At some point over the weekend, perhaps when we were driving to Ipswich on Saturdary morning, I realized how close we were to Maine. I had just kind of forgotten about it. I had read Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs right before we went on our 07 College Tour, a key foundation point in my Literary Boston interests. On that trip we got up on Sunday morning and went to Salem, and then drove to Brunswick, where we went to my professor friend’s freshman seminar on Jane Austen on Monday morning at Bowdoin. The class was in a nice room with a fireplace in Massachusetts Hall, one of the original buildings, where Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Franklin Pierce took courses. My subsequent studies have shown that SO Jewett’s beloved father Theodore, the model for her heroine’s mentor and surrogate father Dr. Leslie in A Country Doctor, was part of this exceedingly famous Bowdoin crew. I remembered looking at the map as we drove from Salem to Brunswick and seeing that Jewett’s home and base, her father’s home in South Berwick, was not too far off the main track, but we had passed it by. So I found myself driving up there now, on a sunny Monday morning, feeling a little better drinking coffee and having a thin but ostensible purpose.

Everything was small and quaint, and South Berwick was little more than a tiny collection of buildings and cross streets. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful time of year, and if this wasn’t gracious living on the scale of the large houses out on Cape Ann, it seemed like a simple version of the good life, a cheat of course because the spring breeze, abundant greenery, and blue skies are so hard-earned. But what do I know, coming from California? The Jewett house stands at what seems to be the very center of the village, such as it is, filling the tine of a fork in the country road. The house opens to the public in the summer, starting in June, so I had missed it by a couple of days–now I would have to come back some other time, but I knew where it was. I got out and walked around. Hawthorne died on a May trip to New Hampshire with Franklin Pierce in 1864, a year before SO Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy. Theodore Jewett died in 1878 and James T. Fields died in 1881. So Jewett started living together with Annie Fields the next year, after they took a trip to Europe together that was very similar to the one that JT Fields had taken his young bride Annie on shortly after their marriage in 1854, and JTF and AAF moved into 142 Charles Street when they returned to Boston. SO Jewett moved into Charles Street after she and Annie returned from their 1882 European trip, and she and Annie would move out to the Manchester house for the summer. And every year, in the Fall I believe, Jewett would return to her home here in South Berwick, enjoying regular extended stays on her native ground. I felt like I had been neglecting the SO Jewett side of the story in recent months, and I made a note to get back into it. It was unfortunate the house was closed and turned the visit into a brief glance, but the trip is short from Boston, and now that I know the distance I’ll go back.

I went back through Essex and checked in with movie folks and then headed over to Salem. I guess I should analyze my reasons for not rushing back to the Historical Society and spending more time reading the Annie Fields diary. Somehow I felt as if I had accomplished my basic goal by getting into the building and getting access to the diary, sitting at the microfilm machine and briefly reading it. The microfilm factor was probably a bit of a turn off, but not having books or doing any extended prep were larger factors. I was a little dull and wondering why I was still hanging around. The success of the quick strike at the Historical Society on Friday morning had been a bit of a surprise, along with “covering” the diary so quickly, and I felt a bit guilty about carving out all of this extra time that I obviously didn’t need. But I wasn’t going to beat myself up too much, and it was only a day or two, and yet I was in a suitably dark mood as I wandered towards Salem, and the sun was gone and the clouds were coming in as well. I circled around and had a little trouble getting my bearings. I wasn’t sure how to approach Hawthorne’s stomping grounds. In my previous trip we had been to the wharf, which is the Maritime Center or whatever it’s called, and we had looked at the House of 7 Gables, but didn’t go in . If I had been in a more dynamic mood I might have gone over there and hoped for the best, but instead I set my sights on the Peabody-Essex Museum, which was reputed to be very solid. I made it to the National Park Visitor Center, took just a quick look inside, and then crossed the plaza to the museum, which is more central to Salem than I would have guessed–for some reason I thought it was on the outskirts of town, but in fact it serves as a nice centerpiece. It was closed, making me zero-for-two on the day so far. The building was quite impressive, however, and that made me want to return–and I still had another day to kill. Now I was loose on the streets of Salem for an hour or so. I wandered around, and headed into “the McIntire Historic District,” named after big time Federalist architect Samuel McIntire (1757-1811), but I wasn’t properly focused and just bumped around on the streets. At close to 5pm I returned to the NPS Visitor’s Center and looked at the books and pamphlets, one of them an architectural walking trail, developed by the NPS, of the area I had just been in, and I bought a small guide for $4.95 called “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem.” This energized me, as I started looking for the Peabody Sisters house, then the site of Hawthorne’s first house (now at the 7 Gables), and I began to get a sense of the original small town. Thinking about it now I’m reminded of poor walking shoes and my heel hurts, but I covered a fair amount of ground. Again, I would have a better idea of how to manage things if I went back, and I picked up the basics.

One of my best friends, Stein, was on the road for a short business trip and we were trying to meet up in Boston. Stein had a Spanish place he liked to go to–he travels a lot for business–and wanted to meet out by Fenway. I made better time than I expected getting into Boston, and I was ahead of schedule and heading out on Beacon St. when I saw the Crossroads Pub, my Richard Yates destination. I parked and went inside, then came out and called Stein to tell him to meet me there.

I ordered an ale and went to sit at one of the raised tables and started to catch up in this book. I know that Yates had a regular spot, where he would sit and drink and eat a little bit and get hammered, and I could guess where it might have been. I wrote an outline of my activities on the trip, the one I’ve been using in putting together this narrative, and then did a brief journal entry. My mood was suitably dark. The day’s transition from Jewett to hawthorne to Yates was working on me, and now I was in the zone, writing, in the perfect venue for an extended evening’s consideration and analysis of mid-life crisis, fueled by alcohol consumption. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the dark spirit of Yates was clearly with me. It was as if one shade had passed me along to the next, starting with the pleasnt SO Jewett morning. The muddled, curious Coverdale-style afternoon ended with the drive up Beacon St., and as I crossed Mass Ave Hawthorne passed me over to Yates. And now Yates was watching from his spot as Stein walked in and we began our conversation, catching up on our desperate and empty lives, covering the latest news in Stein’s epic mid-life struggle. We started drinking.

We start by making the short drive up to Ipswich, just to get a look at it and guage the distance. Ipswich is Updikeville, and I haven’t done any recent Updike reading or research, but I have a strong personal sense of his presence as we move through the little town and stop for coffee. Updike of course just died at the beginning of the year, and it’s funny to think if my experience here would have been different if he was still alive, how I might have been wondering if he was about to pop in for a bagel just like the one I was having.

