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Month: December 2006

The Moonflower Vine, by Jetta Carleton

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt

Cover of the first U.S. edition of 'The Moonflower Vine'

To his daughters as they grew up, Matthew Soames was God and the weather. He was omnipotent and he was everywhere — at home, at school, at church. There was no place they could go where the dominating spirit was not that of their father. And, like rain or shine, his moods conditioned all they did.

With other people around, he was pleasant as could be, full of laughter and witticisms and conversation marvelous to hear. Ladies often said to them, “Your father is just the nicest man!” The girls could hardly help observing that he turned his sunny side to his public and clouded up at home. There, he was often preoccupied and short-spoken, indifferent to his children except to command or reprove. “Daughter,” he called each of them indiscriminantly; it was a little more authoritative than the given name, which might not occur to him at the moment anyway.

“Papa’s nicer to other people than he is to us,” Leonie once said.

“Yes, sometimes he is, honey,” said her mother. “But he’s got to be. Your Papa’s an important man in the community. That’s the way he’s got to act.”

His importance might have been a comfort to the girls if it hadn’t been such a nuisance. There were so many things they were not allowed to do “because it wouldn’t look well.” And they couldn’t get out of his sight and do them, because he was everywhere. For the most part, they resigned themselves to the situation and did as Papa said. The purpose in life, he said, was to work. “Laborare est orare,” he said; and work meant to study your lessons and help Mama.

They had many good times in between. Relatives came often to visit. On the farm they could play in the woods and go fishing. When they moved to town they had girl chums and Sunday School parties. They had no toys to speak of (one doll, handed down from one to the other); but living as they did a good deal out-of-doors, they didn’t need such props. They played with what they had or found or made up and enjoyed themselves hugely. But very early they understood that playing was somewhat suspect, allowed only through indulgence, a trivial pastime soon outgrown, and only about twice removed from sin. Pleasure was only once removed. The girls grew up before they realized that pleasure was not an ugly word. In their father’s vocabulary it meant joyrides, dancing, card games, cigarettes, and other things to dreadful to define.

Editor’s Comments

I read The Moonflower Vine after coming across Jane Smiley’s discussion of it in her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. It wasn’t so much what Smiley had to say about it as that it was essentially the only genuinely little-known novel she saw fit to include in her list of 100 great novels. In there amongst Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick, and Ulysses was this book with a completely unfamiliar title and by completely unfamiliar author. To see a neglected book rate such high-profile coverage alone made it worth a try.

Cover of the first U.S. paperback edition of 'The Moonflower Vine'I can’t say that The Moonflower Vine would have stood much chance of a second look from me had it not come with such a sterling recommendation. Its marketing, back when it was picked as a Literary Guild selection and condensed in a Readers Digest collection, was definitely aimed at a feminine audience, and its first paperback edition featured a small picture of a big, strong, dark-haired man embracing a delicate young woman — the sort of image that’s become the cliche of gauzy romantic novels.

As Bo Diddley sang, though, you can’t judge a book by looking at the cover. There’s barely a lick of romance in the whole of The Moonflower Vine. Carleton grew up on a Missouri farm perhaps not too unlike that described in her novel, and no farm family that survives a hard winter or a bad harvest has much romanticism left in its veins. The pragmatism of farm life is multiplied by the stern morality of the Midwest Methodist, with its clear-cut sense of right and wrong (and none of the Southern Baptist’s taste for a little melodramatic back-sliding).

The Moonflower Vine is a multi-dimensional tale of the lives of Matthew Soames, his wife, Callie, and their four daughters — Jessica, Leonie, Mathy, and Mary Jo. Mary Jo is probably closest in profile to Carleton herself. The youngest of the girls, she is roughly the same age as Carleton and, like her, left rural Missouri for a career in the world of television in New York. She narrates the introductory section of the book, which takes place one summer Sunday when the daughters (with the exception of Mathy, who dies before the age of twenty) have come back to the family farm for a visit. This section is gentle, lightly comic, and bucolic in its description of rustic pleasures such as skinny-dipping in the creek.

The rest of the book, however, is related in the third person. Starting with Jessica, it deals in turn with each of the other members of the family — Matthew, who struggles throughout his career as a teacher and principal of a small town school with a lust for bright young women in his classes; Mathy, the family rebel, who elopes with a barnstorming pilot; Leonie, the dutiful daughter, who never quite manages to find her right place in the world; and finally, Callie, the mother, whose brief moment of adultery mirrors her husband’s own private sin.

Sin is a constant presence in the book. Everyone in the family, with the possible exception of Mary Jo, commits one or more sins, in their own eyes or those of the community, that prevents any form of love expressed in the book from being completely unequivocal. Matthew never fully forgives Mathy for quitting school and running off with one of the local renegades, nor Jessica for marrying a drifter Matthew takes on briefly as a hired hand. The Soames are a God-fearing family, stalwart members of the Methodist Church, very much Old Testament Christians.

