"Middlemarch" Contains the World

I recently re-read George Eliot’s masterpiece, the 1874 novel “Middlemarch.” I have read it several times over the years; it is for me a great source of wisdom, insight, and pleasure. It holds the whole world in it, as embodied in an English provincial town called Middlemarch. This town contains all the characters you can imagine, all the people you meet in your everyday life. There are the idealists, the realists, the dreamers, the moralists, the hypocrites, the confused, the pragmatic, the yearners, the creators, the disappointed, the disillusioned, the good, the evil, the scared, the complacent, the satisfied, the perpetually unsatisfied, and more. They are at every stage in life: children, young people, students, workers, married, parents, middle-aged, old, dying. In other words, the novel leads us to look deeply into the human condition. Despite my list above, very few of the characters are one-dimensional; Eliot’s characters are richly complex. She sets them into motion, watches them grow and learn or stagnate, find or not find their ways in life, succeed or fail, and interact or avoid interaction with each other. You might say any novel does all this, but I reply that the town, and by extension the world, that Eliot creates is both universal and unique. We ache for the wrenching choices some characters make, and for the sad consequences of some of their choices. We identify with the lovers, and we identify with those who have lost love. We are in suspense about how certain matters will turn out: matters of the heart, matters of business, and matters of the soul. Some have called Eliot’s work dry, but they are so wrong. Yes, the prose is precise and intellectual, and the tone is sometimes philosophical, but the novel represents all the life forces; it is full of passion, love, fear, hatred, grief, and redemption. Every time I read this novel, I learn more from it, and appreciate it in new ways. (I have often said that to read a great novel at different stages of one’s life is to understand it in a new way each time, because we bring our own experiences to each reading.) If I were limited to a small armload of books for the rest of my life, “Middlemarch” would be in that armload.

Rimbaud: Poet and Adolescent Hero

Many writers and aspiring writers, as well as avid readers, have fancied themselves bohemian, avant garde, scornful of convention, and a bit outrageous. One of the most prominent models for such a stance was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who has attained an almost mythic status in literature. Born in 1854, Rimbaud wrote his intense, dramatic poetry -- including his best known work, “A Season in Hell” -- between the ages of 15 and 20, and then, shockingly, stopped writing. An article by Daniel Mendelsohn in the 8/29/11 New Yorker describes Rimbaud’s drab, conventional background, and how he rebelled against and escaped it and went to Paris several times before he finally was able to stay there. He “let his hair grow long, sat around mocking the passing bourgeoisie, and smoked his clay pipe a lot.” (It sounds like the sixties in the United States!) He wrote shocking poems, sometimes about scatological topics. But, as the article says, he also carefully studied the history of poetry, and wrote dazzling, iconoclastic poetry. This precocious poet became the lover of the poet Paul Verlaine. They had a stormy, even destructive relationship, but meanwhile Rimbaud’s poetry matured. He became famous, but at the age of 20, stopped writing poetry, moved home to his mother’s farm, and then moved to Aden and East Africa, becoming a trader, far from the literary scene. His renunciation of poetry at such a young age has always been a great mystery. One theory is that he simply outgrew adolescence and all its intensity. In any case, his poetry, his outrageous behavior, and the whole mythology about him still have a powerful influence. The poet and singer Patti Smith says that when she was sixteen, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbuad’s ‘Illuminations,’ which I kept in my back pocket…[It] became the bible of my life.” Mendelsohn concludes that not only was Rimbaud himself an adolescent when he wrote his poetry, but he also appeals most of all, in a very visceral way, to adolescents, as it is “the urgency, the orneriness, the rebellion” of adolescence that they find reflected in his work. I will only add that adolescents always seem to admire and imitate, and/or fall in love with, the “bad boys,” whether they ride motorcycles or write defiant (but perfectly formed) poetry. So here’s to the beautiful, original, rebellious, obnoxious, brilliant, destructive, charismatic genius, Rimbaud!

Famous Writer Couples

Sometimes, for better or for worse, writers find each other and have affairs with, or marry, or live with each other. Some relationships are happy, some not. Some are longlasting, some not. Below are a few famous writer couples.

Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren
Zelda Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett
Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson
Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell
Lady Caroline Blackwood and Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver
Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall
Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris
Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise
Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon

Dickens Fandom

An 8/29/11 New Yorker article, “Dickens in Eden,” reminds us that although Dickens wrote with great scorn about America after his visit here almost 170 years ago, at least some Americans nowadays adore his work, and feel they can learn everything about human nature from his novels. Illustrating this passionate love for Dickens, the article’s author, Jill Lepore, describes her visit to the annual Dickens camp (officially called Dickens Universe) at the beautiful University of California, Santa Cruz campus. This camp provides a week full of lectures, reading seminars, films, rehearsals for and the performance of an original farce, workshops, a Victorian tea, and a Victorian dance. The lecturers are professors from many universities who contribute their lectures unpaid, out of love for the topic and the camp. One of the great things about this camp is that attendance is not just for Dickens scholars and professors, but for anyone who is interested; Lepore met Dickens fans who came to the camp from far and wide. One regular attendee is the English actress Miriam Margolyes, who has acted in Dickens film adaptations, and who states that she first read “Oliver Twist” when she was eleven, and “Since then, there hasn’t been a day in my life when I haven’t read Dickens.” What a testimonial! Lepore’s article discusses Dickens' life, his family, his quirks, the history of his work, the value of his novels, and more; it is long, detailed, informative, and fascinating. I highly recommend it to readers who have any interest at all in Dickens. I have read most of Dickens’ novels, but I must admit it has been a long while since I read them; this article makes me want to go back and rediscover them.

Three Generations of Reading Women

My daughter M., whose demanding job keeps her working long hours, recently told me that it felt like such a luxury, almost a mini-vacation, to very occasionally take an hour or two to sit on the couch and read. She is currently reading and enjoying Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth.” (Lahiri is one of my favorite current American authors as well.) In addition, my mother often tells me of how much she enjoys reading even more than in the past, now that she lives in a retirement home and has more time than ever before. I have written here (3/30/10) of how it gives me pleasure to select, gather and give my mom piles of books I think she will enjoy. She just finished, and absolutely loved, one of the books I gave her, Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible” (also a favorite of mine). She told me she got so involved in it that she would rush back to her apartment after meals to continue reading it. I know that feeling! And you all know -- since you are reading this blog -- how much I -- the middle generation -- love to read. I am currently re-re-reading (it is one of the novels I go back to over and over again) “Middlemarch,” which I will post about here soon. So I just flashed on this lovely mental picture of the three of us, three generations of women, each curled up on her respective couch or chair, eagerly and with pleasure reading our various novels, and then sharing with each other what we are reading and how we are feeling about those books. This vision makes me very happy!

Why Don't Boys Read More?

Are there “Girl Books and Boy Books?” as I asked when I wrote here on 4/22/10 about how some of my female and male students responded differently to a novel they read for my class? As I said then, the topic of whether and why females and males, on average, have overlapping but different tastes in books is too large and too fraught to summarize here. But I wondered about the gender question and books again recently when I read Robert Lipsyte’s essay, “The Lost Boys,” in the 8/21/11 New York Times Book Review. Lipsyte states that “boys’ aversion to reading, let alone to novels, has been worsening for years.” He discusses several possible reasons, but posits that one of the main ones is that most Y.A. (Young Adult) fiction is aimed toward girls. “At least three-quarters of the target audience [is] girls, and they [want] to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.” He goes on to say about current Y.A. titles that “books with story lines about disease, divorce, death and dysfunction [sell] better for girls than…for boys.” Whatever the reasons, it is unfortunate that boys read less than girls, and if publishing more high quality Y.A. titles that appeal to boys is the answer, or part of the answer, I hope that publishers will respond to Lipsyte’s essay by trying to do this.

Memorable Novels about War

Another in my "memorable" series: Memorable Novels about War

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal
Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
Regeneration, by Pat Barker
Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

There have also been many novels about, or including material on, the aftereffects of war. To me, one of the most memorable of these is Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," in which the character Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked World War I veteran; his pain and suffering are visceral and powerfully portrayed by Woolf.