I’m reading Crome Yellow now, by Aldous Huxley. Published 1921, not exactly modernism in the strict sense, perhaps — more like a skeptical eye cast over the conditions that produced modernism, even a satire of muddled would-be modernists.
Huxley can write, definitely, but there’s a lack of focus here that is both deeply attractive — I have an undying love for literary “sports,” things that are neither one thing nor the other, and embrace rather then challenge their limitations — and a bit irritating. He just devoted a chapter to a pitch-perfect parody of a fundamentalist Christian tract, and before that there was a chapter on female sexuality performed entirely in sublimation. And it’s funny, especially as it goes on and the ridiculousness piles up. The plot (so far as there is one) concerns a country-house party, that old standard favorite of farces, cozy mysteries, and Serious Criticisms of the Class Divide, but this is none of those — it’s a novel of conversation, like Norman Douglas or the non-fantastic bits of Chesterton, except we’re not meant to take any of the conversation seriously. It’s great.
But I quoted the above paragraph because I always love documenting contemporary reactions to popular music in history. Huxley’s condescending and frankly racist take on “ragtime” (a year later and he would have said jazz) is still fascinating — as a Briton, he has colonialist, Orientalist associations with it which are unrecognizable to American me.
Finally completed Howards End tonight, because part of being depressed is being unable to make myself do things that give me deep pleasure, like reading or writing. Surface pleasures only — iphone games, certain kinds of pop music, comedy, television, the internet — have touched me. Which isn’t entirely true, either. Other kinds of pop music have also touched me, because that’s my “field,” I guess, even though a handful of solipsistic and badly-structured essays don’t exactly make a career.
The other reason it’s taken me a while is that the book takes a lot out of me. The Great Gatsby I can appreciate for the perfect little jewel setting it is; Brideshead Revisited I can revisit dispassionately, in subdued awe at my early love for it; but Howards End is still deeply part of me, and hits harder every time I come back. E. M. Forster had his faults — which mostly boil down to “he was an upper-class Englishman in the early 20th century” — but when I can’t go for ten pages without encountering a sentence which neatly and accurately pins me, still wriggling, to a note-card and gives my family name and phylum below (this is an entomology metaphor), it can be difficult to want to look so steadily and so whole at my own reflection.
Anyway. This is just a mile-marker. I’m hoping in the interests of speed that the next book I pick up is less perceptive about the human condition.
I generally am not one of those people who goes UFF PROSEGASM while reading — I like to think I have more of a craftsman’s appreciation for words well-used — but “her brain only tingled a little and was silent” really knocked me out.
It’s easy to see why some critics have called Forster a sort of Henry James Lite, because he’s concerned with relations between the sexes, the gravitational power of money, and the interior life, without the super-dense richness of Jamesian prose, but it’s worth remembering that Forster’s comic impulse — his early novels are flat-out funny — is something he doesn’t share with the solemn, weighty man who looms over this era of the novel like Mahler over this era of music.
ironstring asked: you know, i caught a few minutes of the film adaptation of Howard's End. i ended up turning it off in revulsion because I felt they got some key scene (for me) wrong -- something involving Leonard and the Schlegels. cemented my belief that one should always expose themselves to the film adaptation before reading the novel. but maybe I should give it an actual try?
Not necessarily — I wouln’t be surprised if my own high opinion of it is due to the fact that I saw it before becoming familiar with the book (and also Helena Bonham-Carter at her most Helena Bonham-Cartery — phwoar, as I believe the saying is in the UK). I haven’t seen it since, and am rather afraid to.
I don’t know that I have much to say about Howards End.
Even aside from the shittiess of the ipad’s camera (seriously, Apple? my 2004-era phone took better pictures), this is one of the ugliest book-cover designs in my library. (That’s a yellow-green gradient halo around each letter! I know!) Sure, it’s my fault for buying cheap and used, but I seriously wince every time I come out of the crisp, humane prose and look at the binding again. Also an insultingly high number of typos.
Finished the book tonight. Further quotes and thoughts below:
The book is divided into two unequal halves, “Et In Arcadia Ego” and “The Twitch Upon the Thread.” I finished the first last night (or early this morning). I’ve dogeared some passages I want to quote and talk about.
Evelyn Waugh in the opening pages of Brideshead Revisited. Sure, it’s supposed to be the book’s narrator, Charles Ryder, speaking, a foreshadowing of the collapse of his own marriage later in the book (though earlier in time than this prologue), and the woman he marries and later divorces (as much because he’s in love with another woman as because she cheated on him) is one of Waugh’s classic cruel portraits of women who have committed the cardinal sin of being women. The above paragraph is a distillation of Waugh’s treatment of the sexes: men are patient, long-suffering, and reasonably weighing their own blame; women are jealous, deceitful, and (the crowning insult) selfish.
If you’ve ever read even the slightest biographical sketch of Waugh you know he was one of the most selfish writers ever to live, unwilling and unable to ever view other people as full people deserving the same respect and comfort he demanded. A raging Tory and a Catholic convert, he rarely if ever strayed from “a mood of aloofness and cool criticism” from the time he hardened in a hellish boarding school to the time he died, savagely and primly refusing his descendents and heirs the comforts his own dead body enjoyed.
This is probably going to be a pretty rough read; I loved it, when I loved it, because I too was a Catholic convert and leaned Tory, believing in the lost Golden Age (when white men had all the power and no one else had any) and ruing the modern age of mechanization. Tolkien, of course, had instilled this attitude in me as a child, and I had not yet learned better.
But I wanted to post the above because it’s such a perfect, if unconscious, portrait of monstrous male selfishness and privilege. No self-reproach for the disaster is the key phrase: of course all fault lies with the woman (at a certain point it’s not even a metaphor for his relationship with the army anymore, just a screed about the faithlessness of women — Waugh was, famously and doubtless deservedly, a cuckold, and would remain bitter about it till the end of his days), and I recognize the religious fanatic who declares his conscience clear (because, of course, he has examined it thoroughly, a perfect flame of righteousness) as he perpetrates destruction on a woman who has had the monstrous temerity to have her own thoughts, desires, moral codes, and (for fuck’s sake) standards of housekeeping. It’s a paragraph that makes me want to set fire to masculinity, not least because I recognize my own least generous, most selfish and ugliest self in it, if only in flashes. If Waugh was one of my earliest teachers, it’s a wonder I haven’t destroyed more relationships than I have. (And I have.)
Compare this to the opening line of The Great Gatsby, where Nick’s father tells him to remember that other people haven’t had his advantages, so he should reserve judgment. Sure, that’s its own kind of noxious noblesse oblige, but it’s better than Waugh’s collecting all his possible advantage in his arms in order to beat others over the head with it.
Like I said, it’s gonna be rough.
Finished the book earlier today. I kept reading and rereading the last page, the last couple of paragraphs, not because I didn’t understand them (though I’m not entirely sure I do — it’s one of the most frequently-unpacked passages in American literature for a reason), but because I guess I didn’t want it to be over, I didn’t want to stop living in Fitzgerald’s world, I didn’t want to believe that was all there was.
The following is excerpted from my side of some correspondence with isabelthespy earlier today:
