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| Norris |
For
nearly all of my adult life, I’ve read little fiction because I wanted to
further my learning, and I equated learning with non-fiction. It has since become clear to me that there are different kinds of learning, and that both the objective and the subjective have their place. I started my foray into fiction with Westerns but, finding them to be canned and superficial, I returned to nonfiction. After
breaking my back in November, I could do little but read, so I finished maybe
ten books on houseplants, most of which I enjoyed very much. I then read a biography of John Paul Jones (a naval hero from the American Revolution) and several books on existentialism, but the latter left me so depressed (the moreso when I quit taking the narcotic Fentanyl) that I decided to
try fiction again as an escape. I first read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh,
which I so enjoyed that I read it again despite its length. My next book was Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which I followed with another
Lewis book, Babbitt. Then came
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.
The
Lewis and Dreiser books were of a genre called naturalism (to distinguish them from the romantic works of the preceding era) and were set in America
between the 1880s and the 1920s. Upon deciding that I preferred this genre, era, and
locale, over any other that I could think of, I decided to confine my future
reading to it. With that in mind, I read Dreiser’s The Bulwark, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, W.E.B. Dubois’ The Silver Fleece, and Frank Norris’ The Octopus.
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| Dreiser |
The Octopus was my favorite partly because I
could scarcely believe that Norris possessed such depth
of understanding while still in his twenties. Then I learned that Dreiser was in his twenties when he wrote Sister Carrie; Fitzgerald was in his
when he wrote The Great Gatsby; and
Sinclair Lewis was in his thirties when he wrote Main Street and Babbitt,
but none of these books present such intimately detailed portrayals of so
many people. That said, George Hurstwood in Sister Carrie was the most memorable character in any book I’ve ever read, and it was he who led me to conclude that fictional characters are superior to biographical characters in terms of psychological depth. For instance, the biographer of John Paul Jones attempted to psychoanalyze his subject, but because I didn’t know if he was right, I found his portrayal distracting, a problem that I couldn’t have with a fictional character.
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| Lewis |
My main problem with The
Octopus was that I found it so depressing that, just as
I had turned to fiction as an escape from the bleakness of existentialism, I now
needed an escape from my latest fictional work, so I’m reading another novel,
Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, which
is about a self-aggrandizing Baptist clergyman. Because I’ve read other works that started out light and ended up heavy, I fear what is to come, but so
far it’s hilarious, although few people found it that way in 1927. Here’s
a portion of what one website says*:
“During
his research for his next novel, Elmer
Gantry…Lewis would visit various churches in Kansas City each Sunday. At
one service, the atheist Lewis challenged God from a fundamentalist pulpit to
strike him down within ten minutes if He existed. The quote made the newspapers
and Lewis remained safe from lightning but not the fury of the religious
community. Elmer Gantry was published
in 1927 and immediately banned in Boston. ‘There was one good pastor in
California who upon reading my Elmer
Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the
state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of
putting me in jail.’ The novel was the bestseller of 1927….”
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| Du Bois |
(Because every book I've listed was critical in one way or another of the American status quo, they all made one or more groups unhappy. For example, Dreiser's own publishing house tried to suppress Sister Carrie because it offended both capitalists and moralists by portraying a woman whose only escape from dire poverty was to use men for their money. This suppression caused Dreiser to become suicidal and to have a nervous breakdown.)
...I'm also enjoying Elmer Gantry because it describes my childhood:
“The
church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians…it
provided all his painting and sculpture… From the church came all his
profounder philosophy. In Bible stories, in the words of the great hymns, in
the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of
literature… He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School,
except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
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| Fitzgerald |
I greatly prefer old books because I don’t want to
waste my time sifting through the latest bestsellers, none of which have shown themselves to have lasting merit. I also want to read books by authors who lived
in the place and era about which I’m interested rather than those who wrote
about them secondhand. The downside of reading dead people’s works is that I
come to regard them as friends so I find myself grieving that they are dead. You probably won’t meet
many people who cried over the death of Thoreau 125 years after his passing, but I was
one of them. I still sorrow that he died so young, so you can imagine my
grief for Frank Norris who died at age 32 of a gangrenous bowel brought on by a burst appendix.
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