The Mortal Enemy & Obscure Destinies – Willa Cather

Though this will result in the best coming last, I’m reviewing Enemy and the stories that make up Destinies together because, though they were published separately, each volume must have been under a hundred pages. The setting for the first part of the novella is New York, a place Cather knew well – as an adult she was quite cosmopolitan. In it she has a first person narrator observe Myra and Oswald Henshawe. This couple lead a comfortable, cultured life (operas, etc.), but Nellie is perplexed by the dynamics of their marriage – something is amiss – and she remains perplexed right to the end. The problem for me is that I also remained perplexed right to the end. Though Cather seems to value – or be fascinated by – the quicksilver nature of Myra (she even grants her a romantic death), no one in Enemy got to me emotionally; it was merely a fairly interesting read. The three stories in Destinies are set in the plains of Nebraska, where the author was born and spent her early – and impressionable – years. They’re peopled not by sophisticates but by rural folk. In “Two Friends” she again has an outside observer tell the story; and, like Enemy, it was merely pretty good. But then – drum roll – we come to two gems: “Neighbor Rosicky” and “Old Mrs. Harris.” Here Cather enters the minds of her characters, and she does so with depth and sensitivity. Beyond the events that occur, the stories are about what matters in life. Rosisky and Mrs. Harris accept their lives because they live in accordance with their values. They also accept approaching death – the inevitable ending. With these “simple” characters (Rosicky has “one taproot that goes down deep”) I was more than emotionally involved; I was moved.

A Life in Letters – John Steinbeck

A collection of letters has a main character and a plot (the character’s life), but it can’t be reviewed the way a novel would. It comes down to a purely subjective consideration: was the person interesting? In the case of Steinbeck, for me the answer is yes and no. On page 356 he meets the woman who will become his third wife, and from there on my interest began to wane. And, since this is an 860 page book, there was a lot of waning going on. What also began to wane was Steinbeck’s creative output. After his last marriage, at age forty-eight, the only thing he published of consequence was East of Eden. He died at age sixty-five, so we have an artistically fallow period that lasted for almost twenty years. It’s important to note that the co-compiler of this collection was the third wife – Elaine – and she devotes about 500 pages to the period in which she’s involved. Maybe – since he became famous with The Grapes of Wrath – there were more letters available. And he was often writing to people who were of consequence (he was friendly with Adlai Stevenson, Elia Kazan, Oscar Hammerstein, etc.). But Elaine Steinbeck might have wanted to place preeminence on his years with her. At any rate, I found his early letters more engaging. During his first marriage to Carol Henning he was a struggling writer (sometimes struggling to buy food). He made a breakthrough with Tortilla Flat, followed by Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony (my favorite of all his work). And then came Grapes in 1939. Two years later he met the woman who would become his second wife. It’s interesting that in his letters written during the twelve years he was with Carol he never writes a word that suggests any problem in their marriage. She comes across as a stalwart trooper, holding two jobs, typing his manuscripts, etc. Yet in post-divorce letters he writes about how mismatched and miserable they were. Maybe he was revising history to justify his actions; I felt that he moved on, and in doing so discarded the shopworn wife for an aspiring Hollywood singer (from whom he would break after five years). Do you detect a note of disapproval in my choice of words? But John Steinbeck was only human, and he was too damn likable and decent a guy to dislike. As to why he lost the ability to produce work of note, one factor could be that in his later years (especially after receiving the Nobel Prize) his life became way too complicated – too many people, too many demands on his time, too much traveling. He was never comfortable with the status of celebrity and often expressed a desire for a life of anonymity. I don’t think he’d be bothered by the fact that my spell checker doesn’t recognize the name “Steinbeck.” He might have gotten a laugh out of it.

