Honey in the Horn: A Chat

Posted in Gone With the Wind, H.L. Davis, Honey in the Horn, Margaret Mitchell with tags , , , , , , on April 25, 2011 by Diablevert

Diablevert: I just finished the book.

Dreadful: I finished it yesterday (praise the Lord… I was not a fan).

Diablevert: I read the last 60 pages or so over the course of an hour or two. I wanted to speed up but too much was happening.

Dreadful: That’s pretty damn fast… I kept getting bogged down in scenery.

Diablevert: Really? I rather liked it. The scenery was a bit slow, true.

Dreadful: Alrighty then… we’ve got a discussion on our hands.

Diablevert: You go first then. What did you hate?

Dreadful: I think I just had a stylistic epiphany about all the scenic description in these books….we don’t need as much these days, because we have color photos and Google and know what shit looks like

Diablevert: Hunh.

Dreadful: I think the modern reader is pretty much given to skip over most descriptions of trees and rocks and scrub and such.

Diablevert: I agree that there was quite a lot in this book. It bothered me less, I think, than in some of the others. Because it was much more varied, and because there seemed to be more point to it.

Dreadful: The scenery wasn’t the only thing I disliked (I am that ornery). I wasn’t a huge fan of the narrative structure. I never strongly felt the passage of time in the book.

It seemed like Clay was the same emotional age throughout, but really, didn’t years pass?

Diablevert: I think it takes place over the course of maybe two years or so? Clay is a born crank, I can see your not liking him. But I’m not sure how much you expected him to change, going from 17 to 19 or whatever. His character is pretty much fully formed at the start of the book.

Dreadful: See, I thought a lot more time than that passed. Didn’t Clay and Luce spend more than a few seasons camped out in that marshy coast (in Washington state)?

Diablevert: No, I think it was only one winter. They get there in the late fall and stay the winter, and during that time meet the other coast settlers. Sometime in the spring the cattle ranchers there decide to move off and try and find some more land, and they go with them.

Dreadful: Huh. Ok.

Diablevert: It makes a lot more sense that there were only there one winter, since apparently they didn’t knock boots once during the whole time they were playing house by themselves. That was a big surprise to me; I thought it was simply implied, but then Davis goes and inserts a deliberate sex scene and makes a big deal of it. So I assume they weren’t meant to be Doing It the whole winter.

Dreadful: I also assumed they’d been Doing It that whole time, but Davis just chose to describe that one time closely for narrative impact? Man, I kinda blew by it, and that is thoroughly unlike me. Normally, I read for boobs. (That’s how I got through Clan of the Cave Bear in 7th grade.)

Diablevert: I don’t think so, because Luce doesn’t get pregnant till after that, and Davis says something about her finally being sure of him, and so she lets him, and he almost doesn’t want to because of the build-up, but he knows rejecting her would be too cruel. Most explicit sex scene so far, I believe. Not that it was explicit by modern standards. But definitely less allusive, more concrete.

Dreadful: Wait… there must have been some similarly spicy stuff in Scarlet Sister Mary?

Diablevert: There’s a scene with Mary and June, July’s brother (or vice versa, can’t remember now) where they sit on the porch and she decides to let him, and I think there’s a kiss. And then the next page is a new chapter and it’s all “Meanwhile, Mary had become the town whore.”

Dreadful: Ha!

Diablevert: Something like that, anyway. They describe her belly bump early on, but the activities that led to it are pretty much passed over.

Dreadful: That’s where kissing will lead you, ladies!

Diablevert: Word.

Dreadful: So I said two things I didn’t like about the book (trees and time)… give me some stuff you liked about it!

Diablevert: What I thought was interesting about this book is that I felt like it wound up veering between nihlism and amorality, and the ending where they decide Making an Effort Is What Makes It All Worthwhile felt tacked on

Dreadful: Hmmm… nihilism might be a philosophically strong word? Amorality definitely, though…. horses were pretty much more important than people throughout.

Diablevert: A good third of the book is Clay bitching about the frontier settlers either being weird, wound-up assholes who destroy the land and are too stupid and beat down to make a success of anything they do, or else making a success of things by being tightfisted bloodsuckers willing to cheat and scratch and scrounge and gouge somebody’s eye out for a nickel.

Everybody’s kind of an asshole, kind of not, a little bit, maybe 5 percent, which was interesting. And I thought that scene where the old lady gets up from her fever bed and walks her land for the last time was quite striking and powerful

Dreadful: I agree with that… I liked the paragraph about her where it says that she hated the fieldhands, but would still give them a serious breakfast, and basically hated everything else but still did right by the world.

And the description of Wade Shiveley’s lynching was hardcore.

Diablevert: That, to me, was also interesting. I don’t quite trust Clay — or his narrator, whichever you prefer — but to me it was an interesting account of what the frontier must really have been like.

Dreadful: Also, I felt like it was like an occupational handbook for the frontier. You could be a sack-filler! Or a grass-cutter! Or shepherd! Or tollbridge collector! Or horsetrader! Or a cheap hooker! So many opportunities!

Diablevert: The whole moral arc of this book is interesting. Our hero and his love interest are both murders in their way, and they don’t even feel that bad about it.

Dreadful: Didn’t you feel like the book just kinda ended? Like it could have gone on for hundreds more pages or they could have cleared up who killed who at any point and it would have been just about the same?

Diablevert: There definitely is a way in which the travelogue structure is a deliberate device in order to show us all this stuff. It has a knowledge-dump quality which is a little forced and unappealing. But each of Clay’s pit-stops had something of interest, I thought.

Dreadful: A new crackpot at every stop!

Diablevert: I especially liked the super-bitter atheist Civil War Veteran.

Dreadful: We generally think of novels as being plot-driven or character-driven, and this was sorta neither.

Diablevert: Yes, there was some plot in it, but the plot didn’t drive it. In a way I can’t believe this book won, because weren’t they still including the word “wholesome” in the description back then? This book is the furthest thing from wholesome.

Dreadful: Word to that. It is a vivid picture of American life, though… even if it makes everyone look like a cheat, murderer, or wastrel.

Diablevert: Yeah, I think that’s what I liked about it. Writing qua writing, it’s not first-rate work, but the setting is something I’d never even thought about before, and his attitude toward it and description of it is so unexpected it’s fascinating.

Dreadful: It was also interesting to me that some minor characters got names, but more important ones never did, like the horse-trader or the Indian boy with the crippled hands. (I don’t think any of the native characters had names, actually.)

Diablevert: Yeah. To return to the over-arching theme of this blog, The Past: Super Fucking Racist, the attitudes toward Native Americans throughout where fairly appalling.

Dreadful: WORD! That would be an awesome new title, btw. Insanely racist.

Diablevert: on the other hand, it was interesting in that in the time he’s describing, Native cultures are still alive enough that you can describe them as having all these differences and subtleties, even as you’re being all, “every Indian is completely worthless, btw.”

Dreadful: I think every single native woman was a cheap whore…. or not even getting paid for it.

Diablevert: Did that not strike you though, his moral attitude? Because aside from that, there’s a lot in this book that would be a drag in a similar way as say, Lamb was — too episodic, too descriptive. (But I thought Honey‘s characters had more interior life in general, and Davis was, very much so, a great noticer of things, which an essential ingredient of being a good writer.) You seem to have noticed this attitude but not been particularly surprised by it

Dreadful: I think I disliked Honey in the exact same way that I disliked Lamb in His Bosom… while I will concede that Davis is a more skilled noticer, there just wasn’t enough else going on for me.

With Now in November, I loved the poetry of the writing. Not much had to happen for me to be down. Or even So Big, which is nowhere near my favorite book… I just cared more about the people in the book. Not that I can’t enjoy a book about unsympathetic characters, but Clay wasn’t enough of a character for me to either empathize with or really love to hate.

