Kim (1901)

I had a hard time with this Rudyard Kipling novel, considered by many to be his best work. The fact is I came to it already with problems about Kipling. He’s a colonialist by reputation and pretty much in fact. I’ve read a few of his ghost stories, which mostly strike me as stiff and ineffective. And his penchant for inserting poetry, his own and that of others, does not impress me. I’ve seen collections by him that pair stories with poems—an interesting idea in the abstract, perhaps, but generally it does not work for me. I was hoping at least for an engaging adventure story in Kim but alas not even that was working for me. I needed more context, which I might have sought ahead of time from Wikipedia or something. I recommend that for anyone approaching this novel. You can thank me later. It might have helped, for example, knowing what “the Great Game” means, a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. Another problem is the impression I got that Kipling did not understand the region well—roughly India, Pakistan (not yet a state in 1901), and Afghanistan. Nor did he (or very many Westerners, to be fair) seem to understand at all the array of religions and sects in the region, which included broad branches of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. It reminded me of Paul Bowles’s ignorance of Arabs in The Sheltering Sky, which at least is a much better novel. I admit my biases against Kipling, author of the poem “The White Man’s Burden.” But I was still open to the adventure story possibilities. But apparently not open enough because it turned out to be pretty much a forced-march hate read. Fortunately for me it’s a short novel. Our main guy, Kim, is an orphan loose in this part of the world. His impoverished Irish parents are dead. I read him as a mixed offspring, Irish soldier father and native mother, but no, per Wikipedia. He’s all white. He hooks up with a holy man—Buddhist, I think—in search of a holy river. Various adventures ensue. My bad attitude may have partially blinded me to the novel’s better qualities, but I never felt involved with the story or cared about anything going on. As I say, it probably would have helped if I had brushed up ahead of time on this “Great Game,” but I will also say it would have helped if Kipling knew more about what he was writing about in the region—the cultures, the religions, the conflicts. It’s surprising to me that this is considered a classic, let alone one appropriate for kids. I don’t think so!

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

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901)

I appreciate Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist rant, which reminds me of nothing so much as the most passionate bloggers (on either side, I guess) during the Bush/Cheney era. That’s not exactly a compliment because it’s also acknowledgment of spittle-flecked incoherence and, sadly, more than anything, of powerlessness. Twain may have been able to kick up some fuss about the Boer War, Spanish-American War, etc. But it didn’t change what happened, such as the betrayals of Filipinos. Putting the best light on this piece (and on bloggers from the 2000s too) it may have had some effect on policy going forward. Certainly being right is not worth nothing. But in another era with great depredations occurring and too little to be done about it, Twain’s complaints make me sad more than anything. Terrible things had been going on already for a long time in 1901, and the US was hardly innocent of some of the worst even then. The problem is that he’s so angry he shifts often into sarcasm and invective that does not much help his case. I like this piece as an early example of the blogging style but, as with so much op-ed on outrage, the first draft should be a venting exercise and then set aside or at least carefully cherry-picked. But sometimes you’re just too mad to do even that. I write this as someone prone to such screeds myself—and publishing them too, on my blog and elsewhere if I could. What’s to be done? People are terrible. They are good too but way too often terrible. The Boxer Rebellion in China is also an event of importance in this rant. He roams about among the three—Boxer Rebellion, Boer War, Spanish-American War—and there is plenty to be outraged about, as the modern American foreign policy was beginning to take shape, among other things. There’s always plenty to be outraged about, isn’t there? I like the way this ties Twain to people like Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi (in his better days) as ranters of renown. But Thompson and certainly Taibbi—and a lot of those bloggers—aren’t always looking so good these days. Ineffectual, at best, or it’s tempting to look at it that way. For what it’s worth Twain was older than I am now when he wrote this. I appreciate it but have you seen the one I did about Trump and “The Snake”? Some really choice outrage there. And nothing changed. Or very little. I’ll be over here crying now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over (Library of America).
Read essay online.

Up From Slavery (1901)

Booker T. Washington is an interesting American historical figure all the way around and his memoir is a good place to get the basic points. For the full context, as a conservative business leader in the South, you have to dig a little more, and it's complicated. Washington's personal ethos appeared to genuinely hew close to bedrock conservative American puritanism, certainly in terms of traits like work ethic and thrift. What he accomplished in his lifetime with Tuskegee University remains plain amazing. For crying out loud, he built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings while they farmed the rest of the land. There is something at once inspiring and exhausting about this story. Why did it have to be that hard? Washington is an obvious source for the so-called Jackie Robinson rules as we understand and still live by them now—as an African American you always have to be better and you can never get mad or even complain. Washington was born into slavery and raised in a world where he would never get a break. He had to be grateful for even the smallest concession—a loan, say, which could be easily obtained by most white men—and he had to be silent on racism. He's still mostly silent about it here. He is quick to criticize members of "my race" and slow to condemn whites. So among other things Up From Slavery is a look into the strange ways of the South in the transition period from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. Washington is amazed, on his first visit to the North, that he can stay in a hotel where whites stay. It's poignantly sad in those terms. The facts of the shabby treatment of former slaves are mostly left out, and it seems like a strange absence now. Yet who can fail to be impressed with what Washington did? He built a kiln to make the bricks to raise the buildings for a university campus while he farmed the rest of the land for food. Like the best memoirs his book is a pleasure to read, with rambling anecdotes and lots of insight, some of which seems to me now harsher than necessary. But then he accomplished all that he did. Still, Up From Slavery has strange gaps, not just on racism. I got the feeling we're not getting the whole story on everything with his three marriages, for example. But it's great on Tuskegee, and an affecting landmark of where race relations were in America, 40 years on from Fort Sumter.

