mozaikmage

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which I liked fine but almost certainly would have liked more if I had read it at the right age. Contemplating whether I should modify my Dahl reading plans on this account? But then again, Dahl’s books are such quick reads, it seems silly to stop as long as I am enjoying them even if not as much as I would have as a child.

I also read Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, the sequel to the delightful Parnassus on Wheels, which alas like many sequels was not nearly as good as the original. I thought the German spy plot was rather silly, and undermined the more serious points that the book was trying to make about creating a lasting peace after the Great War.

And finally, I read the final Melendy book, Spiderweb for Two, in which Randy and Oliver spend a year completing a scavenger hunt left for them by their older siblings who have scattered to various boarding schools. Loved the scavenger hunt conceit. It worked so well to do it at the end of the series, too, because many of the clues refer back to events/objects from the earlier books, which means that the reader can solve some of the clues too.

I’ve read one other children’s novel featuring a scavenger hunt, but unfortunately my clearest memories of it involve exactly where it stood on the library shelf: in the section for the B or C authors, with a number of other books in the same series, which like the Melendy books were also about a family of about four children and their adventures, but these books were thicker and had red covers… And, like this book, it involved a clue that had been frozen in ice, although not in an ice cube as in Spiderweb for Two, but in some sort of pond or brook or something.

This is probably too vague for anyone to recognize the book, but I figured I’d put it out there just in case.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. It’s been a while since I’ve read one of Alexievich’s oral histories and I had forgotten that the experience is a bit like stabbing oneself repeatedly with a fork… you may not hit it the first time but you know that eventually it’s going to draw blood.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pondering whether Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters should be my next Very Long Book.

When I had a subscription to The Atlantic, I used to amuse myself by going through the archives reading articles by William Dean Howells. One that stuck with me is Howells’ review of Anna Dickinson’s novel What Answer?, in which the hero falls for a beautiful English girl who turns out to be one-quarter Black in heritage, which leads to a level of disaster Howells considered rather doubtful:

We are not persuaded that so much evil would befall the husband of a lady with as good a complexion as any of us, and with so much more wit and money. The family, if they could not hush up her origin, would make a brave attempt to trace it back to African royalty, and possibly the arms of Dahomey might be quartered on the Surrey escutcheon, while society would be far more amiable to the mésalliance than it was to that of the lady who married her Irish coachman some years ago.

(You have to be a subscriber to read the whole article, but you can get a pretty good taste of it here.)

Naturally, when I discovered that Howells later wrote a book on the same theme, I was curious. But I put off reading it because, well, listen. Do you want to read a book about race relations written by a white man in 1891?

Well, apparently I do, at least when it’s by Howells. I finally read it last week, and it was a fascinating although deeply uncomfortable experience.

I have no proof that there’s any direct relation to Dickinson’s story, but Howells is very clearly writing a refutation to the general Tragic Mulatto narrative. Our heroine Rhoda briefly dips her toes into the waters of Tragedy, having received (one suspects from novels about Tragic Mulattos) the impression that Tragedy is the only possible future for her. Then she marries a man who Knows All and still loves her.

The story: young Dr. Olney has just returned from Italy to his native city of Boston. Soon after his arrival, he is called into consult with Mrs. Meredith, a lady that he met while abroad in Italy, who is accompanied by her beautiful and charming niece Rhoda Aldgate, on whom Olney has a little crush. They have a little chat about how nice it is to be back in Boston, particularly how happy they are, after their time abroad, to be back in a city with Black people. “I’ve been finding them delightful, wherever I’ve seen them, since I got back,” Olney says.

Rhoda dashes off to meet the family of a man who is courting her. Mrs. Meredith, physically well but oppressed by mental trouble, explains to Dr. Olney that she’s been trying to nerve herself to tell Rhoda a secret about her heritage, which she feels she must share before Rhoda gets engaged; a secret so terrible that she struggles to share it even with a physician.

Dr. Olney inwardly concludes Rhoda’s true parents must be criminals, and further thinks that her would-be fiance would certainly not change his mind about marrying such a charming and beautiful girl on that account.

“My niece,” Mrs. Meredith tells Olney, “is of negro descent.”

“Olney recoiled from the words, in a turmoil of emotion for which there is no term but disgust.” And so forth for nearly a page. Howells was famously a proponent of realism, and is I think realistically setting forth how the common (or in fact slightly-more-enlightened than common) man of the 1890s would in fact react. He’s also perhaps accidentally showing why realism will always be an also-ran against the appeal of romanticism: readers do not necessarily like seeing people as they are. Reality can be ugly. We like to believe not only that love conquers all but that it does so instantaneously, without a moment’s struggle with deeply ingrained cultural prejudices.

Mrs. Meredith has already basically decided she has to tell Rhoda, and only told her doctor in order to help nerve herself up to it. When Rhoda returns, Mrs. Meredith tells her the awful truth, and Rhoda recoils in disgust so profound that she flees the hotel room into the darkening evening, an opportunity for something terrible to happen to her that Howells pointedly ignores.

Instead, Rhoda finds way to the Black section of Boston and thence to a Black church, where she sits seething with hatred.

“‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘I should have whipped them, too. They are animals; they are only fit to be slaves.’ But when she shut her eyes, and heard their wild, soft voices, her other senses were holden, and she was rapt by the music from her frenzy of abhorrence…”

She concludes that she’ll have to move to New Orleans to find her mother’s people, and devote her life to uplifting the race, in the hopes that working for their good will make her hate them less.

