“The Devil’s Pool” by George Sand

Forest in Autumn, 1841 by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)

There are many wonderful books in the world. There are even more lousy ones and the number of books that are just mediocre would astound you. Even with the best of intentions, boundless curiosity and a life free from toil and obligation, one can never hope to read but a fraction of all the books you hope to read.  When I was a bright-eyed youth studying English lit, I thought my professors had read everything, but now I know it’s very likely that they hadn’t. At least it seemed a statistical improbability given the sheer number of works of literature versus the number of hours in a day. But you can relax. You don’t have to read absolutely everything in order to enjoy literature.

Look at this syllabus from a class taught by poet W. H. Auden in 1941. It is ridiculous—six thousand pages of reading for one class in the span of a single semester. It is a workload that sets the bar impossibly high. This kind of binging could potentially lead to serious mental health problems and feelings of intellectual inadequacy. But remember, one could spend a lifetime climbing that mountain of classics and still only scratch the surface of Western civilization. And that’s not counting time for reflection and meaningful analysis. I never received a syllabus quite like this one, but I have seen a few daunting ones in my time. It took me years not to be intimidated by other people’s expectations of what I was supposed to have read. I eventually learned to enjoy my journey through literature and history in my own way at my own pace—in essence, drafting my own syllabus. I often consult those with knowledge of literary criticism and the art of writing and their insight is often helpful, but I’m not beholden to anyone’s expectations but my own. That’s what The Overleaf is all about—crafting your own course of discovery. 

So far, I’ve kept to a self-imposed schedule of two blog entries per month. I’ve done that for a solid year and built up the blog, giving it a firm foundation. Time is now increasingly short and obligations demand more of my time, so I’m cutting back to monthly posts. But the literary journey continues. Rather than keep to the stringent demands of a bi-monthly binge and purge cycle, cutting back will allow me to spend more quality time with the books I share with you and still have time to work and buy food. This new arrangement is the epitome of a win-win.

Here is a book that may not be on your syllabus yet unless you’re enrolled in a class about rarely read nineteenth century French novels. The Devil’s Pool depicts rural French peasant life. It’s author, George Sand was actually a woman (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), a renowned writer of novels and committed socialist whose unconventional lifestyle and numerous romantic flings with prominent writers and composers like Alfred de Musset and Frederic Chopin made her a bit of a celebrity. She was widely read throughout Europe and America and had vocal supporters from literary giants of her day like Walt Whitman and Ivan Turgenev. This novel is short and straightforward and provides a broader context to some of the stories we’ve read earlier this year about the Russian peasantry. The fact that she isn’t read as much these days is reason enough to give The Devil’s Pool a spin.

"The Ploughman" c. 1525
 by Hans Holbein the Younger
(1498-1543)

The Devil’s Pool (1846) by George Sand

This story was inspired by Dance of Death, a book of wood cut prints by Renaissance artist and printmaker Hans Holbein. One print in particular, “The Ploughman” (right) shows Death running along side an emaciated farmer and his team of oxen. George Sand was struck by how this grim depiction of peasant life in which the inevitability of hardship and toil are rewarded only by the promise of the reward of death contrasted sharply with the reality of peasant life as she witnessed it near her home in the French countryside. While out for a walk, she saw a healthy young man driving a team of newly yoked oxen goaded not by the spectre of Death, but by the farmer’s young son. She mused that perhaps depictions of peasants centuries ago overemphasized the omnipresence of suffering and barbarity. She saw that her peasant neighbors had a deeper, often more joyful connection to the natural world that eluded those who lived removed from nature. She set out to write a book that would right this wrong.

The tale she tells is a simple one. Germain is a widower with three children who lives with his in-laws, helping to run the family farm. He is twenty eight years old—an old man by peasant standards, but exceedingly strong and good looking. His father-in-law suggests to him that perhaps it’s time that he found a wife to help take care of his children—preferably one with a bit of money and property to help the family. Still mourning the death of his wife, Germain nevertheless concedes to travel to meet with a prospective match his father-in-law has in mind. Before setting out on his journey, Germain learns that his neighbor Marie, a virtuous, kind and beautiful sixteen year old shepherdess has secured as a position at a farm near to where Germain is headed and needs a ride to her new digs. You can probably already guess where this is leading.

Along the way, they spot Germain’s little boy, Petit Pierre, who insists on coming along. He joins them on the back of their grey mare and heads into the forest in the loving arms of Marie. Along the way, they become lost in the mists of the forest as night falls, settling along a small pond, revealed later to be the Devil’s pool—a place where it is believed that passers-by are bewitched into a state of confusion and fear. Marie proves herself to be resourceful, wise and a loving companion to Pierre, and Germain starts to fall in love with her, although she insists that he is too old for her and that she does not love him. Love sick but resigned to his fate, the next morning, Germain arranges for Marie to take care of his boy as he presents himself as a suitor to his perspective bride.

George Sand
(1804-1876)

Things don’t go well. Germain arrives to find the widow, vapid and vain, already being courted by a loser brigade of three suitors. He doesn’t stick around long and soon leaves to pick up his son at the nearby farm where Marie is staying, but neither she nor Pierre are anywhere to be found. He finds them frightened and hiding in the forest and learns that her new employer had something else in mind for her other than tending sheep. The three reunite and head home. 

