Great Books Archives - Page 20 of 26

I Am Who You Perceive

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

That is Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night.

The story is about an American spy in Nazi Germany, who pretends to be a Nazi because, he is, after all, a spy, but the American government can’t acknowledge that he is working for the government because he is, after all, a spy, so everyone thinks he really is a Nazi.

His cover story is really good; you would never know he wasn’t a Nazi.

So, is he a Nazi or not?

Vonnegut is claiming that if it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi and acts like a Nazi, then it is, in fact, a Nazi.

In other words, Perception is Reality.

Another way of putting this: Vonnegut seems to be some sort of modern day Berkeley in which the thing which exists actually exists only in a mind—there is no reality outside of perception—but Vonnegut is adding that there also is no individual outside others’ perception of that individual.

I exist in your mind. The “me” perceived by you is “me.” I am under a delusion if I think that there is some entity called “me” separate from your perception of “me.” “Know thyself” is simply a command to “find out what others think about you.”

At first glance, it is hard to think Vonnegut is serious here. Surely I exist separate from your perception of me. Really, I do. [Insert foot stomping.]

But, then I imagine: suppose we have a person who knows himself to be really kind and generous. Truly kind and generous; the most kind and generous person ever to exist. This person never has a thought which isn’t kind and generous.

But everyone thinks the person is mean and nasty and completely self-absorbed. Is that person kind and generous? It is hard to imagine an argument that self-perception trumps external perception in a case like that.

Ask the question another way: if I am kind in my heart and cruel in my actions, am I a kind or a cruel person? It works the other way too. I am a very cruel and mean person at heart, but everyone thinks I am really nice and wonderful and kind. What is the right way to describe me?

Identity is a tricky thing. If Vonnegut is right, I don’t get to define my own identity. Others define my identity.

But, if I think I am a Giant Squid, if I truly believe that I am a Giant Squid, am I a Giant Squid? I feel safe in assuming that we would all agree that any person who claims to be a Giant Squid is crazy. Crazy people don’t get to define their own identity. We, Enlightened Society, get to decide the identity of Crazy People. I am not Napoleon even if I think I am Napoleon.

But, am I Jim Hartley if I think I am Jim Hartley? Or am I only Jim Hartley if others think I am Jim Hartley? And before you hasten to say that my identity exists independent of your evaluation of my identity, remember as soon as you say that I am the one who determines my identity, then I am going to insist that I am a Giant Purple Squid named Qxxwzk. Will you then henceforth address me and think about me in terms appropriate to my true identity?

Here is where it gets troubling. Two weeks ago, in this space, I ruminated about Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. That novel has a person whose interior life is evil and his exterior life is boring and nice. Reading that novel, there is no doubt that the character is really the evil person inside and not the nice person others perceive. Reading Vonnegut’s novel, however, the obvious conclusion is that the character is really the evil person others perceive and not the nice person inside.

Is there a way to reconcile these two novels? If not, which is right? They are both rather persuasive.

One possible reconciliation: in both cases, the conclusion is that the evil side is the real person and the nice side is the act. Is that true? Does evil trump goodness? You can’t be truly good unless there is no evil in you either externally or internally?

Kipling the American Author

Is Rudyard Kipling an American?

Let’s start with the obvious fact about Kipling: he is out of fashion these days.

About the only thing most people know about him is the title of one of his poems. Yeah, you know which poem. Nobody actually even bothers to read the poem any more.

Everyone just knows: Kipling is bad, very bad.

I have spent years trying to convince people that Kipling is well worth reading. I have spent years trying to convince people that Kipling is not at all what they imagine him to be, that he has nuance and insight. Nobody believes me. For some strange reason, they just think I am being contrarian and iconoclastic. Go figure.

But, I am very happy to report that I can now recommend a marvelous new book to people who disbelieve me about Kipling.

If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, by Christopher Benfey.

If you think you don’t like Kipling, if you think he is just a racist imperialist jingoist, then you should really spend some time with this crisply written book. If you love Kipling, you should also read this book. I had a very high opinion of Kipling before I read this book, but I now realize he is even better than I thought.

This book, like all of Benfey’s books, is only superficially a biography. It is actually a tapestry woven together of innumerable people and events. Twain, Longfellow, Roosevelt, Emerson, William and Henry James, and Henry Adams all wander into the picture.

The book starts with an observation that surprises most people—Kipling lived in America for a number of years. He was English, but grew up in India, so it has always been hard to place him. Now, in the biggest surprise of the book, we can place him.

