The primary general impression in reading this book and getting introduced to Stafford’s work is that she is an extremely talented writer, one who seems to have abundant natural gifts. Her prose is rich and thick and graceful, leaning towards postmodern excess but holding back and occupying a unique and peculiar space. Her talent and use of language rejects spare realism and cold analysis, and aims at richness of description and insight. There’s not a trace of narrative minimalism in this book but she’s not over the top either. My impression is just that she’s a great writer, the real thing, some one who has a voice and a flow of words and a view of the world.

There might be some question of her having a story to tell, and I’m curious to see what her favored topics and themes might be in the stories. This is a fascinating–again, the word that comes to mind is rich–brother and sister coming of age story, a mid-20th century version of the Mill on the Floss that looks back at childhood in the 30s and 40s. Its style is modern and lyrical, liberated by writers like Woolf and Cather of the realist and 19th century trappings of George Eliot, but its narrative drive remains clear: it’s never oblique or obtuse.

Cather bears mentioning, along with, I suppose, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, who are closer contemporaries, but I don’t know their work very well. Cather notably found a ready landscape for modern fiction in the far west, gravitating beyond her roots in the prairie. And this is a Western book, one that might not get much recognition in the genre. I was shocked, I must say, to discover that the lengthy opening section has the extremely rare setting of rural Los Angeles, and so it should be considered as Literature of California (and LA) as well–maybe it is; what do I know? Up until the war and midcentury there was an agrarian life all around the urban core of Los Angeles, and I was genuinely surprised to see how this book captures it, and from the point of view of a pair of children. It’s extraordinary. And what’s even more interesting is how Stafford portrays the pressure of old-fashioned and Victorian manners and finery trying to maintain a foothold in the dry and sun-drenched landscape. It’s as if there’s no sense whatsoever of the explosive growth that’s going to hit the region, only that the 19th century mores are wildly inappropriate, and need to go back to the East coast and Europe, where they came from and are more securely embedded.

Brother and sister Ralph and Molly, never comfortable with their proper mother and superficial older sisters, are drawn to the Western simplicity of their grandfather and Uncle Claude. Going to live the ranch lifestyle in Colorado with Claude provides a working existential blueprint for young Ralph, who finds himself growing slowly into a man. But Molly, much like Maggie Tulliver, never fits, although she’s much more comfortable in the spare and simple ranch world. Stafford raises all sorts of gender issues with great subtlety and style as her story progresses.

A comparison between this book and Mill on the Floss is easy pickings, and would be a great assignment. I’m tying to think of other brother and sister bildungsroman, and can’t come up with anything off the top of my head. Stafford makes a dark and searing twist on the infamously problematic conclusion of Mill, one that captures both sadly and beautifully the point of the novel, with great power as well. Reading it against To the Lighthouse wouldn’t be a bad exercise either, and it would stand up well and better than most books in the comparison. It’s a dark vision of women and the West, and I’m eager to read what others have to say about this book and to learn more about Stafford. I knew enough about her, and her disfiguring car accident and severe alcoholism, to know that she came by the pessimism and despair in this book honestly.

So, in a good-sized nutshell, this poorly title book tells the story of four independent and wealthy women of the Gilded Age, who jointly reached the height of their powers in the Edwardian period and in World War I, when they were all rather formidable and something of a unified whole. They enjoyed domestic partnerships and love affairs, and lived through the transition from the seemingly chaste 19th century Boston Marriage to the postwar confluence of feminism, modernism, lesbianism and liberation, shaping it themselves to a certain degree. Like I said, I wasn’t sure why I ever had my hand on this book in the first place, but I guess I was curious about connecting the “marriages” of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alice James and Katherine Loring (the mutual models for The Bostonians), with the world of Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather. And then you throw in New York City and robber barons and Stanford White, and you’re bound to bump into Edith Wharton, and this promised to be a view of the world that Wharton knew and wrote about. So here I go, reading about independent women, pretty happily I mus say. The two Annes, Morgan and Vanderbilt, are okay, and I don’t mind reading about can-do, well-meaning rich women, especially when they’re effective and humane. Elsie de Wolfe is funny and obnoxious and vain and absurd, a strong and lively contrast to Alice B. Toklas in a somewhat similar role, and she’s a good secondary character. The style of the book is solid, not great, showing lots of hard work and knowledge and even devotion to the topic (important for a biographer, of course), and it has probably just the right amount of gossip for the subject matter–plenty, but not too much. But the real story and the great value of the book, the character who made everything worthwhile, is Elizabeth “Bessie” Marbury, just a phenomenal figure. My god–what a woman, and what a story!

