Beyond 30 (AKA The Lost Continent), by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1915)

During your correspondent’s misspent youth – back when dinosaurs ruled the earth – he spent most of his summer vacations reading the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950).

Yes … most of you have just lost what little respect for me that you may have had.  However, I believe you judge too harshly.  I say without shame and in complete candor that some of the people I met in my ramblings through ERB’s corpus are among the most important literary friendships that I have made.  Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars and the explorers of the subterranean world of Pellucidar, where intelligent reptiles live at the Earth’s core, are as real to me to this day as many actual human beings that I have met in later life.  And some of them even make better friends.

No one will argue for a moment that ERB is a prose stylist, or that his insight into human nature was a rare and subtle one.  More damming to his literary reputation are his sensibilities and taste for high adventure; most modern novels are simply slices of life that may better labeled why we are miserable now.  ERB has no patience for that type of thinking or that type of narrative.  ERB wrote adventure stories – set in some of the most exotic places on and off of the planet – and they were unabashedly plot-driven.  If you want know the plight of unhappy men in a midlife crisis, or women struggling for identity in a world redefined by feminism, look elsewhere.  Want to learn how a Civil War soldier miraculously transported to Mars, befriends four-armed green giants and battles rampaging, carnivorous white apes, and you’ve come to the right place.

Minds as brilliant and creative as Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), William Joyce (born 1957) and Jane Goodall (born 1934) have all credited him as an influence, and his contribution to global popular culture is incalculable.

Whatever the faults or strengths of his particular novels, what is most remarkable about his work is the experience of reading ERB.  The adventure novels of ERB has the remarkable quality of affecting the reader in ways unexpected and serendipitous.  Aside from (not so) simple narrative pleasures as a compelling storyline and absolutely unfettered imagination, it is impossible to read ERB without a sense of delight and of wonder.  In the world of ERB, all bets are off and most anything is possible.  There is a sense of energy, drive and, for want of a better word … pep.  ERB is a tonic; read him and grow young again.

And … ERB believed in adventure.  Much of the literary establishment has written off ERB not only for his prose, but also for his abundant output and for his choice of genre.  ERB was no hack, churning out novels at a penny a word.  Rather, ERB lived in an imaginative landscape that was a real to him as the workday world is real to us.  His Martian society, the (mostly invented) African jungle of Tarzan, and the land at the Earth’s Core all share a sense of … conviction.  In his way, ERB was a serious novelist--as his worlds mattered to him; there was a compelling urgency to his vision that is evident in his fiction.

Finally, ERB had a very definite sense of what life should be.  Unlike many contemporary writers, ERB let it be known that life was for living.  Or, as the hero in Beyond Thirty says when finding land:

"It is the nearest land," I replied. "I have always wanted to explore the forgotten lands of the Eastern Hemisphere. Here's our chance. To remain at sea is to perish. None of us ever will see home again. Let us make the best of it, and enjoy while we do live that which is forbidden the balance of our race—the adventure and the mystery which lie beyond thirty."

I was thinking about Burroughs recently when I luckily came across his book Beyond Thirty while rummaging through the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  This is a resource of public domain books available for free download – and if you want to learn more about ERB, there is no better place to start.

At any rate, I cannot think of the summers of my past without thinking, too, of ERB.  I make it a point to at least revisit one of his novels every summer, or, if possible, read one I have not come across before.  Beyond Thirty (sometimes also called The Lost Continent), was first published in All Around Magazine, and did not appear in book form in ERB’s lifetime.  It was collected in book form first in 1955, and later in 1963 with a delightful cover by artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). 

The story takes place in 2137, when Pan-American’s Navy Lieutenant Jefferson Turck, commander of aero-submarine Coldwater, patrols the 30^th meridian from Iceland to the Azores.  The ship’s anti-gravitation screens fail, and it drifts beyond the forbidden territory into Europe.

Europe had been off limits to Pan-America since the start of the Great War in the early 20^th Century, and Turck and a handful of loyal men find themselves in a now savage landscape that was once the civilized world.  Ladies and gentlemen, Beyond Thirty is a corker.

Most science fiction is never really about the future – but, rather, serves as a distorted mirror to the present.  Written in 1915, the world was then plunging into the conflict of the Great War.  The vast majority of the American population (and their politicians) favored an isolationist approach.  What would the world be like, ERB seems to ask, if the New World withdrew from the world stage?  It would appear as if ERB anticipated the American Century before most of the world did – for his tale tells of a unified North, Central and South America that has achieved many marvels of super-science, while war-ravaged Europe perishes when left to its own devices.

Also interesting is what ERB posits happens to a Europe ravaged by global conflict without American intervention.  In short, England descends into barbarism, the countryside now ravaged by wild animals that were once kept in zoos.  Continental Europe is now largely enslaved by Moslems from Abyssinia – who are using slave labor and whatever military expertise they have to prepare for a definitive conflict with the sleeping giant that is China.  With a little tweaking, it would seem as if the foreign policy concerns of a century ago were as pressing today as they were then.

Beyond Thirty is a remarkable and satisfying romp by one of the masters of the form.  It is an extremely short novel, and as a free download, would serve as a terrific introduction to the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

We Visit Barnes & Noble

When your correspondent lived on the Upper West Side of New York, one of the happiest places on earth was the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble.  Many an hour (and many the dollar) was spent there in satisfied bliss.  Few things are more wonderful than browsing the stacks of a major bookstore, discovering new authors, or finding books by already beloved names. 

Being Barnes & Noble, there was also an extensive remainder section, for those interested in cheap books (and who isn’t?), as well as one of the most elaborate children’s books sections in the city.  What bliss.

Sadly, that Barnes & Noble was closed to make way for a Century 21, a clothing store.  Sigh.  I suppose we must have clothes, too, but they are a poor substitute for books.  (Indeed, one must be careful before some entrepreneur creates wearable books…)

After moving uptown – aesthetically and culturally the greatest mistake of your correspondent’s life – bookstores became scarcer.  It was only by zipping through other parts of town that I could dip into the Union Square Barnes & Noble, or, better still, Books of Wonder in the West Village or the Strand in the East.  (Both stores should be consecrated, and rest on hallowed ground.)  So, it was with a great deal of anticipation that we prepared to head to the Barnes & Noble on West 82^nd to hear a talk presented by the authors Grand Opera: The Story of the Met.  The presentation was wonderful.  Sadly, the bookstore was not.

