Vintage Reading (5 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
For Assiz, Forster writes, there was “no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out, because it is only when she finds you out that you have harmed her; she is not like a friend or God, who are injured by the mere existence of unfaithfulness. [And so], he meditated what type of lie he should tell... “
At least in Forster’s telling, the petty falsehoods of Assiz and the Indians generally are like the lies told the dying cancer patient; they insulate against painful truth, protect fragile feelings. To Indians, “unless a sentence paid a
few compliments to Justice and Morality in passing, its grammar wounded their ears and paralysed their minds. What they said and what they felt were (except in the case of affection) seldom the same.”
To the English, who understand none of this, it is all quite simple: The “natives” are duplicitous, unworthy of social contact beyond the merest pleasantries. If the density of prejudice heaped on them here is based even roughly on historical fact, it’s a wonder the Indians didn’t throw off their shackles long before they did. If anything, English women act most callously of all. “Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let them die,” says Mrs. Callendar, wife of the chief medical officer. She’s content so long as the Indians “don’t come near me. They give me the creeps.”
Almost alone among the English to see the Indians as different rather than inferior is Cyril Fielding, principal of the government college. He and Assiz become friends, though the cultural chasm yawns wide; their relationship is ambivalent, strained, easy prey to misunderstanding. Assiz’s problem with Fielding is that, though more comfortable among Indians than with his English compatriots, Fielding is still an Englishman. Only in tender moments can Assiz forgive him that. “He knew at the bottom of his heart that [the English] could not help being so cold and odd and circulating like an ice stream through his land.”
Offering another variation-on-an-Englishman-theme is city magistrate Ronn Heaslop, the man whose merits as marriage partner Adele has come to India to weigh. He’s as scornful of the natives as the others, but less blindly. “I am out here to work,” he says, “to hold this wretched country by force. I’m not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I’m just a servant of the Government.”
A Passage to India
works as both a great tapestry of India and through its small, sharp insights. And it is prophetic, too. In the end, rejecting European ways and European medicine, Assiz retreats from British India. “I am an Indian at last,” he tells himself. “Clear out,” he tells Fielding in what each knows will be their last meeting. “Why are we [Indians] put to so much suffering? We used to blame you, now we blame ourselves, we grow wiser. Until England is
in difficulties, we keep silent, but in the next European war—aha, aha! Then is our time.”
The next European war was World War II, which ended in 1945. By 1948, Gandhi and Nehru had wrested India from the Crown.
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By Willa Cather
First appeared in 1918
This long-time staple of high school required reading lists includes, by my count, one out-of-wedlock pregnancy, two suicides, and three murders. Yet these are the last elements of Willa Cather’s
My Antonia
one would ever remember or remark on. Somehow, they evoke in the reader no revulsion, seem little more than dark ornamentation to a sunny story of growing up on the American plains in the waning years of the 19th century.
A Virginia boy whose parents have both recently died, Jim Burden goes to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie. There he’s thrown into a culture of recent immigrants from Scandinavia and central Europe. There he meets Antonia Shimerda, a girl from Bohemia, a region of what we now call the Czech Republic.
“Tony,” as he calls her, lives in a mud house on a nearby farm. She works in the fields while still young, as a “hired girl” in town when a little older. She runs off with a no ‘count railway conductor who gets her pregnant and then deserts her. Later she marries a solid, gentle man named Anton Cuzak and bears him a brood of kids.
My Antonia
is Jim’s story of his boyhood friend. It is a book free of artifice, plainly written, ornamented only by the author’s love for the land. “Style” has been stripped away, leaving the straightforward story itself. The plot’s more sensational turns—those murders and suicides, for instance— usually take place off stage while the quiet, almost uneventful lives of Jim and “his” Antonia occupy stage center.
The wholesome solidity of a book like this risks being lost on high school sophomores raised on Pepsi commercials and shopping mall glitter. So little happens to Antonia; mainly, she works— and hard, unromantic, callusthickening
work it is at that. Might Cather’s novel, one wonders, be pitched to teens as science fiction? For surely a world of mud houses, backyard chicken neck- ringing, and winter coats made from wolfskin must seem at least as foreign to today’s young as men from Mars.
“Burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country, is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron.” These are Cather’s prairie lands. They are not—like the forbidding Yorkshire moors of
Wuthering Heights
, say—quite strong enough to function as a lead character. On the other hand, they are more than mere decoration. They are a backdrop against which character emerges and personality is starkly drawn.
Antonia is direct, solid, unaffected, her English pleasingly overlaid with a central European inflection. For Jim Burden she represents all that’s vigorous and pure about his prairie boyhood. Indeed, a case could be made that the novel is less about Antonia—who says relatively little, figures in surprisingly little of the action and is, in fact, absent for lengthy stretches—than about the narrator and his love for her.
A haunting prologue launches the story. In it, a third party—an old friend of Jim’s from Nebraska—tells how the book manuscript came to her attention. How she and Jim, by now “legal counsel for one of the great Western railways,” had once, while crossing Iowa on the same train, reminisced about their Nebraska childhoods. How the conversation kept drifting back to the robust, dark-skinned Bohemian girl they both once knew. How Jim mentioned he’d been recording what he remembered about Antonia, and that he would let her read it once he finished it.
“Months afterward,” this third party—presumably a New York editor like Willa Cather herself—writes, “Jim called at my apartment one stormy winter afternoon, carrying a legal portfolio. He brought it into the sitting-room with him, and said, as he stood warming his hands, ‘Here is the thing about Antonia. Do you still want to read it?’”
She did.
We do.
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By Gustave Flaubert
First published in 1857
Her heart thrilled to historical romances. She yearned to be swept away by a man of wealth and refinement, to feel her pulse race with reckless passion. She dreamed of being wed at midnight, by torchlight. She was the unforgettable Madame Bovary, and Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that name became an immediate sensation when it was published in 1857.
But it was almost never published at all. Serializing it first in a popular magazine, the author was tried for “committing an outrage against public and religious morality.” He won, and in gratitude dedicated the novel to his lawyer; but his story posed so conspicuous a threat to domestic peace that it’s easy to see why the authorities were incensed.
Madame Bovary, you see, finds her marriage to Charles, a well-meaning drudge of a provincial doctor, insufficiently exciting. She succumbs to the blandishments of the dashing Rodolphe, who plots his sexual conquests with a chessmaster’s finesse. Their tempestuous affair comes replete with fevered love letters left folded in the chinks of the garden wall. When the relationship ends, Madame Bovary takes up with Leon, a young law clerk. They meet in “their” room in a waterfront hotel in Rouen every Thursday while poor, stupid Charles thinks she’s taking piano lessons; Madame Bovary gets the piano teacher to prepare fake bills. During none of these amorous escapades, needless to say, does Madame Bovary have much time for Berthe, her little girl.
Not a nice person, you say? Flaubert’s achievement is to make you care about a character so seemingly weak, shallow and mean of spirit.
But is Madame Bovary’s conduct really so surprising? When one of her
lovers laments being stuck out in the provinces, life passing him by, Madame Bovary points that he’s “scarcely to be pitied... After all, you’re free.” As a woman, she is not—and knows it. Indeed, one might argue that for a bourgeois woman then an offer of marriage from a suitor with Charles’ credentials was one she could hardly refuse. How could she know that, in wedding’s wake, she would lament: Is this all there is?
A man, Madame Bovary feels, ought to “know everything, excel in all sorts of activities, initiate you into the turbulence of passion, the refinements and mysteries of life.” Yet Charles’ “conversation was as flat as a sidewalk,” and his ideas, such as they were, appealed “to neither the emotions, the sense of humor, nor the imagination.” What a contrast to the men she’d met in her fictional romances! Can we entirely blame her for finding pleasure in the arms of another man? Does it attest to a kind of strength that she is unwilling to settle for her lot? And does it not make
Madame Bovary
a profoundly conservative novel that she is so soundly punished for her behavior?
