Mawkish Sentimentality: Cather’s Lucy Gayheart

An observation after reading Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart: unsatisfying novels by classic writers often provide the very worst reading disappointments. I found Lucy Gayheart particularly unsatisfying because I read and enjoyed two or three of Cather’s books, including My Ántonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop, in high school and college. That, of course, was so long ago that I’m not sure if the problem is with my changing tastes or with Lucy Gayheart itself. Probably both.

Lucy Gayheart is the story of a young woman who leaves a small, cold Nebraska hometown to study music in Chicago. Lucy leaves behind her widower father and older sister, both of whom sacrificed to raise Lucy, and her banker beau Harry Gordon. In Chicago, Lucy finds work as an accompanist for singer Clement Sebastian, a well-travelled older man who has a condescending streak. They fall in love. Separate tragedies, which I’ll try not to reveal below, ensue for Sebastian and Lucy.

I’m sure many of my problems with Lucy Gayheart derive from my own reading history: themes of tragic love and music figure into Russian stories like Aleksandr Kuprin’s “Garnet Bracelet” and Lev Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata. Neither of those pieces appeals to me much, either, though I’ve always had a soft spot for Russian sentimentalism, particularly Nikolai Karamzin’s Poor Liza. Liza and Lucy share plenty of themes, too, like tragic love between a younger woman and a more sophisticated man, and a wagon-load of sentimentality. I think those themes work much better, though, in Karamzin’s eighteenth-century story than in Cather’s 1935 novel.

I think my biggest difficulty with Lucy Gayheart is that it feels mawkishly sentimental—oddly, I was thinking of the book as “mawkish,” a word I rarely use, even before I read Harry Gordon reminiscing about Lucy by thinking “She had ruined all that for a caprice, a piece of mawkish sentimentality.” Worse, Cather never convinced me that Lucy and Sebastian could fall in love: Lucy hearing Sebastian sing “When We Two Parted” and then sensing impending doom just wasn’t enough.

Lucy Gayheart has a neat structure with motifs, like ice skating, that run through the whole novel, and Cather creates some fitting contrasts between town and city. A Chicago passage about “the crowded hour in the crowded part of the city” felt particularly lively. Lucy and Sebastian, though, felt anything but lively, too flat and empty as characters to develop into a true couple. Lucy, with her strong stride and love for cold weather, just doesn’t seem the type to melt for a man like Sebastian, in his velvet jacket. Poor Harry Gordon, who marries another woman after Lucy pushes him aside, feels like the most complex figure of all, thinking of Lucy’s choice as mawkishly sentimental but going to great lengths to preserve his conflicting memories of her.

Up Next: Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, which is definitely not a sentimental novel. Or maybe I’ll finally post about Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption.

Image credit: Carl Van Vechten's photo of Cather in 1936; photo received via Wikipedia.

Willa Cather on Amazon

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No Exit: Dawn Powell’s Dance Night

Dawn Powell’s Dance Night (1930), a not-too-long novel set in nonexistent Lamptown, Ohio, presents a brutal portrait of lonely lives in a small factory town with railroad tracks. Powell shows us the town and its people through Morry Abbott, a dreamy teenager who wants to get the hell out. Morry’s father, Charles, is a traveling candy salesman whose eye and itineraries stray. He doesn’t treat Morry’s mother, Elsinore, proprietress of the Bon Ton Hat Shop, very well, so Powell gives us this, early on, “Elsinore knew that Charles Abbot was a weak, blustering man, but after the day he first kissed her these matters receded, a curtain dropped definitely between her and his faults.”

Life in Lamptown is claustrophobic. Geographically, Morry and his mother live near Bill Delaney’s Saloon and Billiard Shop, Bauer’s Chop House, and the Casino Dance Hall. On the first page, Thursday night music from the Casino drifts to Morry as he reads Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Psychologically, things feel even closer: when Morry goes downstairs that same night, he runs into his mother’s assistant, Nettie, who threatens to tell Elsinore that Morry has been smoking. The tattling really picks up when someone discovers what Mrs. Pepper, the corset saleslady, does in her travels.

It’s not enough to say these characters have strained relationships built on unfavorable premises and unstable lives. Young Morry sees girls—like Jen, the girl next door who has come from an orphanage, and her sister Lil—as abstractions to hold onto, not exactly a surprise given the example his parents, one cheating in reality, the other in her daydreams, have set. The Abbotts are typical: escape is what everybody in Lamptown seems to have in common, whether they want to leave town, a spouse, or their social class. Most escapes are temporary, just sales trips, all-night excursions after the Casino, and/or drinking.

The highlight of Dance Night is a Thursday night dance scene toward the end of the book. Powell has brought the reader to the Casino before for dances, but nothing’s quite like this, with shades of red and plenty of drink, plus words like wicked, carnival, violence, witchcraft, wild, and circus. “Carnival” comes up, complete with its usual masks and reversals of everyday life, just before Elsinore leaves the dance hall, shortly before something truly terrible happens:

Her head was splitting with noise but she wasn’t sure if the noise was outside or inside, so many strange confusing thoughts crowded through her head like masked guests at a carnival, exciting, terrifying, shouting phrases they would never dare whisper under their own names.