Diablevert: I didn’t mind him. I can see what you’re saying, though.

I dunno, even right up until the end I was expecting him to have to kill Luce and them himself or something. Well, not the very end. I suppose it would be better to say, reading the book gave me the sense there would be no price to pay even though both of them have killed a couple people, but 30 years experience reading other books gave me the sense that there had to be a shoe dropping somewhere

Dreadful: Yes! And that’s why the end was so unsatisfying after all that, I think. You can’t help but think, “Really? That’s it? She just confessed to a DOUBLE HOMICIDE.” I wanted to go all Law & Order on that shit and get old Orlando Geary back in there.

Diablevert: Not a double homicide. Two separate homicides.

Dreadful: Good call. You win on police procedurals.

Diablevert: I was more impressed that he stuck to his guns and went for the “romantic” ending.

Dreadful: If by “romantic,” you mean “someone’s still gotta shoot a horse.”

Diablevert: Hey, it wasn’t the bay mare, at least.

Dreadful: Animals do not fare well in prize-winning books. (On a sidebar of awesomeness, there was a 6th grader in my library today wearing a “Save Wilbur” t-shirt.)

Diablevert: And I did like how everything came back around again. The crazy drive down the mountain that was the first interesting part of the book recast at the end.

Dreadful: I actually hated how everything was connected in the end! Like, all of that rambling episodic whatever and now everyone knows each other and it’s like a French farce but with a wagon train instead of a Parisian boudoir.

Diablevert: It reassured me a bit that Davis was good enough to be doing stuff on purpose. Clay met everybody twice, which did seem a bit contrived. I mean, I’m sure there weren’t a super-lot of  people in remote interior Oregon in those days, but c’mon.

Dreadful: Exactly. That pissed me off. I thought Davis substituted coincidence for actual dramatic events one or two too many times.

Diablevert: I can see that. It didn’t bother me that much. I suppose a lot of what you think of this book depends on your interest in seeing total weirdos accurately described. I quite like that. The looney lone settler Clay and the Indian boy meet when he first takes off, or the Civil War Veteran, or Capt. Waller.

Dreadful: Normally, I would say my “intimate portrait of weirdo” interest level is quite high. Now I think, not so much.

Diablevert: You only like gothy chick weirdos, man. If they’re not dying of consumption you’re not interested.

Dreadful: HA! You wound me, my dear, but the wound bleeds truth. I liked Jeff Bridges in True Grit!

Diablevert: He’s a lot like what’s-his-face, Burden. Literally what’s his face.

Dreadful: But, yeah, mostly I like my weirdos in moldering wedding dresses or such like.

Diablevert: Actually, I thought Burden was interesting, too, come to think of it. There was an incredible degree of complexity to that man’s character — or at least to his actions — and I thought it was interesting that Davis lets it ride and ends up having him be a friend to Clay….I mean, basically he works himself up into having Wade Shively arrested/lynched because Wade pissed him off over a parking space. But once he decides to do it, he’s cunning and methodical and cold as ice about making sure it happens. Yet because he is loyal to Clay I think we’re supposed to end up liking him? Clay does, at least.

Dreadful: Wade did seem to get the shaft throughout. His own dad rushed to disown him.

Diablevert: Word. Although Wade also seemed like an asshole, and he did for sure kill his brother. Yet he got his moment of glory at the end.

Dreadful: Moral relativism is a bitch.

Diablevert: You end up hung from a haystack. Or at least I think he was hung from a haystack, I got a little fogged on the set-up there, having no familiarity with haystacks outside of the Impressionism section of the Met’s poster carrel.

Dreadful: Just don’t drop your needle in one! Ha ha ha…. ha. sigh. I didn’t love the book, so we covered everything I was gonna say (scenery, episodic-ness, the past is mad racist, etc.)

Diablevert: Well, I could go on about it, but you were seem bored and irritated by the book, so I think we can skip it.

Dreadful: At least we have the crazy-sauce that is Gone with the Wind to look forward to.

Diablevert: Yeah….There is that.

Dreadful: I do feel a little bad about not liking it (or many of these other early Pulitzers)… like there’s something lazy about myself as a reader for not getting into most of these books. I mean, I don’t need a ton of explosions or anything… but I would love some books that are at least a little more plot-y, or more character-y… or more something-y.

Diablevert: I wonder what Gone with the Wind will be like. Besides terrifyingly long.

Dreadful: Yeah… one edition at my library clocks in at 1440 pages. And I’ve already read Gone with the Wind once! But that was literally about 800 books ago, so I gotta re-read it or you’ll demolish me in our discussions.

Diablevert: Demolish you? HULK DOES NOT INTEND TO DOMINATE DISCOURSE.

HULK IS SAD.

Dreadful: Your rapier-like wit is the verbal equivalent of “Hulk Smash” to my ever-echoing “meh”

I just mean I already don’t remember a thing beyond Scarlett, Ashley, Tara, birthin’ no babies, and some glorification of the KKK. Whee doggies. Gone with the Wind is a hot pulpy mess.

Diablevert: Sweet. I caught most of the movie once and I’m kicking myself because I’m afraid I’ll remember too much of the plot and it’ll be a slog.

Dreadful: Nope… the movie has like a third of the plot and skips most of the Reconstruction stuff.

Diablevert: Oh……oh, dear.

Dreadful: SPOILER ALERT.

Diablevert: Alright. My loins, I must gird them.

Dreadful: You just sit back and enjoy the Confederacy.

Diablevert: It’ll tie in nicely with my addiction to the Times’ Civil War blog

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Honey in the Horn: Summary

Posted in H.L. Davis, Honey in the Horn with tags , , , on April 21, 2011 by Diablevert

Set in early 1900s Oregon, the last gasp of the American frontier, Honey in the Horn is the story of Clay, a 17-year-old who was orphaned at a young age and brought up rough. A young man with a chip on his shoulder the size of Mt. Rainer, at the opening of the book he is working as a shepherd in the hill country, running sheep for old Preston Shively, a now elderly and crotchety example of one the territory’s first settlers. Clay has a fair bit of history with the Shively family — shortly before his mother’s death, she took up with one of the Shively brothers, Old Preston’s no-good sons, and Clay stayed with them for a while after she passed.

Though Clay’s been out on his own for years, he’s soon to discover that his old ties can’t be so easily shaken off. At the start of the book, one of the brothers, Wade, has been on the lam in the back country for months, wanted for murder of his brother in a drunken brawl. When an old prospector turns up dead — and his $800 in gambling winnings missing — Wade is the prime suspect, and when he’s arrested the local sheriff insists that Clay come visit him in jail in order to see if he can tempt Wade into confessing where he stashed the loot.

That’s when things get interesting, because just before the sheriff hauls him off, Old Preston Shively hands Clay a gun, insisting that he slip it to Wade during his visit. The gun is unloaded; both Clay and Preston figure that Wade’s certain to attempt a jailbreak and get himself killed. And that’s exactly what Preston wants. Torn and uncertain, Clay lets himself be bullied into participating in the scheme, taking off with Wade’s horse and high-tailing it for the back country until the jailbreak and its aftermath have blown over.

Clay figures he’ll have to hide out for a few weeks; soon he gets news from a fellow runaway and former ward of Preston’s, an Indian boy, that his plan has gone awry. Wade tried to break jail, alright — but he succeeded, and now Clay himself is wanted for aiding a fugitive. Clay and the Indian boy decide to cross over the mountains before winter sets in a find work on the coast; they set off together, but after only a day or two, go their separate ways. Partly this is because the two boys don’t get along too well — but mostly it’s because of another of Clay’s encounters during their journey, with a horse trader and his family.