We doubled back through Essex and headed out to Gloucester. The weather had been bad for the past two days, cloudy with rain, but now it was gorgeous out and the bright sunshine made all the difference. This is beautiful country, and our scenic drive was now extremely scenic. We covered the west side of Gloucester, then went back down to the center of town and spotted the Crow’s Nest bar from Perfect Storm, then made our second stop of the day at the Rocky Neck Artist’s Colony, getting out, walking around, and enjoying the sunshine. From there we looped out to East Gloucester, where all the big houses are. We kind of stumbled on this, not knowing exactly where it all was, but my scenic drive technique basically consists of putting myself into position to make this kind of discovery–or not. We saw the ocean view inns and motels, which all looked pretty good, and we drove past the beach. From there we headed to Rockport. It was great and we could have happily spent the afternoon there walking around, but we wanted to keep moving and didn’t get out of the car.

I expected we would turn back. But when I was reading the Annie Fields diary the day before, she had mentioned that she and JT were going to their house on Pigeon Cove–I had to assume this was a house they had before building their house in Manchester. When we were finished going through Rockport I saw a sign that said “Pigeon Cove–Two Miles,” so of course I had to keep going, wondering all the while about how different this must have been as a summer spot 150+ years ago. Only I somehow missed Pigeon Cove and soon enough we had definitely gone further than two miles. We were cruising slowly along the winding coast road, enjoying the views and not checking the map, and soon enough we had rounded the Cape and were going through Lanesville, Annisquam and Riverdale, driving the whole of route 127, and we were back at Grant Circle and Gloucester. Combined with the brief ride up to Ipswich, it seemed as if we had put a pretty high score up on the board for the morning scenic drive portion of the program.

And now it was time for the afternoon museum portion. We drove into Boston, which I had down to a science by now, and my scouting/refresher course on Friday morning was helpful as we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This famous “small” museum isn’t exactly a secret, and it had been on my list for my two previous trips, but I hadn’t made it there yet. I knew it would be great, and wasn’t disappointed. In mentioning the museum to people I say that it’s like the Frick (and I could add the Huntington here in Pasadena, I suppose), a rich art collector’s mansion turned into a museum. A lot of people seem to know the Frick (”Oh, I love the Frick,” I keep hearing), perhaps because of its Manhattan Museum Row location, its manageable size and the quality of its artwork. The Gardner isn’t as measured and accessible as the Frick, and it’s a bit dark and brooding and heavy in the Renaissance Palazzo manner that informs its aesthetic, but it’s still spectacular. And when we were there the early summer sunshine was poring down into the beautiful couryard and side garden and it was gorgeous. I appreciate a structure centered around a perfect ancient Roman mosaic more than I might have in the past.

Iszy was in heaven. Her studies took a strong art history bent in the freshman year she just completed. It’s funny to think how she likes the museum even more than I do and has a better idea of what’s going on, since my own knowledge of art is a result of lots of museum going but no formal coursework. The Gardner is like a house (sort of, in a palazzo kind of way), everything the way that ISG left it, and nothing is labeled. This is probably good and it’s different, and it makes me realize how dependent I am on the little cards that say who, what, where, etc. There’s a system with room guides, but it takes some getting used to, and throws me off my game a little bit. That’s probably a good thing, I know. I’m voracious and I move quickly through museums, doing a volume business in a first pass through a larger museum, and in smaller ones, like the Gardner, I often go through twice, lingering on the second round, taking my time as others catch up. But Iszy moves pretty quickly too. We’re efficient.

We head to Copley Square and eat, and she’s telling me about Trinity Church and H.H. Richardson and McKim, Mead and White. I had gone through MMWs impressive Boston Public Library on a previous visit, and I had heard Trinity Church mentioned but didn’t understand the fuss, and now Iszy clues me in. The sun is out and it’s five o’clock and people are everywhere, appreciating the great weather. The library and church are closed, but Iszy snaps a couple of photos with her phone.

Then we’re on the road, well-fed, and I’ve remembered something else I wanted to do: we drive out to take a look at Wellesley College.

When I’m on the road I like to get out and about early and find a coffee place, which helps to get things going. I was on LA time I guess and slept a little late, until almost 8, when I knew I had to check on the parking meter situation. So I was walking up and down Charles Street, finding coffee and considering the associations that I had developed with this locale since the time of my last visit. In “The Dante Club,” for instance, OW Holmes Sr. lives on Charles St., and a few scenes take place in his house, but it’s never mentioned that JT Fields lives down the block–did Holmes live on Charles St. too? We had done a pretty good job of covering Beacon Hill and a lot of the history of Downtown Boston on our previous visit (Freedom Trail, etc.), and that’s when my appreciation for the Charles St. location, right off the Common, had begun, before I knew anything about the famous home and salon of Annie Fields. After a while, coffee and croissant consumed, I confirmed that 142 Charles Street is now the garage where I had expensively parked my car on my previous visit. I was more thrifty this time, and my bill as I checked out of the John Jeffries House was remarkably cheap too.

I wasn’t sure about my next move, and this was when I first wished that I had planned out my literary pilgrimage activities more carefully. I didn’t have the hours for the Mass. Historical Society and thought it opened at 10 (it opened at 9), and I gravitated in its general direction, reacquainting myself with the basic city geography in the process. Just as I didn’t feel like a legitimate filmmaker or member of the production when I had visited the set the afternoon before, today I didn’t feel like a legitimate scholar as I went to look at the Annie Fields papers. But all you really need is a drivers license or photo id, and I knew exactly what I was looking for, so I didn’t have much cause for concern. The Historical Society was a tad formal, as it should be, but I calmly followed procedures and received my orientation, then got some help from my friendly guide. The diaries are on microfilm, and you don’t get to actually look at the real thing, though I had a sense that if I showed up regularly for a few days and became buddies with the Historical Society kids–everybody was young and friendly, but the tightness of the ship suggest that there are plenty of grown ups behind closed doors–that they’d pull it out and show it to me. The Annie Fields papers take up three reels of microfilm, which is something that I knew already, from going online. So if, say, some one wanted to publish that diary, in conjunction with the Historical Society of course, one would only have to copy those reels to begin preparing the text, and the reels could easily be turned into a PDF. Let’s just say that the whole thing could easily be more accessible, if anyone cared, especially since they take the romance out of looking at the papers themselves.

One thing quickly becomes apparent as you crack the diary: the “63 volumes” is a bit of a cheat. It’s more like “63 blue books” or thin little Moleskines. You’d think that AAF would have opted for a fancier venue for her thoughts. It’s another reason why it would be good to get a look at the actual diary, to be able to see what kind of stack the papers make, but it can’t be more than a couple of volumes of Pepys. (I should probably note that I know very little or nothing about Pepys–Royal Navy guy, right?–or Evelyn or any other diarists. Who are the bigwigs in the diary game? In the literary diary game? I guess Boswell’s journals count.) The entries that I looked at weren’t especially lengthy, and they were anywhere from a couple of paragraphs to three or four pages. The diary has a title: Journal of Literary events and glimpses of interesting people. I spent about an hour reading through bits here and there, mostly fascinated by the length of the chapter-like “volumes” and the amount of time they covered, usually a couple of months. My goal on this first quick visit was just to get in and try to take a general glance, and I had set aside two days at the beginning of next week if I wanted to hunker down and really read through it. I realized that my preparation could have been much better, and I regretted not bringing with me on the trip Rita Gollin’s 2002 book, an exhaustive study of AAF that I’ve checked out two different times from the library and have been reading in fits and starts.

