Now, I'm in catch-up phase. I have 4 books(5 if you include the first Robertson Davies book that is part of a trilogy in which the second novel won)to write about before I continue to move forward on my reading...
Book #101 was In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow. It won the Pulitzer in 1942, and was also made into a movie directed by John Huston, starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. This book is about family drama at its worst, and about lost dreams, lost times and lost lives. This novel is about the Timberlake family: the patriarch Asa, the mother, Lavinia, and the two daughters, Roy and Stanley. Men's names for female characters struck me as highly interesting, especially for a novel written in 1942. There is never any indication on behalf of the father and mother as to why they gave their daughters two male names, but there is also no indication on behalf of the author. Except perhaps for this: both female characters have strength, in their own ways, and even then, strength of character could be construed as a male-dominated attribute. Who knows.
Anyway, the entire novel is told from Asa Timberlake's point of view. Asa's family was extremely wealthy, but his parents' fortunes began to go downhill and his father took his own life, leaving the family at the mercy of relatives. He has a nowhere job at the factory which his father once owned, which is now owned by the uncle of his wife, Uncle William. It is clear that Asa's marriage is terrible, and he pretty much can't stand his wife, who is an invalid. Or rather, had a hard time dealing with the real world, and decided to check out physically instead. It appears at points that she is actually possibly more physically capable than she lets on, she just needs people to take care of her. Lavinia was used to a higher quality of living before she married Asa, and it seems that even now, over 20 years later, she still isn't over that. Asa, miserably unhappy, but trying not to be, lives his life vicariously through his grown daughters(both in their early 20s) and through his weekend trips out to the country to see Kate, the widow of his best friend, Jack.
Though the words of the novel are permeated by Asa's sense of loneliness and loss of time as he becomes an old man, the novel's action centers around Asa's two daughters, Stanley and Roy. As the novel opens, Stanley is to marry Craig, an attorney, and Roy is already married to Peter, a surgeon. Stanley(played by Bette Davis in the movie version) is complete and total trouble, though. She always wants what she can't have, and it appears that she needs to be at the center of attention at all times, or at the very least at the center of male attention at all times. She seduces Roy's husband Peter, and they run off together. This is hugely scandalous of course, but also downright mean of her to do. Of course, Stanley insists that she's in love with Peter, but it's pretty clear that she's just in love with attention. Asa realizes this in his narration, but there is not much he can do about it. Lavinia, his wife, is obsessed with Stanley and her beauty and everything that she stands for. To Lavinia, Stanley has everything that she didn't have as a young woman, and that jealousy/desire towards her own daughter has become over the years akin to idolatry. Uncle William, too, worships Stanley. He gives her a car, and other income so she can continue to be sheltered, because he feels like it's something she needs. Asa has much internal frustration towards this. He watches his elder daughter, Roy, begin to self-destruct as her marriage has fallen apart and due to the scandal that her sister has run away with her husband. Both Asa and Roy see Stanley for what she really is, but it seems that no one else really does.
Roy, played by Olivia de Havilland in the movie version, becomes quite the pillar of strength. Though shaken by the loss of her now ex-husband, who eventually, either through his own weakness of character, or guilt, or self-loathing or whatever, commits suicide, and drives Stanley back into the welcoming arms of her mother and uncle; Roy, makes an active and valiant decision to find strength in stoicism, and rebuilds her life. She hardens her heart in a survival mechanism, but finds herself befriending and eventually engaged to Stanley's jilted fiance, Craig.
It is at this point that Stanley returns home, a widow to a suicide. Roy and Craig's lives have been doing well enough, Asa even has some hope for the future of his favorite daughter, and though Lavinia has up until this point been pining the loss of Stanley, that's not really anything new, of course. Once again, Stanley is at the center of attention; pouty and tearful and subject to whatever tranquilizers a doctor can give her, she makes everyone cater to her needs. Roy is resentful, and rightfully so, Craig is also finding himself feeling sorry for Stanley and possibly seeing his feelings resurge. What a f---ing mess.
Stanley is a homewrecker, pure and simple. She is a hurricane that leaves destruction in her path, wherever she goes. And the end (SPOILER ALERT), makes this even clearer. She goes out in the rain in her car, driving fast and recklessly and hits and kills a small girl. She blames the entire incident(claiming she was in bed the whole time and that she wasn't even in her car), on a young black servant that the family has, and that he took the car out. The tragedy in this is that the family suspects that Stanley is at fault, but feel a need to protect her, as well as this young black man had such great promise and was going to go to university and eventually become a lawyer himself. The nights that he has to, as an innocent, spend in prison, do him in mentally and his dreams are over, all because of Stanley. Ugh.
Asa, as an old man is resigned to his fate, and to making the best of whatever snatches of happiness he can find. Roy is the one who, rightly so, is full of rage at how unjust everything is. This is quite the dramatic novel, full of emotion and family strife. It also depicts loneliness very well, and how you can live in a house full of people and still feel like you are all by yourself. If there is any theme that I have seen as a recurring one throughout the now 104 books that I've read, it's loneliness, and how the characters, representing the human condition in all its various facets, deal with that internal struggle. This book is no different, and there are several quotes which are related to this theme.
In the first quote, Roy is talking to her father...
"'I wonder...' she began and then broke off with a laugh. 'I suppose it is easier,' she continued after a pause, 'when the bottom drops out to drop with it. Mother is always saying that the bottom has dropped out of everything.'
He chuckled under his breath, as if he were afraid Lavinia might resent an improper sense of humor. 'A great tradition is an expensive luxury,' he said. 'Falling back on the past may lend inspiration, and it may also lead to gradual hardening of the arteries.'" (44)
The second quote is when Roy has decided to let Peter go, in her heart at least, to Stanley.
"'Poor Father.' Her voice wavered, but the next instant she had regained control of it. 'If you love me, you must leave me alone. I have to work things out in my own way. I have to save myself as I can. It may not be the right way, but it's mine.'
That was only the truth. Her enemy, he knew, was within the heart; for she was at the mercy of some antagonist more hostile than the mere abstraction called life. Her own will must bear her up; she must fight her inner conflicts in solitude. She belongs to another age, he thought; she is a part of the future, and I am still encrusted with the outworn shape of the past. I cannot share either her joy or her grief; all I can do is stand aside and sympathize from a distance. She is stronger than any of us, and finer in many ways; but she lacks tenderness--or is it merely imagination? She is riding a single virtue, the new gallantry, too hard--perhaps to self-destruction. Who knows? He felt that he had come suddenly to the brink of a precipice; and he could not see into the gulf that divided two hemispheres. Was it light there? Was it darkness? Was it another dawn? Or was it but a quite old ending masked as a new beginning?" (148-9)
Also, a quote when Asa goes to visit his beloved Kate, whom he dreams of leaving Lavinia for.
