Category Archives: Articles/reviews

December 18, 2012 · 4:57 pm

“A detective digs around in the garbage of people’s lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage.”–Joe Gores

In his short anthology, Classic Mystery Stories, Douglas G. Greene pays “a tribute to the first great age of fictional sleuthing,” the stories being drawn from 1841 to 1920.  Of course, he dates the first detective story from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue, as it is “widely acknowledged” to be the first by critics and mystery buffs alike.

As Greene notes in his introduction, “We may well enjoy suspense thrillers and psychological probings of diseased brains and even (in our guiltier moments) shoot-em-ups with plenty of AK-47s and car chases” [though writing today in the light of the Newtown shootings, these things seem very distant and far away on our scale of preferences of things to read about.  Writing and reading about such things has indeed been the very topic of a number of posts on the Internet in WordPress, all of which acknowledge our inundation with images and sounds and stories of ‘shoot-em-ups’ which make us less sensitive.  Nevertheless, I continue my post today with a sense that my interest in Greene’s book will not be unfairly mistaken as an encouragement of this sort of writing, the more especially as his book features only genuine mystery tales.]  As Greene continues, “….[W]hen it comes to the mystery story, there is nothing to rival the genuine tale of–to use Edgar Allen Poe’s word–ratiocination, wherein the detective solves the crime by investigation and observation, by using his or her wits.  In this genre fisticuffs may occasionally be acceptable–but only after the detective has already worked things out through brainpower.”

The three tales I want to mention are hardly even tales, but are instead billed as mere conversation-starters by their author.  Charles Dickens grouped them together under the title “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes.”  As Greene notes, “Poe’s stories were popular, but for detective fiction to become a major form of popular literature, public attitudes toward crime had to turn from sympathy for the criminal (as had been the response to the picaresque romances and Newgate Calendar tales of previous centuries) toward admiration for the law-enforcer.”  He notes that the Bow Street Runners were often “corrupt” and that it was not until the “creation of Scotland Yard in 1829” and 13 years later the “Criminal Investigation Department” (CID) that the “success and relative honesty of the Detective Police became known, [and] the old image of the crooked thief-taker was gradually replaced by the upright Bobby.”

As a journalist and an editor of Household Words, Dickens “spent nights with the police, invited almost the entire C.I.D. to the magazine’s offices for a party,” and recorded their investigations in these three anecdotes in 1850.  He was also influenced by them to write a “positive” Inspector Bucket in Bleak House in 1853, and Greene credits particularly Dickens with beginning the process of making the police detective a hero.

The first anecdote concerns a murder of a young woman, in which the predominant clue left behind is a pair of gloves under the pillow of the bed in the chamber where the young woman is found with her throat cut.  It’s a simple enough tale of attempting to find who had cleaned the gloves, in order to find out who owned them and had dropped them off at the cleaners.  Most of the story is a sort of comedy of errors of who found the gloves where and did what with them, and the story unravels as the detective finds the man who owns the gloves.  The main function of this story, however, is not so much to find the man who actually committed the crime as it is to clear the man who owns the gloves (circumstantial evidence) from having participated in the murder.  So it’s a sort of clearing away of a “red herring.”

The second anecdote concerns the apprehension of the “Swell Mob” (a gang of thieves) working Epsom Race Track on Derby Day.  The detectives get together to catch them, but the thieves manage to steal a bit of diamond jewelry off one of the three detectives anyway.  They are all caught, but when they are caught, nothing can at first be found by the two main detectives.  Finally, however, by an “artful touch” (and think here of the term “artful” in the same way as you would the phrase from another Dickens classic, “the artful dodger”), one of the detectives recovers the goods.    I’m not going to reveal exactly what this “artfulness” is, as it would ruin what is already a slight anecdote.  At the end of the story, the thief darts out of court and climbs a tree to escape, but is truly “up a tree,” because they catch him!  This combination of craft and silliness, whether drawn from real life or dreamed up totally by Dickens, has the feel of real life about it, certainly.

The third anecdote concerns a series of thefts from the medical students at “Saint Blank’s Hospital” (obviously, a particular famous hospital was in Dickens’s mind, for which he substituted the name “Blank” as was the custom of the time).  Again, even the ratiocination is not marked in this case, as it mainly consists of finding a hiding place in the cloakroom and waiting for the thief to show up and reveal himself.  Because the detective’s knowledge of men and women upon observation is concerned, however, he is able to determine just by watching the porter that the porter, though drunken, is not the man at fault.  Also, it is another case of the policeman being shown to be not only equal but superior to the thief in honesty and capacity.  Just as with the previous anecdote, there is a final bit of history given of the case after the case is officially over, in the sense that we are told that the criminal killed himself while waiting in prison.  Dickens is thus not as much concerned with heightening the drama of the tale (though a suicide is certainly dramatic) as he is with giving it a touch of verisimilitude:  the thief was a student, and the shame of being apprehended stealing from his fellow classmates and being carted off to jail contributed to his suicide itself.

Dickens’s basing of his characters (both policemen and criminals) on the types of people he was actually familiar with from his experiences as a journalist just goes to show that as melodramatic and unlikely as some of Dickens’s plots may seem to be, he did have the realistic research wherewithal to construct fairly accurate portraits of men and women, and these short anecdotes reveal Dickens in some of his most simplistic plotting.  I am greatly endebted to Greene’s selection of these anecdotes and notes for my material in this post, for though I’ve read a lot of Dickens, I had never before read these stories and realized just how close to reality Dickens could write.

For those of you who are Dickens fans, or even for those of you who are just coming to Dickens for the first time, Caroline at Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat is conducting a Dickens in December Readalong this month.  Why not drop by and participate in the readings and the conversations?  There’s nothing like a long Dickens novel to be read over the cold or at least inclement winter months when you’re trapped inside!

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December 6, 2012 · 7:29 pm

“The future isn’t what it used to be.”–Anonymous

In all likelihood, many of you are familiar with the less common fictional tactic adopted by Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller, in which only the beginnings of chapters are provided.  Each new chapter starts out a new fiction, and there is a sense of genuine frustration for the reader (making a valid and curious fictional point), who of course cannot do anything about the unsatisfactory resolution (rather, the lack of resolution) of the individual stories.  Then, there’s Julio Cortazar’s book Hopscotch, which like a few other novels that have come along since, has chapters which can be read in any order.  One would think that there’s only so much innovation that can be undertaken for innovation’s sake alone.  So that when one comes to Margaret Atwood’s story, “Happy Endings,” which features in its short length six different endings to “the story” of “boy meets girl,” one of the fictional plots which Atwood has always been best at in any case, one says, “Oh, okay, this is old hat; I’ve encountered lots of stories which feature different endings, even as far back as Dickens’s Great Expectations.  It won’t be that unusual.”  And that is where one would probably be wrong.