I’m reading this book and finding it interesting enough, and it’s telling the story of Bessie marbury’s family, how they live respectably in mid-century NYC, impeccable social credentials and not too rich and not too poor. Same goes for Elsie de Wolfe, maybe poorer, and Anne Morgan, JP’s daughter, a whole lot richer. The backgrounds do a good job of rendering the city in the midst of its 19th century rise, which is always fun. So far, so good, and Bessie Marbury is in a “relationship” with Elsie, trying to wrie and find a way to get along in the world, interested in the theater. She’s a dynamo, she pushes Elsie’s career as an actress, and it seems pretty obvious that she’s going to figure something out. And she does indeed, as she sees the value of light French theater being adapted to the New York stage, and more or less comes up with the concept of the modern literary agent and manager. She starts out representing the leading French playwrights, the entire Society of Men of Letters, and then goes on to work with George Bernhard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and later Eugene O’Neill and Cole Porter and a zillion others. It’s crazy. She’s a hitmaker, ruling and reinventing Broadway along with Charles Frohman and later the Schuberts. She comes up with the idea for the modern musical, more or less. It’s a calvalcade of stars and international renown. She sponsors Elsie, who becomes a personality, and their New York home and salon becomes famous, Elsie turns decorator (right after Edith Wharton). The New York house is surpassed by the beauty and culture of their residence at Versailles, the Villa Trianon, where Anne Morgan builds her own wing and moves in. Elsie is fabulous and flighty as it gets, and will be until she dies in her 90s in Beverly Hills (where else?), while Bessie is about work and genius and meat and potatoes and growing obese, an old guard figure who turns to politics after the war and helps guide the rise of FDR. It’s pretty amazing stuff, actually, with Morgans and Vanderbilts and a hundred others thrown in. Lots of fun.

Escape is a memoir from inside the belly of the beast, and I found it to be completely compelling–I read it greedily and pushed hard all the way to the finish. It has sensationalist elements and more than a little prurient attraction, and I was glad that I wasn’t reading it in a vacuum, that I had read and thought about a broader perspective of Mormon culture beforehand. The book does a decent job of creating some context for its story, but there’s not a whole lot of it. It’s pretty much all crazy, all the time, right from the start, with a whole lot of story to tell.

Towards the end, as Carolyn Jessop meets with the Utah Attorney General after her escape, the AG says that “there’s a sect in the southern part of the state, at the border, that is worse than the Taliban,” and he’s not all wrong. But things are bad enough at the beginning of Jessop’s story, describing her childhood, then the power dynamics of the sect turn extremely dark as she outlines her adult life, and things really go nuts as her contemporary Warren Jeffs assumes leadership of the FDLS. Jeffs’ insanity and criminality, which was being played out just as Big Love was swinging into gear, pushed the direction of that show towards lurid melodrama, which was probably its original intent and never a bad place to go for TV ratings, but it was all based on real events and actual human behavior.

Reflecting on the larger context of the book and Jessop’s story, one sees how the seeds were planted in the earliest days of this radical lifestyle. Jessop’s mother is horribly depressed, and Jessop grows up surviving and adapting to not just daily beatings and abuse, all meant to control untoward behavior and thouhts, but also an absolutely joyless existence. Jessop’s parents and family are the original culprits in the story, but they retain a shred of humanity and ultimately land pretty far down on the scale of villainy, as degradation and despair escalate rapidly when Jessop leaves home at age 18 to marry 50+ Warren Jessop. It’s ironic how, in the final all-out craziness, Jessop looks back at how things weren’t so bad in her day, as girls were allowed to come of age (reach 18) before being married off to old men.

Life inside the family, and the power struggle for survival between mulitple wives of one vain, bizarre, and relatively weak man, is all just nuts and unbelievable and consistently heartbreaking, just very sad. Jessop’s strength and instinct for self-preservation is remarkable, and needs to be mentioned. One might guess that the compelling villain in the narrative would be her husband Warren, the titanic “Father,” but it’s not really surprising, given human nature, that Warren Jessop’s third wife, Barbara, actually rules the roost and controls the lives of the dozens of people in the family in a chilling, extremely scary way. Barbara is just the worst, most horrible bitch that you’ll ever read about, and there’s just no other way to say it. It’s interesting how in a radical, alternative lifestyle and belief system corruption enables corruption and feeds on itself, piling up victims and gaining an ever more voracious appetite. As Jessop matures, weighted down by her own eight children and Barbara and Warren’s deepening perfidy, the power grab of the FLDS by Warren Jeffs begins to take shape, and his level of evil crazy raises the stakes beyond the chaos created in the family. The depth of darkness in Warren and Barbara is shown, in the background, after Carolyn Jessop makes her mistake with her children, and the 100 or more members of the Jessop family join Warren Jeffs as true believers in the Texas compound he constructs.