"'In a minute. I'll tell Martha.' She went into the house; and turning away, while Pat and Percy leaped and circled in front of him, he crossed the ragged lawn, beneath dappled shadows of elms, and stood waiting for Kate to come out. The river path, trailing across the meadows, was lost in billowing waves of asters, golden-rod, and life-ever-lasting. There was no wind, and the October sunshine, pouring down from the stainless blue of the sky, kindled the variegated bloom into a running flame, misted over with smoke-colored pollen. 'It can't last,' he thought. 'Time comes, time passes.' But what was time? An element or an illusion? Flow or duration? And how deep was the gulf that divided yesterday from today, or today from tomorrow? The scene was so breathless, so drowned in stillness, as if in a well of being that it seemed to him his pulses had ceased their vibration. Not only time but life itself was suspended. Nothing moved. Nothing passed. The drifting pollen, the bird on the flower, the bronzed leaves on the elms, the shadows asleep on the grass--all these things were as motionless as is the pause between the flow and ebb of a tide, or the breath between the thought and the spoken word...
Then, suddenly, movement stirred in the air above, and again the scene came to life. A straggling line of crows wavered in curves out of the sky, while below them, their shadows skimmed so close to the ground that the meadows appeared to move and breathe with them in slow pulsations of light. Yes, it had to change, he said aloud to himself. Everything changes. Nothing is ever the same again." (187-188)
And then there is the point when Roy and her father are talking about Stanley for about the umpteenth time.
"'She's a broken thing, and she hasn't your courage.'
'Everybody keeps saying that.' She flushed angrily. 'It sounds as if the only good of courage is to make you pay for what other people can't--or won't--stand.'" (305)
And here Asa talks to himself after he gets angry with Lavinia.
'"Well, lie down, and I'll put on the coffee' He couldn't hurt her, that was his weakness. He couldn't bear hurting things. And yet, he knew, that only by hurting her could he defend his own sense of right, of justice, of inward integrity. Is it true, he asked himself wearily, turning away, that there comes a crisis in life when inhumanity alone can serve the ends of humanity? Is it imperative, at such moments, to reach not only beyond one's lower impulses, but even beyond one's better nature? Could a principle betray one as well as an appetite? He was too old to believe tha. Right was right, wrong was wrong, or his universe fell to pieces. I do not know where I am going, he thought. I cannot see a step before me; but I must go on." (399)
Much of the book is like this, with characters like Roy and Asa, struggling to have a life while people like Lavinia and Stanley, soul-suckers, consistently put obstacles in their way, that prevent them from having a happy life. At the end, even Craig gets confused and feels himself falling for Stanley once again. It is at this point that Roy runs off into the night, with plans to go to the ciy, but doesn't get very far. She ends up spending the night with a disfigured man, and realizes someone who is even lonelier than herself....
Ellen Glasgow's novel, made into a movie with powerhouses like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland(Billie Burke, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz plays Lavinia), is largely forgotten in today's world. It is, however, a great book on family drama, something that is certainly, as stipulated in the Pulitzer requirement, an aspect of American life. Why it is forgotten, I'm not sure, except that it has had the fate of many other novels from that era, that just get lost. Though sometimes I thought that black people were portrayed in a little bit of a romantic kind of way, there was something about a young black man, despite the odds in the South at that time, trying to climb his way out of his station. The fact that idealistically it doesn't work makes it almost all the more real...Worth the read? Yes.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Today is the day that I write about finishing book #100, which I finished approximately 2 weeks ago now.
BOOK 100! BOOK 100! BOOK 100!!!!
I feel like there should have been some kind of a ticker tape parade or something to follow me around after I finished it, instead I had a large feeling of self-awe, but also a lot of stress and some depression, as I still have quite a few more to read. I received a few positive emails back after I wrote a mass email to my friends and relatives describing my accomplishment, but it still didn't lessen the load in terms of how I feel about all of this. Am I crazy to continue to pursue working on something this huge? Is it a pipe dream? Will absolutely nobody care? Does it really matter? Is it too much freakin' information? Will it really liberate me as much as I hope?
In the past 2 weeks, all of these questions have plagued me a great deal, and caused not just a little anxiety about my future regarding "the project". By calling it that, it makes it seem so ominous...I feel like I need time, and lots of it, to be fair to the books, and myself, and work on this goal. Many adults don't even read 100 books in their lifetime, let alone 100 of the greatest novels of the last 100 years (though that is a debatable point). I am at a loss as to what to do. I want to quit my job, and devote my life to this full-time, but I have no alternate income with which to do that. I am not independently wealthy, and I'm not moving back in with my parents. At this point, I just need to keep on trucking and hope that maybe around Christmastime I will be close enough to my goal to start to look for some kind of agent. How does one even do that???
Argh. Well, I suppose I should just keep trucking along and cross those bridges when I get there. I have a week of vacation coming to me, and I will spend it relaxing, reading and catching up on whatever writing I can hopefully accomplish. It's my time to just stop and read...
Back to book #100. Book #100 was fittingly enough, William Faulkner's The Reivers. Fitting enough for several reasons, I suppose. What I wrote in the email to my friends was that monumental milestones deserve to be marked by monumental writers, which of course I believe Faulkner very much is. It was also important to me to have a writer that I love so very much, and who has shaped much of my outlook on Western literature be that line in the sand that needed to be drawn. I suppose if I still had a Toni Morrison book or if Harper Lee had written another novel, I would have had a tougher decision to make as to who would be #100. As it stands right now, Faulkner's A Fable will be my final book in the project. It's a tough read, from what I've heard, and I think it would give me great satisfaction to finish off with a difficult, yet rewarding read.
I had, frankly, forgotten about Faulkner's writing style, and about what it feels like to read his style. Actually, let me re-qualify that. I hadn't forgotten about his writing style, but I HAD forgotten about what it feels like to be immersed in his books. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is like to read a Faulkner novel. It is like going to a country where you perhaps only half understand the language, like Germany or the Netherlands, where you have maybe heard a handful of words before and recognize some of the food that the waiter puts in front of you when you eat in a restaurant, but you're never exactly sure what's going on and are at the mercy of whatever situations arise while you there. You are immersed in a world that is swirling with activity all around you, but over which you have very little control or any idea as to what will happen next. Much like life, I suppose. You have to have a lot of patience to read a Faulkner novel, and that is what I had forgotten. I spent much of the novel reminding myself of the reward that would come at the end of this particular book, and I also made sure that I didn't read the book unless I had a decent chunk of time in which to do it, and focus. William Faulkner's writing always requires a great deal of focus. Just read 20 pages of The Sound and the Fury and you'll see what I mean.
