The 1920's are the first genuinely interesting decade for literature- I'm talking about, interesting not just in a historical sense, but actually interesting to read. Much of that has to do with the emergence of literary modernism in both its more and less experimental forms. The 1920's are also when you start to get serious weirdos- Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft in addition to the high modernism of Virginia Woolf. Predominantly, Anglo-American literature from the 1920's veers between realists like Aldous Huxley and more luxuriant romantics like D.H. Lawrence. In the 2008 revision of 1001 Books, there is increased representation from non-English/French/German European counties, it being too early for those writers outside of the "West" to make any but a token impression, even when writing in the language of their colonists, or as their decedents (vs. indigenous voices, who would have to wait much longer and in some cases are still waiting.
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| Winona Ryder played the innocent spouse May Welland, opposite Daniel Day Lewis as Newland Archer and Michele Pfeiffer as Ellen Olenska, Archer's obsession. |
Published 5/1/14
The Age of Innocence (1920)
by Edith Wharton
I completed by undergraduate studies in the mid to late 1990s. At the time, the study of literature was heavily overlaid by "isms" with "post-modernism" being particularly prevalent at the graduate level, and women's studies/feminism being more popular at the undergraduate level (probably because most undergraduates weren't sophisticated enough to grasp the intricacies of post modernism while women's studies/feminism was both comprehensible and popular. Post-Modernism and Feminism weren't the only isms that were important in the study of literature during the 1990s. My own Professor, Charles Larson, was a specialized in the literature of post-Colonialism, with a particular interest in Chinua Achebe, who I had actually read in HIGH SCHOOL, in English class.
The 1990s were a particularly rich time for the role of high level theoretical discourse in the study of literature, and my sense is that three decades of dwindling funds for the humanities at both private and public universities has dampened the enthusiasm for isms and literature. That said, it's hard to see how anyone can separate the subject of "Women and Literature" from the subject of Literature itself, which is so thoroughly dominated by women as subjects, authors and audience members to make any non woman discussion of literature seem almost ridiculous- to me anyway.
My sense is that feminist discussion of literature focuses on the most negative and easily critic-able aspect of the domination of women in literature: their role as subjects for male authors. Particularly in the 19th century, the example of a male author writing about a young, marriage aged woman is so pervasive as to be cliche. More interesting is the relationship of female authors to their female subjects, and this is where Edith Wharton, and the Age of Innocence comes into play.
Edith Wharton was the last female Author who fit into the "classic" mode of literary novelist exemplified by The Bronte sisters and Jane Austen: She was not an experimental modernist, and wasn't a feminist in the conscious, modernist usage of the term. Even as Wharton was winning the Pulitzer Prize for this Novel, avowedly modernist authors like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf were laying the foundation for the kind of relationship between female subjects and their authors that would characterize modern literature.
Does this render The Age of Innocence somehow irrelevant, or unworthy of the attention of a contemporary readery? I would say not- in fact- The Age of Innocence is actually a pleasurable read, something that becomes increasingly rare as literary Modernism begins to fragment narrative structure and play with the conventions of the literary novel of the 18th and 19th century.
The Age of Innocence is a bit of a summation of close to a century of marriage and property 19th century style English novels. Written in a time and place that are as far from the rural English nobility of the mid 19th century as those nobility were from the Middle Ages (but in less then a fifth of the time as they were separated from the Middle Ages); The Age of Innocence wittily guides the reader through the landed aristocracy of New York City in the late 19th century- but bracketed by an enclosing narrative that takes the reader to "the present"- complete with long distance phone calls and automobiles. That bracketing effect firmly links the Victorian past to the Modernist present, without fully dwelling in either area.
The story of The Age of Innocence is plotting 101: Guy marries younger woman but yearns for older woman, but the style and detail of Wharton's writing do make it an enduring classic.