Maybe that’s how Flaubert’s lawyer got him off the hook—by pointing out that for her machinations, deceits and infidelities, Madame Bovary did indeed get her due.
Her fall begins once she agrees to a plan by Charles’ creditor to secure power of attorney over his financial affairs. Charles blindly signs it, and it’s downhill from then on. Behind his back, she spends more and more to satisfy her whims and feed her adultery; in the meantime, the House of Bovary sinks into the mire. Ultimately, notes fall due, the creditors won’t extend them and the whole edifice topples, Madame Bovary with it.
Early on, the modern reader may have trouble slowing down enough to ease into the novel’s provincial life. But gradually that world, initially a blur, slips into sharper focus. There, in Yonville, a stagecoach ride from Rouen, we meet Lomais, a pharmacist with intellectual pretensions who pens sly pieces for the local journal, hates the Church, fancies himself knowledgeable in every field and deems it his duty to advise all the world of his opinions. Then there’s the village priest, Bournisien, with whom Lomais continually wrangles (though in a long night of talk and drink they express affection for
one another). And of course there’s the dry goods merchant and part-time usurer, Lheureux, the instrument of Madame Bovary’s undoing.
Mere types? Better, I think, to call them prototypes—the originals from which later copies derive. So convincingly are they drawn that, steeped in the life of the novel, you could return to Yonville, take a room at the inn and settle into the life of the village as if you had always lived there.
But do watch out for Madame Bovary.
On Many a List for Burning:
Heretics, Outlaws, and Demagogues
The Prince
— Niccolo Machiavelli
The Devil’s Dictionary
— Ambrose Bierce
Ten Days That Shook the World
— John Reed
_________________________________
Evil fascinates. Somehow, the subversive, heretical, vicious, and cruel grip the imagination.
This section encompasses everything from misanthropic short stories, to a curmudgeonly “dictionary” that reeks of bile, to a first-hand account of a revolution many saw as ushering in the Apocalypse, to venomous outpourings of raw hatred that even today cannot fail to shock.
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By Dorothy Parker.
First collected in book form, 1942
If the stories she wrote during her lifetime shed light on her soul, Dorothy Parker was downright wicked.
In “Lady of the Lamp,” one of two dozen stories appearing in one early collection of her work, a woman visits Mona, presumably her dear friend, in the hospital. Mona insists she’s not sick, that it’s just her nerves. “Just your nerves?” replies the friend, whose side of the conversation is the only one we hear. Plainly, she knows something she’s not supposed to know.
“I’d thought it rather funny I hadn’t heard from you, but you know how you are—you simply let people go, and weeks can go by like, well,
weeks
, and never a sign from you ... Now, I’m not going to scold you when you’re sick, but frankly ...”
The emotional stakes escalate. “Oh, Mona dear, so often I think if you just had a home of your own ... I worry so about you, living in a little furnished apartment, with nothing that belongs to you, no roots, no nothing. It’s not right for a woman.”
The sly barbs and wily insinuations begin to wreak their toll. “Why, Mona Morrison, are you crying? Oh, you’ve got a cold?... I thought you were crying there for a second.”
What poor Mona needs to do, says her visitor, is marry. “It would be all the difference in the world. I think a child would do everything for you, Mona ... Mona, baby, you really have got a rotten cold, haven’t you? Don’t you want me to get you another handkerchief?”
It becomes clear that Mona has had an abortion, that the visitor knows, that the visitor wishes to let her know she knows and that the visitor is out
to destroy Mona’s composure, dignity and self-esteem. “Mona, for heaven’s sake! Don’t scream like that. I’m not deaf, you know.”
The taunts and stabs are so subtle, clothed in caring and concern, that their emotional violence is not at first apparent. And yet “Lady of the Lamp” is a full-blown horror story, with all that genre’s sense of mounting terror. By the end, Mona is reduced to a shrinking, miserable rag of distraught emotion— whereupon her visitor, having achieved her end, calls in the doctor.