The Reivers won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Unless I am mistaken, there is only one other time so far that a Pulitzer was awarded posthumously in the fiction category, and that was for Confederacy of Dunces(which I have yet to read), a book that was finally published years after the author's suicide, at the urging of his mother. By the time that The Reivers won the Pulitzer, though, Faulkner had already been awarded a Pulitzer for A Fable and had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Reivers is a good novel, I'm just not sure how I feel about it in relation to As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, which are, as far as I'm concerned, AMAZING. But, it has many of the qualities of Faulkner-ian writing that I love so much, and is an entertaining read.
The Reivers is about a road trip. Faulkner does a great job with road trips, which in non-fictional life as well are rarely free of some kind of excitement or even disaster. As you mentioned, Kate, what Faulkner novel isn't about a road trip? If As I Lay Dying is probably the quintessential disastrous road trip, The Reivers is like the Deep South version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The story is told in flashback form, about a man when he was a small child, growing up in an indistinct period of time in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a county that Faulkner made up, to resemble Oxford, Mississippi and the surrounding area where he lived. The entire novel doesn't span more than a few days. Lucius, the main character, as an older man gives some background on the people who will figure more prominently in the road trip as it continues throughout the novel, but the events that take up the meat of the novel definitely don't last any longer than a week. Lucius Priest's maternal grandfather dies, and the parents have to go away to the funeral. The children are sent to stay with an aunt, but Lucius, an eleven year old boy seduced by the idea of adventure by his father's half-native servant, through a web of lies, deceives his aunt and goes of on a road trip of an unprecedented nature...:) The events are those that only Faulkner could envision and write about. The two men, one certainly more schooled in the world than the other, have a rough time getting to Memphis, but they do, and on the way discover another servant who is a stowaway in the car. Ned is the one who causes the big troubles. When they are all supposed to be spending the night at the whorehouse that Boon is familiar with, Ned sells Lucius' grandfather's car, a car that the grandfather wasn't too into but had as a status symbol mostly. He sells the car for a horse. Now, how the hell is everyone supposed to get back home? Thus the adventure of the novel ensues. In order to get the automobile back, they decide to travel to Parsham and race the horse, to win enough money to buy back the car...It is hilarious, and confusing at times, but even though it is quite bizarre, it is also highly believable.
Perhaps Faulkner's greatest gift to Western literature, and maybe the reason why so many people have a hard time stomaching him, is his ability to write how we really think, and how we really tell a story. When you're telling a story to a friend of yours over coffee or over the phone, it's full of stops and starts, and asides, and "don't you remember so-and-so? They used to date so-and-so.", etc. Human beings rarely tell a story linearly, unless they are set up to do it in some kind of show format, like the storytellers of old, or in a play or a movie. These however, are all staged. Faulkner, who I believe truly mastered the stream of consciousness technique, brings this style of writing into his characters' storytelling methods, as in The Reivers. Faulkner's writing is very, very real. And, I think this method is very condusive to realizing the wealth and depth of human emotion. I suppose, however, that what I also wish is that it was a style of writing more people were used to, so that more people in this era could appreciate him. He is not without some faults; as I read this particular book, perhaps it is because I'm older and a little wiser than I was when I first started reading Faulkner at the tender age of 17, but his characters could be construed as racist, and some things that are said by the characters are brutal observations of the world, perhaps opinions of the author. One could also argue, however, that he is using his characters to depict the world in which they lived in all of its varieties of truth, as unsavory as that may be at times. The South, and the rest of the U.S. for that matter, is full of racists, of bigotry, of hatred, and as we all know, it is best to bear witness and decide not to take that path ourselves, than it is to just shove our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
Great quotes are found here, that are funny and blunt, and nowhere near as long as the ones from Vanderhaeghe's book.
The first one is a when Lucius, as an old man is talking about Mr Binford, who could be considered the pimp of the "boarding-house" that Lucius as an 11-year old boy and Boon and Ned are at. He says:
Another one that I like was Lucius' statement about mules. He launches into a big ranking of several animals and their level of intelligence, of which I won't reproduce all of it, since it is extremely long, but the first paragraph is particularly great.
This next quote I felt like I needed to put down, because it was particularly repugnant to me. But, one of Faulkner's characters said it, and I'm sure that there are some men who feel this way.
Another quote that I liked was from Ned, the black man who gets Boon and the young Lucius into this mess. He's explaining to Colonel Linscomb about how the series of events actually transpired.
The last quote I'll put in here comes only a few pages from the end of the novel...It is when Lucius finally has to face the facts with his grandfather, after everything has been sorted out and resolved, post-horse race.
It is not uncanny to me that both book #99 and book #100 have a theme of boys growing up and learning about how the world really works, and where their sense of morality fits in. Young Lucius has much to grapple with as he ends up being the jockey in the horse race, but also comes to the defense of a whore on behalf of her lady-ness(for lack of a better term). I went on a road trip in order to move out here, with two other people who are still very dear friends to me, and I learned a lot about them, and myself. Faulkner's The Reivers showed the characters in his Pulitzer prize-winning work something about themselves, too.
BOOK 100! BOOK 100! BOOK 100!!!!
I feel like there should have been some kind of a ticker tape parade or something to follow me around after I finished it, instead I had a large feeling of self-awe, but also a lot of stress and some depression, as I still have quite a few more to read. I received a few positive emails back after I wrote a mass email to my friends and relatives describing my accomplishment, but it still didn't lessen the load in terms of how I feel about all of this. Am I crazy to continue to pursue working on something this huge? Is it a pipe dream? Will absolutely nobody care? Does it really matter? Is it too much freakin' information? Will it really liberate me as much as I hope?
In the past 2 weeks, all of these questions have plagued me a great deal, and caused not just a little anxiety about my future regarding "the project". By calling it that, it makes it seem so ominous...I feel like I need time, and lots of it, to be fair to the books, and myself, and work on this goal. Many adults don't even read 100 books in their lifetime, let alone 100 of the greatest novels of the last 100 years (though that is a debatable point). I am at a loss as to what to do. I want to quit my job, and devote my life to this full-time, but I have no alternate income with which to do that. I am not independently wealthy, and I'm not moving back in with my parents. At this point, I just need to keep on trucking and hope that maybe around Christmastime I will be close enough to my goal to start to look for some kind of agent. How does one even do that???
