Literature – Page 4 – Into the Woods

A minor repair on a deserving book

The injured book

A few days ago, I mentioned here that I am very enthusiastic about a five-part BBC series from 2012, Parade’s End. (The series can be streamed on HBO Max.) The series is visually beautiful, perfectly cast, and brilliantly written, with some of the best dialogue I’ve ever encountered. I don’t yet know to what degree the perfect dialogue should be attributed to Tom Stoppard, who adapted the novels and wrote the screenplay, or to the author of the novels, Ford Madox Ford, who published the novels between 1924 and 1928. I had not heard of Ford Madox Ford, but I was determined to explore the novels. First editions of these novels are rare, but I found a 1961 revival edition on eBay. This edition contains all four novels in a single volume, at a hefty 838 pages. My guess is that even this 1961 edition is not common.

When the book arrived, I was sad to see that it had been injured. The front end paper was broken at the hinge, exposing the innards of the binding. No doubt librarians have a standard method of repairing such injuries, but I had to make up my own solution. That was to cut a strip of strong paper and glue it in with rubber cement to close up the rip in the end paper. That worked great. Books with lots of pages are particularly vulnerable to this kind of damage. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the book. Some previous owner clearly understood the book’s historical value, because inserted under the back cover was a printout of an article about Ford Madox Ford from the September 17, 1950, issue of the New York Times Book Review.

Ford Madox Ford

The 1950 article from the New York Times Book Review can be read here but requires a subscription to the New York Times. The article is “The Story of Ford Madox Ford: In Parade’s End a Master Novelist Caught the Essence of His Generation.” The article was written by Caroline Gordon, who I now see represents some literary history that I need to explore, including a connection to my native state of North Carolina. Here is the article’s first paragraph:

In 1938 Ford Madox Ford made a talk before a class of girls who were studying “the novel” under my tutelage. It was in April. In North Carolina. April in North Carolina is like July in less-favored climates. Ford was then in his early sixties and already suffering from the heart disease that killed him; he seemed to feel the heat even more than we had feared that he would. My husband and I debated as to whether it would be safe to let the old man make the talk he was bent on making. When we reached the classroom the next morning and I saw that his veined, rubicund face had gone ashen from the effort of climbing the stairs I wished that I had not accepted his offer to speak. He sat down at one end of a long table, his chair pushed well back in order to accommodate his great paunch, his legs spread wide to support his great weight.

Also:

It is easy to see why Ford’s work was not popular in his own day, but it is hard to see why it has been neglected in our own, for he would seem, in these times, to have a special claim on our attention. He is a superb historical novelist, seeming as much at home in a medieval castle or in Tudor England as in Tietjen’s twentieth-century railway carriage.

I am not yet certain what Caroline Gordon’s connection to North Carolina was, but I suspect it was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I am hoping that I will like Parade’s End and that Ford’s novels — as long as I can find copies of them — will be as rich a mine of literary history as I have found in the also-neglected historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.

⬆︎ The end paper was torn from one end to the other, exposing the book’s spine to stress and the risk of more damage.

⬆︎ The white strip of paper covers the tear and makes the end paper strong again.

⬆︎ Cutting the paper

⬆︎ I used a 100 percent cotton paper

⬆︎ Ready to be glued in place

⬆︎ Rubber cement is amazing stuff!

All the Light We Cannot See

This Netflix series is just barely over the threshold of watchability. The characters are sweet, but cloying, often to the point of being irritating. The dialogue was some of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. Most of the scenes are about 30 percent too long. It’s one of those stories that tries to manipulate us into liking it, usually by being sentimental.

The novel All the Light We Cannot See was published in 2014. It won a Pulitzer Prize.

How, I kept asking myself, does mediocre material like this win a Pulitzer Prize? I found my answer in the Wikipedia article. The novel is written in the present tense. This is a proven technique that the very worst of writers figure out: If you develop some sort of quirky and irritating style of writing, then many people including critics will think it’s good writing. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was published in 2009. I strongly suspect that Anthony Doerr was copying Mantel’s gimmick of writing in the present tense, though Doerr is less opaque than Mantel. (I read a sample of Doerr’s novel on Amazon. As for Hilary Mantel, I tried to read Wolf Hall and flung it after about four pages because the writing was so obnoxious.) Writing like Mantel’s accords with bad writers’ notions of what good writing sounds like. After all, that stuff wins prizes, doesn’t it?

