Modern Library Revue: #22 Appointment in Samarra

Modern Library Revue is Lydia Kiesling’s irreverent, ongoing treatment of the Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the twentieth century. Lydia is a graduate of Hamilton College. She is an ardent book-lover and has spent the last two years working in the antiquarian book trade. The Modern Library project was recently born at her blog, Widmerpool’s Modern Library Revue.Of Human Bondage is a healing salve for life’s pernicious rash. It is a special shoe for the clubfoot of my mind. I have not always felt this way. First I hated the protagonist Philip Carey with what I now realize was the hatred you can only feel for people you think are nerds, who you then realize are just like you. I’m not some kind of sad weirdo or anything, but haven’t we all been teased by our schoolmates? Haven’t we all thought we were good at something only to learn that we sucked at it? Haven’t we all been sick with love for some unsuitable, puppy-kicking wretch? Haven’t we, I ask you? After this realization I got to appreciating Philip Carey’s modest charms, and I go back to them whenever I have a long train ride or an empty Sunday. So many epochs in orphaned, differently-abled Philip’s life to revisit! Let’s see some highlights:Philip goes to live with his vile uncle, the Vicar of Blackstable. He only gets to eat the top of the hard boiled egg, and mustn’t play on Sundays.Philip goes to school, where the children mock his clubfoot, and the object of his bromantic affection spurns him.Philip goes to Heidelberg and drinks beer with a Byronic nitwit.Philip goes home and gets erotic with a cougar-type person, but it’s a disappointment. Women are a drag. Welcome to the world, chum!Now it’s time to join the middle-class grind, wherein you pay someone to work in their office. Boring!Philip’s off to Paris to learn painting! He wears soft pants and talks to drunkards!Philip is bad at painting. Chuck!Medical school, repeatedly.Philip falls in love with a trashy bit of stuff called Mildred. She’s just not that into him. She’ll do it with literally anyone except him. Misery!Philip spends his tiny inheritance on Mildred and the stock market. He sleeps on a bench.Philip goes hop-picking, an allegedly fun vacation for the impecunious. There he has relations with a veritable infant. She guesses she’ll marry him. Philip is happy! The sun is shining!It’s a huge novel filled with embarrassing truths about the various stages of emotional development, about the people one meets and the ways one tries to kick free from society’s traces. You can imagine a sardonic arch to the author’s eyebrow as he wrote about young Philip’s vagaries. I read Of Human Bondage before I read anything else by Maugham, so when I read The Razor’s Edge shortly after I said to myself, “What is this malarkey?” Of Human Bondage is much earlier, and belongs to the tradition of Thomas Hardy and Samuel Butler and feeling bad and being Victorian, except that Maugham had a superior sense of humor.The Razor’s Edge is later Maugham (1944), written when he was very famous and accustomed to fraternizing with society people and spiritual types. It has the taint of sophistication and of “California Chris” Isherwood. I die for Maugham always, especially the short stories, but his later work can seem rushed and less than fully-realized compared to Of Human Bondage. The Painted Veil, for example, reads as though he thought it up during a short lie-down and wrote it before dinner. It’s not a bad novel and I am certainly not calling William Somerset Maugham a hack; nonetheless, beside the massive achievement of OHB, some of the other things look a touch moth-eaten. Maugham himself wrote that he was “in the very first row of the second-raters,” which evidently made him sad. I think that assertion is way harsh. I just think that Of Human Bondage was his Ultimate Literary Jam.

