By now if you’re like me you’ve seen many details about the prospective Covid-19 pandemic. I wrote the Daily Kos’s first article on the topic, and have read many reports and written a few of my own in the nearly seven weeks since then. In particular I tip my hat to Mark Sumner’s clear and up-to-date situation summaries published regularly here.
However, all these graphs and statistics can sometimes overwhelm so much that one can lose sight of the potential human tragedies that may befall us. Great literature can provide more insight into these tragedies than science can. And as it happens, two first-rate American novels can help light the way.
The American novel most closely associated with the 1918 influenza pandemic is surely Katherine Anne Porter’s 1939 masterpiece Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Although only fifty pages — and no doubt partly for this reason more often assigned in American literature classes than its competition — it has been called “the most significant American literary work set during the pandemic”. The short novel is based on Porter’s own experiences in autumn 1918. Already weakened by a previous bout of severe bronchitis, Porter was no match for the flu. By the time she got the disease all hospitals in her city were way beyond full and her landlady, fearing infection, threatened eviction; her boss eventually finagled her into a hospital where she ran a 105°F. fever for nine days while lying in a hallway gurney. Although her newspaper drafted an obituary and her family made arrangements for her funeral, she eventually survived to write her book.
Although less famous than Pale Horse, Pale Rider, William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows is the most moving American novel that I have read of the pandemic. Maxwell survived it as a 10-year-old and grew up to be a superb writer and a great editor for the likes of Nabokov, Updike, and Welty. And Maxwell really let it loose in his semiautobiographical novel about an Illinois family whose 8-year-old son — the novel’s initial protagonist — is struck by influenza.
A couple of sample reviews:
They Came Like Swallows feels completely, uncomfortably real. Maxwell must have dug deep to bring this painful part of his own past to the surface and to look at it from a variety of perspectives. What a fine, human, empathetic portrait we get … — Trevor Berrett in The Mookse and the Gripes, 2019
As you read They Came Like Swallows, you catch yourself from time to time being astonished at how tightly you're gripping the pages…. Each major character is fixed at a moment of transition; and, in the way that novels sometimes manage, we, too, are transformed by reading it…. [T]here isn't a word that has dated. — Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian, 2002
These novels were not written right after the 1918 epidemic. Porter was too scarred, and Maxwell too young. It took two decades before their authors were ready to publish writings related to their ordeals. Epidemics are like that — terrible while you endure them, and not something you want to think or write about so soon after society has recovered.
If the Covid-19 outbreak turns worse (as I hope it does not), we likely won’t get great literature out of it for decades. If and when we do, They Came Like Swallows and Pale Horse, Pale Rider give a glimpse of the sort of novels that we might see. In the meantime, for those of us who would understand through fiction what it’s like to live through a serious epidemic in America, these two books are the finest that we have today.