Scarlet Sister Mary: Summary

Posted in Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary with tags , , , , , , on July 8, 2009 by Diablevert

Scarlet Sister Mary is a bit of an odd duck of a book, Margaret Mead in Margaret Mitchell’s clothing. Set on one of the coastal islands off the Carolinas, round about the 1920s or 30s, it depicts the life of a black village though the story of one of its inhabitants, the title character.

She starts out as just plain Mary, a skinny, lively, pretty 15-year-old, orphaned at a young age and taken in by Maum Hannah, a respectable widow whose only son is crippled. Mary’s in love with July, the handsome n’er do well that’s the despair of the island’s mothers and the idol of their daughters. Mary acquires the Sister when she’s accepted into the island rather strict evangelical sect, but she soon falls off the wagon when July reveals he’s crushing on her too, promising to marry her and marking her as his own by nicking her earlobe with a pocketknife. (Outraged Maum Hannah forces him to allow Mary to nick his own earlobe to make things even.) July seduces Mary and then leaves to look for work on the mainland — but, in a bit of a shocker, returns and keeps his promise to marry her.

The signs and portents are a bit doomish from the get-go, however: Hannah notices a certain shameful swelling as she helps Mary to dress for the wedding, causing a bit of a row; a mouse gets into the wedding cake, necessitating a bit of last minute frosting spackling, and when it comes time for the reception, one of the town’s looser women drags July outside to dance. Mary, however, is not about to be shown up at her own reception and gets a bit of her own back by engaging in a solo dance routine that raises quite a few eyebrows (Baptists are forbidden to dance; publicly flouting church proscriptions means she won’t be able to attend services).

The ominous foreshadowing of the wedding day soon bears fruit, with Mary and July growing rapidly apart after their son is born. July soon takes up with another woman and then takes off, abandoning Mary completely to keep up their small farm and raise their son alone. At first Mary sinks into a deep depression, spending months in a funk doing little but crying and praying for July’s return. But eventually, she begins to come out of her funk a bit….with the help of June, July’s twin brother.

This is where the Scarlet part comes in. Because the book skips forward here about twenty years, with Mary’s oldest children nearly grown….and lots of other children, from various boyfriends who may or may not chip in for their care, having come after them. This part of the book is a rapid unfolding of consequences, with Mary’s eldest daughter dropping out of school and bearing her own child out of wedlock, while her eldest son returns from having worked up North, barely making it to his mom’s door before he dies of pneumonia. The death of her first, only legitimate, and much-beloved son sends Mary into a prolonged fit of repentance, and she ends the book having said goodbye to her scandalous ways and returning to the church.

Such a description of the book’s plot might the island community depicted seem quite a conservative one. But it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. For instance there’s quite a large contingent of folk, members of the community in good standing, who drink and dance and smoke and sing therefore don’t go to church, though they do sometimes hang around outside during services to overhear the preaching. The attitude seems to be, “well, yes, everyone understands what the godly path here is, but that’s damn hard and you can’t expect everybody to stick to it all the time, for goodness’ sake.” And so there’s a bunch of islanders who go to church and obey its strictures, and a bunch who don’t, but little enmity between them.

Little enmity, but lots of gossip. When Mary first takes up her life of sin, it works out, frankly, pretty damn well for her for twenty years, and she’s pretty shameless about it, with the book spending several whole chapters explaining over and over her “hey, man, I got lemons, and I used this fine ass to make some lemonade, and had a fine ol’ time doing it, too” attitude toward her situation. The ending and her repentance almost seem tacked on to get the book past the censors rather than a well-deserved moral come-uppance the author’s handing out. Speaking of which, the plot as a whole is rather thin for such a long book; July makes a re-appearance toward the end, but his finally confrontation with Mary is a whimper of a thing, a tiff on a doorstep, not a dramatic climax.

Indeed, the thing seems more like an excuse for the writer to show us the culture and rituals of this unique place — she spends far more time explaining what kind of food you’d find at a wedding reception, or who sits where in church and why, or how you spruce up a one-room cabin when you’re dirt poor (everything you can’t whitewash you wrap in newspaper), or what they have for breakfast (sweet potatoes baked slowly in the banked ashes of the fire overnight) than exploring the inner motivations of her characters. Mary herself we get to know; we learn a little about Maum Hannah; but everyone else is a rice-paper sketch. This semi-anthropological approach seems to be born of a genuine love for the place; indeed, Peterkin comes close to making the island seem like an earthly paradise.

Which is actually kind of troubling, you know? Because if you step back a minute this is a book set among a black community in the Jim Crow south. A perhaps uniquely independent black community —- there’s barely a mention of white people in the book — but still one with, presumably, their fair share of troubles in real life. But all such darker themes are carefully expunged here — the characters are depicted, basically, as dirt-poor-and-loving-it. In dialect, also. All of which is to say, there are plenty of times in reading the book when the overt racism just slaps the modern reader upside the head, to the point where other passages—-passages that when you read them seem lovely, lyric, pastoral — in retrospect are troubling for their glib joy (“Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh”). But that seem a shade too unfair — for all the complexities of the relationship between the author and the characters she’s writing about — it seems too harsh, just as unfair the other way, to decide that her depiction of all the lovely things about this community which seems to fascinate her so must be false. So it’s a bit of an odd duck, and I’m not sure what I think about it, in the end.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Summary

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder, Uncategorized with tags , on May 27, 2009 by Diablevert

An overlooked classic! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, willya look at that! The Bridge of San Luis Rey is that thing I’d been partly hoping all these old Pulitzers would be: awesome books unjustly forgotten. I say partly because — if I’m honest — I was all along suspecting that some of these novels would be a bit terrible, this justifying the choice of title for this blog. But having read about ten and having most of them terrible and a few mediocre, with one outright classic (Age of Innocence), it was a real relief to find that there’d be a book I’d like before we got to, say Kavalier and Clay, 80 (god help us) books or so from now.

Of course, it might be a bit much to call Bridge overlooked; it’s been made into a movie several times, once fairly recently, and the library where I checked it out had about a dozen copies on hand; apparently it’s a poplar — that is, short — book for high school English classes. Still, though I’d heard of Wilder before thanks to Our Town, I had no real idea what the book was about. Perhaps I had a vague idea of a cross between the Treasure of the Sierra Madre and A Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Turns out it’s more like a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ship of Fools. In colonial Peru, a rope bridge over an Andean gorge collapses, killing five people. A young priest witnesses the accident and sets out to discover what led to those five people being on the bridge at that time, viewing it as a natural moral experiment, a sort of cryptogram from God. The book is the result, although there seems to be a distinction between the narrator of the book and the good friar; more than once the narrator says that he is privy to facts the priest never uncovered, and the book frequently delves into the thoughts of the characters in a way a strict third person narrator could not.

Said characters are: The Marquesa de Montemayor; her servant, Pepita; Esteban, a scribe; Uncle Pio, a man about town and manager of the famous actress Camila Perichole, and La Perichole’s young son, Don Jaime.