John Dos Passos
Published 5/24/12
Manhattan Transfer
by John Dos Passos
p. 1925
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston
Sentry Edition p. 1953
I read Manhattan Transfer out of turn because I was actually interested in reading a book by Lost Generation author cum Right Wing Republican Conservative, John Dos Passos. DURING the Lost Generation period, Dos Passos was a big deal. A "Great American Novelist" who incorporated modernist prose literary techniques gleaned from James Joyce, and one who did things like fight in the Spanish Civil War and incorporate Socialist rhetoric into his fiction. By the end of his life he was, "actively campaign[ing] for Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon, and became associated with the Young Americans For Freedom Group." (JOHN DOS PASSOS WIKIPEDIA ENTRY)
HEY- you want to know what taints a literary legacy? Campaigning for Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon. I suppose though, that the work should stand independent of the man and his shift away from supporting Socialism.
As far as incorporating Joycean derived experimental prose techniques into a "Novel"- I'm not a huge fan. I have no doubt that I'm going to have to come to terms with "stream-of-consciousness" narratives, and Authors who jump back and forth across time and space without telling the reader what's happening, but I felt like I've already absorbed those techniques, if not through literature, through the work of film makers of Jean Luc Godard. OH- AND PS- I HATE JEAN LUC GODARD and all of his movies except Breathless, Alphaville and Week End- which I kind of hate but respect.
On the posi side of the ledger- John Dos Passos writes the (non-narrated) dialogue with the aplomb of a modern sitcom writer. I was reminded of the later work of William Burroughs and the other beat writers. John Dos Passos, patrician he may be, was concerned in his work with what the 60s would call "the plight of the underclass" and his fiction reflects that concern.
I found "the experimental writing techniques and narrative collages" distracting, but a book that randomly cuts between non-intertwined narratives is going to be distracting even without experimental writing techniques and narrative collages." Here's an example of what these experimental writing techniques consist of: He runs two word phrases together as one word. BREATHTAKING.
My sense though is that the Lost Generation itself is ripe for re-appropriation. I think there is already a movie remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's seminal Lost Generation text, The Great Gatsby, and that could well spur a Lost Generation revival. Maybe throw John Dos Passos a bone when that comes around.
This iconic image is of Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock mounted to the outside of the building he is scaling during the climax of Safety Last!
Published 10/23/13
Safety Last! (1923)
d. Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor
Criterion Collection #662
The silent film era is another huge blind-spot for me. Silent films are one area of cinema where the Criterion Collection is of particular value. I've made intermittent attempts to watch silent film era movies on Netflix or DVD at various times, and I'm always disappointed by the degraded quality of the film. Of course, it goes without saying that when you watch a silent film within the Criterion Collection it has been restored.
Safety Last! is billed as a good introduction to Harold Lloyd, the third of the "big three" of Silent film era comedy (Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are the other two. I haven't watched enough of any of them to make comparisons. Before Safety Last! I hadn't seen a single Harold Lloyd film. Safety Last! is an enjoyable romp, with brisk pacing and an accompanying soundtrack (from 1989) that really levels up the watch-ability quotient.
Also, Safety Last! is only 73 minutes long, so it isn't a huge time commitment. The final scene, where Lloyd scales the outside of a 12 story building, delivers multiple 'how did they do that' moments when you see Lloyd's stunt double (?) actually on the outside of a twelve story building with an assembled crowd below. It's a true gee whiz moment that I do not typically associate with silent films, let alone silent comedies.
Published 11/28/15
The Forsyte Saga (1906-1922)
by John Galsworthy
The Forsyte Saga is actually a series of three novels, 1001 Books counts it as a single "book" which seems inconsistent with their practice up to this point. For example, they don't have every Palliser Novel (there are 6) by Anthony Trollope listed under a single heading, but simply put Phineas Finn (the third of six) on the list and omit the others. But for that reason it took forever to make it through The Forsyte Saga- two weeks plus.
Like other English novels of the 19th and 20th century, The Forsyte Saga is a novel about marriage and property, and quite explicitly at that. The central unhappy marriage, between wealthy lawyer Soames and the younger Irene, influences the semi-incestuous relationships that percolate throughout all three volumes. Once again, an unhappy literary marriage caused me to reflect on my own recent experience with divorce.