I have a no spoiler policy when describing books, but the plot of this novel is so simple and predictable that it’s not a stretch to assume that you’ve already figured out that these two get together. The devil’s pool, believed to inspire fear and confusion, seems to have brought Germain and Marie to a moment of clarity. But plot is not the main attraction here. Rather, it’s how Sand depicts these rural characters as simple, virtuous people who experience life unfettered by vanity and artifice and who have close ties with nature and who embrace their ancient Gallic customs and traditions. The complicated rites and ceremonies of the wedding celebration are described in great detail, as is a fertility rite that takes place after the wedding.

Sand’s portrayal of France’s peasantry stands in contrast with similarly themed stories and novels by her Russian counterparts. Although her style is unmistakably realist, she has buffed the images of her characters to a glossy, sparkling, idealized spit shine to reveal an image that middle class readers could easily relate to. Sand’s peasants respond to the hardship of their lives with unyielding stoicism and are upright, moral, sensible and respectable—all attributes held dear by middle class readers. They struggle with hunger and labor for their livelihood, but there is none of the constant drunkenness, squalor and wretchedness found in Dostoyevsky’s peasants, nor is there a trace of the oppressive, inhumane treatment by landowners found in Turgenev. In fact, Russian peasants in the 1840s would be envious of their French cousins, who seem to be having an absolute blast by comparison. The Russian authors we’ve encountered depicted the realities of peasant life unflinchingly, not by portraying them as stoics with a sense of propriety that mirrored the world view of their readers, but as human beings with virtues and flaws who suffered at the mercy of a social and economic system run by allegedly “decent” people whose cruelty and deprivation robbed those in their charge of their very humanity. Nineteenth century rural France was certainly a world away from feudal Russia, but things seem a little too tidy in Sand’s world all the same. 

But yet, this novel has its charms. Sand’s is a compassionate voice. She really wants us to understand and identify with her characters and to see them in context with the natural world. She has a great feel and affinity for nature. Her imagination was stirred by the ancient Gallic marriage rites and rituals at a time when these traditions were dying out as industrialism spread, so on one level the novel serves as a little slice of fictionalized cultural anthropology. We see them not through a veil of tears, but through a halo of morning sunlight that shines down on a people closely linked with the traditions of their ancestors and on a way of life rapidly fading away. This novel is a snapshot, albeit airbrushed, of that time, but was written with the very best of intentions. It’s a pleasant read with some merit. In the pantheon of wonderful, lousy or mediocre books, The Devil’s Pool can easily be classified as “good”.

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Venus in Furs

                   "Venus in Furs" from the album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

On October 27th, Lou Reed, one of the twentieth century's most influential songwriters, passed away at the age of 71. One of his best known songs, "Venus in Furs" from the 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico, was inspired by an 1870 novel of the same name written by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch. I've long had this novel at the back of my mind as a contender for a piece for The Overleaf, and recent news of Reed's death moved it to the front of the line. 

Venus in Furs is a novel about a man and a woman involved in a consensual, female-dominant, sadomasochistic relationship. With the exception of a good, stimulating hot sauce, I'm not one to mix my pleasures with pain. While I've been curious about this book for a number of years, I wasn't sure if it would appeal to me. As it turns out, I actually enjoyed it and was surprised by the novel's depth. Sacher-Masoch (as in "masochism") was a reasonably good writer who managed to sustain a novel-length story of difficult subject matter with only two main characters. That's an achievement in and of itself, but the fact that this book was published in 1870, long before D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and one hundred forty years before  E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Gray, makes it all the more intriguing. Lou Reed's recent passing and our culture's current obsession with BDSM-themed best sellers and films (with or without vampires) suggests to me that the time is right to explore this novel.

Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch
1836-1895

Venus in Furs (1870) by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch

After dreaming of a dialogue about love and cruelty with Venus clad in furs, an unnamed narrator visits his friend, Severin von Kusiemski, to tell him about his dream. Severin hands him a manuscript to read entitled Memoirs of a Suprasensual Man in the hopes that his friend can benefit from his own experience with such visions and feelings.

The "book within the book" is the story of Severin, a self-described dilettante of no fixed profession who is vacationing at a resort in the Carpathian mountains. He is a lover of art, given to ruminating on the terrible beauty and power of woman in her ideal form as expressed in the classics, Goethe, the Bible and a stone statue of Venus in the garden which he often visits and silently worships. He purchases a photographic reproduction of Titian's Venus with a Mirror, a painting that depicts Venus wrapped in furs and attended by angels. On the photo, next to some scribbled quotes from literature, he writes

To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how the glamour of this pales in comparison with the tormenting bliss of worshipping a woman who makes a plaything out of us, of being the slave of a beautiful tyrant who treads us pitilessly underfoot.

Titian's "Venus with the Mirror" c. 1555

The photo finds its way into the hands of Wanda von Dunajew, the rich widow who lives upstairs, when it is accidentally left in a book that Severin has loaned to her. The photo and its strange inscriptions bring these two together. One day while in the garden, he is taken aback when he sees Wanda, resplendent in her furs and the very vision of his beloved Venus come to life. 