The Marquesa is elderly and eccentric, a well-known figure about town who is estranged from her only child, a daughter now living in Spain. The Marquesa devotes the whole of her life to writing letters to her daughter, going out into society strictly for the purpose of collecting material, seeking to win by her wit her daughter’s admiration, and soften her heart by the sheer power of eloquence.

Her servant, Pepita, is an orphan, raised in a convent, where she was the apple of the abbesses’ eye. The mother superior deliberately placed the girl in the Marquesa’s service as a kind of training exercise, hoping to get the Marquesa to donate to the convent and also grooming Pepita to move in upper class circles and gain the persuasive skills she will need to take over the running of the orphanage. Pepita, however, is not privy to the Abbess’ plans and is often overwhelmed in trying to care for the slightly cracked Marquesa.

Esteban was also an orphan, but he had a twin brother, Manuel. The two had been inseparable, until and illness (brought on, indirectly, by love) killed Manuel, leaving Esteban so bereft he contemplates suicide. A kindly Captain in the merchant marine takes pity on him and persuades the young man to take a berth on his boat.

Uncle Pio has spent the last few decades of his life making Perichole a star, after spotting her singing on the street as a young kid. So wrapped up in her does he become that it’s unclear whether he wants to be her father or her lover or what. As it turns out, he ends up neither: They suffer a falling out after the actress catches smallpox, bringing her stage career to an end. Pio, however, offers to help bring up her boy, Don Jaime, an offer La Perichole takes up.

Such scanty paragraphs suffice to describe the motives and much of the action of the book; given that the bugger leads off with the conclusion, and so there can be no mystery as to how it ends, it must be difficult to get an inkling of why I’d call the book a classic. That’s because it’s a book of mood and not motion, scene upon little scene that tries to tell you who the characters were and how they felt while leaving rather blurry what they did and when they did it: The exact period when it’s set, precisely how many years elapse between given events, the ages of the characters, all this is merely hinted at rather than nailed down. It strives for timelessness, for the qualities of a fable, and mostly achieves them, without being overwrought. This is quite a difficult trick; Jorge Luis Borges managed it time and again, but usually for ten pages, always for fewer than 30, often for just four. To pull it off at book length without getting cutesy or faux-mystical is quite an accomplishment. Instead, the tone is of restrained sadness, lyric, mournful, dry. By changing the question of the book from the more usual “What happens to these characters?” to “Whether or not the characters get what they deserve,” Wilder manages to drive the reader onward using cool-eyed ambiguity rather than the spur of revelation followed by resolution.

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Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 3

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield, Uncategorized with tags , on April 27, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

DP: I don’t get the sense that the community is that affluent. I think the Pentland family is greatly wealthy—they bring this up later, that they take great pride in living off “the income of their income.” So I think they live quite poorly in a material sense, but just have great wealth saved up.

DV: That makes sense. There’s a crack about that in the Terry Pratchett books. He makes the observation that, if you’re really wealthy, you can afford to look like shit.

DP: When they start to describe the study and all the artifacts, at some point, they expressly label them as “kinda ugly.” “We have all this old ugly shit, but hey, Emerson sat there.”

DV: That relationship makes more sense to me as the lord of the manor to the village in an English or Continental setting than it would be in a relatively contemporary American setting. He doesn’t have it clear: either it’s a bustling town or ten houses and those guys.

DP: It’s not good world-building, to use a science fiction term. If he’s not talking about a real place, he hasn’t properly mapped his imaginary landscape. Although I do think—and this is one of the great mysteries of the book to me, and I do find it compelling, like an ugly woman wearing a veiled hat—I just want to see what’s under the veil—this book is the second book in a trilogy, right?

DV: Right.

DP: Does reading the first book make this book make complete sense? There are so many characters here that I can imagine their youths were explored in the first book, even though I could totally be making this shit up and they have no connection to each other. But the whole thing with the Pentland father and the widow…

DV: That he’s macking on?

DP: Yeah! Like, is there a youth explored in the earlier books? This is the weird thing about the Pulitzer awarding books in a series, because when you’re reading them years later, obviously this is the one that history has remembered even this much. The Green Bay Tree is lost to the memory of history. But does it contain, partially, the key to this book? Later (and I hate to keep bringing them up) but when we get to the Rabbit novels, Rabbit, Run: not nominated. But you really need to understand what happened in it to get the other two. Like when Shadow Country was re-released this year and it won the National Book Award, which some people were angry about, but in a sense, well, you need to appreciate it as a unit, so… I don’t know. I have great, actual, genuine curiosity about The Green Bay Tree, whether it has all the mysteries solved.

DV: That’s interesting. I do not share that curiosity.

DP: You shan’t read the rest of A Bromfield Galaxy?

DV: I doubt it.

DP: I will probably press on nobly. I’ll keep you updated.

DV: If anything completely scandalous and awesome happens, I’d read.

DP: But in the highly likely event that it kinda sucks?

DV. Yeah, I can live.

DP: Maybe it was like the Oscars this year, in the sense that, aside from Slumdog Millionaire, everything else was a bit crap. So maybe that’s how this won.

DV: I should refer to the Stuckey. I still have a book out from the library: W.J. Stuckey’s retrospective of the Pulitzer prize winners up to, like, 1972, and he pretty much says if that year was a bit crap. Like The Able McLaughlins year was total crap.

DP: I would hope so.

DV: It wasn’t like there was a diamond in the rough that should have won that year. That was a crap year. Not like the Age of Innocence/Main Street showdown year. So know (if I remember correctly) that American literature was not overlooking something grand that year. This was just the most of the mediocre.

DP: It does feel so soap opera-y.

DV: It’s kinda trashy. Not trashy enough to be modern trashy, but it’s pretty trashy. And it gets trashier. It’s not really fun like Jacqueline Susann trashy… well, maybe it would have been at the time.

DV: Maybe it’s just scandalous enough, traipsing that border between genuinely scandalous and a little spicy. Like Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead, where people swear a lot. Like “You said fuck. In a book! Oh my word. Who is this young man?” I would say that D.H. Lawrence is similar, but he believes his own bullshit. I’m not a big D.H. Lawrence fan, These ideas were true important ideas in society, if only people weren’t so repressed. He honestly felt that way.

DP: And Bromfield doesn’t go that far. I could honestly see this ending in tragedy, pretty clearly, but maybe there’s a neat happy ending somewhere. But there’s a third book—again, knowing that it’s part of a trilogy, maybe there has to be tragedy. Maybe this is like the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, and it’s gotta end with someone encased in carbonite.

DV: It does feel like Bromfield is alluding to other books. We keep mentioning D.H. Lawrence, and it reminds me of Becky Sharp a lot, that cunning and cynical character.

DP: It’s rocking the Jane Eyre, with the madwoman in the attic, and it has to have Wharton in mind. It’s not so far removed, and Wharton was known in her day, so I wouldn’t doubt that.