The horse trader is also headed for the coast, traveling with his common-law wife and his beautiful daughter, Luce, who’s around Clay’s age. Clay’s seen them around before and been struck by Luce’s beauty, and now, with few other prospects, decides to travel with them, in the hope of winning Luce’s heart. (Not that any phrase so sentimental as “winning Luce’s heart” would pass within a mile of the cantankerous Davis’ prose.)

At first they bond, and then they bicker. Clay hides the real reason for running away, and he’s convinced Luce is hiding secrets from him, too. A fight over who ought to trust who splits them apart, and Clay is briefly tempted to hook up with another woman. But a sighting of some sheriff’s men drives him back out on the road, and when horse trader catches up to him, he and Luce come to an understanding. They pass the winter together by themselves in a cabin on the shore of the Pacific, hunting, tending the horses, and playing house, and when the spring comes Luce and Clay decide to break out on their own, leaving her father behind and joining a wagon train of settlers headed for the interior.

While on the wagon train, they encounter Wade Shively again, and Clay’s attempt to keep Luce from harm — and from learning of his secret — culminate in a murder, a cover-up and a lynching. Shortly thereafter, Luce becomes pregnant and miscarries, running away from Clay whom she blames for abandoning her during her illness.

Refusing to chase after her, Clay wanders the west, passing eight or nine months working a series of temporary jobs, including hop-bagger and riverboat mate before fetching up as a hay harvester at a remote prairie outpost, where he encounters both Luce and the Indian boy again, and yet another gambling debt gone bad results in another murder, and the prompting book’s climactic confrontation and confession.

A description of Honey’s plot reveals it to be pure melodrama, but Davis as a stylist is allergic to glamor, and skeptical of passion. Though the story takes place in a beautiful landscape, it’s populated with grubby and cynical characters.  Davis employs the long,  rambling travelogue passages which take up much of the book to give a warts-n-all take on the character of the hardy frontier settlers who broke the west, with damn near everyone Clay encounters revealed to be venal and petty, their characters twisted by isolation, fuzzing the brains of some while turning other into petty autocrats, and making most careless of justice and the value of human life, beaten down by nature and ever-questing (and ruthless in their quest) for the big score that will allow them to attain comfort.

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Now in November: A Chat

Posted in Josephine Johnson, Now in November with tags , , , , , , on April 5, 2011 by Diablevert

DreadfulPenny: SO MY NEW FAVORITE BOOK OMG?!?!?

Diablevert: OMG indeed. I defer to you to start us off, partly b/c I don’t think I can stop you. But at some point I will have to tell you about my flags.

DreadfulPenny: I will now gush like a tweener over the Team Edward/Jacob divide.

OK, so Now in November is, if you stop and think about the plot or slight lack thereof in any way, crushingly bleak and depressing. And a good deal of it is scenic description, which we totally panned in Lamb in Her Bosom…

Diablevert: Guh-hunh

DreadfulPenny: … but for me, this was all about the immediacy of the narrator and the style. I just think it was full of goddamn gorgeous writing, like, I was writing bits of it down in a notebook throughout.

Diablevert: Really? Not sarcastically really, but like, really, which bits? I’d be curious.

DreadfulPenny: Still have the book? The first paragraph at the start of part II, for example. Little phrases like “a wry perfection in the slow murder of all things” just work for me. Or the scene on the next page where Merle is putting up the cherries…

Diablevert: Okay. So this is where we may have to take up battle stations. Because while I do agree – and your support for this book helped me to see – that while on a sentence level some of these are arresting, page after page after page of it became just a wee bit de trop.

DreadfulPenny: Now I will freely concede that this kind of thing is not to the taste of all readers… but it hit my Jane Eyre/belle-laide/Marilynne Robinson sweet spot in lines like “There must be some reason why I was made quiet, and homely and slow and then given this stone of love to mumble.” sigh, crushes book to chest because IT SO GETS ME.

I thought it was the perfect length for this kind of writing. And I love that there’s no real resolution or ending…. because life is miserable and then you die! Isn’t it beautiful? * spins around like a long-haired girl in a maxipad commercial *

Sorry, sorry. I’ll stop now.

Diablevert: See, that is like….”stone of love to mumble” is quite, quite lovely…but it doesn’t make we want to crush the book to my chest. I just find my chest crushed. Because….you are fucked, and you’re not wrong, and there ain’t much you can do, but if it was me I would have run the motherfuck away, and clearly you’re not going to do that, and instead I just get to stand by holding your hand while you get sucked into the mire.

This book reminds me of Atryu’s death scene, basically. But I’m older now so I can defensively close myself off to the gutwrenching, if I want, and with this I kind of do want.

Side google: Artax. The horse was Artax, the kid was Atreyu, apparently.

DreadfulPenny: ARTAX! YOU’RE SINKING! I was gonna call your nerd street cred into question for a minute there.

Diablevert: Fight against the sadness, Artax!

DreadfulPenny: It’s funny… I never felt depressed by this book. What happens in it is bleak and awful, and I understand that academically, but I really wasn’t saddened by it…

Diablevert: I dunno, maybe that’s part of the book, too – the dominant emotion was this overwhelming resignation. The character I had the most sympathy for was Kerrin, that mad, bad bitch, because at least she still got mad at stuff.

DreadfulPenny: I also keep trying to think about this book coming out in 1934, in the height of the Depression, and how beautifully it transforms that sadness in a clearheaded, unsentimental way.

Diablevert: Seriously, though — after our first chat I was like, as I go through this I should flag some of the stuff so I better can illustrate the kinds of things I mean, where I felt the desolation was just grinding me down, and I had four flags in seven pages and I was like, f-it, I’m-a end up flagging the whole book.

DreadfulPenny: I think it’s mostly lyrical, not sentimental…. I mean, I feel like I’d rather read this book about miserable rural poverty than Lamb any day, and rather celebrate it as literature.

Diablevert: I agree with you that it’s clearheaded and unsentimental – or at least, unsentimental in the usual way we mean that word, not given to gilded nostalgia, to the elevation of the sweet, the kind. But in other ways, the only thing it is concerned with is sentiment. I’m still not sure where they live. Every single thing is about how the main character feels about the situation, to the point where oftentimes the actual situation is kind of fuzzily described.

DreadfulPenny: You’re going to hate The Road when we get to it, then.

Diablevert: Re: The Road: Possibly, I’ve only tried to read Cormac McCarthy once. Once.

DreadfulPenny: I’ve read the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. While I like most of that, The Road made me want to cry in my pillow fort for days and days.

Diablevert: Oh, goody goody gumdrops.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, you’re right about the sentimentality too. Although as it nears the end and things start to go to shit for everyone and the taxman shows up, I feel like you get a better idea of where they are in the economic scheme of things. Like, not eating their shoe leather starving, but still damn hungry.

Diablevert: Sigh. I feel like I’m coming off here like a soft bastard, which I find rather appalling. I’d like to think I can take the bad with the good.

DreadfulPenny: And I don’t know why I like it so much (except I really do feel that, on the sentence level, it’s the best book we’ve read since Bridge of San Luis Rey). I mean, I’m gonna make the ultimate confession here: I might actually buy a copy.

Diablevert: Go for it. I know that’s big, coming from you.

DreadfulPenny: It’s true.

Diablevert: I dunno – see, one of the things I like about Wilder is his insightfulness. Johnson share that to a large degree – Grant is a very finely drawn character – but for me I kind of felt like the character’s self-obsession got in the way sometimes. Take Kerrin: Like, until the very end I wasn’t quite sure if there was something actually wrong with her, or if she just couldn’t stand being in that house, which had a lot of sympathy for.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, I couldn’t quite figure out what specifically was eating Kerrin besides an excess of spleen, but that contributed to the unease and suspense of the thing for me… helping to move a long what is a slight plot using just tone and foreshadowing.

Diablevert: Which has nothing to do with the beauty of her sentences, now that I think about it.

