Elliot’s Reading - January 2023: George Eliot, Graham Greene, Bob Dylan
For the past several weeks I’ve been reading George Eliot’s monumental first novel, Adam Bede (1859, about 1290 pp on iPad), which shows her continued growth as a writer - a much wider scope in her lifelong study off village life in England ca. 1800 compared with her earlier collection of 3 long stories that were more tightly focused on clerical life. AB is, as well, concerned with a religious motif - a central character, introduced in the first chapter, Dinah, is part of what was then a new and controversial preacher of the Gospel according to a new Protestant sect, the Wesleyans or Methodists; but it’s really not per se a novel about religion - it’s really a novel about love & marriage, one of the first if not the first great English Romance novels. The eponymous Adam is the most honest and upright guy in the world, but his fatal flaw is that he has no judgment about women. He falls desperately in love with the beautiful Hetty, who is living w/ her aunt and uncle as in essence one of their servants. Everyone’s attracted to her, but she is entirely vapid and uninteresting - Adam doesn’t see that at all. The novel takes its time getting going for sure, but at about the midpoint there’s a huge crisis as Adam spies Hetty in the woods in a tryst with Arthur, a young, self-centered aristocrat (also a good friend of Adam’s), and Adam takes out his fury on Arthur and he feels crushed and humiliated, asHetty was obviously in love with Arthur, primarily for entree into his social class - not at all his goal, however. Eliot is discrete, as required and expected even of a “male” writer to present the sex scenes by inference rather than depiction - but there we have it: Hetty was not only vapid but also licentious (loose) - a topic that interestsGE both for its say about the oppression of women and, I would think, her feelings about a woman who has nothing but her looks to attract men - GE being notably homely, I say without bias, it’s just a fact - and readers may expect there is some glee as well as accuracy in her depiction of Hetty and her fate. So why read this novel? For one thing it’s way beyond its prototype as throughout we get a strikingly detailed presentation of life as it was led in the “simpler” times of travel by foot or sometimes on horseback. Throughout, we get amazing insights and epigrammatic perceptions from GE about all aspects of life - with here being a few at random examples: “I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing, too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be liked those little words, “light” and”music”…; or, “How is it that the poets have said so many find things about our fist love, so few about later love?”; or, “…and his broad-shouldered aspect something of the bull-dog—‘Don’t you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.” It’s a long way from Adam Bede to Middlemarch, but we see in this novel GE’s first attempt at what today we see as naturalism: Here limited to two characters and to the conventions of marital bliss; later, in her masterpiece, a portrayal of an entire culture and community, with many surprises and many consequences of false first love and poor decisions about life, a world in which not everything turns out for the best, a world much like ours today.
Somewhere around the time that Graham Greene was writing The Confidential Agent he decided to separate his fiction work (aside from short stories) into either Novels or Entertainments. From what I’ve read, the Greene estate no longer recognizes those categories and treats all as novels (good idea), though the categorization seemed to have helped GG organize his thoughts and ideas. Aside from his “entertainments,” he wrote a # of screenplays, I believe, and at least one of his “entertainments,” The Third Man, became a movie classic (and I think others have adapted his novels, such as The Quiet American, to film). The problem, though, is that he must have considered his “entertainments,” such as The Confidential Agent (1939) as plot-driven, non-literary diversions and sometimes, therefore, pleasing neither readership. Thus, the CA, which has some great, recognizable GG scenes - the threats leveled against the protagonist (always called D.) on his nighttime arrival in England, the train ride and visit to a foundering coal town in the Midlands, the cockeyed plan to escape from England by boat … - yet, at the end, the story line - an “agent” for an at-war European country (Spain?) comes to England to strike secret deal to provide coal to his country (and thereby re-opening some of the dormant mines - is so convoluted and at times thinly sketched that I can’t imagine anyone even trying to adapt this novel, and in fact it’s damn difficult to read as well and troubled by some flaws, e.g., the “love interest” is so scattered and bizarre and obscure that we never quite understand her desires and motives (same with D.’s), the most interesting and appealing character - the teenage maid in a cheap hotel where D. lies low as the scheme unfurls - gets done away with too early - suicide or murder? - that the story feels deflated. It’s worth a look for GG fans and completers, but not great entertainment per se.
Despite/In spit of its ridiculous/whimsical/provocative title, Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022) turns out to be not a toss-off but a terrific source of insight as to what we might more accurately called Themes and Motifs in Popular (mostly) American Music of the 20th Century. Dylan has selected 66 songs to depict and give substance to his major themes; though he never summarizes with an over-riding thesis statement (of essay), several themes, familiar to most Dylan devotees, emerge, notably sympathy for rebels, outsiders, criminals justly or unjustly accused or dispatched, lost love, and vagabonds. Some of these are obvious choices to illustrate this master theme (e.g., Don’t Take Your Guns to Town) and some far more subtle and unexpected, such as a chapter on The Street Where You Live, in which Dylan imagines “you” (many of the essays are in 2nd person) as a guy standing in an alley or street corner waiting for a fix. A second theme throughout concerns the very nature of popular music - CW, rock, folk (a little), Broadway, Crooners, to name a few. His take on Black Magic Woman is among the best accounts I’ve ever read regarding what music means to listeners and thinkers. Many of the brief essays include a background look at the music industry, short accounts of the careers of some of the musicians, discussion of battles over copyrights, a look at stardom and at most talent. These are emphatically not Dylan’s Top 66 songs; rather, these essays recognize and define the driving force that pushed these songs to the forefront (or in some cases didn’t do so). Some of the essays are odd and fanciful: Long Tall Sally as an take on an obscure reference in Genesis to a tribe of tall women. Others are just plain surprising: We all know that Dylan has been a Sinatra fan, but who knew he was also into Perry Como and Rick (not Ricky, thank you) Nelson? There is only one “folk” song (Seeger’s Big Muddy anti-war piece), only one poem (more of a spoken word song, I’d say) and it’s not on any “modern” poet (e.g. no Robert Frost of T.S. Eliot, whom Dylan has quoted from in a radio broadcast: April is the cruelest month. And there’s nothing about the musicians most often compared with Dylan or who performed with Dylan: No Baez, no Simon, no To Petty, not Leonard Cohen. There’s one song from the 1920s though it picks up largely in the ‘40s and there’s only 2 or 3 in the 21st Century (The Who, The Clash, the other Elvis). And only the briefest reference to Dylan’s own corpus (a mention of Subterranean …). Among the surprises are an essay w/ numerous citations of passages in classical music that appear in modern song (he must have had some help in tracking down this info, right?). All told, a terrifically informative book not only for Dylanologists and lot of fun to read; I’d recommend listening to each song before reading Dylans’s take - all are easily available online, many with videos of live performance,