Argh. Well, I suppose I should just keep trucking along and cross those bridges when I get there. I have a week of vacation coming to me, and I will spend it relaxing, reading and catching up on whatever writing I can hopefully accomplish. It's my time to just stop and read...
Back to book #100. Book #100 was fittingly enough, William Faulkner's The Reivers. Fitting enough for several reasons, I suppose. What I wrote in the email to my friends was that monumental milestones deserve to be marked by monumental writers, which of course I believe Faulkner very much is. It was also important to me to have a writer that I love so very much, and who has shaped much of my outlook on Western literature be that line in the sand that needed to be drawn. I suppose if I still had a Toni Morrison book or if Harper Lee had written another novel, I would have had a tougher decision to make as to who would be #100. As it stands right now, Faulkner's A Fable will be my final book in the project. It's a tough read, from what I've heard, and I think it would give me great satisfaction to finish off with a difficult, yet rewarding read.
I had, frankly, forgotten about Faulkner's writing style, and about what it feels like to read his style. Actually, let me re-qualify that. I hadn't forgotten about his writing style, but I HAD forgotten about what it feels like to be immersed in his books. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is like to read a Faulkner novel. It is like going to a country where you perhaps only half understand the language, like Germany or the Netherlands, where you have maybe heard a handful of words before and recognize some of the food that the waiter puts in front of you when you eat in a restaurant, but you're never exactly sure what's going on and are at the mercy of whatever situations arise while you there. You are immersed in a world that is swirling with activity all around you, but over which you have very little control or any idea as to what will happen next. Much like life, I suppose. You have to have a lot of patience to read a Faulkner novel, and that is what I had forgotten. I spent much of the novel reminding myself of the reward that would come at the end of this particular book, and I also made sure that I didn't read the book unless I had a decent chunk of time in which to do it, and focus. William Faulkner's writing always requires a great deal of focus. Just read 20 pages of The Sound and the Fury and you'll see what I mean.
The Reivers won Faulkner the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Unless I am mistaken, there is only one other time so far that a Pulitzer was awarded posthumously in the fiction category, and that was for Confederacy of Dunces(which I have yet to read), a book that was finally published years after the author's suicide, at the urging of his mother. By the time that The Reivers won the Pulitzer, though, Faulkner had already been awarded a Pulitzer for A Fable and had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Reivers is a good novel, I'm just not sure how I feel about it in relation to As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, which are, as far as I'm concerned, AMAZING. But, it has many of the qualities of Faulkner-ian writing that I love so much, and is an entertaining read.
The Reivers is about a road trip. Faulkner does a great job with road trips, which in non-fictional life as well are rarely free of some kind of excitement or even disaster. As you mentioned, Kate, what Faulkner novel isn't about a road trip? If As I Lay Dying is probably the quintessential disastrous road trip, The Reivers is like the Deep South version of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The story is told in flashback form, about a man when he was a small child, growing up in an indistinct period of time in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a county that Faulkner made up, to resemble Oxford, Mississippi and the surrounding area where he lived. The entire novel doesn't span more than a few days. Lucius, the main character, as an older man gives some background on the people who will figure more prominently in the road trip as it continues throughout the novel, but the events that take up the meat of the novel definitely don't last any longer than a week. Lucius Priest's maternal grandfather dies, and the parents have to go away to the funeral. The children are sent to stay with an aunt, but Lucius, an eleven year old boy seduced by the idea of adventure by his father's half-native servant, through a web of lies, deceives his aunt and goes of on a road trip of an unprecedented nature...:) The events are those that only Faulkner could envision and write about. The two men, one certainly more schooled in the world than the other, have a rough time getting to Memphis, but they do, and on the way discover another servant who is a stowaway in the car. Ned is the one who causes the big troubles. When they are all supposed to be spending the night at the whorehouse that Boon is familiar with, Ned sells Lucius' grandfather's car, a car that the grandfather wasn't too into but had as a status symbol mostly. He sells the car for a horse. Now, how the hell is everyone supposed to get back home? Thus the adventure of the novel ensues. In order to get the automobile back, they decide to travel to Parsham and race the horse, to win enough money to buy back the car...It is hilarious, and confusing at times, but even though it is quite bizarre, it is also highly believable.
Perhaps Faulkner's greatest gift to Western literature, and maybe the reason why so many people have a hard time stomaching him, is his ability to write how we really think, and how we really tell a story. When you're telling a story to a friend of yours over coffee or over the phone, it's full of stops and starts, and asides, and "don't you remember so-and-so? They used to date so-and-so.", etc. Human beings rarely tell a story linearly, unless they are set up to do it in some kind of show format, like the storytellers of old, or in a play or a movie. These however, are all staged. Faulkner, who I believe truly mastered the stream of consciousness technique, brings this style of writing into his characters' storytelling methods, as in The Reivers. Faulkner's writing is very, very real. And, I think this method is very condusive to realizing the wealth and depth of human emotion. I suppose, however, that what I also wish is that it was a style of writing more people were used to, so that more people in this era could appreciate him. He is not without some faults; as I read this particular book, perhaps it is because I'm older and a little wiser than I was when I first started reading Faulkner at the tender age of 17, but his characters could be construed as racist, and some things that are said by the characters are brutal observations of the world, perhaps opinions of the author. One could also argue, however, that he is using his characters to depict the world in which they lived in all of its varieties of truth, as unsavory as that may be at times. The South, and the rest of the U.S. for that matter, is full of racists, of bigotry, of hatred, and as we all know, it is best to bear witness and decide not to take that path ourselves, than it is to just shove our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
Great quotes are found here, that are funny and blunt, and nowhere near as long as the ones from Vanderhaeghe's book.
The first one is a when Lucius, as an old man is talking about Mr Binford, who could be considered the pimp of the "boarding-house" that Lucius as an 11-year old boy and Boon and Ned are at. He says:
"There were more than enough places at the table, even with Otis and me. Minnie was still bringing things, all cold--fried chicken and biscuits and vegetables left over from dinner, except Mr Binford's. His supper was hot: not a plate, a dish of steak smothered in onions at his place. (You see? how much ahead of his time Mr Binford was? Already a Republican. I don't mean a 1905 Republican--I dont know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any--I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a man who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooed Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned how to read and write.)" (101-102)
Another one that I like was Lucius' statement about mules. He launches into a big ranking of several animals and their level of intelligence, of which I won't reproduce all of it, since it is extremely long, but the first paragraph is particularly great.
"You were born too late to be acquainted with mules and so comprehend the startling, the even shocking, import of this statement. A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running around the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last--assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence, which is the ability to cope with environment, which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty." (113-114)
This next quote I felt like I needed to put down, because it was particularly repugnant to me. But, one of Faulkner's characters said it, and I'm sure that there are some men who feel this way.