DreadfulPenny: Well, a book that’s just full of beautiful sentences can be super tedious… but that’s where I thought the length worked to its advantage. Also, I’m blown away by how adeptly Johnson can describe the feeling of debt. Like, the weight and heft of it, like a beast with a burden. I still can’t think of a single book I’ve ever read that does this so well, or even attempts it so often.

Diablevert: But to return to Kerrin — Sorry I’m so tangential — you knew something had to happen there, and it was going to be bad. But it was sometimes hard to tell how bad, or what kind of bad – the ultimate resolution, in which we determine for sure that Kerrin was no-shit crazy, but the only person she ends up harming is herself, is kind of the most ….and this is a merciless word….disappointing. For a minute there, I thought she’d stabbed Grant, and that would have been some crazy-bad-assery to go with her batshit crazy. Or like, taking off with a bunch of money would have been on the less-crazy, more-happy side, but crazy-plus-suicide is just sad.

DreadfulPenny: Well, she did clasp Grant in a sooty embrace and throw a knife at her dad’s head before she did it. She just happened to miss. I mean, she killed the dog in Part 1.

Diablevert: Well, that was her and her Dad. (Poor dog.) But I just wanted her to go out in some kind of blaze, glory, madness, actual fire, whatever.

DreadfulPenny: I get why the narrator thought her madness was selfish though. I could imagine Magret thinking “I’m stuck here with no menfolk or prospects same as you, and I’m too slow to teach school, and you don’t hear me complaining… mostly because you can’t hear my internal monologue, but still.” I mean, I had vague sympathies for Kerrin, but mostly I was just annoyed that she wouldn’t get any work done, and that she was clearly such a creeeepy teacher. Like the governess in Turn of the Screw or something.

Diablevert: Well, this gets back to the whole It’s a Wonderful Life thing again – I have a strong bias towards, what-the-hell-you-only-live-once, seize-the-day-ed-ness, and tend to have more sympathy for the character who longs to break free, even if that is a bit selfish, than the one who knuckles under and does their share without complaint, George Baily, you could’ve been an architect and traveled around the world it would have been awesome, it does suck that that never happened….mutter, mutter

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, then you’re totally not going to love a book that ecstatically states: “Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!” But I generally like reading about recluses and compulsive hoarders and nuns under vows of silence, so am predisposed to like this book. I wouldn’t want to live like that, but I find it utterly fascinating to read about.

Diablevert: I should just curl up with my copy of Auntie Mame and suck my thumb.

DreadfulPenny: Or go out on a tear and get smashed in Paris! I’ll be bounded in my nutshell.

Diablevert: It’s funny because what with your busting out of upstate to come to the Big City and seek your fortune – and I don’t think you could be winkled out of it now with a long needle – I’d say at first blush you’re more of a seize the dayist yourself.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah, my fortune as a school librarian. Ho, the glamorous life.

Diablevert: Two impulses at war within!

DreadfulPenny: No, I totally get that, and it’s really weird for a happily married person to be swept up in, and so strongly identify with, such a lonely sad loveless story… but, like I mentioned before, I’m a Jane Eyre girl through and through.

Diablevert: See, Jane’s a seizer, too, though – when ol’ St. What’s-his-face wants to yolk her to his missionary work she takes a dive for the moors.

DreadfulPenny: That’s true… but she also responds to “mustard-seed” and “fearful hag” as terms of endearment. Self-loathing, much?

But I was exceedingly glad to be slightly starry-eyed over any Pulitzer. At all.We’re probably done talking about it… it made you sad, it made me rapturous, and that’s that until we’re face to face and I insist on reading large swaths of it to you until you throttle me.

TEACH ME TO LOVE THE RIND! LOVE IS A STONE!

Diablevert: Dude. Shall I close?

DreadfulPenny: After you…

Diablevert: “Day after day it went on. Hot wind, hot sun, hot nights and days, drying ponds and rivers, slowly, carefully killing whatever dared to thrust up a green leaf or shoot. Only the willows lived. There were times when I wanted to crumple up like an ash, or scream. It was unbearable, I tell you! Death in the hot wind, in the blazing sunlight and dry air. The fields scorched white.”

….and scene. Not my excalmation point, I wish to point out.

DreadfulPenny: Touche. But how about this?

“But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills they may come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter…since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.”

So, actually, kinda hopeful at the end. But I totally bogarted your ending, and that was not mannerly.

Diablevert: I would quote duel with you all night and I want you to know that.

DreadfulPenny: It was actually much more fun to disagree and have someone love the book than both experience the great “meh”… I hope it happens again!

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Now in November Summary

Posted in Josephine Johnson, Now in November with tags , , on April 3, 2011 by Dreadful Penny

Our 1934 Pulitzer-winning novel, Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson, gives us a vision of a Depression-era farm through the eyes of a young woman, Magret Haldmarne. She and her family (father, mother, older sister Kerrin, and younger sister Merle) come to their family land, mortgaged to the hilt, after they lose everything in the bank crash, including Father’s job in a lumber factory. Now in November interweaves meditations on the nature of beauty, love, truth, and happiness around the sparse and sad events on a drought-ridden year on the farm in which tragedy befalls the Haldemarnes and their neighbors.

As their harvest and stock wither and die around them, their neighbors are evicted from their land, a milk strike fails to help the farmers and appalls Father with its waste, and the unbalanced Kerrin loses her job and valuable salary at the town school. Fear of debt, pain, and starvation haunt Magret, who also harbors a painfully unspoken love for their hired hand, Grant Koven. However, Grant has hopes, unrequited, for Merle. When the drought reaches its peak, fire breaks out and Mother is badly burned in attempting to fight the blaze. This loss unhinges Kerrin completely and she commits suicide. Lack of hope or opportunity with the farm or Merle drive Grant to leave the farm and Magret is bereft at his loss. After much pain and suffering from her burns, Mother dies, the rain finally comes, and Magret is left to attempt hope in the face of a bleak future.

All in all, a plot summary doesn’t really do justice to the beauty of Johnson’s prose, so here are a few passages I felt were stunners:

I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here–more than a chance, it is thrust upon you–to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth.

or:

The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.

or:

There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble.

or:

I do not see in our lives any great ebb and flow or rhythm of earth. There is nothing majestic in our living. The earth turns in great movements, but we jerk about on its surface like gnats, our days absorbed and overwhelmed by a mess of little things–that confusion which is our living and which prevents us from being really alive. We grow tired, and our days are broken up into a thousand pieces, our years chopped into days and nights, and interrupted. Our hours of life snatched from our years of living. Intervals and things stolen between–between what?–those things which are necessary to make life endurable?–fed, washed, and clothed, to enjoy the time which is not washing and cooking and clothing.

or, finally:

I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.

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Lamb in His Bosom: Second Chat

Posted in Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom on March 27, 2011 by Diablevert

DreadfulPenny: Lamb in Her Bosom is like an ad for birth control AND an ad for why God hates birth control at the same time.

Diablevert: Hunh. That’s deep man.

DreadfulPenny: I actually think the best thing about the book is Cean’s internal monologues about motherhood. The one about how it feels to be pregnant, then her reluctance to have more children after the first two, and then her post-partum depression… all were surprisingly modern.

Diablevert: Which one did she have post-partum depression with? they kind of blur for me

DreadfulPenny:  After number 3, I think, and then after the stillborn twins.

Diablevert: No recollection. Honestly, I’m not even sure if that one whose name starts with a W is a boy or a girl

DreadfulPenny: Wealthy Tennessee is TOTALLY a girl’s name. Duh.

Diablevert: Is it? If you say so. This book seems to be able to hold my attention like, every third paragraph or so.