Something I came to believe about six months into my separation/divorce is that it is unfair to be angry at a woman who makes what you consider an irrational decision to split up, when in fact, it may have been an equal or even greater level of irrationality that caused you to be together in the first place. Men who have "done nothing wrong" to create a divorce- and here I'm talking about both my own experience and what I've read about in books- in marriage, always take the position that it is the decision to split that is the ultimate evidence of irrationality, but really it's probably the decision to get married that was more irrational, and the decision to break up less.
In the Forsyte Saga the central motif is the Forsyte men as "possessors of property" whether they be inanimate (houses, stocks) or animate (livestock, women.) It's clear that Galsworthy writes with a mixture of understanding and satire when he depicts the Galsworthy men. The women are more opaque. Galsworthy does a better job with older/single women, but when it comes to Irene, the central female figure of all three books, we are left grasping for motivations. Specifically, there is a decade plus long gap between the initial split between Soames and Irene and their divorce, and Galsworthy provides no insight as to what Irene actually did during that entire period. She is literally shuffled off to stage right, and I actually imagined the character smoking cigarettes in the wings of the theater while time passed in the book.
Aside from the frank depiction of happy and unhappy marriage, The Forsyte Saga is notable as a near compete portrait of the post-Victorian Edwardian period. In my mind, the Edwardian's are like a coda attached to the Victorian, who dwarf the Edwardian's in every way, and who had the good sense to vanish before the onset of modernity. Here, Galsworthy depicts modernity but in a very Victorian fashion. There is none of the narrative experimentation that characterizes authors like Henry James (who were writing at the exact same time as Galsworthy.)
The Forsyte Saga is a throwback to Novels of the prior half century, but seeing as that was absolutely the golden age of the pre-modern novel, it is not a bad place to be. Please, note this series is very, very long and is to be avoided unless you have a ton of time to read or read very fast.
Published 2/6/14
The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)
by Edith Wharton
Published two years after her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Age of Innocence, The Glimpses of the Moon is best seen as a refinement of her well received approach to fiction, though the maudlin, forced happy ending hints at an attempt to move books. Up until that forced happy ending, Glimpses is a winning tale about a poor couple with rich tastes, who decide to get married as a way to fund their extravagant lifestyles without having to work.
The idea of being someone with "rich tastes" but without money to match, who none the less simply can not conceive of working for a living seems to be something endemic to Wharton novels, though perhaps that is more a reflection of the early 20th century than Wharton herself. The first two decades of the 20th century were marked by a huge leap in college attendance and graduation, and presumably it was from these ranks that the figure of the lower middle class educated gent/gal with upper class tastes and habits emerged.
In The Glimpses of the Moon the main couple is Nick Lansing and Suzy Branch. He, a would be writer who simply can't bring himself to write on commercial subjects, she the luxe offspring of a degenerate aristocratic pair who have squandered her birthright. Her idea, hatched at the ever-so-disgusting artist cottage of their mutual friends, is that they get married but remain open to the idea of divorce should a "real prospect" come along. Ideas such as this rarely work out in fiction or real life, and The Glimpses of the Moon is no exception.
After a brief honeymoon in the Italian chateau of a mutual friend, Suzy lands them a huge Venetian villa with but a single proviso: that she abet the adulterous behavior of the wife/co-owner of the villa by posting occasional, pre-written letters to the husband/owner of the villa (who is himself in London.) Sensing that this behavior would not be kosher with husband Nick, Suzy conceals the act from him, only to be undone by the adulteress herself, who, assuming that Nick is in the know, gifts him a bracelet at the end of their stay "for all his help."
The confrontation between Nick and Suzy ends up with him embarking on a Mediterranean cruise as the paid Major Domo for a wealthy American couple, and she decamping for a Parisian villa outside Versailles where she is (horrors) asked to serve as a nanny. She escapes the terrible fate of a working human being by accepting the marriage proposal of the suddenly wealth friend whose Italian chateau initially provided shelter for she and Nick, while Nick begins to draw the attention of the wealthy daughter of his employers.
Seemingly in the last five pages their plan for a care free and whimsical divorce is abandoned so that they can remain together happy with their uncertain financial future. The ending cuts against everything else in the Novel, and it actually seems like a situation where her publisher either "suggested" a happy resolution OR she made the decision herself. Certainly, the ending moves The Glimpses of the Moon towards the shallow end of the Wharton canon, a minor classic if ever there was one.
