The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (novel #220)

This was the summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. ~ opening lines

 

The author lets you know what this novel is about right away. Because that’s it; that’s the story. Like the only other novel by McCullers I’ve read, this novel is character-driven, with very little plot. It’s a Southern Gothic, coming-of-age tale.

 

This was the summer when Frankie was sick of being Frankie.

 

What adolescent hasn’t experienced that? Frankie spends most days of the long, hot summer in the kitchen with the African-American housekeeper Berenice and Frankie’s six-year-old cousin John Henry. The three spend hours talking about random things or playing cards. They are halfway through the summer before realizing they are not playing with a full deck…and that’s the depressing feeling the novel has.

 

Frankie’s father is a decent parent and does pretty well for a widower, but he hasn’t a clue about what is going on in Frankie’s mind.

 

And though she tries to explain her “unjoined” condition, Berenice and John Henry can’t really understand; no one can, so Frankie is not a member of anything.

 

Until her brother’s wedding, a day trip away, Frankie determines to join the couple on their honeymoon and life after that, never to return to her hometown. She even adopts a new name to be more alliterative with the happy couple. She is now F. Jasmine. For a day or so, the certainty of this plan makes her content and happy. The reader worries how hard she will take the blow when the impossible plan unravels.

 

The Member of the Wedding feels like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, my only other experience with McCullers. Both novels strike a nearly universal chord: the feeling that no one understands or the desperate need to make someone understand. The Member of the Wedding is a beautiful and poignant rendering of that sentiment.

 

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

 

 

This novel satisfies the category “title about a celebration” in the What’s in a Name 2023 Challenge.

 

^.

 

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (99 down, 1 to go)

…literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. ~ Nick Jenkins

 

A few more thoughts from Nick…

 

Yet love, for all the escape it offers, is closely linked with everyday things…

 

One hears about life, all the time, from different people, with very different narrative gifts. Accordingly, not only are many episodes, in which you may even have played a part yourself, hard enough to assess; a lot more must be judged from haphazard accounts given by others. Even if reported in good faith, some choose one aspect on which to concentrate, some another.

 

The title of this novel is taken from a painting by 17^thCentury artist, Nicolas Poussin. The painting has numerous mythological elements: Apollos, Aurora, Time himself playing music, and four dancers (pictured on the book bindings) who probably represent different stages in life.

 

Poussin is not known to have revealed the exact meaning of his dancers; Powell however, leaves a bit more material from which to infer what he thought. He wrote A Dance to the Music of Time in four volumes – that he called movements – each undoubtedly represents one of the dancers. The main character and narrator, Nick Jenkins, considers Poussin’s dancers, concluding that they are:

 

…unable to control the melody, unable perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

 

As the author’s alter ego, Nick thus reveals a distinct fatalism in Powell’s world view.

 

I can’t say for certain what Powell might have labelled the four dancers, but I infer something like:  

Coming of age (ambitiously, awkwardly, recklessly, naively)

Setting course (success, failure, course-correction)

Fates and follies (drudge, disillusionment, despair)

Conclusion

 

"First Movement" – opens on Nick and a few schoolmates, unnamed college, England, late 1920s, early 1930s.

 

"Second Movement" – follows their diverging, and re-converging careers and relationships, presages of looming war.

 

"Third Movement" – their roles in WWII, mostly uninspired and bureaucratic, several fatalities.

 

"Fourth Movement" – Conclusion of the many lives portrayed in this tome, but also…

 

Time dances on. Like the figures in the painting – dancing in a circle – Powell brings the fourth volume full circle, with the aged narrator in a scene very similar to his opening scene of volume one. (Though I'd nearly forgotten the opening scene by this point.)

 

I thought it an impressive work, but not very enjoyable. I wasn’t invested in any of the characters. Nick is a likeable chap, but too dispassionate to be very interesting.

 

To give Powell proper credit, I have to admit, that it was only the first 2,500 pages or so that I didn’t enjoy. The final pages of the final movement, finally got interesting. That might sound like I’m being sarcastic – I’m not. If you dare to start this work – you need to stick it out.

 

I can’t help but compare A Dance to the Music of Time to In Search of Lost Time. Both are roughly 3000 pages, both cover the lifetime of the main character, even the titles are reminiscent – and both were rather a chore to read. I doubt he intended it, but I felt as if Powell’s work is the British answer to the earlier French novel by Proust. I was already making this comparison in my thoughts, when Nick began reading and commenting on Proust’s magnum opus in the second half of Powell’s classic.