The first third of the novel depicts a negotiative process wherein these two twentysomethings get to know one another and come to agree on the nature of their relationship. We also get an inside look at the psychology of masochism as Severin describes his inner need to be emotionally and physically dominated by a woman. Wanda is reluctant to agree at first, but becomes more and more intrigued by the idea of being worshiped and served by a man who is utterly enslaved to her. However, she warns him very early on that her cruelty, once unleashed, would be difficult to contain and that Severin's course is one taken at his own peril. The dynamic having been established, the two start to play their respective roles. They even go whip shopping.

Before leaving on a trip to Florence, Wanda even draws up a contract in which Severin is to agree to be her slave until he is dismissed. Severin is to accompany her as her servant, Gregor. During their time in Florence, things really start to heat up. Wanda makes hints of imminent betrayal and subjects Severin to even greater physical and emotional abuse. The more abuse he suffers, the more humiliation he feels, the more physical agonies he is subjected to, the more he feels an unquenchable passion and desire for the woman he loves. No spoilers here, but it doesn't end well. After all, this is a cautionary tale.

This is a short, concise novel. The pacing is brisk and the story mostly told through dialogue, which he had a clear knack for writing. Sacher-Masoch, uses the novel as confessional to bare his innermost feelings while blurring the line between fiction and autobiography. Welts are raised and blood is spilled. The physical sensation of pain, coupled with chastisement and humiliation send Severin into raptures, but also propel him further and further into anguish. Severin's turmoil is so painful and personal as to make the reader uncomfortable at times, but above all. this is a work of brutal honesty that documents one man's obsession while speaking to the larger struggle that men and women play out in relationships, societal roles and politics. It is a prescient work.

"Venus in Furs" image from
the author's personal stationery.

Not surprisingly, Venus in Furs was widely misunderstood as just another dirty book to be banned for the public's own good (the introduction, which I recommend, touches on this). But reading through it one is struck by how blatantly unsexy it is. It does contain scenes of abject cruelty in the context of a sexual relationship, but always in service to a larger purpose; this is Freud before Freud, and an early reexamination of sexual politics after the industrial revolution redefined the roles that men and women would play both personally and politically. The questions raised in this novel are far more subversive than any titillating content ever could be. 

In fact, Sacher-Masoch shows great restraint. There is nothing too explicit here, and the language he uses and the things he omits are what gives the novel its real power. The author lets us experience the emotional turmoil of a man whose need to be maltreated and humiliated is inexorably bound with his need for love and validation. Even if you've never felt that way, chances are you'll feel for him. This sort of conflict is the very stuff of great literature and is a theme that has been explored countless times and in many art forms. But here, everything is laid bare. The relationship between Severin and Wanda is nothing if not honest; men and women play out their power struggles in subtle and sinister ways every day, but their relationship, puts all the cards on the table as their assumed roles become more and more real.

Of course, a grain of salt comes in handy. Severin's dilemma seems very much like a first world problem in light of the very real suffering that was going on in 1870 (the Franco-Prussian War springs to mind). After all, Severin and Wanda are rich, educated Northern Europeans not burdened by concerns like finding food and shelter or even dressing themselves. But this novel was much, much better than I had anticipated. It's influence was greatly bolstered by Lou Reed's song and I can clearly see why he was attracted to this book as good subject matter for song lyrics. The Velvet Underground's first album led many listeners--myself included--to a pretty good book. So thanks, Lou. I'm just sorry I couldn't thank you in person. Rest in peace.

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Scary Short Fiction by Famous English Authors

Premonition By Henryk Weyssenhoff (1859-1922) Oil on canvas, c. 1893

In this post, we'll take a look at two pieces of short fiction--call them novellas or novelettes or whatever you like--by two very different English writers: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Both stories were published in 1859 and both deal with the supernatural, which is unsurprising given the popular Victorian obsession with the occult, mesmerism and psychic phenomena. One story is a prototypical ghost story with a hefty dose of esoteric theorizing, the other a hybrid that combines elements of science fiction in the gothic tradition and a narrative technique that was ahead of its time. The first story aspires to rationality and objectivity, the other is told through a gauzy mesh of subjectivity.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a prolific writer of novels, mostly historical fiction, along with some verse and a few plays that span a career of over six decades (we looked at two of his books last year). His prose could be a bit flabby and pompous, but he was an internationally known literary rock star, and while his work falls short of what many consider truly timeless, classic literature, a few of his novels are at least fun to read. George Eliot was one of the greatest English novelists who ever lived and whose work set new standards for the novel as an art form in the mid-nineteenth century. Bulwer-Lytton was an aristocrat and politician who was very interested in unexplained phenomena and theosophy; Eliot was an intellectual heavyweight and dyed-in-the-wool rationalist of more humble means who shared similar interests. When these stories were first published, he was close to the end of his long career and she was just beginning hers. Today, her books continue to be read and studied, his not so much. 

In addition to being fine Halloween reading, taken together, these two pieces display an interesting contrast of narrative styles.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1803-1873
 Illustration by Carlo Pellegrini

The Haunted and the Haunters Or, The House and the Brain (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This first person narrative is a matter-of-fact account of a night spent in a haunted house on Oxford Street in London. Upon hearing a friend's account of an abortive attempt to rent and occupy rooms there for a week (they lasted three days), the narrator, excited by the idea of spending a night in a haunted house soon comes to agreeable terms with the owner and sets off with his manservant, his dog, a revolver and a dagger. For the narrator, this is a fact-finding mission to observe and find rational explanations for so-called supernatural phenomena, and he relates what happened in great detail.