Doerr’s dialogue is what I call lazy dialogue. That’s when the characters say the obvious thing for carrying the story forward, as the writer cranks it out. Good writers will see to it that their characters rarely say the obvious thing. Good writers put far more effort into dialogue that not only carries the story forward, but that also amplifies characterization and that adds color to whatever situation the characters are in.

And then there is rhythm. The rhythm of Doerr’s English sounds like a woodpecker.

I know I’m testy on the matter of bad writing that passes itself off as good writing. If it were merely bad, it would be easy enough to ignore it. But that bad writing wins prizes is an insult to the many better writers who remain more obscure, and an injustice to good editors who see bad writing for what it is but for whatever reason have to let authors get away with it. I have a fantasy of having someone like Hilary Mantel or Anthony Doerr trapped beside me on a crowded train so that I can berate them with what they never hear — that they are terrible writers badly in need of a fearless editor, from whom they might learn a great deal.

All that said, All the Light We Cannot See does contain a warm and edifying story, though a story that could have been much better told. And Doerr was very wise in choosing the medieval town of Saint-Malo, in Brittany, as his setting. Saint-Malo is an extremely picturesque walled town that was occupied by the Nazis in World War II and liberated by American forces in 1944 in battles that nearly destroyed the city. Saint-Malo was carefully rebuilt after the war. It’s now a tourist destination. According to Wikipedia, the population is under 50,000, but in tourist season there may be up to 300,000 people in the city. There are ferries to Saint-Malo from Portsmouth and the Channel Islands. Saint-Malo is now on my travel wish list, though I’d want to go in the off season to avoid the crowds.

Update:

It’s my practice not to read other people’s reviews before I write here about a book, a movie, or a television series. After I wrote the above this morning, I Googled for some reviews of All the Light We Cannot See. The New Republic savaged the novel as “a sentimental mess” and described Doerr’s writing as “pompous, pretentious, and imprecise.” Yes, yes, and yes.

But there’s worse. During the last fifteen minutes of the Netflix series, I cringed lest Doerr, being a bad writer, ruin the ending. The Netflix ending was just as it should be in the art of storytelling. But I learned from a review of the novel that Netflix changed Doerr’s ending, because Doerr had indeed ruined it. Knowing now that Doerr botched the novel with the kind of ending that amateur writers write, I reduce the grade from a C-minus to a D-minus, with thanks to Netflix for correcting such a crass authorial error.

Parade’s End

Benedict Cumberbatch and Adelaide Clemens

By accident, in the trashy wilderness of HBO Max, I discovered “Parade’s End,” a lavish five-part series from BBC Two that was broadcast in 2012. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Christopher Tietjens, a character in four novels by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. I’ve watched only the first episode so far, but it’s one of the best things I’ve come across in a while. The screenplay was adapted by Tom Stoppard, and, according to Wikipedia, it was often described as “the highbrow Downton Abbey.”

Who was Ford Madox Ford, and why had I never heard of him? Ford was very prolific and published something like 70 books. He knew all the literary luminaries of his time. But he never made any money, and his first editions seem to have ended up in rare book collections. That is, he fell out of print. His style was said to be experimental, modernist, and even impressionist — not at all a style to which I am attracted. But I sampled some of his prose at Google Books, and it seems entirely readable.

By some accounts, Ford was a disagreeable person, and Ernest Hemingway famously hated him, though Ford, as editor of the Transatlantic Review, had published some of Hemingway’s work. In a 2016 article “Why did Ernest Hemingway despise Ford Madox Ford?“, there is a quote from an interview with Ford:

“During a late interview with journalist George Seldes, Ford, on the verge of tears, says of Hemingway: ‘he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.’ Tears now came to Ford’s eyes… ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ In his published description of the encounter, Seldes notes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.'”