 

My rating: 3 ½ of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies – “A Classic that scares you” category of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

 

 

Excerpts – This first is one of my favorites taking place during a calm moment of Nick’s army days, and is a casual conversation between Nick and his commanding General. The general, knew that Nick was an author, and literary critic.

 

‘Book reader, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What do you think of Trollope?’

‘Never found him easy to read, sir.’

‘You never found Trollope easy to read?’

‘No, sir.’

He was clearly unable to credit my words. This was an unhappy situation. There was a long pause while he glared at me.

 

‘Whom do you like, if you don’t like Trollope?’

‘There’s Balzac, sir.’

‘Balzac!’

General Liddament roared the name. It was impossible to know whether Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one. 

 

And although Nick was uncertain, he must have made some points as the general then recommends Nick for a better position.

 

Other Excerpts: Mostly narrative by Nick

 

That illusion – as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear – was closely related to another belief:  that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways:  unthinkable as formerly appeared any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

 

…the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

 

Yet love, for all the escape it offers, is closely linked with everyday things, even with the affairs of others.

 

‘Look here,’ said Stringham, ‘I must be allowed to get in and out of my own bed. That is a fundamental human right. Other people’s beds may be another matter. In them, another party is concerned, but ingress and egress of one’s own bed is unassailable.’

 

‘It seems to me,’ said the General, ‘that he is a typical intuitive extrovert – classical case…’

 

War is not an exact science, but a terrible and passionate drama ~ quoting Foch

 

‘The god, Mars, approaches the earth to lay waste. Moreover, the future is ever the consequence of the past.’

 

‘Adventures only happen to adventurers.’

 

‘The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves.’ ~ Isobel (Nick’s wife)

 

…literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

 

Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward – in contrast with love – is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment…

 

You know growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

 

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them…

 

When people speak of a subject close to them, they can look transformed.

 

One hears about life, all the time, from different people, with very different narrative gifts. Accordingly, not only are many episodes, in which you may even have played a part yourself, hard enough to assess; a lot more must be judged from haphazard accounts given by others. Even if reported in good faith, some choose one aspect on which to concentrate, some another.

 

…a restless soul wandering the vast surfaces of the Earth ~ Nick’s description of his Uncle Giles

 

A Dance to the Remembrance of Time is FILLED with references to classic literature. Nick, being a literary person (and as I said Powell’s alter ego), sometimes referenced an author, a title, or merely a character from some prominent work. These are the ones I caught. There were undoubtedly more.

 

Les Misérables

A Doll’s House

Jude the Obscure

Joseph Conrad

J.M. Barrie

H.G. Wells

Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

Orlando

John Milton

The Idiot

Henry James

Sherlock Holmes

William Thackeray

The Waste Land

Stendhal

D.H. Lawrence

Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov, and "The Grand Inquisitor"

Stavrogin

Ernest Hemingway

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Franz Kafka

Anthony Trollope

Alice in Wonderland

George Orwell

Edgar Allan Poe

Hamlet

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Molly Bloom

Dr. Zhivago

Pilgrim’s Progress

Charles Dickens: Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, The Old Curiosity Shop, Bob Cratchit

 

A favorite reference: a character concocts their own cocktail and calls it Death Comes for the Archbishop

 

And of course

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

 

A Dance to the Music of Time is officially 12 novels, published 3 at a time in four volumes/movements. Personally, I don’t think the 12 novels are truly novels, but more like rather long chapters. I don’t believe any of the novels, nor any of the volumes stand very well on their own. But of course, to get the full effect, you must commit to nearly 3000 pages.

 

1st Movement

- A Question of Upbringing

- A Buyer’s Market

- The Acceptance World

2nd Movement

- At Lady Molly’s

- Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

- The Kindly Ones

3rd Movement

- The Valley of Bones

- The Soldier’s Art

- The Military Philosophers

4th Movement

- Books Do Furnish a Room

- Temporary Kings

- Hearing Secret Harmonies

 

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The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (89 down, 11 to go)

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

What a charming little tale – though I almost feel ghoulish for saying so. It involves a bridge collapse and the death of five souls, and the execution by burning of the monk who chronicled their lives…

And yet, it still comes out as charming. Not without some grim reading first though. This little book grew on me slowly. I knew nothing of the plot and thought perhaps it was some sort of adventure or military tale.

Nope. It is the story of an ancient Incan bridge, in Peru that collapses in 1714, five souls who perish, and the Franciscan monk who witnesses the tragedy.  

Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

Brother Juniper was apparently obsessed with how divine providence selects souls to be affected by such events. Once before, he had devised a mathematical formula attempting to put a value of the worth of souls that had perished in a different tragedy, but as you might guess, he found little to satisfy his passion.