Kipling is best considered an American author. Before reading Benfey’s book, I had never even thought about this idea. But, after reading this book, it seems so obvious.

Consider:

1. Kipling’s poem “If” was originally published in a volume of Kipling’s tales, right after a story about George Washington. “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,/ Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch” is just one of the many refrains that are suddenly obviously setting forth Washington as the role model in “If.”

2. Kim, Kipling’s greatest novel, was started when he lived in America. Kipling was fascinated with Mark Twain; on Kipling’s first trip to America, he made an arduous effort to track him down to meet him. Now, knowing those two things, compare Kim to Huckleberry Finn. They are essentially the same story. Kim and Huck are virtually the same character. The lama and Jim are the same character, both in need of the guidance of their respective young friends in their quest for liberation. The Mississippi River and the Grand Trunk Road are the same paths. Once you see it, it is uncanny.

3. Captains Courageous also written while Kipling was in America, is obviously an American story. See Moby Dick.

4. The Jungle Books were also written in America. This is the most curious surprise. Kipling’s original idea for the Jungle Books was to write a set of stories about local life near his home in Vermont. When thinking about it, he realized he could do better imagining the local color of the jungle of India, where he grew up.

Kipling's The Jungle Books: American Novel?

This got me wondering: Start with the idea that the Jungle Books are about the idea of a person living in a particular space. Now add in Mowgli and ask: stripped of the details of the location, who is Mowgli most like? Yep, Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. Impish, resourceful, and recklessly brave. At home in the wild parts of the world, but chafes in civilization. Then add in the characters to interact with Mowgli and realize that none of them are authority figures; they guide by example, both good and ill. In other words, the Mowgli stories take place in India, but they are really American stories.

The Just-So Stories were also started in America; I haven’t thought about it yet, but I suspect on reflection they will also betray their American origins.

5. And then, to look at the obvious, that poem everyone knows, “The White Man’s Burden,” was written about America and the Philippines. Benfey notes this poem had its genesis at the same time as another famous Kipling poem, “Recessional.” He rightly pairs them to note that Kipling is vastly more ambiguous than people who only know the title of the one poem want to believe.

“Recessional” is published before “White Man’s Burden.” “Recessional” notes the collapsing of the British Empire, “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday,/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Since Biblical literacy is not as high as it was in 1897, it is worth noting that Nineveh and Tyre are cities condemned by God in the Old Testament.

But, as the fallen empire retreats, what will fill the void in those lands? Enter America: “Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives need” and “The ports ye shall not enter,/ The roads ye shall not tread,/ Go make them with your living,/ And mark them with your dead!”

Combined, Kipling is arguing that America, not England, is the future. Kipling has the American optimism that America can succeed where other countries have failed. This is nothing other than American Exceptionalism.

(The obligatory note: Yes, Kipling does not have the views on race we all now share in the 21^st century. Yes, it would sure be nice if he had our 21^st century sensibilities back in the late 19^th century.)

But, the idea that America needs to take on the burden of helping others…what is still more American than that?

In other words, Benfey’s book shows that almost everything Kipling wrote was started in or deals with America.

Once I started thinking along these lines I realized that a good case can probably be made that my favorite Kipling work, The Barrack Room Ballads, is also shockingly American.

These poems were written before Kipling ever set foot in America, and yet the focus on the common soldier is incredibly egalitarian.

For example, “Gunga Din” ends with “you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!” Class structure doesn’t matter—the simple Gunga Din, giving his life to bring a drink of water to a wounded soldier, is the better man. The same sort of theme shows up in other poems in this collection.

The fact that Kipling has vastly more nuance than most people believe is beautifully illustrated in the surprising epilogue to Benfey’s book. Having finished showing how Kipling interacted with America, Benfey devotes the epilogue to showing how America interacted with Kipling during the Vietnam War. I cannot imagine a better way to show how nuanced Kipling is.

There are, Benfey notes, three phases to the way Kipling played a role in Vietnam. At the outset of the war, Kim was literally a field manual for CIA operatives in Vietnam. Then, as the war turned into a grind, The Barrack Room Ballads became the touchstone, describing the life of the common soldiers in the jungle. And as the war was slowly lost, there was Kipling again, in a poem much quoted at the time:

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

For years I have been recommending Kipling to anyone who is willing to give him a chance.

