Great Books Wrapup: "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber", by Ernest Hemingway; "A Rose for Emily", by William Faulkner; "A Mathematician's Apology", by G.H. Hardy
It's that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they're fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he like this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don't know what started it. But over now. Hadn't had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.
--Hemingway
These are some of the shortest works in the entire Great Books set, and highlight that the 20th century volumes highlight representative works instead of the best, much longer work. Hemingway and Faulkner are two American literary giants who get one short story each (I am bored by most of Hemingway and fascinated by Faulkner and may read a lot of Faulkenr next year while continuing to ignore most of Hemingway; if your mileage varies, that's cool)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is worth a read, because it is so vintage Hemingway it almost satirizes itself. You can smell the testosterone dripping from every word. A big Manly Man hunter and safari guide takes the title character and his wife on a big game hunting safari. Macomber the tourist is charged at by a wounded lion, and runs away. Oh No! He is not a Manly Man. The guide pities and despises him. His wife henpecks him and then cuckolds him with the guide, who is a Manly Man (as one does). The next day they hunt buffalo. Macomber successfully stands his ground and shoots a buffalo, and loves it. He is now a Manly Man! he has totally redeemed himself! Now he stands up to his wife's henpecking, frightening her with his newfound courage, and so she "accidentally" shoots him dead within a couple of pages (as one does). The guide has a stoic about it, and there we are. If you can read it without bursting into peals of merry laughter at the Ernestness of it all, you too might be a Manly Man.
I first read the much shorter "A Rose for Emily" long ago, and considered it a horror story at the time. I find that it grows a lot on a second reading a few decades later. I found myself with a lot of sympathy for Emily, who may have been the loneliest woman in America, sheltered away from the world by her patriarchal father, who drives all the suitors away as not good enough for her, until the bloom fades from her, at which point he dies, leaving her with nothing but the decaying antebellum mansion to live in as its location transitions to being the ugly neighborhood, generations come and go, and we eventually learn what became of the one other man who briefly paid attention to her.
Hardy was a pure mathematician, whose brief famous essay "A Mathematician's Apology" argues that math can be a self-justifying art form, beautiful irrespective of applied uses, and gives examples of what Hardy considers "perfect" math, such as the proof that there is an infinite number of primes.
If anyone feels like imitating me and attempting the great Books cover to cover, I suggest starting the math portion with Hardy, and with Whitehead's Introduction to Mathematics (see Book Post, December 2019) before trying to make sense of Archimedes or Newton. The moderns were writing for generalists, while the classical scientists were writing for specialists.
Misfits and Outcasts: The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
My body collides with something. I feel dense fur, over an even thicker carapace. A single warm tentacle brushes my face, and I realize I'm standing a few centimeters away from a full-sized crocodile.
Her giant front pincer is close enough to crush my head in one lazy motion. I hear a low sound under the wind's endless chorus, and I'm sure this crocodile is opening her wide, round mouth full of sharp teeth to devour me, bones and all.
The fourth (in my order of reading) of the 2020 Hugo nominated novels alternates between the viewpoints of Sophie and Mouth, two young women in a strange world where the beasts have familiar names but are nothing like the "crocodiles" and "bisons" in our own world. The main metropolis prides itself on clinging to "old-fashioned values", by which we mean vicious bullying and a police state that will exile kids into the deadly wilderness for stealing three food stamps.
Sophie is cast out of the repressive big city, but finds her true self among the supposedly hideous monsters on the outside. I am myopic. I didn't figure out until halfway in what this was a metaphor for, and then I had to go back and start it over again. It was worth it. Very imaginative, and very high recommendations.