In case it's not at the library.

The Sacred Fount (1901)

Henry James apparently disavowed this short but interminable novel, declining to include it in a comprehensive 1908 collection of his work. Whatever else it is, The Sacred Fount is difficult and annoying, that's for sure. Even the typically anodyne Wikipedia has a note of impatience in its summary: "[A]fter a while, the narrator's theories begin to drive everybody, including the reader, a little nuts." Yes, and what's more, as usual, finding the antecedents to the pronouns is the hard part, with generous portions of "that to which he had earlier referred" and the like. The consensus appears to be that this nuanced narrator is overly interested in various sexual affairs going on behind the scenes at a weekend gathering in the country, and that might indeed be what this novel is about. I'm struck, however, that the basic clue appears to be who has aged among the weekend attendees, and who, improbably, has grown more youthful. Some of these people are 40 and look 25, that is, but their descriptions are rendered in such excruciating detail that I'm halfway willing to believe they actually are younger, and this is some kind of science fiction twist (after all, we've seen that James likes detective and horror stylings). "The sacred fount" is not sex, as most take it, but literally the thing Ponce de Leon was looking for. These richies have a line on it. Although that doesn't explain some of the unnatural aging of some of the other characters, so fuck that. The novel is probably short enough it could be mistaken for a Dick Francis in mass market paperback, but don't let that fool you. You're going to want to hurl this one across the room frequently, and you can take that as a recommendation underlining James's own instinct to avoid it—I read it so you don't have to—or perhaps you can take it as a personal challenge. After all, it's so short. It does have a kind of spooky Twilight Zone air somehow, as if the narrator is the only one truly alive there and the others come to life only when he engages them in conversation. Otherwise they are like murmuring extras in party and dinner scenes in movies like Last Year at Marienbad. If you're going to read The Sacred Fount, see if you don't agree with me that there really is some kind of potion or elixir these wealthy privileged characters are sharing with (and/or denying to) one another. They are visibly becoming younger even over the course of the weekend. In another week they might be teenagers. What the point of that could possibly be, I admit, is not a question I'm ready to answer yet. One theory that occurred to me is that James read Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and it made him mad with jealousy. Following this came arguably his greatest period of work.

"interlocutor" count = 14 / 172 pages (includes "interlocutress")

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

Buddenbrooks (1901)

I'm familiar only with the classic H.T. Lowe-Porter translation of Thomas Mann's first novel; even though I found the John E. Woods translation of The Magic Mountain a bit better than Lowe-Porter's, with Buddenbrooks it's more just a matter of sticking with the copy I have, a problem of being a cheapskate. I'm no Thomas Mann scholar—just a fan, at least of the two novels by him that I know and like best. Buddenbrooks is another outsize work, but rather more straightforward than The Magic Mountain, backfilling with 19th-century German history where Mountain tends to use philosophy and other sports of the intellect. In a way it's kind of a straight version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, taking a middle-class family of German merchants and tracing their decline across a few generations (the Woods translation, indeed, bears the subtitle The Decline of a Family). As always, Mann is preoccupied with the place of the creative soul in the modernizing world, a world often defined and controlled by monied interests. The most likeable people also tend to be the most naïve, and many times the least likeable are the most successful. So it goes, as someone said elsewhere of other circumstances. But there's much more to Mann and Buddenbrooks than just artist and businessman. Mann's language is so elegant and charming, even in translation, that it really does make me wonder what it must be like in the original German. His characters are richly detailed, uniquely human, and almost always recognizable one way or another. They are people we know. And Mann's ability to construct a narrative that feels as big as an ocean, one to simply dive into knowing the way is sure, is a pleasure and probably accounts for why I consider him still my favorite of the great European novelists. Buddenbrooks is his first, and even if it never seems to me to read like a first novel in virtually any way, I think I'd still point to it as the best place to start if you're ever thinking of making a project of reading him. Oddly enough, perhaps, I have struggled with a good deal of the rest of his oeuvre: I like his stories and shorter pieces, such as "Death in Venice," but rarely feel moved to return to them. On numerous occasions I have struggled with and never finished the Felix Krull novel. And while lately I have been making my way (slowly) through the Joseph and His Brothers quartet, and find them pleasurable enough, they are a bit more deeply Biblical than suits my taste. But Buddenbrooks I love.

In case it's not at the library.