One would be wrong, because quoting a phrase, “the future isn’t what it used to be” when it comes to this six-part short story:  there are six different segments, each supplying a different ending from part A to part F, to the opening statement “John and Mary meet,” true.  But they all have the same ending, too.  How can this be?  Here’s how the stor(ies) progress:

“A–John and Mary fall in love and get married.  They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging.  They buy a charming house.  Real estate values go up.  Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted.  The children turn out well.  John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends.  They go on fun vacations together.  They retire.  They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging.  Eventually they die.  This is the end of the story.”

In story B, the variation is that John doesn’t appreciate Mary, and things go gradually downhill between the two of them until Mary tries to fake a suicide so that John will “repent” and they can marry; unfortunately, she is too successful at her attempt.  John ends up marrying Madge and the story continues as in A.

In story C, John is an older man already married to Madge, and falls in love with Mary, who cheats on him with James, a younger man of Mary’s own age.  When John discovers them in flagrante delicto, he shoots both of them and himself.  Then, we are told, with a pricelessly dry tone, “Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.”

The next story, story D, picks up with Fred and Madge, who, however, might as well be John and Mary for all the difference it makes to the eventual outcome, which we’ll get to in a minute.  They live by the sea, and when their life is threatened by a tidal wave, “the rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it.”  The last line reads “they…continue as in A.”

Story E also picks up with Fred and Madge, but begins with a sentence which by its very structure takes up the previous story, story D, in medias res (beginning with “Yes, but,” “but” usually being a connective and not technically grammatically correct at the beginning of a sentence):  “Yes, but Fred has a bad heart.  The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies.  Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A.  If you like, it can be ‘Madge,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘guilty and confused,’ and ‘bird watching.'”  Here, the author is both playfully and carelessly tossing away the variations and alternatives which would usually be a significant part of the plot and character choices and would help structure the story.  Thus, it’s obvious by now, if it hasn’t become obvious already, that the thematic point of the story, not the plot or the characters, is where the author has really invested her energy.

F suggests “If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you.  Remember, this is Canada.  You’ll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.”  (This paragraph is truly a masterful exploration of tone, inasmuch as the “see how far that gets you” implies that it won’t get you very far.  The humorous self-deprecatory note of “Remember, this is Canada.  You’ll still end up with A” is part of the national treasury of such moments, which disallows Canadian grandstanding on the issue of birthright and which also bespeaks a certain justifiable pride in it all the same.  Finally, the phrase, “a chronicle of our times” followed by “sort of” is yet another way of taking literary pretension down a peg, by use of the casual voice.

The essence of the piece is contained in the last two paragraphs of F, in which we are told that all the endings “are the same however you slice it…The only authentic ending is the one provided here:  John and Mary die.  John and Mary die.  John and Mary die.”  That the essence is not only about life, however, but is about life as lived by fiction writers is revealed by the last few lines:  “So much for endings.  Beginnings are always more fun.  True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.  That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.  Now try How and Why.”

One can see from even these short quoted segments of fabula* that Mieke Bal is correct in her assumption in Narratology:  Introduction to the Theory of Narrative that “a structural correspondence…exist[s] between the fabulas of narratives and ‘real’ fabulas, that is between what people do and what actors do in fabulas that have been invented, between what people experience and what actors experience….[If not,] then people would not be able to understand narratives.”  This is a necessary remark to make because of the history of modernist and strains of post-modernist thought opposed to narratology, in which the assumption sometimes is that there is no essential relationship between the experience of characters (“actors”) and the experience of “real” people.  I say that Bal is correct because of the very sense we get even in Atwood’s highly conscious and deliberate and ironic short story that “the future isn’t what it used to be”:  that is, the future changes with our expectations, and our expectations must become narrower as do our opportunities, and all we finally can know for certain about the opportunity of this span of “real” fabula we possess is that it always has death in it.

Finally, Atwood’s challenge, “Now try How and Why” does in fact transcend the fictional experience again, however, and stand for the Alpha (“How do we come to be here?”) and Omega (“Why are we here?  What is our purpose?”) not only of fictions, but of real people as well.  The opposition is thus posed between “happy endings” and “the only authentic ending,” with the challenge being perhaps to see where they coalesce and whether, if the future is changing every time we get a step farther forward, it necessarily is as “grave” a matter (to make a very old and bad pun) as we might otherwise think it.  Atwood’s story certainly has its share of mordant and deflating wit to keep it from too solemn a tone, while it is the very lack of morbidity itself which insures it a place among serious works about life.

* “A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors….Actors are agents that perform actions.  They are not necessarily human….”  [A full set of definitions and terms used in narratology, the theory of narrative, is available in Mieke Bal’s book, as cited above.]

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November 30, 2012 · 6:11 pm

American Gothic Romance and the impatiences of (one) modern reader– “Wieland; or, the Transformation”

“In a land without castles or ghosts, [Charles Brockden] Brown found the suggestion for a Gothic tale of terror in the strange case of a farmer in Tomhannock, New York, who believed he had been commanded by angels to kill his family.  He provided a sensational plot to interest all readers, while writing a novel of ideas that explored ‘the moral constitution of man.’  The elder Wieland, a mystic, builds a temple on his estate for his private devotions.  One night he is killed by a mysterious flash of light.  His children live on happily with their companions, using the temple as a summerhouse–until they begin to hear unearthly voices, a charming vagabond joins their circle, and the father’s fanaticism overtakes the mind of the son.  In its time Brown’s writing presented a searching and original study of mania and remorse, foreshadowing Poe and Hawthorne.”

This paragraph immediately above is a copy of the blurb from the Dolphin Book edition of Wieland; or, The Transformation:  An American Tale which I read, and I supply it because my topic today is not so much what actually happened in the story as something I’ve noticed in my own perusals of Gothic fiction, an impatience with the character’s avowals of various emotions and beliefs which makes me want to say, “Oh, c’mon now, you surely don’t expect me to believe that that was your honest reaction to that event/remark/action.”  In this tale, as in many such tales, the narrator is a woman, and we are asked to believe that she is an upright and well-trained and veracious person, as well as being a composite of all the womanly virtues, etc.  Therefore, certain (Gothic Romantic) pretenses are in order when she speaks.  But it makes one skim over her narrative and skip certain words and phrases and even sentences and paragraphs, because it seems so masochistic of her to insist upon suffering so!

