Billy Budd and Other Stories by Herman Melville

After I finished this year’s reread of Moby Dick, I thought it was weird that I had read it eight times and had not read anything else by him.* I’m pretty sure I was assigned Bartleby the Scrivener either in High School or College because I remember having a cheap edition of it. But if I actually read it, I had completely forgotten it. As I read (and really loved) that story in this collection, I had no memory of it at all. I am pleased, and not at all surprised to report that, based on this sample (with the possible exception of Benito Cereno, which I’m still mulling over), Melville’s other work holds up well. It includes five of the six stories collected in the Piazza Tales and replaces the other with the posthumously published title story. Like Moby Dick, I suspect I’ll need multiple rereads to get these, but in most cases I won’t mind that at all.

It took a few pages to get into Billy Budd, Sailor. Melville is not a direct writer, and here takes quite a while setting the scene and the characters in place. This is true of Moby Dick as well, of course, but my familiarity with that book offsets any (or at least most) of my frustration with the discursive path Melville takes to get to his point. In Billy Budd, that point is an ethical question about the law and intention. Budd is falsely accused and then in frustration strikes and kills his accuser. He did not intend to, and the accuser was very much in the wrong. Yet Budd had to hang for the killing. Apparently this is often posed as a legal puzzle in some law schools. It makes sense. There’s a broader application to contemporary discourse as well, I think; to what degree does intention matter? Budd didn’t mean to kill Claggart, but Claggart is dead. How much do the circumstances extenuate. It’s hard to say. Melville doesn’t make it clear either. He means for the reader to have to think about it. I liked this, but on first reading it was one of the weaker stories in the book.

In The Piazza, the narrator builds a piazza onto his house in the remote hills. The surroundings put him in a fairy tale mood and he imagines another house in a distant spot in the wilderness. Living there is a woman thinking the same of his house. It’s written in ornate language that attempts, mostly successfully, to cast a spell on the reader. It’s ambiguous whether something actually supernatural is happening, and the implication is that the rest of the Piazza Tales were spun from that same porch. It also has somewhat of a moral warning that lands somewhere between cautionary tale about living in a fantasy world and not falling prey to assuming someone else has it better. I thought it better than the title story, but it is still a little lighter than most of the book.

Bartleby the Scrivener, though, really deserves its place as a standard text. It had a surprisingly eerie tone for a story about resisting office life. The theme of resistance to the death in life that happens in bureaucratic jobs has long appealed to me, and the end to which it is put here reminded me a lot of The Moviegoer. Binx Bollings statement that “everydayness is the enemy” wouldn’t have been out of place here. The criticism of the pursuit of wealth and being tied too much to the job is expressed with the atmosphere of a horror story. Like Moby Dick, it seems to be a precursor to the existentialists of the next century. I am certain I didn’t fully grasp this story on this read through, but I do look forward to revisiting it often.

Benito Cereno was the story I wrestled with the most. One of the many things I like about Moby Dick is the diversity of the cast of characters. Every character, regardless of race, is given agency. Which is why I was taken aback when this story, written several years after Moby Dick, seems very much in line with the more racist views of the time, at least on the surface. The story deals with a whaling ship that comes across a slave ship in which the slaves are eventually revealed to have taken over and the titular captain has to pretend that all is normal for the point of view character, the captain of the whaling ship. That captain’s judgement is called into question early on. “Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine.” I was surprised when an English Professor friend said that he and his wife, also an English Professor, thought this was Melville’s best work. They see it as highly critical of slavery, and the narrator as unreliable. I’m not used to third person narrators being deliberately unreliable, so I didn’t initially read it that way. In that reading it indicts the reader’s perception of the leader of the slave revolt. He should be the hero of the story, but is portrayed as evil, and like Humbert Humbert, the narration is showing readers something about themselves. I fear this is reading a contemporary viewpoint back onto the text, but I’m almost willing to give Melville the benefit of the doubt based on Moby Dick. I’ll have to reread it before I make too strong a call on it.

The Encantadas were probably the best part of the book for me. The title is another name for the Galapagos islands and take the form of a series of sketches of the place. Rereading Annie Dillard recently well prepared me for these. They really ride the line between fiction and creative nonfiction essays. They are beautiful evocations of nature and the desolation of the place. These are just beautiful, and along with Bartleby, are the most essential pieces in the book.