DreadfulPenny: Actually, I only know that because I’m taking notes for the summary later. I’ve actually drawn a family tree that I should probably just scan, and that can serve for the plot description of the whole novel. It’s kinda like a soap opera, but everyone has bad teeth and likes to butcher hogs.

Diablevert: No. Soap operas have plot. Soap operas are nothing but plot. You are constantly wondering how events will compel a character to act in a certain way, and what affect this will have on the rest of the characters. Lamb, not so much. More like: Paragraph of theoretically plot-like occurrences, three chapters of musings on nature, motherhood, the coast, the race question, old age, etc.

DreadfulPenny: (I’ve actually never watched a soap opera, so that was a totally ignorant observation.) There is a lot of sexing and emotional sturm und drang, including that brother catfight.

Diablevert: But not really, though. Like, when you go to write this out, it’s going to sound like it has a plot. Condensed into a dozen paragraphs, maybe it does. But the reading experience is the most meandering damn thing I’ve every encountered.

DreadfulPenny: I agree… I think I said in our last chat that it’s extremely episodic, and the plot never really congeals.

Diablevert: The further I get into it, the more the fact that it has no plot is driving me nuts. Like, I actually really wanted to put the book down at like p 241, but then I was like, dammit, I have to finish this chapter. It was only ten pages, but it felt like such a drudge.

DreadfulPenny:  It’s actually not bothering me so much, because I do feel like these characters’ lives are so vividly described. Again, it’s by no means the most interesting thing I ever read, but it’s not unbearable either. I feel like it’s the first Pulitzer in which poverty has been so crushingly described.

Diablevert: It’s not unbearable, and there are bits where I find it engaging, but it just fails to grip. That’s the other thing I don’t get about this book. How are we supposed to take this setting? Because it often sounds pretty fucking brutal, but it’s all described in such gauzy syrupy terms that I’m not sure how to take it.

DreadfulPenny:  I actually get that part… the landscape is really the only beauty that these people have in their lives. So while they sound truly miserable, there’s still blooming trees and animals to observe and clouds and all that shit that makes you feel better to look at while your teeth fall out of your head.

Diablevert:  Yeah, but there doesn’t seem to be any real shift in tone from how the natural wonders are described and how the natural/accidental/domestic horrors are described. When she goes into the “our god is a mean-ass god” stuff, there’s a tone shift. But you don’t feel a big shift in tone with some of the other stuff.

DreadfulPenny:  That’s what makes me feel like this must have been either part of the author’s own experience or family stories that she’d heard a hundred thousand times.

Diablevert: I wonder about Miller, too. These stories are intimate, but at the same time remote…she doesn’t seem like she’s drawing from her own life, really. Like Tilly what’s her face, with the famous short story about the ironing.

DreadfulPenny: Tillie Olson?

Diablevert: Yeah, her.

DreadfulPenny: A few seconds of Googling has revealed that these were not the author’s own experiences, and only slightly inherited family stories, so my theory’s all blown to hell. I don’t know… I just don’t hate this book as much as you do. I mean, would I read it recreationally? No. But do I like it better than some other Pulitzers? Probably.

Diablevert: I don’t hate it, I’m just often bored by it. It’s like really traditional blues music, or something – something that is interesting, and might be enjoyable to listen to in the right mood, but if you’re not in the mood for it, it’s just a drag.

DreadfulPenny: It’s a way of life that’s interesting, that you don’t often read about. I mean, the idea that anyone would think for a second that the lives of slaves are more comfortable than their own is pretty insane, but actually makes some sense in this context. Ignorant, yes; ill-informed, yes; racist, yes, but sensical when your life is this horrid.

Diablevert: True. But the lack of structure is driving me nuts a bit. All this stuff happens, she includes all these incidents that should be heart pounding, and then they just wisp away like fog…it’s not like they have no impact on the characters, it’s just that they have no impact on the narrative, until somebody happens to recollect one, much later, during some entirely unrelated passage. Like the scene when she gets up from the birth bed and kills a goddamn mountain lion.

See? Typing that makes it sound heart-pounding. But the way it’s written, it’s like, “what’s that? a mountain lion?” And then we get one sentence of suspense, and then boom, next paragraph, it’s already dead. That didn’t bother you? I found some of that stuff jarring, actually.

DreadfulPenny: You mean “the painter”? It actually took me a minute to translate that into English.

Diablevert: Yeah.

DreadfulPenny:  It didn’t bother me terribly. I mean, it probably will next time I sit down with this book, now that you mentioned it, but I don’t feel that the individual incidents particularly lack for drama. They’re just not strung together to emphasize or sustain that.

Diablevert:  Maybe that’s it then. I feel adrift with no thread to pull me through. But going back to the racial aspect to this story – did you not find it a little off putting when the kids are playing “Coast” and the one kid wins by suggesting he’d bring back 100 slaves for his mother to whip? I was like, damn.

Thinking about it now, maybe that’s part of what she’s trying to show – how remote the actual fact of slavery was to these people, as remote as the life of a fine planter.

DreadfulPenny:  That scene was the epitome of fucked-up.

Diablevert: But like, while a lot of the other books we’ve read were racist, this is the one where blacks are out and out discussed as the equivalent of livestock. It’s illustrative, in a way.

DreadfulPenny:  But it made total sense to me, in the context of those characters.

Diablevert: But you get no feel from the author of like, how you’re supposed to take that. And normally I regard that as a good thing; it’d be hypocritical of me to take that back now….but I just don’t trust Miller. Especially after a few of the comments she puts in Cean’s mouth about the necessity of obeying her man, etc.

DreadfulPenny: This is funny, because I think I trust Miller a little more than you do, and you trusted Stribling more than I did.

Diablevert: Well, Stribling was sardonic.

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Lamb in His Bosom: A Chat 100 pages in

Posted in Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , on March 27, 2011 by Diablevert

DreadfulPenny: So I totally crammed for tonight and read 100 pages of Lamb in His Bosom in the last three hours. And, let me tell you, this book is quite literally soporific.

Diablevert: I kept finding myself zoning out on the nature stuff. It’s not bad, nature-stuff qua nature stuff, but it just reminded me of like, really boring PBS docs from when I was a kid, with all these long pans of the forest or a branch or something. Not to be all MTV generation – which probably marks me as old, actually – but I kept wanting to get back to the plot

DreadfulPenny: Dude… it’s like Little House on the Prairie, but NOT told through the eyes of a spunky 11-year-old.

Diablevert: I never read Little House. It never appealed to me. I kept thinking of it, in an appallingly bigoted way, as the Cracker Scarlet Sister Mary

DreadfulPenny: I read the Little House books repeatedly as a child, and would obsessively type out parts of the Little House cookbook (probably because of an early obsession with hog fat)… but that’s neither here nor there.

Diablevert: Hog fat? Do tell.

DreadfulPenny: One of the most famous parts of Little House in the Big Woods is the hog-butchering, or “everything but the squeal” scene, where they make cracklings and eat the pig’s tail and blow up its bladder and use it for a balloon. HAPPY DEAD HOG DAY!

But Lamb is pretty episodic so far… la la la marriage and homesteading and cotton-planting and OH LOOK a trip to town and now some adultery.

Diablevert: Oh, you must be a bit a head of me. I’m like literally on page 99 of my edition.

DreadfulPenny: I just finished chapter 10… sorry for the spoiler. What just happened in yours?

Diablevert: Uh, let’s see – Lias just went into a reverie about how Margot’s no good for him and angries up his blood, and Major the hound died, fairly brutally

DreadfulPenny: Oh, yeah, I’m a bit ahead of you then. Sorry.

Diablevert: Nah, I knew all that cackling over the broken plates would lead to no good. (Unless I’m totally wrong. In which case I suppose let me abide in my ignorance.)

DreadfulPenny: Wrong, so far… although I’ve got the same suspicions for later in the book. Once you break a plate with a man, you just know there’s a tawdry bedding in your future.