If you doubt my words, I’ll just give you the final paragraph of the book Wieland (pronounced as in the German VEH-lundt).  Don’t worry:  if you want to read this book, you won’t miss anything by knowing the last paragraph from the beginning:  “I leave you to moralize on this tale.  That virtue should become the victim of treachery is, no doubt, a mournful consideration; but it will not escape your notice, that the evils of which Carwin [a trickster] and Maxwell [a seducer and murderer] were the authors owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers.  All efforts would have been ineffectual to subvert the happiness or shorten the existence of the Stuarts [Maxwell’s victims], if their own frailty had not seconded these efforts.  If the lady had crushed her disastrous passion in the bud, and driven the seducer from her presence when the tendency of his artifices was seen; if Stuart had not admitted the spirit of absurd revenge, we should not have had to deplore this catastrophe.  If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty and of the divine attributes, or if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double-tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled.”  This is of a piece with the opening poetical epigraph:  “From Virtue’s blissful paths away/The double-tongued are sure to stray;/Good is a forth-right journey still,/And mazy paths but lead to ill.”

This is pitching it a little too strong, and is rather like blaming the rape victim for what she was wearing when she was attacked.  First of all, there’s the perspective of the narration.  The story is told from the beginning in a way which capitalizes on the miraculous.  And there’s the fact that the father Wieland’s death is a mysterious matter, full of lightning flashes from heaven and the spontaneous combustion of his clothing (he is found in the temple/summerhouse where he regularly goes to worship, with all his clothes burned away from his body while his body is bruised, and then he dies a few hours later with “insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction” a factor in driving all mourners away from his body).  What I’m saying is that the narration is a sort of “fake-out,” a “sleight-of-hand,” because through most of the story the characters hear mysterious voices telling them to do or not to do things, and moreover it’s not just one character hearing the voices, rather it’s several.  Given the beginning, what else could one suspect but that heavenly or devilish voices are the sources of their visitations?

But pitted against these seemingly overwhelming odds, the prissy female narrator is constantly reassuring us of her own and nearly everyone else’s virtue and prudence.  The only thing of which she is not possessed in supernatural degree is “foresight,” and the amount of foresight she would have had to have to know what was actually happening would have been impossible (and I’m not going to tell  you; you’re going to have to read this book, both the exciting and good parts and the “draggy” and “gloopy” parts yourself–yes, those last two are critical terms).  Without having been a mind reader, she could not have known in any way or even remotely have guessed, in my view, what was happening to her.

So why all the “I would rather have stabbed myself than have defended myself against a potential rapist/murderer,” and “It would have been better to blame myself than to have assumed that a self-proclaimed liar/villain was to blame”?  I think it must be because it increases the reader’s suspense and tension to a certain nearly unbearable point.  The fact that it could also exasperate a reader and make her want to shake the protagonist silly (if the protagonist weren’t silly enough already) doesn’t seem to be a factor that was considered by Charles Brockden Brown.  Also, Brown was early on the author of a work on the rights of women, and as a champion he perhaps felt that it was necessary to “gild the lily” (that is, to make something good or holy enough even holier).  It has often been the case that male authors writing as women have felt the need to make the narrator more virginal, or naive, or just plain good than a realistic heroine would be, and of course this is a Romantic Gothic work, not a realistic one.

There are also a number of spots in which, true to form, the heroine/narrator decides upon a course of action which the foreshadowing clearly tells the reader is a mistake:  oh, if only she would take the opposite course of action, then this whole tragical farce would be cleared up!  But then, the story would be over, too!  So, it’s a choice between having one’s emotions as a reader manipulated and played upon, and coming to the end of the story too soon.  Personally, I stuck it out to the end, though the structure caused me to skip a sentence or a paragraph here and there during the last ten pages or so, because quite inartistically, some minor characters from early on suddenly resurfaced and had a story told about them which had little or nothing to do with the main fiction, or at least if the smaller story was meant to “point a moral, and adorn a tale” it wasn’t as apposite as it might have been to the main story:  why, for example, didn’t it have something to do with voices from heaven, or inspiration, or family dramas?  It actually seemed to be a sort of afterthought.

I realize that normally I review or write essays upon books that are of major worth, and though this book is a bit dated and not as good as other Gothic thrillers like Frankenstein or Caleb Williams (to name the two far poles of sensationalism that this thriller seems to lie between, partaking of the gory details of one, and the human drama of the other), it’s still worth reading.  It’s a book which was ahead of its time in 1798 America when it appeared, because fiction wasn’t well thought of on this continent then, and Brown had various troubles trying to survive as a literary figure, having to rely on a law career as well as having a position writing history and working on magazines.  But I really have been self-indulgent in this post, because my topic has not been so much a delineation of the progress of the tale itself (I don’t want to ruin the experience of the novel for the reader) as a topic about the price sensationalism paid and still perhaps pays in order to be allowed to outrage our sentiments legally:  the moralistic trappings of the narrator’s tale constitute the “wedding” that sometimes follows after (or accompanies rather than precedes) the “seduction.”

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November 27, 2012 · 4:55 pm

Awareness at the moment of death–the elegiac and the factual, Tennyson and Dickinson

Two of the most beautiful short poems in the English language have been written by two different poets, one the paternalistic Poet Laureate of England during Queen Victoria’s reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the other the dainty highly realistically-imaged wordsmith Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson.  And in both poems, the moment of death is of key concern and is a centralized concept, with the tenses and surrounding matter in the two poems suggesting that there is life after death from which to survey the moment itself.

In the first (1847), Tennyson writes “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,/Tears from the depth of some divine despair/Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,/In looking on the happy autumn-fields,/And thinking of the days that are no more.”  This all seems fairly normal, and highly elegiac, though in the second stanza we get “Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,/That brings our friends up from the underworld,” and thus the poem speaks of the life after death for the first time, since this “underworld” is not our contemporary one of goblins and demons, but the classical one with which Tennyson was familiar, one from which Aeneas’s or Dido’s ghost might rise to speak or sign.  But the really emphatic moment of death sequence occurs in the lines “Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns/The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds/To dying ears, when unto dying eyes/The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;/So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.”  In the last stanza, in fact, there is even an ambiguous line with the comparison “Dear as remembered kisses after death,” with the ambiguity residing in the question of who exactly is doing the remembering, the dead person or the living person!  And of course the poem ends with the the clincher of the “we are immortal though perpetually separated and saddened” argument, “O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”  It seems at first as if the elegiac mournful tone itself has simply transported the poet into imagining that he has once been dead and has experienced the sensory input of “dying ears” and “dying eyes,” and yet the whole gist and force of the poem resides in calling to life, desperately, longingly, things that once have been.  They are “no more,” but live on in memory, and as I’ve noted, it is unclear who exactly is doing the remembering, the dead or the living (or both).