The final story, The Bell Tower, is a proto-science fiction/feat of engineering/horror story. It’s the most straightforward storytelling I’ve yet seen from Melville, and it is very effective.

Melville’s writing in this collection demonstrates that Moby Dick was no fluke. He’s genuinely great. His style is more discursive than most contemporary writers, but the work it takes to get into his mindset is well worth it. He’s prescient in the way he approaches existential questions. His obsession with death is on display, as is his wit. I will certainly be returning to many, if not all, of these.

The stories range from recommended to canon-worthy.



*When I said that to a friend, he said, “Yeah that’s the weird part of that sentence.”

Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand

I think I’ll remember this year, in book terms anyway, as the year I discovered Elizabeth Hand and George Eliot.* Curious Toys is the fifth of Hand’s books I’ve read, and maybe the best. Though that is picking by degrees from a very good group. Generation Loss really blew me away, but the more I think about Wylding Hall and Waking the Moon, the more I love them. Available Dark is as tense as Generation Loss. Between those first four books Hand showed herself to be a master of genre switching: horror, fantasy, nordic noir. She can do it all. In Curious Toys she adds historical thriller to that already impressive list.

Anyone who has read any of the Cass Neary books, knows that Hand is drawn to outsider art. It’s no surprise then that she would want to write about the artist and writer Henry Darger. I’ve heard bits and pieces about him before, but this is the first time I’ve thought about him in any extended way. Darger worked a day job as a custodian at a hospital and after he died they discovered thousands of pages of a fantasy novel and hundreds of accompanying drawings and watercolors. Darger is a supporting character in this, as is Charlie Chaplin.

The main character, Pin, is a 14 year old girl who goes in disguise as a boy. Her mother has taken a job as a fortune teller at an amusement park in Chicago. She runs errands, delivers drugs for Max, an actor who does one of those acts in which he plays male and female characters by turning opposite profiles. The other main players are her mother, Francis “Fatty” Bacon an ex-cop who works at the park and Glory (Gloria Swanson), an actress she is in love with. Pin moves between the sets of the film industry which is still active in Chicago at the time and the world of the amusement park. She meets Henry Darger when they both witness what the disappearance of a child; Pin later discovers the body.

The book is set roughly 20 years after the HH Holmes murders at the 1890 world fair. Those murders loom over the proceedings as another serial killer active and some of the older cops reflect back to their experiences at the fair. It would be reductive to say this book is a cross between The Devil in the White City and carnivalesque works like Geek Love, Nights at the Circus or Swamplandia, but that is a pretty accurate accounting for the feel of the book. That’s not to say the book is derivative. Hand is far too good a writer for this to be mere copy work.

There is a darkness and bleakness in Hand’s work that I really love. This darkness is most clearly expressed in the Cass Neary books, but is on display here as well; The killer hunts young girls, poisoning them and then dressing a life size doll in their clothes. This has probably moved ahead of Generation Loss, the first Neary book, for me because that bleakness doesn’t quite reach the nihilism that characterizes Neary’s outlook. Curious Toys does not flinch from the darkness, but doesn’t entirely despair either. It is perfectly structured. There are several people who may be the killer and as each is eliminated as a possibility, the tension grows. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the ending is satisfying, but plays fair with the subject matter and attitudes of the time period. To the extent that I know the history of the time, she plays fair with that as well. The prose, as always, is excellent. I loved this book and will be rereading it, I suspect, for years to come.

Canon-Worthy

*And probably as the year Moby Dick (and possibly Peace and Middlemarch as well) passed Pale Fire as my favorite novel. And the one that cemented Caitlin Kiernan, David Mitchell, William Gibson and Donna Tartt among my favorite writers. And I finally looped back around to more Austen and Karen Joy Fowler. And when I discovered Jill Lepore. I’ll remember a lot of bookish things, but Hand and Eliot are high on the list.