"'...And meanwhiles, stop fretting about that gal, now you done said your say to Boon Hogganbeck. Hitting a woman dont hurt her because a woman dont shove back at a lick like a man do; she just gives to it and then when your back is turned, reaches for the flatiron or the butcher knife. That's why hitting them dont break nothing; all it does is just black her eye or cut her mouf a little. And that aint nothing to a woman. Because why? Because what better sign than a black eye or a cut mouf can a woman want from a man that he got her on his mind?'" (249)
Another quote that I liked was from Ned, the black man who gets Boon and the young Lucius into this mess. He's explaining to Colonel Linscomb about how the series of events actually transpired.
"'With my people, Saturday night runs over into Sunday.'
'And into Monday morning too,' Colonel Linscomb said. 'You wake up Monday morning, sick, with a hangover, filthy in a filthy jail, and lie there until some white man comes and pays your fine and takes you straight back to the cotton field or whatever it is and puts you back to work without even giving you time to eat breakfast. And you sweat it out there, and maybe by sundown you feel you are not really going to die; and the next day, and the day after that, and after that, until it's Saturday again and you can put down the plow or the hoe and go back as fast as you can to that stinking jail cell on Monday morning. Why do you do it? I don't know.'
'You cant know,' Ned said. 'You're the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn't never want to be a white man again as long as you live.'" (276)
The last quote I'll put in here comes only a few pages from the end of the novel...It is when Lucius finally has to face the facts with his grandfather, after everything has been sorted out and resolved, post-horse race.
"'Come here,' he said.
'I cant,' I said. 'I lied, I tell you.'
'I know it,' he said.
'Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.'
'I can't,' he said.
'There aint anything to do? Not anything?'
'I didn't say that,' Grandfather said. 'I said I couldn't. You can.'
'What?' I said. 'How can I forget it? Tell me how to.'
'You can't,' he said. 'Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.'
'Then what can I do?'
'Live with it,' Grandfather said.
'Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see I cant?'
'Yes you can,' he said. 'You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should. Come here.'" (286)
It is not uncanny to me that both book #99 and book #100 have a theme of boys growing up and learning about how the world really works, and where their sense of morality fits in. Young Lucius has much to grapple with as he ends up being the jockey in the horse race, but also comes to the defense of a whore on behalf of her lady-ness(for lack of a better term). I went on a road trip in order to move out here, with two other people who are still very dear friends to me, and I learned a lot about them, and myself. Faulkner's The Reivers showed the characters in his Pulitzer prize-winning work something about themselves, too.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Since my last posting, I have finished three more books, bringing my grand total of novels read for the project up to 101. I am currently in the process of finishing Willa Cather's One of Ours, a Pulitzer winner from the 20s. In the next 48 hours, however (at least this is the plan), I am going to write about 99, 100 and 101. That way I can get caught up before I go on a much needed vacation.
For book #99, I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy. I was a bit apprehensive in reading this book, only because I read the Canada Reads selection a few years ago, which was Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing. I dunno. The book was not that gripping, and felt oddly similar to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers which I read right around the same time, and which I felt, if I was to compare, was a better novel(and won the Governor General). That being said, I'm glad that I had that disappointing experience, because I think my expectations for another Vanderhaeghe novel were substantially lowered. The Englishman's Boy was excellent. Page-wise it is not an exceptionally long novel (333 pp.), but it is rich and full of story, of character development, of prose that makes you think. I think what I also liked about the book was that the subject matter was different from what normally shows up on the lists, as well as it spanned both the U.S and Canada, fitting for a project like mine.
The novel The Englishman's Boy has two different narrative strands that weave together in the end to create a complete picture. In the beginning, we are faced with some unsavory "cowboys" (though I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to give them that lofty qualification), who go to sleep for the night in the U.S. prairies and Native Americans steal all of their horses. It is the decision of the head of the gang, Hardwick, to pursue the Natives, eventually into the Canadian prairies, get the horses back and seek revenge. Related to this story strand is a young boy, left to his own devices in the world, who is the servant to an Englishman coming to the Prairies to seek adventure and fortune, possibly to escape some kind of situation at home that he would sooner forget. The Englishman, while staying a saloon, dies from illness, and the "boy" is left once again to his own devices. He takes the Englishman's guns and clothes, leaves behind nearly all of the rest of his master's possessions including the overwhelming amount of his money; takes some to pay the innkeeper, leaving the rest as a way to cover the funeral, and heads out, alone. He has a tough exterior, and a fierce desire to protect himself, but inside he is still very much a boy learning how to be a man. In a saloon, where he stabs a man who threatens him, is where he meets Hardwick and his gang, and at this point he has a home base, and a job: to travel with the men and help get the horses back.
The novel takes a dramatic shift forward an undetermined amount of years, but at the minimum about 30, to Hollywood in the 1920s, when talkies were still not quite available, but when the U.S was mesmerized by all things silver screen. What an era! Cecile B. DeMille, Goldwynn and other men who formed the production studios that we now all know very well are mentioned, as well as female actresses like Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford. This is before Graummann build his now famous Chinese theater, and has an Egyptian one instead...I can tell you that before I read this book, I had very little knowledge about Hollywood, especially in the era before the talking pictures, but now I at least have a vague idea. At the center of this very young town, in the reader's eye at least, is a young man from Saskatchewan, who has come to Hollywood to make a living, a fortune, perhaps, and while looking after his mentally ill mother. This particular man is a scenerist, writing out the cards that the audience will read on-screen, that will fill in the gaps that cannot be provided because there is no speaking. Through a series of circumstances, he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy newcomer to Hollywood who has bought out a production company, and who has a quixotic eye for film. He wants to make the GREAT American Western...He wants to tell the story of the American West as history has meant for it to be told. He wants its grittiness, its authenticity, its truth, to shine through the camera lens. Our narrator is to be his detective, and search out a man that Damon Ira Chance believes to hold the secrets to an old West, an uncultured, tough-as-nails West. This man is Shorty McAdoo, a sometime cowboy extra in Hollywood Westerns of the time. Producer/Director Chance wants our narrator to find him, and get him to tell his story, which will subsequently become the Greatest Western Ever Told(at least up until that point).