In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–” (1896), the poet takes another tack entirely.  As is usual with Dickinson, she selects not the grand high tone of Tennyson, but a simple domestic image, that of a fly buzzing and bumbling around in the room in the midst of some solemn human doings.  There is, of course, the element of grand belief:  “The Eyes around–had wrung them dry–/And Breaths were gathered firm/For that last Onset–when the King/Be witnessed–in the Room–” though whether the “King” here is God or Death is in Dickinson’s own style uncertain, as either is a possibility, given the frequency with which both appear in her poems.  She talks briefly of making a will at the moment of death, then continues with the simple, factual statement (in which the Fly is both only itself and a symbol of something much larger and more final):  “–and then it was/There interposed a Fly–/With Blue–uncertain stumbling Buzz–/Between the light–and me–And then the Windows failed–and then/I could not see to see–“.

In both cases, the poems go not to a Christian heaven or an afterlife reference, so my readers may be wondering why I am so emphatic that the two poems signify a point beyond that of death as the poetic speakers’ locale.  My answer is this:  in the Tennyson poem, Tennyson generalizes about what dying ears and eyes see and encounter, which suggests that the speaker is knowledgeable about the general experience of having been a dead or dying person, and has “lived” to tell about it (in this poem).  In the Dickinson poem, the very tense of the initial verb and the whole verb sequence of the poem tells its tale:  “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”  provokes the question (which is answered), “Yes, and what happened then?”  The fact that the speaker says what she says from the past tense suggests that she is speaking from a point further along in time (and Dickinson has adopted this tactic elsewhere too, as in “Because I could not stop for Death–” and “My life closed twice before its close”).

Thus, the similarity in the two poems is in the positioning of a character’s awareness in a person lying in bed dying, though with Tennyson, the whole experience is a meditation on “the days that are no more,” and a more generalized sense of loss; with Dickinson, the sparse, dry tone impresses by its very lack of mourning, and its sense of loss only comes to a head with the lines “And then the Windows failed–and then/I could not see to see,” a loss not of memories or of days long past, but of the very sense and capacity of sight.  “Windows” as images of the eyes are of course a poetic staple, but in this case, the poet hangs on until the very last moment to the realistic and the sense of symbolism only surfaces when one has entirely finished the poem.

Both of these poems have long been favorites of mine, and I hope that this short post will cause you to look them up in their entirety if they are previously unknown to you, and will make them favorites of yours as well.  They are easily located, both appearing in almost every short collection and anthology of the two poets.

As you may have noticed, I am easing my way back in gradually to doing my posts, not having done more than one or two in the last two weeks since I took a brief hiatus.  I do plan to resume doing more, but I am in the process of covering several works upon which I want to write, and none of them are done yet, so that will have to be my excuse.  I want to thank all of you who have been keeping up with my blogsite and welcome you if you are a new follower.  Onward and upward!

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November 11, 2012 · 4:36 pm

A riddle about an unlikely comparison–“How are James Tiberius Kirk and Magda Danvers of ‘The Good Husband’ alike?”

I have first to apologize to all the original Star Trek fans out there who will no doubt be searching so diligently for a lengthy comment about the James (Tiberius) Kirk character, when all I have to offer is a mere comparison.  But there’s something about him which has been the key character asset to stick in my mind for years now, my favorite tidbit about him, and in more recent years, I’ve located a female equivalent in the character of Magda Danvers (alias Marsha Danziger) in Gail Godwin’s excellent novel The Good Husband.  Finding this similarity is reason enough for self-congratulation for a good feminist (such as I try to be), because it proves once again that creative and notable character traits are the preserve of humans in general, not of one sex or the other.  But enough of the tease:  what is it that I want to discuss, you ask?  It’s that tricky quality of psyche and personality which caused James T. Kirk to come up with a solution to an apparently insoluble problem on a Star Trek examination, part of his back history, in fact:  instead of agonizing and wasting time on the boundaries of the exam itself and ultimately coming in as an “also-ran” or a “good-enough,” Kirk simply reprogrammed the test.  This has often been commented on as having been envisioned as a particularly American trait, but this too is unfair:  it’s no more American solely than it is male solely, but in fact is part and parcel of the way humans in general function when under greatest pressure (and let’s not forget to give some extra-fictional credit to the fact that the actor who so notably portrayed Kirk is William Shatner, himself originally not a U.S. but a Canadian citizen).

So, how is this like what the character of Magda Danvers does in the book The Good Husband?  She too in her back history as it is given in the book has in a sense “reprogrammed” the test:  when doing her thesis for her degree and receiving some guff about it from her committee members, she simply goes ahead and publishes it as a book before submitting it to the committee for the exam, which to those of you unfamiliar with the procedure is doing things backwards; by this means she more or less forces the hand of her committee.  It is only fitting that her book should be about visionaries and should be called The Book of Hell, for her pattern of life is a truly visionary one which inspires a number of other people, both those closest to her and those in the extended circle around her, those at the periphery of the ripple effect in the body of water where a pebble has been thrown in.

The particular insight of Magda’s which applies in her personal life and which inspires others when she is dead is “Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates.”  Her mate is Francis Lake, a much younger man whom she met when he was in a midwestern seminary, and whom she married.  As everyone around them is aware, she pursues her career and Francis attends to the caring homebody side of the relationship, not ceasing his attentiveness when Magda becomes ill with her final illness.  She has been teaching since her degree was granted, and teaches those around her to receive her death with grace and dignity as she does, referring to her final illness as “my final teacher” and death as her “final examination.”  She continues to challenge those around her with life-changing speculations and questions, and considerations which will keep them busy long after she is gone (but she has ensured that she will never be forgotten).

The second couple in the book, and the couple most nearly affected by the drama at the center of Magda’s life, is that of Alice Henry and her Southern novelist husband Hugo, the couple whose marriage is in difficulties.  But there is some question as to whether what attracts Alice most is Magda’s intellectual challenge to those around her, or the nearly irresistible atmosphere of the “perfect marriage,” something which Alice cannot tell herself by any means that she has with Hugo.  So what will happen when Magda, on her death bed, “wills” Francis to the newly single Alice?  What happens when Alice remembers the bequest but Francis seems not to?  And who has the last word in the world of the novel as it is written?  At the risk of telling too little, I am avoiding telling too much:  characters who live beyond the lifespan granted them by their authors, those characters who inspire us for years to come, are those who show themselves capable of doing what’s now called “thinking out of the box,” and coming up with questions and solutions that call out the best from their fictional friends, adversaries, and colleagues.  About such characters, we too as readers are the beneficiaries, as we may “play” any role in our minds of any character in the book; we may be the friend or adversary, but we may also learn, by example, how to be more like the main character ourselves, perhaps toning down some of the character’s more outrageous traits while achieving the same sort of creative thought pattern.  So, here’s to James Tiberius Kirk and Magda Danvers (who reinvented herself in choosing a different professional name):  long may such characters come along in various kinds of fictional endeavor and handily help us out of our self- and other-imposed traps–to the tricky but honest in human nature!  As Albert Einstein said of God (upon whom many believers feel we should base our actions) “Herr Gott is subtle, but not malicious.”  Such characters as Kirk and Magda Danvers embody this quality of being “subtle, but not malicious,” and show us something of the limits we can aspire to test.