Diablevert: For sure.

DreadfulPenny: So, did you also get that Vince (which is such a Guido name for this book, it seems) had his way with Margot in her earlier life as a tavern wench? I mean, that’s pretty thinly veiled, but I wasn’t 100% sure of the timing of all that.

Diablevert: Oh, yeah. I didn’t think that was veiled at all. I thought it was pretty clear – I mean, when Lias says he’s going to marry her, he just blurts out “She’s a slut” and then we get some close third of him thinking he has direct knowledge of this. Speaking of which, for the back of beyond, people see to get a lot of play…

DreadfulPenny: Word. I was a little distracted by all the ponderings over the river delta and the grass growing et al. And I agree… between this and Scarlet Sister Mary, I think it’s hot time in the backwoods most nights.

Then again, what else is there to do? Even if you settle down for a little fun candy-pull, you might get burned in the feet by boiling sugar until they look like white slab bacon (an image that might have lessened even my considerable verve for bacon).

Diablevert: Yeah, that was interesting. Actually, that brings up an interesting trope in this book – tons of awful shit happens, but it’s all random and doesn’t seem to mean anything. Like, the rattlesnake bite in the second or third chapter – I was totally expecting the baby to be stillborn or have some kind of birth defect. But nope, no problem. And then Seen gets her feet boiled off, but then seems to turn out fine a few chapters down the line – it gets mentioned again, but it’s not crippling her, clearly. And then the dog breaks for the baby, but no harm no foul even though he has to be put down…

DreadfulPenny: I actually enjoyed the creepy image Cean had of this snake baby growing inside of her after the bite. There’s a lovely bit about what it feels like to be pregnant that I liked a lot, actually, in all that description.

Diablevert: I agree – Miller’s descriptive powers are more than decent, she has some fine passages, she just goes to the well too often. It reminds me of a cake with too much frosting.

DreadfulPenny: Poor Jake, though, having to shoot his dog… if he were a character in a YA novel, he would have had more sympathy, but instead it was just a throwaway with a backhand.

Diablevert: Speaking of Jake, I thought the book was going to be a little different, with that mildly incestuous implications of the first passage. I dunno, I have the feeling I’m reading that differently than a typical 1930s reader, maybe.

DreadfulPenny: Oh, yeah! Me too! Then I was thinking that it’s probably just pretty damn cold in those backwoods cottages and they only had a few beds for the whole family.

While I can see that some of this lyricism is well done, at the sentence level Caroline Miller is a bit of a hot mess. There was this deliriously redundant sentence on the first few pages of the book that nearly made my inner copyeditor give up. Her syntax is all twisted and redundant and just plain awkward most of the time. There’s a passage on p. 17 of my copy that illustrates this, where Miller’s talking about her name and she takes, like, 6 sentences to essentially say “Cean was a weird name, even for us hillbillies.”

Diablevert: Yeah, I think I know what you mean…my inner copy editor is for shit, I can’t point precisely to errors like that, but you’re right, you can feel it flow wrong sometimes. Over-explaining is her besetting sin. We don’t get one paragraph of winter settling on the woods, we get six, and it’s like goddamn Goodnight Moon, we’ve got to visit every blessed creature of the forest.

DreadfulPenny: And flowers… there’s a lot of floral description happening. Some of it symbolic, some perhaps not… all contributed to my nap around 5:00 this afternoon.

Diablevert: Heh. I’m glad it’s not just me. Sometimes I’m a city kid when it comes to the pastoral.

DreadfulPenny: Nope. I don’t mind a fair amount of country writing (and I’ve got especial fondness for reading about really rural Appalachian style life)… but this is pretty tiring so far. There’s, like, no dialogue in the novel, either, which DEFINITELY slows things down.

Diablevert: But I like the quotidian. I rather enjoyed the bits about Cean settling into her new home; the idea of what you’d have to do to settle into a place like that. And the poor calf.

DreadfulPenny: Awww. Poor calf. And hound dog. And pet white rat. Animals do not fare well in this book (a good warmup for The Yearling).

Diablevert: Man, I hadn’t got to the rat yet. Also, this is set at an odd time, it seems to me. I think it’s like, 1830-something? I don’t think I’ve read any other book that really dealt with this era of American history. I mean, Little House is similar in theme and setting, but it actually takes place, like 50 years later and 1500 miles west, doesn’t it?

DreadfulPenny: Little House is all about westward expansion and the frontier. But Lamb is just pre-Civil War, yes? In Alabama or Mississippi (I don’t think they’ve mentioned a state yet, but it’s south of the Carolinas and north of Florida).

Diablevert: Georgia, I believe. On the Florida border. Before the Mexican War (since Florida’s still Spanish) and that was the 1840s, I think. When the interior of parts of the east coast were still a frontier of a sort.

DreadfulPenny: Word… good call Go geography!

Did you get to the part where Cean expresses weirdness about slaves… because she can’t imagine a black person as a housekeeper with its hands on her children? WEIRD.

Diablevert: Nah, haven’t mentioned that yet. Although it’s clear from Jake’s thoughts on the trip to the Coast that he’s like, never seen a black person.

DreadfulPenny: Oh… well, wait for it, and tell me what you think when you get there.

Diablevert: Speaking of race, I really do keep comparing this book in my head to Scarlet Sister Mary, though.

DreadfulPenny: Because of setting and general sexiness?

Diablevert: This too, seems to be as hardcore about romanticizing, in many respects, a way of life that must have been pretty brutal. I mean, there’s lots of bad accidents and things in the book (at least the bit s I’ve read so far) but nobody’s ever permanently harmed by them. And while there’s some mention of Seen being nostalgic for Carolina, and you know, people, everybody else seems fine with what must have been an incredibly isolating lifestyle. Except for when Vince reminisces about getting the letters from his Mom. But other than that, this is pretty glossy – it’s all huckleberries and bounty.

DreadfulPenny: I was thinking that, too… although you do get passages like the one where Cean is churning butter and she’s hoping that someday they will have spices but first they need stuff to trade for them AND Lonzo has to actually carve the jars to keep them in. Which gave me this overwhelmingly oppressive sense that they had to make every single thing they ever needed, and how exhausting that must have been.

Diablevert: That’s the thing, when you step back and think about stuff like that, I feel as you do – like, “damn, that must have sucked.” But in the book it’s presented very warmly.

DreadfulPenny: I dunno… I get the sense that all that self-sufficiency is pretty hard. Plus, when you go to pick huckleberries, you’ll get rattlesnake-bit.

Diablevert: Mmm, maybe I’m not being fair; a lot of bad things do happen. Maybe it just seems glossy because of all the lyric nature bits. One way it differs from Scarlet Sister Mary is that in that book the narrator takes this sort of light-hearted attitude toward the rather strict brand of religion endemic to the culture, and implies that half the island does, too – but here the main characters, especially Vince, all have these long interior monologues about how God is/will send them suffering for their sins, they kind of revel in it…it’s a real old country-style, hell-fire and brimstone system, and the tone of the narrator seems just as kindly and benevolent when explaining how the father thinks God killed his kid because he loved her too much….

I feel like there’s an incongruity there; Scarlet Sister Mary seems outright anthropological at times, the plot only existing to hang the observations on; this too is kind of plotless, but it doesn’t have the quite the same distance….or maybe better say, it’s just as distanced, but it doesn’t seem detached….Like the authors’ imagining her great-grandpappy, not peering over a bush at a strange new culture.

DreadfulPenny: Yeah… it feels more autobiographical than anthropological. I’ll think of the comparison as we do the next section of the book. Anything else on this installment?

Diablevert: Nope.

DreadfulPenny: Word… you make some great points about Scarlet Sister Mary… it will be good to have something to pay attention to for the next 100 pages.