Though I am willing to admit that I am cranky and out of touch, I was amazed at how bookstores have morphed and degraded into high-end junk shops.  Don’t believe me?  Well, there on the parlor level of what is now, probably, the flagship B&N store, book-buyers can select Batman, Superman or Green Lantern figures.  Fortunately, Dickens doesn’t take up too much space.

Nearby, there are rows upon rows of Party Games.  Beyond that, Jigsaw Puzzles.  Standing silent sentinel in a center aisle are Star Wars light sabers and Dr. Who toys.  Not to mention a whole section of This Season’s Must-Play Games.

The café on the top floor does a brisk business, and yards of space has been cleared away to make room for a Nook kiosk, to sell the Barnes & Noble Kindle knockoff. 

And room for actual books shrinks…

I know that the book world has changed, and that the Internet and books to download have altered the landscape forever.  Bibliophiles and aesthetes are a dying breed, and New York’s book-culture is a shadow of its former self.  (New York was once the epicenter of the book world; no such place exists any longer.)  But we here at the Jade Sphinx are always too well aware of what we lose with every technological gain.  And the death of the hard-copy book trade – which was, for all intents and purposes, just abandoned by both the industry and book-buyers – may be a cultural and intellectual blow from which we may never recover.

While I love Manybooks.net (and own two Kindle devices), there is less serendipity book-shopping online than there is in a physical bookstore.  How many readers have browsed through the stacks only to find just the ‘right’ book ‘magically’ fall into their hands?  Or, have run into authors, neighbors or other interesting people?  (Two of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in bookstores were with actors David Warner and Richard Thomas, both of whom I ran into at the now-gone Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble.)  Or make a realization paging through a random volume that left shockwaves rippling through life for years to come?

Better yet, who does not get a thrill running a hand over a new book, holding it close and inhaling its heady ink and new binding smell?  Or marveling at brightly colored illustrations in a new children’s book?  Or just being surrounded by books – a sensation both sensual and homey.

Geraldine Brooks wrote:  for to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.  As the once-great bookstores of our once-great cities recede before dwindling away completely, can the same be said for our minds?

The Pagan Papers, by Kenneth Grahame (1893)

Regular visitors to The Jade Sphinx know of our love for children’s literature.  Few figures of the field loom larger than Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), author of Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the great classics of the field.

Readers familiar with Wind know that it chronicles the adventures of Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad along the banks of the river.  Rat and Mole are often contentedly picnicking along the riverbank, simply “messing around in boats.”  Badger’s spacious underground abode provides comfort, books and plentiful food.  It is a perfectly sexless idealization of ease and creature comforts.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the recurring themes in Grahame’s oeuvre is that of escape.  Like many of the great children’s authors, Grahame had an ambivalent attitude towards adulthood and its concomitant responsibilities.

Poor Grahame had a tumultuous life.  He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His mother died when he was five, and his alcoholic father gave young Kenneth and his brothers and sister to the children’s grandmother, in Cookham in Berkshire.  Grahame loved the countryside there, and it was there that he was introduced to the pleasures of boating.  These years in Cookham would be remembered as the happiest of his life.

Following his years at St. Edward’s School in Oxford, Grahame wanted to attend Oxford University.  He could not do so, his guardians claiming that it was too expensive.  Instead, this sensitive and introverted boy was sent to work at the Bank of England in 1879, where he rose through the ranks until retiring as its Secretary in 1908.  The reason for his retirement was that an anarchist broke into the bank and shot at Grahame three times, missing each shot.  The incident forever shattered his nerves; he would move back to the country in an effort to find peace.

Grahame published his first book, The Pagan Papers, in 1893.  He would follow this with his first two great novels about children, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898).  He would not write again until after marrying Elspeth Thomson in 1899.  They had one child, a son named Alastair (nicknamed Mouse), born blind in one eye and plagued by various mental problems.  Grahame would tell Mouse stories about the woodland denizens around them.  These stories would eventually morph into Wind in the Willows.

Sadly, the stories provided only a limited amount of succor to Alastair, who would commit suicide by lying on a railway track two days before his 20^th birthday.

The Pagan Papers is a collection of essays on the general theme of escape.  It has little (or nothing) to do with paganism as is understood today; actually, it was a long mediation on the invasive and horrifying transformations brought about by the machine age, and extolls the virtues of long country walks, rivers, the countryside, and welcoming pubs.

While the tone varies wildly from piece to piece, what is unmistakable is that the book is suffused with a powerful emotion, a particularly English yearning produced by the countryside.  Again and again Grahame urges pastoral escape, transgression against an increasingly urban system, and recognition of the genius of remote places, often represented in pagan figures like Pan.  That these essays were written by a man in the stranglehold of a formal job, distant from his beloved countryside, should come as no surprise.

This reader found many of the passages moving.  This is from his essay in favor of loafing and idleness:

When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest, realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures than the other — that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others, the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

Here is another, in a more puckish vein: In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our happier fathers were free … 'Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner that is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom stimulus. To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness: why not try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch — for every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done; the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town; these new pleasures — these and their like — would furnish just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired worker.

My favorite passage, though, has to do with his friendship with a wandering painter – it is a view of freedom that resonates strongly with anyone in a restrictive job:  This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and other artists' materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he wanted to.