At the same time, though, progress makes its own changes in their lives. While Matthew and Callie refuse to install indoor plumbing, planes, trains, and automobiles all bring the outside world a little closer to their doorstep. Jessica and her new groom catch a train for his family home in southern Missouri — genuine hillbilly country — and though he dies less than a year later, she remains with his people thereafter. Ed, one of Matthew’s old students, returns to town with an old biplane and proceeds to sweep daughter Mathy off her feet, only to kill her a year or two afterwards in a crash landing. Some time later, Leonie takes a trip to Kansas City, meets a somewhat reformed Ed, and eventually decides to marry him.

Though The Moonflower Vine is full of lush descriptions of the trees, birds, flowers, and plants that fill the Soames’ world, it’s very much a Midwestern, rather than Southern, novel. The comedy and tragedy are always moderated with a spare sense of realism. Missouri is, after all, the “Show Me” state — that skepticism prevents any of the characters from leaping headlong into any of their passions for more than a moment or two. Or, rather, it makes them look before leaping, if leap they do.

As the reviews of The Moonflower Vine on Amazon.com demonstrate, this novel, though long out of print, continues to hold a fond place in the hearts of readers who’ve discovered it. Carleton never wrote another book, though she did publish over 100 others through the Lightning Tree, a small press she founded with her husband, Jene Lyon, after she left the television business and moved to New Mexico. She died there in 1999.

Other Comments

· Jane Smiley included The Moonflower Vine among the classics she read (or reread) and then discussed in her 2005 book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and wrote of it:

This novel may be the most obscure contemporary novel on our list, but those who have read it, if the customer reviews at Earth’s Biggest Bookstore™ are any guide, are very loyal to it. Jetta Carleton wrote only this novel, which appears to be autobiographical, at least in part, but Carleton’s style is so dense and precise and her method of imagining the inner lives of each character so daring that she seems to have been unconstrained by fears either of remembering things wrongly or of offending her relatives….

Carleton mostly avoids the perils of this material, which, baldly summarized, sounds scandalous and best-sellerish, a Peyton Place of the Midwest, by depicting the southern Missouri landscape of the family farm in exceptional detail. The farm is small but much beloved, full of fields and grasses, trees and shrubs, rocks and flowers that present a seasonal drama to the members of the family. All admire and appreciate their natural surroundings, sometimes in spite of themselves. Since most of the novel takes place in the summer, when the family is settled on the farm, the characters frequently suffer from the heat, which has the effect of making the scenery palpable and especially sensual.

The five characters are a convincing family in several ways. They resemble one another but are ill-assorted, as members of families often are. Their contrasts to one another are exaggerated by proximity. Matthew loves Callie and she is essential to his sense of his identity and self-confidence, but her lack of interest in intellectual things (she can’t read, though she pretends sometimes she can) means that he can’t share things with her that are important and satisfying to him. Callie is sexy but submissive, and hardly ever dares to challenge Matthew, or even ask anything of him. She recognizes, though, that he had been the best bet of all the young men she might have chosen, and in the end he is a good husband even though he hasn’t shown her the tenderness she might have liked. Carleton excels at depicting the personalities of the girls, who often don’t understand one another at all, and would never, they think, make the choices that the others have made, or even have similar relationships to their parents. And yet there is familial loyalty and attachment, mostly arising out of a shared sense of the enjoyment of the farm and each other.

To my mind, this is a novel characteristic of its time, the 1950s, because it completely avoids all political themes. To read it you would never know that black people existed in southern Missouri, that the area was still a hotbed of post–Civil War resentments, that the Cold War was raging, and that World War II had taken place. The novel exists in a timeless world of seasons and of girls coming of age, love their greatest concern, with earning a living teaching school or giving music lessons a distant second. The Soames family thinks only of religion, love, nature, and sometimes music. They are American innocents in spite of their lustiness, quite untainted by the compromises of American history. The novel is neither liberal nor conservative — more, perhaps, tribal, in the sense that while the characters do make authentic connections, these connections are only within their own family rather than with anyone outside (except for Jessica, who moves away). In addition, the world is repeatedly redeemed, not by human action but by natural renewal, as symbolized by the nightly flowering of the moonflower vine (a relative of the morning glory). In the end, none of the characters comes to an understanding of Christianity or Christian precepts — doctrines of fundamentalist Protestant religion don’t seem to fit what they have learned — nor do they embrace their sexuality (though they seem to learn that they can’t get rid of it), but they do come to an understanding of the nature and purpose of forgiveness, and each character achieves a feeling that happiness, even fleeting happiness, is to be recognized and cherished. Several American novels on our list — The House of the Seven Gables, The Awakening, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Moonflower Vine — gain considerable dramatic tension from secrets that the characters are required to keep to maintain respectability in the towns where they live. The conflict between who a character feels herself or himself to be and what is acceptable to friends and colleagues is as constant a theme in American novels as, say, a character’s relationship to the state is in German novels. In exploring the romantic secrets of each member of a single family, Carleton offers something of a catalog of ideas on the subject of secret desires — The Moonflower Vine could have been a scandalous novel. But by presenting each character’s desire as a moral dilemma for that character, and especially by consistently depicting the bonds of love that eventually hold the family together, she succeeds in arousing both empathy and sympathy in the reader. At the same time that she portrays the abnormality of her family, she demonstrates that abnormality is always more complex than it appears on the surface.