On eBay, I found a 1961 edition of the four novels in a single volume. The titles are Some Do Not …, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post.

As I think I’ve said here before, novels that don’t become classics tend to become obscure. Some are rediscovered. Ford lived during a very fertile time for literature — Proust, Hemingway, James Joyce. Fertile or not, it’s not a period that interests me very much. But I’ll have a go at Ford, in the hope that, if a nimrod like Hemingway disliked him, that’s a recommendation.

The Name of the Rose

1986

While scouring for watchables, I recently came across the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, on Netflix. It’s truly a classic film and always worth watching again. Back in the 1990s, I read Umberto Eco’s novel on which the film is based. The novel, too, is worth reading again, now that I think about it.

It left me thinking about Umberto Eco and how scholars can be extraordinarily good novelists, even when their academic field is very narrow. Eco’s thesis for his degree in philosophy was on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Horrors! As an unrepentant heathen, it is hard for me to imagine a mind uglier than that of Thomas Aquinas (except maybe Augustine of Hippo). But Umberto Eco’s mind was a mind ahead of its time. (Consider, for example, his 1995 essay on fascism.)

I don’t recall that Eco’s novel was as rich in dark humor as the 1986 film with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. There are only three people in the film whom we can easily bear to look at — Connery, Slater, and the peasant girl. Otherwise the film is hilariously cast as a pageant of ghastly old men — all monks. And, as with Thomas Aquinas, the monks’ minds are as ugly as their appearances. The abbot’s hairstyle, for example, is like that of Thomas Acquinas in a portrait by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Whatever Eco thought of the church, The Name of the Rose is a story about the ridiculousness of theologies. The church itself is the main villain. The year is 1327, and part of the plot is that theologians from Rome are arriving at the isolated abbey to settle, by debate, a burning theological question: Did Christ own, or did he not own, the clothes he wore? The structure of Eco’s story is entirely classic. The wicked get punished, the good prevail. The peasants not only save the peasant girl from being burned at the stake by the inquisition, they also give the grand inquisitor a horrible and much-deserved death. Much of the dark humor is Christian Slater’s constant terror, not only that he’ll be the next to be murdered, but also the terror of being surrounded by ugly minds — a terror not unknown to sane and decent Americans during the Trump era. In fact, this film would be a good starting point for a serious essay on what I call ugliness of mind.

There was a new film version of The Name of the Rose in 2019 which was, at least for a while, available on Sundance TV. But, as far as I can tell, that 2019 version is not available for streaming in the U.S., nor are DVD versions available that will play on American DVD devices. I hope that will change. I’d really like to see the 2019 version.

2019

A new edition of Tolkien’s letters

A new edition of Tolkien’s letters (from William Morrow in the U.S. and HarperCollins in the U.K.) will be released in the U.S. on November 14, and in the U.K. on November 9. The new edition, in hardback, contains 150 new letters since the previous edition of Tolkien’s letters in 1981, bringing the total number of letters to 500.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

Look at that tweed jacket! And I’m still waiting for the Tolkien Society to do something about my suggestion of an article on Tolkien’s typewriters.

Scapegoats 2, Republicans 0

The political death wish of the Republican Party is mind-boggling. Why do they go on fighting battles that they’ve already lost and that accelerate their slide toward permanent minority status and the contempt of history? — at least, in civilized places as opposed to places such as Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.

Banning books, and threatening librarians with prison sentences, can only backfire, given time. According to the Washington Post, at least seven states have passed laws that impose criminal penalties for books that Republicans deem obscene. Arkansas threatens librarians with prison sentences of six years, Oklahoma ten.

Don’t Republicans know about the internet? Young people have always found ways of finding out about things that adults don’t want them to know. Because of the internet it’s easier today than ever. Schoolchildren in Florida no doubt know that there are some subjects that their teachers aren’t allowed to talk about. The kids will work twice as hard to educate themselves on such subjects. They’ll also learn another lesson — that Republicans are hateful and contemptible. Florida’s law originally applied only to grades K-3, but earlier this year the state board of education expanded the ban to include grades 4-12.