It was raining outside and I was worrying about the parking meter–when I originally went in I didn’t know if I would be there for five minutes or five hours. The morning was getting on. In the microfilm reading room with me there was a “real” scholar, looking at another diary. I eavesdropped to try to discover his topic. He hit a snag and asked for help reading the handwriting (”how good are you at reading 18th century handwriting?” “um, probably pretty mediocre, since I’ve never done it?”). I took a shot, to no avail, and then a Historical Society tyro stepped in and figured it out in seconds. It was, I believe, Thomas Pickering’s diary he was reading–some Pickering–and he told me he was writing a book on Washington. He asked about my research, but he hadn’t heard of AAF, and I explained the diary in a speedy flourish by saying that Emerson had just stopped by, “Hawthorne shocked us by his invalid appearance,” “Who should join us in a wood-land walk this morning but Mr. Franklin Pierce formerly President of these United States”–that sort of thing. The scholar went back to work, and I rolled up the microfilm reel to leave. As I signed out I saw that he was Ron Chernow–yep, a real scholar.

It was around noon now and I thought I would fit in a couple of bookstore stops before going back out to the set. I had googled Boston bookstores before I left, but didn’t make a list–of course not. I remembered the general location of Brattle Bros. Books on West St., and saw Commonwealth Books close by, so I thought I would check those out. Every good bookstore is different, while bad ones are generally the same, and I have a standard routine for making a snap judgement on overall store quality, before settling in and poring over the shelves. I look to see sets of collected works, which are generally close by the counter, unless there’s a rare book room or it’s a very high end store. Then I mosey around looking for scholarly books on literature and other topics in search of something that I just have to have and can’t possibly resist, before working my way to seeing cheaper, trade paperback editions that I might actually purchase. I was on an extremely tight budget on this trip, so I went in with my anti-book buying force fields fully engaged. A book was going to have to be very special to break through my defenses, but the common practice is that if one book busts through then four or five very often follow. Both bookstores were excellent. My supposition is that Boston, with Harvard, MIT, and literally a zillion colleges and universities and the whole American/New England intellectual tradition thing, should be a bookstore Mecca, and these two stores provided a good start. Commonwealth had all sorts of good, well-priced books and I remember four stately volumes of G. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson, books that I’ve long coveted, for $100. The complete idition is 6 volumes, I believe, but the text is complete in the first four if I remember correctly. And downstairs I saw “The Letters of Celia Thaxter,” by her friends AF & __”–an Annie Fields book, for $25. The force field held steady.

And Brattle Bros. was a solid step up from the very solid effort by Commonwealth. This is a pretty dreamy bookstore, comprehensive, scholarly, accessible. Any lover of books and personal libraries could do some real damage here. It has a rare book room up on the third floor, reminding of Moe’s Books in Berkeley. It’s a little smaller than Moes’s and not an emporium like The Strand, or what I imagine Powells must be like. There are interesting sets galore, of all different kinds and prices, lots and lots of Emerson and Hawthorne and some beautiful Throeau and all sorts of stuff. I was moving quickly, scanning at top speed and checking prices and worrying about the stupid parking meter again, half a mile away in the rain. The force field was weakening, as I was happy to be in this just slightly untidy (pretty good for a bookstore), dynamic intellectual sanctuary, but I managed to bail out.

I stepped outside and stumbled on what was perhaps the best literary pilgrimage moment of my trip, completely by chance. On the house next to Brattle Bros. there is a plaque, marking it as the site of Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore. A paragraph gave a good brief description of the store as a crucial locus of the trancendental movement–I wish I had written down the quote. I suddenly felt like I was on hallowed ground, at the site of the center of things, and it’s interesting to reflect on how the spot is just a short walk across the Common from Charles St., where I had started my day. I jogged through the drizzling rain back to my car, plunging forward, but it seemed like I had gotten lucky, and was off to a good start on my literary activities.

It’s hard for me to even begin to tally up my basic goals in taking a trip to Boston, but I’ll give it a shot since it’s the obvious place to begin. Foremost in my mind was Annie Fields, although I haven’t been especially close to her life and work recently, but I did check out Rita Gollin’s biography in my latest trip to the library, along with her book on the portraits of Hawthorne. I didn’t bring Gollin’s books with me, however, as I’m an anxious traveler and worry about losing my bag. That seems silly in retrospect, as the books could be replaced easily enough. Anxiety and scattered, obsessive, even chaotic planning and execution are my standard mode, however, something that I just have to accept.

I knew I was going to be staying for at least one night down at the end of Charles Street, by the river, and that would cover the first goal. Annie Fields lived on Charles St. for 60+ years, and Willa Cather’s essay about Fields and Jewett, which appears in her book “Not Under 40,” is called “142 Charles Street.” Next on my list was Annie Fields’ diary, 63 volumes sitting in the Masschusetts Historical Society. Also on the Fields list was Manchester-by-the-Sea, where she and JT Fields had a summer home, and I was going to be staying nearby, out on Cape Ann, in Essex. And that seemed to be the AAF items, going in.

Next comes Hawthorne. I didn’t expect to be spending a good part of the year reading and writing about Hawthorne, but ever since The Blithedale Romance was recommended to me as a follow-up to Henry James’ The Bostonians, or rather as a crucial predecessor, it seems as if I haven’t been able to get away from Hawthorne. My Hawthorne pilgrimage goals were rather general, and I had already gone through Salem briefly with my daughter on our college tour in 07, and I remembered it as a good place from which to steer clear, overrun by witch kitsch. But it is right there on the north coast, and I was ready to go back and poke around a bit. I should mention that we had spent a morning in Concord on that college tour, and it was much more satisfying than our stop in Salem, so I felt like I had a good sense of Emerson and Thoreau’s stomping grounds and the setting of Hawthorne’s Old Manse, and I wasn’t thinking about going back.

In my accustomed manner, I was hoping to knock out the Peabody sisters with the Hawthone stone. Or I should say that I was looking at Hawthorne in part through his relationship with his wife and her sister, who had their own presence in Salem. And again, none of these interests were attached to any specific plans or methods on how to pursue them. Salem was there, in close proximity with all of its kitsch, and it would get sorted out somehow.

Next I should mention Richard Yates. Last year my Yates correspondent KCJ had come from England and her own Essex to read through the Yates archive at Boston University. She’s finishing up her dissertation now, and at the time I prodded her to meet with Yates colleagues and scholars and keep track of it all on a blog, and her trip turned into an amusing adventure that ended with her hanging out with Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes after the New York City premiere of Revolutionary Road. She did a great job of writing it all up over at KateonYates. In my vague plan I set aside two extra days, one for the Annie Fields diaries, and one for the Yates archive, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get to the Yates papers. My guess was that I would cover Yates by having a beer at the Crossroads Pub, where he got drunk every afternoon and evening for years and years.