· H. C. Gardiner, America, 2 February 1963

The amazing thing about the people who come so alive in this novel — it is called a novel, but despite the author’s statement that it is mostly fiction one cannot escape the feeling that it is all recaptured by a loving memory — is the fact that they had so much fun, uder circumstances that seemed to promise anything but fun…. Perhaps the second most remarkable aspect of the book is that this sense of serenity is achieved without sliding into Pollyanish sentiment.

· M. Moriarty, Best Sellers, 1 February 1963

Whether or not it will be a critical success, The Moonflower Vine is a well done picture of a more innocent, simpler era, when sin was sin and duty was duty and God in His heaven was acknowledged and worshipped.

· Barbara Fielding, ReviewersChoice.com, 2003

Jetta Carleton’s autobiographical novel captures the mood and times of midwestern rural life and brings it to life. From the idyllic, heartwarming beginnings springs dark and hidden truths; truths only the reader will see and know. The gentle revelations of the secrets, fears and heartaches that drive these wonderful and endearing characters is storytelling at its best.

Find Out More

· Rosina Lippi, who writes under the nom de plume Sara Donati, on reading The Moonflower Vine:

I first read this book in German when I was living in Austria. I loved it so much I tracked down the original English, and ever since I’ve been re-reading it on a regular basis. Whenever I see a copy in a used bookstore I buy it to give away. This is the story of a farm family in Missouri, set in the early part of the last century. Each section is told from the perspective of a different family member. This is a beautifully written, carefully constructed story that I have never tired of over the years.

· A page on the Lightning Tree Press, the small press Jetta Carleton set up with her husband in New Mexico in 1973

Locate a Copy

The Moonflower Vine, by Jetta Carleton
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962

This Slavery, by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Chris Lynch writes to recommend the 1925 novel This Slavery by the British writer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.

In Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory, Bridget Fowler writes of This Slavery:

It centres on women workers in a Lancashire textile mill. Their experience is conveyed through the story of two sisters: Hester, who enters a loveless marriage to a mill master, and Rachel, who becomes a strike leader. At the climax, as the workers starve in a bitter strike, Hester unexpectedly retails news gained confidentially from another employer; thus, despite her own death, she helps the strike succeed. In this novel, it is a woman, Rachel, who criticises the economistic narrowness of many trade unionists, and Rachel who reads Capital and dreams. Less lyrical but more compelling than her dreams are the novel’s small realist details, of women’s tiredness, for example, or of hunger: “We seem to do nothing but talk and think about grub…. Our bodies get in the way. We’re a set of pigs kept grovelling in the ground.” Or again, in ironical reflections on workers’ endurance: “To starve quietly, unobtrusively and without demonstration, is perhaps the greatest art civilisation has forced on the masses.”

Chris adds, “I have been collecting her books for a couple of years now (a very difficult task as they are almost impossible to find). I plan to contact publishers to see if any of them would be interested in reprinting this remarkable book.” A quick check through the obvious sources ( Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and AddAll.com) produced a sum total of two books by Carnie-Holdsworth, neither of them This Slavery.

Chris has written an article on Ethel Carnie Holdsworth on Wikipedia. Two others articles on her life and work, one by Dr. Kathleen Bell and one by Nicola Wilson can be found on CottonTown.org, a site about the history of the cotton milling industry in Blackburn, England, once known as the weaving capitol of the world.

He also mentions that Trent Editions will republish her last novel, All on Her Own (1929) in 2007.

Three Recommendations from Chris Kearin

Chris Kearin writes to suggest a few neglected books he’s discovered:

· Flying to Nowhere, by John Fuller

Photo of John FullerA very short novel that got lost in the shuffle when first published because it had the misfortune to appear at roughly the same time as Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a much longer, louder, and easier to read book with which it has some superficial things in common (monks, murder, Middle Ages). Fuller is the British poet, not to be confused with the American writer of the same name. The book begins with an amazingly vivid description of an unsuccessful attempt to land a horse on a rocky island from a small boat, and the writing remains at the same level throughout, even as the story gets stranger and stranger.

· The useful plants of the island of Guam, or, to give its full title, Contributions from the United States National Herbarium Vol. IX: The Useful Plants of the Island of Guam; with an Introductory Account of the Physical Features and Natural History of the Island, of the Character and History of its People, and of their Agriculture, by William Edwin Safford

Kearin writes about this book on his “Dreamers Rise” blog. There, he quotes the botanist Edgar Anderson, who wrote of Useful Plants:

Under this modest title is hidden one of the world’s most fascinating volumes. The author, who apparently came as close to knowing everything about everything as is possible in modern times, was professionally both a botanist in the United States Department of Agriculture and a lieutenant in the United States Navy. In this latter capacity he served for a year as assistant governor of Guam. In somewhat over four hundred pages he not only takes up all the native and crop plants of any importance, but also touches on such subjects as the history of pirates in the Pacific, how floating seeds led to the discovery of ocean currents, the grammar of the native language, the actual anatomical means by which stinging plants attain their devilish ends, and the aspect of the various kinds of tropical vegetation on the island, each of these digressions being developed with finicky regard for accuracy and appropriately embellished with authoritative footnotes.