The Eustace Diamonds – Anthony Trollope

This novel first appeared in twenty monthly installments of the Fortnightly Review. No doubt it was eagerly awaited – how else were those in the upper crust of British society supposed to entertain themselves back in 1870? Trollope offers up a cynical look at the values of that very society, but this aspect is somewhat masked by the light, comic tone he employs. Because she’s primarily a caricature made up of moral deficiencies, no one would see themselves in Lizzie Eustace (Lady Eustace – for she is so elevated in status by having married into money and a title). The plot revolves around a Eustace family diamond necklace valued at ten thousand pounds that her husband – who died shortly after their marriage – had given her as a gift. Or so she claims. Whether he did indeed give her this gift is the matter that is hotly disputed for over 700 pages. The diamonds represent what is valued by society. Love and virtue are insignificant for Lizzie and many others. Marriages are made not on the basis of love (in one notable side story the engaged couple despise each other), but to enable the parties involved to garner economic and/or social advantages. This is not true for everyone – Trollope has some characters who are virtuous and for whom love is meaningful. But the flawed ones are more vivid. The novel has the feel of having been written in haste, and is not one of Trollope’s full-fledged successes. One-dimensional Lizzie is not that interesting in the long run, and I began to get mighty tired of those damned diamonds. Also, the book’s many disparate parts don’t coalesce, and the result is a sprawling, sloppy mess. But it’s a delicious mess, and I never faltered in my reading. In his presentation of a greedy and willful woman, Trollope injects a cautionary note. Because Lizzie is false to the bone – unable to have sincere feelings for anyone, not even her infant son – she’s destined to be alone and loveless. And at the end she may have met her match in the greasy cleric she marries, for he’s as avaricious and devoid of morals as she is. Since Trollope takes up moral issues, he has something to answer for in his depiction of Jews. They are, without fail, loathsome creatures (Lizzie never elicits loathing). The cleric is actually a Jew, and I used the word “greasy” to describe him because that’s the word Trollope uses whenever a Jew makes an appearance. You’d think a writer of his genius would have been able to come up with other terms (well, actually, at times he does resort to “oily.”). His anti-Semitic attitude must have been sanctioned by the people for whom he wrote. Which is another fault of that society, but one which Trollope was also guilty of.

The Hustler – Walter Tevis
In a lean, efficient prose Tevis takes us into a world that has elements of grime and grandeur. For Fast Eddie Felson the bright rectangle of a pool table is an arena where he can impose order by guiding the paths of ivory balls with amazing precision. When he goes against men nowhere near his level he pretends to be only a middling player – until the stakes are worth exploiting. Sometimes his opponent is as good – or nearly as good – as he is, and these encounters are prolonged battles of skill and will. The movie version, which I saw many years ago, stuck closely to the novel in plot and casting (Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats is Tevis’s creation brought to life). As in the film, Eddie meets Sarah in a bus station lunchroom where she’s killing time until a bar opens at 6AM. They come together largely because they’re both drinkers and lonely; though they begin to care for one another, they’re emotionally wary and thoroughly mismatched. At the novel’s end their relationship is left unresolved – as are many issues. Eddie has the determination and discipline needed to beat a player like Fats; but after victory he finds that he’s the property of his manager, and to go against this imposed arrangement is as dangerous as going against a mobster. This seems like a last minute – and unwarranted – complication. For an author whose endings are usually strong, to leave so much hanging is perplexing. The Hustler was Tevis’s first novel; I had previously read three other books by him (starting with his best of the lot, The Man Who Fell to Earth). I consider him to be a neglected author; he should be better known. He was always good, and at times he could be as exceptional as Fast Eddie on a run.

Signals – Tim Gautreaux
This collection has twenty-one stories, of which I read twelve. Gautreaux abides by the solid old virtues of storytelling – particularly the primacy of voice – and though the results are sometimes good, the slight nudge to very good isn’t there; often it’s sabotaged by a tendency to get sentimental or to send a message. In the title story, sixty-year-old Professor Talis lives an isolated existence; his radio – a venerable Pioneer SX-1250 – has been his “Mozart-seeping companion” for decades. It breaks down, and it turns out that the all-capable lawn lady is capable of fixing it. She’s a life force, his opposite, and in the course of the repairs he awakens to what he’s been missing. He asks her out, she refuses, saying “I don’t believe we’re cut from the same bolt of cloth.” With the radio once again producing beautiful sounds, he asks her to dinner, and she replies, “You stay home and be a good listener.” Talis responds by lugging the radio out of his house and throwing it on the sidewalk, where it breaks into pieces. He says, “And now?” She accepts. The Message was not only too overt and simplistic, but it came by means of a foolish act. Another aspect that kept recurring in the weaker stories was an over-reliance on outlandish characters (often old folks whose mind has given out) and the weird situations they get into. When this outlandishness goes rogue – when stories feature low-life types who are scraping bottom (such as the vicious, drunken cretin in “Sorry Blood”) – I felt I was being dragged through the mire for no good reason. But even in its milder manifestations, as in “The Adventures of Sue Pistola,” a character study is sacrificed for laughs based on someone’s freakish behavior. Bottom line: I have too many objections to what Gautreaux offers. He and I just aren’t cut from the same bolt of cloth.