Dance Night, which is heavier on psychology than plot, is worth reading if only for Powell’s descriptions of her characters’ thoughts and their obsessions so linked to carnival and escape. Her language is beautifully crafted and expressive, scary and lovely at the same time, and Powell succinctly characterizes Lamptown’s people through Morry’s aspirations for real estate development. Morry wants to build houses that don’t all look alike but his venture fails and another man tells him, “Boy, you might as well make up your mind now as later that people don’t want anything pretty, and damned if they want anything useful, they just want what other people have. You take these cement porches--” Grasping the mediocrity around him and his own failure, Morry realizes that “Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself…” Then he starts wondering what to do with himself next.

For more:

Dawn Powell: The America Writer, by Gore Vidal (The Library of America) [Warning: This piece reveals most of the major plot turns in Dance Night.]

Margo Jefferson’s review of Dawn Powell at Her Best (from Steerforth Press, the edition I read… a nice find at the library book sale!), The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 1994. I particularly like this observation: “Actually, [Dance Night] is as close to musical theater as a novel can get: all the people have their own cadence and language; they move along through the stuff of their daily lives, then suddenly burst into action or fantasy as if they were bursting into song.”

Up Next: Su Tong’s Boat to Redemption.

Image Credit: Photo of Dawn Powell, 1914, uploaded to Wikipedia by DanielVonEhren.

The Heart of John Williams’s Stoner

John Williams’s Stoner isn’t what it sounds like: Stoner is the life story of William Stoner, a rather staid professor of English at the University of Missouri, not reefer madness. Stoner is my kind of novel, a portrait of an imperfect human whose life looks unhappy, even futile, from the first page – Stoner’s career is undistinguished and he experiences strife at work and home – but keeps on keeping on thanks to a lurking, low-key passion for life.

I know “passion” sounds horribly banal but I’m borrowing it from Williams, whose writing in Stoner is beautifully plain and understated, appropriate to its subject, as he characterizes Stoner, his colleagues, and family through actions and expressions. Here’s Stoner on his wedding day, looking at his wife with her parents :

“Then he saw Edith. She was with her father and mother and her aunt; her father, with a slight frown on his face, was surveying the room as if impatient with it; and her mother was weeping, her eyes red and puffed above her heavy cheekbones and her mouth pursed downward like a child’s.”

The match, of course, is pretty disastrous: Stoner is a country boy, raised on a farm and sent to college to learn about agriculture only to become an academic, and Edith is from a well-to-do St. Louis family. Edith misses her European tour, which must have been a particularly big deal just after World War 1, so she can marry Stoner. Their honeymoon is described with words like “isolation” and “prison.” Their daughter Grace is “happy with her despair” toward the end of the book.

But Stoner isn’t altogether dissatisfied, despite sometimes feeling numb or seeing “nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.” He values the purity of academia, a place removed from the world and remembers how one of his friends said, in their youth, that academics are “better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world.” The same guy calls Stoner “our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho.” Though Stoner realizes in middle age that academics are “of the world,” he still identifies himself with academia and cannot leave because he would be nothing.

At the end of the book, as Stoner dies, he feels pain, hears laughter, sees his wife’s face, and feels joy on a summer afternoon before he loses touch, literally, with what has given his life meaning. Williams gives Stoner – and Stoner, a beautifully crafted piece of existentialism – a sendoff that is fitting in its simple, melancholic but reassuring elegance. I’d recommend Stoner to anyone but think non-native readers of English might especially enjoy its uncomplicated, expressive language.

Up next: Maybe a report from Book Expo America. Next book post will be about Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary.

Disclosures: I bought my copy of Stoner at the library book sale but should note that I have discussed literature in translation with New York Review Books. I look forward to seeing NYRB at Book Expo America this week!

Image credit: Photo of Jesse Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, from Stevehrowe2, via Wikipedia.

What Keeps Things Fall Apart Together

Every now and then I feel almost indifferent to a book as long as I’m reading it… but don’t close the book when I finish the last page because I’m ready to go back to the beginning, to revisit and analyze. These books tend to stay with me. Such is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which combines vivid detail of Igbo (or Ibo) tradition with literary archetypes to describe religious and cultural transitions that came to Nigerian life through colonization.

There are plenty of online summaries of Things Fall Apart – such as this one on Wikipedia and this one on ImageNations, a blog about African literature – so I’ll focus primarily on a few motifs I found most interesting. I know some of you have read the book so would love to hear your thoughts about favorite passages and themes.

Express Summary (without revealing plot twists): Things Fall Apart describes the life of Okonkwo, a prosperous, hard-working, and angry yam farmer with three wives. Okonkwo is determined not to resemble his father, Unoka, who was “lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.” The first half of the novel depicts Okonkwo’s life at home and in his community, then Achebe broadens his settings and draws in missionaries and colonization.