DV: If he ends the book with Olivia jumping in front of a train, we’ll know he’s literally ripping off the great authors.

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Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 2

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield with tags , on April 16, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

DP: (skeptically) I’m discovering that I actually kinda like the Bromfield… in a weird way. How far along are you?

DV: Sabine just finished thinking that she was going to fix everyone’s life, and Olivia’s having a conversation with her daughter about…

DP: … people she might marry?

DV: Yeah. Trying to figure out how she’s going to get them out of this hell hole to where there’s actually an attractive man.

DP: (laughs) This book is actually a lot like Spinal Tap’s song “Hell Hole.” As in “You know where you stand in a hell hole. Folks lend a hand in a hell hole.” Like, their place is kind of a hell hole, but they love it, and it has its charms. They want to get out of the hell hole and meet attractive men, but in the governing system of the society, it’s a rather nice hell hole. It’s an upper-middle-class hell hole. Even an upper-UPPER-class hell hole!

DV: I’d say. I keep wondering where this actually takes place. I mean, they keep saying they’re in New Hampshire, but I know of no place in New Hampshire that has mills filled with Polish people.

DP: There’s a later reference to something about Vermont.

DV: Yeah, but he goes into Boston every day.

DP: Maybe they’re in southern Vermont? Because southern Vermont isn’t far from Boston…

DV: (waving hands) No, no! Southern Vermont’s left… on my imaginary mental map of the United States.

DP: Maybe, to you, everything’s to the left of Boston, except ideologically.

DV: Indeed. (persisting) No, but New Hampshire is above the northern part of Massachusetts. New Hampshire’s on the coast and then Vermont is above the Berkshires, so you could probably get from the corner of Vermont to Boston… oh man, that would take a couple hours.

DP: Drive. In cars. So I guess it must be in New Hampshire then.

DV: Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to be, but he jets off to Boston to go to work in the morning, which is dumb, so it must be in Massachusetts somewhere. But they keep mentioning New Hampshire. It’s very strange.

DP: I didn’t think about the geography of the book at all.

DV: It’s a minor quibble—I kinda knew what he was getting at—but it bugged me. There are a couple of sloppy things like that. He was specifically talking about the characters’ ages… he has Sabine thinking that she left when she was twenty, and that was twenty years ago, but then she’s more than ten years older than a guy who’s thirty-six. So, wait, was this supposed to be thirty years ago?

DP: She can’t be more than ten years older than O’Hara, because I thought she was a contemporary of Olivia, and Olivia’s only…

DV: Thirty-nine. But in that passage, he says that she [Sabine] is more than ten years older than him.

DP: Unless Sabine is supposed to be a contemporary of Anson, and Anson is greatly older than Olivia, which I didn’t think was the case.

DV: Actually, that makes more sense because it talks about them [Anson and Sabine] both being kids at the same time. Yeah. But, still, it’s weird.

DP: The math doesn’t quite add up.

DV: It’s sloppy… The book turned out to be very stiff and lockjaw-ish, and I keep getting the feeling that he does not quite know whereof he speaks. It doesn’t feel like…. like, Henry James actually grew up in a higher class and stature…

DP: Whereas Bromfield’s just talking out of his ass.

DV: Yes. I just get this talking-out-of-his-ass feeling.

DP: Like when he describes the room. The drawing-room, where there’s the desk where dear old Mr. Lowell sat… with a very vague sense of what that would actually look like and what this sort of life would actually be like.

DV: I can’t tell if that’s authentic or not, because we’re too far removed from it. There are other bits where it seems like he’s just throwing in the props that would be typical of such a thing. It feels very stage-y.

DP: Well, I really really really would like to read a book where there’s some showing and not telling because I think a lot of these books have this in common: it’s just all internal monologue and third-person omniscient narrators. So long swaths of the book are just descriptions of what the characters are thinking. It doesn’t help the staginess of it. It’s all stage directions and no action. Although, I do have to say, I’m farther along than you are, and it’s starting to get spicy. In a completely predictable way. There’s general hook-up-er and Pentland scandals are revealed. (DV speculates as to the nature of the scandals.)

DP: Oh, don’t worry, the scandals aren’t close to the main characters in any way. They’re more historical, genealogical. There’re some spicy love letters in your future. Things start to get a little funky. And in fact, there’s one plot development—is it worth it for me to tell you this or do you just want to find out on your own?—where you find out why John Pentland’s wife went mad. Because she lost her virginity.

(DV cracks up)

DP: No, honestly. She was apparently a “tender, simple woman” who was wooed “too ardently” and then went batshit crazy after she lost her virginity. Well, became a little off after she lost her virginity and went batshit crazy after she had Anson and had to be retired to the attic. Sex is like a squall in this book: it just fucks shit up. It makes the book so much weirder.

DV: Well, remember how we were talking before, that we really just wanted one of the books to not be a bildungsroman? And finally, for the first time, that’s happened. The thing it’s closest to is The Age of Innocence (which I think is a much better book) but it’s about people bursting to get out of society.

DP: And the same sort of obsession with sex and the sexual tension and the fear of class and the money. Yes.

DV: The show-y/tell-y bit struck me most in the dialogue. There’s this big long passage where Sabine and Aunt Cassie are having their showdown…

DP: Evil aunts are also a theme in these books. I keep thinking of the aunt in The Magnificent Ambersons, who maybe wasn’t evil as much as manipulative.

DV: The lonely spinster woman.

DP: Yeah. Nobody likes their aunts, man.

DV: P.G. Wodehouse did hate his aunt… like “barbed wire next to skin.”

DP: (laughs) I’ve never read Wodehouse.

DV: Oh, he’s very funny. Sidebar on Wodehouse: reading him the second time is sometimes better than reading him the first time because he constructs these incredibly elaborate farce plots, very well, but the pleasure you get is from the language.

DP: The plot is beside the point?

DV: Yeah, the fact that it’s nagging at you to find out what happened next is almost irritating. Because what’s so enjoyable about it is like playing Mousetrap: watching the whole contraption go, rather than not knowing what’s going to happen. Plus the immense pleasure you get out of the references. Like one of his aunts: he always describes her as “wearing barbed wire next to skin.”

DP: That’s an apt comparison. There’s nothing more reprehensible than these aunts.

DV: Yeah, now that you mention it, the fact that she Did It (with capital letters) is pretty interesting, because he pretty much implies that Aunt Cassie got married, decided she was an invalid, waits until her husband dies, and now she’s fine. The clear implication that she’s trying to avoid… well, no naughty-naughty for you.

DP: The book is very preoccupied with sex without ever actually saying the word. There’s the weird ruination in Sabine’s past where she had the husband but I guess the husband played around, which she let him… I don’t quite understand that, but there’s something there. Then she’s got her weird daughter who’s all scientific and into frogs.

DV: I was thinking earlier it’s like D.H. Lawrence filtered through nine layers of schmuck.