Ripley Underground by Patricia Highsmith

If anything, I like Ripley Underground more than The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s incredibly tense from near the beginning. It picks up a few years after the main action of the first book, and Tom Ripley is living in luxury in France; partially due to the money he inherited from a character in the first book, partly from his recently married wife’s income, and partly from several grifts he has going. The one that provides the initiating action for the novel is that he has partnered with an art gallery and an artist to continue to produce work under the name of a more successful artist who killed himself. The artist’s work has reached a new height of popularity, and there is a big operation including smuggling, merchandising and a steady output of new works, and Ripley gets his cut. But one collector spots an inconsistency in the newer work and starts asking questions. Ripley impersonates the dead artist, now allegedly hiding in Mexico and things spiral out from there.

Highsmith does a great job evoking Ripley’s world of wealth and the sociopathic lengths to which he’ll go to protect it. If you’ve read the first book, you will see some of the twists coming, but there were several genuine surprises mixed in. Highsmith is a master of both tense action and portraying sociopaths. This is true across five of the six of her novels I’ve read.* She is relentless in her bleak view of human nature. It’s difficult at times to know whether she’s trying to say everyone has this darkness in them or if she sees her sociopaths as separate from the rest of humanity. While I tend to think the former, I’m not sure that she would agree. In either case, she uses her insight into people’s nastier tendencies to great effect in her books, this not least among the ones I’ve read. I was in the mood for something bleak and seedy, and this checked that box nicely.

Highly recommended, though you should definitely Talented Mr. Ripley first if you ever plan to read it. The 1999 adaptation is excellent as well.

*The other was The Price of Salt( the basis of the movie Carol) which, as a romance, has no relentless sociopaths in it. I also highly recommend it!

Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives by Phyllis Trible

One of the dangers of growing up reading the Bible is that it's easy to miss the experiential horror of much of what happens because of encountering it before reaching emotional maturity and because of familiarity. Returning to them years later as an agnostic the horror can still be vague. Often a separate work will make me think of something that escaped me in all my reading as a child and into adulthood. Most of the sermons I heard growing  Noah's Ark wisely focused on the animals and not the genocide. Most mentions of Noah’s post-ark drunkenness focus on the reaction of his sons and whether they honored him or not. Aronofsky’s movie Noah, whatever its faults, does remind you that if you had just seen everyone in the world die, you might want to get drunk yourself. Similarly, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling actually gave Abraham’s choice to sacrifice Isaac weight in a way that hadn’t considered before I read it (though admittedly I read that before I admitted to myself I wasn’t a Christian any more). Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror* nearly did the same thing with the stories of Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed concubine from Judges 19, and the daughter of Jephthah. I often joke (though there’s an underlying truth) that I’m surprised that my very strict parents let me read the Old Testament given all the sex and violence.

These are stories that I’ve already considered before in a more critical way than when I was a believer, so the effect was not as strong as that of the Kierkegaard and the Aronofsky, but sitting with the stories was a very uncomfortable experience. I picked up a copy of this years ago when it was on reserve for a class at the library where I used to work and finally got around to it. While Trible is clearly a believer trying to reckon with these passages and use them to challenge the church on the way it treats women, I’m glad I read them after I drifted from the faith. Like many who have left Christianity some of the more shocking content of the Old Testament forms one of the signposts on the road out.* Judges 19 has been especially troubling to me for a long time. Trible says that the narrator disapproves and is setting up the reader to prefer the era of Kings over that of the Judges. That is not a bad argument, but it doesn’t really answer everything. One of Trible’s recurring arguments is based on De Beauvoir’s Subject/Object binary. Even as she uses the passages under study as an argument to the church to fight against misogyny, she never quite escapes the fact that the text approves of putting women in the Object category. This didn’t ruin the book for me; it is very much worth reading.

I am generally against academic prose. It is usually stultifying and often just bad. Despite some tendencies in that direction, Trible mainly sticks to a heavily annotated close reading of the text from a feminist perspective. I don’t know enough about academic textual criticism to say whether the book succeeds on that level (though the fact that it is taught in classes speaks in its favor). I found the prose dense, but worth wading through. These stories are disturbing, and sitting with them in this way and in this much detail was at the very least thought-provoking.

Recommended if you have a stomach for academic prose and with a content warning for brutal rape.