I Don't Drink, And I Know Things: Nothing Good Can Come of This, by Kristi Coulter
Stay on the floor. It's the best place for you now. Know that the advice your brain is giving you--buy a gun, pull all your money out of the stock market, move into a women's separatist commune--is not helpful. Don't act on any of it right now. Try to stop crying. Know that whil you feel crazy right now, may in fact *be* crazy right now, you are sober. If you find yourself saying 'I'm only sober because there's no alcohol in the house', stop. You've driven through snowstorms, power outages, with fevers or tear-swollen eyes to buy booze, and you could have done it tonight. Nothing stopped you from drinking tonight but you. Because whenever you thought about it--and how could you not?--a voice inside said, 'Sure, you could drink. But he will still be president.'
---Coulter on 11/9, the day that changed everything.
I meet the most amazing people via friends of friends on FaceBook. Kristi Coulter is a smart, high-achieving woman from Seattle who writes cool posts and usually reflects my values. And so, when some troll tried to neg her about something something garbanzo not so great just someone who wrote a book, I was quick to be like "Congratulations, you just convinced me to buy the book." Until that comment I had no idea Coulter was a published author. There are hundreds of Facebook friends who enrich my world with fun memes and political rants and quirky observations, and I have no idea what their actual lives are like. Now I know a little bit about one more of them.
Nothing Good Can Come From This is a collection of autobiographical essays, loosely centered around the themes of her decision to quit drinking and being a woman in a country that despises women. Coulter carries a lot on her shoulders. She has imposter syndrome and other emotional difficulties that she's not afraid to share, and a lot of the thing going wrong with the world today hit her hard. She is bemused that some people around her call her 'strong' while inside she feels like she's barely hanging on. On the other hand, she is also on the other side of the economic chasm from most of the rest of us, has a near-perfect marriage, and made a fortune putting in her dues at her high-stress job, from which she has now transferred and takes vacations to everywhere. Much of her vulnerability comes from constantly striving to be better than she was the day before.
Like not drinking. Unlike a lot of sobriety success stories, Coulter does not have a pathetic before picture of hitting bottom in a sea of vomit, broken friendships, job losses and arrests. She just, after some number of unsuccessful attempts, decided that alcohol was not making her better than she'd been yesterday, and stuck with the decision. In an environment where co-workers have their private coolers full of booze for drinking at work and the waitstaff pressures customers to buy cocktails and yet the bars at the lavish parties are not equipped with so much as a glass of soda water for the sober. Do they not use mixers in the high end of Seattle?
High recommendations for perspective on the world and the psyche, and for walking a path worthy of respect.
Parnell Verses the Crones: The complete poems of William Butler Yeats
O''DRISCOLL drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Hart Lake.
And he saw how the reeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride.
He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
And he saw young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.
The dancers crowded about him
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.
But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands.
The bread and the wine had a doom,
For these were the host of the air;
He sat and played in a dream
Of her long dim hair.
He played with the merry old men
And thought not of evil chance,
Until one bore Bridget his bride
Away from the merry dance.
He bore her away in his arms,
The handsomest young man there,
And his neck and his breast and his arms
Were drowned in her long dim hair.
O'Driscoll scattered the cards
And out of his dream awoke:
Old men and young men and young girls
Were gone like a drifting smoke;
But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
---"The Host of the Air"
I've been grazing on the collected Yeats in the bathtub all year, and finished it this month. While we were quarantined indoors, the air outside thick and unbreathable with forest fire smoke, and the center unable to hold as rough beasts slouched towards Mar-a-Lago to be born, it was good to have visions of green Irish lands with crystal lakes and cliff tops and fresh sweet air.
And then he got all political. As one does.
Like a lot of modern era poets, Yeats is an enigma wrapped up in contradictions. It's almost as if he started out as a young romantic idealist, and became pained and bitter (and fascist) in his old age. Fancy that happening to a man.
I went to Ireland last year, and was able to compare the things I saw with the visuals in Yeats's poetry. The book is divided into "lyrical' and 'narrative/dramatic', so reading it in order, one transitions from verses about Irish mythology and lovely young women into harsher urban visions and odes to Parnell and the Easter rising, and then back into the myths and the long tales like "The Wanderings of Oisin" and "The Shadowy Waters". Yeats is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live in his world.