DP: Then there’s the thing with the groomsman too. You’re so right! That just gets stranger and stranger and stranger as the book goes on. Higgins is a recurring character. In fact, at one point, Higgins develops this conversational affection with O’Hara, and he is trying to imply to O’Hara that Olivia’s a fine pick of a woman, and he calls her a “thoroughbred.”

DV: Ooh, that’s nice.

DP: And the implication is clear that he means “thoroughbred” in the breeding sense, because if she had been paired with a better mate, she wouldn’t have produced such a sickly son as Jack. And at one point Higgins is described as a centaur. There’s something very D.H. Lawrence about him, with him peeking over the bushes.

DV: So you’re saying there are a lot of “subtle” allusions to horseflesh?

DP: (laughs) It’s a book about horseflesh. Sort of. Kinda. It’s a weird book cloaked in a very normal book.

DV: I like that about it, though. I could be down with that. Oh, to go back to the showing/telling thing in the dialogue, so in the big showdown scene, I’m reading the actual dialogue, the stuff between quotes, and it’s perfectly fine. They’re not lighting the world on fire, but they’re getting across the characters’ viewpoints. Every single line of dialogue then is followed by three lines of what the characters are thinking. A good writer would have just put the dialogue and we would have inferred their relationships to each other, which is more fun for the reader.

DP: It’s just a different definition of good writing. It must have to be.

DV: No. Remember when we were talking about The Age of Innocence and the whole point of it was that you had to infer too much? And at some point Wharton cracks and is like, “There’s no way they’re going to get this. I’m going to have to write something down here.” If Wharton had done this, Sabine would have known that Aunt Cassie was offering her pity to humiliate her, but she only would have said, “I see.”

DP: It’s all just describing the subtext. The subtext is rapidly becoming text.

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Early Autumn: Summary, Slightly Belated

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield with tags , , on April 12, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

Sorry that we started the in-depth discussion of Early Autumn without the traditional summary to bring you up-to-speed (or for intrepid book report cheaters to one day crib). Here we go:

The 1927 Pulitzer winner Early Autumn by man-about-town Louis Bromfield looks into the lives of the Pentland clan, whose roots in their New England community stretch Pilgrim-ward. We’ve got Olivia Pentland, long-suffering wife of Anson Pentland, who’s perpetually writing a history of his family of interest to precisely no one; mother to Sylvia Pentland, dewily on the market; and the sickly Jack Pentland, a.k.a. Young Master Not-long-for-this-world.  Also, there’s a bitchy aunt who’s all up in everyone’s business, a melancholy and alcoholic grandfather who is Olivia’s secret ally against the rest of the family, and a madwoman in the attic. Just your standard moneyed New England house of slow, dreary horrors.

The change agents come in the form of Sabine, a cousin (if I remember correctly) and childhood playmate of Anson’s, who returns from Europe with a tarnished reputation and a scientifically-inclined daughter of marriageable age, and John O’Hara, a “shanty Irish” up-and-coming politician who takes up residence in a nearby cottage and casts an appreciative eye in Olivia’s direction. Desire long dead in Olivia’s heart is stirred by his attentions, and she spends the bulk of the book contemplating adultery. Unfortunately, the death of her son, the elopement of her daughter Sabine with a visiting French musician, and the suicide-framed-as-accidental death of her father-in-law, the scion of the Pentland clan, forestall any actual play.

There’s a strong historical subplot in the middle of the book about Pentland ancestors who actually managed to do something genuinely scandalous, and this refracts forward and backward into Pentland family history, casting aspersions on the purity of the bloodline and generally throwing into stark tragicomic relief Aunt Cassie’s self-righteous meddling and Anson’s stony propriety. The novel ends with Olivia turning to a home now empty of her allies (father-in-law and daugher) and a future spent maintaining the stalwart bloodline and heritage for which she cares nothing.

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Early Autumn: The Man Done Gone

Posted in Contemporary Reviews, Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield on April 9, 2009 by Diablevert

Loius Bromfield was the man. This seems like an important thing to know about him. He did it all first: Joined the ambulence corps in WWI before America entered the war (and was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor), wrote a first novel which became a bestseller (The Green Bay Tree, two books before Early Autumn), hung out in Paris between the wars (he helped Hemmingway get his first story published), conquered Broadway (play based on his first book: smash hit), was the toast of 30s Hollywood (Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart got married in his backyard) and then retired to the country, incidentally, as it were, becoming one of the pioneers of the organic farming and ecology movements (his home, Malabar Farm, is now a state park).

I must correct myself: Louis Bromfield was the fucking man. If he’d managed to cram in a few evenings gigging with Louis Armstrong during this period, not only would you believe it, he’d be fucking Zelig.

Which makes it all the odder that I’d never heard of him. Not so much because I’d never heard of him, but because you’d think anybody would have heard of him, with a resume like that. The cat was hep. He made the scene. Cooler than Lou Reed on F.D.R. drive in February. And he won a goddamn Pulitzer. So how could he have died from literary memory so quickly?

Well, the short answer may suffice: He’s not very good. Dread Penny and I chatted a bit about this, of which more anon, but there’s something about him that reminds me a bit of Stephen Fry’s character in Cold Comfort Farm. There’s a brief scene in a tea shop that shows what I mean (two and a half minutes in, although Ian McKellen as a fire and brimstone preacher has its pleasures as well, as does the entire film and the book it’s based on):

In a slightly less spittle-flecked way, that’s Bromfield to a T. Early Autumn is a book consumed not with the actuality of sex, but with its possibility; practically everyone in it who actually does manage to knock boots is nearly destroyed by the experience, because they’re too weak, damn it, damnably weak, and lack the passionate animal spirits which lend the lower classes their pulsating vitality. Or something like that. Bromfield condemns this narrowmindedness and leads the rah-rah section for honest lust; but it all feels like a wrestling match with a scarecrow today, and one gets the vague sense that it did even back then. To wit, here’s a contemporary review of the book from the Hartford Courant:

Bromfield Not Quite Master of His Craft

The Hartford Courant

Nov 28, 1926

Here is presented to us the third “panel” in Louis Bromfield’s “screen of American life,” “The Green Bay Tree” and “Possession,” being the “panels” already unfolded to the reading public. Mr. Bromfield’s books are exceedingly difficult to criticize the author possess, indubitably, a fine talent, yet it is a talent with abrupt and daunting limitations; his imaination is acute and subtle, but he lacks the power to bring the fruits of that imagination clearly and acceptably before the reader; he has the mind, and the material, but somehow they do not fuse properly, the author is unable to work them together into a wholly satisfying narrative.
“Early Autumn” is a sad scare story of the yellow leaf; of the decadence, or better perhaps the disintegration, of an old aristocratic New England family. In an exceedingly interesting letter to his publishers, Mr. Bromfield writes of how New England, through the migration of her most vigorous citizens to the west,—“has spread over all America a thin veneer of what passes for Puritans, and is merely a pale, degenerate imitation of the positive, fighting, masculine force represented by the Roundheads of Cromwell’s day.” This is a bit of acute analytic comment, which reveals something of Mr. Bromfield’s individual idiosyncrasy.
The men and women in “Early Autumn” are drawn with patient, painstaking care, but they never come quite alive; but Mr. Bromfield does succees in conveying the sense of breaking down, of a strain bred too far, of general collapse. If only this sensitively minded writer were more completely master of his craft, if he were able to attain the height for which he manifestly strives, his work would be comparable with that of Mrs. Wharton; as it is there is, in Mr. Bromfield’s New England trilogy, a constant suggestion of Mrs. Wharton’s manner and method.