Things start off with the usual hearing of footsteps, the moving about of furniture, mysterious letters and a cold, depressing room that functions as the "heart" of the house. As night approaches, a dark, weighty, will-quenching oppression grips the heart of the narrator as ghosts from the house's past play out the circumstances that led to their tragic ends. These gothic, melodramatic elements are kept in check by the narrator's persistence of will to remain objective by resisting fear. Indeed, that's a central theme of the story; by not succumbing to fear, a rational explanation for seemingly otherworldly phenomena can be found in the form of a human agency rather than a supernatural one. 

I won't spoil the story for you, but the convoluted explanations found for these disturbances are obscure, to say the least. While the author's journalistic style strives for objectivity, the pseudo-scientific blather that attempts to explain the disturbances is only so much malarkey. But if one is willing and able to suspend disbelief, The Haunted and the Haunters is a fun ride and a classic ghost tale for the nineteenth century thinking man. Whether you're a true believer or scoffing skeptic, if you have any pulse at all, the ghostly descriptions alone will raise at least a few empirically challenged hairs and inspire purely subjective feelings of dread. This piece can be taken at face value, and that's precisely what we should expect from a good ghost story.

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George Eliot
(Mary Ann Evans)
1819-1880

The Lifted Veil (1859) by George Eliot

This one is something altogether different. In The Haunted and the Haunters, Bulwer-Lytton strives for objectivity, and although the holes in his narrator's logic are large enough for a ghost to fall through, the tone of the story remains one of dispassionate inquiry. In George Eliot's The Lifted Veil, the narrator's point of view is subjective to the point of being untrustworthy, and his morbid fascination with his own psyche colors his interactions with everyone around him. 

At this point some of you might want to read the story first before reading my little analysis. I don't exactly spoil the ending, but I do discuss some key story details.

Here is a laughably simplified plot synopsis: Latimer is a sensitive male type in the Romantic tradition, not unlike Goethe's Werther. He prefers nature and poetry to science and business. After a childhood illness, he is seized by intermittent visions of the future and develops the ability to read the minds of those around him. He becomes enamored with Bertha, his brother's fiancee and the only one in his circle whose thoughts he cannot read. Despite glimpses into an grim future in which they are unhappily married, he marries her anyway after his brother is killed in a hunting accident. Their marriage is a disaster, and as time goes on, they drift apart and Bertha becomes inexplicably close and secretive with one of their maids. Dr. Meunier, one of Latimer's school chums, shows up for a visit just as the maid becomes ill with peritonitis. The doctor suggests to Latimer that, since the maid will surely die anyway, he would like to perform an experimental procedure to resuscitate her--namely, to give her a blood transfusion. He does so, and the maid wakes up and speaks of the secret she would have otherwise taken to her grave…but I digress. No spoilers here.

Does Latimer really have psychic powers or has he merely convinced himself of it? He gets a few predictions right, but he ignores the most important one that foretells an unhappy marriage to a cold hearted woman who is incapable of loving him. Even if he had psychic powers, they don't seem to have done him any good. Or is he so self involved that he projects his insecurities and miseries on everyone around him? Why should we believe his tortured version of what happened? Who knows? Who cares? 

George Eliot uses a literary device called the unreliable narrator. We should question Latimer's truthfulness because he lacks objectivity. For all we know, the whole story could be a smoke screen. The best parts about using this narrative device is that she can fiddle with how she presents the chronology of events (the story opens with Latimer's death) and keep the attentive reader guessing as to the sanity of her protagonist (although a face value interpretation is also possible). George Eliot made her reputation on realist prose, so this story is a real curiosity and an ambitious experiment in narrative technique that anticipates some of the innovations of modernism by forty or fifty years.

Apart from the clairvoyance, the real sci-fi element of the story doesn't occur until the very last pages. In 1859, blood transfusions were still in the experimental phase and were not known to bring the dead back to life. But hey, we can't blame George Eliot for being a woman of her time, especially when her writing technique and imagination were so far ahead of her time. Although the plot contrivances don't really work, Eliot's prose is as rich and full of the wonderful subtlety and complexity that characterizes her work. 

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Here Lies Literature: Curious Epitaphs

Illustration by John Blair Moore

October marks our one year anniversary! On October 26, 2012, the very first essay was posted to the blog and The Overleaf has been chugging along ever since. Thanks to those of you who have read and enjoyed the blog over the past year. I hope you'll continue to check in. 

Last October, the second article I posted dealt with three nineteenth century horror novels and the films they inspired. I like the idea of writing about books for Halloween reading, so this year we're establishing a new tradition in which essays in the month of October will be devoted to scary, or at least Halloween-appropriate, literature.

The great thing is that there's no shortage of good books to choose from. In addition to the many stone-cold literary classics we've explored, there is a growing number of oddball titles appearing on Project Gutenberg that would have slipped through the cracks and probably been lost to history were it not for the deluge of public domain titles that have been made available as eBooks. In the coming year, I'm making a point to write more essays on a few of these oddball titles. The first of this season's Halloween picks is one of them--a nineteenth century collection of epitaphs collected from gravestones in Great Britain and the United States.

Curious Epitaphs (1883) by William Andrews

The epitaph is literature that serves a practical purpose. For centuries, when a family or community cared enough about someone to bother to erect a monument in honor of his or her memory, they called in two folks with special skills--the stonecutter, who created a suitable stone relief, and the poet who encapsulated the dearly departed's life and essence in a few words. Imagine…the poet's job was actually deemed important. 

