Dr. Metablog

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, tandem, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles.  But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

     They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
    "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of an New England abolitionist, has married a slaveowner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees.  Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton.  Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride.  Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation.  When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe.  They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye.  More like a father welcomed by his chlIdren than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring.  She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good.  As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate.  Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre.  It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off.  When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting.  De Lord never made us look like dem.  We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat:  He knows best, I 'spise.  Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow;  what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses.  Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons.  Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for?  I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect.  The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states.  One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does.  I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity.  I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead.

Updike's Gamble

John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture."  I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things.  If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted with extensive and elaborate footnotes.

"Roy has been carefully shaping can his Total mush into a kind of a pyramid with the back of a spoon."  Who will understand the meaning of this sentence.  "Total mush?"  I imagine a footnote:  "'Total' was the brand name of a fibrous dry packaged breakfast food which, when liquids such as milk were added, could be formed into a paste."  

Here's another example.  Rabbit is musing.  "Biblical names.  Rachel, Esther.  Not always.  Barbra, Bette."  And here's the putative footnote. "In this passage, Harry muses about the names of Jewish women.  "Barbra" (sic) refers to Barbra Streisand, a popular Jewish-American singer and actress of the period.  Professor Harvey Wrongbody's assertion that "Bette" refers to Bette Davis is clearly uninformed, as Miss Davis was not Jewish. "Bette" as Professor Wrongbody should have known, references Bette Midler, a performer famous in her day for impersonating Janis Joplin (see Index) in The Rose." 

In the first few pages of Rabbit at Rest --  which is perhaps the most consistently fine of Updike's novels, there are dozens or scores of allusions that will test a future annotator's learning.  It's highly unlikely that with the passing of generations anyone but specialists in late twentieth-century Americana will be able either to identify or grasp the significance of  "this guy Bundy who murdered dozens of women in dozens of states."  (Bundy?  Is that King Kong Bundy?  McGeorge Bundy?  Al Bundy?)  Or have the least idea what is meant by a "Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face" or the possible thematic significance of "Cara Lott Gets Hot" or "Winn Dixie" or "Ekerd Drugs" or the National Enquirer or "Planter's Peanut Bar" or "Melanie Griffith" or "Deion Sander's recent arrest."  It's only twenty years since Rabbit at Rest was published, and I was there, paying reasonable attention, but frankly, I'm already becoming a bit vague about some of  the details.

If I were a novelist of Updike's talent, I would think twice about loading up on trivia that cannot help but  barricade the novels from future readers.  But perhaps Updike doesn't care.  Perhaps he's only interested in the moment and in readers of his own generation.  To me, it seems as though he doesn't give a royal fig for the future. 

Shakespeare, a writer not for his age alone but for all time, occasionally included references to fleeting phenomena.  I rather like it that he did so.  I'd be intrigued to learn, once and for all, who was that "red-nosed innkeeper at Daventry" to whom Falstaff refers.   But neither Shakespeare nor any other writer with whom I'm familiar so saturated his work with multitudinous and forgettable popcultch trivia.

But perhaps Updike has made the right choice.  Perhaps the density of reference makes the novels so credible, so real, that scholars will be happy to annotate and readers will revel and glory in the footnotes.

It's a gamble.  My guess is that it's a losing one, but time will tell.  

Yellow Face

"Yellowface" is the Asian equivalent of theatrical "blackface," as in the case of Warner Oland (a Swede) or Sidney Toler (an Scottish-American) impersonating Charlie Chan. "Yellow Face" is also the name of an uncharacteristic Sherlock Holmes short story -- one that is unusual among Conan Doyle's compositions in that no crime is solved nor none committed, and also because Sherlock Holmes' overconfident deductions prove to be entirely erroneous.

Grant Munro has married a young widow, Effie Hebron, who returned to her native England after her Atlanta husband died of yellow fever.  After some years of blissful marriage, Effie begins to act most strangely;  she sneaks out to a neighboring house in the middle of the night -- a house at the upper window of which her puzzled husband catches sight of a strange and unnaturally immobile yellow face.  

