Books I’m Not Recommending for Christmas: Mystery, Art and Literature, and Fiction

It’s that time of year again, when I don’t recommend books for Christmas. I’ve always believed that decisions about what books to buy are intensely personal. So, what follows is a list (linked to the review) of the best books I read in 2017. But I’m not recommending them. I think.

The first group includes the categories of mystery; art, literature and criticism; and fiction. Next week I’ll have history and biography; life, culture, and faith; and poetry.

Books that I would include in these categories but for which I haven’t published reviews yet include East End Vernacular: The Artists Who Painted London’s East End, published by Spitalfields Life; Heads or Tails, a mystery by Damien Boyd; and Ink, a play by James Graham.

Mystery

Thirteen Guests by J. Jefferson Farjeon.

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny.

Death in Profile by Guy Fraser-Sampson.

A Shattered Peace by Luke H. Davis.

Death of a Busybody by George Bellairs.

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves.

Art, Literature, and Criticism

A Well of Wonder by Clyde Kilby.

The Arts and the Christian Imagination by Clyde Kilby.

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite.

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincy by Frances Wilson.

The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Margaret Ellsberg.

Everything to Nothing: The Poetry of the Great War, Revolution, and the Transformation of Europe by Geert Buelens.  

A is for Azure by Donna Falcone and L.L. Barkat.

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England by Peter Parker.

Fiction

News of the World by Paulette Jiles.

Beren and Luthien by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Day the Angels Fell by Shawn Smucker.

The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth.

Can You See Anything Now? by Katherine James.

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman.

Photograph by Cesar Viteri via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Imagine reading the following in a contemporary literary study:

“Through the opening years of the nineteenth century, and even as late as the forties, while literature in America dawned and spread, (John James) Audubon haunted the frontiers, north, south and west, that encircled the centres of culture and their men of thought. His ‘Episodes’ were a cyclorama of the primitive scenes of theses frontiers, and he spoke words of good cheer for the future of the race.”

The passage is from The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), the writer and literary critic who won the 1936 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Flowering of New England (1815-1865). I’ve been reading The World of Washington Irving, and the more I read, the more I am struck by not only how much literary studies have changed but how much the United States has changed since Brooks published the work in 1944. (This edition is marked with the “This is a Wartime Book” emblem, denoting that it had met government regulations for conserving materials during the war.)

Brooks and his style of literary study have long been out of fashion. In fact, he was out of fashion for the last 10 years of his life. But he had been enormously influential, and how he understood the development of American literature is how several generations of students and teachers understood it (including my own generation).

Consider that passage, and what academics today would find wrong with it. It sounds pretentious. It’s far too generalized. It is based on questionable assumptions. It disenfranchises women and minorities (“their men of thought”). And what would an artist like John James Audubon have to do with literature anyway?

Washington Irving by John Wesley Jarvis (1809)

The passage, and the book in general, assumes something else – a national consensus about who we are (or were) as a country. It sounds almost as if Brooks is describing a “manifest destiny” for American literature. How overblown, vague, imperialist, sexist, racist, capitalist, and florid could the man get, right?

In our own time, literary studies tend to be more about 50 Shades of Grey and how Lady Gaga interacts with her social media fans. No self-respecting academic today would write the kind of studies that Brooks did. Yes, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.

As I read The World of Washington Irving, I’m constantly reminded how impoverished we’ve become. Brooks didn’t ignore the issues we take deadly seriously today – like race and slavery or what happened to native Americans – but he didn’t exclude everything else so as to exclude or downplay other important developments. He took a broad, knowledgeable sweep, and he seemed to effortlessly draw upon literature, biography, history, science, art, politics, and geography, sometimes all in the same sentence.

And I think, this is how it used to be. But this is not like it is. How it is seems less than what it was. And this isn’t only my imagination. Something profound has been lost.

Van Wyck Brooks in 1909

Brooks began his literary career as a poet, publishing (while he was still a student at Harvard) Verses by Two Undergraduates with John Hall Wheelock. Brooks’ literary studies included Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, William Dean Howells and others. What he’s best known for is a series of studies on the writer in America, focusing approximately on the 19^th century (1800-1915).

His literary output was enormous, and it was recognized. He received honorary degrees from 11 universities, including Harvard, where he earned a degree in 1908. He was roughly a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, and their years at Harvard overlapped. Brooks was also a lifelong friend6of poet John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978), who worked at Scribner’s Publishing and became senior editor in 1947.