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November 9, 2012 · 4:31 pm

How Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “A Major Acquisition” helps rid his narrator of a minor inconvenience (the conflict between facts as facts and facts as whimsy)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s short story “A Major Acquisition” is in fact very, very short (it runs to a length of only three pages), and yet as with all his stories, the conflict between fact and whimsy is marked enough to merit comment at some length.  His story opens with the narrator being approached in a somewhat surreptitious manner by “an unusual-looking man” in the local tavern, who inquires as to whether he would like to purchase a locomotive.  The comic force is immediate:  the approach, made “in a softly intimate voice,” is one that a reader might imagine taking place between a sly salesman of risqué cards or photographs, yet the real item on offer is something as large and as unwieldy as a locomotive.

Typically, the speaker in the story is himself quite whimsical to match the events he encounters.  As he says of himself:  “Now it is rather easy selling me something, because I find it hard to say no; however, I felt that caution was warranted with a major purchase of this sort.  Although I know little about locomotives, I inquired about the model, the construction year, and the piston gauge; I was trying to make the man think that he was dealing with an expert who had no intention of buying a pig in a poke….The locomotive looked good, and I ordered it once we agreed on a price.  For it was secondhand, and although, as we know, locomotives wear out very slowly, I was unwilling to pay the catalog price.”  The obvious fact is that the speaker is a little off his hinges himself if we take him seriously, and yet the astounding fact that someone would actually flog a locomotive in this way causes all the other odd “facts” to assume a status that forces the reader to practice a “willing suspension of disbelief”; besides, the story is so engaging in its mannerisms and conclusions that the reader must accept it for what it is.

What in fact we are asked to believe is unusual is the fact that the locomotive is delivered that same night to the speaker’s house, which he sees after the fact as peculiar:  he says that the speed of delivery was “shady,” but that at the time “this never dawned on me.”  He parks in it his garage, after what we are encouraged to believe is serious consideration as to whether it will fit somewhere in the house!

The major conflict in the story between people is between the narrator’s cousin (who represents “facts as facts”) and the speaker himself (who represents “facts as whimsy”).  The cousin soon comes to visit, and Hildesheimer’s readers are told this about him, in an accusatory tone which would cause them (in a less absurd story) to see him as the villain of the piece:  “This man is averse to any sort of speculation, any display of emotion; for him, only facts are facts.  Nothing surprises him, he knows better, and can explain anything.  In short, an unbearable person.”  When the speaker tries to act as a good host and introduce an unexceptional topic for conversation by beginning “‘These marvelous autumn scents–‘” his cousin interrupts and says “‘Withering potato tops.'”  Though the speaker acknowledges that his cousin is right, he challenges his cousin’s gift of cognac by saying that it tastes “soapy.”  Whereupon, the cousin tells how many world’s fair prizes it has won in minor cities, and decides to stay over the night in the house.

The intrusion of whimsical fact throws the cousin off his game, however, because he can’t deal with the “fact” that the locomotive is in the garage where he wants to park his car.  The cousin inquires, in a practical application of having found it there, as to whether the narrator often drives it.  The narrator replies that “a few nights ago, a nearby farmer’s wife had been about to have a blessed event, and [he] had driven her to the city hospital.  She had given birth to twins that same night, but that probably didn’t have anything to do with the locomotive ride.”

In the next and penultimate paragraph of the story, the narrator confesses to the reader, “Incidentally, all this was made up; but on such occasions, I cannot resist embroidering a little on the truth.  I don’t know whether he believed me; he silently registered everything, and it was obvious that he no longer felt very comfortable here.  He became monosyllabic, drank another glass of cognac, and then took his leave.  I have never seen him again.”  Thus, the inconvenience of having a locomotive in the garage helps rid the narrator of the inconvenience and discomfort of having his factually oriented killjoy cousin around.  He seems to consider it a fair trade, though he does note that a short time later there is a report that the French National Railroad is missing a locomotive, which had simply disappeared from the switchyard.  As he comments on his experience from this perspective (and Hildesheimer clearly loves to play with the reader’s reactions thus), “I naturally realized that I had been the victim of a fraudulent transaction.  When I saw the seller in the village tavern a short time later, I acted cool and reserved.  On this occasion, he tried to sell me a crane, but I did not wish to have any more dealings with him.  Besides, what am I going to do with a crane?”

This last line is in a way the most pointed comedy in the whole absurdist piece:  one might as easily ask what he plans to do with the locomotive, which there is no indication that he will get rid of or return to its rightful owners.  The whole story is written in an “as if” manner, observing the fictional boundaries of a sort of magazine cautionary tale about not trusting strangers, and about alienating one’s relatives by odd behavior; yet the assertiveness of the narrator’s behavior clearly labels his attitude as one which he feels he is right to have.  Thus as with most of Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s stories, the reader is asked to navigate back and forth between probabilites, impossibilities, improbabilites, and what we are told are dead certain facts, and by the way to take part in a joyous sort of play with reality.  I hope my readers will be able to find this fine collection of short stories in a bookstore or library; the translator I have read is Joachim Neugroschel, and the exact title is The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer.  You will find, if you do get a chance to read all of the stories involved, that your efforts to keep track with Hildesheimer’s quick shifts between “fact” and whimsy are well-rewarded.

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October 31, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Helping to restore the “wyr,” or life force, after calamities to nature–Daniel Heath Justice’s “The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles”

Today, I have an apology to offer my readers, and a presumably good excuse for it.  The apology is this:  I promised some time ago to finish reading, and to write a review of, Daniel Heath Justice’s (already obviously excellent and motivating) omnibus revised edition of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  That is, I rather cavalierly assumed that I would be finished with it by the end of October and would have already written a satisfying and provocative post on it.  The book is quite long (588 pages, plus a 28-page Glossary of Names and Stories at the End), but that isn’t part of my excuse:  I’ve read long books, longer works, before, and have been able to comment on a number of books at one time in some earlier posts.  The problem is just that chore after chore and routine after routine from daily life got in the way, so that I barely had time to do simpler readings in order to complete the posting schedules I’ve set for myself.  I had hoped to finish the book and leave myself time to comment, but now that I am 159 pages into the work, it has already become obvious that I cannot begin to do credit to it.