(This is in fact what the heroine does in Frances Harper’s 1892 Iola Leroy. Like Rhoda, Iola was raised white and only discovered in her late teens that she has Black ancestry; unlike Rhoda, she is thereafter sold into slavery and remains enslaved until the end of the Civil War, which gives her plenty of time to bond with other Black people, build up a sense of Black identity, and generally approach the idea of uplifting the race from a place of love rather than a place of “Oh God I hate them so much.”)

I am not convinced that Rhoda would have successfully uplifted anyone, even herself, so it is perhaps for the best that Fate intervenes, in the form of Mrs. Meredith’s accidental death. Now alone in the world, Rhoda goes to stay with friends. She fiercely refuses her original suitor, whom she never liked that much anyway, and anyway she’s decided that marriage is completely out of the question now that she knows The Truth.

Or is it? Olney has recovered from his first shock, and upon further acquaintance, his little crush on Rhoda has ripened into love. Awkwardly, however, he’s not sure if Rhoda’s aunt ever let her into the secret about her heritage. Is her response to his courtship hesitant because she doesn’t return his feelings, or because the secret is weighing her down? Would it help to tell her “I know you’re one-sixteenth Black, and I still want to marry you!”, or would that be letting the cat out of the bag?

Fortunately Olney decides to just go ahead and ask her to marry him. Rhoda informs him tragically, “I am a negress!”

“Well, not a very black one,” Olney says. “Besides, what of it, if I love you?”

Rhoda is a bit put out to have the legs cut out from under her melodrama like this, but also she does return his love and indeed has only been hesitating because of her secret. They get married and move back to Italy, partly because they both like Italy, but also because if news of Rhoda’s heritage ever leaked, it would make only a minor splash rather than a seismic detonation. Presumably if necessary they would quarter the Olney escutcheon with the arms of the Dahomey, but as things stand, they’ve decided to hush it up. An unheroic choice, but one that the advent of genetic testing has shown must have been pretty common. Realism strikes again.

Okay, this was probably inevitable. I wrote a Horatio Hornblower fic. Movie!verse, set during the episode when Hornblower and company are imprisoned in Spain. Hurt-comfort, Hornblower finally gets around to telling Kennedy that Simpson is dead. It always bothered me that here poor Kennedy is having nightmares about Simpson and no one ever gets around to telling him the man has kicked it!

Fic: Imprisoned
Fandom: Hornblower (TV)
Rating: General audiences
Warnings: None
Relationships: Horatio Hornblower & Archie Kennedy
Characters: Horatio Hornblower, Archie Kennedy
Summary: While Kennedy lies in his sickbed in prison in Spain, Hornblower tells him Simpson is dead.

John W. Crowley’s The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William Dean Howells is not so much focused on Howells’ later fiction as on how the literary public elevated him to the rank of Dean of American Letters (partly because the pun was irresistible, but he did wield a great deal of influence through his column at Harper’s), which ended up tanking his reputation during the post-Great War shredding of all things Victorian.

Although in his younger days Howells had been considered something of a troublemaker, his elevation to Dean marked him as not merely a member of, but the embodiment of the Establishment. So when the Establishment fell, it was open season on Howells. Younger writers derided his work as stuffy and sissified, often without having ever read his novels. They certainly had no awareness that he had championed shocking authors like Ibsen and Zola. (I don’t know if Ibsen is still shocking, but Zola will probably be shocking as long as there are novels.)

He also wrote his own “J’accuse” defending the Haymarket anarchists. They were sentenced to death on the grounds that their anarchist beliefs had incited the Haymarket bombing, even though none of them had actually been involved with the bombing. At the time, the Haymarket anarchists were so widely loathed that no one else in America was willing to go on record saying "we are hanging these men for their BELIEFS and that's FUCKED UP."

Aside from writers in translation like Ibsen and Zola (and Turgenev, and Tolstoy…), Howells also helped launch the careers of many American authors: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others. But obviously not even Howells could read or appreciate every single deserving author, and some of them clearly held a grudge, notably Theodore Dreiser, who probably gotten off on the wrong foot by faking (!) an interview with Howells in the late 1890s. So beyond the basic generational conflict, there were some writers with personal axes to grind.

(Howells may have never read Dreiser, although Dreiser later claimed that he once ran into Howells in the offices at Harper’s, where Howells told him, “You know, I don’t like Sister Carrie,” and walked on. Brutal. Absolutely ice cold. Dreiser very much admired Howells, so you can see how an encounter like that would turn his love to hate, assuming of course that it actually happened.

I have never read Dreiser but nonetheless have a strongly negative opinion of his work: an American Thomas Hardy, writing grim boring slogs that no one reads except when it’s assigned in class. I’ve also escaped the misfortune of reading Thomas Hardy. It is actually quite fun to lambast authors whose work you haven’t read.)

A bit of a downer, but full of interesting tidbits about the publishing market in the years around 1900. For instance, serialization in a magazine prior to publication in book form was seen as a sign of quality, so Howells knew he was on the way down when no one would serialize The Kentons.

To end on a lighter note: I laughed at this gripe from an aspiring writer, who wrote to the Century magazine, “If you do not take some of my contributions, I shall have to resort to the humiliation of being discovered by William Dean Howells.”