And finally, before I left, I had read Kipling’s Captains Courageous, which provides a great description of the Gloucester-based 19th century cod fishing fleet. So I wanted to see Gloucester, since I was going to be in the neighborhood. I confirmed my lousy memory that The Perfect Storm is set in Gloucester and wanted to look at Junger’s book again, but I forgot to grab my copy as I headed out. As always I would be stopping in bookstores, and I was curious to see if there would be copies littered all over Gloucester, kind of like the witches in Salem.

These were the basic literary goals. I also wanted to make sure that we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which I have heard great things about and missed on previous visits. And I figured that the Museum of Fine Arts would get thrown into the mix along with the ISG. But it was all up for grabs, more or less.

When I got back from the trip there was an email from my professor friend, the person who had recommended that I read Blithedale. He had read Annie Fields’ obscure novel Asphodel, and sent me his thoughts. Yesterday, in reply, I was recounting a couple of scenes from my trip in my return email. I quoted the beginning of AAF’s diary, where she writes, on July 27, 1863, “I wonder much how I have already allowed so many years to elapse without making an attempt at least to record something of the interesting events in literature which are constantly passing under my knowledge.” Throughout my trip, as I was looking at the diary, stumbling through Salem, or driving around Cape Ann, I would head back to the film set where my daughter was working and my friends were making a movie, and I would sit around video village while movie stars would make fun of me by saying things like “your daughter just told me that she likes her boyfriend better than you.” My own odd persona, subject of all sorts of ironies, was complemented by my daughter’s quiet, serious, youthful presence. It made for a strange, fun week.

There are two ways that I can approach generating a narrative of my experience. I can cover the literary-historical elements, keeping up with my standard blogging practice. Or I can go whole hog, and try to capture the strange attempt to combine advanced parenting practice, a New England literary pilgrimage, and contemporary studio big budget filmmaking from my own jaundiced, professional point of view. I found myself, in my email reply, altering the quote to say “I wonder much how I have already allowed so many years to elapse without making an attempt at least to record something of the interesting events in movie-making which are constantly passing under my knowledge.” I happen to enjoy my literary pursuits, associations, and speculations, and I try to keep my movie experiences (and frustrations) separate and private, but AAF’s statement gives me pause. Obviously, that’s where the real meat is on this crazy bone. A lot more people will have a lot more interest in stories about Adam Sandler, Selma Hayak, Kevin James and Chris Rock, than they would about Annie Fields, Elizabeth Peabody, and Richard Yates. It’s what we like to call a long strange trip to live in both worlds, a quiet exercise in fear and loathing that isn’t exactly gonzo, just a bit surreal around the edges from time to time. I’ll take the general prompt from Annie F. and make a note to write more about Hollywood, one way or another, and in this specific case we’ll just see how it goes.

*

So that’s the beginning of the little narrative I’ve been working on for the last week and it has been going very well. I realized I can make excerpts for blog purposes covering the literary parts. The fun stuff, of course, is the wacky minor Hollywood hijinks, not to mention parenting follies, but that will all probably end up locked away in the studio vault, like AAF’s diary.

I thought I had read The Duel when I first started reading Chekhov last year, but I was mistaken–I think I mixed it up with The Kiss. At any rate, The Duel is a substantial, enlightening text. It has a farflung setting, in the Caucacus, where the main character, Laevsky, has run away with a married woman to try to live the good life. Laevsky is a bored and corrupt minor scoundrel in the best Chekhov manner, wracked by self-pity, and the analysis of his shortcomings and pathetic machinations is both searing and sustained. Chekhov creates an extraordinary foil for Laevsky in the zoologist character von Koren, who seems to be an updated version of Turgenev’s seminal Bazarov. The Duel is very much aware of its literary predecessors: as Laevsky and von Koren are about to face off in the climax, a ritual that they know is outdated by decades, they remember how it’s managed from reading about duels in literature, in Lermontov and “in Turgenev, too, Barzarov exchanged shots with some one there…” The duel itself is an interesting device, because we see that the story is based on two conflicting philosophical positions, or rather modes of life, and Chekhov manages to make a tidy and poignant conclusion out of it, and he creates a number of great characters as well.

The literary echoes even get the story going, as Laevsky recalls Anna Karenina as he decides that he has fallen out of love with his mistress, Nadezhda Dedorovna. At first we’re seeing things almost purely from Laevsky’s perspective, and we think that he’s gotten himself into a bit of a pickle. Laevsky unburdens himself to the kindly, rather foolish and old-fashioned military doctor Samoilenko, and we initially consider Laevsky with a large portion of Samoilenko’s natural sympathy. But Samoilenko has two men that he boards, making meals for them, von Koren and “the Deacon,” a young man fresh from the seminary. Von Koren is a man of science, of course, with all of the intensity of Basarov but none of the politics. Von Koren is a keen critic of character, and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and Nietszche are added to the the mix–Samoilenko laments “the germans” on more than one occasion. Von Koren describes how Laevsky has corrupted the moral landscape of the town, introducing gambling at vint and new modes of drinking, not to mention living openly with his mistress. And now Laevsky’s self-pity, his inability to work or do anything to help himself, takes on a more desperate and destructive edge.

Nadezhda Fedorovna, meanwhile, is just as corrupt, immobilized, and unhappy as Laevsky. Chekhov does a great job of revealing the desperation of two troubled, weak, damaged individuals who live together and make a bad situation worse through their inability to communicate–it’s the stuff of the best modern realist fiction. The rather amazing thing here is how he uses the old-fashioned means of the duel to bring these characters back together, redeeming Laevsky through his brush with death and showing how the truth can save a seemingly doomed couple. Nadezhda isn’t exactly a sterling heroine, compromised from the start by her flight from her husband and living with Laevsky, and her shallow weakness and rising desperation are well-observed as she sleeps with not just one but two men in the small town, the second of them simply in hopes of cancelling a debt. The second affair is used deftly to drive the plot towards the climax, as her second lover takes Laevsky to catch Nadezhda in bed, under duress, with the first. Laevsky, obsessed with getting away and already engaged to duel von Koren, is emotionally scarified and barely able to stand when he shows up for the confrontation. His humiliation goes a beat further, as von Koren is determined to wipe him out, feeling the drive to dominate and kill rising as the critical moment arrives. But the quiet Deacon, a laughing sidekick for von Koren but a man of faith, yells out when he sees von Koren’s bloodlust and the distraction throws off the shot. It’s one of Chekhov’s characteristic minor notes of grace–not showing any belief himself, but instead the effect of the ability of some men to believe, morality at work in the world. In a story filled with the immobility, neuroses and self-deception of the semi-educated, as well as the world of science and its effect on philosophy, it’s a startling conclusion. Perhaps we should have expected that the Deacon would play such a role. The image of Laevsky at the end, transformed and working hard every day to pay off his debts and living in acceptance and even deep contentment with Nadezhda Fedorovna, is quite satisfying, even more so when von Koren says goodbye and seems to understand that his philosophy is limited, that he underestimated Laevsky’s capacity for change and redemption. And the final image is very fine, of von Koren’s boat being rowed out to the ship that will take him away, the oarsmen battling the waves on the day of a dark Chekhov storm, making three strokes forward to be pushed two strokes back.

