Notes on Recent Reading 38 (London, Vonnegut, Cather)

John Barleycorn (London)

London’s account of his lifelong use of alcohol is at the same time a revealing story of the economic conditions of his youth, reminding the reader yet again of how recently a person could work hard in America and yet suffer genuine need. He takes one strenuous and unrewarding job after another, including an illegal entrepreneurial venture as an “oyster pirate” on his own boat at the age of fifteen. His physical powers and discipline are not quite enough to lift him from the slough, but his mind can. He becomes radicalized, and eventually manages to acquire the rudiments of education. After very little time he is selling short stories and lands a book contract. In what seems temporarily almost a fairy tale denouement he acquires not just comfortable but substantial wealth, and establishes his estate in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County.

The narrative has in part the outline of a simple success story more inspirational than those of Horatio Alger that were popular in London’s youth and more real since it was not through charity or accident but his own energy and ability that he rose, but the author is pursued by a demon. He is stalked at every turn by John Barleycorn who, as he says, appeared everywhere that “chesty” men gathered, eventually weakening him and doubtless hastening his death. He is so clear-sighted about alcohol’s seductive power that he wishes to be rescued by circumstance. For this reason London enthusiastically supports women’s suffrage, certain that voting women will bring about Prohibition, which would redeem him whether he assented or not.

The book is a candid report of an individual’s addiction, and, as a study of chemical dependence, London’s evasions are as significant as his admissions. He insists countless times that he is not constitutionally or physically an alcoholic but succumbed due to alcohol’s accessibility, particularly on the “adventure-road” of masculine milieux. At the book’s end, he confidently reports his having overcome the temptation to overindulge as well as his tendency to “pessimism,” his term for depression. Essential as it is to a self-help book, London’s biographers would term that a rosy view.


Deadeye Dick (Vonnegut)

In those days when Vonnegut star was rising, I half-way tried to keep up with contemporary fiction, but I tended to prefer Barthelme and Barth and Coover. I was never taken by Vonnegut, though he was popular among the youth of my generation, and I certainly applauded his tendencies to pop culture, left-wing politics, and the counterculture. His vogue, after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, transformed his career, but his work never attracted much of my attention.

Reading Deadeye Dick now, I feel still dull to Vonnegut’s appeal. The book seems like a series of little routines, the more satisfying of which end with a snap something like a damp firecracker. The author’s considerable inventiveness rarely goes beyond what Coleridge might have called fancy. Reflecting this fact, his prose is simple and colloquial, matter-of-fact even while relating dramatic events.

Admittedly, this attitude consistently maintained through an accumulation of sketches amounts in the end to a Weltanschauung, which I would describe as a sort of youthful wonder at all things more or less equally, which, for this reader, eliminates the better part of the wonder. Perhaps I am too much reminded of the late sixties overuse of “wow.” (Its epigone “awesome” is flourishing, I believe, yet today.)



Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather)

Willa Cather’s last novel is her only work set in Virginia, the state of her birth. She is said to have based the central incidents of the story on whispered family lore she overheard from her elders. In the epilogue a first person narrator suddenly appears whom one might well take to be the author.

Cather’s descriptive prose is straightforward and quite precise. Descriptions of the changing seasons form a sort of lyric interlude every now and then in an episodic novel. Lit by righteous indignation overt slavery eighty years after abolition, she does deserve credit for making her case nuanced and engaging.

She is not portraying the plantation slavery more common in literature. In the western part of Virginia, in the hills among poor and struggling whites, Sapphira’s inherited slaves brought her not social prestige but her neighbors’ distrust. Her husband himself is opposed to slavery, but does not wish to make problems or diminish his wife’s wealth, so he does nothing. When he does raise the possibility of manumission to a slave who serves as his skilled assistant, the man asks to remain in servitude. Nancy, the slave “girl,” is virtuous but sufficiently boring to be annoying, though the reader can only be pleased that she comes to a good end.

Rather than description or theme, the real triumph of the book is the development of the character of Sapphira, whom one encounters as a snobbish and suspicious woman. Despite her social pretensions and her often small-minded and self-interested actions, the reader comes to appreciate her dignity and strength and to realize that, of course, she, too, has emotional capacity. Her bearing through her crippling dropsy and her approaching death make her in the end a hero, a feat that might have seemed unlikely after the first fifteen or twenty pages of the book.