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Honey in the Horn: Ornery about does it.

Posted in H.L. Davis, Honey in the Horn with tags , , , on March 19, 2011 by Diablevert

I’m about halfway through Honey in the Horn — more posts to come to catch us up on Now in November and Lamb — but in the meantime, I do have to say I never thought I’d find myself charmed by a book which reads as if it’s being written by Yosemite Sam’s bookish cousin.

There’s a quality in the style, hard to pin down, but a sort of autodidact’s yearning, burning need to present his findings in a manner acceptable to the larger world. Like Davis doesn’t know how to describe it differently, it’s not a stylistic choice, it’s the only palette of expression open to him, but within that limited palette such precision, a world wrought new, each thought bent and hammered out of raw observation. To describe it this way seems a little patronizing, and I think I am being patronizing. But it is that naïve quality which gives Honey such freshness, wholeness. I don’t know why it should be so, exactly; several other authors in the Pulitzer trip have been newbies—Pearl S. Buck, LaFarge, The Able McLaughlins lady, Caroline Miller. Now in November, too, had something of that burning quality, the drive to tell the world what it knows of it. But somehow that book felt slower and more thoughtful, more deliberate. Lamb was naïve, but that barely hung together as a book — the author was always forgetting that the characters needed to be involved in a plot. This book is more sure-footed; Davis has a surer hand when setting characters into conflict. But he also wants to get across flavor of this place and time intensely, as did the others of our two most recent books.

Also surprisingly charming is the befuddled cantankerousness of his main character, Clay. One can’t help but wonder if describing the mindset comes so easy because the author shares it. You don’t get much experience from the viewpoint of a born crank when he’s so young, and it’s interesting to see where his crankiness comes from — Clay is smart enough to be always a half-step further along a chain of reasoning that whoever he’s dealing with, and is therefore poised eternally in impatience, waiting for the world to catch up and trying to shove them along to get there, and finding as he does it that the world hates to be hurried. He never gives people the space to present their view, to arrive at a conclusion themselves; and therefore about everyone he deals with feels irked and insulted the whole time. Davis can see this, and is coolly analytical in describing this attitude and its consequences, and so far it’s been amusing to read of…

Oh, and one last thing, as long as I’m rambling — this is the first book I’ve ever read that describes the characteristics and personalities of the brave pioneers that broke the frontier in a way that makes them seem in the least like people instead of saints and superheros in buckskin. Of course, I’m hugely biased, here, I’ve never much liked wilderness tales and have read few for that very reason — but Davis’ old settlers, with their petty vices and cramped lives and self-assured high-handedness feel real, feel like the natural form of something hard-baked by 30 or 40 years of isolation that comes near desolation and hard, hard physical struggle…

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Lamb in His Bosom Summary

Posted in Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom with tags , , on March 13, 2011 by Dreadful Penny

We ride again! It’s been a long hiatus, people, but you would take some time off too if you were slogging through 1930s Pulitzer novels. Especially if some were hard-to-find and slightly stinky once they got there (my copy of Lamb in His Bosom was particularly bedraggled, being held together mostly with mouldering yellow tape, but I digress)… for your reading pleasure, a summary!

It would be easier to present you with a scan of the crazy-complicated family tree I drew to keep track of all the progeny in Lamb in His Bosom than to describe the actual plot of this novel, which has more “begats” in it than the Old Testament. Cean Carver is the protagonist and progenitor of this tree with many branches, trying to eke out a life in backwoods Georgia with her husband Lonzo Smith and their ever-expanding brood.

The bulk of the plot revolves around the toil inherent in homesteading and childbirth, in which Cean reluctantly gives birth to somewhere around twelve children. Honestly, I lost count at one point–easy to do, since some of the children are unnamed and die at birth. Every event of Cean’s life seems riddled with tragedy and bad luck, from her mother being crippled by spilt boiling sugar on the eve of her first birth, to the panther she kills moments after her third birth, to the illicit antics of her ne’er-do-well brother Lias. There’s even a dog with rabies to be put down… Lamb is just that kind of cheerful read, people.

More stuff happens: There’s a large subplot about Cean’s brother Lias being a scoundrel who leaves his wife Margot to father a child with flirty Bliss Corwin, take up with fancy Coast women as lovers, and then run away to look for gold in California. When Lonzo cuts his foot open with an ax, the wound turns gangrenous and kills him, widowing Cean. Cean’s other brother Jasper marries Margot when Lias is declared dead after eight years of silence. Dermid O’Connor, an itinerant preacher, sets up a school in town and then the Sweetwater Church of the New Light and woos Cean. Cean’s eldest daughter Maggie dies in childbirth. Just about every man in the book goes off to fight in the Civil War and just about every woman and child moves in with Cean for the duration. Lias torments everyone from beyond the grave by sending a letter for Margot to expect his arrival, even though he knows he’s on death’s door and will never make it home to see her again. Some of the
men make it home from war, some are maimed, some are crazed, and others never make it back.

All in all, the novel is episodic, stretching back to discuss Cean’s parents and forward to follow her children and grandchildren. Throughout, though, the struggle and difficulty of life at the time and surprisingly contemporary insights into the condition of pregnancy and young motherhood are the through-lines that draw the novel together.

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The Store: An Old Review

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , on May 13, 2010 by Diablevert

This is a bit like the 70-year-old Pulitzer version of the lurkers support me in email, but hey, look! A review of The Store from Time magazine back in the day:

Written in the great tradition of well-peopled novels, the book successfully commingles impartial observation and ubiquitous sympathy, tinged with a faintly subacid humor. In pitch, scope, execution it is easily the most important U. S. novel of the year. Col. Miltiades Vaiden, a vastly human character who should walk straight into the U. S. Pantheon, is more than the central figure of the story. He is the focus in which the town of Florence reflects its earthen realities, its haunting bright potentialities.

Really, I should have been lazy and just linked to their summary, it’s better than mine. And they largely agree with me, so what’s not to love. But seriously, anyone who’s read the book might want to check it out for contemporary take on the novel.

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The Store: Summary

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , , , on May 12, 2010 by Diablevert

As I liked this one better than my erstwhile partner, I feel guilty for neglecting poor Stribling. But on the other hand, my feeling that I ought to write something substantive has tempted me into delaying doing anything at all (….there’s a disturbing allegory there….) and meanwhile, I’ve left the summary to rot. So here it is in brief:

The Store, by T.S. Stribling, is the second book in a trilogy concerning the fate of the Vaiden family. It’s set in Florence, Alabama — a city Stribling knew well — in the 1880s, or in other words, the rise of Jim Crow and the aftermath of the Civil War.

This is a novel with a sizable cast and a few prominent players, but the main attraction is indisputably Miltiades Vaiden. Milt is Col. Milt, a former Confederate army officer, plantation overseer, and leader of the Klu Klux Klan. When we meet him, though, he’s hit a very tough patch: Headed into his late 40s, he’s married to a wife, Ponny, he isn’t attracted to and whom he thinks beneath him in class and understanding; they have no children, though Ponny desperately wants one. His family farm is barely making any profit, and has fallen into disrepair, and he himself is living in town in rented rooms, with nothing much but a pension to get by on.

It wasn’t always meant to be this way; before the war, he had ambitions of moving from plantation overseer to plantation owner, and was engaged to Drusilla, the beautiful daughter of one of the most prominent families in town. Drusilla ditched him at the alter (runs off with a dashing young officer named Crowninshield who’s killed in the war, leaving her with one daughter, Sydna). His marriage to Ponny was supposed to bring him enough scratch to get him back on his feet, but that all fell through when the store owner to whom he had sold his whole cotton crop, one J. Handback, declared bankruptcy without paying ol’ Milt. In the years that have passed since the Reconstruction, Handback has opened a new store and done well with it, and now owns many of poor farms surrounding the town, but Milt’s never recovered from the loss.