It cheers me to think at least some reviewers saw him as a bit of a soapy old fraud as well. (Of course, maybe I’m just pissed because Humph and Lauren didn’t get married in my back yard. We’ll always have Paris….) But it is startling and disturbing to think that such a prominent cultural figure could disappear so utterly. Quality, it seems, does count for something. But contemporary prize pickers don’t seem to be very good at spotting it….which makes one’s right eyebrow float aloft when looking at some more recent winners….

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Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, part 1

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield on April 1, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

DV: So, how far are you into that thing [Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield], anyway? I’m probably fifty, sixty pages in.

DP: Yeah, you’re farther than I am. I just got the book and I’m probably about twenty pages in. So they just went home from the ball. There are lots of balls.

DV: Yeah.

DP: But not those kinds of balls.

DV: Not so far.

DP: No, there are just actual… balls. Dances. There are a lot of social mores being defied in very subtle ways.

DV: “Subtle” is not the word I would use.

DP: [laughs] No, well, you know what I mean. There’s like a “sorting matches” kind of vibe about the whole thing. The most scandalous thing in the whole book so far is, like, her garish red hair.

DV: Yeah, and the fact that she, like, looks at people. She just has an air about her.

DP: And the other one, too… and honestly, their names are very close together and it’s going to bother me for the whole book. There’s a Sabine and a Sibyl and an Olivia and a Therese, but she’s only referred to once by her first name, and I already have them confused. Which is the mother and the daughter? The one sort-of cougar is too fiery in the way she looks at people and the other is just too languid in the way she looks at people. And both are very offensive.

DV: I feel like this is going to be hard to evaluate because it’s like asking “is this a good or a bad dinosaur?” I can see the movie they would have made of this in 1932, the drawing room drama with Katharine Hepburn. That’s so distinctive a genre that I can’t tell if this is a good example of it or even a good book or what.

DP: That’s been the major drama in any of these books that we’ve read about society. It’s all looking at people the wrong way or wearing a dress that’s out of date. It’s like Alice Adams without the snobbery.

DV: Or they’re actually rich.

DP: Yeah, that’s true. I did think in the beginning, “You’re [Diablevert’s] from Boston? Is this what it was like?”

DV: No! I’ve heard rumors of such, but it died over a hundred years ago. I came from the wrong side of the tracks anyway. The idea of Boston as this dying cultural center, that it would have been the “it” city of the 1800s, was slowly dying off and falling away from a leadership position. Like, that all happened a hundred years ago. You just have no concept of that now.

DP: Boston before the Red Sox, I don’t know much about.

DV: People do still talk about the Transcendentalists.

DP: That’s right! It’s only been twenty pages and I’ve forgotten about the weird off-handed references to Emerson, which, honestly, I don’t think Emerson would want you to take his name in snootiness. That’s kind of not the point of Emerson. Also, a society in which James Russell Lowell is a mad crazy paparazzi-worthy houseguest is just difficult to…

DV: Yeah, I feel like it’d be like writing a book about Greenwich Village now, with the grandma character always bitching about how much cooler it was back in the 50s, how Greenwich Village is slowly becoming yuppified and dying. There was a period in the 1860s where Boston was probably the leading intellectual city in the country and New York was much more about commerce.

DP: But these people aren’t particularly intellectual. I don’t think that they’re so celebratory towards Emerson because of anything that he wrote, but just his sheer celebrity, or his uppercrust-ness.

DV: I think it’s the same way that nowadays New York looks down on LA, because New Yorkers consider themselves to be smarter and more of an intellectual hotspot. I think Boston had that kind of… that weight of history happening. Maybe more the way London was. Boston’s a provincial city. It’s one of the leading provincial cities, but well behind New York, L.A., Washington.

DP: Chicago, even.

DV: Chicago’s a much bigger city. Given its size, Boston carries a lot of weight, culturally. But that makes the book tough to evaluate, because that atmosphere is kind of extinct for so long that it’s hard to tell whether it’s true or clichéd or what.

DP: Sometimes I feel like it’s not very fair of us to read these books because we’re accustomed to so much more just happening in a book. Honestly, when you compare it to the most recent Pulitzer winner, Oscar Wao, which is a very action-packed book… the history is full of sturm und drang, there’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot going on. It lives in this sea of pop culture that these older books just simply don’t. So for this major prizewinner to have the first twenty pages just be about who looked at each other wrong at a ball…

DV: But at the same time, isn’t that fucking The House of Mirth? And all Henry James?

DP: I guess this just has no air of danger. In The Age of Innocence, I felt like someone was always about have their bodice get ripped off, like we were just one step away from total utter…

[DV scoffs]

DP: OK, we were many many steps and longing glances away from someone shedding a bustle, but… these books just seem very safe to me. They’re safe, they’re traditional in plot, in style, they’re beside the point of modernism. Unless we start to go all “Moo cow” in fifty more pages, I’m like…

DV: Maybe. There was that weird D.H. Lawrence-y bit where the groom was looking into the ball.

DP: That’s right! What was up with that?

DV: I don’t know! I was, like, “where are we going with this?” Because if he turns out to be a major character, this will be pretty much like D.H. Lawrence.

DP: There’s some weird foreshadowing here. Well, from the beginning of the book (and I think we both Twittered this), we start in the first three sentences with the word “bedizened”

DV: Sidebar: “bedizened” was in the New Yorker this week. It’s so weird. I’d never heard that word before and now it’s twice in one week.

DP: Someone else is reading this book! Does it mean “bedazzled”?

DV: I believe so, yes.

DP: There you go. Not a bad word, necessarily.

DV: It has a musty old-timey-ness that feels forced.

DP: It is old-timey. It is like Ye Olde Vocabulary Teste.

DV: After the ball, she goes upstairs and sees her husband… have you gotten to that bit yet?

DP: No, I haven’t gotten to that bit yet. She just saw her aged father-in-law down the hallway.

DV: It’s like what you were talking about before, like watching something that’s been ripped off many times. I can’t tell whether this was a cliché at the time, but it does just feel very much like that Eddie Izzard bit. “I guess you’d better had.” I’m trying to give the book the benefit of the doubt, but I get the strong feeling that…

DP: Well, there’s the possibility that we’re not picking up on the cultural nuances in it, in that the difference between phat with a “ph” and fat with an “f”… I don’t know. That we’re sensitive to micro-distinctions in celebrity and slang that maybe there are micro-distinctions here we’re just not picking up on.