Oliver Sacks also discovered this odd classic, and wrote of it in his The Island of the Colorblind:

I had thought, from the title, that it was going to be a narrow, rather technical book on rice and yams, though I hoped it would have some interesting drawings of cycads as well. But its title was deceptively modest, for it seemed to contain, in its four hundred densely packed pages, a detailed account not only of the plants, the animals, the geology of Guam, but a deeply sympathetic account of Chamorro life and culture, from their foods, their crafts, their
boats, their houses, to their language, their myths and rituals, their philosophical and religious belief.

All in all, it sounds like one of the few things the Government Printing Office has published you’d care to take to a desert island. Most of Safford’s other publications were articles for scientific journals. Among them is the intriguingly titled, “The Potato of Romance and Reality,” from the Journal of Heredity, which can be downloaded for Oxford Journals’ outrageous single-article price of $23.

· Los autonautas de la cosmopista (o, Un viaje atemporal París-Marsella), by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlap

A travel journal, done in mock-heroic style, of a six-week journey along the autoroute from Paris to Marseilles. Unfortunately it’s never been translated, but I did post a sample here.

The General Is Older Than the Capital, from Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech

I. The General Is Older Than the Capital

Cover of 2001 reprint of 'Reveille in Washington'That winter, the old General moved from the rooms he had rented from the free mulatto, Wormley, in I Street to Cruchet’s at Sixth and D Streets. His new quarters, situated on the ground floor–a spacious bedroom, with a private dining-room adjoining–were convenient for a man who walked slowly and with pain; and Cruchet, a French caterer, was one of the best cooks in Washington.

In spite of his nearly seventy-five years and his increasing infirmities, the General was addicted to the pleasures of the table. Before his six o’clock dinner, his black body servant brought out the wines and the liqueurs, setting the bottles of claret to warm before the fire. The old man had refined his palate in the best restaurants in Paris; and woodcock, English snipe, poulard, capon, and tête de veau en tortue were among the dishes he fancied. He liked, too, canvasback duck, and the hams of his native Virginia. Yet nothing, to his taste, equaled the delicacy he called “tarrapin.” He would hold forth on the correct method of preparing it: “No flour, sir–not a grain.” His military secretary could saturninely foresee that moment, when, leaning his left elbow on the table and holding six inches above his plate a fork laden with the succulent tortoise, he would announce, “The best food vouchsafed by Providence to man,” before hurrying the fork to his lips.

From his splendid prime, the General had retained, not only a discriminating palate, but the defects suitable to a proud and ambitious nature. He had always been vain, pompous, exacting, jealous and high-tempered. Now that his sick old body could no longer support the racking of its wounds, his irascibility had dwindled to irritation, and his imperiousness to petulance. His love of flattery had grown, and he often declared that at his age compliments had become a necessity. While taking a footbath, he would call on his military secretary to remark the fairness of his limbs. In company, he spoke of the great commanders of history, and matched with theirs his own exploits at Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane, at Cerro Grande and Chapultepec. Near his desk stood his bust in marble, with shoulders bared; classical, serene, and idealized. The walls were brilliant with his portraits at various ages, from the young General Winfield Scott who had been victorious over the British in 1814 to the already aging General-in-Chief who had defeated the Mexicans in 1848. They were arresting figures, those generals on the walls; handsome, slender, heroic, with haughty eye and small, imperious mouth. Gold gleamed in spurs, in buttons and embroidery and huge epaulettes, in the handle of the sword which had been the gift of Virginia; and one portrait showed the superb cocked hat, profusely plumed, that had earned for Scott the sobriquet of “Fuss and Feathers.” He stood six feet, four and a quarter inches in height, and had been wont to insist on the fraction. But, swollen and dropsical, he spoke no longer of his size. He pointed instead to the bust, to the portraits, to show what he had been.

Such was the commanding general of the Army of the United States in December of 1860, but not so did his compatriots see him. His eye had lost its fire and he could no longer sit a horse, but in huge epaulettes and yellow sash he was still his country’s hero. Europe might celebrate the genius of Napoleon; the New World had its Winfield Scott. For nearly half a century the republic had taken pride in his achievements as soldier and pacificator; and if he now lived in a glorious military past, so did his fellow-countrymen. He was the very figure to satisfy a peaceful people, fond of bragging of its bygone belligerence. The General was as magnificent as a monument, and no one was troubled by the circumstance that he was nearly as useless.

Reveille in Washington is back in print (at $39.95 list — Ouch!), so, for the moment, it can’t be considered completely neglected. But as the above excerpt suggests, it’s a richly detailed and wisely comic narrative that ranks as one of the best pieces of American historical writing around. Used copies can be found for as little as $0.01 plus postage, although I suppose it’s hypocritical to write about neglected books and then encourage you not to buy your own copy from a publisher that’s keeping it in print. Multi-Pulitzer winner David McCullough often cites it as one of the books that inspired him to become a historian, and it’s difficult not to believe that Gore Vidal didn’t have a copy close at hand while he was writing his Lincoln. An excellent book for some winter nights’ reading.

Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941

The World of the Thibaults, by Roger Martin du Gard

Cover from first U.S. edition of 'The Thibaults'Reader Chris Leggette recommends Roger Martin du Gard’s family saga, Les Thibault, a series of seven novels published in the U.S. in two volumes: The Thibaults and Summer 1914, and then in a two-volume set, The World of the Thibaults. Clifton Fadiman included it in his compilation, Reading I’ve Liked, but as you can see from his New Yorker review below, the work held second candle in his eyes to Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will. Contemporary reviewers such as Mary McCarthy and Malcolm Cowley also had mixed feelings about The World of the Thibaults — ironically, feelings not dissimilar to those expressed by other reviewers by the time Romains reached the end of his own saga.

A few years ago, Timothy Crouse, best known for his comic account of the press coverage of Nixon’s second presidential campaign, The Boys on the Bus, helped translate and revive Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, a massive novel Martin deu Gard left unfinished at his death. Its release in 2000 led John Weightman to write in The New York Review of Books,

The 1930s now seem so far away that many members of the younger generation outside France, and even in France, may never have come across the works of Roger Martin du Gard. Yet, in his day, he was famous enough to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but even that international accolade is no guarantee of survival. Witness the case of René-François Sully-Prudhomme, the very first winner in 1901, who is now no more than a name in the reference books. But Iremember how eagerly we read Martin du Gard’s novels before the war. Now, having looked at them again, together with this unfinished, posthumous volume, which has taken so long to appear in English, I feel that they have a permanent quality. They may seem rather staid and old-fashioned compared to the overpowering intellectual and emotional fluency of Proust, but they have the merit of defining a certain kind of average Frenchness — that is, bourgeois anti-bourgeoisism — which existed strongly at the time, although it may have evaporated to some extent since then, just as Englishness is no longer what it was in those days.

Other Views on The World of the Thibaults

· Andre Gide, letter to Roger Martin du Gard, 17 March 1936

I do not want … the weekly mail to leave tomorrow without telling you of the immense joy, the profound satisfaction I felt after the first reading [of Summer 1914, the seventh volume of Les Thibault]. It was a difficult contest; you have won….

Dear friend, I believe that this book is destined to create a stir, to have a considerable success. Everything is said in it that needed to be said, with a perfect honesty in its presentation–so that even the most stubborn reader’s deepest convictions will be shaken…. Yes, I believe that this book has a considerable power of persuasion aside from its literary merits. But it is as a man of letters that I want to speak to you, and I can find nothing to say but praise. Some chapters are tours de force of skill and precision. You have written nothing better.

· Mary McCarthy, The New Republic, 26 April 1939

The machinery of the plot works with extreme awkwardness. It is, an a sense, a novel about time, yet the author’s only notion of conveying time’s passage is, after each gap of several years, to have two characters tell each other the events of the interim….

But The World of the Thibaults is not simply the study of a French family. Martin du Gard has taken Tolstoy for a model and, with this family for a center, has attempted to show a society as a whole. Thus the work contains, besides the usual elements of a novel, generous trial samples of modern science, modern literature, modern art, practical politics, religion, war, socialism and pacifism. The difficulty is, however, that these topics have not really been woven into the novel, but merely added to it. The result is not so much a novel of history as a historical grab-bag.

For all its encyclopedic qualities, The World of the Thibaults is not an important book. It is, however, a genuine literary curiosty. Industry and seriousness have been called in to substitute for talent, and the result is a work whose learned obtuseness is, so far as I know, unequaled in fiction.

· Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic, 10 March 1941

With glazed eyes and swollen lids, I have just finished The World of the Thibaults in the complete English translation — both volumes and all the 1,900 pages. It isn’t fair to blame Roger Martin du Gard, a kindly man and a conscientious writer, for the dull headache that comes from reading too much. Yet I wonder whether this business of writing oversize novels hasn’t been carried much too far, since Marcel Proust first set the fashion. Is there any human subject that can’t be treated in a hundred or at most two hundred tliousand words, instead of spinning the story out to nearly a million? Is there any reason for believing that a novel published in eleven books — as this one was in France — is eleven times or even twice as good as a novel in one reasonably large volume with a beginning, a middle and an end, and not too many extraneous incidents?

Isn’t it possible that giantism in fiction is quite as unhealthy a symptom as giantism in business or architecture or armies? The least one can say is that the author who writes an inordinately long novel is like the orator who delivers an inordinately long speech; he is disregarding the capacity for attention of his audience. Either the book must be leisurely sampled over a period of .weeks, in which case the reader is likely to have forgotten the beginning before reaching the end; or else it must be read as a reviewer’s chore, hour after hour and day after day, in which case it leaves one with aching eyes and perhaps a blurred picture of the author’s intentions. And the author, too, is running a risk. Any man who sets out to write a 2,000-page novel is betting against fate and human experience that he can remain unchanged until the book is finished….

Summer 1914 is the work for which Martin du Gard will be remembered and for which he deserved to receive the Nobel Prize. In the easy-running translation by Stuart Gilbert, it can be enjoyed almost as much as in the author’s pedestrian French. Yet it would have been better, I think, if it had been written quite independently, without regard to the family affairs of the Thibaults and the Fontanins. Standing alone, without seven other books as an introduction and without an epilogue, it would be even more impressive. It could then be read for itself, and with clearer eyes.

· Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker, 1941

In 1939 there was published in this country The World of the Thibaults a book containing rather less than half of his Thibault series. Now, bearing the title, Summer 1914, the remainder is available in another book. The entire series, under the general heading, “The World of the Thibaults,” thus appears in two thick volumes, equivalent to eleven in the original French. Those who have not read “The Thibaults” may find “Summer 1914” somewhat puzzling. It is advisable to tackle the whole job or not tackle it at all. That means a total of 1,879 pages, but they are 1,879 pages that offer you a solid, almost tangible experience. They are pages for grown-ups….

In “The Thibaults” the emphasis was all on individuals and their relation to society; in Summer 1914 society itself almost ursurps the canvas. For me, there is a certain loss of power and originality….

But when du Gard concentrates he approaches magnificence: in his study of the Fontanin family, in his agonizingly perceptive account of the love between Anne and Antoine, in his heartbreaking record of the slow decay of the mind and body of Antoine. As a whole, The World of the Thibaults is unquestionably an impressive work. That world is now dead, its final hours having lasted from 1918 to 1939…. Someone had to write its epitaph, and for that epitaph to be clear it was necessary to go back to the roots of the Thibault world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was du Gard’s task, to which he has now devoted two decades of his life. The task, one presenting almost insuperable difficulties, has been presented with honor…. You may not read him with absorption; you will read him with respect.

· Time magazine, 24 February 1941

In 1937 when Martin du Gard’s award was announced, the question arose why — if the Nobel committee wanted to pick a long, social French novel — it did not crown Jules Romains’ longer, as yet unfinished Men of Good Will. The question is still valid. Both works cover the same period, both are fraught with the desire of idealists to stop the war, both are written with objectivity approaching self-effacement. The general impression left by Men of Good Will is rich, vascular, forthright; of Les Thibault nervous, sinewy, tangled. Men of Good Will chronicles a whole society, Les Thibault a family and its immediate connections. Romains cut into French life at scores of levels, pulled out hundreds of characters. They are alive, but they are polished as flawlessly as marble. Some are almost too pat to his purpose.

Martin du Gard’s people have the puzzling surfaces of real people whom he has studied closely but not entirely understood. At times their motivations stretch thin to the vanishing point, and their behavior seems perverse and arbitrary. But in some ways they are even more alive than Romains’ people. Doubtless Romains’ book is a greater work of art; but Les Thibault may be the better novel.

· Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Perhaps, in Martin du Gard’s eyes, the only guilty person is the one who refuses life or condemns people. The key words, the final secrets, are not in man’s possession. But man nevertheless keeps the power to judge and to absolve. Here lies the profound secret of art, which always makes it useless as propaganda or hatred…. Like any authentic creator, Martin du Gard forgives all his characters. The true artist, although his life may consist mostly of struggles, has no enemy.

· David Tylden-Wright, The Image of France: Studies in Contemporary French Literature, 1957

When in 1937 Roger Martin du Gard was awarded the Nobel Prize for Summer 1914, the seventh part of The Thibaults, it seemed a fitting reward to mark not only the completion of a mammoth and magnificent achievement but also a life or remarkably disinterested devotion to literature…. He has never attempted or wished to be an exceptional writer in the sense of shunning the duller, more ordinary side of life. Rather the reverse. his aim, it has always seemed, has been to reflect life itself, with its tedium, its limitations and its complexity, not raised on the pedestal of a particular point of view but life in the round, in the rough, as it appears to, and affects, ordinary people such as, for example, the Thibaults.

· Masterplots, Revised Second Edition

The eight-part novel cycle The World of the Thibaults was inspired by the author’s desire to emulate for his own time the accomplishment of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In fact, the work’s style and pessimism is closer to Roger Martin du Gard’s countryman Gustave Flaubert than to the Russian author. Although the historical background of the action in the novel is of interest, it is the powerful depiction of human relationships that constitutes the book’s chief merit.

In many respects, the most influential character in the vast novel is old Monsieur Thibault, the patriarch of the Thibault family. A complete hypocrite, he announces to the world that his conscience is clear, yet he is concerned only with his own convenience and peace. Cloaking his craving for power and authority under a guise of fervent religiosity and philanthropy, he actually has no sense of either religion or generosity. He possesses no love for his sons, demanding only that they be completely docile. Any contradiction or sign of individuality throws him into a rage. For all of his big gestures, he is a petty man. Everyone automatically hides feelings from him, for one never can tell what his reaction might be. He forces his family into hypocrisy. By avoiding all introspection, Monsieur Thibault unknowingly condemns himself to a life of petty pride and cruelty, a life so alone that he must find his only consolation in public honors and the “knowledge” that he is a “good man.” As he grows older, however, the fact of approaching death terrifies him increasingly, and he desperately seeks some kind of immortality, as if he subconsciously realizes how futile his busy life actually has been.

