Dickens’ Descent of Desertion

Posted on April 12, 2016 by smellincoffee

“…the great paradox of morality is that the very vilest sort of fault is exactly the most easy kind. We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or ‘anything mean’. But for actual human beings opium and slaughter have only occasional charm; the permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean. The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss, and the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men commit grand sins; it makes its great men (such as David and St. Peter) commit small sins and behave like sneaks. 

Dickens has dealt with this easy descent of desertion, this silent treason, with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecisions of Pip.”  

From p. 28 of Critical Essays on Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, G.K. Chesterton, quoting from GKC’s Charles Dickens.   Another random discovery while poking about in the library’s English literary criticism cases.

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This week: 1066 and all that

Posted on April 11, 2016 by smellincoffee

A third of the way into April, this year’s Read of England is already a roaring success. It helps that I had a head start in March, of course. The main reason I tried to reserve a block of time last year was to take on Dickens and Austen, since if my regular torrent of reading wasn’t interrupted, the’d never compete. This year the project succeeds: several classics have been spoken for, along with a few minor diversions. Having favored literature so heavily at the start, this week I’ll be relaxing with my usual treats, history and historical fiction, before pushing literature heavy again to close. What’s up next? The English Resistance, most likely, though I’ve also purchased a book on Waterloo by a certain familiar author with the initials, B.C.

Our English pilgrimage so far:

English Classics
Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Other Works Set in England:
My Man Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
The Road to Little Dribbling, Bill Bryson

Other Works, by English Authors
Frodo’s Journey, Joseph Pearce
Bilbo’s Journey, Joseph Pearce

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Jane Eyre

Posted on April 11, 2016 by smellincoffee

Jane Eyre
© 1847 Charlotte Bronte
525 pages

  Years ago an online quiz declared to me that of all the characters in English literature, I was most like…Jane Eyre. It may have been a quiz intended for women, but I had an awful lot of spare time on my hands in high school. Regardless, since that I’ve had a faint interest in reading Jane’s novel, and since I’ve instituted April as English Lit month, why not?   Jane Eyre is the story of a young orphan who must find her way in the world, overcoming both temptation and self-righteousness.  Jane is probably the most personable of the classics I’ve read, using as it does the first-person perspective and beginning not with a storied introduction, but with a seemingly mundane episode in Jane’s life that will set her on her own course.  Charlotte Bronte combines a happy talent for description with wisdom that is neither strident nor impotent.

Jane begins as a ward of her uncharitable aunt, a woman who bemoans the fact that she has been made the guardian of her niece. Rather than bringing Jane up as a member of the family, she instead attempts to reduce Jane to an abused servant.  This injustice so distresses Jane that she collapses in nervous sorrow, and on the advice of a doctor, is sent away to a boarding schools for indigent orphans, where she encounters a saintly young girl who  is an exemplar of virtuous patience and long-suffering.   The young girl perishes, as is the way of saintly mentors, and Jane quickly grows to become a teacher at the school herself.  The real story begins when she, craving something new, advertises for and lands a job as a governess. Her new home is a gloomy place with  an absent master and strange goings-on, some of which won’t be explained until very late in the novel, but presently the owner arrives and things grow steadily more agitated.  Though Jane has no money, no familial connections, and no great beauty, she develops feelings for this Mr. Rochester. Unknown to her,  but fairly obvious to the reader from his wide array of pet names,  Rochester also has feelings for Jane….but things aren’t quite that easy. Rochester isn’t the man he appears to be, and Jane must choose which she prefers: love or honor.

“I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am quite insane — quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”

Mad though she may be with love,  since her friend ‘s death she has attempted to live rightly, and it is that habit of seeking the Good, not merely what feels good or can be rationalized, that keeps her beginning a new life with a mistake.  From there she flees into the country, with resources and again fixing for herself alone, winning friends and admiration for her character and kindness. She discovers long-lost relations and encounters a different kind of proposal before returning to where the story began, for a marvelous conclusion.

Readers today might praise Jane for being an independent woman in the Victorian age, but truth be told she is a remarkable character even in today’s age. She is independent, but not self-obsessed. From an early age she is aware of her own dignity, and respects that of the people who  antagonize her; even when she denies them, thwarts them, she is doing it as much for their sake as hers.  Thus we have independence, but not egotism.  Jane’s strength is her character, her compassion. Unlike Pip, another literary orphan, she is not possessed by her wealth;  it leads her to embrace and strengthen her bonds with those “who knew her when”, not push them away in search of social status.  (She did have the advantage of having escaped her youth, I suppose. Pre-Helen, Jane might have made Pip’s same mistakes.)