The story of Carolyn Jessop’s escape and legal battle and the heroism of her fight is all good enough, and a very real and relatively straightforward account, particularly given the sensationalist and bizarre subject matter. It isn’t worthy of any book awards, and it’s not even especially significant in the thriving genre of the memoir, although that’s perhaps harsh. The narrative is clear and efficient and aimed at its shocked mainstream audience, and the book accomplishes its purpose of telling the story, getting inside, and generating an impact. There’s almost too much pain and suffering and darkness I guess, and the emotional toughness and detachment that enable Jessop to survive and get out makes her telling seem more real and even a little pedestrian–a fair amount of the banality of evil going on here, which makes for a bestseller but not a special piece of writing. But that doesn’t matter at all, as survival and escape and the ability to tell the tale at all are more than enough.

Unlike McCarthy, who perhaps had some trouble finding her voice and metier and then kept going and wrote her way through a long and amazing life, Stafford seems to have been more of a natural fiction writer, a born novelist and storyteller. McCarthy was fiercely intelligent and a personality, and her life was her art through her early period, while she developed her skills as a critic. Edmund Wilson famously helped her begin to write fiction, and she followed up her success by adding great accomplishment as a memoirist to the mix. It added up to a long, productive and extraordinary career, with a shape and success and readability that seems to get better and clearer with the passage of time.

Stafford provides a strong contrast. I don’t know that much about her, with vague memories from reading Laskin’s book a couple of years ago. Stafford’s talent was evidently obvious in her first novel, Boston Adventure. It has been awhile since I was trying to read “Literary Boston,” which had a Maine and New England sidebar, but hearing about Stafford’s book enhanced my interest in her. I remembered that The Mountain Lion was her best book, but also noted that she won the Pulitzer for her collected stories. Her personal story is one of sad trauma and decline, as her relationship with Lowell was marked by his manic-depressive machinations, and she was in a horrible, disfiguring car accident. And, like Wilson and McCarthy and Richard Yates and so many others, the grind of daily drinking in the postwar years eventually gave way to a pathetic and debilitating alcoholism. Stafford wasn’t able to keep reinventing herself the way that McCarthy did. But she was a major talent and important and this is an impressive book, which I’ll write about as soon as I finish, I hope.

The story is extremely well-crafted and has a number of layers to it, but the main thrust is an immediacy and intimacy, the way in which the direct narrative is meant to share the experience and consciousness of its subject. The lack of decoration and reflection makes its own point when contrasted with the small details of necessity and survival, as tiny objects like a crust of bread or the hiding place of a trowel assume great importance. Realism makes its own strong statement about a society that would place some of its citizens in such a setting and circumstance. It seems like a story and a world that would only be possible in the postwar era, as if such a bureaucratic nightmare and inhuman regimen was only imaginable after Nazi atrocities, the revelation of their Soviet counterpart, but this might be a matter of form and narrative style and subject–the desperate lives of the indigent and lowliest workers in industrialized 19th century cities and mines, etc., perhaps weren’t so different. But Shukov’s plight and the work camp are a direct product of a state, of the place where a society wants to entomb its internal enemies and malcontents.

The story somehow has a rhythm to it which matches the experience of the day, a deft touch. In the beginning it reads slowly and sluggishly, as Shukov feels sick and troubled with the pain and degradation of his life, and he doesn’t feel he will have the strength to fight the cold. The same effort is required to engage the story. And the dull comings and goings of men, massing at the gates and heading out to work, have the air of reluctance that Shukov feels, his hesitancy and resignation. The extraordinary part of the story is the section when Shukov is able to work and lead the squad in building the wall; it’s an extraordinary bit of heroism, dignity, and spiritual resilience, and the narrative races along suddenly, a surprising instance in which to find excitement. The way all of this works in interesting and worthy of study–it’s probably the essential point that Solzhenitsyn intends to make, transcending the glaring political statement of the story.

It’s also notable that the “day in the life” format is so simple and effective and well-used in this particular context, and it is also done with great skill and knowledge and insight. As I said, there are all sorts of levels, and not the least of them is the poignancy of the experience of a single day, the universality of that construct, and the heartbreaking narrative attachment that we feel, reading in our comfortable literary leisure, with Shukov’s harsh and seemingly unbearable life.