Of course, sometimes a parish clerk or sexton had to fulfill the duty of parish poet, and sometimes local amateurs filled the bill. Some prominent citizens even wrote their own epitaphs to ensure a firm grasp of their legacies from the grave. In any case, results were mixed. At their best, epitaphs could be succinct, artful summations of lives, highlighting the good deeds and redeeming qualities of their subjects, forging in stone the life stories that might have otherwise been lost and giving their subjects a lasting, dignified monument. Epitaphs could be funny, profound, cautionary and weird, sometimes all at once. At their worst, they could be long winded, self serving, pompous wheezes that serve only as metered and rhymed public relations copy, enshrining the deceased in a chiseled halo of folderol.

In Curious Epitaphs, there is much in the way of shrewd wit, reflecting a healthy and even whimsical attitude toward death that can only be embraced by people who had little choice but to make peace with it one way or another. Before the twentieth century, lives were shorter, disease more rampant, women were far more likely to die in childbirth and infant and child mortality were grim facts of life. Reading through these epitaphs made me realize how improvements in health and living standards have sheltered us from the reality of death in a way that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. One seldom finds a tombstone in this day and age that exudes a sense of humor.

If William Andrews' introduction is to be believed, his book was a runaway hit, selling out its first edition quickly in 1883. It may come as a surprise to some that a potential bummer of a book like this should be so popular, but it doesn't surprise me at all; these epitaphs give us glimpses of life stories just as novels and history books do. Through the gravestone etchings of those long gone, we can recognize the common thread of humanity connecting their individual lives--and their collective fate--to our own. 

Anyway, here are a few examples of what can be found within this most curious volume:

Simple, concise phrasing that carries a message more profound than one might expect is always a pleasure to find, especially on a gravestone. Consider the mind-bending recursive quality of this epitaph, chiseled on the tombstone of Frank Raw, of Selby, Yorkshire-- the guy who, until then, was responsible for chiseling epitaphs on tombstones:

Here lies the body of poor Frank Raw,

Parish clerk and grave-stone cutter,

And this is writ to let you know

What Frank for others used to do,

Is now for Frank done by another.

Some of the best epitaphs are replete with inside jokes and/or groan-inducing puns, like this one for a watchmaker:

Here lies, in horizontal position,

the outside case of

George Routleigh, Watchmaker;

Whose abilities in that line were an honour

to his profession.

Integrity was the Mainspring, and prudence the

Regulator,

of all the actions of his life.

Humane, generous, and liberal,

his Hand never stopped

till he had relieved distress.

So nicely regulated were all his motions,

that he never went wrong,

except when set a-going

by people

who did not know his Key;

even then he was easily

set right again.

He had the art of disposing his time so well,

that his hours glided away

in one continual round

of pleasure and delight,

until an unlucky minute put a period to

his existence.

He departed this life

Nov. 14, 1802,

aged 57:

wound up,

in hopes of being taken in hand

by his Maker;

and of being thoroughly cleaned, repaired,

and set a-going

in the world to come.

This punny epitaph makes very clever use of the name of one Dr. William Cole, Dean of Lincoln, who died in 1600. It approaches eloquence while holding fast to the obvious gag:

Reader, behold the pious pattern here

Of true devotion and of holy fear.

He sought God’s glory and the churches good.

Idle idol worship he withstood.

Yet dyed in peace, whose body here doth lie

In expectation of eternity.

And when the latter trump of heaven shall blow

Cole, now rak’d up in ashes, then shall glow.

Here's one for a sportsman, presumably a cricketer, near Salisbury. It's straight to the point, combining universal truth with a grin-inducing pithiness:

I bowl’d, I struck, I caught, I stopp’d,

Sure life’s a game of cricket;

I block’d with care, with caution popp’d,

Yet Death has hit my wicket.

How about this one found on the gravestone of a bellows maker:

Here lyeth John Cruker, a maker of bellowes,

His craftes-master and King of good fellowes;

Yet when he came to the hour of his death,

He that made bellowes, could not make breath.

Indeed. Or consider the unassailable truth of these lines:

Here I lie, at the chancel door,

Here I lie, because I’m poor;

The farther in, the more you pay,

Here I lie as warm as they.

I could go on forever. This is a fascinating, well researched book that is more than a mere catalog of epitaphs. The author includes many morsels of backstory and context on the lives soliloquized here, sparking the imagination and often inspiring a giggle. Who would have thought a book full of tombstone scribblings could be so fun? This is the kind of eBook you can pick up and put down at will, which makes it the perfect bus or train commuter's companion. Think of it as a literary palette cleanser. That's probably the best way to read it, too, because these bits of past lives should be savored.

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Russian Literary Criticism

"Rye", Grigoriy Myasoyedov (1835-1911), Oil on canvas, 1881

I love books and I'm wary of literary criticism. Some works of lit crit do a great job of putting works of literature into historical and cultural perspective, broadening our understanding of their significance. But literary criticism can also obfuscate the real virtues of a good book and only confuse and alienate readers. As we've seen frequently on The Overleaf, the most common forum for criticism is found in the introduction of a novel or short story collection in which the story is spoiled and the author of the work is derided as being overrated. This can be off-putting, and make curious readers think that the book they're about to enjoy is too complex for them to understand, turning them off completely. I guess everyone has their job to do.