DV: (skeptically) It’s possible.

DP: I’m also a little troubled in my OCD by the fact that this is the middle book of a trilogy, so I can’t help but think that maybe there was stuff going into it that we should know from the book prior. We’re gonna have this problem later when we get to the Rabbit books in that the first one or two Rabbit books did not win a Pulitzer but the second two did.

DV: Well, I’ve read Rabbit, Run. It’s funny: there was a review that I read this week about how you can’t understand that book until you’re the age that Rabbit is and realizing that your life is not going to amount to a whole lot. So part of me wonders if I’d feel differently about it now.

DP: (vehemently) I hate that book. I hate all of those books.

DV: Rabbit was such a jackass. That’s the problem with Updike: that you were supposed to feel bad for these people who treated other people like shit because they’re all confused and lonesome and things didn’t work out like they thought they would. But that does not give you an acceptable excuse to ditch your wife and baby and leave them in a depression spiral. That’s like, “No, you’re an asshole. I’m sorry.” Or, you couldn’t play basketball to make a career out of it, but that does not give you free abandon to be an ass.

DP: Well, it’s that kind of egotism and that sort of attention to Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea that he didn’t live up to his expectations so he gets free rein to be a wreck of a person and wreck all these other lives. Updike was essentially writing about these reprehensible people doing reprehensible things. It’s just not fun for me.

DV: But he doesn’t acknowledge that they’re reprehensible. They’re supposed to be lost and confused and sympathetic. That’s what gets me.

DP: I don’t know if this is going to be the same issue, to read this award-winning middle book of a trilogy will somehow be less fulfilling, mostly because I have the three-volume edition. So I will be reading the other two books out of sheer OCD. So pray for me. It’s also hard for me, because I like to judge books by their covers, and as we delve into the Pulitzer back archives in the dusty stacks in Central [Library], you can’t judge rebound library books by their covers.

DV: Some small press reissued this, I found out when I was looking for a cover image of the book. I was talking to L. about starting a new book, and she said “Yeah, you just don’t like any of those, huh?”

DP: I liked The Age of Innocence. And even So Big, a little bit.

DV: I get a sinking feeling that this book is going to be terrible.

DP: Or Booth Tarkington-esque.

DV: I don’t think it will be Booth Tarkington, because it seems to take itself a little too seriously. Tarkington had that Midwestern thing.

DP: There’s something sort of burnished and golden about this book.

DV: Booth Tarkington did that thing where he could make a pastiche of that to make fun of it, but he couldn’t do it for real. I mean, nobody does it realer than Edith Wharton. Booth Tarkington could have never written The Age of Innocence, because he was too much of a middle-class soul. Which sound fucked up to say, but whatever.

DP: I hear you. He was so class-bound that he could only see wealth from…

DV: … an outsider’s perspective. Which is normal, but Tarkington was just such a piece of shit.

DP: I guess we’d have to know more about Bromfield to know categorically if he’s writing from experience or not.

DV: I don’t think he is. The sense I get of it (after not reading much of it, to be sure) is if I tried to do an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I wouldn’t know dick about what it was like to live the life of a rich millionaire in the 20s, other than what I’ve read about it. It feels clichéd like that. But it’s hard to tell because this whole genre is so dead-and-gone that it’s hard to say.

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Arrowsmith: A Final Shudder.

Posted in Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis on March 23, 2009 by Diablevert

Good Lord, you mean to say that Lewis won his Pulitzer for having ripped himself off? According to this account of Main Street at The Millions it would appear so. What a smug little hack. Well, at least Penny doesn’t have to feel bad for not having read his best stuff. You may not have had the Whopper itself, but you have had the Whopper Jr., and the lingering taste and indigestion is the same…

Actually, this fills me with fear. When you consider the ratio of canonical authors to classic novels  on the to-be-read list there is cause for worry: Wharton, Cather, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Cheever, Mailer, Updike, Morrison, Roth. Wharton — the Age of Innocence. Fine and dandy. Steinbeck for Grapes of Wrath, doubleplusgood.  But Faulkner for The Reivers? Hemingway for the Old Man and the Sea? Beloved is Morrison’s best known, and American Pastoral widely considered one of Roth’s best, I believe. But then they are more recent and more familiar….I wonder in time how many of these will come to seem pity prizes, disguised lifetime achievement awards, or just the fruits of a weak year, like Kate Winslet’s Oscar…

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Arrowsmith: Aftermath

Posted in Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis on March 18, 2009 by Diablevert

In the interests of reviving the blog a bit, we’re making it a bit more relaxed and conversational, and incorporating some posts where we discuss our reactions to the book. We’re thinking of doing these like a real podcast soon, but first we’ve got some kinks to work out. (Like, say, learning how to edit sound.) So here’s a transcript of our postmortem on Arrowsmith.

We open with Penny reporting her encounter with an actual reference to Arrowsmith in pop culture:

Dreadful Penny: ….it was a naughty joke that Hawkeye was telling.

Diablevert: About Arrowsmith? What was the context?

Penny: It was an early M*A*S*H episode, and Hawkeye was like, making out with a nurse in a naughty way, and Trapper comes in and asks about some naughty pictures, Hawkeye’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And Trapper’s like, “Well, why did I find them before, behind your copy of Arrowsmith?” That’s hysterical. Such a great character note for Hawkeye. Of course he would have this copy of Arrowsmith, this doctor character who wanted to do good in the world, and save everyone, and thought he was kind of a savior. So: Thank you for enriching my knowledge of M*A*S*H, Sinclair Lewis. Or not even Sinclair Lewis. The Pulitzer committee.

Dv: Do you think that’s part of the problem with some of these books, that they’ve passed out of culture in a way?

Penny: Yeah, I think they definitely have. They’re books that time has forgot, and authors that time has forgot. I’m part of the Pulitzer forum on GoodReads, and I watch it sometimes and sometimes people get really passionate about these books. They love them so much, and wish that everybody read them. And I get that sense as we read them that they’re very much of a time, and you can’t really understand that time unless you experience — like, to be fully immersed in a time when the automobile was a seismic shift in culture.

Dv: That’s one of the things I sort of appreciate about them in the aggregate. The sense that it gives you, little details that you see repeated again and again — like they way in which soft coal apparently made living in cities at that time like a being in fucking coal pit. That’s not something that you’d every really pick up on from watching movies, or hearing stuff about that time, you don’t really imagine it that way.

Penny: And genuine skepticism about the automobile actually taking hold is kind of interesting. They’re all so scared of the car. But they’re all bildungsromans. And I wish that would….stop. Like a lot.

Dv: Yeah, we haven’t had a romance, really, except Age of Innocence.

Penny: I guess The Able McLaughlins was kind of a romance. That was definitely a book that time has justly forgot.

Dv: Oh, that was fucking terrible.

Penny: Yeah. I think The Able McLaughlins and Arrowsmith can both go down in history as books that almost killed our blog.