Published 5/9/14
The Fox (1922)
by D.H. Lawrence
Oh man only the third D.H. Lawrence book that I've read? Seems like more. I guess four if you count Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Fox is a novella, not a novel, not a short story. I'm curious about the dividing line between short story and novella, maybe more than 50 pages is a novella, less is a short story?
The story- sorry- Novella, is about two "intellectual" women (maybe lesbians) who decide to take over a small farm. They are plagued by a fox that keeps raiding the hen house. Henry, a young man home from World War I shows up looking for his now deceased Grandfather. He sticks around and sets his cap on the butcher of the pair. The fox, in this tale, is a symbol of masculinity and Henry is himself a kind of fox.
It's hard to discuss the ending without ruining the "fun" but The Fox is an accessible access point for someone trying to dip into D.H. Lawrence. Also a super erotic 60s movie version came out- may have to look that up.
Stefan Zweig is apparently such a big influence on Wes Anderson that he dedicated his most recent film, Hotel Budapest, to him.
Published 5/15/14
Amok (1922)
by Stefan Zweig
in The Royal Game and Other Stories
1981 Harmony Press translated from the German by Jill Sutcliffe
Add to the seemingly endless list of authors I've never heard of, Stefan Zweig. I was blissfully unaware of him until last month, when I went to see the new Wes Anderson film, Hotel Budapest, and saw that he had, in fact, dedicated the film to Stefan Zweig. Zweig is a bit of a forgotten man in the story of 20th century literature. It's true today, and it was true in 1981, when John Fowles wrote the introduction to the volume that contained the version of Amok that I read. According to Fowles, Zweig was hugely popular in his day, which makes his eclipse all the more puzzling.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm some kind of literary expert, but I feel like if he was being read today I would not have heard of him for the very first time via the end credits in a Wes Anderson film. Again, according to Fowles, Zweig was obsessed with the idea of obsession, or "mono-mania" as he called it back then. Like many enduring authors of the 1920s, Zweig was hip to the teaching of Freud (Zweig was a Viennan by birth and lived there until the great unpleasantness of World War II began to take shape.)
Amok is framed by an unnamed narrator taking a cruise to Australia from Southeast Asia. On board he meets a Doctor who is actively seeking to avoid everyone else on board. The Doctor relates to him the story of a wealthy English wife of a Dutch trader who is seeking to terminate a pregnancy that is the result of an affair that took place while her husband was abroad. The Doctor refuses her rich offer of money, instead insisting that he...um... be able to "fully possess her." He compares his state to what happens to the natives when they drink to much- they "run amok" - a familiar term to us today, but not in 1922.
I think this is the first description of an abortion in any story I've read, chronologically speaking.
Aldous Huxley: More than Brave New World
Published 5/19/14
Crome Yellow (1921)
by Aldous Huxley
If you are like me you equate Aldous Huxley with his 1931 dystopian fiction Brave New World, probably in high school, and are unaware that he has other books. Crome Yellow was Huxley's first novel, and it is light years away from his better known work. Crome Yellow is a country-house satire, about a group of early 20s avant gardists who gather in a country house to eat, talk and dance. The main character is a would-be poet/novelist named Denis Stone. Stone is surrounded by a cast of characters who embody different aspects of the bohemian world of England in the early 1920s: The succesful writer who has grown rich off of glorified self help books, the empty headed spiritualist, the feckless libertine. The fact that Crome Yellow was itself published in 1921 reveals that Huxley was very much on top of the trends that would come to define the 1920s avant garde. His prose is stylish and still funny, and the stylistic panache far outweighs the almost absolute lack of plot or even incident.
I would very much recommend Crome Yellow for those unfamiliar. The libary bound edition I checked out from the San Diego Public Library clocked in at 305 pages with huge margins, making it readable in a couple hours.
Published 5/20/14
Antic Hay (1923)
by Aldous Huxley
Antic Hay is like an English equivalent of a "Lost Generation" novel: over educated, under worked young people complaining about the meaningless-ness of life. Fortunately, like Crome Yellow, Antic Hay is a satire of this culture, not a celebration. In theory, Antic Hay is about Theodore Gumbril, son of an architect and erstwhile school teacher, who, at the beginning of the book, ups and leaves his stable job to develop his invention, a pair of "pneumatic pants" that contain an inflatable cushion to make sitting down on hard surfaces comfortable.