This is precisely what The Overleaf seeks to address. I try to make books more accessible by demystifying them. Ideally, authors write for readers, not for critics. But now and then I come across a work of literary criticism that enhances my enjoyment and understanding of literature.  So here are two books I discovered while doing research for my essays about the Russian short story. One is not so good, the other is excellent. One wades in a morass of generalities, one gets down to brass tacks about style and context.

Lectures on Russian Literature (1889) by Ivan Panin

After being thrown out of Russia as an anti-Tsarist revolutionary, Ivan Panin emigrated to Germany and then the United States in the 1870s, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard and began giving lectures on Russian literature. After converting to Christianity, he became consumed with what he claimed were significant numerical patterns in the Bible that revealed a secret meaning. This volume of his lectures on Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy (conspicuously omitting Dostoyevsky) is currently available for free, while his Biblio-numerological obsessions have fallen by the wayside. 

Unfortunately, Panin is given to rhapsodic fits of purple prose that sing lofty praises of the usual suspects. He has a vague construct of the evolution of the soul and ascribes stages of the soul's development to the work of each author. Hence, Pushkin is the "singer", Gogol the "protestor", Turgenev the "warrior" and Tolstoy, "the preacher", creating a top heavy construct that parallels the development of Russian culture with man's destined journey toward God. Fair enough, but it's hardly about literature. He even uses this idea to bash venerable English writers like George Eliot, Charles Dickens and W.M. Thackeray for not being as clever and inspired as his beloved Russians. For all that, he only ever scratches the surface of their work, and his rhapsodies are unabashedly sentimental and quite frankly, corny. We can partly forgive his evangelical zeal. These great Russian books were still fairly new to American readers and he clearly wanted to get the word out, but his emphasis on rhetoric and lofty language doesn't serve his subject our our understanding very well. This book does explore and contextualize Russian literature, but only within very narrow parameters. Modern readers are likely to roll their eyes and utter a collective, exasperated, "Oh, brother!" You can give this one a miss.

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Essays on Russian Novelists (1911) by William Lyon Phelps

This one has much more meat on the bone. In his day, Phelps was an immensely popular lecturer, public speaker, newspaper columnist, preacher, and later, host of his own radio show. His lectures on literature at Yale at the turn of the twentieth century attracted lots of media attention, and his rising celebrity status aroused the jealousy of his veteran colleagues on the faculty. Apparently, one hundred years ago, it was possible to parlay a career as an academic into stardom. If he were alive today, he's be doing TV commercials, have his own cooking show and a hundred thousand Twitter fans.

Phelps is also opinionated, but backs his opinions up. The excellent introduction explores how the culture, language, history, politics and geography of Russia all contribute to the singular character of Russian literature, which sets the table nicely for his commentary. While walking us through the major Russian writers, he calls out Dostoyevsky for his lack of proportion and occasional incoherence, but praises him for his many flashes of brilliance. He gives Tolstoy props for his immense contributions to world literature, but disdains the author's didacticism and (unlike Panin) questions the sincerity of the author's Christian anarchic zeal in light of his legendary egotism. He dislikes Gorki's bloodless socialist realism but admires a couple of his stories. Generally, his criticism of a given author's work serves to highlight the author's very best qualities. This is balanced, constructive and enlightening criticism--a rare thing indeed. Alert readers will soon notice that Phelps is what we in the twenty first century would call a cultural conservative, but like Panin, he was a man of his time and his somewhat myopic views about religion and morality don't detract too much from his insights. I would have loved to have had this guy as a college professor.

Phelps favors Turgenev as the greatest Russian writer, a view reflective of his era. I think that Turgenev is considered the greatest of all Russian writers by European and American critics at the turn of the twentieth century because the structure of his novels adhered more closely to established forms of Western literature than his contemporaries. Turgenev's emotional reserve and familiar templates fit European tastes better than the sprawling, prodigious, emotional styles of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Since this book was first published in 1911, Tolstoy has supplanted Turgenev as the preeminent Russian novelist in many minds, and apart from Turgenev's brilliant 1862 novel Fathers and Children, his books aren't read as widely in the West as they once were. That's a shame because his novels and short stories are great stuff indeed. I would encourage anyone interested in Russian literature to read them.

As for the rest, apart from Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Phelps explores a few novels by authors barely known one hundred years later, including Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanin (1907), The Red Laugh (1904) by Leonid Andreyev and The Duel (1905) by Aleksandr Kuprin (also known as In Honour's Name). Just learning of novels and authors entirely new to me made this book worth reading, and it's an ideal companion to Best Russian Short Stories, an anthology we explored at the end of my series about Russian short stories. If you want to better understand Russian literature in context, I would suggest having a look at these two books together to get a taste of some of the lesser known authors. 

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Dickens Does America

U.S. wall map from 1845, just three years after Dickens' journey, Click here for the full rez version.

When Charles Dickens set sail for North America from Liverpool on January 3, 1842, the nation he visited was a work in progress, and one hundred seventy one years later, it remains so. It's infrastructure was scrappy, its people a little rough around the edges, and its geographical obstacles daunting, but the pluck of its citizens and its vast natural resources made its potential seem limitless. In many respects, the United States was what we would now consider a third world country, or at most a developing nation. Dickens was both charmed and appalled by what he saw there, and his criticisms did not go over well with the American public upon publication. At the time, Dickens was the biggest literary star of his day with a huge readership in the former colonies and around the world. so its understandable that his missive stung a bit.