After listening to Munro's narration, Sherlock Holmes confidently theorizes that Effie's first husband did not die, but has secretly returned to England to blackmail his erstwhile wife.  But when Munro, Watson, and Holmes break into the house, they discover at the window not a husband come back to life but a young girl, Effie's daughter, wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she is a "little coal-black negress."  The mystery is solved:  Effie has been behaving peculiarly not because she is seeing another man (as Munro seems to fear) or because she is being blackmailed, but because she was afraid to confess to her second husband that her former mate was black --  even though, she proclaims,  "a nobler man never walked the earth."

And so the story proceeds to its climax.  How will Munro respond to the revelation? Will he reject his wife, or embrace her?  "It was a long two minutes [ten minutes in the first American edition!!] before Grant Munro broke the silence....  He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door. 'We can talk it over more comfortably at home,' said he.  'I am not a good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one that you have given me credit for being.'" 

"Yellow Face" is designed to be an uplifting story of tolerance and trust and in truth it is extraordinarily progressive, even radical, by the standards of 1894.  But it's also a naive story.  It elides and dodges the complications that it raises, especially about matters of race.  Is it credible, or is it not more fear than fact, that a mixed-race husband and an English woman would produce a "coal-black" offspring. Doyle's belief that such an engendering is possible is a mark of the simplicity of his thinking about race.  Moreover, there were strict "anti-miscegenation" laws in Georgia in the last part of the nineteenth century. How did Effie and John Hebron manage to evade them?  In what way did they live?  Hebron managed to leave a considerable estate to his wife?  How did he achieve his wealth?

Doyle is interested in making a case for tolerance and he is interested in Holmes.  But he does not much concern himself with the other characters that he creates.  He does not explore the psychological costs for Effie when, as she says, "she cut herself off from her race."  What prompted her to violate so strong a taboo?  And why would a strong and independent woman suddenly become so fearful when she re-married?  What did it cost her, emotionally, to leave her child behind in Georgia where a dark mixed-race girl would be so awkwardly situated?  How could she conceal so much of her history from Grant Munro without overwhelming guilt?  How did she manage to achieve so blissful a union with him while carrying many important secrets?  And what about the poor child?  Born to an illegal union that is soon fractured by death, then abandoned, then reclaimed and brought to a strange land -- and asked to wear a yellow mask for fear the someone would be shocked by her pigmentation. Doyle does not even broach the question of the damage to the child?   And what kind of future can be in store for her in England?

Doyle seems to consider that "Yellow Face" concludes happily -- but does it? While it is certainly to the author's credit that he is unfazed by the taboo against "intermarriage," it is also true that he rests satisfied with easy, superficial, and naive answers to hard questions. Or rather, he does not even seem to realize that he has started a whole pack of hares in motion.   

It's curiously negligent that Doyle does not even give a name to the "coal-black negress."  She remains a plot-device, not a person. 

It is equally odd that Doyle does not find fault with Sherlock Holmes's' inability to think past the convention of the genre, where blackmail is a commonplace.  Intermarriage, Doyle seems to suggest, is so exotic, so unusual, that it would not occur even to so brilliant a detective as Sherlock Holmes that a yellow mask might hide a black face.

Updike -- Part IV

The Updike-athon continues  Since my last report, I've read Museums and Women, Bech is Back, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. 

The good news:  Updike is fluent, a masterful stylist, a remarkable story-teller, a distinguished craftsman.  He's original, entertaining, bold, inventive.  The section of Beauty of the Lilies that describe Alma DeMott's childhood in Basingstoke, Delaware is as good as anything I've read in years -- a truly classic piece of writing  

The bad news:  Updike's characters have no heart  They're almost uniformly small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving and, in fact, incapable of love.  The novels are distressing and depressing.  And inconsistent.  The Rabbit quartet is reputed to be Updike's masterpiece, but the long section about Skeeter in Redux is a ludicrous mess, a total bomb, a failure that disfigures the entire series  

A reader who knew America only through the Rabbit series would be convinced that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were selfish, money-grubbing, racist, entirely without culture, sex-obsessed, alcoholic, uneducated, insecure, obnoxious, undisciplined and knowledgeable only of TV trivia.  I suppose that there are such people -- but there are also substantial citizens, artists and artisans, and good, functioning families.  I must say that four large novels in the company of Updike's folk can wear a reader down.  I think it's time to re-read Trollope's Palliser novels, wher4e there is villainy but also redemption.  I need an antidote.

