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.