American Notes for General Circulation (1842; this edition: 1913) by Charles Dickens

Americans can be a little touchy about criticism from their former imperial rulers, and patronizing lectures in stern English accents tend to make us cringe. It's in our DNA. But, to use an American phrase, "he called 'em the way he saw 'em", and while his tone can be a little paternal in places, his motivation was not to flout his cultural superiority but to write an accurate record of what he experienced. Between the lines, one gets the feeling that Dickens really wants the young nation to succeed and to live up to its own constitutionally prescribed standards regarding human rights. He also presents vivid portraits of cities, towns, the wilderness and the people he met on his journey with that singular Dickensian eye for detail and ear for dialect. This is Charles Dickens, after all, so you can expect beautiful writing and short jabs of dark, poignant humor. I won't spoil it for you, but here are a few highlights of the journey:

He made land on the continent near Halifax after a rough journey with choppy seas and the dismal echoes of aggrieved stomachs churning across the Atlantic. On the first leg of his journey, he headed for Boston, stopping at Lowell and Worcester, Massachusetts, down through Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut via the Connecticut River, then via the Long Island Sound to New York and on to Philadelphia. 

Dickens was not the typical holiday maker. In all of the major cities he visited, he made a point of visiting the local prisons, insane asylums, poor houses and rehabilitative facilities for the disabled, making American Notes a sort of twisted Zagat's guide for the disenfranchised. Boston had the best of facilities, New York and Philadelphia the worst. One of the most engrossing passages in the book concerns meeting Laura Bridgman, a young deaf and blind girl in Boston who learned special sign language fifty years before Hellen Keller. Dickens was much encouraged by the orderliness and cleanliness of the city and its facilities and was sufficiently moved by Bridgman's story to include a very detailed description of her education, making her world famous. By contrast, his description of New York's darker corners and of a prison in Philadelphia in which all the inmates are in perpetual solitary confinement conveys the essence of human despair and the depths of the author's compassion.

Laura Bridgman

From Philadelphia, Dickens travelled to Washington D.C. where he watched Congress in session and was unimpressed by showy political posturing and rhetoric, but positively appalled by the preponderance of tobacco chewing and the poor marksmanship of perpetually masticating Yanks when aiming for the spittoon, even in the White House. Of American cities in general and of Washington, D.C. in particular, he notes that America seems to be in a perpetual state of construction as many public buildings and public works projects stood unfinished, often awaiting funding for completion. When traveling between cities, the roads were muddy and perilous and wagons often cramped and uncomfortable. Locomotives were brand new and could only carry him along a few routes. An American road trip was not for the faint of heart in the 1840s.

Crossing into Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, Dickens experienced his first glimpses of the grim reality of slavery. The picturesque vistas of Richmond were spoiled by a painful awareness of the inhumane treatment of African Americans. In fact, at the end of the book, he devotes and entire chapter to denouncing slavery in the bluntest terms, including several unsettling excerpts from newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves, complete with graphic details of distinguishing wounds and disfigurements from various physical abuses that would identify them. He also cites stories concerning duels, murders and assassinations to illustrate the young nation's tendency for gun violence and vigilante justice. Sobering and prescient stuff, to say the least.

He then left Dixie for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Louisville en route to St. Louis (where your humble blogger resides). It was a tough journey by boat, and Dickens describes the transition from the Ohio River to the Mississippi in dramatic terms as the pristine beauty and relative tranquility of the Ohio gives way to the muddy clutter and the ferocious current of the Mississippi. At the time, Missouri was the western most state in the Union--the last stop before reaching the wild, lawless Indian territories. From St. Louis, he made a visit to the Illinois prairie, back to St. Louis and back through Ohio up to Lake Erie and on to Canada, passing through Niagara Falls and completing his six month journey at West Point.

In many ways, his reportage of America mirrors the view of many outside observers at virtually any point in its history (Alexis de Tocqueville's Journey to America, written a decade earlier, comes to mind). Dickens sees a world of contradictions: beauty and brutality, industry and soul-chilling poverty, equality and oppression. In fact, as Dickens tells it, my forefathers were friendly, earnest men with great spirit and gumption, who spat great wads of tobacco juice on the floor, kept their heating stoves on high, had a few bugs to work out of their conception of human rights, embraced an informal, egalitarian attitude in court proceedings and legislatures, swore allegiance to lofty ideals that they struggled to live up to in practice, and used quaint and colorful colloquialisms. Except for the constant spitting part, these words could be aptly applied to the present day, and as an American, I really don't have a problem with that assessment. One hundred seventy one years later, American Notes is both a valuable historical document of what the U.S. once was and a still-relevant, farsighted commentary on what it has become.

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Two Years Before the Mast

The Pilgrim

It's interesting that I've randomly chosen this famous memoir of a life at sea after an in-depth exploration of realism in Russian short stories. But this book, although a work of non-fiction (as memoirs once were in bygone days), reads like realist prose to me. It is unembellished, plain spoken realism written without frills, without clutter, without unnecessary adornment. And the simple words and economical phrasing and sentences add up to something far greater than its constituent parts.