He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the merest accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for a long ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his vesper pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short grass beside him. He greeted me without surprise or effusion, as if we had only parted yesterday, and without a hint of an allusion to past times, but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last three years, and, without ever telling his story right out, left a strange picturesque impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life still lingered on in places, it seemed, once one got well away from the railway: there were two Englands existing together, the one fringing the great iron highways wherever they might go — the England under the eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as of old: the England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes and village-greens — the England of Parson Adams and Lavengro. The spell of the free untrammelled life came over me as I listened, till I was fain to accept of his hospitality and a horse-blanket for the night, oblivious of civilised comforts down at the Bull. On the downs where Alfred fought we lay and smoked, gazing up at the quiet stars that had shone on many a Dane lying stark and still a thousand years ago; and in the silence of the lone tract that enfolded us we seemed nearer to those old times than to these I had left that afternoon, in the now hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames.

This is a wise and wonderfully wistful book.  It is available at the indispensable Manybooks.net, and comes highly recommended.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford (1915)

My taste for literary Modernism has always been fluid, at best, so I have always had some reluctance in approaching the work of Ford Maddox Ford (1873-1939).  A man of formidable and varied talents – novelist, poet, critic, editor – Ford was also a literary Impressionist; employing out-of-sequence storytelling, unreliable narrators, and conflicting recollections.  Not my literary line of country at all, but when The Good Solider (1915) was given to me as a gift this Christmas, I knew it was time to take the plunge.

This was a fortuitous present indeed!  Ford considered The Good Soldier to be his masterpiece, and it is certainly one of the finest novels I’ve read in years.  It is available at Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net, as well as in a handsome Barnes & Noble edition.

In other hands, The Good Solider would descent into simple melodrama.  But Ford carefully structures his tale as a series of reminiscences told by John Dowell; a rambling narrative told to an imaginary audience beside an imaginary fireplace.  It concerns Dowell and his wife, Florence, and their friends, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham.  The tale ends with two suicides and one descent into madness – and yet, our narrator says it’s the saddest tale he’s ever heard, as if he, himself, were not a player in the events.

In short, Edward Ashburnham is a career solider during the waning days of Empire.  He is in a marriage of convenience with Leonora; while spending their winters abroad they meet American couple John and Florence Dowell.  Florence and Edward become lovers, while Leonora struggles to maintain some stability in their lives and John slowly falls in love with Nancy Rufford, the young ward of the Ashburnhams.

Because the novel is nonlinear, both the story and the true nature of its characters are gradually revealed.  This structure does not allow for surprises in the plot – but it is wonderful for surprises in character.  Ford is the master of the gradual reveal, and by the midpoint of The Good Solider, we have to rethink our opinions of all the major characters.

Take Edward, for instance.  Dowell repeatedly calls him a “sentimentalist,” but what he really means is that Ashburnham is a Romantic.  He is a heroic soldier, a charitable landlord, a stolid friend, life-saving sailor, capable horseman and a considerate squire.  He is a figure out of Sabatini or Dumas, and if he was a character in a film, he would be all Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  But – and this is the overall point of the novel, and perhaps Ford’s overarching worldview, as well – the world is not a Romantic place. 

Ashburnham is quite a bad husband, and in a world of bland and mundane reality, that is enough to ruin him.  In the construct of a realist novel (and in the real world), a figure like Ashburnham could not, must not, function successfully, and therefore ceases to exist.  This tension is the fulcrum upon which the novel rests – Ford is writing about the antagonism between romance and stark reality, or, perhaps more pointedly, the encroaching modern world.

The Good Solider is a prototypical Modern novel in that it is about the triumph of Anti-Romantic sentiment.  By offering Edmund (and, later, Nancy) as a sacrifice on the alter of middle-class respectability, it distinctly draws the line between two conflicting worldviews.

The Good Solider is also a profoundly “Catholic” novel: it deals with guilt, expiation and penance.  Ford was a convert to Catholicism, but it seems as if inwardly he remained doubtful and unconvinced.

Ford also has a very interesting view of women – one that is perhaps more true, though less politically correct, to posit today.  To Ford, form and function are more important than passion and love; and all the women in this novel are ultimately calculating.  Here is Ford writing on Leonora after the death of Edward and her subsequent remarriage:  They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal; they were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the girl—though Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances—for Mr Rodney Bayham, who will keep a separate establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.

It was difficult for your correspondent not to sympathize with Edward – and I found myself often uncomfortably nodding in self-recognition.  (Sadly, though, not at the parts of his effortless heroism.)  Edward is a displaced person in time.  His tragedy is that dull reality was allowed to kill his sense of romance, and this this sense of romance gave him no alternative other than suicide.

The Good Solider is gripping, chilling and profoundly moving.  Ford’s genius is that the final line of the novel puts the entire story in perspective, and provides the final insight into the characters that we need.  It is a tour de force and highly recommended.

Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan, by Clement A. Miles (1913)

No one who is seriously interested in Christmas can afford to overlook this cornerstone book by Clement A. Miles, first published in 1913.  Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan is a remarkable read for the folklorist, the casual Christmas buff, or the historian.

Miles traces mid-winter festivals that date back to our most ancient times, and shows how ascendant Christianity took the traditions, motifs and sentiments of these celebrations and melded them into the splendid Christian holiday that resonates today.  I quickly point out here that Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan is not a revisionist, anti-Christian work; rather, this is the deeply detailed and researched work of a folklorist who looks at the many parts of our contemporary Christmas and traces them back to their earliest roots.  It is fascinating.

Miles spends some time in his explication of the three traditions of Christmas – Christmas, Noel and Yule – and then reveals the origins of many beloved Christmas traditions, including the Christmas tree, carols, the Yule log, feasting and various games still played around the holiday hearth.

Sadly, your correspondent has not been able to learn much about Miles.  He died on February 2^nd, 1918 at only 37 years of age.  He was a member of the Folk-Lore Society, and had for many years been on T. Fisher Unwin’s literary staff.  Miles also worked for the Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee, and possessed a wide knowledge of European languages, translated Sabatier’s Modernism and other works from the French, and was co-translator from the Italian of Gayda’s Modern Austria: Her Racial and Social Problems. His early death was clearly a great loss to anyone interested in history or folklore.

Here is a quote from Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan that best provides a bit of the flavor of the book:

Before we pass on to the pagan aspects of Christmas, let us gather up our thoughts in an attempt to realize the peculiar appeal of the Feast of the Nativity, as it has been felt in the past, as it is felt to-day even by moderns who have no belief in the historical truth of the story it commemorates.

