Elliot's Reading January 2022: Bread Givers, stories by James and Mansfield, Middlemarch, Magnificent Ambersons

 January 2022: Bread Givers, Middlemarch, Scarlet Letter, Magnificent Ambersons 

Anzia Yezierska’s collection of stories from 1925, Bread Givers, is a bit of social realism about life in the Jewish/Yiddish immigrant community on the lower East Side of NYC, written intentionally in an awkward and often broken English to capture the sound and voice of the community. Today we would call this book a collection of (about 30?) “linked stories,” which in sequence tell of the life and gradual adaptation and emancipation of a young woman, Sara, in a strictly Orthodox family - who overcomes the shortcomings, financial and emotional, of her birth family to complete college and embark on a career as a school teacher. (First publication was of a 3-volume set, but each would be no longer than a pamphlet by today’s measures.) There is a sense that this collection is autobiographical, though the fate of the protagonist doesn’t quite follow AY’s lifeline; it’s also a much stronger and nuanced book than it appears at first viewing: it’s not a romantic, fiddler on the roof, tree grows in Brooklyn loving re-creation of immigrant life. The father, who at first seems just eccentric - devoted to his studies while wife and daughters slave to maintain the household - gradually is revealed as a tyrant, ruining his children’s lives through his selfishness. All told, quite a book good book - both for its window on its time and place and for a surprisingly strong narrative arc. I have to note here as well that the edition I read, from the library, is a dreadful, shameful work of publishing. The publisher, the Wilder Publications (never heard of them) seems to claim copyright to this book, a claim that seems dubious at best. There is not a word in this poorly designed edition about the author and a reader might suspect that it was published in 2021, the date of the claimed copyright. Great to have this book widely available (I believe it was published in the 1970s), but a disgrace to have it published in such a poorly edited, designed, and truncated manner. 

I posted on Katherine Mansfield in March 2015; yesterday re-read her great story The Garden Party - once again I’ll recommend it. What starts out as looking like a tedious account of the preparations for a big party - don’t these people have anything better to think about and spend money on? - and we can feel superior to the characters in particular because of their condescension toward the “help” and their unquestioned social privilege, and then everything us overturned, for them and for us, when there’s news that a young man living nearby - but in a totally different social set, a neighborhood of workers’ cottages and neglect - has died in an accident (his horse rears when frightened by a train, I think - some heavy-handed symbolism there). The young woman at the center of the story agrees to take some leftovers to the home of the bereaved, and it’s not so much that we see the social disparities and feel the discomfort and apprehension of the young woman (Laura) - as we ponder the ambiguity of her concluding social insight: Isn’t life … - and she doesn’t complete the sentence. How would we? Unfair? Beautiful? Scary? 

And a few more notes on what I’ve been reading this month:

First, at last finished (re)reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. For some weird reason I had the conclusion of the novel all wrong in my mind, seeming to remember that it ended w/ a bequest to establish a hospital for elderly men, with Legate as the supervising physician. What book am I confusing this one with? The novel ends with what many other authors would present as an instance of high comedy - the villain vanquished and the young couples embarked on their married life. But with Eliot this otherwise “happy” ending is salted w/ tears: Can Ladislaw and Dorothea really make a go of their marriage? Aren’t they such different types? Will Ladislaw give up his flirtatious ways? Won’t he be drawn to life in London - which is antithetical to Dorothea? And Eliot pulls no punches in portrayal of Lydgate and Rosamond’s shaky marriage - and with the sense of failure that will follow him through life. The only truly bright spot: Mary Garth’s marriage to the immature but sweet and abiding Pilcher. Maybe he will reform, who knows? Great book that accomplishes all GE set out to achieve, a portrait of an English village in the early 19th century as seen through the intertwined lives of several inhabitants, each distinct and peculiar.

Also re-read several stories that I’d come across in a cheap anthology several years back - still hugely impressed by Hemingway’s Three-Day Blow, a story told almost entirely in oblique dialog, important as much for what is not said as for what is. Henry James’s Brooksmith, the life story of a servant on a downward slide, may not be his greatest story but it’s a great example of high irony, the narrator all full of himself for his courtesy to this household butler but unable to do anything of substance to same the man’s life and never recognizing his complicity. Pushkin’s The Shot another fine story in essence about military life and bravado, a story of revenge and codes of justice and behavior: How far would you go to settle a dispute of honor? 

Also started re-reading The Scarlet Letter, and though it’s compelling in some ways - as a portrayal of the eccentricity of Puritan life in the 17th century in Boston - finding it clumsy and belabored: Can anyone not foresee who’s the father of the out-of-wedlock Pearl? Not sure I want to slog through the whole novel to find out how or whether Hawthorne maintains the narrative tension. 

And finally tried reading Booth Tarkoington’s The Magnificent Ambersons - a really rare instance in which the film version, despite its flaws, improved upon the original. Written ca. 1915 and set in the late 19th-century in a small midwestern town - in fact a town that’s growing and thinks it’s on the verge of prosperity but in fact is on the cusp of manufacturing, pollution, and general decline, told through the rise and fall of the Amberson family. The best scenes - the ball, the sleigh ride - are so much more vivid and dramatic in the Welles film version; in contrast, the plot, despite Tarkington’s genial tone - Twain without the sarcasm and romanticism of youth - the novel feels overly programatic. Also, there are some painful passages of racism and condescension that flag the novel as incendiary and not likely to rise from the ashes. 