As the opening narrative of the Englishman's boy and his involvement in what is to become one of the bloodiest massacres of the Canadian West, the Cypress Hills Massacre, continues to unfold, so too does the story of our narrator Harry with his discovery of Shorty McAdoo, and his embroiling in Hollywood politics of the 1920s. Eventually Harry convinces Shorty to tell his story, and it goes to Chance, who changes it to suit his needs, enraging Shorty and deeply troubling Harry's sense of morality. We the readers don't know what the left-out details are until much later, when more of the Englishman's boy's story is revealed. And, as the gut-wrenching, vomit-worthy details come to light, we see the Englishman's boy, and in a parallel, Harry 30 years later, struggle with their sense of right and wrong, of justice and fairness in a world that seems all too corrupt. Choosing the moral high road leaves both characters in a far worse position, and the movie gets done without them. The outcome is not without its own tragedy, however.
There were many great characters in this book that I haven't yet mentioned, some of which are fleshed out more than others, but all of them drive the narrative forward. Rachel Gold is my particular favorite, probably subconsciously for me because she is a woman and I always love strong women characters amongst a male majority. Rachel Gold writes screenplays in a misogynistic environment where she is outnumbered both in sex AND religion. She is described as stunningly beautiful by Harry(who is unabashedly and not so secretly head over heels in love with her), and definitely catches the eye of many men in Hollywood. She churns out pulp-y screenplays so that she can save up money to write the great American novel that she knows she never will. But, she is charming, in an educated Dorothy Parker-esque way, and takes no shit from anyone, still maintaining a heart for Harry and his ill mother. She is also a particularly easy way for Vanderhaeghe to show the anti-semitism starting to bloom in the film industry as Jews of many different backgrounds came out to start production companies and direct films. A foreshadowing, too, of the shake-out of the world as Hitler began to take power nearly 10 years later.
There are many other great characters. Harry's mother, trapped in her mind, staying in a home outside of Hollywood. Vanderhaeghe's description of her scrubbing one particular spot in the window is heart-wrenching in its detail. The Englishman's boy's friend named Grace, is also a great secondary character. There is Fitzsimmons, Chance's right hand man, who is a piece of shit, but every book needs a Judas of some kind.
At the heart of this novel is what we are forced to do as human beings when we come to a moral crossroads, and how we live with ourselves when we make our choice. Some people survive despite being dealt a bad hand or even despite making poor choices; some others crumble under the weight of their bad judgement. Others still receive their karmic come-uppance. Ultimately, it is up to all of us as humans to wrestle with our demons as we can and hopefully they shape us, not destroy us.
There are, as always, a few quotes that I thought were particularly good.
The first is when Chance is talking about his hero, D.W. Griffith, explaining his philosophy to Harry.
"'And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of The Birth of a Nation. It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they're dependable. The average American feels foolish when he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn't feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he's learned something useful, informed himself, improved himself.
'You mark my words, Harry, there'll come a day when the public won't swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it's more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.
'Of course, he qualifies, 'the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.' He pauses dramatically. 'I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,' he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.'" (18-19)
The next quote is from Rachel, and it definitely gives one a taste of who she is and what she believes...
"'The true test of any scenario,' Rachel was fond of saying, 'is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the theme of your simple tale through an alchoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except - El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions-such as writing fiction for one of the better women's magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.'" (36-37)
(Rachel by the way divides men into two categories: menschs and gigolos...:))
Another quote is the producer/director Chance speaking again. He is a little Welles-ian, but Orson Welles would have only been a child when this book takes place. Chance is a pretty unlikeable dude, but he does have interesting things to say.
"...Sitting through Griffith's picture is like sitting through one of those dark summer nights when a thunderstorm breaks: instants of brilliant illumination when the the things which flash before your eyes - a tree waving in the wind, a river in spate, your bedroom chair - burn into your brain in a way they never would in the steady, even light of day. There is no logical explanation as to why or how this happens. Images take root in your mind, hot and bright, like an image on a photoplate. Once they etch themselves there, they can't be obliterated, can't be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there's no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What's up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can't control the flow of images the way you can control a book - by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember.'
I am interested in what Chance has to say. It must show in my face; he leans forward in his chair, lowering his voice. 'Birth became America's history lesson on the Civil War. For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted in Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in Wyoming. The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed of; one big classroom stretching from Maine to California, an entire nation sitting at Griffith's feet. In New York alone, eight hundred thousand people saw Birth, more people than there are students in all the colleges in all the states of the Union. Think about it, Harry. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Griffith is the Great Educator. Whatever bits of history the average American knows, he's learned from Griffith. Griffith marks the birth of spiritual Americanism.'
'And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?'
'Perhaps it can't be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.' Chance shoots me a victorious look. 'You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!'" (107-108)
Another great part of the book I loved is a discussion between Rachel and Harry about Chance's vision on film.
"She ignores my question and fires back with one of her own. 'And what's the American sprit, Harry?'
The best I can do is one word. 'Expansive.'
'Oh, that nails it, Harry. Just expansive?'
'And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality. Like the movies themselves. Chance says the movies are the only thing that can capture the American spirit because they are like America herself. It makes a kind of sense to me.'
'Quite the theory, Harry. But for myself, if I want a dose of the American spirit I'll go to Whitman, Twain, or Crane before Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'
'You're missing the point. Chance wants to make films that are the artistic equal of Leaves of Grass. He might fail but he's go the guts to try. Besides, how many people have read Leaves of Grass in Mencken's Sahara of the Bozarts? Or anywhere else in this country for that matter? And what about the tenements and the ghettos? Immigrants can't read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It's the movies that have the chance of making everybody - the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League professor - all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don't make a people.'
'And you're a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?'
'Because I chose this place. And I'm not the only one in Hollywood. America's Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn't a country at all, it's simply geography. There's no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you're going to be anything you have to choose. Even Catholics don't regard Limbo as something permanent. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We'd be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn't want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don't think that's ignoble.'" (180-182)
The descriptions in this book are priceless, but the dialogue, as I've tried to capture, seems to say the most thematically at least to me right now, and for my memory's sake. The last quote I picked was because of its anti-semitism. I thought it was an important theme to look at. Chance here is speaking to Harry.
"'Was it something I said about the Jews that got you up on your high horse, Harry? Fitz tells me you're romantically involved with a Jewess - Rachel Gold I think he said her name is. Now I have no objections to such alliances when they are purely physical ones. Surrender your body to a woman if you must, but remember to keep your independence and integrity intact. I suspect this woman has been a bad influence on you. The Jews are a sentimental and emotional people, Harry. We need only look at the pictures they make to confirm it. Which is why they are so dangerous. The morality of necessity - of survival - has no room for sentimentality. The Bolsheviks are not sentimental. The Fascists are not sentimental. The Americans who made this country were not sentimental. Far from it. Do you need proof? While I was researching our picture I made a point of reading the diaries and journals of early traders and settlers. One entry in particular made a great impression on me. It was simply two lines written on September 30, 1869. 'Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian.' That was all. It was not accompanied by any tortured self-examination of conscience. Because the diarist knew his enemy would not have indulged in anything of the kind if he had killed him. The Indian, we might say, was a Bolshevik in a loincloth. Kill or be killed. They both understood compromise between them was impossible.'