First of all, on the most pragmatic level, there are perhaps even more significant if not more main characters in the book than there are in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or at least as many.  This bodes well for the book’s ethos, because it helpfully represents that every voice is heard, even those which may not be helpfully inclined.  Secondly, the book has several spiritual paths to Enlightenment through craft, not one generalized sort of wizardry which is split into good and evil practitioners, though the most sympathetic path is that of the wyr, or the Green and growing world, the world of the various Tree-Born Kyn, and Beast-Clan Tetawi; there are also Other Folk of the Everland and Beyond and The Sons and Daughters of Man, to give the names of just the groups of main characters.  The concepts of sexuality have also been expanded to include other than just male-female relationships, which along with many other features in the book indicates a generosity of the picture of empathetic life force for everyone.

The path leading to further experience of the wyr as a flowing life force for one of the main characters, Tarsa’deshae, a she-Kyn Redthorn Warrior destined to become a wyr Wielder, is a rite of passage, in which (as far as I have read so far) she encounters her “true face” as a mysterious floating mask suspended in mid-air in the tunnel behind a waterfall in the main council town of the Kyn.  When she accepts the correct mask, she has a vision of the Eternity Tree, and swims in a body of water which surrounds it:  a brief quote cannot begin to describe the beauty of the full description, but I will provide it anyway.

“The Wielder couldn’t identify the color of the Tree’s bark–there didn’t seem to be a word to describe it.  It was neither silver-blue, nor grey, nor green, but a shifting marriage of the three….The leaves were of all seasons and none.  The burning red, brown, and orange of autumn flared amidst the young green of spring-born morning, and these mingled with ageless silver, copper, brass, and gold.  The Tree was of all species, all forms, all genders and none, but each image was unique in its way, and each leaf grew large and lush, wild beyond living memory, as tendrils of endless generations of ivy wrapped themselves around the great trunk and branches, dipping deeply into the waters that lapped against the wide and reaching roots.”  There is a union of opposites in the image of Tarsa in the pool of water while her clothes are consumed away by a mystic flame of life from the Tree and through the water itself, and then her elders and teachers come to claim her as one of themselves.  But this is by no means the end of the story, as all the stories in the book are still waiting to be resolved at this point; this is as far as I have read, and I simply had to share the description of the Tree, though there’s a lot more about it and about the force of wyr to read in the book.

Thus, though I have failed on my original promise to write a full review/article on this so-far gripping and spiritually very fine book by the end of October, I hope I have whetted your appetite for the book itself:  it’s less important in the final analysis that I get a lot of credit for writing a good post on the book, though I naturally want to do it justice, than it is that you read the book and we get a chance to discuss it.  So, if you read no other fantasy novel this whole year and even if you think fantasy except for classics like The Lord of the Rings isn’t your “thing,” please consider that this book is truly a world classic and isn’t just like Tolkien’s in the sense that unlike Tolkien it isn’t limited to Western culture’s mythologies and traditions, but is about the World, as its multiple cultures and divination traditions indicates.  I will faithfully try to finish the rest of the book as soon as I possibly can, and perhaps do another post on it when I’m done, but I couldn’t let the last day of October go by without reverting to my promise and attempting to fulfill it as far as I can.  As I said before, I may have covered only 159 pages so far (to the beginning of Chapter 12), but I’m already anticipating re-reading it once I’ve finished it, as I have with Tolkien’s work many times in the past.

Though I know that many people just now are still recovering from the latest of natural disasters, recent storms such as Hurricane Sandy that have hit as well as the massive snowstorms that have blanketed parts of the United States due to Sandy’s conflict with the jet stream, I am writing today because I have mostly been only inconvenienced by the storm, and would like to share something which might provide spiritual inspiration for others who are equally looking to help people in need of a worthwhile distraction from their own worries.  I would like to position this novel squarely where its talented writer has already positioned it in the writing:  in the belief that we all have a part to play in the world, and that what happens to one person does not happen to him or her alone, but happens to us all; thus, we need to share in whatever way we can to restore the “Eternity Tree” of life to those around us both near and far, and to improve the flow of life force to us all.  I hope it won’t seem callous thus that I am going on with my life in an ordinary way, having given Sandy its due and picked up again where I left off.  And maybe, just maybe, if I get really lucky, my post will lift someone’s spirits who needs it, or will place a copy of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles in someone’s hands, someone who needs a spiritual boost from a writer who is a true leader and an inspiration for the way to go forth after much destruction.  And this applies not only to Sandy, but to tsunamis, and earthquakes, and tidal waves and tornados:  there is for each culture a Good Book to which people look for guidance, but in the world there are in more modest ways also many “good books,” “great books” even, which can help to show the way when life seems most threatened by disaster.  Justice’s book is one such book, is all I am claiming.

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October 26, 2012 · 4:58 pm

Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder”–a mystery and a story about conflicting loyalties in the Amazonian forest

So many times it seems that I start a post wanting to share my sense of the book, but am forced to “spoil” the plot by retelling large chunks of it in order to make my points about the quality of a book.  This time, however, even if my post turns out to be a great deal shorter than usual (which is what I always seem to threaten but rarely deliver on), I’m determined to keep the book’s character development and events largely a mystery because they are just too good to ruin for my readers.

The story in State of Wonder begins in Minnesota at Vogel, a large pharmaceutical company, which has recently received news about Anders Eckman, a lab technician who has been sent to the Amazon to check on the progress of a recalcitrant researcher (a Dr. Swenson, who is in her seventies).  Dr. Swenson has sent news that Eckman has died of a fever.  Marina Singh, Eckman’s office mate, receives the news from her boss, Mr. Fox, with whom it later turns out she is having an affair.  Neither is married to or involved with anyone else, because this isn’t where the drama of the story lies, but also because there is a certain constraint between them due to their relative positions in the company, Marina calls him only “Mr. Fox,” seems mostly to think of him that way, and only uses his first name about once.

From the beginning, there is a blurriness between the loyalty Mr. Fox feels to his relationship with Marina and his use of her as an employee.  When he goes to tell Karen Eckman about her husband’s death, he leaves Marina to do the hard emotional work, and leaves it largely to her after that to care for Karen’s upset over the issue and her urgent insistence that she would know if Anders were actually dead.  There is also an obscurity in the pull Marina feels between helping Karen and helping Mr. Fox, until the two threads of narrative entertwine:  it turns out that whatever it is that Mr. Fox feels for Marina, he wants her to go to the Amazon and push Dr. Swenson some more about her research, when it will be done, for example, what the results are.  It is a fertility drug being researched in the confines of the Lakashi nation as far as Marina knows.

