The Winds of Morning – H. L. Davis
This is the third novel I’ve read by Davis, and his strengths are consistent. When his characters talk (and do they talk!), their voices have an earthy vigor. His descriptions of the Northwest of the 1920s, and of the tools men use in their daily work, have an indisputable authenticity. One of those tools are horses, and this book can serve as a primer on equine psychology. Two men are moving a herd to a new location, and there’s a murder mystery hanging over the affair. Amos is the first person narrator, but we learn little of what makes this reticent man act and feel as he does. He’s an observer, and it’s his companion on the trip – an old man named Hendricks – that he observes most closely. Hendricks has made mistakes in his past (undisclosed ones), and as a result has adopted a strict code of conduct; he always sees a choice, even in minor matters, as to what’s the right thing to do. Both men sense that there’s something awry in the world – their personal worlds and the larger one – and they’re trying to find ways to deal with it. Nature, though largely conquered and defiled by man, can still inflict suffering, but a more formidable problem is presented by people. Amos and Hendricks instinctively respond to others with suspicion: most likely they’re deceptive and possibly dangerous. As for women, Amos is deeply cynical, and the love story involving a girl named Calanthe moves in fits and starts. The same can be said for the plot in general. Davis is at ease describing a river crossing, or an incidental conversation, or a landscape, but when it comes to the entanglements of human emotions he becomes grudgingly obscure. Regarding the murder, its never made clear who did what to whom, and why. And though Hendrick’s source of guilt is revealed, it’s handled in an offhand way. As for Amos and Calanthe, Davis can’t, at the end, bring himself to settle for us, in simple terms, if there’s just a possibility of happiness for them.

Under the Net – Iris Murdock
This was included in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels written in the English language in the 20th Century. I struggled to the halfway point (page 127) just so I could ask, in this review, “Why?” Murdock tries for a lively lark (and the effort is evident) by having the main character run here and there in frantic pursuit of this and that, with a host of eccentric people crowding their way into the loose-ended plot. Even the prose strains for animation: “At that very moment the telephone rang. My heart sprang within me and fell like a bird striking a window pane. I started to my feet. I had not the slightest doubt that the caller was Hugo. I looked at the phone as if it had been a rattlesnake.” (Two animal similes?) Or Jake’s reactions while eavesdropping: “I must hear more, I thought, with my eyes popping out.” “I was seized forthwith by a convulsive desire to laugh, and had to prevent myself by covering my mouth violently.” This book was a mistake – rollicking comedy was not Murdock’s thing. But it’s an amateurish mistake. And can’t mistakes show talent? The main character is no more than a prop; I never for a minute believed in Jake, his actions, his feelings. This book doesn’t belong on any “best” list. So why is it there?

The Revolt of the Angels - Anatole France (French)
Guardian angels, each assigned to a human, abide on earth and are privy to modern (early 20th Century) learning. Through their reading of scientific texts, they conclude that the bible is a conglomeration of falsehoods, and that God is a tyrannical fraud. The author doesn’t seem to be troubled by the contradiction in his premise. He has his rebellious angels express atheistic views, but their very existence – and that of the God they want to overthrow – is confirmation that a spiritual world exists. When they begin plans to wage war on heaven (with the help of a mysterious arsenal of bombs), I felt I was reading a book for kids, and I quit. The points France makes – that the dominance of Christianity brought on much suffering, that it’s rampant with hypocrisy, etc. – were surely not groundbreaking even in 1914. He seems to believe that the pre-Christian pagan worshipers – the Greeks especially – were on the right track; if humans are to worship anything, why not Bacchus and Venus? The aspect of the novel that deals with humans has interesting moments, but the angels are duds, every one of them. Despite how misconceived this undertaking was, I got the impression that the seventy-year-old author was having a fine time expounding his views.

Asymmetry – Lisa Halliday
Under the photo of the young woman on the back cover we’re informed that this debut novel won the Whiting Award, and that Lisa Halliday was born in Medfield, Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. The book came to my attention when, in a radio interview, Ms. Halliday talked of her real-life affair with Philip Roth; it took place some sixteen years ago, when she was in her twenties and he was in his seventies. In the first part of Asymmetry, entitled “Folly,” a young woman (Alice) recounts her affair with a much older Famous Author (Ezra Blazer). In the interview Halliday denied that this section was autobiographical. Really? I read the book in order to get the inside scoop on Roth, and surely Halliday (and Simon and Schuster) were aware that others will do the same. The second section, “Madness,” veers off into an entirely different sphere: it deals with the problems in the Middle East and the first person narrator is a Muslim man. This novel (or, rather, two novellas) is a polished, intelligent work, but I constantly found myself questioning what was behind the author’s decisions. This led me to try to sort out, in simple terms, exactly what Halliday did and what she didn’t do. You can find my conclusions at “Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry” at my Tapping on the Wall blog.