Updike-III

Two more Updike novels down the hatch.  The first, Seek My Face, published in 2002, is an extended short story rooted in the author's prodigious knowledge of the contemporary art scene.  It's casually written -- as if Updike didn't try very hard.  Am I excessively sensitive to be insulted that Updike didn't extend himself to invent a plot?  The second novel is iRabbit at Rest, composed back in 1990 when Updike was trying harder.  Harrry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "hero" of four novels, is a force in modern fiction.  He's nasty, amoral, and crude, but hardly more so that the panoply of suburbanite creatures who surround him  Updike mercilessly draws attention to everything odious in America culture -- he's the poet laureate of tacky. Rabbit is fascinating but repellent. Whatever happened to "to teach and to delight?"  

Every once in a while Rabbit, always, alas, comprehensible, becomes momentarily sympathetic. But then Updike allows him to speak -- and Rabbit's words are invariably aggressive and offensive.  I think that the gap between what Rabbit thinks and what Rabbit says is a major structural flaw in the novel -- and one that will eventually push the novels from center to periphery.  But time will tell. For now, the Rabbit books are a guide to our own American kind of shallowness -- and so here I am, off to the library or to the second-hand bookstore to hunt down the earlier novels in this series.  What does Dickens say about Uriah Heep -- something about "fascinating in his own repulsion."  Yes, I think that phrase will serve nicely for Updike's Rabbit.   

Updike- II

In Terrorist, Updike takes us inside the head of a young,malleable, soft-spoken Islamist fanatic.  The protrayal is persuasive, in part because the horror bigotry is understated and casual.  It's quite a feat of imagination on the author's part.  It's a good novel -- a page-turner, as they say.  It's most remarkable feature is that the hero of the novel is a tired and bedraggled high school guidance counsellor;  What a breakthrough -- the guidance counsellor, figure of o-so-much contempt and satire, as savio!.  Of course, the contrived/dramatic ending in which the terrorist and the counsellor square off is totally unbelievable, but at least it doesn't involve fistfights or animatrons.  On the whole, Terrorist is a very readable, imaginative and largely satisfying novel.  It's a bit spare, laconic  -- but perhaps it only seems so because I'm also reading Doestoevsky.  It's not a novel for the ages -- it's too obviously occasional.  And I must say, I'm suspicious of a piece of fiction about the interaction of various ethnicities in which the only two Afro-Americans are a whore and a pimp named Tylenol.  

Off to the Bradford Public to see what else is in their Updike holdings.

Updike

I've shamefully neglected the writings of John Updike.  I read the first Rabbit novel when it appeared in 1960 and was struck by its vigor and authenticity.  A talent to watch, I said to myself -- but then I lost track.  I loved one of the Bech books, devoured on an airline ride from somewhere to somewhere else twenty years ago.  I've been dazzled by short stories in various anthologies and by art criticism in the NYRB.   But for a writer considered an American master, nominated for a Nobel  -- well, I've been inattentive.  And now Updike is gone.  I'm late (as usual).  To remedy the personal deficiency, I hastened to the Bradford Public Library, where, sad to say, the only Updike on the shelf was one I'd never heard of,Villages, published in 2004. 

Villages is billed as an autobiographical novel and appears to be so.  It's eminently readable, slickly written (sometimes so facilely that it crosses into self-parody).  But, my-oh-my, what an embarrassingly bad performance.  It's no more than a sexual history of "Owen Mackenzie" in which the succession of women Owen encounters are diffentiated only by the size and shapes and degrees of mucosity and erectility of their reproductive organs.  It's an adolescent novel written by a seventy-year-old eminence.  What the heck was Updike thinking?. Why would he waste precious time on such unambitious, indulgent stuff -- unless he took a long-ago manuscript out of a drawer and fooled around with it a bit?