This appeal of Christmas seems to lie in the union of two modes of feeling which may be called the carol spirit and the mystical spirit. The carol spirit—by this we may understand the simple, human joyousness, the tender and graceful imagination, the kindly, intimate affection, which have gathered round the cradle of the Christ Child. The folk-tune, the secular song adapted to a sacred theme—such is the carol. What a sense of kindliness, not of sentimentality, but of genuine human feeling, these old songs give us, as though the folk who first sang them were more truly comrades, more closely knit together than we under modern industrialism.

One element in the carol spirit is the rustic note that finds its sanction as regards Christmas in St. Luke's story of the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. One thinks of the stillness over the fields, of the hinds with their rough talk, “simply chatting in a rustic row,” of the keen air, and the great burst of light and song that dazes their simple wits, of their journey to Bethlehem where “the heaven-born Child all meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies,” of the ox and ass linking the beasts of the field to the Christmas adoration of mankind.

For many people, indeed, the charm of Christmas is inseparably associated with the country; it is lost in London—the city is too vast, too modern, too sophisticated. It is bound up with the thought of frosty fields, of bells heard far away, of bare trees against the starlit sky, of carols sung not by trained choirs but by rustic folk with rough accent, irregular time, and tunes learnt by ear and not by book.

Again, without the idea of winter half the charm of Christmas would be gone. Transplanted in the imagination of western Christendom from an undefined season in the hot East to Europe at midwinter, the Nativity scenes have taken on a new pathos with the thought of the bitter cold to which the great Little One lay exposed in the rough stable, with the contrast between the cold and darkness of the night and the fire of love veiled beneath that infant form. Lux in tenebris is one of the strongest notes of Christmas: in the bleak midwinter a light shines through the darkness; when all is cold and gloom, the sky bursts into splendour, and in the dark cave is born the Light of the World.

There is the idea of royalty too, with all it stands for of colour and magnificence, though not so much in literature as in painting is this side of the Christmas story represented. The Epiphany is the great opportunity for imaginative development of the regal idea. Then is seen the union of utter poverty with highest kingship; the monarchs of the East come to bow before the humble Infant for whom the world has found no room in the inn. How suggestive by their long, slow syllables are the Italian names of the Magi. Gasparre, Baldassarre, Melchiorre—we picture Oriental monarchs in robes mysteriously gorgeous, wrought with strange patterns, heavy with gold and precious stones. With slow processional motion they advance, bearing to the King of Kings their symbolic gifts, gold for His crowning, incense for His worship, myrrh for His mortality, and with them come the mystery, colour, and perfume of the East, the occult wisdom which bows itself before the revelation in the Child.

Above all, as the foregoing pages have shown, it is the childhood of the Redeemer that has won the heart of Europe for Christmas; it is the appeal to the parental instinct, the love for the tender, weak, helpless, yet all-potential babe, that has given the Church's festival its strongest hold. And this side of Christmas is penetrated often by the mystical spirit—that sense of the Infinite in the finite without which the highest human life is impossible.

The feeling for Christmas varies from mere delight in the Christ Child as a representative symbol on which to lavish affection, as a child delights in a doll, to the mystical philosophy of Eckhart, in whose Christmas sermons the Nativity is viewed as a type of the Birth of God in the depths of man's being. Yet even the least spiritual forms of the cult of the Child are seldom without some hint of the supersensual, the Infinite, and even in Eckhart there is a love of concrete symbolism. Christmas stands peculiarly for the sacramental principle that the outward and visible is a sign and shadow of the inward and spiritual. It means the seeing of common, earthly things shot through by the glory of the Infinite. “Its note,” as has been said of a stage of the mystic consciousness, the Illuminative Way, “is sacramental not ascetic. It entails ... the discovery of the Perfect One ablaze in the Many, not the forsaking of the Many in order to find the One ... an ineffable radiance, a beauty and a reality never before suspected, are perceived by a sort of clairvoyance shining in the meanest things.” Christmas is the festival of the Divine Immanence, and it is natural that it should have been beloved by the saint and mystic whose life was the supreme manifestation of the Via Illuminativa, Francis of Assisi.

Christmas is the most human and lovable of the Church's feasts. Easter and Ascensiontide speak of the rising and exaltation of a glorious being, clothed in a spiritual body refined beyond all comparison with our natural flesh; Whitsuntide tells of the coming of a mysterious, intangible Power—like the wind, we cannot tell whence It cometh and whither It goeth; Trinity offers for contemplation an ineffable paradox of Pure Being. But the God of Christmas is no ethereal form, no mere spiritual essence, but a very human child, feeling the cold and the roughness of the straw, needing to be warmed and fed and cherished. Christmas is the festival of the natural body, of this world; it means the consecration of the ordinary things of life, affection and comradeship, eating and drinking and merrymaking; and in some degree the memory of the Incarnation has been able to blend with the pagan joyance of the New Year.

Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan is available at Project Gutenberg, and the invaluable www.ManyBooks.net.  It is essential reading for Christmas.

On a Chinese Screen, by William Somerset Maugham (1922)

We have made little secret here at The Jade Sphinx of our love for writer William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965).  Maugham was a great literary artist and a rare one – often his books are related in first-person narration, but the point-of-view is seldom intrusive or misleading.  Maugham had the gift of being everywhere and nowhere; equally at home in a native hut in Burma as at a London society party.  Having earned a medical degree but never practicing medicine, Maugham cast a cold, clinical eye on human behavior, and mercilessly robbed us of our pretentions and affectations.  His is a voice that is missed.

Maugham’s biography makes that of overly macho writers like Hemmingway pale by comparison: world traveler, espionage agent, playwright, art collector, literary stylist.  Maugham travelled long enough and far enough to make Indiana Jones envious, and he used his wide experience as the basis of several of his most successful novels, including The Razor’s Edge (1944) and The Moon and Sixpence (1919).  For those who long for a world that is still exotic, or yearn for places before they were spoiled by fast-food chains and American consumer culture, a diet of Maugham is just what the doctor ordered.