*

Interesting to do a quick scan of Solzhenitsyn and get a view of the backgrounds of One Day and its relationship to his own experience. It appears that Solzhenitsyn and Krushchev were something of a pair, that Krushchev’s “Secret Speech,” a piece of basic Soviet and and 60′s history that any world history student might know, had its literary expression in this celebrated text. It’s all very solid stuff, a great book in a great context by a great author with an amazing story, one that is crucial to understanding of the entire century. And it’s eminently teachable, a really good book for high school students. I’m really glad that I got this tip and had a chance to look at this material from my current perspective. Solzhenitsyn’s life and publication history feels like something that I lived but mostly missed–I was obviously too young to feel the impact from the publication of this particular text, but AS’s story echoed through the late 60′s all the way up to the 90′s. It feels a little like my general but limited awareness of apartheid during roughly the same period, something that was strange to remember when I read through J.M. Coetzee’s books.

So yeah, I guess I got a little busy, both writing and working, and I’ve been doing some traveling too Not doing so great on the reading in November and early December, but I just go back from a trip and read two very out of the way and peculiar books. The first is Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women, a gossipy group biography of a fascinating set of Gilded Age characters, Elizabeth Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Vanderbilt and Anne Morgan. That should be fun to write up. And then I read Escape, the story of Elizabeth Jessop’s life inside the polygamous world of the Fundamentalist LDS. Eager to talk about that one too.

I bought my own set of the complete Chekhov short stories in the Fall, the same one that Amateur Reader (Tom) has put to such good use, and started reading The Steppe. If I recall from my scattered Chekhov studies, it was a breakthrough, more ambitious story of greater length for the Maestro, and I never had an edition that included it before. As I mention in the Denisovich post, my son read Day in the Life and then moved on to Crime and Punishment. I just saw him and took him copies of Father and Son and Chekhov’s stories. Just some Russian Lit notes, and I could get serious about Chekhov now, with a complete edition, and read or reread everything. Over the great sprawl of time, don’t you know.

I just got distracted, however, by Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, which is just so clear and fun and interesting. Wilson is always pretty amazing, and this is yet another book that I’m kind of surprised I have never read. Other stuff too–and of course, since I made this note, my excuse about writing something isn’t really valid any more, as I’m on a break from that too. Oh well.

Trying to decide how to catch up. It might be best to do most recent first, since the stuff from a while ago (Mountain Lion) isn’t going to come any closer. But it’s still backwards, a little strange, and pretty lame. Whatever.

Happy New Year to the Happy Few. Everybody be safe out there and healthy, and enjoy your books and reading as you find it. Good times.

LS notes: Those who glance at comments around here might know that I’m in contact with Catherine V. Hollis, author of the excellent pamphlet/book “Leslie Stephen and Mountaineering.” I was going to write on this topic as an M.A. thesis in the 80′s, but she has done a much better job. In writing to her I started spewing on my path to discovering LS, and it took shape as more of a blog post than something I would send in an email. Haven’t fixed it or typed it up yet, but there’s some exciting new prospects, if not activity, backstage over here these days on Leslie Stephen.

May Sinclair. I haven’t started reading the The Creators yet, because I was moving books around and for some reason started reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion. I made a good start on it and need to try to finish. But I did made progress on Sinclair because, after a couple of false starts and waiting for librarians to track it down, I now have a copy of May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, by Suzanne Raitt. This book seems especially pricey, or I would buy it. At any rate, I haven’t been this excited about a biography in a long time. Sinclair is interesting and complex enough, with a veiled and obscure private life, and plenty of work to analyze, that it should be great.

Jean Stafford. Yes, but how and why? This is a belated follow up to Mary McCarthy and Partisan Review and post-war New York Intellectuals studies, that goes back to early days on this blog. Stafford was a dark and brooding figure in the background of David Laskin’s Partisans . I wanted to read her book Boston Adventure when I was doing Literary Boston, but Mountain Lion is supposed to be her best book, and I stumbled on a nice copy of it not long ago. And then when I was moving stuff around I saw it again, and it jumped to the top of the stack.