Dv: Yeah.

Penny: They were brutal.

Dv: The Able McLaughlins was at least more digestible, I feel like.

Penny: It was shorter.

Dv: Yeah, that’s pretty much what I mean. Is that it was much shorter. And an easier book to blow through, because it wasn’t terribly well-written. You know what I mean? So you were just like, “uh-hunh, uh-hunh, uh-hunh, whatever.” With Arrowsmith, it was more dense and just went on for fucking ever.

Penny: I guess Arrowsmith was more dense… of course, it was better written.

Dv: You’re forgetting how terrible The Able McLaughlins was, in my opinion. It was awful.

Penny: But Arrowsmith was so snide, in just an unpleasant way, in a way that I didn’t feel like I was participating in. I felt like Sinclair Lewis just hated everyone. In the world.

Dv: Yes.

Penny: So completely misanthropic.

Dv: I don’t know if he hated people. He just thought he was smarter than them. That’s been interesting, because one of the things he has contempt for has been a running theme in a couple of the books. The idea of this—I think he captures his time very well—this whole civic boosterism bit. Pep. Talking things up. All that shit. It was in The Magnificent Ambersons, one of the first books, that whole idea of—

Penny: Spirit and civic-mindedness.

Dv: And that’s something that’s not well-remembered.

Penny: The reputation of the upper-crust.

Dv: But also of the town. The idea of having this whole community of people being patriotic in a very local way. Which I think he captured well. But it’s really annoying to read about, because he has such contempt for all these people that display that quality.

Penny: But that’s what makes all of these books so xenophobic in that way, though. Because it is the pep, and this town spirit, and then there’s the encroaching city. And the fear of immigration comes into that. Nearly every book is about small towns disintegrating. Or even big cities, like in the Age of Innocence.

Dv: Do you know what’s funny? It’s sort of the weirdest thing. When I think back on it, the very first one we read was — what was the name of that?

Penny: His Family.

Dv: Thank you. In some ways, it was one of the most sophisticated ones. Because it had the fucking flapper, and was talking about the problems of the inner, urban city, and it had this chick, the daughter, who was like a Wobblie or whatever—

Penny: The reformer! Yeah.

Dv: Right. So even though it was a terribly-written book, in many ways—just leaden prose—but in terms of issues and the themes it was dealing with, in comparison to some of the other ones I think it had a different take. All the other ones, all of them are obsessed with this final conquering-of-the-frontier shit, which just seems so irrelevant at the moment.

Penny: Exactly.

Dv: The fucking prairie was fucking killing me. It was just like, three books and we were stuck in the goddamn wheat fields, and it we can’t, like…

Penny: Yeah. But there was also a genuine New Woman, in His Family, and the women in most of these books were…pretty contemptible.

Dv chuckles.

Penny: The female characters in Arrowsmith were like Leora, who just waited for no reason, and had bad grammar, in a kind of endearing way.

Dv: I like her better though, than some of the other female characters in that book. I agree that she — everyone in the book was treated with contempt. So I think she actually probably gets more credit than a lot of characters do. Because she sticks up for herself. She’s given that.

Penny: I guess that’s true. And he probably wasn’t expecting that much more of her, because he was probably a misogynist, so

Dv: He’s very chauvinist. I agree that he thinks Leora knows her place and that he thinks that’s a good thing. But in comparison to all the other characters—she rebels against her family. When they try and stop her from marrying Martin, she’s like fuck you, I don’t want to put up with your bullshit — in a very 19th century way that wouldn’t use words like that…

Penny: But she’s also like…. “Screw you, I’m not going to put up with all your nonsense, I’m …just going to sit at home and wait for you.”

Dv: Yeah, but it’s sort of like—

Penny: “But I’m going to wait, always, for you!”

Dv: Okay. One of the most irritating episodes in Arrowsmith is the pseudo-affair he has, where he gets bored with his job and starts macking on the daughter of his boss.

Penny: Of the booster? Pickerbaugh?

Dv: Yeah. Which, talk about shitting where you eat. But anyway. That whole thing is really dumb. But Leora’s attitude toward it is interesting, because she’s just like, “You’re being a dumbfuck. Get over it.” And that in itself is interesting, because it’s passive in that she just sort of sits there waiting for him. But…he’s being a dumbfuck. And he really just needs to get over it. Would you have wanted him, to…?

Penny: It didn’t ruin their marriage, it didn’t send them into divorce.

Dv: It was so petty, and tiny, and she could see that. She could see his limitations, in way that some of the other characters don’t. His second wife wants him to be a great man and all this bullshit, and that’s essentially what they break over. Whereas Leora sees past his bullshit and likes him anyway, which is why I feel like they made a good match. There’s a fair bit of depth to that writing in some ways, but there was just such a contempt, that reigned over everything, and made it very difficult to read because you didn’t care for the characters.

Penny: It was a book that seemed pleasingly accurate in its attention to the small details of its time and I appreciated that. But there was also a lot about science in it that we don’t accept anymore. And I think that just frustrating, and was something that very much dated that book. There was a lot of, “and then they discovered molecules!” And while I can appreciate what it was like to live at a time when nobody knew what a molecule was, it is kind of tedious to look back on that, and read that.

Dv: Oh, really? That’s interesting. That didn’t bother me. It did get a little technical, and that dragged a bit. But for me it was interesting because it was like the car bits, in that you forget this stuff was ever new.

Penny: I felt that way to a certain extent. But there was just so much of it in the book that it was obsessive.

Dv: Whatever Lewis is doing, he get so wrapped up in it. You can tell that with writers, when they’ve done all this research, and it’s like, “here’s 19 pages that explain exactly how this process works that have nothing to do with the goddamn plot.” And you’re just like: Dude. There was a bit of that, yeah. But I just didn’t see what his overall point was, in a lot of ways.

Penny: What do you mean?

Dv: The whole essential conflict in the book is Arrowsmith being the man of science and everything tries to pull him away from being this scientific researcher genius who’s purely pursuing science’s ends and not really even caring for the individual as per the individual, but only looking to discover the true principals of how all this shit works, and eventually, broadly, that will be good for the race. I think Lewis approves of all this, but it’s kind of hard to tell sometimes.

Penny: I don’t know if he approved of it, if you extrapolate to the plague stuff. The idea there was that he was going to conduct this perfect experiment, but then can’t, can’t bring himself to do it, because he’s too moved by human suffering. And not only human suffering in the abstract, but by his own suffering. So he loses his wife — spoiler alert!

Dv laughs.

Penny: I feel ridiculous, but sometimes talking about these books, I feel like “Sorry if we ruined that book for you. It was ruined for me in the first ten pages. By starting it.” So…no, it’s cool, Arrowsmith’s good, or not…

Dv: No, it’s not.

Penny: But I think the point of it was that humanism did intrude, that you can’t get past that humanism. You can’t in a purely scientific way. I think that was Lewis’ point.