Jane Eyre was for me another happy surprise. I intended on reading A Classic. I found myself immediately attached to an admirable and lovely young friend in Jane.

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Reads to …er, Reels: War of the Worlds

Posted on April 10, 2016 by smellincoffee
“…coming this way, about twenty yards from my ri—”

Tonight I turned off the lights and put on a recording of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ (confusing, that) The War of the Worlds.  According to a popular urban myth,  the format of this radio-play  so confused and alarmed the listening audience that they began running amok, wandering into the country and firing guns at anything suspicious-like.  While the extent of that panic is greatly exaggerated,  having experienced the play I can appreciate why people might believe the myth.  After an introduction which identifies the novel as its inspiration, the play begins as a period music broadcast which is interrupted periodically by news accounts of strange activity on Mars, then some sort of impact in New Jersey, and then — by golly — the dots are connected.  The interruptions are first routine and annoying (I was rather enjoying “Stardust”, though the version wasn’t close to Glenn Miller’s)  and then increasingly panicked.  The scene in which an on-site reporter arrives at the first impact and witnesses the cylinder begin to open are especially well done, and later we seem to hear a man killed by the Heat Ray on air.   Broadcast interruptions are frequent, as the fictional network officials scramble to keep accurate reporting even as the affair widens. By the time we reach an assumed-dead scientist commenting in a “it’s the world as we know it” fashion, musing over the events of the last several days, the radio-play status of the broadcast is much more obvious. The recording ends with Orson Welles reminding readers that this was a Halloween play, and please do not run amok.  I don’t know how the panic myth started, but I certainly enjoyed listening to the play and experiencing an odd piece of American history.  You can find copies on YouTube, of course.

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Bilbo’s Journey

Posted on April 9, 2016 by smellincoffee

Bilbo’s Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Hobbit
©  2012 Joseph Pearce
147 pages

The Hobbit begins with the sudden arrival of a pack of dwarves at Bilbo Baggin’s house. Though he is very much the quiet homebody, they have arrived expecting him to both play host an then join them on a dangerous quest – which he does, grudgingly, because he has little choice against a band of strangers and the stern wishes of the wizard Gandalf. His resulting adventure is a coming-of-age story in which the hobbit  learns to look outside his hobbit-hole and appreciate the world at large. Bilbo’s Journey expounds on the moral aspects of this travel into maturity, and sees in its conclusion a Bilbo who has learned to look outside himself.   Pearce relies on Tolkien’s myth-saturated scholarship to stress that the Dragon is not merely a large reptile whose lair was disturbed, but a creature of evil who is utterly craven. The Dragon feasts on innocents and hoards gold not because it is hungry and wishes to put something by for its retirement, but because it is wicked, and its presence makes real our own craven consumerism and selfishness. Tellingly,  when near the end the Dragon is loosed on the town and swoops down, shining in the moonlight, its lone piece of unarmored flesh is its black heart, open to one well-shot arrow.  As with Return of the King, the defeat of the monster is not the end of evil;  the wealth-obsessed dragon sickness leads to a war between various factions, and when Bilbo returns home he finds his distant relations greedily pawing at his own possessions. Having grown throughout the adventure, however, Bilbo is not nearly as wrecked by having lost his ‘precious’ possessions as he once was.  As with Frodo’s Journey, Pearce comments on other aspects of the story – the development of the ring, Thorin’s kingship vs Aragon’s  — but the virtue against evil, charity vs selfishness theme is predominant.   There’s a fair bit of redundancy between this and Frodo’s Journey,  but this one has broader appeal.

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My Man Jeeves

Posted on April 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

My Man Jeeves
© 1919 P.G. Wodehouse
132 pages

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Leave it to Jeeves.”

