The other day I posted Ernest Hemingway's list of 16 favorite novels,
or recommended novels...whatever...although one was a poetry collection
and one was a memoir.
Anyway, I thought I'd make my own list of 16
books, limiting them to stuff published during Hemingway's lifetime so
that he could have had the chance to read them.
To avoid making the
post too long, I've broken it up into two parts. This is Part I.
In no particular order:
John Dos Passos,
USA, all three volumes.
You really need to read this trilogy, pretty much forgotten as it is. You won't be sorry.Incidentally, Hemingway hated Dos
Passos, once saying that he moved right with every dollar he made;
that's something often forgotten in the obfuscation of Hemingway as
Macho Man: He was a lefty through-and-through. And, as far as I am
concerned, after the Nick Adams stories he became just a tourist writer,
writing frivolous drivel (well, not all of it was drivel...) about
ex-patriots and foreigners whom he really couldn't know that much about
while ignoring his own country and his fellow countrymen. He lived
through the Great War, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression and
wrote essentially nothing about his own country, America, during these
astounding years. Dos Passos did. And did so with originality and a profound depth of feeling for what it is like to be alive at a certain time and place and age, to really live the lives of others as if they were your own.
A lot of professional critics dislike this novel because...well, let's just say because. But I do.
“The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but
not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered
scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway,
the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats,
register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want ads,
learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses,
sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one
life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by
himself alone.”
'
“What's the use of a league of nations if it's to be dominated by
Great Britain and her colonies?" said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. "But don't
you think any kind of a league's better than nothing?" said Eveline.
"It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath
that counts," said Robbins.
"That's a very cynical remark," said the California woman. "This isn't any time to be cynical."
"This is a time," said Robbins, "when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves.”'
“Lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a
living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human
soul.... And the little helpless buzzings of honest, kindly people,
aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?”
Sherwood Anderson,
Poor White.
Hemingway hated Anderson,
too, and wrote a novel, "The Torrents of Spring,"
mocking him, his
subject matter and style. How much do you have to hate someone to waste
that much of your time going after them? What a creep. Anyway,
Bertolt Brecht liked "Poor White" enough to write a poem inspired by
it. I didn't know that before just now looking up what Wikipedia had to
say about the novel. Alas, other than that, not much. But I can
understand why Brecht was inspired by Anderson's novel. Hemingway was a
jerk.
“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
I
even like the long-outdated descriptions of whale behavior and biology
and all the details of life as it was lived in 1851 and before. The
mate Starbuck is, in many ways, my ideal man, and I really don't like
that a crummy chain coffee shop has appropriated his name.
Lines from this novel continually refresh themselves in my mind as they are recommended by circumstance:
"A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that."
"It's not down on any map; true places never are."
"I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts."
"From hell's heart, I stab at thee!"
"Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all
mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in
this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of
the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill
whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince.
Well, gosh, go ahead and sneer, I don't care. I love it so much.
“She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to
have run away from her.... I ought to have guessed all the affection
that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent!
But I was too young to know how to love her...”
“For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For
millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not
serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce
thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between
the sheep and the flowers? Suppose I happen to
know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my
planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one
morning, just like that, without even realizing what he's doing -- that
isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example
exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to
make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's
up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him
it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?”
Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass.
It
can be repetitive and tedious at times, but it is a fine view of
America at mid-19th century, and a fine view of the mind of a sensitive
and thoughtful man who cared very deeply about his country and his
fellow countrymen. By the way, it was published the same year, 1855, as
Alfred Tennyson's "Maud." Reading them both gives you an idea of how
far apart the sensibilities of the Americans and the English had become
by then.
“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write
poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is
filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these
are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty,
romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”
“Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
Casually met there who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else
Has long been forgotten by me,
I remember only that woman.”
W.H. Hudson,
Green Mansions.
A
wonderful dream from the mind of a man who did so dearly love the
natural world, wilderness and non-human life. I've read, I think, every
book Hudson published, love them all, but of them all, this is my
favorite.
“To each of us, as to every kind of animal, even to small birds and
insects, and to every kind of plant, there is given something peculiar—a
fragrance, a melody, a special instinct, an art, a knowledge, which no
other has.”
“When I look at her I see them all—all and more, a thousand times, for I
see Rima herself. And when I listen to Rima’s voice, talking in a
language I cannot understand, I hear the wind whispering in the leaves,
the gurgling running water, the bee among the flowers, the organ-bird
singing far, far away in the shadows of the trees. I hear them all, and
more, for I hear Rima.”