The volumes of the series are crowded with fascinating, well-drawn secondary characters. These include Monsieur Chasle, the middle-aged secretary of Monsieur Thibault, who is suddenly revealed to have his own life, his own preoccupations, fears, and miseries. The reader becomes aware of many other lives lurking in the background, and beyond them still others. In the volume entitled The Springtime of Life, the adult Daniel and Jacques experience the bohemian life of Paris, encountering characters such as Mother JuJu, the retired prostitute, and many colorful girls of the streets, as well as the rich Jew Ludwigson, who sells Daniel’s pictures. Earlier, in a powerful scene at young Jenny’s sickbed, the Rasputin-like pastor Gregory chants and prays and condemns with equal fury and somehow saves the girl’s life….

The graphic realism of the sickbed and death scenes, and, in the seventh volume, Summer 1914, the dramatic buildup of the war, as the European nations are swept relentlessly to destruction, are impressive achievements. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that as the focus of the novel expands, the author never loses sight of the individuals who make up the world. For this vast, panoramic survey of society and the meaning of life, as well as for his earlier novel of the Dreyfus affair and atheism, Jean Barois (1913), Martin du Gard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1937.

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Constructions, by Michael Frayn

Constructions by Michael Frayn

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
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Excerpt

  1. For as much of the time as possible, we shut ourselves up in our notations and refuse to come out. It’s when we are forced to observe and think afresh that the discrepancy between this simplicity and that complexity overwhelms us.
  2. By our inmost animal nature we are readers. We read the world around us continuously, obsessively, necessarily. Reading our notations is a late specialization of that skill.
  3. Our reading of the world and our mastery of notations are intimately linked. We read the world in the way that we read a notation — we make sense of it, we place constructions upon it. We see in the way that we speak, by means of selection and simplification. I should like to end up by saying (gnomically, metaphorically) that we read the world by developing from it a kind of notation of itself. You see your hand by seeing it as a hand. You see the branches of the tree against the blueness of the sky by seeing that the branches of the tree are against the blueness of the sky. I say to you (in all the relative simplicity of the language notation), “The leaves on the tree are shaking in the wind,” and, given a context, you take the sense of this (directly — you don’t have to form a mental picture to understand what I say). There is an unremarked parallel between what you do here and what you do when you look at the tree yourself, in all the immeasurable complexity of the natural world, and (without formulating any thought in words) take the sense that its laves are shaking in the wind.
  4. We are significance-seeking organisms.
    We seek out significance from our environment as we seek out food. We crave meaning as we crave warmth.
    If we didn’t find significance and meaning we shouldn’t find food or warmth, either.
  5. We look at the taciturn, inscrutable universe, and cry, “Speak to me!”

Editor’s Comments

  1. The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation.

    Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed.

    Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.

This is the first of the 309 statements — most just a few sentences long, none more than a few paragraphs — that comprise Constructions. Published just a year after Sweet Dreams, Constructions was practically guaranteed to vanish with barely a trace soon after its few copies hit the book stores. Works of philosophy written by philosophers go almost unnoticed outside a few academic circles, and works of philosophy written by non-philosophers rarely even qualify for that, unless they’re a once a generation fluke like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (published, coincidentally, within weeks of Constructions). The problem is that such a work isn’t “serious” enough in the eyes of the philosophy professionals, but it’s too serious for the reading public. Combine these drawbacks with a completely unsexy cover (nothing but text!) and an obscure publishing house, and neglect is assured.

I must admit that I only special-ordered my copy of Constructions, back in the late 1970s when Wildwood House still had a few copies in stock, in hopes that it might have something of the flavor of Sweet Dreams. To that extent, I was confirming a view of the reading public Frayn himself offered a few decades later:

The only advice that I could think of giving to a young writer is to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it. Very simply, people want reliability and continuity in a writer. If you buy cornflakes you want cornflakes.

Well, Constructions is most definitely NOT the cornflakes of Sweet Dreams, at least not at first glance. And so, after thumbing through a few pages, I stuck it into the bookcase. And aside from a dozen transfers to and from moving boxes, there it remained for the next 25 years.

It was after reading Ray Monk’s wonderful biography of Wittgenstein that I finally gave Constructions another try. I knew I’d read something similar to Wittgenstein’s precisely numbered and aphoristic philosophical statements, and some digging into the unpacked book boxes soon produced it. The pages might have been a bit weathered, like aged newsprint, but my copy was just as crisp and undiscovered as it was upon delivery.

It will not serve Constructions very well with professional philosophers to describe it as a poor man’s substitute for Wittgenstein, but in my case, that’s what it was. I couldn’t get past 3 point something in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Yet I think Frayn’s opening construction above is not that far removed from Wittgenstein’s attempt “to draw a limit to thought — or rather, not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts….” I also have a feeling Wittgenstein would not disagree with Frayn’s answer to the question, “Is there an order in the universe?”: “There are orders. And disorders” [#233].

Like Wittgenstein, Frayn sees language as the key with which both we unlock the world and lock off the world that falls outside language:

  1. You can translate out of the German, or out of the Aramaic. But only into another language! Not into the world of which the language treats!
    Moving from one myth to another is in some ways a little like translating between languages. A particular language has its own idioms, its own voice; a topography which favours certain ways of speaking, and makes others awkward.