One of the frequently banned books is Casey McCuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. The book was a New York Times Bestseller. According to Wikipedia, translations have been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Spain, Israel, and Uruguay.

Republicans might as well stand in front of a speeding train and wave a crucifix. Publishers must love it when a book is banned. For many books, a ban creates a sharp increase in sales.

A movie version of Red, White, and Royal Blue was released this weekend by Amazon Prime Video. The film is more serious than it appears to be in the trailers. There is an immigrant element (Mexico) as well as the gay element. Texas gets the middle finger. Only just now did I realize that “Royal Blue” is a double entendre, as one of the characters sets out to make Texas not just a blue state, but a royal blue state.

The cast includes Stephen Fry and Uma Thurman. Thurman was born in Boston, but she does a pretty good Texas accent.

The sound track is clearly meant for people younger than I am. That’s as it should be. But upon hearing a few lines of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You,” (1945), sung by a voice and in a style that just doesn’t work for someone my age, I had to pause the video and go listen to a proper performance. I’ve included a link to a video below, from Royal Albert Hall.

Young people have another internet hit to stream right now, the second season of “Heartstoppers,” on Netflix.

Oxford India paper

Click here for high resolution version.

Once again, unable to find any newer fiction that interested me, I’m reading another Sir Walter Scott. It’s The Fortunes of Nigel, and I believe this will be the eighth or ninth Walter Scott that I’ve read. Though Scott’s works are available at Gutenberg and can be read on Kindles, I like having nice old editions of 19th Century classics. I bought this copy of Nigel on eBay from a seller in the United Kingdom.

The book was not expensive, but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the binding and, in particular, the quality of the paper. Though the paper is 111 years old, it is bright white and has hardly yellowed at all (though the heavier paper used for the illustrations has yellowed somewhat). The paper is remarkably thin and opaque. There is no brittleness. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what kind of paper this almost certainly is. The clue is the name Henry Frowde on the title page, over the Oxford University Press imprint.

Henry Frowde, it seems, was not a scholar, but he was a genius at printing and binding. He must have been a bit of a religious fanatic, because he printed a lot of Bibles. One of his innovations was the use of Oxford India paper, which was made from bleached rags and hemp. It was often used for Bibles, and as you’ll see in the Wikipedia article, Encylopedia Britannica used it for their 1911 edition.

So now that’s another item for my next visit to the U.K. — visiting some bookstores that sell old books. I’m guessing that there are several of those in Edinburgh. I am not particularly interested in rare books, nor would I be able to afford them. But I am very interested in beautiful books that are beautifully printed on good paper and beautifully bound. There are many cheaply printed old editions of 19th Century classics. It’s nice to see that the Oxford press adhered to a higher standard.

⬆︎ Click here for high resolution version.

John Scalzi

I meant to buy the hardback but accidentally ordered the large print edition. The machine in the background is an IBM Model D typewriter in pretty rough shape. It’s out of its case while I try to determine if it’s restorable.

The Collapsing Empire. John Scalzi. Tor, 2017. This is part one of a three-part series, The Interdependency Series.

I had been gasping for a space opera, and I found one. Scalzi, I think, is one of our best contemporary science fiction writers, and, at age 53, I hope he’s got a long career ahead of him. About five years ago, I read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and found it to be entirely entertaining. At the time, though the first part of The Interdependency Series had been published, the remaining two books of the trilogy were yet to come. I found this book while experimenting with Google searches that would find recently published space operas (if any even existed).

Space operas seem to be out of fashion. I find that irksome. Though socially conscious novels about social oppression and diversity seem to be what publishers are interested in these days, that’s not what I’m interested in. Social oppression and diversity are what politics is for. Novels are for entertainment and escape. The more one is involved in politics, the more one needs some means of escape — preferably to anywhere other than the here and now. It’s all about imagination.

Scalzi, I think, is not a writer who is greatly concerned with big ideas. I may find, in books 2 and 3 of this series, that he is concerned with the big idea of what happens in failing empires. But Scalzi’s greater concern, I think, is in providing a hot read. I finished this book in two days and immediately ordered book 2.