*It’s the inverse of something Chesterton said of Catholicism. There is often not one cause for losing the faith. Rather a series of smaller things that eventually add up to unbelief.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

I first read Jane Austen, after many years of being told I should do so by many people in my life, in 2006. That year, I read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure and Mansfield park for an English class and with pleasure. Given the thirteen intervening years, I remember Pride and Prejudice relatively well. I loved the satirical tone and the clever dialog and characterization. I remember both my enjoyment of Mansfield Park and the class discussions of it more than the actual book itself. I’m sure that I started Northanger Abbey at some point, but I didn’t get far into it. I’ve been meaning to circle back and read the four I haven’t and reread the two I have but just haven’t. I’ve finally been nudged into it by my recent reading of The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

I’ve heard Persuasion described as Austen’s best book. I’ve read so few of them, that I can’t speak to that other than to say I preferred Pride and Prejudice. I suspect it is mostly a matter of genre; I prefer satirical romantic comedy to straightforward romance. That said, Persuasion may be the more fully realized novel. The characters are well drawn; you can still see Austen’s attitude toward/ criticism of the society in which she found herself; she’s just less concerned with laughing at them in this case. Her prose is excellent and the novel flows well.

It does seem to buy into the idea that romantic love is the end all be all of existence. One thing I liked about The Jane Austen Book Club is Fowler’s criticism that Austen was more concerned with the wedding than with wedded life, though you do see bits of some of the marriages here in Persuasion. It also suffers by comparison to Middlemarch by George Eliot (which I recently read for the first time and was an immediate favorite). That novel shares some of this book’s concerns, but is way sharper about other aspects of life than romance.

That said, I enjoyed this thoroughly. Based on old memory, I still prefer Pride and Prejudice, but I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Austen’s novels over the next year or so. I’m thinking Sense and Sensibility next.

Recommended.

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Flannery O’Connor is savagely funny. Her characters, grotesque and exaggerated, are always a few degrees off of reality. Her descriptions are always unflattering. But she was always able to spin surprising, harsh and insightful stories around them. She complained in The Habit of Being (her posthumously published collections of letters) that she was perceived as a sort of “hillbilly nihilist” (one of my favorite phrases of hers) when she considered herself a “hillbilly Thomist” (a devotee of Aquinas to the extent she understood him). In an essay in Mystery and Manners she said that she wrote such harsh figures because “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” saying in effect that to express a Catholic worldview in a way that folks would pay attention to, she had to out-shock value them. And that she did on some level. Her world is touched with grace, but a grace that is often as horrifying as punishment. That is not to say she wrote thinly disguised sermons. Her stories were art first, though she thought they reflected her outlook.

Hazel Motes, the main character of this, is certainly a large startling figure. He’s a veteran who takes up street preaching when he gets back from service. The trick is he preaches a brand of nihilism, a church without Christ in which people need no redemption because there’s nothing from which to be redeemed. In a brief author’s note to the tenth edition, O’Connor set the stage by saying that she sees Hazel Mote’s integrity as springing from his inability to escape from Jesus, whereas she perceived critics to be saying it stemmed from the nihilistic message that he preaches until he finally succumbs to a self-flagellating form of Christianity; that his struggle against Christ was the thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial intent, and O’Connor is weighing in on the side that it matters a lot. When I first read this, I was still a devout believer and was ecstatic to find a christian writer with literary cred. As hard as she was on nihilists, if you take her at her word about the substance of the book, she was as hard on Protestants. Another street preacher who is more of a grifter tries to pretty up the message of the Church without Christ: “Now, friends," Onnie Jay said, "I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this church-- it's based on the Bible. Yes sir! It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and intirpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be intirpited. That's right," he said, "just the way Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here," he complained." Now reading it as an agnostic, I still think there’s plenty of textual evidence for O’Connor’s perspective (though I could be bringing in my knowledge of the rest of her work here). She certainly knew how to use irony. But that nihilistic reading is very tempting and plausible.

The glaring issue is O’Connor’s heavy use of racist language. I’ve always thought that she was pulling a similar trick to the religious one; she was using that language to tell us something about the character saying it while holding the opposite anti-racist viewpoint. Her characters are always morally worse than they perceived themselves to be, and this was a part of that. Also, if she was writing with any level of verisimilitude, the characters she was writing about would most certainly be racist. I still think that was largely what she was doing, but I’m less confident than I once was about that. I would certainly not begrudge anyone who disagreed with that assessment.