These differences ensure there is always a certain amount of miscommunication and confusion inherent in any exchange between people of different tongues. This tendency towards miscommunication is one of Frayn’s favorite themes, going back to his earliest novels (The Tin Men and The Russian Interpreter). “Even if lions could speak, we couldn’t understand them,” Wittgenstein once wrote. For Frayn, one doesn’t have to leave our own species to encounter this problem.

Construction #248 offers an illustration of this, one he would later develop into one of the major themes of his play, “Benefactors”:

The people who move us from myth to myth are like the reformers who hoped to cure all social ills by taking people out of the slums, which were the context of their diseases and crimes, and installing them in new, disease- and crime-free housing estates. It was a terrible blow to discover that these estates in their turn developed a characteristic pattern of social disorder.

“What is your aim in philosophy? To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,” Wittgenstein wrote in #309 (another coincidence) of his Philosophical Investigations. Frayn is skeptical of mankind’s ability to escape the fly-bottle. Our fascination with the truth that lies hidden at the heart of things is, in his view, one of the handicaps that guarantees our continued captivity:

  1. … It’s true that in life people sometimes do surprise us at such moments [of stress and crisis], by revealing flaws or virtues we had not known about before….
    … But in most cases the truth that is revealed about us by our behavior in a crisis is just this: the truth about our behavior in a crisis.

Which leads him to this droll, quite un-Wittgenstein-ian parable:

  1. The secret police arrest us all. I, who have been a well-mannered and amusing guest at your dinner parties these past ten years, betray you as soon as they show me the electrodes. That bore Puling refuses, heroically.
    If ever we all get out again, don’t make the mistake of inviting him to your dinner parties instead of me.

To Frayn, the fly-bottle is what makes us human, rather than something else. We cannot get outside it:

  1. What would we be like if we put all our roles off, and emerged from behind them? We smile and stretch, reborn, untrammelled: Now we are playing the role of one who has put his roles off.

Frayn is nothing if not an elegant writer. Elegant in the sense that the term is used in mathematics: balanced, spare, aesthetically pleasing. Take the efficiency with which he encapsulates these paradoxes:

  1. Our complexity is such that we can understand many complex things. But not our own complexity!

  2. A capacious suitcase. We can get everything we want in it: clothes, books, a folding table, a bed, a bicycle…. This suitcase is infinitely flexible! The only thing we can’t get in is the suitcase itself.

I suppose that a professional philosopher could easily demonstrate that most of Frayn’s constructions are derivatives — and low-quality ones — of statements made by Wittgenstein and other thinkers from Pascal to A.J. Ayer. So I feel I am in no position to justify the merits of Constructions as philosophy. Recent scientific research does suggest that there is some truth to Frayn’s statement that “We read the world in the way that we read a notation” than he may have suspected. Mark Changizi and other scientists, as reported in The American Naturalist, found that “… visual signs have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.” In other words, it appears our notations themselves derive from the way we read the world.

But Constructions couldn’t make the grade as “serious” philosophy in 1974, so it probably stands little better chance of making it on this basis today. It may not help us know how to think or what to think, but it certainly does stimulate us to think.

“[T]he glory of writing is its dependence upon the world — the necessity it puts us in of coming back again and again to confront the complexity of what lies before our eyes” [#308]. And to that extent, this slight sliver volume, long out of print, qualifies as a glorious book. A dip into just a few of its pages always serves to remind me of the complexity what lies before my eyes; my own limitations in grasping it — but also my infinite opportunities to try to. Having finally worked through its unnumbered pages, I find I turn to it often to remind myself of the never-ending paradox of trying to understand the world around me.

Thirty-two years after Constructions, Frayn published another foray into the world of philosophy. At four times the length of Constructions, The Human Touch has already managed to attract more reviews and cross the Atlantic, with a U.S. edition coming out in early 2007, but this is certainly due to the growth in Frayn’s reputation since 1974.

Other Comments

· Jonathan Raban, “Is God a Novelist,” Sunday Times, 3 November 1974

These 309 numbered homilies, reveries, and speculations make nods of acknowledgement to Wittgenstein and Pascal, but they are actually the secret marginalia of a novelist who understands how the world works because he has created worlds too.

· Philip Toynbee, The Observer, 20 October 1974

Constructions is a fascinating and endlessly thought-provoking little book of a kind which is so difficult to categorize that it might almost be described as unique. It is poetical; it is philosophical (yet almost anti-philosophizing!); and it is a genuine contribution to psychology…. This is not only an unusually cheerful book; it is also a witty one.

· Jonathan Bennett, Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 1975

It is a philosophical treatise, a wrestle with a set of identifiably philosophical problems, and sometimes the method of sober, prose argument is used in it. More often, though, it works with aphorisms, jokes, metaphors, analogies, questions: the final effect of the work is enlightenment, which is comparable with what linear argument can produce; but the means of its production are more like poetry than prose and there is also something special about what is produced. For example, when Mr. Frayn remarks that “A man dominates his environment by establishing a unifying principle — himself,” and compares this with “a tank laying its own tracks across the wilderness,” something is achieved, for me anyway, which lies outside the reach of the prosaic means of academic philosphy.

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Constructions, by Michael Frayn
London: Wildwood House, 1974