Jim Grimsley

There are only a couple of George Eliot books that I had not read by the age of thirty and this is one. It was a revelation in that it was a book of hers that I could dislike, and the novelty of that is what kept me reading. I have seen it called her best novel, admittedly by only one of her contemporaries, and kept thinking about that while I endured the reading. She herself is said to have claimed that each sentence in the novel is as good as all her skill could make it, though I am paraphrasing and maybe overstating. The sentences are certainly fine enough, and Eliot is a good writer even she is not at her best. What was most interesting here was to see her undertake an historical novel, and the idea of that was also a bit revelatory, since all her novels read like history from this distance. For the first time I understood her to be a modern novelist in the context of her time and place. Though she often writes about an era thirty or forty years in the past, as her introductions to her books often reveal. What I mean is that as a writer she was dealing with contemporary people and issues, not about the remote past, which is what I as a reader had always felt from her. This explained some of what was missing from Romola. It is certainly a good story and should be compelling except that one feels Eliot straining at the creation of the world, constantly convincing herself of the reality of historical Florence, and at pains to record all the details of her research. What is missing from the book is her sense of humor. In every other novel there are comic passages, careful touches of dialog that reveal the person speaking, like the aunts in The Mill on the Floss, or Adam’s mother in Adam Bede. She is a masterful creator of background characters and low-minded people, and these touches are vital to the representation of the foreground, the heroes and heroines, the virtuous, the sublime. This background is mostly missing from Romola. The characters have little voice. They speak in translation, as it were, and not in themselves. Which leaves virtue (Romola) and vice (Tito) to carry the book on their own, and they make a poor job of it. The end of the book, with angelic Romola among the plague victims, adored and all that, feels a bit laughable, at least to me. I am certainly not accustomed to thinking of George Eliot in these terms, as having written a not-good book. Reading the book humanized her for me. Even great writers have their failures. There’s no reason to gloat over this, though I suppose that’s what I’m doing. But there is a certain humanizing quality in the knowledge.

Like many people I loved the books from long ago. When I began to watch the series I read some positive reviews that mentioned the negative reactions of purists who disdained the changes to the television version of the classic story. Oh well, I thought, one has to expect changes from the original, it’s just the way television works. I even reread the books, which hold up well enough but have a tattered aspect after all these decades. Very clever writing, sayings like “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” which became part of the landscape of science fiction in the 60s, because of Isaac Asimov’s enormous impact. The stories of Foundation, like the robot stories he wrote, are all aimed at proving the truth of his truisms in clever ways. But nevertheless it was entertaining fiction and when I was young it felt very profound and satisfying. Now, many millions of dollars later, here is this television series that gives us a glimpse of the Galactic Empire that we knew and loved. At first it was a bit enthralling. There was Hari Seldon talking about psychohistory. Right away the embellishments that were necessary to fill out the bare bones of Asimov’s books began to appear worrisome. Worst of these is the genetic dynasty and the silliness about clones being identical. Even identical twins don’t remain identical forever, and they certainly don’t see themselves as such. The idea that a clone can’t have a soul or change becomes important about midway through the first season. More silliness. From the first we hear that psychohistory can’t predict for individuals (Asimov’s doctrine, to which he remains faithful) but this becomes all muddled because it turns out Hari Seldon could foresee Gaal’s destiny and she has special powers and is a golden child (she was just Seldon’s biographer in the novels) and she has a daughter who is also a golden child and prescient and on like that. The child being Salvor Hardin, the origin of the “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” saying (in the books), who in the television version stomps about carrying a big rifle and protecting everybody by pointing the rifle at things. Speaking of the saying, the “incompetent” appear to be television producers who cannot make television without constant resort to violence, guns, explosions, and the like. The first season is about the first crisis faced by the Foundation, which in the book is resolved by clever diplomacy but in the television series by many gunfights and killings and snarling villain(esse)s and hero(in)es. At the end of the season come emotional parting scenes as Salvor goes off to find her true mother Gaal, and after the actors have chewed each other’s shoulders for a while, Salvor sails off into the hugeness of the galaxy to the exact location were, a century later, her mother will also land in her little life pod, after chewing her own ration of scenery, and they Find Each Other At Last. In other words this is just Hollywood doing what Hollywood does, spending millions upon millions to rehash the same tripe from the last epic science fiction morass and all the previous ones. With cool space rifles. So I console myself that at least it was pretty and had some good special effects. Special effects being the true last refuge of the incompetent.