Brooks on the cover of Time, Oct. 2, 1944

The World of Washington Irving is a delight to read. Irving, Brooks says, was America’s first true “American writer.” And he details Irving’s career, surrounding it with the deep context of what was happening in American writing and literature at the time (I didn’t know, for example, that Irving’s Sketch Book, for example, was loved was Byron, Shelley, and the other Romantic poets, and that it was used as a first reader for students of English all over the world for more than a century).

But Brooks’ book is also something of an archaeological artifact, buried under 70 years of debris, broken crockery, old coins, dust and dirt – the remains of a popular intellectual tradition that we’ve sent to the ash heap. And I wonder if Washington Irving’s writings are taught today in literature classes. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and other selections from the Sketch Book were still taught when I was in high school.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be considering some of Brooks’ other writings, too see if my initial impressions bear up. But in the meantime, I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling that what’s in our used bookstores and used book sales may be more important that what we find in our college bookstores and Barnes & Noble.

Top painting: The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, by John Quidor (1858). The portrait of Van Wyck Brooks in 1909 is by John Butler Yeats, father of William Butler Yeats.

A Critique for One Stop Poetry

Pete Marshall, one of the editors at One Stop Poetry, asked me and several others to participate in a poetry critique exercise today, to help people get used to the idea of criticism as a part of what poetry is all about. Criticism is a sensitive subject. Done well, it can help a poet grow and improve; done poorly, it can be ugly and destructive. I’ve seen it done both ways (and recently). But a poet has to be prepared for both, for both kinds can be ways to learn and grow.

Pete bravely offered up one of his own poems, one he wrote as a teenager. Here’s his original poem and what I posted in the comments, followed by how I would rewrite the poem.

Thoughts From A Decaying Age
by Pete Marshall

Let life live on a desolate shore
untouched by man and free of law
where all who live are but creature & flower
on a paradise island these dreams are our
fantasies that wont come true
for Man destroys anything who
stands in his way to accomplish a dream
with Science, War, Religion & we
who all just sit back and watch
do not try to stop as the world destructs.

Let their blood flow on through the valley
covering the land raped by the tyranny
scorching the Earth so dry & disfigured
where once stood trees & flowers & people.
hard to believe there once was life here
this barren land savaged by the years
but no river runs cold when you fight for existence
to live & breathe & laugh is resistance.

Critique

In my own work, I tend to the spare and sparse; not quite minimalist, but with an enthusiastic leaning in that direction. I’m also not overly fond of rhyming. I start with here to set my own biases up first – it’s all too easy for a critic to view everything through that overly personal lens. And that lens can’t be entirely escaped, for criticism is ultimately as personal as the poem itself.

I have at least three positive reactions.

I like how it sounds when it’s read aloud. It has a rhythm and flow that’s easy to miss if you only read it silently.

It has a defined point-of-view; it takes a stand.

It has a rather dark theme, but it offers hope. It takes a dim view of the destructive tendencies within humanity, tendencies that the poet suggests are inherent.

I have four concerns.

First, a grammar issue: “…for Man destroys anything who…” “Who” is the wrong word (so, too, in the first stanza). I see it and immediately ask, is this deliberate or simply unknowing? But it stops me for a moment from reading the poem, to ask the question. It seems small thing but small things can be telling things. And some periods seem to be missing, or something to indicate the end of one thought and the beginning of another (see the third and fourth lines of the first stanza).

Second, there’s an overreliance on the ampersand. It’s as if the poet were in a hurry and didn’t take the time to write out “and.” Again, a small thing. But it stops me to ask that “deliberate or unknowing” question.

Third, the rhyming is not consistent, or rather, it’s slightly disorderly, almost as if it can’t make up its mind whether it wants a rhyme or not. This is true in both stanzas.

Fourth, there seems to be break between the two stanzas, a break not quite bridged. Whose blood, exactly, should be allowed to flow?

A suggested rewrite (and if more time were available, I would work this over several times; the theme is worthy of a series of rewrites):

Thoughts from a Decaying Age
By Pete Marshall (edited)

I want life to live on a desolate shore,
untouched by man and free of law,
where all who live are but creature and flower.
Yet even on a paradise island this desire
is fantasy, a mirage that only shimmers,
for Man destroys what stands
in his way, to realize a dream
of Science, War, Religion while we stand aside
to observe, and to watch, and do nothing,
nothing to stop as the world destructs.

Let blood flow through the valley;
let blood cover the land raped by the tyranny
scorching the Earth so dry and disfigured,
Earth now scarred of trees and flowers and life.
There once was life here, they say,
this barren land savaged by the years.
Yet no river runs cold when you fight for existence;
to live and breathe and laugh is resistance.

To see what others offered as acriticism and various suggested rewrites of the poem, please visit One Stop Poetry.

Photograph: Dramatic Landscape by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.