In the winter of 1919, Maugham travelled 1,500 miles up the Yangtze River.  While on the road, Maugham noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper, gathering them together for publication in 1922 under the title On a Chinese Screen.  These scraps include views of Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilization.  With his typical precision, Maugham sheds light on the most vulnerable parts of their lives.

On a Chinese Screen is, in many ways, the perfect summer book.  There is no through narrative, and most of the ‘chapters’ run no more than a few paragraphs.  It is the perfect book for dipping or gobbling up – the vignettes that Maugham parades before us are mesmerizing.  Reading more like the rough notes of never-realized novels or short stories, the scraps in On a Chinese Screen will resonate in your memory much longer than more sustained and fully-crafted narratives.

Here, for example, is Maugham (celebrated playwright!) talking with a Chinese professor who has studied English theater:  "Does it require no more than that to write a play?" he inquired with a shade of dismay in his tone.

"You want a certain knack," I allowed, "but no more than to play billiards."

"They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America," said he.

"The Americans are an extremely practical people," I answered. "I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs."

"I do not think I quite understand you."

"If you can't write a play no one can teach you and if you can it's as easy as falling off a log."

Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

"But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?"

"They didn't, you know. Lope de la Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush."

"You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play."

"It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last in despair used the very same that he had used before."

"What do you mean?" the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream. "I do not understand you at all."

"Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, then some one comes (from the mountains or from over the sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets a cold in the head and the curtain falls."

Or, better yet, here is Maugham, on a Chinese junk, thinking about the nature of adventure and romance.  This passage, perhaps more than ever, parses closest to the center of the Maugham persona, and provides a greater understanding of the sustained sense of living he sought abroad:  Then suddenly I had a feeling that here, facing me, touching me almost, was the romance I sought. It was a feeling like no other, just as specific as the thrill of art; but I could not for the life of me tell what it was that had given me just then that rare emotion.

In the course of my life I have been often in situations which, had I read of them, would have seemed to me sufficiently romantic; but it is only in retrospect, comparing them with my ideas of what was romantic, that I have seen them as at all out of the ordinary. It is only by an effort of the imagination, making myself as it were a spectator of myself acting a part, that I have caught anything of the precious quality in circumstances which in others would have seemed to me instinct with its fine flower. When I have danced with an actress whose fascination and whose genius made her the idol of my country, or wandered through the halls of some great house in which was gathered all that was distinguished by lineage or intellect that London could show, I have only recognized afterwards that here perhaps, though in somewhat Ouidaesque a fashion, was romance.

In battle, when, myself in no great danger, I was able to watch events with a thrill of interest, I had not the phlegm to assume the part of a spectator. I have sailed through the night, under the full moon, to a coral island in the Pacific, and then the beauty and the wonder of the scene gave me a conscious happiness, but only later the exhilarating sense that romance and I had touched fingers. I heard the flutter of its wings when once, in the bedroom of a hotel in New York, I sat round a table with half a dozen others and made plans to restore an ancient kingdom whose wrongs have for a century inspired the poet and the patriot ; but my chief feeling was a surprised amusement that through the hazards of war I found myself engaged in business so foreign to my bent. The authentic thrill of romance has seized me under circumstances which one would have thought far less romantic, and I remember that I knew it first one evening when I was playing cards in a cottage on the coast of Brittany. In the next room an old fisherman lay dying and the women of the house said that he would go out with the tide. Without a storm was raging and it seemed fit for the last moments of that aged warrior of the seas that his going should be accompanied by the wild cries of the wind as it hurled itself against the shuttered windows. The waves thundered upon the tortured rocks. I felt a sudden exultation, for I knew that here was romance.

And now the same exultation seized me, and once more romance, like a bodily presence, was before me. But it had come so unexpectedly that I was intrigued. I could not tell whether it had crept in among the shadows that the lamp threw on the bamboo matting or whether it was wafted down the river that I saw through the opening of my cabin. Curious to know what were the elements that made up the ineffable delight of the moment I went out to the stern of the boat. Alongside were moored half a dozen junks, going up river, for their masts were erect; and everything was silent in them. Their crews were long since asleep. The night was not dark, for though it was cloudy the moon was full, but the river in that veiled light was ghostly. A vague mist blurred the trees on the further bank. It was an enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I sought was not there. I turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter the magic which had given it so extraordinary a character was gone. Alas, I was like a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in what its beauty lay. And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his face a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my little cabin, my dish of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about them something of the thrill which for a moment was mine. I could not see them any more quite indifferently, because for a moment I had seen them magically.

On a Chinese Screen is available for free download at the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  This is the perfect book with which to beguile the closing days of summer.

All Things Considered, by G. K. Chesterton

Not many people today remember Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (1874 – 1936) outside of his delightful Father Brown detective stories.  This is a shame, because Chesterton was also one of the outstanding critics and thinkers of his age.  It has been argued that we are all born with a natural sense of wonder, but that by age 13 or so it is beaten, combed and prayed out of us.  Chesterton never lost that childlike innocence and clarity, and mixed that sensibility with a gargantuan intellect.  To read Chesterton on Dickens or Shakespeare, for example, is to see these writers anew, as if some profound truth were staring us in the face and it took a little boy to point it out.

Gargantuan was perhaps the perfect word for Chesterton in other respects.  He was simply enormous, both tall and hideously corpulent.  He wore a broad-brimmed slouch hat and cape, and often carried a sword cane.  Of such figures legends are made, and Chesterton, the man himself, influenced writers who converted the easily recognizable figure into a string of fictional characters.  (Most notably amateur detective Dr. Gideon Fell, created by author John Dickson Carr.)

Chesterton’s political thinking was fairly close to that of your correspondent, writing that the whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.  Hauntingly prescient to 2013 America.  I have been reading a great deal of Chesterton latterly and have found him a balm for a somewhat bruised soul. 