Often I’m afraid that, having devoured novels all my life, I’ve now read all the good ones, and few good ones are being written anymore. Regular readers here know that one of my quirks is that stories set in the here and now almost always bore the daylights out of me. I just don’t see the point of it. If one consumes as much news as I do, then one is saturated with more than enough stories from the here and now. I make an exception for stories about espionage and international intrigue, probably because they take us to exotic places that I’ll never see and inside such places as MI6 where the news can’t take us — Prague, St. Petersburg, Vauxhall Cross, arctic outposts, top-secret military installations. Another visit to L.A.? No thanks.

Speaking of imagination, I’ve been re-watching Game of Thrones on HBO. I don’t know how much of it I’ll watch, but it’s comforting to visit characters who feel like old friends — the Starks, John Snow, Sam Tarley. Speaking of the Starks and international intrigue, I also have been watching The Citadel on Amazon Prime, which stars Richard Madden, who played Rob Stark.

A few days ago I read yet another article about how reading novels is good exercise for the memory, because one has to remember on page 486 what happened on page 37. Scalzi is a lot like Isaac Asimov in that there is not a lot of action. Rather, the story unfolds as the characters, sitting in rooms (in palaces or aboard space vessels) talk. There’s more exposition than most editors would recommend. But, like Asimov’s characters and dialogues, Scalzi’s characters, both the nice people and the villains, are sharp and interesting. One might be tempted to make a list of Scalzi’s characters (of which there are a great many), the places on multiple planets, or the almost-a-dozen space vessels that Scalzi names, to keep everything straight. But I didn’t, and instead I did brief periodic reviews to make sure that I had it all down.

According to the Wikipedia article, Scalzi’s writing style was influenced by Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Joe Haldeman. Though I haven’t read much Haldeman, I would agree. I suspect that Scalzi also was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s model of empire, drawing on the conflicts among powerful families doing terrible things to amplify their power.

The Bulletin of the Tolkien Society

A few weeks ago I mentioned having joined the Tolkien Society. Today I received in the mail a welcome letter and a copy of the April 2023 Amon Hen, the Bulletin of the Tolkien Society.

The packet was hand addressed, with nice U.K. postage stamps. International mail always looks so exotic!

Amon Hen is very nicely printed on heavy paper. The April issue contains some beautiful artwork, a photograph of Tolkien, and seven articles.

Soon I will write a letter to the Amon Hen editor begging them to do an article on Tolkien and his typewriters, hoping that photos of Tolkien with a typewriter exist.

A strange book about fairies

Source: eBay

The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. W.Y. Evans Wentz, Oxford University Press, 1911.

Gutenberg.org edition

The English historian Ronald Hutton has persuasively argued that there is no continuous history of paganism in the British Isles. Rather, during the 19th Century there was a revival of, and a romanticization of, interest in Celtic paganism. This book, published in 1911, is almost certainly a product of that romanticization and revival. Yet, despite the apparent credulity of its author, W.Y. Evans Wentz, there is much in this book that is genuine, in that Wentz’s interviews were with old folks who were describing actual folk memories as opposed to any new material made up by 19th Century romanticizers.

My biggest surprise with this book is that it is superbly written. The first few chapters are lyrical, picturesque descriptions of the places where Wentz traveled to do his interviews — Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, and the Isle of Man.

First editions of this book are rare and very expensive. At present, two first editions are listed on eBay, one at $750 and the other at $999.95. Because the book has been in the public domain for quite some time, there are many reprints for which the text, I assume, was taken from Gutenberg.org.

Wentz, though he obviously was very intelligent and wrote beautifully, must have been quite a poseur. One of the photos of Wentz on Wikipedia shows him dressed in an elaborate Tibetan costume. It seems there wasn’t any form of mysticism that he wasn’t into, including Theosophy. Yet I think Wentz’s book about fairies contains real scholarship with his snapshot of folk beliefs — folk beliefs that I suspect actually were continuous and accounts of which he captured from about 1907 to 1910. Wentz’s papers are at Stanford University and Oxford University.