I’d never have thought to give a mere three stars to a Virginia Woolf book, or to write about its charming qualities, its cuteness, its rather sentimental portrait of dogs, their owners, and poets with strange ailments who languish in their bedrooms; but there you go. This book was an amusement made delightful by its contrast to the serious-literature quality of nearly everything else I’ve read by Woolf, whom I admire to distraction. What English major could resist the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog as told by one of the pre-eminent authors of any possible canon of literature? Here is Woolf having, of all things, some fun with her writing. The appeal of this, however, does fade as the book goes on, as Flush jealously guards his mistress from other animals, from suitors, from one suitor in particular; as Flush escapes from the Barrett household with the happy poet couple of Browning and Browning; as Flush adventures in Italy in search of love. It is both a statement of the book’s strengths and weaknesses to state that this alone among Woolf’s work would be suitable, and even recommendable, as a Disney property. An animated story in which Elizabeth becomes the next Disney princess, perhaps, and Flush her faithful dog companion. My tongue is where it ought to be for such a statement, but nevertheless that would be a cartoon worth watching.

When I first encountered Elizabeth Gaskell (Wives and Daughters) I thought that she was one of those writers who ought to get more attention; later I realized my response was indicative of my own ignorance, which is so often the case. Cranford has, after all, been adapted to television with one of the best casts to be found, and I have watched the series almost as often as I have read the book. In her other works, Gaskell is concerned with social problems and issues of her time; in this book she is largely concerned with recording the lives of strong spinsters and widows in a small, old-fashioned community that sees itself as a bulwark against change. The charm of this book is the women whose stories she tells, with such particular attention to their intersections, their spats, their gossip, their mores and customs, and the changes they endure. In this regard, especially when the railroad comes to Cranford, Gaskell’s social analysis merges with her incomparable ability to draw meaning out of what for lack of a better word I would call the ordinary. She is one of those writers who reminds that there are no small lives, no ordinary people, but only the particular and the real. These writings are not intended as stories so much as portraits, “vignettes” as they are often termed, but they are as delightful as they are incisive. (I will forever see Miss Mattie as Judy Dench, Eileen Atkins as Miss Deborah, and Imelda Staunton as Miss Pole. What has that to do with the book? Actors bring their best to material that they love.)

This book is the closing volume of the Beulah Quintet, which I see mentioned on Goodreads as Settle’s best known work. The incidents that are narrated in this novel are mentioned in the introductions to all the previous volumes, the shock of something in the past – presumably in Settle’s past – that incited the search for the roots of what she terms American freedom. Let me state that I have admired the first four books in the series especially for the quality of the writing, but have been at times troubled by the content, as I have detailed in posts on volumes one through four. Settle is a remarkable writer of historical works, delving into the characters and depicting them as they were in the era, however uncomfortable that might be for modern readers, given that the books are populated by slaveholders, slaves, First Nations peoples, and a wealth of others. She has an eerie ability to enter into the modes of thinking of her creations, and this is often disconcerting, for she understands that these people of the past are alien to modern readers, but she forges ahead with her work, convinced of its purpose. What has convinced her of this purpose is what she writes about in this last volume of the set. The protagonist of the book is the writer of the Beulah Quintet, and so one is justified in relating her as Settle. So I will not make much distinction between the two in my response. It is utterly disappointing to find that the impetus for this long historical delve is the death of her brother, Johnny, and we are somehow to see his figure as tragic, when he appears to be more or less a wastrel, a drunk, and a dog. Exactly how he gets himself killed is less important than the aftermath of his death, when all his friends (who are of course of the best families in Beulah and environs) mourn him and search for the meaning of his wasted life. In Settles’s vision, Johnny is as much a victim of the past as are all the descendants of slaves, all the poor people who worked in his ancestor’s coal mines – I won’t belabor this as I have nothing to say about the conceit except that it borders on lunacy for me. This book is emptier and less appealing. But I don’t feel that I wasted my time in reading this book, and certainly not in reading its predecessors. What is interesting in it is the theory of the novel, that suddenly we can meet the author of the previous four and read her as a fictional character. There are some vivid episodes throughout the text. But there is a presumption of the importance of the rich and their history – they are the people who matter most, and it is in them we find the core of history. For me, this is a deal-breaker.