There is some play with conflict in the early parts of the novel when Marina must decide whether or not to go to the Amazonian jungle and resolve the mystery surrounding Eckman’s death while also prodding Dr. Swenson for her employer.  One such moment of indecision for Marina is when she must decide whether or not to take Lariam, an anti-malaria drug which causes almost hallucinogenic nightmares in the taker, as Marina knows because she had to take it as a child in order to visit her father in India.  Another is when she distances herself from Mr. Fox’s demands by taking with her a special cell phone he has sent, while leaving it in her suitcase, which gets inconveniently (or conveniently) lost.  Finally, when she reaches Manaus, Dr. Swenson’s port-of-call on a bi-monthly basis for supplies, there is the sense of straining loyalties as well.  Dr. Swenson has left Barbara and Jackie Bovender, a married couple of alternative culture nature, in charge of her apartment and of fending off inquiries about where exactly in the jungle she is.  They themselves don’t even know exactly, and Dr. Swenson in the protection of her research has cut herself off from telephone, computer, and every other form of modern technology, even from her employer.  The Bovenders genuinely like Marina and are torn by their obligations to be nice to her and also to respect the wishes of Dr. Swenson, their employer.

When Marina finally makes contact with Dr. Swenson and a young deaf Hummocca boy whom she adopted in the past under unarticulated circumstances, she is at first strenuously rejected by Dr. Swenson and then unwillingly accepted.  It turns out that Dr. Swenson was once Marina’s teacher and mentor before she became a pharmocologist, when both were in obstetrics, and Marina made a serious error in a caesarian section, one which she herself saw as a reason to change careers.  Since the drug being researched involves fertility, there is an overlap of interests, as when Marina gets to meet the Lakashi people and becomes willy-nilly their obstetrician and general surgeon.  She is very, very unwilling to do so, but because of Dr. Swenson’s past and present influence over her, her loyalty causes her to allow herself to be committed to the project.

Past this point, I am unwilling to proceed, because I don’t want to give everything away.  But I will give some hints:  the fertility drug can cause unexpected people to become pregnant, and has some interesting side effects; Anders Eckman’s death has more to it than is first articulated, much, much more; there are other doctors there doing an unproclaimed kind of research with Dr. Swenson; Marina Singh experiences some of the joys and perils of “going native,” as it used condescendingly to be called, a topic in literature important in such works as The Heart of Darkness most noticeably; and the most heartbreaking scene in the whole book is when the deaf boy, Easter, whose hero was Eckman before Eckman disappeared, is used unwittingly at first as a counter in an unexpected barter.  Beyond these hints, which I hope will lead you to discover the book for yourself and experience the complexity of Patchett’s ability to consider all variables involved in experiments with life forces and the interactions between different peoples, I won’t go.  Please dip into the book at your earliest opportunity, and follow it through to the startling ending.

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October 24, 2012 · 2:57 pm

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat”–Coincidence and the Inconsequential in Fiction

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat” is at first encounter a short, short, and flimsy tale about a coat, of all things.  It isn’t as “big” or as long as Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” for example, though it is riddled with absurdities as well.  It is rather about coincidences and the inconsequential which add up to the breakdown of true communication, and the result is that it causes one to wonder if one has in fact understood what real communication is about.

The story begins when the character narrating, Paul Holle, receives a note from a long-lost cousin who had disappeared twelve years before after going out to mail a letter.  But the absurdity begins almost at once:  the cousin writes, requesting that Holle mail to him in Australia his “light gray spring coat,” but notes that he may keep the book about edible mushrooms which is in the pocket, because there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When Holle tells his wife that he’s had the letter from his cousin, she doesn’t respond in a characteristically human way, by asking where the cousin has been all this time, or expressing surprise that they’ve heard from him.  Rather, she simply asks “‘Really?  What does he write?'”  When Paul tells her the message, he reduces it likewise to something inconsequential:  “‘He needs his light gray coat, and there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.'”  His wife responds that the cousin (Eduard) should then eat something else.  The conversation ends here, and once again, all lines of ordinary communication are shut down:  there is no further curiosity expressed between these two characters about Eduard’s motives in leaving or his choice of Australia, or anything else for the time being.

The next section begins with “Later, the piano tuner came.”  One wonders just what the “through line of action” could be, but this is not left a mystery for long.  While the piano tuner is working, Paul notices that what he takes to be his cousin’s “light gray spring coat” is hanging in the closet, and knowing his wife’s habits, is surprised that she has brought it downstairs so promptly from the attic, “for normally my wife does something only after it no longer matters whether it gets done or not.”  He takes the coat and mails it out, but forgets to remove the book from the pocket.  When he gets back, his wife and the piano tuner are searching for something, which turns out to be the piano tuner’s coat:  it is the one which Holle has mailed out to his cousin by mistake.  When he tells them he has just sent it to Australia, “by mistake,” he explains no further, nor do they ask for an explanation, except that his wife asks “‘Why [to] Australia?'”  He only repeats “By mistake,” and the piano tuner takes his part in the farcical dialogue: “‘Well, then I won’t intrude any longer,’ said Mr. Kohlhaas [the piano tuner], somewhat embarrassed, if not particularly surprised.”  The humorous here is invested in the fact that Kohlhaas is not in fact surprised, since he knows nothing about the similar appearing coat, nor about the cousin.

They give the piano tuner the cousin’s coat in exchange, but the mistake (despite the fact that Paul has a sherry with the man and they talk about pianos) is never explained.  Two days later, they receive a box of mushrooms from the piano tuner, and a letter which he found in the pocket of the cousin’s coat, sending a now twelve years old ticket to the opera to a friend and telling him that he was going to be out of town for a while.  The incurious wife only asks about why they’re having mushrooms for lunch, and when she’s told that the piano tuner sent them, remarks that it’s “nice of him,” but he “shouldn’t have” without apparently seeing any connection with the previous remark at the beginning about there being no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When she sees the opera ticket on the table, she asks about it too, but when told simply that it’s twelve years old, says only “‘Oh well….I wouldn’t have cared to go to [it] anyway.'”

But the ridiculousness of the situation doesn’t end there.  The cousin writes another letter and says that he needs to be sent a tenor recorder.  The cousin reports that in the coat pocket of the coat he has received “(which, strangely enough, had grown longer)” he has found a book on how to play the recorder and is going to use it.  He also says, however, that recorders are not “available” in Australia (this is patently absurd, to borrow a phrase, but by now the point is clearly made).  When Paul reports to his wife that he’s had another letter from his cousin Eduard, the wife once again asks, as if by rote, “‘What does he write?'”  When Paul ridiculously condenses the whole matter into the information “‘He says there are no recorders in Australia.'”  His wife simply responds:  “‘Well, then he should play another instrument.'” Paul agrees.  The story ends with the simple two-sentence paragraph, “My wife is refreshingly and disarmingly matter-of-fact.  Her replies are straightforward but thorough.”