'Perhaps it was not up to the Indian to compromise. Ever consider that?'
'What would you advocate, Harry? Offering your throat to the knife because you might be wrong? History deals us our hand and we must play it. We do not choose our enemies. Circumstances choose them for us. I see the enemies who threaten my country. But I refuse to offer my throat to them.' He tips forward in his chair, one hand resting on the bed. 'I am not preaching anything new, Harry. I am only saying what Christ and Abraham Lincoln said before me, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' That is a fact.'" (295-6)
(295-296)
What makes the book so much more complex is that the person that Harry Vincent admires the most for the longest time, Damon Ira Chance, is the one who ultimately sells out on the story, doesn't tell the whole truth for the sake of Hollywood and betrays the morales that he seeks to uphold. This destroys Harry in a way, on a personal level, as Chance doesn't become the Whitman of the film industry at the time, but rather selfishly caters to his own vision rather than to that of the greater film-going good. It is Shorty McAdoo and his friend, the has-been cowboys living on the fringe of society who display a level of integrity that leads to their own ruination, but is also brave.
This is a great book, and definitely one that I would not have read otherwise. I'm tired, and cashed out for writing for the night.
For book #99, I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy. I was a bit apprehensive in reading this book, only because I read the Canada Reads selection a few years ago, which was Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing. I dunno. The book was not that gripping, and felt oddly similar to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers which I read right around the same time, and which I felt, if I was to compare, was a better novel(and won the Governor General). That being said, I'm glad that I had that disappointing experience, because I think my expectations for another Vanderhaeghe novel were substantially lowered. The Englishman's Boy was excellent. Page-wise it is not an exceptionally long novel (333 pp.), but it is rich and full of story, of character development, of prose that makes you think. I think what I also liked about the book was that the subject matter was different from what normally shows up on the lists, as well as it spanned both the U.S and Canada, fitting for a project like mine.
The novel The Englishman's Boy has two different narrative strands that weave together in the end to create a complete picture. In the beginning, we are faced with some unsavory "cowboys" (though I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to give them that lofty qualification), who go to sleep for the night in the U.S. prairies and Native Americans steal all of their horses. It is the decision of the head of the gang, Hardwick, to pursue the Natives, eventually into the Canadian prairies, get the horses back and seek revenge. Related to this story strand is a young boy, left to his own devices in the world, who is the servant to an Englishman coming to the Prairies to seek adventure and fortune, possibly to escape some kind of situation at home that he would sooner forget. The Englishman, while staying a saloon, dies from illness, and the "boy" is left once again to his own devices. He takes the Englishman's guns and clothes, leaves behind nearly all of the rest of his master's possessions including the overwhelming amount of his money; takes some to pay the innkeeper, leaving the rest as a way to cover the funeral, and heads out, alone. He has a tough exterior, and a fierce desire to protect himself, but inside he is still very much a boy learning how to be a man. In a saloon, where he stabs a man who threatens him, is where he meets Hardwick and his gang, and at this point he has a home base, and a job: to travel with the men and help get the horses back.
The novel takes a dramatic shift forward an undetermined amount of years, but at the minimum about 30, to Hollywood in the 1920s, when talkies were still not quite available, but when the U.S was mesmerized by all things silver screen. What an era! Cecile B. DeMille, Goldwynn and other men who formed the production studios that we now all know very well are mentioned, as well as female actresses like Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford. This is before Graummann build his now famous Chinese theater, and has an Egyptian one instead...I can tell you that before I read this book, I had very little knowledge about Hollywood, especially in the era before the talking pictures, but now I at least have a vague idea. At the center of this very young town, in the reader's eye at least, is a young man from Saskatchewan, who has come to Hollywood to make a living, a fortune, perhaps, and while looking after his mentally ill mother. This particular man is a scenerist, writing out the cards that the audience will read on-screen, that will fill in the gaps that cannot be provided because there is no speaking. Through a series of circumstances, he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy newcomer to Hollywood who has bought out a production company, and who has a quixotic eye for film. He wants to make the GREAT American Western...He wants to tell the story of the American West as history has meant for it to be told. He wants its grittiness, its authenticity, its truth, to shine through the camera lens. Our narrator is to be his detective, and search out a man that Damon Ira Chance believes to hold the secrets to an old West, an uncultured, tough-as-nails West. This man is Shorty McAdoo, a sometime cowboy extra in Hollywood Westerns of the time. Producer/Director Chance wants our narrator to find him, and get him to tell his story, which will subsequently become the Greatest Western Ever Told(at least up until that point).
As the opening narrative of the Englishman's boy and his involvement in what is to become one of the bloodiest massacres of the Canadian West, the Cypress Hills Massacre, continues to unfold, so too does the story of our narrator Harry with his discovery of Shorty McAdoo, and his embroiling in Hollywood politics of the 1920s. Eventually Harry convinces Shorty to tell his story, and it goes to Chance, who changes it to suit his needs, enraging Shorty and deeply troubling Harry's sense of morality. We the readers don't know what the left-out details are until much later, when more of the Englishman's boy's story is revealed. And, as the gut-wrenching, vomit-worthy details come to light, we see the Englishman's boy, and in a parallel, Harry 30 years later, struggle with their sense of right and wrong, of justice and fairness in a world that seems all too corrupt. Choosing the moral high road leaves both characters in a far worse position, and the movie gets done without them. The outcome is not without its own tragedy, however.
There were many great characters in this book that I haven't yet mentioned, some of which are fleshed out more than others, but all of them drive the narrative forward. Rachel Gold is my particular favorite, probably subconsciously for me because she is a woman and I always love strong women characters amongst a male majority. Rachel Gold writes screenplays in a misogynistic environment where she is outnumbered both in sex AND religion. She is described as stunningly beautiful by Harry(who is unabashedly and not so secretly head over heels in love with her), and definitely catches the eye of many men in Hollywood. She churns out pulp-y screenplays so that she can save up money to write the great American novel that she knows she never will. But, she is charming, in an educated Dorothy Parker-esque way, and takes no shit from anyone, still maintaining a heart for Harry and his ill mother. She is also a particularly easy way for Vanderhaeghe to show the anti-semitism starting to bloom in the film industry as Jews of many different backgrounds came out to start production companies and direct films. A foreshadowing, too, of the shake-out of the world as Hitler began to take power nearly 10 years later.