He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.

But Brother Juniper again tries to find reason in the circumstance and spends six years researching the lives that were lost. I could try to synopsize their tales, but what stood out was Brother Juniper’s devotion. I think Brother Juniper loved humanity. In the end, he writes a book about the five and expostulates his premise on the mysteries of providence. The book and author are burned for heresy. Brother Juniper approaches his earthly judgment calmly.

He was willing to lay down his life for the purity of the church, but he longed for one voice somewhere to testify for him that his intention, at least, had been for faith; he thought there was no one in the world who believed him. But the next morning in all that crowd and sunlight there were many who believed, for he was much loved.

Brother Juniper, in his devoted and tender way, focused on the souls who were lost, but the narration then turns to the survivors – those whose lives had been touched by the victims – and oh then – there lies the charm.

One such survivor comments:

“Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.” 

Oh and, one copy of Brother Juniper's book is spared; it mostly collects dust in a university library.

I have hinted before that I care more about a great story than for polished writing. Thornton Wilder however, accomplishes both. His prose is nearly poetry and was a pleasure to read. The excerpts below, even without their context, are offered as evidence.

My rating: 3 1/2 of 5 stars

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and was the best selling-work of fiction that year. At a bit over 30,000 words it is considered a novella, and I believe the shortest work on my 100 Greatest Novels list.

This is the first time I’ve read The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I've read a bit of Wilder, long ago reading bits of Our Town. Have you read this novel? this author? What did you think?

Excerpts:

“I may see you Tuesday,” says a Limean, “unless the bridge falls.”

Doña Clara was in the hand of malignant Nature who reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

…but the servant loved the master because he could quote from any of Cervantes’ prefaces and because his tongue had a little Castilian salt about it still.

…his passion for overseeing the lives of others, his worship of beautiful women, and his admiration for the treasures of Spanish literature.

But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream.

She had a new way of fingering a wine-glass, of exchanging an adieu, a new way of entering a door that told everything.

All night they talked, secretly comforting their hearts that longed always for Spain and telling themselves that such a symposium was after the manner of the high Spanish soul. They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news. They talked until the sun rose, about wars and kings, about poets and scholars, and about strange countries. Each one poured into the conversation his store of wise sad anecdotes and his dry regret about the race of men.

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All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (86 down 14 to go)

…what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost. ~ Jack Burden

This is the first time I’ve read All the King’s Men or Robert Penn Warren. The book is a modernist novel with existential themes. It is the tale of Jack Burden and Willie Stark, because as Jack, the first-person narrator put it

...the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before reading All the King’s Men, I didn’t know it won a Pulitzer or that the 1949 movie adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture. I’m glad I didn’t know, as that would have set expectations high. I much prefer to have no expectations.

Jack Burden is a history researcher and aide to Governor Willie Stark – the popular and powerful governor of an unnamed Southern State in the 1930s (unnamed but most likely Louisiana). Jack is a crafty cynic, and worldly wise Jack-of-all-Trades for the governor.

In a flashback, the two meet when Willie is a petty county bureaucrat. Willie attempts to expose a crooked construction deal for a new school, but the old political machine is untouchable, until an inferior fire escape at the school gives way during a fire drill and kills several students and cripples others.

According to Jack:

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

(cynic…I told you)

It launches Willie’s political career, and he runs for governor, or again as Jack put it…

he was running for Governor. Or rather, he was running in the Democratic primary, which in our state is the same us running for Governor.

In his initial campaign, Willie is naïve and politically inept. He is also initially a man of honesty and integrity, until he learns he is a stooge of the political machine, trying to split the support of another candidate.

Willie does not win that primary, but he does eventually become governor. He is wildly popular with the people, despised by political opponents, and feared by his stooges. His staff all call him Boss. Jack calls him boss, but is no stooge. Jack’s job included many things, such as digging up dirt on people that needed persuading.

Jack had other, less sordid, duties. He said: 

I was supposed to do a lot of different things, and one of them was to lift up fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound hairy white dogs on summer afternoons and paint an expression of unutterable bliss upon their faithful features as they gaze deep, deep into the Boss’s eyes.[photo-op at the old family farm]

The tale is about Willie’s growing political savviness – and slow corruption, and simultaneously about Jack’s philosophizing of the entire saga. I couldn’t and wouldn’t attempt to recapitulate Jack’s philosophy. The quotation at the top of this post is one example, and here are a couple more:

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

And…

If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy. I was a student of history once in a university and if I learned anything from studying history that was what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had learned.