What ho, readers all!   My Man Jeeves renews my acquaintance with young Bertie Wooster, exemplar of the aristocracy in decline.  Bertie has loads of money and no sense in the least, but is saved from the worst of his foibles by the ever-present Jeeves, he of the unrivaled brilliance.  The work gathers a handful of Bertie-and-Jeeves stories,  ranging from the whimsical to the inane.  There are also a couple of stories about Reggie Pepper, a  character who was a prototype for Bertie, and is just about as thick but lacks a Jeeves to see him through.   If he survives, let alone triumphs, it is only through that bit of wisdom that God preserves fools.  The premise is the same in this as in other collections; either Bertie himself, his aunts, or his friends have gotten him into a fix, and Jeeves must contrive to find a way out of it.  Plots thicken, Jeeves stirs, Bertie’s out of the soup and into his recliner to enjoy a whiskey and soda and contemplate the wonder that is his man Jeeves.

In this collection, his friends are typically the culprits.  One notable exception is the arrival at his American apartment of one of his dreaded Aunt Agatha’s friends. She is on a tour of American prisons and wants Bertie to take care of her intensely repressed son, Wilmot. No sooner has mummy dearest run off on business than has Wilmost escaped the apartment to engage as much sordid revelry as he can. This is his one chance to accumulate a storied and sinful past, and he’s intent on making the most of it. It’s up to Bertie to keep him from ruining his health with all-night binge drinking and partying, so naturally the ward winds up in prison. There’s often an element of backfire here;  Jeeves suggests, for instance, that if friend Corky wants his uncle to approve of his girlfriend, that they arrange to impress said uncle with the young lady’s authorship of a book on said uncle’s favorite subject – not expecting the uncle to be so taken with her that he  marries her.  The Reggie stories are all backfire  While Bertie’s scrapes and Jeeves’ ingenuity are fun reading in themselves, as I’ve noted in prior volumes, part of the fun of reading Wodehouse is the writing.  Bertie is an eccentric character and an enthusiastic narrator,  the sort who manages to make sitting in a  chair fun to read about. He’s like laughing gas, nonsensical and with a contagious effect.

“Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy, overpowering sort of dashed female, not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.”


Here, in a sentence, is part of what makes Bertie a ball to read. There’s such energy to his narrative, the way he slings out descriptive fun with a healthy sampling of odd slang, some of it assuredly made up on the spot.  There is no one funnier to read out loud than P.G. Wodehouse, especially if you do it in a Hugh-Laurie-as-Wooster voice.  Even more giggles are to be had from Bertie’s interactions with Jeeves, who reins in his employer’s questionable fashion choices and is often allowed to destroy an offensive article as a reward. While Bertie professes to resent being dominated sartorially by his valet,  Jeeves is such a master at getting Bertie and company out of trouble, getting rid of pink ties and colorful sports jackets are a small price to pay.  If your interest is piqued, My Man Jeeves is available online for free via Gutenberg,  or through Amazon. 

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Frodo’s Journey

Posted on April 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

Frodo’s Journey: The Hidden Meaning of the Lord of the Rings
© 2015 Joseph Pearce
158 pages

Noting that Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy is rich with symbolism is rather akin to observing that the Pacific Ocean is big. The description is accurate, but weightless. Frodo’s Journey examines much of its symbolism in detail, chiefly elaborating on Tolkien’s observation that it was, “of course, a deeply religious work”. The religion is present not in the trappings of a Church, as with Asimov’s Foundation series, but in the epic’s core story of grace against evil.   Pearce informs his argument by studying the details of the story in the context of Tolkien’s mythic background, drawing from the Simarillion. Although his focus is on Tolkien’s Christian symbolism, Pearce also touches lightly on Tolkien’s love for the language and lore of pre-Norman England.

In the Simarillion, Pearce writes, Tolkien establishes a celestial atmosphere not unlike the Christian one. There is one central deity, the Iluvatar, who creates the Cosmos by conducting music. One heavenly musician refuses to play in harmony, and is struck down to Middle-Earth, but is told that no matter how much discord he attempts to introduce,  the grand master will always restore harmony..  Central to the story of the Lord of the Rings is, of course, the Ring, which is far different from the ring of The Hobbit. There it was a mysterious but powerfully helpful object;  in the Ring trilogy, it dominates the minds and hearts of those who wear it, and exposes them to attack by dark forces.   The ring, writes Pearce, is Sin – not only is it burdensome, but taking it on distances the wearer from the good world which was divinely created, and makes them more visible to the Dark Lord – Sauron,  Morgoth’s chief servant.  The coup de Grace:   according to Return of the King,  the ring was destroyed on March 25, the same day that Catholic tradition maintains was the date of the historic crucifixion.  The whole story has the stamp of Providence on it, writes Pearce, for Gandalf muses that Bilbo was meant find the Ring, so that it might be destroyed.  Although Pearce’s brief work shines a light on many of Tolkien’s other little allusions – the Charlemagne-like crowning of Aragon, the linguistic fun Tolkien has with the “far-seeing” stones that dispirit Sauron’s enemies and have the same etymological structure in Elvish as Television and Fernsehen do in English and German,   the Christian connection is the most broadly developed.