Obviously I steered off onto a major sidetrack by reading The Blithedale Romance. I suppose I had a suspicion that I was going to get sucked in by Hawthorne studies, and it’s an amazingly rich topic and has been quite enjoyable.

So I’m overdue to check in on Chekhov, to use an obvious phrase. Before the Hawthorne sidetrack there was a surprising turn in my Chekhov studies, as I jammed through the major plays much earlier than I would have expected, only because a friend was going to see Uncle Vanya in New York. I had already read more stories than I had written up before that, and in the interim I’ve probably added another dozen or more. I keep planning to catalogue my reading, get organized and make notes, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it. I’ll mention that I’ve been writing a larger, unrelated piece over the last couple of months, and that has further impaired my blogging.

Chekhov stories are easy to read and digest, while writing about them takes more of an effort. After reading Blithedale, while it was becoming obvious that I haven’t been reading any books this year, I decided to move to some of the longer stories of Chekhov, called Short Novels in the 1963 Norton Library edition I have here. So I read Ward #6 a few weeks ago, and Three Years more recently. Right now, with what I have at hand, it’ll be best to work backwards, going over what’s still somewhat fresh in my mind.

And I’ll say, generally, that this “Chekhov thing,” whatever it is that I’ve been doing, and regardless of the slow and leisurely pace, has been fantastic and is highly recommended. It’s satisfying, with great depth and infinite refinement, and it’s not especially challenging, although writing about the work isn’t so easy. One reason why I whiffed on Chekhov in my first breathless 10 year run through literature, I realize, is because it isn’t known for being difficult. There’s an attraction to dense and oblique modernist texts, from Virginia Woolf through Joyce and Proust and Musil. Alongside that is the attraction of the earlier big fellas, books like War and Peace and Brothers K and Moby Dick and Middlemarch and even Clarissa and Tom Jones. And with that, recognizing the quality of these writers, you want to read more of their works, trying to read all of Austen and Eliot and great gobs of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. And moving forward, after modernism, in my time it was easy to get pulled in by John Barth and Pynchon, not to mention Kerouac, Mailer and Kesey and Nabokov, Marquez and Calvino and others. Skipping over realists like Richard Yates and Mary McCarthy happened as a result, and perhaps the neglect is akin somehow to missing Chekhov.

The point I want to make, I think, is about the variety of Chekhov’s canvas as a whole. At a glance, and this is the mistaken assumption that I made, a bunch of stories and a few plays don’t seem to amount to much. Part of this is presentation, as we generally see standard-sized assorted collections of Chekhov’s stories, which contain anywhere from 5 to 6 stories to 25 or 30. It’s an unfortunate fact that there is no readily available Chekhov big book, a volume or pair of volumes with 100 stories, including the longer ones, something hefty to set beside Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The two newer black Norton Critical Editions, Short Stories and Plays, cover a fair amount of ground and set the mood, and the stories volume is a broad selection, but it’s missing a lot. One effect is that when you read one of these smaller collections there’s an impulse to say okay, I get it, I see what he’s doing, what he’s about. Yes, that’s obvious enough, but the format diminishes the accomplishment. It would be different if the quality wasn’t uniformly at the highest level, but what do we do when one story is better than the next, when we see the exquisite detail and twists and turns of character and event time after time? I myself made the mistake of skipping Chekhov, of glancing at it, of seeing his work as not particularly challenging, despite generally knowing that he was worthy somehow. With no big, challenging book of obvious variety and difficulty, Chekhov is too easy to miss and read in smaller, bite-sized pieces. I’m guilty of this myself, but I’ve read enough now that I’m starting to see the value of the whole. It’s a stunning accomplishment, and it seems as if part of the trick is to evaluate it from the perspective of completion (completion neurosis!), as one would with Austen or Dickens or Woolf. And batting average and slugging percentage are factors too. If Chekhov has no grand slam–although it’s easy to argue that the four plays are just that–and few home runs, how many doubles and triples does he have? Dozens?

And so I wonder about the path that people take, in the same vein, I suppose, as my remarks on “getting to Adam Bede.” The case is slightly different, falling under the heading of reading challenges. I’m reminded of the case of reading Clarissa, and Boswell for that matter, back in the day. When I was in college and grad school the only edition of Clarissa in print was the Riverside abridged version, which was four or five hundred pages–I can check. The abridgment allowed it to be assigned in 18th century lit and novel courses. I find myself on the same ground as the Adam Bede post, looking at the choices that are made in developing a syllabus. If you’re going to read Tom Jones, long enough in itself, you’re not going to get through Clarissa, and you have no chance if you want to do Tristram Shandy or anything else. It was strange, however, that one had to dig somewhat industriously, going to older out-of-print editions in the library, if you wanted to read a complete version of Clarissa. I remember being very proud of my copy of the Everyman 4-volume edition, which didn’t turn up very often. I’ve mentioned before that I read the Signet radically abridged version of Boswell’s life when I was a sophomore, and how I was overjoyed to discover that there were another six or seven hundred pages at least that had been left out. When a book is great, when you care, you want all of it. Not too long after my grad student days, in the mid-80s I would guess, a complete Penguin edition of Clarissa appeared, and the interesting thing is that the abridged version fell away and quickly disappeared. And a lot more people are probably reading Clarissa, and they’re reading it whole.

Part of what I was interested in with Clarissa, along with Boswell and Tolstoy and Proust, was the challenge. I can figure out Chekhov for myself, although the cataloguing process would be simpler if I didn’t have five or six different books I was sampling, and maybe all of this is just a complaint about my own lack of organization. But I wonder how the available editions affect our exposure and experience, and if a large group of readers might not be missing something great in Chekhov because his work isn’t presented in a more challenging and comprehensive format.

What do we think of Rudyard Kipling these days? His popularity had already dipped precipitously when I started reading literature 30+ years ago, although I knew about The Jungle Books and had a vague sense of Kipling a decade before that, perhaps some of my earliest literary references, right up there with Alice in Wonderland. I guess I need to study the topic a bit, and it seems like Kim still makes some reading lists although I’ve never read it. But my general sense is that Kipling was hugely popular at the height of the British Empire, a dominant writer expressing the point of view of a dominant, imperial culture, and then it all fell off a cliff. Or perhaps more accurately, it was wiped out in the trenches of World War I, where Kipling’s own son died, crashing his world down and a lot of his assumptions. My question, more specifically, based on the idea there was no imperative to read Kipling in his increasingly faded status 30 years ago, is what happened to his work in the interim amidst the rising tide of political correctness and the development of postcolonial studies? And what kind of author was Kipling to begin with, on his own terms? I don’t know. How is that possible? Another good question–and the answer may be that he’s a very late Victorian, and more of an Edwardian writer. It’s a transitional period, and I’ll have to line up the dates and do some more digging, like I said.