Albert Schweitzer,
Out of My Life and Thought.
His
"Reverence for All Life" philosophy has profoundly affected my world view
and the way I try to conduct my life. We are kindred souls.
“To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the
advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit.... Just as a tree bears
the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new
each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created
anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit
by tying artificial fruits of deception and lies onto its branches.”
“For animals that are overworked, underfed, and cruelly treated; for all
wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for
any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all
that must be put to death...and for those who deal with them we ask a
heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words.”
“The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply
rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we
must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even
the lowliest creature; for to do so is to renounce our manhood and
shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.”
“The Full Measure of a man is not to be found in the man himself,
but in the colors and textures that come alive in others because of
him.”
T.H. White,
The Once and Future King.
White uses the Arthurian legend to grapple with the problem of violence and its powerful attraction to men.
King Arthur devotes himself to finding a political system that
will do away with the brutal excesses of feudal power and its “might
makes right” ethos. At first he tries to channel his knights’ violent
urges into the fashionable ideal of chivalry, of protecting the innocent
and saving the pure. Later, he tries to focus it on religious quests,
and later still, he introduces the innovation of civil law.
But despite everything Arthur does, Camelot
creeps ever
closer to decadence. Every
system Arthur creates only invites the worst of his knights to find new
ways to twist it toward their own purposes. In the end, Arthur fails
and Camelot collapses, not only because of the impersonal, overwhelming
war lust of men in general, but also because of individual personal
failings, as personified by Arthur himself and Sir Lancelot.
White's
Lancelot has something broken inside him, emotionally, something that he
is aware of but does not understand.
Lancelot’s dream is that in spite of the thing inside of him that is
broken, he might be able to become the greatest knight in the world and
work miracles on behalf of God. He considers sexual purity to be
fundamental to that work: In order to be the greatest knight in the
world, he must be chaste; he must be a virgin. So when Elaine the lily
maid drugs and rapes him, he is destroyed. “You have stolen my
miracles,” he tells her, weeping. “You have stolen my being the best
knight.” After that, he gives up his dream, betrays his friend and king by seducing Guinevere.
The
novel would be relentlessly grim were it not written in such lucid and
beautiful language. A thoughtful, wise, sad book that will stay with
you.
“Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle
motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man,
because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.”
“You have become the king of a domain in which the popular
agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight
each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops
to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that
gets hurt.”
Henri Alain-Fournier,
Le Grand Meaulnes.
Most
of this book is a beautiful bittersweet dream. Much of its appeal
comes from the exquisite, delicate writing (I read it in French) which a
translation can't really replicate. Even the title is not really
translatable. Still, this is not a novel to pass up.
In
addition to a compelling, fascinating story, the novel is
full of elegant description, especially of the country surrounding the
villages and the changes of the seasons. It’s a story about fairy tales
and what comes afterwards, what happens after
the end of the conventional
myth.
“We said to him: here is your happiness, here is what you spent
your whole youth looking for, here is the girl you saw in all your
dreams!
How could anyone, pushed by the shoulders like that, avoid a
reaction of indecision, then fear, then dismay--how could he resist the
temptation to escape?”
“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to
me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish
it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all
their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are
waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never
come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of
remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long
enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my
day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”
Alexandre Dumas fils,
La Dame aux Camélias.
This
novel so profoundly affected me that it would be impossible to write
anything about it. I think about it often as its fundamental truth is
reinforced by every day that I live.
“We must have done something very wicked before we were born, or else we
must be going to be very happy indeed when we are dead, for God to let
this life have all the tortures of expiation and all the sorrows of an
ordeal.”
“Because
when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept;
because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going
to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with
a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When
he died I cried more than when my mother died. Well, I loved you all at
once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they
would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.”
“Here is Christianity with its marvelous parable of the Prodigal
Son to teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls
wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and to
find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he said
to the Magdalen: 'Much shall be forgiven thee because thou hast loved
much,' a sublimity of pardon which can only have called forth a sublime
faith.
Why do we make ourselves more strict than Christ? Why,
holding obstinately to the opinions of the world, which hardens itself
in order that it may be thought strong, do we reject, as it rejects,
souls bleeding at wounds by which, like a sick man's bad blood, the evil
of their past may be healed, if only a friendly hand is stretched out
to lave them and set them in the convalescence of the heart?”