I was surprised that I hadn’t read this since 2002 (the first year I kept a reading log), and given that, how well I remembered it. It supports my theory that the books that really stick are the ones I’ve read multiple times. I read this at least twice and maybe as many as three times including that last readthrough. It could also be watching the John Huston adaptation a couple of times in the interim, an interesting take that seems to take the nihilism at face value. It could also just be that it’s a great book. Acidly funny and outright weird at times. It really moves along, despite not having a lot of sympathetic characters. Whether you read it as nihilistic or harshly Christian in the way it portrays Motes descent, it is very smart about the gap between self perception and reality. It is riveting. In the past, I had been dismissive of this in comparison to her short stories. As much as I still prefer many of the stories, I was pleased to find that I love this novel more than I remembered.

Canon.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor is savagely funny. Her characters, grotesque and exaggerated, are always a few degrees off of reality. Her descriptions are always unflattering. But she was always able to spin surprising, harsh and insightful stories around them. She complained in The Habit of Being (her posthumously published collections of letters) that she was perceived as a sort of “hillbilly nihilist” (one of my favorite phrases of hers) when she considered herself a “hillbilly Thomist” (a devotee of Aquinas to the extent she understood him). In an essay in Mystery and Manners she said that she wrote such harsh figures because “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” saying in effect that to express a Catholic worldview in a way that folks would pay attention to, she had to out-shock value them. And that she did on some level. Her world is touched with grace, but a grace that is often as horrifying as punishment. That is not to say she wrote thinly disguised sermons. Her stories were art first, though she thought they reflected her outlook.

Hazel Motes, the main character of this, is certainly a large startling figure. He’s a veteran who takes up street preaching when he gets back from service. The trick is he preaches a brand of nihilism, a church without Christ in which people need no redemption because there’s nothing from which to be redeemed. In a brief author’s note to the tenth edition, O’Connor set the stage by saying that she sees Hazel Mote’s integrity as springing from his inability to escape from Jesus, whereas she perceived critics to be saying it stemmed from the nihilistic message that he preaches until he finally succumbs to a self-flagellating form of Christianity; that his struggle against Christ was the thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial intent, and O’Connor is weighing in on the side that it matters a lot. When I first read this, I was still a devout believer and was ecstatic to find a christian writer with literary cred. As hard as she was on nihilists, if you take her at her word about the substance of the book, she was as hard on Protestants. Another street preacher who is more of a grifter tries to pretty up the message of the Church without Christ: “Now, friends," Onnie Jay said, "I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this church-- it's based on the Bible. Yes sir! It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and intirpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be intirpited. That's right," he said, "just the way Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here," he complained." Now reading it as an agnostic, I still think there’s plenty of textual evidence for O’Connor’s perspective (though I could be bringing in my knowledge of the rest of her work here). She certainly knew how to use irony. But that nihilistic reading is very tempting and plausible.

You can't talk about O’Connor’s work without reckoning with her heavy use of racist language. I’ve always thought that she was pulling a similar trick to the religious one; she was using that language to tell us something about the character saying it while holding the opposite anti-racist viewpoint. Her characters are always morally worse than they perceived themselves to be, and this was a part of that. If she was writing with any level of verisimilitude, these characters she would most certainly be racist. I still think that was largely what she was doing, but I’m less confident than I once was about that. I would certainly not begrudge anyone who disagreed with that assessment.

I was surprised that I hadn’t read this since 2002 (the first year I kept a reading log), and given that, how well I remembered it. It supports my theory that the books that really stick are the ones I’ve read multiple times. I read this at least twice and maybe as many as three times including that last readthrough. It could also be watching the John Huston adaptation a couple of times in the interim, an interesting take on the material that seems to take the nihilism at face value. It could also just be that it’s a great book. Acidly funny and outright weird at times. It really moves along, despite not having a lot of sympathetic characters. Whether you read it as nihilistic or harshly Christian in the way it portrays Motes descent (and I lean towards the latter), it is very smart about the gap between self perception and reality. It is riveting. In the past, I had been dismissive of this in comparison to her short stories. As much as I still prefer many of the stories, I was pleased to find that I love this novel more than I remembered.

Canon.