Here’s a sampling of what struck me most:

Wrestling: Achebe mentions Okonkwo’s wrestling skill in the first paragraph of the book: “As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat… Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was as slippery as a fish in water.” Wrestling matches resurface later in the book, but I liked the use of wrestling as a metaphor for many types of struggles: between Okonkwo and his surroundings, between Igbo spirituality and Christianity, between masculine and feminine...

Masculine-Feminine: Okonkwo dislikes weakness and has such a preference for masculine over feminine that he often wishes his beloved daughter Ezinma were male. He looks back on his warrior days with nostalgia, saying “Those were days when men were men.” I thought one of the most interesting passages in the book was a mini-lecture from his maternal uncle, who tries to impress on Okonkwo the importance of a mother’s protection, mentioning that the commonest name is Nneka, which means “Mother is Supreme.” Okonkwo doesn’t seem too impressed.

Tragic Flaws & Archetypes: Though Okonkwo’s tragic flaws are obvious – all that pride, anger, and violence! – he has a positive side, too, in his loyalty, work ethic, and ability to support his large family. The ambiguities in Okonkwo, as a character, often parallel ambiguities in his culture.

Oral Traditions & Spirituality: Achebe begins invoking oral tradition and folk themes on the novel’s first page, where he mentions that the founder of Okonkwo’s town “engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.” He later includes an untranslated song plus folk tales told at night in the family’s huts and among friends. There is also talk about slavery that shows interesting attitudes toward storytelling. Initially, nobody thought the stories were true, and Okonkwo’s uncle comments, “There is no story that is not true. The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.” Also: Near the end of the book, after Christianity has begun to take hold, I was interested to see an example of dual belief: a woman is suspended from church for allowing “her heathen husband to mutilate her dead child” in a traditional ritual.

Things Falling Apart: When Okonkwo discusses the disintegration of his culture with a friend, the friend tells him:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

Up next: Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, which incorporates lyrics from Styx on page two. *cringe!*

Image credit: Scartol, via Wikipedia.

On Revisiting A Сlockwork Orange After 25 Years

I suppose it’s fitting that my first post on this new blog concerns Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange: the book combines my native language (English) with my second language (Russian), and I decided to reread it after I found similar themes in a Russian novel, Mikhail Elizarov’s Мультики (‘Toons), which I wrote about here on my Russian literature blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf.

The story of A Clockwork Orange – with all its talk about religion, free will, teenage violence, reformation, and redemption – still intrigues but it was Burgess’s use of language that grabbed me most in my first reading of the book in about 25 years. (I won’t summarize the plot since Wikipedia does.) Alex, the book’s first-person narrator, is a violent teenager who speaks in a youth slang that blends Russian with English, and Burgess wrings maximum effect out of both languages. “Creech,” for example, comes from the Russian verb кричать (krichat’, pronounced roughly kreechaht, scream) but evokes “screech,” too. And “rabbit,” similar to the Russian noun and verb for work -- работа (rabota) and работать, respectively -- makes work sound awfully meek. Then there’s “gulliver” for head, a nifty blend of the Russian голова (golova, gahlahvah) and Gulliver, the guy with the travels.

There’s so much Russian in A Clockwork Orange that it was far easier to read the book now than when I was in college. The blend of languages still feels jarring – the Russian words aren’t always transliterated exactly, and some are adapted – but I have to admit I missed the mystery I felt when reading the book before. Reading then was a more intense experience of ostranenie that forced me to see English, Russian, and language itself differently. As I sorted through the puzzle of words, I had to follow and trust Burgess’s narrator, Alex, when he used terms in context to display their meanings. There’s a strange, eerie irony in growing accustomed to Alex’s language as he describes ultraviolent episodes with lots of blood.

One of my favorite Russian terms in the book is “oddy knocky,” lonely, a split and quirky but nearly accurate transliteration of the Russian adjective “одинокий.” The word, which sounds to me like knocking around in an odd way, is perfect for the book, given Burgess’s presentation of personal choices, government control, and Alex’s attempt to find his place in the world, even as he separates himself through language, and narcissistic and sociopathic behavior.

[Beware: Plot turns revealed!] Strangely, I didn’t realize that my book, dated 1980, is incomplete, missing a final, 21^st chapter, in which Alex makes a decision that changes almost everything. I’m so used to the 20^th chapter ending, which I see expressing pessimism about human nature as Alex prepares to return to ultraviolence, that the 21^st chapter, with Alex deciding to put away childhood things and abandon crime, initially felt sappy. But the chapter fits (and this is satire, after all), what with Alex’s references to the youthful achievements of his beloved composers and his very human -- dare I say adult? -- desire to avoid an oddy knocky existence by finding love.

New York Times review dated March 19, 1963 (no reviewer name)