Also like Crome Yellow, Antic Hay has little or no plot: Gumbril takes some meeting, chases some skirts and hangs out in the greater London area with other arty friends. No one gets married, pregnant or loses an inheritance. Antic Hay successfully parodies the shallow/deep culture of 20s intellectuals- after the First World War exposed their transcendentalist/universalist ideas for being neither universal or transcendental, but before Existentialism gave intellectuals a mid twentieth century rallying call. Gumbril and his ilk are bored, and excited about nothing at all.
For those more familiar with late 20th/early 21st century "Hipster" culture, Antic Hay will strike a resonant chord, and is worth a read for precisely that reason.
Author Jean Toomer: He's African American!
Published 5/21/14
Cane (1923)
by Jean Toomer
It makes sense that the first significant African American novelist-writer wouldn't consider himself an African-American writer, and would be so upset by such a designation that he would move to France and turn to spiritualism, never writing another novel. Jean Toomer is present on the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list as the first African-American author. Post Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American's were a central THEME in American literature, but typically as characters in the work of well meaning Whites. The rise of African American authors, alongside other non-traditional literary voices, is one of the key occurrences in literature in the 20th century, so even as a one hit wonder, being first in time within that category is a significant achievement.
The vehicle for the emergence of African American literature written by African Americans was the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a multiple discipline artistic frisson that reached across music, studio arts (painting, sculpture) and literature. In the area of literature, the Harlem Renaissance produced the first world famous African American novelists, short story writers, novelists and poets.
Jean Toomer was the mixed-race or "Creole" son of an established Creole family from Georgia. He moved to Washington DC as a child and was raised in a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood. He studied at several colleges but graduated from none of them, eventually moving to New York, where he landed in 1919. In 1920, he returned to Washington DC to care for his ailing parents. In 1921, he took a job as a school teacher in rural, African-American Georgia, where he was exposed to that culture for the first time.
Cane is not a conventional novel, but rather a mix of short stories and poems. The characters are largely African Americans: The only white character I remember is a deranged lover who is killed by an African American romantic rival via a slit throat. Toomer is free with his use of the 'N' word and discusses sex frankly and without prudery. The frequent dropping of the n bomb might be one reason this book is little read. Another might be the non-standard format combination of poetry and prose. Regardless of present popularity, it is the first significant work of literature by an African American in the period immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance (which gave birth to MANY significant works of literature by African American authors.) so it is very much worth seeking out.
Also, Cane is only 160 pages, so you can read it in a sitting.
Published 5/23/14
The Last Days of Mankind (1922)
by Karl Kraus
Abridged and Edited version, published 1974
Translated by Frederick Ungar
This is an 800 page PLAY written by an Austrian Jewish writer who was an early "anti-war" thinker and generally part of the Viennian literary ferment that produced Freud, Schnitzler, Kafka and Zweig. Including it on a list of 1001 Books To Read Before You Die seems somewhat questionable, because I'm not sure an unabridged edition of this book exists in English. If it is, no library in the greater San Diego area has it.
What I was able to find was an abridged and edited version at the San Diego library, which appears to have spent 1991-2013 in storage before being brought back onto the shelves when the new downtown library opened AND according to the still present library check out card at the front of the book, it was checked out exactly once wit a due date of January 24th, 1975. That means I am the only person to read this book in the 40 plus years since it was purchased by the San Diego County Library system.
So I think calling The Last Days of Mankind "obscure" is an understatement. That said, the 250 page version has much to recommend it. The so-called "play" (which was written to be staged "on Mars" because it was epic in scope and number of characters) has the feel of sketch comedy, mixed with Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs. In fact, I'm now curious to know if Burroughs may have actually read The Last Days of Mankind prior to writing Naked Lunch.
Much of the prose was lifted, documentary style, from the Vienniese press, in the some way a modern Author might lift from Fox News. The tone is satirical, and even through the translation many of the jokes about the senselessness and violence of War culture land their blows nearly a century and a continent away from their initial publication.