Chesterton was also a journalist, and writing for the London Daily News.  His 1915 book All Things Considered features more than 30 columns on a variety of different subjects.  Leaving few stones unturned, Chesterton writes about daily annoyances, on literature, on missing trains, on Modernism … Chesterton wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, and this is, understandably, the smallest sampling.  Anyone interested in learning more about this fascinating man should look at his newspaper columns while also reading his many novels and books of sustained criticism.

In the introduction, Chesterton writes This is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current subjects for it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks.  So, yes, many of the bugaboos and cultural concerns are outdated, but the refreshing take on reality and the authorial voice remain magnificent.

Here are some quotes:

But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is rally the matter with modernism.  The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness.  It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly “in the know.”  To flaunt the fact that we have had the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris.  To introduce into philosophical discussion a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age.  It is caddish because it is irrelevant.  The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot stand to be one month behind fashion.

Here’s something quite terrific: They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.

On reformers: It is a fact that optimists are more practical reformers than pessimists. Superficially, one would imagine that the railer would be a reformer; that the man who thought everything was wrong would be the man to put everything right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better… It is because the optimist can look at wrong not only with indignation, but with startled indignation… The pessimist can be enraged at wrong, but only the optimist can be startled [enough to want to change it].

On Shakespeare: Nobody could say that a statue of Shakespeare, even fifty feet high, on top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, could define Shakespeare’s position. It only defines our position towards Shakespeare. It is he who is fixed. It is we who are unstable.

Like much of Chesterton’s criticism, this book is available for free on www.manybooks.net.  It is an invaluable site for bibliophiles.

Rereading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I think that there are certain novels that must be read at multiple ages.  David Copperfield – Charles Dickens’ autobiographical novel of 1850 – is a very different book to a 22-year old than it is to someone approaching his dotage.  As I am in that enviable (or unenviable) season of life, I find it to be so different from my recollections as to be a new book entirely.

It’s not that I have misremembered the incidents of the novel, but, rather, the emotional tenor.  No one has written about children for adults as well as Charles Dickens, and the further one is removed from childhood, the more resonant and moving a book like Copperfield is.

Dickens writes childhood the way that it is lived – often clouded in ignorance through inexperience, and quaking in terror or crying in pain.  David often thinks smiling villains are the kindest of people; he is robbed and taken-advantage-of by unscrupulous older boys and adults, and mystified by the actions of several people actually striving to do him good.  When I think back to my own childhood, I realize how much of it was experienced through a miasma of misinformation, misconception and miscalculation.  Dickens realized that children are a race separate from adults – and the notion that adults always behave well towards children a polite fiction.  All too often, children live in a world of giants indifferent to the pain they cause smaller people.

Another thing that strikes me is how I now chuckle at the notion that Dickens was an “optimistic” writer.  Though the book is suffused with love and good feeling, hominess and tender nostalgia, it is also a hard-headed book that lays bare man’s inhumanity to man.  David is beaten by the stepfather Mr. Murdstone, criminally ignored by his own mother, abused at school and essentially sold into drudgery.  These events ran past my eye during my initial reading more than 20 years ago as I savored the sweet parts with Mr. Dick or the comedy of Mr. Macawber; today, I can’t help but read them with a shudder of horror.  The pain of the authorial voice – the tale is told by the now-adult David, standing in for Dickens himself – is all to clear and often intolerable to bear.  In other words, I read the book when I was younger and thought the world a wonderful place with harsh moments; I now know it to be a harsh world with wonderful moments.

Dickens often said that Copperfield was the favorite of his novels and it’s easy to see why.  The novel most like it would be Nicholas Nickleby (1839).  Like Copperfield, Nickleby is filled with memorable (and sometimes grotesque) characters.  However, Nickleby himself is a nonentity; he is the excuse to parade a series of memorable character turns like Vincent Crummles and Smike.  Copperfield, however, is as fully-rounded a character as his supporting gallery; and I think the time-worn truism that Copperfield=Dickens is correct.  The novel may not be strict autobiography, but as a man’s picture of his own interior, emotional self, it consistently rings true.

Finally, the thing that strikes me is the warmth of Dickens, the man.  He is a man of uniformly good humor – he feels fully the pain of past experiences and wrongs, but his own emotional chemistry makes it impossible for him to be depressed or sad for long.  On top of that, he is a man who must have his little joke; he can’t help it.  Often, while describing the most horrific incident, Dickens-as-David tosses in a casual aside that lets us know that he see the funny part of the human comedy.  Here, for example, is the wretched David after walking cross country to find his Aunt, Betsey Trotwood:

My aunt, with every sort of expression but wonder discharged from her countenance, sat on the gravel, staring at me, until I began to cry; when she got up in a great hurry, collared me, and took me into the parlour. Her first proceeding there was to unlock a tall press, bring out several bottles, and pour some of the contents of each into my mouth. I think they must have been taken out at random, for I am sure I tasted aniseed water, anchovy sauce, and salad dressing. When she had administered these restoratives, as I was still quite hysterical, and unable to control my sobs, she put me on the sofa, with a shawl under my head, and the handkerchief from her own head under my feet, lest I should sully the cover; and then, sitting herself down behind the green fan or screen I have already mentioned, so that I could not see her face, ejaculated at intervals, 'Mercy on us!' letting those exclamations off like minute guns.

I think it is this – the emotional stability and high spirits of Dickens himself – that has been the essential part of his enduring popularity, and the main reason he is so beloved by readers.  First class minds are fairly common, but first class temperaments are nothing short of miraculous.

The Hero By William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) has fallen out of fashion today and that’s a great shame: there are few writers of such clarity of prose and consistency of vision who are also so eminently enjoyable to read.  He also wrote of the people he knew; people who, for today’s world, are increasingly irrelevant.  His is a vanished world of the English living abroad in a developing world, or of the complacent English at home wracked by an intruding outside world. 