Modern Library Revue is Lydia Kiesling’s irreverent, ongoing treatment of the Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the twentieth century. Lydia is a graduate of Hamilton College. She is an ardent book-lover and has spent the last two years working in the antiquarian book trade. The Modern Library project was recently born at her blog, Widmerpool’s Modern Library Revue.As of last week I had never heard of Darkness at Noon, and I had no idea what it was about. When I found a paperback copy I was tickled by the cover art, which is exceedingly sinister and features a hammer and sickle and a landmine-looking thing with a person’s face on it. Knowing, as I did, that the Modern Library list is composed of books in the English language, I expected some sort of hysterical Red Scare novel out of the U.S. of A., and I wondered how this Koestler person had sleazed his reactionary way to a top ten slot. Then, however, the title page informed me that the work had been translated into English, a statement confirmed by many internet sources. Maybe I’m the reactionary here, but this seems like a scandal. Did the judges just not read their instructions? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules? That said, I’m actually very pleased that I read this; I don’t hold against Arthur Koestler the fact that some people entrusted with important cultural tasks choose not to fulfill them properly.I think we can all agree that the Communist Party turned out to be one of the most unfun parties ever. And I’m not talking about the “communism” that confused American people to this very day think is the bad thing that will happen if people are allowed to go to the doctor for free. I’m talking about Joseph “Gardener of Human Happiness” Stalin being in charge and turning the hose on everyone. I haven’t read any samizdats or anything, and to be frank I get pretty confused about Trostky and Lenin and whatnot, but I can understand these minor distinctions. Darkness at Noon is about the completely unfun kind. It begins as Rubashov, a former high Party official, is thrown in jail (again) for “political divergencies.” He is imprisoned for the duration of the short novel, and the narrative consists of his memories of past commie hijinx, and the thought processes which lead to his capitulation, confessions, show trial and [spoiler] liquidation. Throughout all this he uses an insane system of visualizing numbers on a grid and tapping them on the wall in order to chat with the touching moralistic bourgeois monarchist in the next cell. This neighbor mostly wants to hear about naked ladies and is kind of a bore but I liked him all the same. If I was in the cell and was capable of figuring out the tapping system, I would have told him about my favorite Mad Men episodes.In order for me to understand why this book was a big deal, I had to contextualize. If you have read 1984 it is hard to read another book about a totalitarian system without reflecting on certain things, mainly “I read this book already” and “war is peace, bitches.” 1984 is part of our collective consciousness; even people who don’t like to read have usually read that novel. Now, having read Koestler’s, it is hard to overstate the debt 1984 owes Darkness at Noon (which preceded it by nine years). I mean, I don’t think I’m overstating. Consider the following: 1. Orwell wrote a long essay about Koestler. 2. Orwell tried to marry Koestler’s sister. Obviously Orwell was into him.The characters in Darkness at Noon talk a lot about following things through to their logical conclusions. Rubashov in prison has a series of extraordinarily tedious conversations (to be in, not to read) with his old pal Ivanov who is in charge of his case, and then with a meathead named Gletkin who replaces Ivanov and shines a bright light on Rubashov after Ivanov gets got. Basically, they tell Rubashov, the logical conclusion of heterodoxy is an attempt on the life of Number 1 (that’s Stalin), so Rubashov must confess to this crime, which he didn’t commit, because he as good as committed it. Hello, Thoughtcrime! Rubashov looks at library shelves, which are constantly being purged, and imagines a world wherein newspapers are rewritten. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth! While Rubashov was important in the Party and 1984‘s Winston Smith was a nobody, they are both people who witnessed the birth of the current system, and they can recognize what the Party has wrought. They both recall charming little things about the beginning of the upheaval. Winston thinks about his mom, and how he took her chocolate; Rubashov thinks about his dad’s cute guinea pigs, and how he ate them. Both Rubashov and Winston also see the new generation rise up, a generation of people in whom the old feelings have been stamped out, who can’t remember a time when reactionary activities like hugging and kissing and loving your parents were popular. They both get it in the back of the head.Rubashov is a great character. He is not an unlikable guy, and he demonstrates, as Orwell sez, that people are “rotted by the Revolution they serve.” He has all of these very clear thoughts that make a lot of sense and that basically point to Number 1 being the worst, but somehow he still concludes, “I will confess at my show trial,” which makes no sense at all. Orwell says I can’t understand this mindset because I am not a European person. Anyway, sorry to talk about Orwell so much, but I am in love with him, and I do think that 1984 used Darkness at Noon as a model, and then everyone forgot about it because they were so into 1984 (although not, obviously, the Modern Library judges). 1984 does have the distinct advantage of being written in the future, which makes every story more fun and sexy, while Darkness at Noon is confined to awful things that actually took place, which nobody likes to hear about. In sum, Darkness at Noon rules, Stalin sux, freedom is slavery, but universal health care would still be awesome.