There are many other great characters. Harry's mother, trapped in her mind, staying in a home outside of Hollywood. Vanderhaeghe's description of her scrubbing one particular spot in the window is heart-wrenching in its detail. The Englishman's boy's friend named Grace, is also a great secondary character. There is Fitzsimmons, Chance's right hand man, who is a piece of shit, but every book needs a Judas of some kind.
At the heart of this novel is what we are forced to do as human beings when we come to a moral crossroads, and how we live with ourselves when we make our choice. Some people survive despite being dealt a bad hand or even despite making poor choices; some others crumble under the weight of their bad judgement. Others still receive their karmic come-uppance. Ultimately, it is up to all of us as humans to wrestle with our demons as we can and hopefully they shape us, not destroy us.
There are, as always, a few quotes that I thought were particularly good.
The first is when Chance is talking about his hero, D.W. Griffith, explaining his philosophy to Harry.
"'And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of The Birth of a Nation. It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they're dependable. The average American feels foolish when he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn't feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he's learned something useful, informed himself, improved himself.
'You mark my words, Harry, there'll come a day when the public won't swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it's more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.
'Of course, he qualifies, 'the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.' He pauses dramatically. 'I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,' he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.'" (18-19)
The next quote is from Rachel, and it definitely gives one a taste of who she is and what she believes...
"'The true test of any scenario,' Rachel was fond of saying, 'is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the theme of your simple tale through an alchoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except - El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions-such as writing fiction for one of the better women's magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.'" (36-37)
(Rachel by the way divides men into two categories: menschs and gigolos...:))
Another quote is the producer/director Chance speaking again. He is a little Welles-ian, but Orson Welles would have only been a child when this book takes place. Chance is a pretty unlikeable dude, but he does have interesting things to say.
"...Sitting through Griffith's picture is like sitting through one of those dark summer nights when a thunderstorm breaks: instants of brilliant illumination when the the things which flash before your eyes - a tree waving in the wind, a river in spate, your bedroom chair - burn into your brain in a way they never would in the steady, even light of day. There is no logical explanation as to why or how this happens. Images take root in your mind, hot and bright, like an image on a photoplate. Once they etch themselves there, they can't be obliterated, can't be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there's no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What's up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can't control the flow of images the way you can control a book - by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember.'
I am interested in what Chance has to say. It must show in my face; he leans forward in his chair, lowering his voice. 'Birth became America's history lesson on the Civil War. For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted in Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in Wyoming. The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed of; one big classroom stretching from Maine to California, an entire nation sitting at Griffith's feet. In New York alone, eight hundred thousand people saw Birth, more people than there are students in all the colleges in all the states of the Union. Think about it, Harry. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Griffith is the Great Educator. Whatever bits of history the average American knows, he's learned from Griffith. Griffith marks the birth of spiritual Americanism.'
'And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?'
'Perhaps it can't be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.' Chance shoots me a victorious look. 'You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!'" (107-108)
Another great part of the book I loved is a discussion between Rachel and Harry about Chance's vision on film.
"She ignores my question and fires back with one of her own. 'And what's the American sprit, Harry?'
The best I can do is one word. 'Expansive.'
'Oh, that nails it, Harry. Just expansive?'
'And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality. Like the movies themselves. Chance says the movies are the only thing that can capture the American spirit because they are like America herself. It makes a kind of sense to me.'
'Quite the theory, Harry. But for myself, if I want a dose of the American spirit I'll go to Whitman, Twain, or Crane before Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'
'You're missing the point. Chance wants to make films that are the artistic equal of Leaves of Grass. He might fail but he's go the guts to try. Besides, how many people have read Leaves of Grass in Mencken's Sahara of the Bozarts? Or anywhere else in this country for that matter? And what about the tenements and the ghettos? Immigrants can't read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It's the movies that have the chance of making everybody - the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League professor - all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don't make a people.'
'And you're a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?'
'Because I chose this place. And I'm not the only one in Hollywood. America's Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn't a country at all, it's simply geography. There's no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you're going to be anything you have to choose. Even Catholics don't regard Limbo as something permanent. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We'd be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn't want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don't think that's ignoble.'" (180-182)
The descriptions in this book are priceless, but the dialogue, as I've tried to capture, seems to say the most thematically at least to me right now, and for my memory's sake. The last quote I picked was because of its anti-semitism. I thought it was an important theme to look at. Chance here is speaking to Harry.
"'Was it something I said about the Jews that got you up on your high horse, Harry? Fitz tells me you're romantically involved with a Jewess - Rachel Gold I think he said her name is. Now I have no objections to such alliances when they are purely physical ones. Surrender your body to a woman if you must, but remember to keep your independence and integrity intact. I suspect this woman has been a bad influence on you. The Jews are a sentimental and emotional people, Harry. We need only look at the pictures they make to confirm it. Which is why they are so dangerous. The morality of necessity - of survival - has no room for sentimentality. The Bolsheviks are not sentimental. The Fascists are not sentimental. The Americans who made this country were not sentimental. Far from it. Do you need proof? While I was researching our picture I made a point of reading the diaries and journals of early traders and settlers. One entry in particular made a great impression on me. It was simply two lines written on September 30, 1869. 'Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian.' That was all. It was not accompanied by any tortured self-examination of conscience. Because the diarist knew his enemy would not have indulged in anything of the kind if he had killed him. The Indian, we might say, was a Bolshevik in a loincloth. Kill or be killed. They both understood compromise between them was impossible.'
'Perhaps it was not up to the Indian to compromise. Ever consider that?'
'What would you advocate, Harry? Offering your throat to the knife because you might be wrong? History deals us our hand and we must play it. We do not choose our enemies. Circumstances choose them for us. I see the enemies who threaten my country. But I refuse to offer my throat to them.' He tips forward in his chair, one hand resting on the bed. 'I am not preaching anything new, Harry. I am only saying what Christ and Abraham Lincoln said before me, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' That is a fact.'" (295-6)
(295-296)
What makes the book so much more complex is that the person that Harry Vincent admires the most for the longest time, Damon Ira Chance, is the one who ultimately sells out on the story, doesn't tell the whole truth for the sake of Hollywood and betrays the morales that he seeks to uphold. This destroys Harry in a way, on a personal level, as Chance doesn't become the Whitman of the film industry at the time, but rather selfishly caters to his own vision rather than to that of the greater film-going good. It is Shorty McAdoo and his friend, the has-been cowboys living on the fringe of society who display a level of integrity that leads to their own ruination, but is also brave.
This is a great book, and definitely one that I would not have read otherwise. I'm tired, and cashed out for writing for the night.
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