Maugham lived a life as exciting and varied as any of that of his heroes.  He was an inveterate traveler and addicted to romance; his stories usually have a kernel of truth, often something he heard while aboard ship, over a game of bridge, or in some distant outpost of the Empire.  Many of his short stories are little better than detailed anecdotes, but the majority of his novels have a distinct power, commanding a clear-eyed (and often cynical) view of humanity and a sense of narrative sweep.  He is a writer to be savored, read and re-read.

It was with a great deal of anticipation that I recently approached The Hero, his novel from 1901.  It is available for free at the invaluable www.ManyBooks.net, and comes highly recommended.

The finished book was a huge disappointment both critically and commercially for Maugham.  It did not enjoy a second printing in the UK, and did not receive US publication until decades later.  It is a stunning indictment of small time mores and morals, and the small-mindedness that seems to be second nature with habitual do-gooders.  Readers were unhappy with Maugham’s social satire and blistering criticism, and reacted accordingly.  (Oddly enough, The Hero was the first book in which Maugham used the Moorish symbol on the cover that would become associated with him for most of the 20^th Century – used, ironically, for luck.  The writer would have to wait for better luck next time.)

The story is a tale of the Boer War and its aftermath.  Young Jamie Parsons received the Victoria Cross for bravery in the Transvaal for his failed attempt to save the life of Reginald Larcher.  Now a celebrated war hero, he returns home to the small town of Little Primpton, Kent.  He is met with a parade and speeches, as well as by his father and mother, the devout Colonel Richmond and Frances Parsons.  Jamie’s bravery is a particular boon to the Colonel – a deeply Christian man, the Colonel was responsible for the loss of his regiment after he showed mercy to the enemy, and was repaid with a surprise attack.

Also waiting at Little Primpton is Mary Clibborn, his fiancée.  She is an extremely tedious person – constantly doing ‘good’ with little or no regard for the recipients of her largesse, or any understanding of the real world outside of the homilies of provincial religious primers.

The worst part of it all is that Jamie has come back to Little Primpton a changed man.  After his experiences in the wider world – including war, death and a flirtation with a brother-officer’s wife – Jamie no longer fits into the way of life nor the mindset of this little backwater.  When Jamie decides to end his engagement to Mary, the town – led mostly by the parson and his wife – exact revenge.

One of the chief joys of The Hero is watching Maugham deflate the small-town sanctimony of many of the characters.  Here his ruthless in his summation of his world.  Here he is on the state of England at the time (and he could have been writing about America today):

James had been away from England for five years; and in that time a curious change, long silently proceeding, had made itself openly felt—becoming manifest, like an insidious disease, only when every limb and every organ were infected. A new spirit had been in action, eating into the foundations of the national character; it worked through the masses of the great cities, unnerved by the three poisons of drink, the Salvation Army, and popular journalism. A mighty force of hysteria and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population was affected; the current literature of the day flourished upon it; the people of England, neurotic from the stress of the last sixty years, became unstable as water. And with the petty reverses of the beginning of the war, the last barriers of shame were broken down; their arrogance was dissipated, and suddenly the English became timorous as a conquered nation, deprecating, apologetic; like frightened women, they ran to and fro, wringing their hands. Reserve, restraint, self-possession, were swept away ... And now we are frankly emotional; reeds tottering in the wind, our boast is that we are not even reeds that think; we cry out for idols. Who is there that will set up a golden ass that we may fall down and worship? We glory in our shame, in our swelling hearts, in our eyes heavy with tears. We want sympathy at all costs; we run about showing our bleeding vitals, asking one another whether they are not indeed a horrible sight. Englishmen now are proud of being womanish, and nothing is more manly than to weep. To be a man of feeling is better than to be a gentleman—it is certainly much easier. The halt of mind, the maim, the blind of wit, have come by their own; and the poor in spirit have inherited the earth.

James had left England when this emotional state was contemptible. Found chiefly in the dregs of the populace, it was ascribed to ignorance and to the abuse of stimulants. When he returned, it had the public conscience behind it. He could not understand the change. The persons he had known sober, equal-minded, and restrained, now seemed violently hysterical. James still shuddered, remembering the curate's allusions to his engagement; and he wondered that Mary, far from thinking them impertinent, had been vastly gratified. She seemed to take pleasure in publicly advertising her connection, in giving her private affairs to the inspection of all and sundry. The whole ceremony had been revolting; he loathed the adulation and the fulsome sentiment. His own emotions seemed vulgar now that he had been forced to display them to the gaping crowd.

The Hero is highly recommended, though I fear that the people who should read it (small town America) will not.  Its sour overview of empty-headed churchmen and interfering blue-noses is as needed today as it was in 1901 … and would probably be just as popular.

Beasley’s Christmas Party, by Booth Tarkington

 

It is both amazing and sad to your correspondent that American novelist Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) is so little read (and regarded!) today.  Tarkington had a distinctly American voice – a distinctly Midwestern voice – that resonated with turn-of-the-century America in a deep and profound way.  He is one of only three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once – but today he is remembered chiefly for The Magnificent Ambersons, which was turned into a now-highly regarded film in 1942 by Orson Welles.

Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and would eventually graduate from the prestigious Exeter Academy, Purdue University and, ultimately, Princeton.  He came from extremely well-to-do people, but the family lost money during the Panic of 1873 – though eventually they would recoup much of their fortune.  It was this up-and-down experience that would later influence his 1918 novel Ambersons.

It is amazing that a man called “the most significant contemporary American author” by Publisher’s Weekly in 1921 should be so little remembered today.  Perhaps his reputation was usurped by fellow Princeton graduate F. Scott Fitzgerald, a critical assessment that baffles your correspondent as Tarkington is the better writer with the more distinctive voice.  Perhaps it is the sense of wistful nostalgia, a sense of sweetness that makes Tarkington so unpalatable today; his lack of irony and cynicism is distinctly unfashionable in academic circles.

Christmas, and its ability to transform a diverse spectrum of men, was of particular interest to Tarkington, and he wrote of the holiday more than once.  He wrote the novella Beasley’s Christmas Party in 1909, and it was later dramatized by C. W. Munger.  It is available for free at Project Gutenberg or ManyBooks.net, and is heartily recommended for holiday reading.