Modern Library Revue is Lydia Kiesling’s irreverent, ongoing treatment of the Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the twentieth century. Lydia is a graduate of Hamilton College. She is an ardent book-lover and has spent the last two years working in the antiquarian book trade. The Modern Library project was recently born at her blog, Widmerpool’s Modern Library Revue.On occasion, my mom and other loved ones have gently suggested that I am a cranky sun of a gun. Sinclair Lewis is a panacea to people like me; I would have loved to hang out with him, drink to excess, and complain vociferously. This might help explain my belief that Lewis is one of our finest American novelists. He was not a particularly stylish or literary writer. A few of his novels were boring or bad. But he gave us a savage portrait of American attitudes in the early twentieth century, and he was, perhaps unintentionally, the most prescient of our authors.In Main Street, Lewis describes the American citizenry as a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race of the world. The novel is about a woman named Carol, who starts out young and breathless and fey – an Anne Shirley with Modern Ideas. Carol goes to college, and then she gets a job. Like most of us, she discovers that working for a living is a drag. She meets a doctor, and they canoodle chastely. They get married, have relations in a tent, and go to live in Gopher Prairie, an up-and-coming Midwestern town. There it is necessary for Carol to comes face to face with American Values. She goes to parties with the smart set, who recite racist stories and complain about labor agitators. They judge her for lacking a foul something called “pep.” She fraternizes a little bit with immigrants, overpays the maid, admires Art, and thinks she yearns for city life. Carol is a Liberal Elitist. She tries to Reform the town, but not very hard. It doesn’t work, so she learns to play bridge. Everyone is watching her. She has a baby, and then she has enough. She goes to work in Washington, alone like a hussy. It’s a little better. Her husband comes to visit and respectfully woos her. Carol goes back to Gopher Prairie. She has another baby. Nothing changes. Life goes on.If you are like me, a hating liberal so-and-so, to read Main Street is to experience the pyrrhic victory of feeling that you are right about everything. Most of Lewis’s novels are demoralizing like that, especially right before or after a U.S. election, when everyone feels distinctly uncharitable toward fifty percent of his neighbors and we have heard those eternal sore spots, taxes, immigration, and morals, argued into the ground in fatuous platitudes. Lewis was not a subtle writer, but I will make bold to say that we are not, in many ways, a subtle people. The misinformed xenophobia and racism of Gopher Prairie are alive and well in America today. We still exhibit a distasteful reverence for “pep” in our politicians; we embrace a down-home rhetoric that is not so very different from the skin-crawling turn-of-the-century boosterism. We still feel the meddling hand of religion in our politics. We still (well, until recently), erect hideous buildings across our beautiful country with unbridled enthusiasm. Like the upstanding folks in Lewis’s novels, we talk about Family Values and goose receptionists in the back room. We are Gopher Prairie, except with cell phones and The Real Housewives of Orange County.If you think these ideas are tired, remember that Lewis wrote almost one hundred years ago, anticipating with strange accuracy the content of HuffPo or The Nation, as well as the often snobbish aversion of the Left for the Right. Sometimes it becomes necessary to shake yourself out of your high-minded ineffectual outrage and remember that some happy changes have in fact taken place since Lewis satirized those “regular Guys, the fellow with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the world’s work done.” Big things like Civil Rights and the Pill, and smaller but still thrilling innovations like trousers for ladies.Main Street is, I think, the slightest bit longer than it needs be. I suppose it was Lewis’ intention to really paint that picture of how boring and tedious the life in Gopher Prairie was for Carol or someone like her, but it sometimes feels like rather too many iterations of one conversation. I preferred Babbit, which is a similar story but shorter and told from a man’s perspective, and Elmer Gantry, which is about an evangelical preacher and filled me with a really bracing rage. In fact, I have read and enjoyed almost all of his novels, with the exception of something comically terrible called The God-Seeker. I have seen a couple of articles which describe Sinclair Lewis as a forgotten figure of American letters, and I think that is sad. He was an important chronicler of this country’s people and ideas – a prosy Fitzgerald of the middle class.