Two Years Before the Mast (orig: 1840; this edition: 1911) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

There were hundreds of books written in the nineteenth century that document ship journeys, explorations, hunting expeditions and the like, many of them self important, long winded, monotonous, self-aggrandizing tomes of little value. Fortunately for us, Dana's book is way better than that.

Richard Dana was a sophomore at Harvard when he came down with the measles. The disease affected his sight and made it difficult for him to study, so he decided he would take two years off to work as a common sailor aboard a merchant ship, believing the air and hard work would do him some good after his illness. He set sail from Boston in the summer of 1834 aboard the Pilgrim, a merchant ship that transported goods to the California coast and to return packed with cowhides. But of course, back in the days before the Panama canal, if you wanted to sail from the east coast to the west coast of North America with a boat full of stuff, you had to go the long way, all the way around Cape Horn at the very tip of South America, which took several months and exposed sailors to some very harsh and dangerous conditions. The tale of the journey back is hairier and more riveting than the journey out, when nature's great power, beauty and fury are aptly described with a sense of respectful awe.

He wrote about the perils and pleasures of life at sea and gives us character sketches of his fellow sailors with a keen eye and ear for detail and dialect. He also describes the indignities and abuses that merchant sailors were subjected to by greedy and incompetent captains, unscrupulous agents and predatory recruiters who lured the ignorant to perilous journeys, often stripped of their rightful wages and kept in servitude. In fact, exposing these wrongs was his primary purpose in writing the book, which became an enormous success, bringing the issues facing merchant sailors to the attention of a wide audience and making its author world famous.

Dana and the crew spent most of their time going back and forth collecting hides between Mexican ports at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, San Pedro and San Diego, and each port as he describes it is very different than the cities we know today. Back then, they were sleepy, somewhat desolate places at the very edge of civilization in the final years of Mexican rule. He engaged in backbreaking work carrying thousands of hides from shore to ship for the journey back east, spent a few months ashore in San Diego curing and preparing those hides for transit with a group of Sandwich Islanders he came to love and respect, and walked through the small towns near the ports, meeting people from other cultures and observing their habits and ways of living. Two Years Before the Mast is a document of what life was like on the California coast in the years before America's final westward expansion and is of great value to historians.

At one point, Harvard educated guy that he was with bright hopes for his future, Dana expresses concern about rumors that his engagement at sea might last as long as four years, After having spent so much time aboard the Pilgrim learning and adopting the the coarse ways of sailors, he feared that he might not be able to re-enter polite society and thus become a sailor for life.  As it happened, his engagement lasted only two years and he was able to retain his agile mind and gentlemanly demeanor, thus managing to write a cohesive narrative without using the word "argh!" in every other sentence. Dana managed to escape this fate by switching ships and returning home on the Alert, a ship that was much nicer and better run than the Pilgrim, whose captain was given to gruffness and the occasional unprovoked flogging.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.  1815-1882

Dana's writing is literature of the highest order. His natural style reveals a recognizably American voice--factual and unsentimental, yet full of emotional intensity.  Read Moby Dick right after this and you'll see what an effect Dana's account had on Melville and subsequently on American literature.

Here's a good example of his considerable descriptive powers. At one point, Dana is given shore leave and writes about witnessing the funeral of a child in San Pedro. This passage wouldn't be out of place in a realist novel:

"From the beach we returned to the town, and, finding that the funeral procession had moved, rode on and overtook it, about half-way to the Mission. Here was as peculiar a sight as we had seen before in the house, the one looking as much like a funeral procession as the other did like a house of mourning. The little coffin was borne by eight girls, who were continually relieved by others running forward from the procession and taking their places. Behind it came a straggling company of girls, dressed, as before, in white and flowers, and including, I should suppose by their numbers, nearly all the girls between five and fifteen in the place. They played along on the way, frequently stopping and running all together to talk to some one, or to pick up a flower, and then running on again to overtake the coffin. There were a few elderly women in common colors; and a herd of young men and boys, some on foot and others mounted, followed them, or walked or rode by their side, frequently interrupting them by jokes and questions. But the most singular thing of all was, that two men walked, one on each side of the coffin, carrying muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded, and fired into the air. Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not, I do not know. It was the only interpretation that I could put upon it."

This is a straightforward account, yet so vivid and evocative, describing an emotionally charged scene with sparse language and an objective, even tone. This passage, and indeed the whole book, is written in a journalistic style yet positively breathes with compassion for the suffering of others. 

However, Dana does use a fair amount of antiquated nautical jargon here when describing his duties as a sailor and the finer points of how a crew of men work together to keep their ship afloat. But using your eReader's dictionary or making an occasional visit to Wikipedia to decode these terms is kind of fun. You get the hang of the shop talk after a couple of chapters.

This 1911 edition includes his son's forward and afterword, plus Dana's account of his return to his old haunts in 1859. Between his and his son's follow-up efforts, we're brought as up to date as we can be about the fate of the places, the people and the ships he sailed on and encountered. We also learn of Dana's lifelong commitment to protecting the human rights of oppressed people in his law practice and we learn of his commitment to the abolition of slavery. This is a book written for all the right reasons, giving us a rare view into history and of one man's conscience. Historical forces forged the destiny of the right man for the job, and the result is a fantastic book that combines the very best elements of a personal and historical account. Well done, sir.

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