Milt’s desperate for one last chance to reverse his fortunes, and he seizes it when he runs into the aforementioned J. Handback, walking through town late one night, drunk as a lord and bragging about his mulatto mistress. Armed with blackmail ammo, Col. Milt demands a job from Handback. After a few months go by, Handback sends Milt to supervise the transport of 500 bales of cotton from his farms to storage so it can be shipped to New Orleans for sale — and that’s when Milt comes up with a scheme that will really let him get his own back, conceiving a clever plan that will allow him to nick Handback’s whole shipment, netting him about $25,000 — if word doesn’t leak before he gets the profit in his bank account.

While Milt schemes his way back to the good life, his young nephew, Jerry Vaiden, dreams his way though his last years of high school, mooning over Sydna and groping toward Nirvana with the help of a dusty library book on Bhuddist mysticism. To say that Stribling nails Jerry’s characterization is too blunt; he pins him, more like, as an entymolologist spikes and spreads a beetle on a corkboard, penetrating right to the heart of a certain type of too-sensitive adolescent, and displaying all his flaws to best advantage: Jerry’s self-obessesed (though unconscious of their self-obsession), inspired by high ideals — of valour, asceticism, self-sacrifice, romance — and utterly oblivious to the ways in which he fails to live up to them. His depiction of Jerry may be remorseless, but it is not unkind; you get the feeling there’s a fair bit of self-portrait in him. Jerry’s a bit of an outcast—attempting to adhere to the practices of Zen Bhuddism doesn’t win your too many friends in small-town Alabama in the 1880s, even if you do keep it on the down-low. But he preservers, strengthened by his belief in and yearning for a life beyond his current circumstances, and always hoping to be given an opportunity to prove his own goodness.

Stribling also follows the fortunes of one of the town’s black families, the mother-son pair of Gracie and Toussaint. Gracie is the beautiful mulatto mistress Handback couldn’t help bragging on; what’s more, she used to be a Vaiden family slave. Her son, Toussaint, is so pale he could pass for white — if he ever moved far enough away to be among people who didn’t know his family and his history, and that is Gracie’s dream for him.

I’ve realized in writing this much, I’ve barely sketched out the background to the actual plot, the central characters and the major event that sets all the others in motion. Seeing as it took my 750 words just to get that far, I’m going to Cliff notes the rest, with spoilers galore: Milt gets his money, gets caught, and then gets off, cash intact, but only because of a tragic technicality — sherrif’s men, sent at the behest of Handback to roust him from his house, frighten his wife so much she dies of a heart attack, and Handback’s afraid his suit for the profits on the cotton will be met by a counter-claim for wrongful death. With lots of other bills coming due, and creditors putting the squeeze on him again, Handback faces bankruptcy a second time — and kills himself.

Newly free and only half-mournful, Milt is blamed for both deaths and widely shunned by the townsfolk, all except for one, however — Sydna, the young daughter of his ex-flame, who remembers the tales of his battlefield valor and kindness to her family, and still idealizes him as a noble and fallen warrior. She is at first unconscious of the true depth of her affection — but her mother’s not. And when the Col. shows up at the Crowninshield door, his old dream of owning a big house and having a beautiful wife to grace it newly revived with the stolen money, Drusilla turns him down and then turns him lose on Sydna, who accepts him.

That tears up Jerry’s heart, of course, and he becomes a little meaner and more orney in his heart-brokeness. Meanwhile, Milt’s actions have also harmed Gracie and Toussaint — Gracie had helped Milt hide his cash asked her to, betraying her lover and revealing her true loyalties, to her own self-disappointment. Now that Handback’s out of the picture, she’s been forced to take up Milt’s offer of a place as a tenant on a newly-bought property of his. Locked away in the remote countryside, she loses all hope of herself or her son ever escaping Florence to a better life when Toussaint marries a young local school teacher.

Toussaint has never managed to attain the level of necessary self-abnegation to survive in the Jim Crown South, as will be proved when a conflict arises between him, a poor white sharecropper and Col. Milt over the use of some farm equipment. Toussaint decides to stand up for his rights, leading to the final tragedy of the book….to bring across the true flavor of the dramatix climax Stribling constructs, a mixture of fated doom and chance ill luck, of the accidental lack of information and deliberate, Peterine denials and failures to act, would take nearly as long as it does to read it; suffice it to say that it ends with three men hung from a tree in the village square, Jerry having unknowingly failed a great moral test, and Milt having lost one precious thing he never knew he had.

So that’s basically what happens in the book. Why should you care what happens in it? Stribling’s not the greatest stylist we’ve run into in this quest; a little dipping into his bio reveals that he spent years as a hack writer for the pulps before attempting more serious work, and it shows in spots. (Such as the end of chapters, which are nearly always cliff-hangers.) Some of the characters are thin, some coinciendences a bit contrived. I can’t say I’d tell you to read it for style.

Nah, I’m going to say that you should read this book for the thing I thought least promising about it when I picked it up: Its setting, post-reconstruction, pre-Jim Crow, small-town Alabama.

See, I think the reason I feared this place and people was that, have read a decade plus of other Pulitzer winners and noted their batting avergae, I was afraid it we’d get a ham-handed portrayal of race relations and small town tensions, or some Gone With the Wind-like paen to the gracious, glorious Old South.  (Which is awaiting us quite soon.) A cuddly nostalgia-fest, or a red-faced moral jerimiad.

What you get instead is cold. Cold in the sense that Stribling knows this place, these people: The things they say, the things they think, the minor and the major hypocricies that get them through the day. In respect to this particular time and place, I’d say he’s got as keen an eye for the delusions people allow themselves as Flaubert. (Though he doesn’t, perhaps, take as much visceral joy from totting them down.)  

But also cold in the sense that’s that’s how he serves up the characters to the reader: He presents their actions, their reasoning, and he gives them to you flat, with no real indication of where his own sympathies lie in respect to those actions. (I can think of a few spare, swift moments which are an exception to this, where he lets slip a sentence or two that suggests his judgement — Handback’s death scene is one.)  This too, is different from most of the Pulitzers; Penny and I have complained copiously of the snideness, contemptuousness, even arrogance that many of the other authors display toward thier characters (Lewis and Tarkington spring to mind). Even with the better writers, it’s been clear who their favorites are: Cather is quite fond of Claude, and Ferber approves of Selina. Peterkin ain’t a great writer, but she is clearly delighted with Mary. Being able to step back and let the reader form their own judgement entirely is difficult, and I think many writers wouldn’t even attempt it. It’s also the cause in part, I think, of why Penny and I disagreed so strongly in the beginning about this book. I was inclined to favor Stribling more clearly from the first, while she was more doubtful of his intentions (especially in regard to whether he was commenting on racism or actually being racist). And that I think is an interesting affect to be able to achieve, and vitally necessary one for him to be able to do the thing he does so well in this book, which is tease out the web of moral conflicts and obligations that entangle every character in this town. The things that stick with me about The Store aren’t the big, dramatic climactic scenes. It’s the little ones, which skip across the surface of the plot: Milt returning to his old family home and learning that the child of a free slave is being taught to read by his sister, and has been named after him. Handback’s brief visceral repulsion at the thought of Toussaint leaving town and passing for white — at the same time as Toussaint’s mother, Gracie, is the love of his life, whose betrayal he cannot survive. Jerry, watching over the body of his aunt the night before her funeral, and harshly turning away a black man who begs for some part of the funeral feast, his honor insulted by having his knighltly vigil disrupted and his family’s grief intruded on—though he knows the same man had saved his uncle’s life the day before, and lost his job because of it. These things gave me a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to live in that time and place than I had heretofore ever know, the compromises people had to make with themselves and with the world, and for that I’ll always be grateful for having read The Store.

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