I was mildly surprised when Captains Courageous showed up on a list or two of books on literary Boston. My knowledge of it was based on the 1937 Spencer Tracy–Freddie Bartholomew movie, which I watched at least 10 years ago, and remember as a nice bit of classic 30’s Hollywood studio fare. The simple story in the movie is memorable too in its broadest outlines, which consist of a star turn by Tracy as a Portuguese fisherman who tames and educates a spoiled rich kid who has fallen off a yacht. Film adaptation is always an interesting topic, especially in its more egregious slash and burn encounters with literature, but I won’t get into that here. Now that I’ve read the book I’m excited to watch the movie again (and I can’t believe that I haven’t rented and watched The Bostonians yet–how is that possible?), but it will suffice to say that the movie takes great liberties with the book, where Manuel, played by uberstar Tracy, is a minor character.

I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that the story has anything to do with Boston, that’s for sure. Or more accurately, the Cape Ann/Gloucester fishing fleet, which is the true subject of the novel. It so happens that I’m on a plane to Boston to visit my daughter as I write this, and expect to explore Cape Ann, the “Essex National Heritage Area,” and Gloucester over the next few days. To get out there you go through Salem and Hawthorne and Peabody Sisters country of course, and James T. and Annie Fields had a summer house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, but once again, I digress.

There’s a great description of Gloucester and its fishing history in The Perfect Storm as I recall, another thing I need to check on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Captains Courageous gets a bit of play there, but that’s something that I’ve forgotten or didn’t notice in the first place. What I do remember is that Perfect Storm gives a state-of-the-art, contemporary best-selling creative non-fiction treatment of the hard, heroic lives of the fishing community. Perfect Storm is an eminently readable book, as well, and it could easily be joined with Captains Courageous in a high school literature course that would hold the interest of young boys, no easy feat. CC is dated and quaint (and it contains racism) and it would bore kids on its own, but it is short, and combined with Perfect Storm (and two movies) it might do the trick. I would probably have kids read Perfect Storm first, which they should be able to get through easily, and the information there will give them the necessary leg up on CC. And from there, I suppose, you move on to The Old Man and the Sea. Fishing, if you like that sort of thing. And by that time you’re well on your way to Billy Budd and The Secret Sharer, which are short enough to read, but a little more tricky to understand.

It was striking to see the variety of character in CC, after arriving with simplistic assumptions. The main focus in CC, aside from young heir Harvey Cheyne, is really Captain Disko Troop, and as I mentioned Manuel is very much in the background, along with a small collection of other minor fishermen characters, each of which has his own calling card and interest. The Captain is generally referred to as “Dad” in the novel, because the next major character is his son Dan, a young man a couple of years older than Harvey, who is 15. The Dan-Harvey relationship is similar to the Artful Dodger and Oliver Twist, in the world of Grand Banks fishing rather than London street crime. CC provides a detailed portrait of fishing in schooner-based dories for cod on the Grand Banks, an organic livelihood of tradition and highly-developed skills. It’s a world that ran concurrent, one assumes, to the era of whaling described by Melville, and it of course predates the swordfishing industry of Perfect Storm. Intuitive skills garnered over time have a great value in the book, reflecting the organic nature of the profession. Manuel has the timeless abilities and values of generations of dory fishermen, and he’s perfectly at home on the water in any sort of fog or weather. And Disko Troop is portrayed heroically as a savant of the Grand Banks, spending hours thinking like a cod and always staying one step ahead of the fleet of lesser captains and fishermen, who follow his every move. Another device Kipling puts to good use is young Harvey’s ignorance, as we learn about boats and fishing and this peculiar profession through his eyes.

If the setting of the novel is the world of the Gloucester fishing fleet, a regionalist topic, its larger subject and concerns are class and capitalism, told through the moral development of an adolescent boy. A good question about Kipling’s reasons for writing this American story can be raised, and the answer, which I don’t know, should be interesting. (Kipling’s research and method for writing about this specific world is also a great question.) When Harvey Cheyne Jr. falls overboard he’s a pampered, spoiled mess and a bit of a monster. I’m reminded of Twain’s Prince and the Pauper, which I only know in concept, but its historical setting and royal elements seem to generalize it. And Oliver Twist is an innocent victim, a blank slate. The realism of Kipling’s fishing fleet is revealed after the contrasting brief introduction of Harvey Jr’s family and its wealth, a highly advanced stage of bourgeois captialism at the end of the century. The thrust is that a robber baron father preoccupied with making millions, and a culturally sophisticated, indulgent mother, will have no hope of raising a solid citizen.

It’s worth remembering that this is the era where Theodore Roosevelt moved to the Dakotas and turned himself into a genuine cowboy and a true Westerner. I suppose the idea is that it’s incumbent upon the rich, in a country of vast resources and open spaces, to develop their values through a connection to traditional American lifestyles. The education of Harvey Cheyne Jr., at the hands of his buddy Dan, Captain Disko Troop, Manuel and the others is fun, absorbing, and satisfying, and there are overtones of the class warfare that was roiling in the industrialized world at the time. CC is a very interesting text from the point of view of economics and Marxist criticism, especially coming from a colonialist author.

And all the while it’s building towards a compelling, if rather melodramatic climax, which is fascinating from the economic perspective. We’re waiting with rising impatience through a relatively short tale for Harvey’s parents to learn that he’s alive, and to see the changes in him. And the story, for all of the manipulative elements here, goes to another, deeper level of intriguing significance, as it goes into close focus on Harvey Cheyne Sr., robber baron and multimillionaire. The story is set up to ask the simple question, how does the robber baron, with all of his millions, feel when he loses his son? The obvious answer is that he questions the value of his various capitalist enterprises, and is reduced to grief and philosophy. But Kipling puts considerable topspin on this volley. He makes robber baron Harvey Cheyne a self-made man, who holds the same values that his son has just learned, having gone to work himself as an adolescent. Junior’s fateful sojourn has simply made him a better, more dynamic capitalist, with a certain degree of enlightenment and appreciation for hard work, values which his father already possessed, that in fact fueled his rise. With all of its engaging description of the fishing industry, Harvey Cheyne’s breathless, record-setting cross-country railroad journey from San Diego to Boston, racing with his wife to reclaim his lost son, is truly exciting and builds to an extremely effective emotional climax. And it serves a deeper purpose of showing what the energy and spirit of the American 19th century had created, depicting the impressive accomplishments of the captialist. From this point of view, it’s an inspiring generational story, but apparently the thing that Kipling couldn’t stomach was the way that the generation coming of age just after Harvey Jr. and Dan, European boys growing up just 10 years later, marched off expecting soldiering to make them men, and they were slaughtered by the thousands.