Now, I will recommend Benfey’s If because it is hard for me to imagine that anyone giving it a fair read will not immediately want to pick up and start reading the poems and stories of that Great American Author, Rudyard Kipling.

The Worst Wodehouse Novel

P. G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest writers of all time. He has over 100 books to his credit. There are endless web pages devoted to telling you which are the best Wodehouse books.

But, what is the worst Wodehouse book?

My current candidate for that (dis)honor: Not George Washington.

One of Wodehouse’s early books (1907), co-authored with Herbert Westbrook, it is an autobiographically informed fictional account of a struggling writer seeking to make his way in the world.

It is a story with four narrators, none of whom is really all that interesting, with a plot that just barely holds together, mostly serving to introduce an even larger set of not very interesting people.

Even the title is odd; George Washington is never mentioned in the book; I suspect the title refers to Washington’s reputation for never telling a lie, but even that guess is a bit tenuous.

But, you don’t have to take my word for the fact that this book is not really very good.

Robert McCrum in his truly excellent Wodehouse biography (cleverly entitled Wodehouse: A Life) notes that Not George Washington is “now a very rare book,” a fact which has been corrected by the Overlook Press reissuing it as part of their Collector’s Wodehouse.

McCrum first explains the autobiographical nature of the novel—James Orlebar Cloyster is Wodehouse; Julian Eversleigh is Westbrook.

McCrum then notes this:

The plot turns on [Cloyster’s] cunning plan to maximize the sale of his writing by persuading four complete strangers to put their names to his work.

Obviously, this book is so bad that McCrum, writing a biography of Wodehouse, could not be bothered to actually read the novel. That summary is wrong, completely wrong.

1. Cloyster’s plot to have others publish his works under their names had absolutely nothing to do with maximizing sales. The point of the plan was to makes sure that Cloyster’s fiancée would not find out he was a successful writer because he had decided he didn’t want to marry her after all.

2. Cloyster persuaded three, not four, people to put their names on his work. There are even chapters with the titles “The First Ghost,” “The Second Ghost,” and “The Third Ghost,” so it doesn’t take much more than a glance at the table of contents to realize there is no fourth ghost. (I suspect McCrum got the fourth person from the fact that Cloyster eventually published his fiancée’s play under his own name.)

3. None of the three people Cloyster involved in his plot were “complete strangers” or even less-than-complete strangers. Cloyster’s relationships with all three are discussed at length in earlier chapters.

In other words, McCrum’s summary isn’t even ball-park close.

It would be impossible, literally impossible, to read the novel and write the summary in McCrum’s biography of Wodehouse. Indeed, it is hard to figure out how McCrum even got his “summary.” (If anyone knows, I would love to hear how this happened. Maybe I should write him to ask.)

When I recommended Wodehouse, I used to tell people it didn’t really matter which book they picked up first—they are all great.

This was not ever precisely true; Wodehouse’s earliest books were tales of life in English boarding schools; but until Psmith enrolled at Wrynken, the books are not Wodehousian. But, at least the school stories are charming in their own way.

After reading Not George Washington, however, I can never again pretend that all Wodehouse books are worth reading. This particular book is only worth reading if you are obsessed with reading every volume in The Collector’s Wodehouse.

Cultivating Awe

Which book meets this description: “could be read in an hour and its effect was like a punch in the solar plexus,” whose discoveries were thrown “like a bomb into the arena of the learned world”?

Would you like to read that book?

Is it even possible that such a book could be written today? Do wonder and amazement still exist in the 21^st century?

When was the last time you were awestruck, literally struck with an overwhelming sense of awe, about something newly discovered?

The book described above is Galileo’s The Starry Messenger What made this book so amazing?

Imagine growing up at any time before 1610. Obviously you looked up at the sky. You saw the moon—a big white circle. You saw stars. You saw a few bright lights you heard were other planets.

It doesn’t matter when you grew up—before the discovery of agriculture and writing, at the time of Socrates or Jesus or Genghis Khan—no matter when you looked up, you saw the same thing as everyone else did or ever had.

Then Galileo publishes a book, a simple book. He built a telescope, a better telescope than anyone had built before. He looked up at the sky with his telescope and he discovered:

1. That white circle in the sky everyone saw had mountains and craters.

2. There are stars up there that nobody had ever seen before. And, not just a few new stars: “these are so numerous as to almost surpass belief.”