As Jack implies, there are definite parallels between his story and Willie’s. Both are pragmatic and have no qualms with the seedier aspects of politics. Jack is able to justify his role because as a historical researcher – he loved truth. If it was the truth he dug up – so be it. The Boss did the dirty work with it. And even the Boss’ dirty work – well, they told themselves they were doing it for the greater good.

Several distinct but related violent events shake both Willie and Jack to the core of their beliefs. It comes too late for one, and perhaps just in time for the other.

I really enjoyed this novel. First, for the philosophical dilemmas, or moral ambiguity, or conflicted consciences, or situational ethics, or well you see – the complex business of life.

But secondly, Robert Penn Warren uses fabulous dialogue and narrative that is simply a lot of fun and entirely believable for his characters (examples in the excerpts at the end). Jack in particular likes to string together a half-dozen or more adverbs or adjectives in describing people and events.

There are several great tragedies in this novel – more than several, but in spite of them, there is a very satisfying ending.

Once more, in Jack’s words: 

This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way.

Have you read All the King’s Men? What did you think?

Excerpts:

There’s a reference to Moby Dick as Jack describes the alluring look a love interest gives him. [she]

…sunk her harpoon deeper than ever Queequeg sunk it…

Then the boss spied a fellow, a tall gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…

My god, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he’ll sure be useful from now on. ~ The Governor discussing how to deal with a corrupt bureaucrat

He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-filed pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part where the flat-footed, bilious frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eaters live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook-legged, high-heeled, gun-wearing, spick-killing, callous-rumped sons of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and then all go round the corner to see episode three of “Vengeance on Vinegar Creek,” starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete.

I had seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different. In a hanging you do not change a man’s personality. You just change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression, and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a wholesale lot.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

Film Rendition:  There is a 2006 version but it didn’t receive great reviews so I passed. The 1949 version however won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Actress in Supporting Role (Mercedes McCambridge). It also received four other nominations. So, it should go without saying it’s very good.

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A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (85 down, 15 to go)

I will show you fear in a handful of dust – The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot (the source for the title of this novel)

This is the first time I’ve read A Handful of Dust and the second novel I’ve read by Evelyn Waugh. The book is a modernist, and/or humanist novel according to Waugh, and the third-person narrative of Tony Last, an English gentleman, set in 1930s England and Brazil.

My rating: 3 ½ of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies 2017 Back to the Classics Challenge category #10 – A classic set in a place I’d like to visit (Brazil).

Tony Last is an English gentleman, lord of the ancestral home, Hetton Abbey, a large country estate where he lives with his wife Lady Brenda and eight-year-old son John Andrew. Tony and Brenda seem happy together and a perfect match; John Andrew is being raised a proper British gentleman, and not terribly spoiled by his privileged life. Tony seems to love being guardian of the family legacy, though he is struggling to restore the decaying manor to what he envisions as its proper state. Tony and Brenda were considered by their friends as a pair who were – preeminently successful in solving the problem of getting along well together. It all seems a perfect picture of early 20th Century British nobility.

You probably caught the ominous use of the word “seems” – everything “seems” idyllic, but then – it all unravels rather quickly.

SPOILER ALERT – the following contains a spoiler.

Two events turn Tony’s world upside down. His son, John Andrew is killed in a hunting accident – no one to blame. Shortly after the funeral, as in later the same day, Brenda tells Tony she’s been having an affair and wants a divorce. The reader has known about the affair for a while, along with most of Tony and Brenda’s friends. The affair was so inexplicable, I at first thought it a severe weakness in the plot.

Brenda seemed genuinely to love Tony, and even to like him. The two were cute together. They were affectionate and playful. She didn’t seem bored or restless. The man she has the affair with, Mr. Beaver, is not handsome, accomplished, wealthy, or charming. In fact, he lives with his mother – every woman’s dream, right? Nor does fate does throw them together in some intimate way. Brenda just decides to have an affair, and Beaver is the closest man.

She is completely cavalier; all her friends and even casual acquaintances know, as do Tony’s friends, Brenda’s sister, and Mr. Beaver’s mother. No one is shocked, and no one tells Tony.

It just didn’t make sense to me. Until I learned that Evelyn Waugh received a similar shock from his first wife. He was the wronged and innocent party. It probably didn’t make sense to him, so I’ll give him some credit for what initially seemed a weakness in the plot. I believe, witting or not, he was expressing through Tony what he must have felt. It worked, because I was certainly hurt for Tony and rather disgusted with Brenda.