What creates the highly comic atmosphere of this story is in fact the combination of coincidence (the two light gray spring coats appear similar, each has an instruction book in its pocket, there are several letters) with the inconsequential manner in which every possibility for the characters to create a genuine kind of communication about the events is neglected and short-circuited.  It’s true, the issues at hand are not major life and death issues and are purposely mundane and somewhat silly.  Yet, if this is how these characters ordinarily communicate, what on earth would they do with a more devastating event?  In each case where there is an opportunity for the narrating character to explain more about what he knows, he neglects to do so.  What’s more, the other characters (including the piano tuner, who loses his own coat and finds a book on mushrooms in the replacement coat he is given, and the cousin, who receives a coat that doesn’t fit and a book on recorders in the coat pocket) regard this situation as normal, and don’t ask for further information.  The punchline of the whole story truly does occur in the final paragraph, because the speaker is praising his wife’s matter-of-factness, straightforwardness and thoroughness which she exhibits while lacking total information without which she is acting or advising action.  One must therefore wonder what this marriage is based on, a serious point in the midst of so much humor, if the characters or even one of them routinely hide matters from the other, or speak so definitively about something they don’t have complete information about.  But they obviously feel secure with each other this way.  And in fact, since all the characters in the story share this notable lack of curiosity, what sort of world is it they live in which provides for such incompetence in social circumstances without devastating catastrophes of misunderstanding?  If the stakes were a little higher and had to do with something more than a misplaced overcoat, this story itself might depict such a catastrophe.  As it is, once again Hildesheimer has managed to captivate and enchant with his off-beat, quizzical, absurdist view of life.

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October 20, 2012 · 2:20 pm

What did I know about dinosaurs before there was Jurassic Park? Plenty–all of it confused!

When I was a child in grade school (known to some as primary school), I had already started out with the reading habits I have today, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on that interested me.  My interests were more shapeless and inchoate then, because even with all the reading I did, I hadn’t yet narrowed things down to simple preferences.  I had interests (monsters, ghosts, dinosaurs, love stories, folk and fairy tales, tales of heroes and heroines, things rather in the fantastic line than not).  Those early years were the years which saw the creation of that great masterpiece “Vicki and the Spider” by my friend David D., a story in which I fell into a giant pit and was eaten by an equally giant spider, a masterpiece made of sheets of that giant paper teachers used to give us to write on with our giant pencils (no wonder the spider was so big, everything in our world except us was big in those days!).  This scurrilous publication of course called for retaliation, but I took the high road and gave my friend David a nobler foe than a creepy old spider in my follow up short “novel” “David and the Lion.”  The literary gods were clearly pleased with me, for after David D. moved away to another part of the country, they continued to inspire me to read and to write, and led me to some of my favorite books earlier than was suggested for my age range.

First there were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, then some secretary who solved crimes whose name I no longer remember, but whose titles always featured color names, such as “Murder in Maroon,” and so forth and so on.  Then, there was the terrifying short story which I’ll swear also had the name “The Woman in White,” but which unlike Wilkie Collins’s novel of that name featured a jealous and vindictive wraith of a first wife who stalked a betrothed man with a bread knife and at one point visited him in a dream, trying to slice him in half.  Though he doubted the veracity of the dream the next morning when he first awoke, when he looked down, half of his mattress was cut in ribbons!

One of my earliest memories was of my first fantasy/science fiction novel, however.  It was  a dinosaur story which had far more of fantasy than science about it, and was read in the days when my friend David was still around with his brotherly recommendations about what to read.  There was nothing cute and cuddly about these dinosaurs, no “The Land That Time Forgot” about any of them.  They were fearsome and toothy and nearly inescapable except for those very accustomed to surviving with them–and here’s where the Jurassic Park element comes into play:  where, in what space and time, is it likely that humans and dinosaurs would ever interact?  Just as in “Jurassic Park,” in this book, whatever its obviously forgettable title was, the anachronism was alive and well, and events conspired to make the book exciting if totally inaccurate.

When I refer to anachronisms, I’m not referring to the part of the book in which two boys, friends, go to a mysterious carnival/state fair where they visit the booth of some piece of machinery like Zoltan the Fortune-teller, who predicts an adventure (or was it an actual human fortune-teller?  I’ve forgotten).  Nor am I referring to the fateful tent they enter which is full of dinosaur bones and skeletons.  Nor am I referring to whatever happens to them to throw them back into the past, into a dinosaur-filled realm in the world, where all around them the world is a constant menace and a threat.  What I am referring to by anachronism is the fact that in this world (as happens by scientific accident in “Jurassic Park”) there are real, live humans alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, picking their way carefully in the giant footsteps of their monster-like neighbors!  The only other fiction I’d ever seen at the time in which a dinosaur was alive at the same time as humans was the cartoon “The Flintstones” on television, in which a very tame and dog-like dinosaur was the family pet, and there were a few other dinosaurs scattered in the storyline here and there, all geared to (human) domestic purposes.  By contrast, this book about the two boys and the dinosaur-age boy they learn to communicate with was thrilling!  What excitement!  What chills as they barely escaped the vicious monsters time after time!  What a life-like picture (I thought in my small person’s head) of a village of stone age (?) people forced to live alongside forces and beings constantly trying to eradicate or simply to eat them!  This was the life!  This was camping out!  This was reading!

Inevitably, of course, the two boys fall asleep or faint in the past, or get hit over the head, or something along those lines, just as they are about to be eaten.  They wake up again in the dinosaur bones tent, or at Zoltan’s booth, somewhere which of course makes them half doubt their big adventure (though it’s at least a minor sort of adventure in adult terms for even two very emotionally connected individuals to go through a sort of folie à deux experience in this way).  And the book is over.  And within a short amount of time, David D. moved away, and before the year was out, we studied dinosaurs, and a teacher concerned to keep us from nightmares and to provide us with the truth as was her duty and prerogative informed us that in fact dinosaurs and humans had never inhabited earth at the same time, far from it!  I promptly lost my interest in dinosaurs and started to think more about ghosts and monsters, things which were in my dreams often enough and could lurk helpfully in the shadows until teachers were otherwise occupied, and which were murky enough to exist in the miasma of a young reader’s mind, however much adults might deny them.

Though I can’t blame my entire lack of interest in science that isn’t carefully explained in detail which makes it alive for a non-specialist on this early disillusionment about dinosaurs and humans, who knows but that I might be scraping down the sides of an early human encampment with a trowel and saving crockery specimens with the best of them had the threat of meeting up with dinosaur bones in the same burial plot been possible there?  What about you?  What are the most memorable reading experiences of your early childhood, and how do you feel they shaped your later reading self, career, or intelligence?  My comment pages are always open!

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