The Distant Music – H. L. Davis
I turned to this book because I wanted more of what Davis did so well in his first novel, Honey in the Horn. But instead the one flaw in Horn was the dominant feature of Music. Davis couldn’t depict close relationships, especially those between men and women, and in this generational saga we have a plethora of relationships. Paragraphs describing feelings are an unintelligible jumble, major characters are disposed of in a cursory way, love is absent, even between parent and child. As in Horn, his ability to render full-bodied dialogue and to tell a lively anecdote are major virtues. But the humor so abundant in Horn is absent from Music. This is a much darker novel. Its people are hard, reticent, distrustful; ambitions that begin in defiance invariably end in deterioration. The same can be said of the land; man’s helter-skelter progress destroys all natural beauty. Davis’s point-of-view about life comes across forcibly, but his one inadequacy as a novelist is fully exposed in his ending. He has six characters caught up in an emotional quagmire; he needed to bring about a comprehensible resolution, but instead he flails along for many pages, then abandons all of them. Though the book is a failure, the imprint of Davis’s personalty was so strong that I was motivated to find out more about him. I wasn’t surprised to discover that Music was an end-of-life work by a man whose final years were marked by physical suffering and emotional turmoil. Early on in the novel he writes, “In that country the change from youth to maturity was not a process of enlargement, but of narrowing down from an infinite range of light and transitory interests to a few serious ones, possibly six or eight. The change from maturity to old age narrowed them still further, usually not to more than two or three, and finally to only one or none at all.”

O Pioneers! – Willa Cather
This novel isn’t about the hardships of pioneering in Nebraska in the 1800s; it’s about relationships. In the first chapter the four main characters are introduced. Alexandra is in her late teens, her friend Carl is a few years younger, and her brother Emil is five. Carl rescues a kitten that has fled to the top of a telegraph pole. Later Alexandra and Emil go into a general store where a little girl named Marie is being shown off by her uncle; Marie and Emil begin playing with the kitten. We will follow the lives of these people for the next twenty years. Of Alexandra Cather writes, “Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.” It’s these qualities that make her the solid core of the novel. She’s oblivious of her beauty; in the opening scene, when she removes her veil to put around her brother’s neck, a traveling man emerges from the store: “He took his cigar out of his mouth and held the wet end between the fingers of his woolen glove. ‘My God, girl, what a head of hair!’ he exclaimed, quite innocently and foolishly.” She stabs him with a look of “Amazonian fierceness.” Which brings up another aspect of Alexandra: “Her mind was a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things. Not many people would have cared to read it; only a happy few. She had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries.” Yet she does have a recurring reverie in which she’s “being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as if she were a sheaf of wheat.” Though she’s self-sufficient, she does need friends, and to them she’s reliable and generous. No better friend exists for her than Carl, but he’s restless, unhappy with the difficult life of a farmer on the High Plains, and he departs for the city. Emil grows to young manhood; Marie, who is married, lives nearby; that these two love one another leads to tragedy. One hopes, in a book as good as this one, that the author won’t make a misstep. But Cather lets her emotionality override her restraint; for me the tragedy was overwrought and melodramatic. I wanted the “white book, with the clear writing” to continue on its calm way. I was, for a week, one of the “happy few” who read that book.

The Country of the Pointed Firs – Sarah Orne Jewett
Jewett gives a resolutely positive depiction of life in a small town on the coast of Maine in the late 1800s. In describing Mrs. Blackett she writes, “Those dear old fingers and their loving stitches, that heart that had made the most of everything that needed love!” There are too many frilly adjectives insisting on the qualities of preciousness and charm. People show generosity toward each other because they know the danger of isolation in such an isolated place; interdependency is a necessity, if only as a means for socializing. One character, “poor Joanna,” is disappointed in love and goes to live alone on a small island called Shell-heap; that people respect her decision but still care for and help her is to their credit. Eccentricities are common in Dunnet, and are observed closely. Very closely. If one is alert to undercurrents the human tendencies to be nosy, to engage in gossipy sniping and to hold onto petty grievances are evident. Yet this remains an undercurrent; the surface of the book is placid. What gives it spirit and verve is Jewett’s ability to portray people through their speech; in this case, Maine dialect. And do her people talk! Mrs. Almira Todd, in whose house our observant narrator stays, is an especially vivid creation: “Last time I was up this way that tree was kind of drooping and discouraged. Grown trees act that way sometimes, same’s folks; then they’ll put right to it and strike their roots off into new ground and start all over again with real good courage.” There’s some gentle folk wisdom to be found on these pages. Willa Cather dedicated O Pioneers! to Jewett, “whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.” My reaction was more moderate: I felt I had been on a pleasant vacation, but I was glad that I didn’t stick around for the harsh winter months.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie – Jean Rhys
The meager plot has Rhys’ waif-like heroine wandering around Paris and London, trying to scrounge money from former or new lovers. She has no inner resources except a waning survival instinct; she fears the day (not too far off) when age will erode her looks. She’s very cynical about life and bitter about people (I wonder how many times a character is described as “cold-eyed”). Again and again we get observations like this: “People are such beasts, such mean beasts. They’ll let you die for want of a decent word, and then they’ll lick the feet of anybody they can get anything out of.” I must be one of the mean beasts, because I didn’t have much sympathy for Julia. I wondered why men got involved with such a mentally off-balance and rage-filled individual, and why they continued to fork over money (though usually with the caveat that no more will be forthcoming). I suspect that early on Rhys was given bad advice about her writing. In Quartet and Mackenzie (her first and second novels) her prose is clipped to the barren bones, but the minimalism comes across as an affectation. And when Rhys concentrates on her own unhappiness the only mood she conveys is a stifling glumness; that mood remains intact even when she enters the minds of other characters. Her third novel, Voyage in the Dark, was better because it was more expansive, with different locales and a supporting cast that added color and verve. Thirty years later Wide Sargasso Sea came out, and in that work she got it all right. Last word on Mackenzie: it seems pretentious to divide a less than two hundred page book into three parts (Part III is thirteen pages long). That’s another thing Rhys should have been warned about: pretentiousness.