My Antonia – Willa Cather
This novel is set in the Nebraska prairie in the 1880s. Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda arrive at Black Hawk at the same time, but they face drastically different circumstances. Jim is ten and has been recently orphaned; he’s going to live with his grandparents, who have forged a comfortable life on their farm. Antonia is a few years older; she and her family are immigrants from Bohemia. When Jim and his grandmother pay a visit to the Shimerdas they find that their home is a hole dug in a draw-bank. Antonia’s father is a cultured gentleman, totally unfit to farm the land; the mother is a shrewish study in negativity. Jim and Antonia form a closeness in the few years before she’s saddled with work (which she embraces, proud of her strength). Though they never lose the bond from their early years, she begins to live her hard life while his continues in an unruffled fashion. In the book’s second section, called “The Hired Girls,” Jim leaves the farm when his grandparents move to Black Hawk. Antonia is one of those hired girls, employed as a domestic; at the Saturday night dances life opens up for her, with mixed results. When Jim goes to the university, he and Antonia part ways (and the book loses some of its spark). As an adult Jim comes to think about Antonia in an almost worshipful way. In the closing scene he visits her, now a woman in her forties with a large brood of children, and he sees someone battered by life but still vital and able to “stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning of common things.” Maybe, through Jim’s outsized emotions, Cather is trying to express an appreciation for the pioneering spirit that can survive all obstacles. Not all survive – Antonia’s father commits suicide. Madness is not uncommon, and in some people the worst aspects of human nature take root. Others work and grow in generosity and understanding. Cather’s prairie is a testing ground for character. This is a rich and heartfelt book. And a tough one – when events or subject matter warrant it, Cather can be as unyielding as a Nebraska winter.

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.

Saints and Strangers - Angela Carter
An abundance of riches on display, both imaginative and verbal. Talent galore. Overflowing. Am I saying too much? The point is that Carter often says too much. The riches flow too copiously, overwhelming the narrative. And sometimes the subject is not worth the image-filled verbiage lavished on it. Three stories succeed, and their atmospherics are remarkable: “The Fall River Ax Murders,” “Peter and the Wolf,” and “The Kitchen Child.” But some stories are flops; Carter can be boring. To put it mildly, this is a mixed bag.

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult - retold by Bedier (French)
Graceful translation by Hilaire Belloc (who must have been true to Bedier). Graceful in the simplicity of the language. The book gives insight into the medieval mind and perhaps shows us the origins of romantic love. The love is caused not by two people responding to each other but by their drinking a magic potion; they’re bound supernaturally. Although the Christian religion pervades the story, it’s intermixed with spells, healing herbs, hairy giants, etc. And much brutality. These began as oral tales and were gradually compiled into one narrative. It doesn’t flow seamlessly – there’s repetition. Also, Tristan and Iseult are two-dimensional; love is their third dimension, controlling them. I found that the book couldn’t hold my attention when taken in large doses, but one chapter a day was rewarding.

The Old Beauty - Willa Cather
Three long stories, done near the end of Cather’s life, all concerned with mortality. They’re not dark; rather, a detached sadness prevails. And, unfortunately, a tiredness. In two stories Cather goes through the motions of creating emotions, but characters who can convey those emotions are missing. Only “The Best Years” has resonance. It succeeds because Cather tells about the people of a past time – the time of her prairie youth – and this lit a spark in her. And thus in me.

Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
A novel about the spiritual life is unusual. This one succeeds with a straightforward, restrained approach. A spiritual calling means something in this book – it’s deserving of respect. To provide needed action and color, Cather includes many hardships, some adventures, much about the Indians and the Mexicans, a few legends. Also, nature plays a big part – the landscape is a character, alive and interacting with the humans who inhabit its deserts and mountains. Overall, the book has a calm, unmoving center, which reflects the rock solid faith of the two fathers.

The Prevalence of Witches - Aubrey Menen
An interesting philosophical novel that peters out by the end. It was mostly ideas, with little in the way of characters or plot. Just a situation. But it was an unusual diversion for a while.

South Wind - Norman Douglas
A unique work by a sophisticated writer. He uses a light touch, humor, he creates colorful characters in an fantastic setting (an island called Nepenthe). Most of the book consists of people talking about life and how it should be lived. Many of the ideas are radical, but Douglas is too intelligent to leave those ideas unsupported. He wants to be provocative, and he does set one to thinking along new lines. Behind the light touch there’s a caustic view of human nature, but in Nepenthe nothing is to be taken seriously (one of the simpler ideas offered up: Life is a lark, enjoy it). Despite the pleasure Douglas provides, this doesn’t succeed fully as a novel because too many characters come and go, too many plot lines are weak, too much of the talk is idle. I left not having felt deeply about anyone. Still, it was a charming party.

The Rise of Silas Lapham - William Dean Howells
A solid, grounded work, and Silas Lapham is a strong character; I cared about his dilemma. In its concern with money and ethical decisions, the novel is old-fashioned, in a good way. Another, not so good, is the awkward romance between Pen and Tom. Also, the last part has the feel of a summary (the pace changes noticeably). The book needed an ending that had impact, but it just trails off vaguely. The solid bricklayer got a bit hasty, or tired, or something. Still, this was a satisfying read.