Notes on Recent Reading 41 (McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim)

The Stones of Florence (McCarthy)

     McCarthy provides a pleasantly idiosyncratic account not only of the art that makes the city such a popular destination and of the city’s history, but also of the Florentine character in the mid-twentieth century. Offsetting the oh-so-aesthetic sensibility Tuscany often inspires, she makes a point of the region’s practicality, business sense, and even plainness in contrast to the sensualism of Venice. She creates a vivid sense of fifties Florence, still under the war’s shadow, bustling with Vespas and equal measures of pride and irony.
     Her freshness and vinegar are physic to the viewer who has ever felt that Botticelli, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi can be a bit sweet. In a certain mood Pater’s enthusiasm can be off-putting. It is then that McCarthy’s acerbic comments are particularly welcome. Florence attracts enthusiasts; it is refreshing to have this account by a cynical and sharp-eyed intellectual.
     The Stones of Florence reads as though it was a weaker sequel to her excellent Venice Observed. Nonetheless, the book deserves a place in the libraries even of those who are not travelers.


An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

     J. B. Priestley practiced a profession virtually obsolete today; he was a man of letters, the author of at least twenty-eight novels, as well as books of short stories, and a good many plays and films and four books of literary criticism aimed not at specialists, but the general reader. He wrote English Journey, a road book worthy of being placed next to Jack London’s The Road, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Responsible in addition for a number of works on history and politics, autobiography, and essays, he was an exemplary hard-working professional writer.
     He is most remembered today for one play of enduring popularity, a favorite of community theater, An Inspector Calls, written rapidly as a bit of agitprop as WWII ended and first performed in Moscow. The play’s success in repeated revivals by companies of all sorts is not due to its tendentious theme, however, but rather to its disguise as a conventional mystery story.
     The genres are not mixed without hazard. The trajectory of the unfolding of the inspector’s indictment is so clear that the viewer has little doubt what will happen by the end of the first scene. Lacking opportunity to surprise expectations in the main line of the story, he resorts to a switcheroo or two at the end instead.
     When Mr. Burling wonders why he put up with the inspector’s accusatory behavior and his independence from any legal forms, the audience is likely to wonder with him. Having been simply enough amused to watch the working out of a pattern clear from the start, they may have neglected to worry about realism. By the end of the play we are to accept the supernatural when it appears the inspector is not a regular police agent at all. Unconcerned with making arrests, he is nonetheless devoted to tending to the moral order. Once the resemblance to Everyman emerges, realism is no longer relevant. When the Burlings realize that it is possible that the various incidents for which they feel culpable may have involved not one woman, but many, this cleverly mirrors the thematic implication that they play is not about a single egregious case of persecution, but about the capitalist system.
     All very well, but why, then, does the final telephone call occur, letting them know that an inspector is on his way. Is what they had just experienced happening again? Is it happening now for real whereas it was before a phantom summoned up by a family full of guilty consciences? Is it all of a sudden about one woman again? What is going on? But before one can think, the curtain has fallen.


Prince of Monkeys (Ehirim)

     Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel provides an overview of Nigerian life during the nineties, and the picture is disturbing, even tragic. The plot concerns the emergence into adulthood of his protagonist Ihechi and his circle of school friends in a profoundly corrupt society. The bleak depiction of Nigeria is intensified by the older characters’ memories of the Nigerian Civil War.
     The middle class Ihechi is anti-colonialist, yearning for a distinctly African form of communalism, leading him and his set to idolize Fela. Yet he is as scornful of the Ifa orisas to which his mother is devoted as he is to the Anglican Jesus. Given the political theme, the horrifying ending is perhaps inevitable, as each individual comes to grief, doomed simply for having independent judgment and conscience.
     The lurid character of the final scene is of a piece with the over-striving of some of the prose. Ornamental alliteration or figures of speech that seem to be for show alone occasionally distract the reader, but it is in a way exhilarating to see style and rhetoric for their own sake. Very likely West African fancy for oratory in the days before literacy influences even this young writer. The ample use of proverbs is without a doubt traditional (and European ones sneak in as well).

Notes on Recent Reading 29 (Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam)

Anthills of the Savannah (Achebe)

     Chinua Achebe’s last novel, published twenty-one years after A Man of the People, again engages the theme of sub-Saharan African “democratic” politics, portraying a land utterly lost to avarice, tyranny, and corruption. My own experience is limited, but he seems right on the money. Since independence the continent has suffered decline due to neo-colonialism, domestic profiteers, HIV, and helplessness in the face of world capitalism, and it is proper that the most eloquent protests should come from Africans. Achebe’s readers know how skilled he is at writing a readable and informative novel. Not for nothing is Things Fall Apart a school and university favorite. If the characters here seem mere types (the tyrant, a collaborator, a radical, a more detached female love interest), it is because they are in service to their theme. I, for one, was taken by surprise by the dramatic events that constitute the final portion of the story, including the sudden deaths of two leading figures, and a concluding ceremony for an infant that seems to point suddenly toward cheerier possibilities which I am afraid for me seemed altogether unmotivated.
     I enjoyed particularly the passages in pidgin and the oratory of the Abazon elder, but this may be peculiar to my own experiences in Nigeria decades ago.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (Jewett)

     Jewett’s near too-fond vignettes of the coast of southern Maine and its people will always have a significant place in accounts of American regionalism, but those interested in camp and kitsch may see in it embryos of the ironic aesthetics so popular in the Modern era. The author was in fact a native of South Berwick, though her family was among the town’s most affluent, and she strayed regularly to greater cultural centers. In this she differs from writers like Mark Twain who, despite his immense success and sharp satiric bite essentially never left his rural Missouri upbringing or George Washington Harris whose Sut Lovingood is wholly a figure of fun. Jewett depicts her characters with warm condescending affection as “dear old things” among whom the narrator is a (presumably urban) intruder set apart by education, taste, and manners yet sufficiently sociably adept to appreciate the people of the boondocks and to ingratiate herself with them. My strongest impression from this reading was a powerful sense of the harshness of the environment, both for those who sought a living at sea and on land, and a hardihood in response that seems a throwback to the Old English. If Jewett seldom writes a memorable descriptive passage or even an attention-getting figure of speech, she is never guilty of verbal missteps, and her prose is clear and refreshing. She may not evoke tragic sensations, but she plays at sentimental and pathetic with a light and restrained hand.
     I was in Ogunquit shortly after Labor Day and my first thought, upon turning into town and seeing holidaymakers thronging the sidewalks, was, “I might almost be in Puerto Vallarta.” Yet I ate my lobster and was glad.


Cruel Tales Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

     Those who fancy Oscar Wilde and Huysmans will likely know Edmund Wilson’s excellent Axel’s Castle with its title reference to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s prose poem Axel, in which the hero notoriously says, “Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous" (“Living? Our servants can do that for us.”) Axel itself is far less well-known and the author’s other efforts, notably short stories, but also journalistic pieces, plays, and poetry have even fewer readers. Yet anyone with a taste for the decadent and perverse will enjoy these brief tales, though a few seek to prove their point at too great a length, most are well-turned, with a refined sense of irony and a relish for a sort of modulated horror. Some border on horror or science fiction, while others devote themselves to provocation. The modern reader can agree with Verlaine (if not with his capitalization) who placed Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in his pantheon of Les Poètes Maudits, calling the author “VERY GLORIOUS. “