This meaning is not nearly as overt as C.S. Lewis’ own Narnian chronicles,  in which the Christ-figure Aslan announced to the children that he was known by another name in their world, but it definitely registers.  Being as Tolkien was a practicing Catholic, some degree of the inspiration could have been accidental, like the Mary-like veneration of Galadriel, but the use of dates has the stamp of deliberation.  For the Fellowship to have started out on December 25 (by Tolkien’s appendix) and triumphed on the same date of the first Good Friday makes clear that Tolkien was paying homage at the very least.   While this is my first foray in reading books about the Ring trilogy, it won’t be the last, and I’m eager to see if other authors share or differ from Pearce. I’m sure the trilogy has tremendous depths to plumb!

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The Invisible Man

Posted on April 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Invisible Man
© 1897 H,G, Wells
149 pages

The Invisible Man opens with the arrival of a Mysterious Stranger to a country inn. He is covered from head to toe, and remains so even after he takes a room. The townsfolk don’t know what to make of the irritable visitor who insists on wearing gloves, a hat, and goggles indoors, and peevishness only intensifies their curiosity. That, and the fact that his luggage consisted of a small library and an enormous set of chemical apparatus.  The more time he spends with them the more suspicious he seems, and those who keep trying to get a feel for the man notice…curiosities. For instance, once his sleeve seemed to be empty, yet it moved in a way that would be impossible for an amputee’s.  Driven to frustration by their constant prodding, the visitor reveals that he is, in fact, an Invisible Man. From there, the plot is one of spectacle, siege, and violence as the Man lashes out in desperation. The other villages think the people in the first hamlet are lunatics, but soon the “madness” spreads as he moves. His every encounter results in contemptuous treatment of the terrified people he meets, followed  by attempts to subdue people with inexplicable force. It turns out that the English winter is not the best time to embark on an experiment in invisibility.  Invisible he may be, but he still still needs clothing and food — and both expose him.   Eventually the Man is cornered when he attempts to enlist the help of a university colleague. That man, Kemp, listens to his story but can’t help but notice that the Invisible Man seems to be the one instigating all of the trouble. He is especially bothered by the Man’s account of nicking a man’s goods….from his very house. This is England, you transparent lout, don’t you know a man’s home is his castle?  When the Man reveals that he wants to inflict a profitable Reign of Terror on England, that’s the last straw.  A trap is sprung, the man is caught, and when he dies the electro-chemical process he exposed himself to wears off to reveal him.  That’s that.

The Invisible Man is curious, as compared to the other Wells novels I’ve read. It drops the reader right into the middle of the character’s story, and doesn’t consist of any thoughtful narration. In recapping the story, I’ve attempted to be as sympathetic as I can, attempting to frame him as a man driven to desperation by the miserable condition he inadvertently cast himself into.  It’s a bit of a stretch, though, because the Invisible Man is a grump from page one, as though the invisibility simply escalated his own disdain and short temper. His intelligence is all technical; he doesn’t have the least bit of tact or strategy in his head.  A Reign of Terror in England? Sounds awfully French.   I don’t know if Wells was aware of the old Greek story about a ring that makes the wearer invisible and quickly immoral, but the lesson certainly applies to our fellow here.

This is a fast story, with the feel of horror.. The Invisible Man is more a monster to be feared than a man to be awed by or pitied.

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Lord of the Flies

Posted on April 4, 2016 by smellincoffee

Lord of the Flies
© 1954 William Golding
156 pages

A group of boys marooned on a tiny Pacific Island must work together, battling the elements and one another. If they don’t adapt, they’ll be voted off the island — or thrown off.   It’s not Survivor, it’s Lord of the Flies.  You know the story, of course.  A plane crash dumps a score or so of boys onto an island,  an attempt at restoring civilized order is made, but it falls apart in tribalism and bloodshed.  In taking a group of creme de la creme school children, some of them literally choir boys, and placing them in an idyllic setting that leads only to chaos and death, Golding offers not an adventure story but a reflection human nature.