Honey in the Horn – H. L. Davis
After finishing a section of this book I often thought “How did this guy get so good?” By “section” I mean a stretch of one to three pages in which Davis describes a place or person or event. The place is Oregon in the early 1900s, the people are settlers looking for ways to get by, and the events concern the various ways that most fail to reach that goal. It’s a raw and often treacherous country, full of characters of all stripes (most of them nefarious in some way), and it’s rendered with an earthy and unsentimental authenticity. I have great respect for Twain’s Roughing It, and I think Davis was every bit as good a writer of prose as Twain (and as funny). But unlike Twain’s account of his travels, Davis wrote a novel, and plotting and long-term character development weren’t in his arsenal of strengths. We follow the misadventures of a young man named Clay, but he never attains much substance, and his relationship with Luce is so vague that I couldn’t understand how they felt about one another. A weakness that would be fatal to another book doesn’t detract a whole lot from Honey because Clay’s wanderings are a means by which Davis moves to those vigorous and pungent anecdotes he excelled at. He writes about a garrulous people, most of whom are isolated. “Loneliness is supposed to make people reserved and taciturn, but it didn’t work that way with them . . . What solitude had lost them was the habit, not of talking, but of listening.” Take Mrs. Yarbrow, “who raised bees in the fireweed slashings on Upper Thief Creek. She was so enslaved by the habit of unbosoming herself before strangers that she deliberately worked into a lawsuit regularly every year so she could explain to the jury, from the witness stand, what a hard life she led, and how worthless her last four husbands had been, and how much trouble her children had given her to raise, and how her roof leaked and her cow had run off with a stray bull and her bees swarmed when they weren’t supposed to and stung her when she went after them, and how her female disorders (which she described in minute detail) gave her hell all the time and no doctor in the country had been able to do them a lick of good.” When it came out in 1935 the novel was appreciated: it was reviewed by the likes of Mencken and it won the Pulitzer Prize. As for my question regarding how Davis got so good, Honey was his first novel, written when he was forty-two, so he had a store of life experiences and the ability (unlike Mrs. Yarbro) to listen. He also was diligent about staying away from any publishing or literary establishment. He declined to go to New York to pick up the Pulitzer because he didn’t want to be a “subject for exhibit.” Which is exactly what one of his cantankerous and idiosyncratic characters might say.

The Inspector General – Nikolai Gogol (Russian)
After I finished this play (in a translation by Constance Garnett) I read the chapter in Vladimir Nabokov’s biography of Gogol devoted to The Government Inspector. He considers it to be one of Gogol’s three masterpieces (the others being Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”). He goes on and on about how it was misunderstood; he even rejects Gogol’s explanation of his intent. But if you rail about misinterpretations, isn’t it necessary to say what it’s really about? Nabokov buries his point in obscure verbosity (something about “the mimetic capacities of the physical phenomena produced by almost intangible particles of recreated life”). I have a more down-to-earth opinion (for Gogol was a down-to-earth writer). When he wrote Inspector Gogol wasn’t the isolated oddball he may have become later in his life; he was a worldly and very observant man. He sets up a mistake in identity, and then lets the characters (every one of them) display a wide array of commonplace vices and weaknesses. The play is about people acting badly, and Gogol makes it a lively, high-spirited romp. Along the way he ridicules the human tendency to grovel before power. If someone is considered to be of importance he’s treated as (and is considered to be) a noble creature; those who are unimportant are treated like dirt. That’s how the world works, both in Russia in 1836 and here, today. The most revealing moment comes at the end, after it’s learned that the inspector was an imposter. A letter from him is intercepted and is read aloud; in it he mocks each of the assembled townsfolk. The Mayor goes into a frenzy: “It’s not enough to be made a laughingstock – there will come some scribbler, some inkslinger, and will put you in a comedy. That’s what’s mortifying! He won’t spare your rank and your calling, and everyone will laugh and clap.” Then he turns on the audience: “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves.” *