One can’t leave the book without mentioning its racism, which doesn’t come as a surprise considering Kipling’s colonial background and assumptions, and the deep current of race running through American literature. The cook on Disko Tripp’s schooner, essentially nameless and mostly silent, is a black from Cape Breton who is treated as a second class member of the crew at best. He recognizes young Harvey as a master from the beginning, and at the end of the book he follows Harvey to become his personal servant as Harvey moves into his semi-enlightened future. Young Harvey gains his black companion, reminiscent of Huck and Jim, but it’s shoehorned into the story awkwardly, gutting the novel’s message about class like a codfish. The n-word is sprinkled about, and the “mighty white of you” compliment shows up at a couple of key emotional moments. The language is largely incidental and of its time, easily edited I suppose, which wouldn’t be necessary, but the cook’s story is unsettling and woven into the fabric of the novel, and the presence of these elements isn’t gaining Kipling any extra readers.

Maybe this will just be a quick note. After writing up a few thoughts on George Eliot, I discovered that Amateur Reader had read the book last year, following in the wake of a group-read over at The Valve, that was directed by Rohan Maitzen. I haven’t read all of the posts from the reading group, but I reviewed the basic plot of Adam Bede and had fun looking at a lot of commentary. I suppose I knew that GE has no shortage of fans and plenty of people have read Adam Bede, but all of this was nice to see.

In AR’s posts he’s curious about GE’s commitment to realism, and he wants to mention, if not highlight, the fact that Madame Bovary was published in 1857, three years before Adam Bede appeared. I remember looking up the Bovary publication date recently, in the last few months, probably with regards to Chekhov and Tolstoy, but also perhaps with Middlemarch in mind, and being surprised by the 50’s date, as I would have guess early 70’s. Just shows how out of the 19th century mix I am sometimes, and also, this creeping sense that the 19th century and the 20th century have some crazy “decade” similarities, which I first noticed when Chekhov mentioned the “holy 60’s.” AR’s mention is a good note, but it’s important to remember just how radical and, well, French, Madame Bovary was. George Eliot wanted to write about the world that she knew from her childhood in the English midlands, and its past, the world where her father lived as a young man. Wordsworth and the pastoral romanticism of the Lyrical Ballads is an important and obvious influence, and the book can be seen as a revision of sorts of Jane Austen, or perhaps better as an extension. Eliot centers her moral standing on her hero Adam, in an appreciation of labor, and her antagonist Arthur Donnithorne is drawn from the idle gentry. The fact that Arthur seduces Hetty Sorrel might make us think of Madame Bovary, but it’s probably better to see it as a new spin on some of the racier subplots in Jane Austen, such as Wickham’s seduction of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice. That, along with innumerable other seduction plots out there in the world of novels.

A quick comparison of P&P and Adam Bede as a “four hander” helps set things up. Adam Bede-Arthur Donnithorne contrasts with Darcy-Wickham, and Dinah-Hetty makes a nice change on Elizabeth-Lydia. Sense and Sensibility is an even simpler sister-based four-hander.

It should be obvious where I’m going with this. What if we put Flaubert aside, and consider Hawthorne as an influence on George Eliot? (It helps that we can assume that Eliot read and absorbed everything.) The seduction plot in The Scarlet Letter, along with its historicity, seems like it would have been covered easily enough in relation to the subject matter of Adam Bede. Is it safe to say that The Scarlet Letter set a new standard for a seduction novel, one that held for a short 7 years until Madame Bovary was published?

I’m more interested at the moment in Blithedale, my book of the month. The four-hander breakdown is an interesting match: Hollingsworth & Coverdale/Adam & Arthur, and Zenobia & Priscilla/Hetty & Dinah. It appears from this perspective that Eliot is determined to take the curse off of the countryside, as it were, and treat it as a serious subject for fiction. There’s a strong contrast between Hollingsworth’s zealotry about criminal reform and the jaundiced view of the Blithedale experiment, and Adam Bede’s presence in the organic pastoral setting Eliot wants to portray. Eliot seems to be just as concerned with origiinal sin in her Eden as Hawthorne. Hetty’s “walk of shame”–the only term that leaps to mind; AR did a nice job of tying it to the Heart of Midlothian–comes close to Zenobia’s flight and drowning. Later, in Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tolliver shares Zenobia’s fate, although in Maggie’s case it’s unintentional. Unless, of course, you count the intention of the author.

In my last posts about Blithedale and The Bostonians I talked about how Henry James adapted Hawthorne’s romance. James didn’t use the “four hander” structure, choosing instead to present a single hero, Basil Ransom. But after reading Blithedale and thinking about Zenobia’s death, April Wheeler’s complex version of suicide/abortion in Revolutionary Road came to mind (big surprise), which somehow made a connection to The Great Gatsby for me–no doubt through mindfulness of Yates’ obsession with Fitzgerald. And somehow The Blithedale Romance tied this basic plot structure together in a rather profound way.

It would be hard to find a closer match to Hollingsworth/Coverdale than Gatsby/Nick Carraway. Blithedale is essential to the creation of The Bostonians, but is its line to Gatsby even tighter and more direct? The first-person narrator alone seems to give the game away. Gatsby’s character is reminiscent of a Jazz Age Hollingsworth, isn’t it? Fitzgerald didn’t push forward so much on the women of the story, although Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan sets up a cleaner and more effective plot in which seduction and infidelity are routine, but jealousy provides a drive towards death and murder. When thinking about Tom Buchanan, it’s worth remembering Westerfelt (and Coverdale’s reaction to him) and his relationship with Zenobia. And Fitzgerald doesn’t neglect the sexual ambiguity in Hawthorne’s model either, as Nick manages to match Coverdale’s achievement as a voyeur and he’s either deeply ambivalent or gay, depending on how you want to read it. Jordan Baker, whose identity as a female pro golfer seems more obvious to us today, picks up on the line that Henry James took with Olive and Vernea. So did Fitzgerald read both Blithedale and The Bostonians, did he see all the connections and the power of the materials, and he shaped it to his own concerns, experience, and era? You tell me. My guess would be Blithedale yes, Bostonians probably no, but I’d be interested to see a study of Fitzgerald’s reading and influences, which I generally have thought of for a long time as starting and stopping with Flaubert.

That would be a fun American Lit class, wouldn’t it? Blithedale-Bostonians-Gatsby-Revolutionary Road? What else would go in there? Madame Bovary might put some of the discussion on firmer ground, and there would be time for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a Howells book that I’m missing.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow/431120/support_marcy_wheeler

I keep the politics to a spartan minimum here at the blog about nothing, but I take blogging pretty seriously, at least in certain ways. And in a lot of ways Marcy Wheeler is my favorite blogger and has been for a long time. Like Peter Rothberg says,

And, playing that role as if she was born to it, blogger Marcy Wheeler’s Empty Wheel on FireDogLake, has, along with Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, been making as big an impact in breaking news as any blog out there.

