Notes From Underground (1864)

It’s not hard to understand why this short novel is widely considered a starting point for reading Fyodor Dostoevsky. It’s short and, perhaps most importantly, it’s a good example of his narrative style (when he finally gets to a narrative). I read it and didn’t like it when I was about 20, but it may (or may not) stay with me longer now even if it hasn’t been so easy getting here. In many ways Notes From Underground is Dostoevsky pure and you may like the ranting style sans narrative more than me. You obviously have to get here, if you are reading Dostoevsky, but I think it can wait. Crime and Punishment is a better place to start, if it doesn’t have to be short (or The Double, if it does). Notes From Underground has some intellectual heft, as an existential or otherwise philosophical treatise. I can certainly see how this leads directly to Nietzsche—it often felt like I was rereading him, which is admittedly remarkable—and even to Kafka. Not for nothing was Dostoevsky included in somebody’s list of the four great sick men of Europe (I think it was J.D. Salinger’s list and I’m guessing the fourth is Kierkegaard). For me the first part of Notes is a slog, a blistering rant about even the most basic elements of social life. The anonymous first-person ranter extols the virtues of the will over the tediously suffocating rational, even if the will is perverse and self-destructive. It’s a natural human right, or something. It often feels like he is railing against the terms of existence itself, heady and bracing with lunatic assertions. The second part of Notes is more the Dostoevsky I like, when our unpleasant ranting narrator—unnamed, for that modern existential flourish—is seen in action with acquaintances and a sex worker who is just being drawn into the life. The narrative momentum may still be fragmented, but it has some great scenes of painful social interactions, one of Dostoevsky’s great abilities as a writer. I sympathize with our guy’s reclusiveness and even to some degree with his resentments. But I draw the line at his cruel and vindictive behavior (nonetheless understanding the impulses). At that point Notes becomes an amazing freakshow spectacle, at which we can only gape in astonishment. All these harrowing and maddening terms of existence—that’s what Dostoevsky does best and still, arguably, better than anyone else. Notes From Underground stands with his greatest, but you might have to exercise some patience at first, or anyway I had to.

In case the library is closed to pandemic, which is over.

"The Phantom Coach" (1864)

This story by Amelia B. Edwards is plain old-fashioned ghost-storytelling and a clinic in one way to do it. There's a hunter, the first-person narrator, traipsing the moors by himself for game. He's on a long honeymoon or independently wealthy. His new wife is at home and he loves her dearly. He has spent the day hunting, but now darkness is falling and he is lost. He is sad that his wife will be worried about him. It's set in December (all the good ones are in December, aren't they?) but that's as close to Christmas as it gets beyond a lovely snowfall. He must seek shelter for the night. He finds himself in the isolated home of a sort of British Voltaire figure, an intellectual renaissance man of letters and science, with a telescope, a microscope, and books stacked everywhere in his study. At first, finding himself 20 miles from home, the hunter intends staying overnight, but when the snow lets up and his host tells him there's a way home to his wife (his motivation to return to her is believable, not weird, and one of the most grounding details here), he jumps at it. It involves walking to a point where he can meet up with a night mail coach. On the way there he learns of a terrible accident involving this coach. It's a little late and a little clumsy on the foreshadowing, but all right. Edwards has spun her web and we are well caught up in it by now. When the coach shows up, sure enough, it's full of ghosts, presumably from the accident. It's mechanical in some ways, but what Edwards is good at is the extraordinary experience itself—the way the ghosts look and behave (and smell), the way the hunter responds, unknowing at first. "The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea." The bad smell and some details about their appearance make it clear these ghosts are more like decomposing bodies than immaterial mist. The coach itself, on closer inspection, is about in the same condition as Miss Havisham's wedding dress. When the hunter comments on its deplorable state one of the ghosts is annoyed. "His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural luster. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between." It only gets worse and then there's a calamity, the accident of the coach, but the narrator survives. He swears the whole thing is true but the doctor thinks he's cracked. At least he's back with his dear wife again. The clarity of some of these older stories can just be remarkable. They effectively describe an uncanny vision of horror, and we're all good. That's enough.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby
Read story online.

Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green (1864)

The last slave narrative in the Library of America collection feels a little like an addendum. At 50 pages, it's on the short side, telling tales of a persistent escape artist and trickster character. J.D. Green's story brings us chronologically nearly to the end of the Civil War, which began with the secession of South Carolina in 1860. The narrative proper seemed a little carelessly edited, though that's probably from the original, with odd and inconsistent spellings, capitalizations, and even typos. It happens with some of the others too but I suspect this one is here more for its own addendums, which are fascinating. The first is a newspaper article from a British publisher about the secession of South Carolina, attempting to understand in real time what it means for slavery and the US. The second is a speech credited to a Georgia statesman, A.H. Stephens, arguing in the Georgia legislature against secession. The picture he paints has many depressing parallels today, with Southerners successfully setting the agenda for the country. Stephens points to how the North had relented on spreading slavery to new territories in the Fugitive Slave Law, which also made the North legally responsible for returning runaway slaves, and he points to the Dred Scott decision too. He lists all the advantages the South has enjoyed, including the original notorious three-fifths provision in the Constitution on slaves for tax accounting purposes, which enabled slaveholders to keep people without rights of any kind who nevertheless contributed to the political power of the owners. Donald Trump may seem unprecedented, but the animus that motivates him and his followers has been in this country since its beginnings. Next up there is a response by Scottish clergy to a statement written by Confederate clergy defending slavery. The Scots condemn slavery in no uncertain terms and even pound the Bible a couple of times, which I found interesting. Their critique of the Confederate argument seemed solid to me, in terms of debunking it, but I also wondered how they responded to the justifications for slavery found in the Bible. Maybe that's Old Testament stuff? I don't mean to minimize Green's story—it's pretty good in its own right, doing the usual work of these narratives laying bare the realities of homegrown American slavery and its legacy of assault, rape, and murder, as well as the casualties of families separated forever.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"A Tragedy of Error" (1864)

This story by Henry James has a few points of interest. Perhaps most significantly, it's his first story published, when he was 21—published without attribution, however, which may be the reason it was "lost" and then "rediscovered" in the 1950s. It's relatively primitive, but easily enough recognized as James. More interesting still, it's a kind of mystery or even horror story, and quite frank about the sins and transgressions it recounts. A woman has taken a lover while her husband is away at sea—more than a lover, a man she has fallen in love with, and wants to be with. As the story begins, she has learned that her husband is returning—indeed, will be back the very next day. She visits the docks of the unnamed French seaport where the story is set (it might be Le Havre) and finds a ruffian, whom she engages to murder her husband. As it turns out, and as you might easily have guessed—yes, I'm giving it all away now—through strained but believable enough confusions, the man murdered is her lover. Oops. That's about it. The longest scene covers making contact and closing the deal with the ruffian. The murder happens off stage, perhaps even soon after the last events of the story. There's a kind of doomed fatality to it that we know, penalty for indulged sexuality. It's even a bit of a cliche, and may have been then too. It's never graphic, but it's not coy either, and in that way strikes me as more candid than typical of its Victorian times about such behaviors. At the same time, all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed in terms of who gets punished: only the guilty, and all of the guilty. As usual in a moral universe, the innocents are spared, if not rewarded. It's recognizably James in its language, but even more in the perverse way it riffs on conventions of the novel of manners, focused on the ends of marriage. But not ends of marriage this way. It's less often the case that adultery and murder plots are injected at all in those stories, let alone made the subject. In that way it's nothing like a story of courtship and much closer to instructive morality. But the artful way it depends on misunderstandings and miscommunications is pure manners. Plus, even though James was only 21 when this was published, there is already an unmistakable urbanity to his voice. Interesting curiosity.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 32 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)