3. Jupiter had moons that nobody had ever seen before or even suspected might exist.

Try to imagine the shock of that book. Everyone knew what was in the sky. Everyone—peasants, kings, and philosophers—all saw exactly the same things in the sky and always had seen exactly the same things in the sky.

Suddenly, it is announced: there are more things in the sky than anyone ever knew. Suddenly a man with a telescope saw things never before seen by any human, things that were always there, but nobody knew even existed.

Galileo writes about the newly discovered moons around Jupiter:

There remains the matter which in my opinion deserves to be considered the most important of all—the disclosure of four PLANETS never seen from the creation of the world up to our own time, together with the occasion of my having discovered and studied them, their arrangements , and the observations made of their movements and alterations during the past two months.

Note Galileo’s all-caps PLANETS. Can you feel the excitement?

Galileo also wants you to notice the “occasion of my having discovered and studied them.” Galileo was a bit of an egomaniac, which got him into that trouble later in life about which you might have heard. But, we can give him a pass here; he really did discover something exciting.

(The quotations in the first paragraph are from Arthur Koestler’s marvelous tome, The Sleepwalkers.

I highly recommend this book if you have any interest at all in the history of science…and you should have a huge interest in the history of science.)

It is hard to recreate that feeling of excitement at the discovery of something new. Part of the problem is that we live in an age of technological wonder.

There is also the fact that scientific discoveries are no longer announced in pamphlets which can be read in a hour by any educated person. Scientific journal articles are…dense.

The recent book that comes closest to enabling an educated person in the modern world to approximate the wonder people must have felt reading Galileo in 1610 is a very short little book (also easily read in an hour or so) by Carlo Rovelli: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

Short chapters explaining the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the universe, elementary particles, quantum gravity, and time. You need absolutely zero scientific background to read and appreciate this book; if you are afraid of science and think it is above your head, fear not—this book is still perfect for you.

We need to cultivate our sense of wonder. Look out at this world and be amazed.

The Killer Inside All of Us

Stanley Kubrick described it as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”

That is the same Kubrick who directed a film based on A Clockwork Orange. So, what book is more “chilling and believable” than that Burgess’ novel?

Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. First published in 1952 and now included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s.

Lou Ford is the sort of person you really don’t want to know. You don’t want to know him because he is a guy who primarily talks in tired clichés; he is a boring guy, a very, very boring guy. Not too bright, affable, but really, really boring and dull. We learn this in chapter 1—two pages long, and by the end of it, the reader is gripped with a terror of spending 160 pages reading cliché after cliché after cliché.

Then 5 pages later, after he has savagely beaten and had relations with the new prostitute in town, we no longer want to spend time with Lou Ford because he is, well, a rather nasty bit of work.

The whole book is like that. Lou Ford interacting with society in public is really boring. Lou Ford behind closed doors is a vicious mean guy, and as the title notes, a killer.

So who is Lou Ford? Which one is he—the affable dullard or the cold-blooded killer? The closing line of the novel reveals his true identity: “All of us.”

OK, you are not as boring as Lou Ford on the surface. You are also (I certainly hope) not a murderer behind closed doors.

But, be honest: how much is the person everyone sees like the person inside your head? How many things have you done or thought in your life which you would not want exposed to the light of day?

Which one is the real person? Is Lou Ford a boring dullard who sometimes acts like a calculating beast or is he a vile murderer who sometimes acts like a nice guy?

Interestingly, that isn’t really a hard question. You don’t even have to read the novel to know the answer. The real Lou Ford is the killer. We all know this. The external Lou Ford is an act. Why do we know this? Remember Lou Ford is you and you know this of yourself.

Eliot describes this phenomenon:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The invaluable Annotated text of The Poems of T. S. Eliot has two interesting notes:

1. Eliot’s brother’s description: “he spoke of always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people…like a man playing a part.”

2. Eliot underlined the following passage from Kant: “For the truth is, that, however far we may carry our investigations into the world of sense, we never can come into contact with aught but appearances.”

Not only are you Lou Ford, everyone you meet is also Lou Ford. You only meet the mask, the face the other prepared to meet the face you prepared to meet it. You will never see the mind of another; you always see something else.

Some people are better at preparing the face to meet the other faces; some people’s exterior appearances may be closer to their inner sense; but in every case, every single case, you will only see he face presented to the world.

The Killer Inside Me is one of those books you just want to enjoy reading and then dismiss as a noir novel about a disturbed individual. But, it won’t let you do that. All of us.

Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people.
All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnny Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us.
All of us.

You meant so good and did so bad. It’s easy to acknowledge that your inner life is not what you present to the world. It is easy to acknowledge that the same must be true of other people. It is easy to conclude that you only know the mask the other people put on to meet you.

But, here is that part that is not so easy to acknowledge. If all of this is true: do you also put on a face to meet yourself? Do you know your own self? Do you know the killer inside you? Are you sure?

Becoming Immortal

Is the desire to be immortal a universal constant? I’ve never really thought about it like this before, but a combination of a short story by Hawthorne and a volume of short stories by Doyle, has me wondering about the desire for immortality.

Hawthorne’s “The Devil in Manuscript” is a quick tale of an author who cannot find a publisher (he lived in the pre-blog era) and in despair hurls his life’s work into a fireplace. A fire roars up in the fireplace, sending flame onto the roof, setting the building on fire. Commotion ensues throughout the town. And the story ends with the author exclaiming, “Here I stand—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire! Huzza!” (Does anyone ever say “Huzza” anymore?)

It’s a nice little story that certainly captures the latent frustration of many an author. Indeed, there is no doubt that the number of frustrated authors, those who believe that their own work deserves a much wider attention from the world than it has earned, is vastly greater than the number of satisfied authors, a set which is likely to be very small indeed.

Now that I think of it—I suspect the most widely known authors may be among the most frustrated—after all, there is always more acclaim and readership possible.

At roughly the same time I read the Hawthorne story, I was finishing up Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The first thing I noticed in rereading it—despite all the claims of Holmes’ amazing deductive powers, the deductions necessary to solve his cases are amazingly small.

Holmes demonstrates vastly more deductive powers in the parlor trick of telling the person he is meeting something about said person’s activities or profession which Holmes deduced from some oddity in the person’s appearance or dress. Said person is always dutifully shocked. Watson expresses his amazement, at which point Holmes explains, allowing Watson to note with Chagrin that he (Watson) was just too daft to notice the obvious, unlike Holmes, who never misses a thing.

At any rate, as detective stories, there is surprisingly little detection in them. As parlor tricks, there is no reality there—there is no way Holmes could pull off his trick in real life.

But, then, presumably because I had just read Hawthorne, I noticed something else which is rather odd in the stories of Holmes’ exploits. Why is Watson there at all? Now I know why we need him to write the stories, but imagine it is real. Why does Holmes want Watson around? Holmes keeps claiming that Watson is useful to him, but Watson is rarely even remotely useful.

Then it dawned on me. Holmes wants Watson around not to help solve the crime, but to write about the solution afterwards. Holmes, who labors in obscurity pretending to care only about logic and deduction, wants the immortality of having his exploits sent down in print.

So, what is it about immortality that so appeals to people? What is this longing in the soul to want to live on after death?

Undoubtedly, it is a good thing—there is something hard-wired in living organisms to perpetuate the species by having offspring, and in humans that is obviously rationalized as a desire to have one’s DNA continue into the future. But, children are not really exactly like the parents and great-great-grandchildren are even less like them; children are a poor vehicle for immortality.

Then again, so are books. Consider Charles Dickens. I know about Charles Dickens. I know nothing about the kid who grew up one-quarter mile away from where Dickens lived when he was 7. Dickens has lived on in a sense that this other kid has not.

Yet, what difference does that make to Dickens now? He and that other kid are exactly the same level of dead. I suppose if both are ghosts wandering around the world, Dickens gets to go to cocktail parties of the dead and laugh at the other little kids who are totally unknown. But unless that is the picture of the afterlife, it is hard to see what benefit Dickens derives from having his books on my bookshelf.

Then back up. Why would it make an author happy to know that his books will be read over a century after his death? That it would make an author happy is undeniable. But why? Why should that matter? Why should it seem perfectly sensible that the author in Hawthorne’s story is thrilled that his work is having an effect even if the effect is undesirable?

Somewhere deep in the human heart, there is an obvious desire to live on and on and on. That desire finds its way out in curious ways. Homer’s heroes want to do acts of valor so people will still talk about them after they have traveled to Hades. Homer lives on and on by writing about those people.

So, now we know about both Achilles and Homer, but their paths to immortality were rather unalike. Would their persistence after death bring equal amounts of pleasure? Do people care why they continue to be known after death?

Is Benedict Arnold happy for being famous? Is Pilate?