December 2021: Updike bio, stories by Malamud and Mann, Booker Prize winner Galgut

 Elliot’s Reading - December 2021

Adam Begley’s biography Updike reads something like 250 A+ college essays in sequence; AB gives us a concise summary and a report on the public and critical reception for each of JU’s many works (novels especially but not exclusively) almost each of which involves some discussion of how the material is drawn from and reflects on JU’s life - quite different from the Bailey Roth bio that I read recently, and for two reasons: First, JU’s life was much more private and free from the controversy and deep trauma of Roth’s; second, Bailey had access to an enormous amount of Roth material and most important he had the full cooperation of Roth and of many of his family members and friends - Roth was extremely concerned about how his life would be memorialized, whereas JU seemed to agree reluctantly to a bio but gave Begley little aside from the works and some archive material - few interviews, and even fewer interviews w/friends and family. And how could one not note the seething, beneath the surface hostility between Begley and JU’s second wife, Martha - who is not even mentioned in the acknowledgments!? Though it’s far thinner on gossip and life drama, Begley’s is still well worth reading for anyone serious about Updike’s work, in particular for the illuminations about his childhood and how that carried him through, or that he carried through, till his death. The final section, on his fatal illness (lung ca), is moving and mysterious, and throughout Begley gives his valuation of most of the works (Bailey was less judgmental about Roth). Overall, JU comes off well, as one would anticipate - thoughtful, forthcoming about his writing, reserved about his personal life. (I met Updike once, seated next to him at a post-reading dinner, and found him polite, witty, a very nice man, but guarded about everything he said to or near a reporter [me].) I would add here a bit of trivia: One of JU’s Harvard classmates and his supposed equal as an English major was Jacob Neusner, who became a rabbi and scholar and on the Brown faculty; JN was extremely prolific, more so than JU! Jacob and I were friendly when I was books ed. at the Journal, and at one point he asked if I would like to visit JU for a feature/magazine story. Of course! So Neusner wrote to or called JU, who responded to me w/ a polite no, via one of his famous postcards (I can’t believe I can’t find it!). About a year later, JU published his next novel, Memories of the Ford Administration, and one of the characters was unquestionably modeled on Neusner. The character’s name: Krieger. 

Reading and Re-reading from the RV Cassill short-story collection - so just a brief post on two of the stories that I re-read but that I wrote in more detail in previous blog entries: First, Bernard Malamud’s The Jewbird, and, as at my previous reading, this story gets a big shrug of the shoulders. Sure, there are some broadly comic lines and images as this bird lands on a NY fire escape and joins (and disrupts) family life: the bird expects to be coddled, and munches on herring pieces, and effects a Yiddish vocabulary, and in the end - takes flight. But does it mean anything? Is there any greater mystery to this metamorphosis, if that’s what it is? It’s just a “what if,” not nearly as poignant and provocative as, say, Roth’s early stories (let alone Kafka) - just a few gags that probably made the story fun to read aloud. Second, Thomas Mann’s Disorder and Early Sorrow - which remains one of the great short stories, an account at great (maybe too great) length of a middle-class German family hosting a dinner/dance party. The focus is on the grandfather, who dotes on his 8-year-old (approx) granddaughter; at end of story granddaughter has hysterical tears when she’s put to bed as she wants to be with one of the men at the party w/ whom she’d danced; grandfather recognizes that this is the first of many passions that will be part of her life - and that he’s completely excluded from her fantasies and yearnings - she’s growing away from him into a life of her own, over the course of which she will inevitably endure the sorrows foreseen in the title. Story is far too long by more standards of our era, but its antiquity is part of its charm.

And a word in praise of Colin Barrett, new to me, whose short story in last week’s ew Yorker, A Shooting in Rathreedane (an Irish village/small town), which to my mind is as good a story about a police procedure that I’ve ever seen - the story closely follows through a work day a mid-career, female police officer off to the scene of a possibly accidental shooting, upon which she finds - small-town police - that she knows the victim, a long-time ne’er do well, and his family; over the course of the story she works valiantly to keep the victim alive and takes part in the on-scene interrogation - the shooter claims to have been trying to scare off an intruder, likely true, but then again, did he have to shoot to the body? - and of course she is thinking all the time about details of her life and of those working with her - all told an excellent, tense, credible piece of short fiction. 

This is the kind of book I usually deplore, a generational story (yawn) with multiple narrative voices (choose one and carry it through!) about an ordinary, everyday family that we follow through the lives and to deaths of all but one all wrapped neatly in 250 pages or less - and that’s what the recent Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, is and the surprise is that I really liked this novel against all my prejudices and trepidations. What a great job he does in bringing this farming family in rural South Africa as over time the struggle and die off and adapt, awkwardly, to the land that is changing and evolving even as they are not. There are 5 main characters, across two generations, and Galgut artfully weaves their story and stories, moving seamlessly among the several narrative voices - he’s really the child Joyce and Faulkner, Sound and the Fury in particular - although obviously he is nearly a century later so readers today are for more adept at making their way through this sometimes circulative narration, that offers a few postmodern winks toward the end (one of the characters aspires to write a novel, though he has no literary training or skills - yet is it his novel that we are reading? how is that possible?). So, yes, it’s not the easiest book to read - it’s definitely “literary fiction” and not the debut of a movie or episodic series - but once you by in an being to clarify the populace (unhelpfully, yeah of the 3 children has a name beginning w/ A) you will, or I was anyway, be drawn into this world, a world most American readers know little of I would guess.