles.

    Nevertheless, I enjoyed the challenge of reading Swann’s Way.  Proust’s writing may be difficult, but it’s done extremely well, and this book is in no way a waste of one’s time.  Last but not least, hats off to the translator, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff because, as complicated as the sentences in English are, and as highfalutin as the vocabulary is, I gotta believe it was even worse in the original French.

    8 Stars.  I read Swann’s Way out of curiosity when it was referenced in two comics within a relatively short period of time.  I expected it to be a slog, and it did not disappoint.  I’m unlikely to read any of the subsequent six volumes, but I'm proud I persevered in reading the book the whole way through.

    There’s a Kindle feature that shows you what other readers highlighted, and over the first 10% of the book, there are several dozen entries so marked, and often listed as having been highlighted by more than 100 readers.  After that however, the e-book is devoid of any “highlights by others”.  I suspect that bespeaks of how many readers gave up before finishing the book.