Disappointing indeed. A few years ago, I read through the novels of Philip Roth, who is an exact contemporary of Updike.  My conclusion:  that Roth (see Books over there on the side of the page) was a writer of arrested development.  Oh no, not again!

Let's see if the BPL has anything else by Updike today.  Let's hope for the best.  Villages has got to be an aberration. 

What We Should Have Read in the Fifties: Two Years Before the Mast

It's been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which describes events of 1834-36 and was first published in 1840.  It's a great piece of writing.  I've heard about it since I was a child, but just got around to reading it this week. It's a book that alters my understanding of the early nineteenth century. 

Why did I like it so much.  Let me count the ways.

1.  It's a sensitive work.  Dana's a Boston patrician but instead of going to sea as a junior officer, which he could easily have done, he enlists as a common seaman.  He describes life on board the ship from the seaman's point of view.  I don't know another book that's so honest, so real, and so uncomplaining. Dana later put what he learned to work, becoming an advocate for sailors' rights.  His is not a modern sensibility, but on the whole there's far less of the deplorable racist and sexist assumptions that disfigure the earlier literature and make us cringe for our ancestors.

2. I've always loved sea stories.  Wasn't I transfixed, as a child, by the Bounty and Hornblower stories?  But Dana is leagues ahead.  Two Years  is non-fiction that is more compelling reading than most fiction.  I couldn't put it down.  Besides, I had just read Moby-Dick, a thoroughly romanticized version of life on sea. Melville is poetic, Dana is gritty and detailed.  I'm sorry, but I'm almost always happier in the world of the enlightenment than the world of nineteenth-century romanticism.  Something in the mitochondria, perhaps. 

3.  A large hunk of the book takes place in California, when it was still part of Mexico and there was a shack or two where there's now Santa Barbaraor San Diego or Monterey.  It's an invaluable record of California before the gold rush. Picturesque and enlightening 

4.  It has great characters:  ship captains both competent and cruel, sailors brave and cowardly, as well as the occasional onboard eccentric.  A good account of naval camaraderie.

5.  Language. Some of us enjoy specialized vocabulary of any sort.  This book is a treasure trove of words unfamiliar to a landlubber like me.  "It was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed forepenser."  "I threw the downhaul over the windlass, and jumped between the knight-heads out upon the bowsprit.  The crew stood abaft the windlass and hauled the jib down, while we got out upon the weather-side of the jib-boom... the great jib boom flying out to leeward and slatting."  "The cook made us a mess of scouse."  "Dessert was duff."  Sometimes Dana lays it on a bit thick, but it's worth it.  What is a martingale anyway?   Well, "it comprises the parts of the standing rigging which strengthen the bowsprit and jib boom against the force of the head stays"  Clears that up.  

Another Crack at Moby Dick

I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twice in the '60s and I just didn't get it.  I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet -- it's so highly stylized that either you buy into it or you don't, and I don't. To me, Melville is a quite ordinary GrubStreet quill-driver whose every sentence screams at the very top of its lungs, "Look at me, I'm Shakespearean."  I resent Melville's attempt to draft using WS as puller.

Ultimately, there's a deep  incompatibility of sensibility between me and HM.  I'm not a big Romantic guy. Baring the soul isn't enough to keep me happy, certainly not  for the length of so elongated and dense a novel. Perhaps for a brief lyric. 

I like stories.  Moby Dick must have the thinnest plot in the history of 800-page novels. Man hunts whale, man finds whale, and (last ten pages) whale wins. 

Charles Reade's formula for the long nineteenth-century novel was "Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."  Melville neglects the first two of these maxims.  There's nothing either amusing or pathetic about Moby Dick but I'm here to tell you that Melville totally mastered the "make them wait" part.  Totally.