I’m an emptywheel/TPM guy, they’re a big part of how I follow the news, and I first got interested in blogging by emptywheel’s Scooter Libby Trial liveblog. Before that my online participation was limited to comments about the LA Clippers on an ESPN chat site, and I might have read Bill Simmons a few times. On my first day and one of my first comments I was quoted by Jane Hamsher on FireDogLake after Marcy Wheeler’s first TV appearance, with her hair blowing in her face, saying that we would all look back and remember it as a historic moment in journalism. Her work on the Libby trial was phenomenal, and she wrote a book about Cheney and Valerie Plame. Being “born to it” has enabled her to follow the firing of Carol Lam and the US Attorney scandal, wireless wiretapping, and torture and everything else that matters with a fierce intelligence and scholarly precision, as well as humor and grace. Marcy Wheeler stays after it.

Shows you what one of them there PhDs in literature can do for you.

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Marcy Wheeler wrote her dissertation about feuilletons, and according to this too-brief bio, feuilletons and blogging, same thing, the conversational essay. You could say she’s the ultimate litblogger, but she left academic concerns and controversies behind a long time ago. She does stuff that matters. Like today she’s test-driving the Chevy Volt–did Rothberg fail to mention that she’s the ultimate auto industry blogging mole? Her auto industry coverage is simply extraordinary, overshadowed only by her thunderous torture coverage. I suppose I wish she would write about literature every now and then, maybe 10% as much as she writes about the NFL and foosball, but she’s a very busy girl, and no one would dare to ask her to do any more than she’s already doing.

I never give money to anything, because I’m a mess, always barely meeting the basics of foraging for food and finding shelter in this gilded Hollywood crate where I live, but I sent a little money to pay Marcy Wheeler. I just want to praise her here, and anybody who likes her stuff can do as they please. I’ll finish by saying that my own payment was just the tiniest fraction of the debt that I owe to her, and the role her work played in my evolution of my feuilletons here.

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Hawthorne’s doomed woman in Blithedale, Zenobia, is an extraordinary character, deeply appreciated by Henry James. I’ve mentioned how important the relationship between Zenobia and Priscilla might be, how the novel casts a veil over the fact that they’re sisters. Zenobia’s strong first generation American feminism is another key element that James wants to update and appropriate, with great care and thought and effort. Zenobia is a part of the beginnings of 19th century intellectual feminism, a contemporary of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, themselves contemporaries with Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau, Lowell and James T. Fields . From that perspective, it’s a nice stroke by James to include a member of that generation as a figure in his narrative, remembering that The Bostonians’ Miss Birdseye is based quite directly on Elizabeth Peabody. Look at that!

James tossed the veiled sister plot, and in what is perhaps his primary, defining innovation, much less subtle than the fusing of Hollingsworth and Coverdale, he bases the female pairing on his own sister’s domestic life. James’ depiction of an attempted Boston marriage is an exponential leap of complexity, and it makes the novel deeply subversive, daring, and probably contributes somehow to it being little read. The fact that the attempt by Olive Chancellor to live with Varena Tarrent is thwarted by Basil Ransom at the last moment makes the tale a romance of sorts, and like Blithedale it has gone to a place beyond the norm and bourgeois expectation, while testing realism at many turns. Ransom’s character is meant to be a romantic, isolated, final representative of chivalry and the old code of honor, but he’s almost as self-conscious, feverish, and confused as Miles Coverdale. We’re not really rooting for Ransom, and his role as a man of action is highly questionable, even to himself.

His antagonist is Olive Chancellor. Olive lives in Annie Fields’ house on Charles Street, and she’s the same age and generation as Annie–it’s an interesting question to see what Annie Fields has to say about Elizabeth Peabody/Miss Birdseye, although we know her relationship with Sophia Hawthorne was close and complex. Rita Gollin’s “biography” of Annie Fields, which tells her story–sort of–through discussions of her different relationships, would be helpful here, and Gollin is also a Hawthorne scholar. The closer model for Olive is Alice James’ partner Katharine Loring. After writing this yesterday, I picked up a copy of Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James at lunchtime today. I read it when it came out in 1980/81, and missed the Boston Marriage element completely–10 pages on The Bostonians, flying right over my head. Analysis of Strouse’s approach will have to wait for the later, promised post on criticism, but she says this in her chapter “Peculiar Intense and Interesting Affections”:

When Henry described Olive’s disappointment, loneliness, and deep humiliation “in the point where she felt everything most keenly,” he drew on what he saw as Katharine’s full possession of Alice, knowing how desolate either would feel at the defection of the other.

Olive Chancellor walks a hard road in The Bostonians, and she’s fascinating. James tries to do justice to her but there is very little sympathy. Unlike Zenobia, quite importantly, she’s not attractive at all, decisively so. She’s a pure, advanced, and often-misguided example of intellectual feminism, a creature that Hawthorne never dreamed of. It’s a neat trick by James, ambitious and perhaps flawed–can you call it a postmodern romance? a postmodern twist on Hawthorne? Does that mean anything? Probably not.

Verena Tennant is fleshed out to a much greater degree than Hawthorne’s Priscilla. There was always a sense of a natural bar between Zenobia and Priscilla, and Priscilla seems to arrive as a ward of the forming couple, Hollingsworth and Zenobia. Zenobia seems maternal with Priscilla, although there are plenty of depths, unexplored by me at the moment, in the chapter where Zenobia narrates the story of the lifted veil–I should probably look at it again. What seems semi-maternal turns into sisterly, of course, and then suicide. There’s no “natural bar”–did I say that?–in The Bostonians, opening up the entirely new topic of mutual female attractions. Coverdale’s attraction to Hollingsworth was in the Blithedale post, and where Blithedale has Hollingsworth-Coverdale, Bostonians substitutes Olive and Verena. The mesmerist scoundrel Westerfelt turns into Selah Tennant here, Verena’s father. James plays a tidy shell game, a bit of mixing and matching.

One could easily identify a significant flaw in James’ approach in the characterization of Olive, especially coming from the view of Blithedale and the dynamism of Zenobia. Hawthorne has her drowning after being thwarted in love, while James makes Olive an anxious, unpleasant zealot. James splits Zenobia’s charms, perhaps, in between Olive and her sister Mrs. Luna, who is there to provide a temptaion for Ransom, turning him away from Verena in a different manner from how Zenobia turns Hollingsworth away from Priscilla. Perhaps this seemed sufficient and explains why James went to some lengths to prevent Olive from being attractive. Oddly enough, the disdain and anxiety that Olive feels about Ransom is actually quite reminiscent of Coverdale’s feelings about Westerfelt. It can’t be said that the anxiety James generates through Olive isn’t present in Blithedale: Coverdale’s feelings of sexual threat and general anxiety are a close match.