Harold Frederic is a major topic, although it might not appear that way. I read In The Valley (after messing up on the blog and calling it “Up In The Valley”–haven’t bothered to correct that yet) and thought it was pretty good, and then I spent at least a week writing about it, and it got more interesting. That’s a big typing job that I made almost no progress on all week. But I’ll get there. I’ll probably split the thing up into at least two posts, if not more–it’s pretty long. And while I was at the library I got Frederic’s book of stories, In the 60′s, which apparently contains some good civil war stuff. I read the preface and was surprised to discover that it was all about the history of his writing process, with a lot of material about how he formulated and struggled and later came to write In The Valley. And I read the intro to the Belknap edition of Theron Ware, the publication of which was a bit of a Frederic breakthrough, a good step on his rescue from oblivion. It was pretty strong as an initial statement marking the book as a neglected and valuable classic.

And the Russians. My son got to choose a couple of books to read and analyze and compare, and his picks were Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Crime and Punishment. That was pretty cool, I thought, and I kind of knew Denisovich and read some of Gulag Archipelago and maybe something else, not Cancer Ward, but it seemed like a book I wouldn’t mind reading. On the same “College Board” list the other Russians were War and Peace, Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, and Turgenev’s Father and Sons. Discovered this week that Tom Stoppard adapted Anna Karenina, which Joe Wright is directing for his girl Keira Knightley, which should all be interesting I guess. I’m a fan of Father and Sons and might suggest reading it to my son, if he powers through the first two, but we’ll see. The question I had was one about Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard is an obvious and solid choice. I recently picked up my own version of the complete stories, which I’m very happy about. It wouldn’t work for the format, but it you were going to do an Intro to Chekhov, what stories would you pick? How many? I’m trying to figure that out, but I suppose there must be some basic collections that answer the question simply enough.

A Good School is hardly a necessary book, but it’s a welcome text for Yates readers, and my question is how it fits with other classic “school” texts. It’s primarily marked by the thinness and fragility of his later style, such as it is, when Yates’ ability to create finished stories amidst the wreckage of his alcoholism and ridiculous personal life was rather miraculous. AGS was written in 1978 after the shocking and harrowing triumph of Easter Parade (1976), and it has the feel of its author coasting along creatively with a sweet and easy momentum (if the word “sweet” can ever be used in relation to Yates), enjoying the discovery of a serviceable perspective and technique, the demons of doubt and ambition and perfectionism more or less behind him. Yates seems to have a number of purposes in writing this book, but one of the most important ones is to describe the formation of his earliest literary style and approach, attaching it to an exploration of the development of his dark and troubled identity.

In both Disturbing the Peace and Easter Parade Yates plays an inspired creative game with his own experience and its transformation into fiction. Here he seems to be even more directly autobiographical, but he is also reaching into a confusing and challenging epoch in the past, his adolescence, which is strange and distant enough to lend itself to a more straightforward representation.

One of the things that I’ve done in the years since my 08 Yates run was to read a good chunk of WWI Lit recently. There is a corresponding body of WWII Lit, and AGS fits neatly into that category. WWI Lit includes the postwar development of High Modernism along with a number of memoirs, and within those there is a subcategory of the pre-War idyll, a description of the innocent and less apprehensive years leading up to the shock and surprise and tumult of conflict. Some versions, including fiction from the decade before the war, contain the seeds of character and behavior that will emerge later–I’m thinking of Robert Musil’s Young Torless, which I haven’t read recently, but it would seem to make an interesting corresponding text to A Good School. Musil’s book, similar to the excellent recent German film White Ribbon, shows incipient Nazism at a pre-WWI boarding school. My question, I suppose, is whether Yates is trying to describe the source and original prototype of his generation’s post-war malaise and ambivalence, the classic detachment and fear and loathing that he was able to capture so well in Revolutionary Road.

The war increasingly hangs over AGS, and Yates’ generation, and I might not emphasize it if I hadn’t read other similar books and memoirs recently. Also significant is the way that Yates’ fictional Dorset Academy is a “funny school” that closes down and fails just as Bill Grove and his class graduates. The point seems to be that these peculiar circumstances will never be repeated, and this particular disengaged hothouse model was never sustainable, as it was all based on the whim of an eccentric wealthy woman–who, it turns out, always wanted to be a man, or at least have a man’s freedom. Yates works hard exploring the darker side of “a man’s freedom,” and the brutal and miserable elements of identity formation, which inevitably include the sexual and gender confusion that lies in the actual founding of the school. WWI Lit is saturated with similar sexual ambivalence and homosexual attraction, desire, and coupling. The pre-war experience of Robert Graves at Charterhouse, in Goodbye to All That, makes a good comparison to Bill Grove in this book. Yates is trying to merge two worlds: the source of the postwar malaise of the self-doubting, confused heterosexual of the Frank Wheeler, Gray Flannel Suit type, and the cauldron of pre-war sexual identity formation.