Published 5/27/14
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
by Virigina Woolf
Fair to observe that the whole "1001 Books project" has been leading up to the great Modernist explosion of the 1920s. To be sure, James Joyce was first out of the gate with Ulysses- fully published in 1922, but Woolf had actual hits. She had a publishing imprint- one that published Joyce. She had a literary circle in Bloomsbury inside London. She killed herself in 1941.
Woolf wasn't just a writer, she was an economic actor, a market maker, and a "rock star" in terms of the development of her public image. All that said, I see Mrs. Dalloway as a triumph of narrative technique. Mrs. Dalloway combines a fully developed stream of consciousness- for multiple characters- with seamless transitions to a more traditional third-person narration. She also moves backwards and forwards in time. The central events all take place during a single day, where Mrs. Dalloway is having a party and getting ready to have a party- buying flowers. An old boyfriend of hers, freshly back from fucking up in India, is back in town.
Other characters include a shell-shocked World War I soldier, Septimus Smith, married to an unhappy Italian woman, Mrs. Dalloway's younger sister and her husband. It's hard not to compare Mrs. Dalloway to Ulysses- and I haven't even READ Ulysses. The full development of stream-of-consciousness narration was such a seminal event in 20th century art history that it took several authors the course of decades to really understand the power and limits of this novel narrative technique.
This is also the exact point where "high art" begins to distinguish itself from popular art by creating art with a limited or even no audience. The successful trailblazers created works that are read today, but for contemporary readers the experimental techniques of the early modernists relegate them to the margins of public consciousness.
It's possible that the high point for Mrs. Dalloway in terms of an Audience came only after The Hours film- based on Mrs. Dalloway, was released in 2002 and grossed more than 100 million world wide. It seems to me that no casual reader would get much out of the Mrs. Dalloway experience, whereas it essentially required reading for an undergraduate majoring in literature and maybe any undergraduate taking a survey course in 20th century literature. After all, unlike Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway is only 200 pages long. You know which title is going to get read as an example of narrative technique development in the 1920s.
Published 1/6/15
Ulysses (1922)
by James Joyce
Even writing about Ulysses is intimidating. Almost universally acknowledged as THE masterpiece of high modernism in literature (Virginia Woolf called it a disaster.) Reading Ulysses without a guidebook handy is almost impossible- the paper copy I bought is something like 800 pages. I decided to listen to an audiobook version on the theory that I would get more out of the text listening to it. The 18 sections of Ulysses added up to 30 hours of audio. I listened to it entirely while I was either driving between San Diego and Los Angeles, San Diego and El Centro or running. Mostly running. While listening I kind of read along, although as I write this after finishing the audio version I'm only three hundred pages into the print version.
Ulysses is a kind of litmus test for whether a person is serious about literature. It is one of those works that is more often referred to than read. but I would imagine intimate familiarity with Ulysses is essentially a prerequisite for graduate study of Literature in English speaking countries. It is hard to imagine anyone actually getting through Ulysses in print or audio and not appreciating it. The well publicized obscenity prosecutions which prevented wide spread dissemination of the text for decades only add to the allure.
James Joyce self consciously wrote Ulysses as a text that would occupy scholars and become immortal due to its complexity, which includes intentional errors and a panoply of specialized areas from medicine, to linguistics, to the study of literature, to religion, geometry, Irish nationalism, etc, etc etc. The combination of intentional obscurity, innovative narrative techniques, specialized knowledge and earthy sexuality is a heady mix, and again, it is easy to feel the direct influence that Ulysses has had on literature which has followed.
At the same time, Ulysses is an incredibly frustrating, dense, exasperating ordeal to consume, and it is hard to see where someone not obsessed with 20th century literary modernism would ever find the time, let alone the will power to undertake the quest outside of the framework of schooling. Perhaps though the analogy can once again be drawn between undertaking the comprehension of Ulysses and the experience of binge watching an entire television show with multiple seasons. One could read Ulysses in the same amount of time it takes to watch a show like the Walking Dead and the reward is an understanding of the keystone of modernist prose.
Published 10/27/20
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