A sad and lonesome day

Sometimes I look back and count up the things I've achieved in a day and the sum seems greater than the whole. Here's what I did today. Please bear in mind I slept in and had a hangover.

1. Wrote a poem that I quite like
2. Played baseball with friends and hit an out-of-the-park homerun.
3. Consolidated new living arrangement and met my landlord-to-be
4. Took a nap
5. Did some research and wrote about a page of the essay I'm working on.

Somehow I still feel guilty for wanting to drink beer and play video games after midnight. Ah, life. Here is the poem. Out of everything I did today, this is likely the only thing I will remember:

***

I could look at you all day

from every angle

and never want to leave.

There is a depth to your countenance

I still can’t pull myself out of.

There are only a few of you,

rare bird,

and you only stay a season:

happily fluttering

on a strong perch to hold.

It makes me so, so

sad to see you sing.


***

Personal response to Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes"

For anyone who has followed the last few entries in this ‘blog, you may have noticed me gradually discovering that Victorian fiction isn’t all bad. I noticed that in books like Wuthering Heights, gothic romance can actually be fairly gripping, even if there are too many commas. I noticed that even a long novel like Great Expectations can be pithy and unsentimental. I didn’t like Jekyll and Hyde, but at least it was short. Then along came Hardy and A Pair of Blue Eyes, which lived up exactly to all of my preconceived ideas of what a shitty novel from that time period could be. In fact, if I had never read any of these books, and you asked me to write a parody of a Victorian novel, I would probably write something like A Pair of Blue Eyes. Where to start? The language: sentimental, flowery, verbose, descriptive, and so, so weak. At this point I can work around the odd passive sentence in the name of the style of the day, but Hardy takes loquaciousness to new heights.

You may recall my main problem with Jekyll and Hyde was that there can be no suspense when the audience knows the outcome before they open the book—and therefore my objection was that the action of the narrative was insufficient to bear a retelling. There is a similar cultural gap at work in Hardy’s novel for a modern reader: the scandals that unfold all have to do with engagements and social propriety and have no bearing on even the strictest relationships of our century. I won’t bore anyone by condensing the story, but it has to do with an engagement broken off for reasons of social station, a secret yet aborted elopement, and a love triangle that ensues. It’s just that there is nothing to sink your teeth into. How exciting is a stolen kiss on the cheek, really? I know that they wouldn’t be having sex, nor could Hardy portray it if they did, but all of the romantic interludes and “lovemaking” scenes in the story are painstakingly dull because nothing happens, and the scandal is really just a kind of misunderstanding—sort of. It’s not a comedy of errors; it’s a drama of indecisiveness. It’s about a stupid young girl who falls in love with every man that takes her for a walk. It’s also about two men, of whom I can’t decide which is duller. There is no Heathcliff here, just an architect and an art critic.

Of course there is a bright side to this literary adventure: I have been assigned this book for my essay topic and there are actually some great things to write about from a formal perspective. The narrator, for example, is very interesting. He is constantly moralizing and passing judgment. He tends to have incredible insight into the ways of men and women—especially women, and hence I plan to call my essay “What women want: dating tips from Thomas Hardy.” Here’s an example: “A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming so when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table in obedience to some remark.” Really, narrator! Is that so? Tell us more: “When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often than not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.”

I refuse to believe that this could be read seriously even in the nineteenth century. I mean, the narrator seems so sure that these blatant generalizations are correct, and he keeps them coming throughout the book. This omniscient third-person narrator speaks his mind so often that he becomes like another character in the book—although he is not literally a character. There is a very slight chance that these statements are ironic, which means that Hardy believes none of it, which also means he is actually a genius. I doubt it, but I have my back against the wall, and that may just be my only reasonable position. So I will go a write and try to be generous, because my current professor does not appreciate my cynicism. Next up, the book with the most boring title of all time: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Wish me luck.

Response to Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier"

For some reason The Good Soldier hooked me before I had even cracked the book. First, at Russell Books I got to climb the ladder in order to get it down from the topmost shelf, and I found a really good, used copy with nice, big, attractive print and a foreword. I noticed right away that at 278 pages, it is the perfect length for a novel. That is a bonus. Also, my edition has a quote from Graham Greene on the cover, calling The Good Soldier “[o]ne of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.” I have recently delved into Greene’s oeuvre and I think of him as a “novelist’s novelist”—that is to say that he is a master storyteller and a formal genius. So if he likes The Good Soldier, it must be good, right? Also, Ford Madox Ford is just a wonderful name for an author (I know it’s not his real name). So the stars were aligned for me and this book, and I was glad to see it on the reading list.

One of the most striking things, and one of my favourite things about the book, is the narrator, John Dowell, and the way he structures the story self-consciously, as if he is sitting “at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage” for a couple of weeks, telling the story as it falls out. This allows the narrative to build in a multi-faceted way and to gain in intensity as we find out more and more about this, the “saddest story”. Another quality of this style of storytelling is that the narrator forgets details, leaves things out by accident and returns to them later, gets sidetracked, and omits things about which he’d rather not speak. He is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, it seems to me. I love this aspect of Modernism, and I completely understand the impulse to distance narrative from the unnaturalness of Naturalism, and the reliability of an omniscient narrator. The 20^th Century was a century of uncertainty, of expansion, colonialism, and of global conflict. To pretend to be sure about anything would seem arrogant, especially as the characters are dashing away from country to country, continent to continent, and as people fall in love with people to whom they are not married, and conduct affairs under the very noses of their spouses and friends. Our poor, misled Dowell seems hopelessly unequal to the task of sorting out what happens, and part of the joy of The Good Soldier is sorting out the bits that he seems to resist admitting to himself and to us. Notably, he refuses to show us that he is at all emotionally distressed, and the story reads not as catharsis, but as a sort of parsing. It makes me feel sorry for Dowell.

If this story were truly a slipshod narrative, or a series of fireside fables, as Dowell believes it to be, and for which he continuously apologizes, then the reader would likely lose interest. However, I for one was gripped by the narrative to the degree that I read most of the second half of the novel in a single sitting. When I step back from the narrative and concentrate on Ford the author, I notice brilliance in storytelling that I do not come across every day. Ford seems to know exactly how much to give the reader and when. I wonder (and this can be argued both ways) whether Dowell himself is capable of constructing such a complex and engaging narrative. If the answer is yes, then he is a supremely manipulative narrator; if no, then the novel presents a logical problem about where the implied author ends and the narrator begins.  I return here to Graham Greene—the novelist’s novelist—and his admiration of Ford. I think both authors are not only great storytellers but great writers. I feel as a reader that I am in good hands: that the story will go on, and no matter how sad, nonsensical or disjointed, the journey through the novel will be the ultimate reward.