The island not only abounds in food, but is predator-free. Coconuts, fresh water, and timber for making shelter are everywhere for the taking. Despite this, the boys become increasingly psychologically stressed, a plight made worse by the ambitions of one to become the next Chief.  This idyllic bloodshed directly repudiates the myth of the noble savage, though, maintaining that there is something dark and irrational within man that will devour society from within if it is not tamed.  Yet there is something irrational outside in this story, something that makes it a near-fantasy, because the boys are haunted by some Beast that attacks from the sea, from the trees, from the air. It’s not simply a parachuted corpse they dread; at one point the Beast directly taunts one of the boys, and another time they enact murder under some sort of a mass delusion that one of their number is the Beast.  What keeps the boys together as long as they were is the proud memory of being English, and therefore devoted to good order and setting things aright.   The intelligent thing to do, maintains their leader Ralph, is to maintain a signal fire — but the fun thing to do, the thing that enchants the senses and drives the boys to madness, is putting on war-paint and hunting pigs. The madness and chant of the hunt will so consume the boys that murder joins them on the island, though they are saved from destruction by Her Majesty’s Ship, the Deus ex Machina.

This is a grim little story, of course, but a welcome rebuttal to those who today believe everything would be peachy-keen if it weren’t for this politician or that program or lack thereof.  The ‘beast’ isn’t so mild that it can be drawn out of the sea with a hook.

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Reads to Reels: Great Expectations

Posted on April 3, 2016 by smellincoffee
“Hallo! Here’s a church. Let’s go in. Hallo! Here’s some gloves. Let’s put `em on! Hallo! Here’s Ms. Skiffins. Let’s have a wedding!” 
I’ve never done a reels this close on the heels to a read before, but there’s no waiting with a movie that stars Ioan Gruffud and Ian McDiarmid! As soon as I discovered my library had this, I wanted to watch it, and waited only until I had finished the final pages of the book to begin.  This version is a 1999 television miniseries, but I thought it was marvelous.  Having just finished the book yesterday, of course, I caught a lot of the alterations made to the book.  A lot of frankly tedious scenes are dispatched with single lines here while characters are moving to action to action, and the attempted escape exit of Pip’s Mysterious Patron is simplified nicely.  The Masterpiece host informed me at the end of the movie that there were two endings to Dickens’ novel; the original had Estella married off to someone else, and a second ending left the matter of Pip and her relationship more ambiguous. The movie plays to the idea of the second ending, though in a far more spiriting way: the final shot is of Pip and Estella playing cards in a now-restored Satis house, not as lovers but together still. 
 Casting was on the whole superbly done, with the exception being Miss Haversham.  Yes, that’s her on the cover, looking considerably less deathly than she’s described in the book. She looks more appropriately corpselike in the actual film, but was too lively for the part.  Ian McDiarmid’s casting as the lawyer Jaggers makes him absolutely sinister in retrospect, since the modern viewer is half expecting him to give a menacing smile and send Pip off on some murderous mission involving a sabre.  I know Gruffud from the Horatio Hornblower movies, and here he looks and sounds very much like good ol’ Horry. He starts the film off affecting a brogue, but once he begins his education as a gentleman he reverts to RP. (Hearing Gruffud speak with anything less is jarring, especially when he did an American accent in Fantastic Four.)   As a curiosity, I’m tolerably sure the fellow who plays Wemmick (Jaggers’ clerk and a friend to Pip) played the traitor Wolfe in the A&E movies, shot around the same time. He was a sterling addition here.  

Good pacing, excellent actors, nice music — the only fly in the soup here is that midway through, Masterpeice SPOILS THE MOVIE’S ENDING! It’s a television miniseries, consisting of two episodes, and midway through they stick in the preview trailer for the second half. The trailer actually gives away the patron’s identity long before he appears in the movie properly.  I am astonished that PBS created a trailer that completely wrecks the twist,  and doubly so that they stuck it into the middle of the film. If you watch it with someone who’s never seen the film, you’ll need to fast forward through that bit.  Otherwise, it’s a winner.

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