Yates wrote this book long after the success of A Separate Peace (1959–two years before RR), and it’s funny to remember the note that I gleaned at some point during my previous Yates work, that A Good School was mentioned in the Preppy Handbook. I have a friend who had known about Yates for 30 years, ignorant of RR, based on reading AGS from that reference. Yates wrote a novel that marginally qualified for the list of classic school and adolescent texts, but it is deeply subversive at the same time–in a genre that is subversive in its nature. My new colleague was pondering how Revolutionary Road and Catcher in the Rye (1951) stand together as classics from the same period, and Salinger’s wildly popular and seemingly indispensable, definitive postwar book makes a tidy bridge between A Good School and Revolutionary Road. Salinger, with his own war baggage more scarring than Yates’, created a disaffected hero forever suspended in adolescent crisis, with a power that can be traced back to Huck Finn. Connecting A Good School to Revolutionary Road along these lines provides considerable depth and insight. Throw in Lord of the Flies (1954), another school classic with echoes in AGS, and you have a list of readable and well-known, easy references. In typical Yates fashion, his brief and secondary, seemingly fragile book, casts the entire collection in a darker, more honest and harrowing light. If you want to freak out a classroom of teenage literature students, perhaps start with Young Torless and include Revolutionary Road and A Good School on the reading list. Sounds like fun, feels like familiar pain, reads like truth.

I remember very well my reasons for and excitement in turning to The Divine Fire after reading Sinclair’s later, overtly modernist books Harriet Frean and Mary Olivier. DF is the book that became a bestseller in America and turned Sinclair into a literary celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan, and my more recent studies have revealed that Sinclair became good friends and a close correspondent with Annie Fields during her American tour, and Sinclair’s letters to Fields are sitting over in Pasadena at the Huntington Library. The point, then, in reading The Divine Fire was to get a sense of the book that put Sinclair on the map and thrust her into the consciousness of the public and the intelligentsia, where her years of study and superior learning made her immediately authoritative and fairly comfortable, although she was not a natural public figure. If you want to draw the George Eliot parallel, I suppose that The Divine Fire was the rough and lesser equivalent of Adam Bede, a hit book that revealed a “new” novelist of surprising depth and insight.

The Divine Fire is fun and engaging and exciting, and it’s easy to see why it was a bestseller. the set-up and main character is almost too good to be truie, if you love literature and old books and libraries and the romance of the book trade, as I do. the hero is “Savage” Keith Richman, who has grown up from infancy in his father Issac’s bookshop, a business which has expanded to a larger and more central location. Richman, or SKR as he sometimes signs himself, is thus an 1890′s version of young Samuel Johnson, a prodigy and savant of books and literature–who happens to have the soul and spirit of a poet. The fact that the central character is male is also reminiscent of Adam Bede, as Sinclair was evidently evolving and seeking a readership, and wasn’t ready to cast a “new woman” as her protagonist.

Having her poet-bookseller as male affords Sinclair a broad latitude to make SKR a man of his time, and in the opening chapters he gets drunk, chases after an actress, and rumbles around comfortably in the demi-monde of Grub Street and the London music halls. All the while Sinclair does a good job of making us believe that Richman has a deep soul and profound learning, the the hungover expert clerk at the bookshop dreams in Greek and has inherited the mantle of British poetic genius from Dryden, Pope, Gray and Johnson, Byron, Scott, Tennyson and Hopkins. And Keats of course, always Keats, and throughout the book we wonder if Richman is too fragile and precious for the rough world in which he lives. There’s great suspense all along that Richman will perish unknown and forgotten in a garret–that’s a major part of the story.

With Richman established as the contemporary, proto-modernist poet hero, Sinclair introduces her complementary heroine, Lucia Harden, a scholarly young woman of transcendent beauty who comes equipped with an ancient estate and family library, both under duress because of her charming, roguish father’s excesses. It’s a library that only Richman can properly value and appreciate. He shows up humble, hungover, and torn about neglecting his poetic calling to engage in commerce. He’s shocked to meet his soul mate when he’s at such a disadvantage, with a clearly unbrigedable gulf of class and means standing between them. And thus an updated, wide-ranging Austenian game is afoot, one that stretches from country houses with rare books to up-to-the-minute portraits of Grub Street and the new generation of writers, modernists trying to claw their way out of the mire.

