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. “

Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe]

Country of the Pointed Firs [Jewett]

     Reading Jewett one thinks of William Carlos Williams’ line in “To Elsie”: “The pure products of America/ go crazy—“ Though Jewett’s bona fides as an old-line downeaster are impeccable, she writes as though the region was populated entirely by eccentrics with the exception of the normative detached narrator. Just as pastoral poetry was originally written by urbanites amusing themselves with a mythological projection of country life, the late nineteenth century regional American writers virtually all wrote from a doubled perspective: familiar with the local culture yet not contained within it.
     Indeed, Jewett marvels at what she sees of “the waste of human ability” along the Maine coast where individuals are stranded like sea-wrack. A person in a small town may have “a fine able character” yet feel “caged” by “a narrow set of circumstances.” (467) A devolution has occurred: the earlier generations were “more vigorous.” (473) When the chunky Mrs. Todd is compared to Antigone (417), Jewett is plainly playing an endgame of belated epigones. The poignancy of her one romance and the dull marriage that followed is sentimental rather than tragic. Her plodding tidy decent endurance, however admirable, falls far short of heroic.
     In historic terms, many of the odd characters that populate Dunnet’s Landing testify to the passing of the old order in which sea captains not only commanded a prosperous industry but also brought a cosmopolitan viewpoint to an otherwise small and isolated seacoast town. Travelers know that the economic backwaters are always the most colorful tourist destinations, and, in spite of her own Maine origins, Jewett, like her narrator from Boston, was just passing through.


Cato [Addison]

     Joseph Addison’s play was a hit when it premiered in 1713. Written to conform to the neoclassical literary theory of the sort advocated by Thomas Rymer, it set the standard for a generation of tragedies and maintained its popularity on the stage well into the nineteenth century. Since that time, despite academic interest and occasional revivals, it has lingered in some obscurity while the author’s marvelous essays, casual and elegant at once, have always commanded readers.
     Addison’s blank verse is pallid compared to Shakespeare, but whose is not? Cato the Stoic (great-grandson of the Censor) speaks in a rhetoric that is nothing if not dignified, uplifted with sublime sentiment. The listener can only be charmed by the self-abnegating virtues of the hero. The love interests of Marcus, Portius, and Juba are adventitious; what the play presents is the grandeur of tragic submission, contemptuous of mere passion. Though Cato must argue himself into acceptance of immortality, noting, in a line later quoted by the pleasant Mr. Micawber, “Plato, thou reasonest well,” his detachment from desire and devotion to others are exemplary.
     The more-or-less “natural religion” of Stoicism was not the only reason Cato was the rage in the Enlightenment era. Addison was an active Whig, and participated in the struggle to decrease the prerogatives of the monarchy. His play was read as part of a developing critique of tyranny that impressed both American and French revolutionaries. George Washington, in fact, had the play performed for the troops at Valley Forge. Cato himself had been elected plebian tribune and had, with Cicero, opposed the patrician Catiline conspiracy, and so might be regarded as something of a progressive. At any rate the old Stoic is surely innocent of the fact that his name is used today by rightwing sycophants of our own tyrannical Caesar, the corporate dollar.


Collected Poems [Crabbe]

     We tend to accept the idea of the penniless poet as natural, though the poor had little voice until the Romantic movement created a new interest in the lives of the humble and an audience for poets like Burns, Crabbe, and Clare who had themselves experienced real privation. For a man like Crabbe, the English countryside inspired neither the confectionary fantasies of classical pastoralism nor the mystical afflatus of Wordsworth. Like American writers a hundred years or so later such as Edwin Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters, he described struggles and dramas taking place far from the centers of power, often with a dark or tragic tone.
     In Byron’s phrase, Crabbe was “Nature’s severest painter, yet her best,” and The Borough, The Village, and “Sir Eustace Grey” remain worth reading for their psychology and pathos. The tales in verse are well-shaped and satisfying, even if most would agree with Émile Legouis’ observation that “His ear has no fastidious requirement.”
     As much a poet of depression as of rural life, it is no wonder that some categorize him as a pre-Romantic, yet Leavis places him last of the Augustan Tradition, and Horace Smith called him “Pope in worsted stockings.” Though he says he “sought the simple life that Nature yields” it was in fact his circumstance from birth, and it is to his credit that he set down as much of its horror as of its picturesque charm. He was a competent craftsman, and in his often easy-going heroic couplets (sometimes ballad-like stanzas), if he rarely comes up with striking images or thrilling thoughts (we are no longer impressed with his sententiae), he sustains a consistent simmer of interest and generally hits his mark. While he rarely soared, he regularly looked closely at his surroundings, material and emotional, and recorded what he saw in carefully wrought language.