Vintage Reading Page 4

  The next European war was World War II, which ended in 1945. By 1948, Gandhi and Nehru had wrested India from the Crown.

  My Antonia

  ____________

  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.

  Madame Bovary

  ____________

  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.

  II

  On Many a List for Burning:

  Heretics, Outlaws, and Demagogues

  Stories — Dorothy Parker

  The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli

  The Devil’s Dictionary — Ambrose Bierce

  Mein Kampf — Adolf Hitler

  Nana — Emile Zola

  Ten Days That Shook the World — John Reed

  Native Son — Richard Wright

  _________________________________

  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.

  Stories

  ____________

  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.

  Dorothy Parker, a poet and critic as well as storyteller, presided over a court of literary wits that frequented Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s. Mona’s visitor is like most of the characters appearing in her stories; there’s scarcely a good, sweet, sensitive soul in the lot.

  In “Horsie,” a baby’s nurse is cursed with large, indelicate features; her employers tease her mercilessly behind her back, all but waiting for her to whinny. In “Glory in the Daytime,” Lily Wynton, a legendary actress, turns out to be a sad and sodden alcoholic, given to drunken recitations of her past roles. Then there’s Hazel Morse, the “Big Blonde” of the story’s title, who drifts from man to man, speakeasy to speakeasy, devoid of all sense of who she is, or of any talent but being company to men.

  Why drop down into Parker’s underworld of snide, shallow and otherwise unlikable characters? It’s not fun, I’ll tell you, though it is perversely fascinating. That’s one reason to lap up her stories. To harmlessly satisfy a sadistic streak? That’s a second.

  To study a consummate master in the cruel craft of dissecting human frailty might be a third.

  The Prince

  ____________

  By Niccolo Machiavelli

  First published in 1537

  Machiavellian, adj.: Following the methods recommended by Machiavelli in preferring expediency to morality; duplicity in statecraft or general conduct.

  That’s what the word meant in 1592, when the Oxford English Dictionary records its appearance in the phrase “pestilent Machiavellian policie,” and that’s what it means today. Its impressive constancy of meaning owes much to this slim book, The Prince, and to the force and single-mindedness of its message.

  Which is that politics and power are one thing, morality and ethics something else.

  The Inquisition ordered Machiavelli’s works destroyed. Mussolini chose The Prince as the subject of his doctoral thesis. Lenin and Stalin studied it, and Hitler reputedly kept it for bedtime reading. Is it, then, a work of evil, and thus not fit reading for all who ally themselves with good?

  As a matter of fact, Machiavelli himself allied himself with good. A Florentine statesman who lived from 1469 to 1532, Niccolo Machiavelli cared passionately about the fate of Italy and held important diplomatic posts with the Florentine Republic. He wrote The Prince while banished to a country villa when out of favor. In it, he never argued for evil over good, hatred over love, war over peace. He simply observed that any ruler inclined to retain his kingdom and achieve his political ends ought not give misguided obeisance to mere ethics.

  The Prince is a practical textbook, a guide on how to rule. Chapter 5, for example, tells “The Way to Govern Cities or Dominions That, Previous to Being Occupied, Lived Under Their Own Laws.” Chapter 17 is entitled “Of Cruelty and Clemency and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared.” Only the book’s frequent references to the labyrinthine politics of early sixteenth century Italy make its advice anything less than instantly relevant to the modern student of power.

  Machiavelli points out that too-liberal policies may drain the public treasury and thus prompt unrest and wide-spread misery more readily than “niggardly” policies that preserve the state’s financial health. Sound familiar? He writes that an assassination attempt, “which proceeds from the deliberate action of a determined man cannot be avoided.” And he insists that, in the long run, the occasionally cruel prince “will be more merciful than those who, for excess of tenderness, allow disorders to arise, from whence spring bloodshed and rapine.”

  The Prince may be read today as a treatise on men and women in groups generally, and many of its prescriptions seem no less applicable to the corporate boardroom than to the halls of government: “There is no other way of guarding one’s self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth,” is surely a constructive insight. A bit more questionable: “It is much safer to be feared than loved.”

  Machiavelli’s air of supreme self-assurance surely owes much to the clean lines of his prose—whose virtues, as critic Kenneth Rexroth once noted, “survive all but the worst translations,” and which comes across not as self-consciously “stylish” but elegant and pure. And pithy, as in: “It is the nature of men to be as much bound by the benefits that they confer as by those they receive.”

  Do not, though, be too quick to condemn Signor Machiavelli. His divorce of politics from ethics inevitably leads to statements easily construed as callous or cynical—which, of course, they are. Yet the man himself plainly felt it was better to be good than evil, kind than cruel, on the side of God than of the Devil. And when it suited him, he wrote, a prince ought to embrace just tho
se policies most popular among the people—leave them to live their lives in peace, don’t confiscate their property, and so on. Wrote Machiavelli, “The best fortress is to be found in the love of the people.”

  But a sentiment like that fails to account for how he wound up in the dictionary, whereas this vintage Machiavelli does: A prince “must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and... not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.”

  The Devil’s Dictionary

  ____________

  By Ambrose Bierce

  First published in 1906

  Babbits, boosters, flacks and other purveyors of a sunny view of the human condition will find little to sustain them in Ambrose Bierce’s misanthropic tour de force, The Devil’s Dictionary. Why, just turn to the A’s and find:

  Air, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

  Proceed to the Z’s and encounter:

  Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

  This irreverent literary frolic offers welcome respite to the curmudgeon who’s spent a vexing day batting off vapidly smiling young waiters and retail clerks determined to wish him a nice day. Marriage, according to Bierce, consist of “a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” To pray, says the author, means “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” But of course.