Divine fire is fairly lengthy, and the odyssey of Savage Keith Richman is a proper extended saga with all sorts of trials and tribulations, twists and turns. His initial significant conflict is with his father Issac, and it’s a characteristic divide between the Victorian elder against the new century’s young man. Sinclair deftly plays this out in the world of bookselling, which Issac has always treated as a business, while knowing that his son might fall prey to the content of his wares. SKR’s break with his father shifts the scene to a Bloomsbury boarding house, where Richman toils away at journalism and composes immortal sonnets, abandoning hope that he will ever see or know Lucia Harden. Richman goes well down the road in a relationship with a loving, blooming young woman living at the boarding house, Flossie, who is comically called “the Beaver” throughout her appearance in the text. Simclair’s comedy is serviceable, balancing out the high-pitched aspirations of her characters and narrative.

The poet struggles on and years go by. The narrative really is extraordinary as a canvas for the tale of a romantic poet living in the modern world of London at the turn of the century. It’s somehow populist and standard plotting on the one hand, with the elements that made it a bestseller, and dead serious about literary ambition and the trappings of literature and learning and poetry all at the same time.

Is Divine Fire a great book? No, probably not, but it has all sorts of wonderful qualities. It’s fun and serious, exciting and romantic and thoughtful and deep. Sinclair writes engagingly and well, with range and humor and energy, and the book is a strong announcement that she deserved to be known and read and supported. And the book also makes a good argument that Sinclair deserves to be known as a whole, that her substantial body of work deserves and repays study, that there’s a lot more to her accomplishment than a solid secondary Modernist classic, Mary Olivier, along with its condensed companion, Harriet Frean. I still have a long way to go with Sinclair–The Creators is next–and it’s a very enjoyable ride.

What is Theron Ware, and why is it good? I’m eager to wade into the criticism of the novel, which promises to be especially interesting because there’s so much going on in and around the text. Its 1896 publication date lies in the fin-de-siecle sweet spot of the transition from realism to modernism that I find so interesting. Certain works from the 90′s, led by Chekhov I suppose, have a clarity of vision that reads as modern, along with a sense of form and structure that signals the advent of Modernism. This is clearly one of those books, and the question is whether it’s the best of them.

I saw one note that Theron Ware marked the end of the reign of Howells’ “tea cup realism,” which seems true enough, and the book itself contains a direct critique of Henry James’ internationalist stories and heroines. It seems comprehensive somehow, inviting comparison to Hawthorne and Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy and all the rest, as if Frederic quietly showed up, unnoticed, at the gates of the literary pantheon with a golden ticket guaranteeing admission.

But to answer the main question about what and why, rather than how it fits and compares, I would say that Theron Ware is an extraordinary tale of romantic obsession, self-deception, and the loss of faith. It gives profound meaning to the terms “damnation” and “illumination,” taking them in the course of the story from their traditional religious meanings, and ultimately placing them firmly in a 20th century, modern context. “Damnation” was incidental, as Frederic, writing in London (where he was an important New York Times correspondent), titled it “Illumination” there, but the US publishers were never informed of the change from the working title. Damnation turns out to be a stunning concept when it’s placed in the contemporary metropolitan world, even more so when it’s tied to romantic and sexual obsession.

Theron Ware is divided into four parts, and it has intriguing formal elements that I need to study and understand more carefully. The parts follow the seasons, and the narrative is compressing quite cleanly into a single year. Perhaps it makes sense to view the first “book” as firmly rooted in the 19th century, and the innocent America of a broad characterization of the era. This opening might be costing the book readers and recognition, because the world of simple and earnest religion seems quaint, staid, stodgey and familiar, like other things we’ve read before, and it completely disguises the way in which the story will hurtle forward into the modern world like a runaway train.

Frederic does fascinating things with his hero and point of view in the final book. Somehow the direction of the story manages to come as a complete, chilling shock–at least it did to me. If Book One portrays an innocent world of hope and faith within stern religious conservatism, the middle books make the turn that includes an open heart discovering the larger world with all its possibilities, and the loss of faith that goes along with enlightenment. Ware is exposed to rationalism and higher criticism and he opens up to beauty and truth in Book Two. At the midpoint he falls into a transformational fever, an interesting episode, leaving behind his ministry and its constraints, and his attachment to his wife. In Book Three he walks about as an enlightened man of science and philosophy with great confidence, albeit with a nervous edge, seeking salvation in romance, art, and nature like any other pilgrim since Goethe. Ware has befriended the local intelligentsia, as he’s adopted and inspired by them and their freethinking in the second book. The characters are a biologist who is a doctor of science, a sophisticated and worldly priest, and an unspeakably beautiful “New Woman,” Celia Madden, who lives with Grecian freedom and embodies the pure and wild Celtic spirit that landed in Ireland 2000 years before. Not surprisingly, Ware replaces his loss of faith with worship of Celia.

