Notes on Recent Reading 45 (Williams, Muir, Waugh)

 

White Mule (Williams)

     William Carlos Williams’ novel, the first of a trilogy (followed by In the Money and The Build-Up), is a beautiful example of the power of clarity and straightforwardness in narrative.  Williams plays a good deal with point of view, and some of the early passages from the infant’s perspective may remind readers of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but, for the most part, the novel is closer to the proletarian realism of the thirties than to the experimentalism of the twenties.  Valuing descriptive vignettes over plot lines, Williams records several varieties of convincingly real speech and wholly plausible events in the life of an American immigrant family clearly modeled on his wife’s.  His willful neglect of reader expectations can be obtrusive as when, for example one sees a horrifying glimpse of the abusive Carmody home which is never again mentioned.  Worse, in the antepenultimate chapter Joe is being set up as front man in a dubious business venture, yet this theme vanishes.  Even if Williams had a multi-volume plan in mind, raising such significant issues only to drop them in this volume is annoying.  The reader feels played like the viewer of a movie serial, left with a cliff-hanger.

     The baby Flossie becomes the unlikely center of the book, though she is barely talking by its conclusion.  Her stubborn élan vital in the face of an inattentive mother, physical frailty, and all the imperfections of the world becomes a sort of mute heroism.  While all the adults bumble on, each handicapped by prejudices, habits, and vices, the baby makes her own way, sometimes by screaming, sometimes by repeatedly falling only to rise again undeterred.  Everyone who has raised a child will recognize the faithfulness of the good doctor’s account of the earliest and most significant stage of life, so rarely documented.

 

 

Scottish Journey (Muir)

     I was prejudiced in favor of this account remembering the German translations (some, provocatively done in Scots dialect) I had seen attributed to Muir (though I understand his wife Willa played a larger role in these than he) and I am receptive to writing about travel.   This particular journey proved, I am afraid, disappointing.  Borne down by the Great Depression visible on every side, Muir cannot prevent his righteous Socialist lamentations from intruding on nearly every page.  As he concedes more times than once, his descriptions are hardly specific to Scotland.  Legitimate enough, had he not defined his goal as setting down something of the national character.  His extended comments on the Scottish National Party reflect the tensions between nationalism and socialism, but are of primarily historical interest at this point.

    I did relish Muir’s down-at-heel persona (reminiscent of other road books by London, Orwell, Miller, and Kerouac).  He portrays himself as somewhat disreputable-looking with a car challenged by every hill, forcing its driver on the mercy of strangers, and this is wholly consistent with his picture of a land depressed by chronic unemployment on top of centuries of subjugation by England, with industrial centers filled with street-corner loiterers, drinking even more than usual. 

     For Muir the sentimental alternative is the pastoral dream of his memories of a childhood in the Orkneys in spite of the fact that his own father’s fortunes steadily declined there, leading him to move the family to Glasgow when Edwin was fourteen.  The description if the trauma of this sudden descent into a sordid urban scene is perhaps the finest passage in the book.  For the most part, however, his prose brings few rewards.  Muir has a sharp eye, and a serviceable pen, but this book is too hasty-seeming to reinforce the reader’s impression of his poetic skills.  Perhaps his wife should have taken a greater share in its composition.

 

 

When the Going Was Good (Waugh)

     I ordinarily avoid anything like an abridgement, but I make an exception for this collection of long excerpts from four travel books written between 1929 and 1935. It is, at least, Waugh’s own editing here of what he jauntily assures us were a series of books written, he assures us, as no more than a means of supporting himself.  Charming and self-deprecating, he describes these as “pedestrian,” “commonplace,” and, at times, callow.  Perhaps others may discern, as he must, the “vernal scent” of his youth in these pages covering trips through Egypt, Palestine, Ethiopia, Guiana, and Brazil.  Like the great off-hand observations of Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin, he conveys with humor and humanity the bizarre and often inexplicable experiences of the traveler who ventures off the beaten track. 

     If all travel encourages receptive senses, the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open.  One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, knowledge about the variety of ways to be human, allowing at once new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes, but, as there so often is, a complementary view is equally true.  The strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and taste and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding only magnifies the distance between one consciousness and another and even more between the individual and the world.  The tolerance and acceptance of a drifter stranded in a tropical village where the road ends, as Waugh was more than once, are perhaps a workable attitude toward life.  They are sometimes all that one has.

Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams]

Parallel Lives [Plutarch]

     Though his purpose was to praise and blame, Plutarch, like an old history book, is heavy with wars and politics and not so good on culture and thought. His Lives would be improved with fewer accounts of battles, but the stories never fail to engage the reader. It is fascinating to see how Athens and Rome, even in their days of power, were like small towns in that everyone knew everyone and historic changes might be initiated on a street-corner after a chance meeting.
     Though the so-called Dryden edition was not exactly translated by Dryden it is accurate enough and readable. I haven’t seen Sir John North’s version of Amyot’s French translation; perhaps it is more appealing.


Agricola and Germania [Tacitus]

     Tacitus’ praise of the work of his father-in-law Agricola in subduing the Britons serves as a vehicle for his expression of the old Roman values. His straightforward style is nonetheless susceptible to irony, archness, and some good set-pieces. The Agricola describes the assimilation of such “demoralizing temptations” as Roman “arcades, baths, and banquets,” saying that the “unsuspecting Britons” regarded these as “civilization” whereas they were more accurately enslavement. In the Germania he notes with approval the northerners disregard for gold and silver, their hardihood, and their strict sexual morality. “No one in Germany finds vice amusing, or calls it ‘up-to-date’ to seduce and be seduced.”
     His account of Boudica is sympathetic. The report of Calgacus’ speech rallying Rome’s enemies is eloquent, damning the imperial power for bringing “robbery, butchery, and rapine” while calling it government. His passionate cry of liberty or death must surely be a coded lament for the loss of the Roman Republic whose ineffectual Senate could only ratify the madness of one emperor after another. He goes so far as to implies that Domitian, whom he says had a “hatred of merit,” killed Agricola.
     In Tacitus one sees the dilemma of a man of principle seeking to take an honorable role in a tyrannical state. He is surely offering his own apologia when he says in the Agricola that “even under bad emperors men can be great,” and, through “a decent regard for authority” may attain “distinction,” whereas opposing even a wicked monarch can bring only an unseemly and “ostentatious self-martyrdom.”
     A modern reader of the Germania can hardly avoid reflecting on recent history when reading of the northern tribes passions for racial purity and for war. My old copy of the Penguin translation by Harold Mattingly from 1948 makes a number of contemporary references. Whether or not Tacitus was mistaken on the first point, the Nazis were only too glad to appropriate his words. As for the latter, Tacitus considers them a bit mad on their eagerness for battle and their scorn of farming. According to his account, when not fighting, they spend their time in idleness. The book includes solid anthropological information on governance, divination, and human sacrifice.


White Mule [Williams]

     William Carlos Williams’ novel (1937) is narrated in a pure distilled straightforward American idiom that moves fatalistically from each word to the next. Much of the book is colloquial, reproducing American working class accents of African Americans, Irish, German, and Norwegian immigrants will such precision the good doctor must surely have kept a notebook handy for years, making memoranda of expressions he heard in his daily life.
     The fact that the novel’s first reviewers (Alfred Kazin in the New York Times and N. L. Rothman in the Saturday Review) compared the book to Joyce only shows us what conventional narratives they expected. The stream of consciousness is mild indeed, though the figure of the infant Flossie, bearing the name of the author’s beloved wife on whose family the story is based, is original and unsentimental. The Stecher family’s further experiences are detailed in the sequels In the Money and The Build Up.