The story concerns a journalist who moves to the all-American town of Wainwright, where he befriends Mr. Beasley, a local politician who is sure to run for governor and win.  However, Beasley has taken to talking with imaginary people, and when his political enemies learn this, they dragoon the reporter to witness this eccentricity and report upon it.  The resolution provides wonderful satisfaction, and perhaps not a little envy at political malice so easily erased.

Here is a taste of Tarkington’s prose: It might be difficult to say why I thought it was the “finest” house in Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain, set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair spread of flat lawn.  But it gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some people do.  It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it.  Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old fashioned people living there, who would welcome you merrily.

It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be on the table often; where on called “the hired man” (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his keens on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful – and that is about as near as I can come to my reason for thinking it is the finest house in Wainwright.

It is a perfect house, in fact, in which to spend some reading time this Christmas.

The Heart of the Sunset by Rex Beach

Author Rex Beach

Our fathers used to like that sort of piece, I believe.  The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.  – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Few things can gladden the heart more than reading the over-ripe melodrama of our grandparents.  One master of this form was novelist Rex Beach (1877 – 1949), who was also a playwright and Olympic water polo player.  His most famous novel is undoubtedly The Spoilers, written in 1906.  It is one of those gloriously sprawling potboilers detailing the taming of Alaska, complete with miners, prospectors and corrupt government officials.  (Alas, Sarah Palin is nothing new…)  The Spoilers was adapted for the movies at least five times, the lead played by both Gary Cooper and John Wayne in different versions.  His 1909 opus The Silver Horde (another Alaska story) was twice adapted for movies, once starring Joel McCrea.

Beach came to his adventure tales honestly.  He was born in Atwood, Michigan to a prominent family and was a successful lawyer before he succumbed to gold fever and went to Alaska for the Klondike Gold Rush.  He turned to writing after the failure of his prospecting plans – only to find gold of another kind with a wildly successful writing career.  He knocked out novels and plays, along with producing the odd film-adaptation of his own work, and became quite a rich man.  In 1949, two years after the death of his wife Edith, Beach committed suicide in Florida at the age of 71. In 2005, when the home Beach lived in was remodeled, a bullet was found in the wall, believed to be the bullet that killed him. 

The book which concerns us today is Heart of the Sunset, which first saw the light of day in 1915.  Like many forgotten treasures, Heart is available for free download at Amazon.com to your Kindle, or from the invaluable manybooks.net for the e-reader of your choice.  (A quick word about manybooks.net: if you’re a serious book-lover and own an e-reader, this is a gold mine of quite another sort.  Upon receiving my first Kindle, your correspondent was able to download some 300 of his favorite books in minutes, and now carries them with him everyplace.)

Heart of the West is not … good. It is, in fact, terrible in that delicious way that only vintage potboilers can be.  Heart does not take place in Beach’s accustomed Northern setting; indeed, the action surrounds the people of Texas and Mexico during the tensions of the time, and our heroes cross the Rio Grande several times.

Heart tells the story of Dave Law, a square-jawed he-man Texas Ranger with an uncanny gift of talking to horses.  Law is tracking down a group of bad men who are dealing with Mexican revolutionaries, led by the evil Gen. Longorio.  Longorio is a wonderful creation: a vicious and brutal egomaniac who is nearly tamed by love of the beautiful and virtuous Alaire – who also loves (and is loved by) Law.  Unfortunately, Alaire is married, at the moment, to one of the men who Law is currently hunting.

Oh … and there is one additional complication.  Insanity runs through Law’s family, and the quick-tempered lawman is afraid that he too, will one day go mad.  But … was he adopted?

Law may make a credible hero in 1915, but he is perhaps a tad too brutal for modern readers.  Capturing one of Longorio’s henchmen, he tortures him for information.  Here’s a glimpse of Beach’s breathless prose:

Seizing the amazed Mexican, Dave flung him upon Morales’s hard board bed, and in spite of the fellow’s struggles deftly made him fast.  When he had finished –and it was no easy job – Jose lay “spread eagled” upon his back, his wrists and ankles firmly bound to the head and foot posts, his body secured by a tight loop over his waist.  The rope cut painfully and brought a curse from the prisoner when he strained at it.  Law surveyed him with a face of stone.

“I don’t want to do this,” he declared, “but I know your kind.  I give you one more chance.  Will you tell me?”

Jose drew his lips back in a snarl of rage and pain, and Dave realized that further words were useless.  He felt a certain pity for his victim and no little admiration for his courage, but such feelings were of small consequence as against his agonizing fears for Alaire’s safety…

Well … our hero does rather graphically torture his captive.  Take that, James Bond!  But our antagonists fare little better.  Here is Longorio after his plans are thwarted:

His face was like tallow now, his lips were drawn back from his teeth as if in supreme agony.  A moment and the hoof beats had died away.  Then Longorio slipped his leash.

He uttered a cry – a hoarse, half-strangled shriek that tore his throat.  He plucked the collar from his neck as if it choked him; he beat his breast.  Seizing whatever article his eye fell upon, he tore and crushed it; he swept the table clean of its queer Spanish bric-a-brac, and trampled the litter under his heels.  Spying a painting of a saint upon the wall, he ran to it, ripped it from its nail, and, raising it over his head, smashed frame and glass cursing all saints, all priests, and churchly people.  Havoc followed him as he raged about the place wreaking his fury upon inanimate objects.  When he had well-nigh wrecked the contents of the room, and when his first paroxysm had spent its violence, he hurled himself into a chair, writhing in agony.  He bit his writs, he pounded his fists, he kicked; finally, he sprawled full length upon the floor, clawing at he cool, smooth tiles until his nails bled.

“Christ! O Christ!” he screamed.

I know how he feels.

Heart of the Sunset is a heady dish for anyone willing to undertake it today.  And while it is easy (too easy) to poke fun at the cultural detritus of a bygone age, I hasten to remind us all that this week’s lead entertainment story is the release of a trailer for The Avengers.  What will be the reaction to that 96 years hence!