What’s interesting is that we stay with Ware through these first three books, and believe in him and his changing view of the world. His progress is natural and unforced, the gaining of wisdom in the search for truth in the real world. His departure from his problematic flock and wife is a slow movement, and it seems like he will work things out somehow. The turn begins subtly, just short paragraphs at the end of the early chapters of the final Book IV, when Frederic gives the briefest of glimpses of how Ware is perceived by his new friends. First there’s a moment of mild misgiving–uh oh, where is this going–and then it turns into a revelation: Holy shit! This was all in his head! It’s all a lie! And we realize that the narrative we have been following is a closely observed version of Ware’s own self-absorbed consciousness, that there has been virtually no narrative detachment throughout the transformative middle portion, before this final section. And Theron Ware himself was wrong about everything, and he is lost and, yes, damned.

The Damnation of Theron Ware is a master text in the study of self-deception. Self-deception and its mechanics and manifestations has always been my primary critical hobby horse, and I suppose I would have freaked out about this book and its accomplishment back in the day–I’m amazed and humbled by it now. The concluding book in the novel is simply fantastic. We get direct description, in dialogue and from extraordinary characters, of Theron Ware’s malaise and descent into breakdown and madness. Subtle glimpses give way to direct statements, which then snowball into tracking Ware’s unhinged obsessive pursuit of Celia. We find ourselves in the realm of Dostoyevsky and Raskolnikov, understanding Ware and how he got here, and how he’s powerless to escape from his own internal logic. Even better and more disturbing, Ware’s obsession is romantic and sexual, and Frederic’s text is a portrait of a man driving himself to madness over a woman who absorbs his every thought, clinging to his fantasies even as every signal and intruding element from the outside world denies their reality.

The strong contrast between Books 1 and 4 continues and climaxes with Ware’s journey to the metropolis, as he stalks Celia when she makes a trip with the priest, Father Forbes, to New York City. Book One carries Ware and his wife from the bucolic innocence of their rural Methodist beginnings to the more complicated and burgeoning, industrialized town, Octavia, based on Frederic’s home in Utica, New York, seen through the prism of his decade of expatriation in London. Just as we realize that Ware has completely lost himself in Octavia, there’s nothing to prepare us for his damned descent into the hell of modern metropolitan society. Ware’s train journey and his furtive trailing of Celia from the station to her hotel is brief, but it is genuinely frightening, as Ware is a rogue narrative agent hurtling towards climax and destruction. By saving the exposure of modern urbanity to the very conclusion and giving it a decidedly hellish aspect, Frederic taps directly into fin-de-siecle fear and anxiety, and at the same time he even manages to describe quite expertly the disintegration of the self. With its “damnation” of an American innocent, this novel prefigures Eliot’s post-WW1 Wasteland as it appears in Frederic’s keen disciple F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. We’re used to hearing about Fitzgerald’s admiration for Flaubert and others, but Theron Ware seems to be a much clearer and more direct antecedent, and it would be a fantastic companion text to The Great Gatsby.

And The Scarlet Letter too, for that matter. It would be hard to find a better book to act as a bridge between the two, I would think. I suppose that some of my enthusiasm is based on a steady effort to reduce my ignorance about once-neglected women writers and their extraordinary works from the exact same period, tracking the accomplishment and importance of books like The Story of an African Farm, Country of the Pointed Firs, and The Awakening. Ethan Frome (“Hawthorne everywhere you look”) and The House of Mirth would make excellent Ware companion texts as well. Frederick’s expansive artfulness, which invites such comparison, seems to me to put his work well above Drieser and the standard post-Howells crew, including Crane’s modernity. Obviously Theron Ware is known well enough to Americanists and specialists in the period and I suppose my question is when they encounter it, and how it fits for them. So now I get to go and try to find out. This is hardly a lost book, as the fact that I owned a copy of it should attest–it’s funny to think about how I had a copy of Revolutionary Road on my shelves too, without really knowing what it was or even how it got there. And I should note that reading it was meant to be general background to my upcoming read of lesser, more obscure Frederic–his historical novel of the American Revolution, In the Valley. But The Damnation of Theron Ware is a very great book, and any one with even roughly similar tastes to my own would thoroughly enjoy reading it.