Dv: See, I don’t know. I’m not sure about it because it doesn’t seem that way from the reaction of the characters. It was more like, Arrowsmith was really fucking depressed and gave up on everything, and became like, “Fuck. Fuck the experiment. I don’t give a fuck.” Lewis didn’t really give him a clear moment of “I reject my former principals, and now see that I was being blind to suffering.” He’s just sort of like, “Fuck it. My wife died. Who cares? Whatever you want to do, it’s fine.” Which might have been more realistic about how a person would actually behave in that situation.

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Arrowsmith: Summary. Or, The Novel that Rendered This Blog Comotose

Posted in Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis on March 18, 2009 by Diablevert

So, that was November, eh? Man. Okay, so Arrowsmith almost killed us. It was long and a bit boring and it became hard to think of interesting things to say about it that didn’t sound like whining. But we decided fuck it, let’s try anyway. So, we’re gonna loosen things up and do these in a bit more conversational style.

In the meantime, however, it is only fair to summarize to get us started.

Arrowsmith is the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor, and the book covers almost his entire medical education and career. Following a brief intro describing the boy’s first mentor — a local doc in a tiny cow town who has a little problem with the glug glug but is happy to let the boy Arrowsmith hang around the office and play with the specimens — the book spends its first, expansive section on Martin’s medical education at a state university, among the first of the huge institutions created out on the prairie.

Arrowsmith joins a frat, chums around with a bunch of other medical student, some skilled and priggish, some friendly, boorish, and rather bad doctors. His idealized conception of the selfless medical man is swiftly punctured by encounters with actual professors, from the old docs who rely on gut instinct and folk remedies to get by to the new docs who view a thriving practice as a mere launching pad for a political career, or better yet, a chance to get their face on the label of a patent medicine bottle. Only one of Martin’s professors retains his admiration and becomes a lifelong mentor to him: Max Gottlieb, a gloomy German who couldn’t give two shits about treating patients but is passionately dedicated to research, pulling all-nighters over his lab bench to ferret out the root causes of disease. At the time the book was written, the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, but though it was known that microscopic agents caused disease, how they did so — and more importantly, how they might be prevented from doing so — was still a hot research topic. (Wiki informs me that Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin in 1928; Arrowsmith won its Pulitzer two years before.)

Martin becomes enchanted with Gottleib’s brand of saintly asceticism and takes up lab work himself, but he soon hits a snag. Or rather, he picks up a snag, in the form of a rather slatternly young nursing student at the local hospital called Leora. (Their meet cute? He finds her taking an unauthorized break when she’s supposed to be cleaning the wards and bums a smoke off her.) Martin dumps his existing girlfriend and decides, rashly, to marry Leora right away. He ditches school for a couple weeks so they can break the news to her family — a maneuver that nearly gets him bounced out sans degree — her fam flips a wig, they get married anyway, yet can’t afford to live together because Martin’s barely scraping by on a small fund left to him by his parents, eventually he has to beg her folks for money, the whole thing’s a bad scene, basically.

Because he’s married now and needs to support his wife, Martin abandons research and decides, with his in-law’s help, to set up as a country doctor following graduation in Wheatsylvania, North Dakota. After many pages of bickering, boredom, and small town scandal, Martin starts spending all his time out in the garage, tinkering with home-grown experiments. Eventually his work results in a scientific paper, which in its turn is enough to get him a nod from his former mentor Gottlieb, and helps Martin’s reputation to the extent that he’s able to blow town for sunnier climes, or at least, for a post as assistant public health director at a small midwestern city, Nautilus.

At first Martin’s excited by the opportunity to put some of his evolving ideas about disease prevention into practice. But after about 6 seconds with his new boss, Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a super-cheerful bastard posessing a teacup’s worth of knowledge about the practice of medicine but gallons and gallons of pious, patriotic swill on the subject of health, vitality, vitamins and so-forth that he likes to spew at luncheon club meetings — kind of a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and John Harvey Kellogg — Martin realizes that his new gig is about 90% mindless boosterism to 10% actual scientific and public service work, and only that 10% so long is it doesn’t interfere with the usual practices of the B.S.D.s in town by knocking down their vermin-infested tenements. Having 29,400 more people around does provide a few more opportunities for escapism that Wheatsylvania, and Martin tries a couple different ones to break up his career monotony — a) hanging with what passes for the “fast crowd” of the town and drinking a lot, and b) flirting with one of his boss’s daughters. The faithful Leora — who remains a blunt, slouch-socked, gum-snapper, permanently unsuited to the role of prominent doctor’s wife, but devoted to Martin — doesn’t mind a any too much, but rolls her eyes at b and pretty much orders Marin to snap out of it. Which he does, without ever really getting poonanynani, thereby eliminating the danger of causing conflict and interesting plot developments.

Instead, Martin is once again called to the bench, and after a series of twists and turns ends up with a new job as a researcher at a prestigious private institute in New York City. This, too, proves not to be an Eden on second glance: There’s vicious competition among the researchers, the heads of the institute all have their heads up their asses, etc. But Martin is once again reuinited with his old pal Gottleib, also a researcher at the institute, and gets down to some serious work. After a time — and many many pages on the state of bacteriological research at the time — Martin discovers the hot ticket, a new form of antibiotic that may have the potential to cure the plague. His bosses at the institute are preassuring him to publish his results, but his old mentor warns him again and again that he must conduct full, unimpeachable studies in order to really prove he’s got the goods — otherwise he’ll thrill the press and be shredded by fellow scientist. So Martin heads down to the Carribbean, where the plague has broken out on a small island, and he sets out to test his new “phage,” as he calls it. Martin wants to do his experiment the pure science way — some people get the real cure, some get bubkis to act as a control — but after a very hostile reception, when his new drug begins to look like it’s actually helping the island government comes down on him like a ton of bricks, wanting him to hand it out to everybody (and thus ruining his experiment). Martin is unmoved by their pressure, caring more for proving his point and finally coming up with some publishable results — until his wife, Leora, falls victim to the disease, and dies. At which point Marin loses his shit and starts handing the stuff out left right and center.

A grief-stricken Martin eventually comes home, salvages what he can of his results, and publishes them. At the same time, an acquaintance he made while on the island — a sophisticated, wealthy young widow — is rekindled again in New York, and he soon falls for her and marries her, and even has a kid. Wife No. 2 sets about making Martin into a great man of affairs — an endeavor made easy by the success of his plague treatments. Even though the results weren’t scientifically perfect, with a little help from the good PR men of the institute Martin is soon Hero Doc and in line for the directorship.

But just as ultimate public and professional recognition comes close, Martin gets fidgity once again. Looking out at the prospect of a life filled with black tie dinners, while his test tubes gather dust, he decides to chuck it all again, divorcing his wife, renouncing any claim to her fortune, resigning from the institute and retiring to a little cabin in the woods in Vermont run by a fellow scientist, where he divided his time between experiments and log-splitting. And there, blessedly, the book ends.

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