Tony is of course, staggered by these two blows coming in such short succession. He has lost his wife and his son. He might have struggled on with one blow or the other, but his whole existence:  lord protector of the Last family manor and legacy is in jeopardy. He has no heir and no mate to give him one.

In order to cope, Tony travels abroad and plans to be gone many months. He joins a jungle excursion in search of a lost city in the Amazon, grand adventure – all that, with a new acquaintance. The reader is dubious of Tony’s qualifications for such an adventure, and Tony’s companion does not inspire confidence either. Nonetheless, in intrepid British fashion they soldier on to the jungles of modern day Brazil.

It doesn’t go well.

But I’ll leave it at that. It is a terribly depressing story. I can get past that. I shouldn’t like every tale to be “happily ever after”. I didn’t like it much when I first finished, though, I have to admit I was engrossed. I read it in two sittings. I’ve been ruminating on it since and it has grown on me.

Waugh described Tony Last as "a Gothic man in the hands of savages…" The savages were not just those in Brazil, they were also the civilized savages back in England. It’s not clear which the worst were. As I say, it grew on me, but I didn’t like it as much as my previous experience with Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited.

Sometime after the initial publication, there was an alternate ending published – a happily ever after ending. I didn’t like it. I generally don’t like alternate endings in principle, but this one was completely incongruous.

A Handful of Dust is VERY reminiscent of American Pastoral by Philip Roth - a contented successful man, has it all - and then...

I liked the epigraph Waugh used from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland

…I will show you something different from either 

Your shadow at morning striding behind you 

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you 

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

References to Classic Literature:

All of the rooms at Hetton Abbey are named for characters from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.  One of them then is of course, Tristram – reminding me of the last classic novel I read: Tristram Shandy.

The library at Hetton Abbey had, among other works, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

There is a character who possesses the complete works of Charles Dickens – but he cannot read and must employ someone to read to him

Trivia:  Evelyn Waugh’s first wife – her name was Evelyn.

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Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara (80 down 20 to go)

Julian English sat there watching him, through eyes he permitted to appear sleepier than they felt. Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly?

This is the first time I’ve read Appointment in Samarra or John O’Hara. The book is a modernist novel, third-person narrative of Julian English, a young society man in Middle America, early 1930s.

My Rating: 3 1/2 of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies 2017 Back to the Classics Challenge, Category #2: A 20th Century Classic (but published before 1967). Appointment in Samarra was published in 1934.

Julian English is a member of the social elite in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. He is the privileged son of a Doctor, an Ivy League graduate, Cadillac dealer, and happily married man – no children. Early in this short novel, you would never guess it is the Great Depression, or Prohibition, for all the money that is represented and all the alcohol that flows at the opening country club party. Julian English fantasizes about throwing his drink in the face Harry Reilly, a wealthy society man he despises, seemingly simply because Reilly is bombastic and popular – presumably due to his high social (financial) standing – that and English is slightly drunk.

Julian English sat there watching him, through eyes he permitted to appear sleepier than they felt. Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly? What was there about Harry Reilly that caused him to say to himself: "if he starts one more of those moth-eaten stories I'll throw this drink in his face."

Unfortunately, English does more than fantasize, though O’Hara reveals it in a very clever way. The omniscient narrator reveals English’s thoughts about throwing his drink in Reilly’s face, but he also seems to talk himself out of it. The next morning, English awakes only slightly hungover. His wife’s cool attitude suggests that he embarrassed himself and her at the party, and English eventually realizes, if not quite remembers, that he did indeed throw his drink in Reilly’s face.

That one act, seems to set off a series of self-destructive actions which cause English’s picture perfect, American dream to quickly unravel.

SPOILER ALERT:

This is the second novel in a row, wherein the main character commits suicide. That is undoubtedly why I didn’t love either. I hate to see people driven to despair, even in fiction. But, like The Heart of the Matter, this novel is well written. I empathized with English and was urging him away from his foolish and destructive path. The setting is a complex era in American history, and O’Hara portrays an intriguing picture of people and lifestyles – that have no relevance for me otherwise. That’s a large part of why I read – to be a student of humanity.

Interesting fact I learned reading this: An REO Speedwagon was an early pickup truck produced by the REO Motor Car Company. I only knew it as the band - never thought about the meaning of the band's name.

And an interesting story behind the title. It comes from a play by W. Somerset Maugham. The appointment - is an appointment with Death. Writer Dorothy Parker showed O'Hara the reference, and he chose to use it for his title. He related that Parker, his publisher, his editor, everybody hated it but O'Hara. I like it, so now there's me.

Have you read Appointment in Samarra? What did you think?

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