Werther's Original Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

Yes, dear Lotte, I shall arrange and order everything; give me as many things to do as you like, and as often as possible. One thing, though: if I might ask you not to use sand to dry the notes you write me. . . ? Today I raised it hastily to my lips, and was left a gritty crunching in my teeth.

I needed a break from Phil Maddison's semi-coherent crankiness, so I read THE BEST POSSIBLE BOOK for that purpose and also, as befits its role as a Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight antidote, one of the shortest non-picture books I have ever read. It's called The Sorrows of Young Werther and it's the sad tale of an adorable doofus who never reckoned on having to live in an imperfect world when his skin and his summer days have always been perfect heretofore. I mean, he knows there's such a thing as the inherent tragedy of all life, because it gets name-checked in all his favorite songs, but no one told him it would hurt this much!!

The plot is very simple. Thackeray put it best:

Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.

Charlotte was a married lady,
And a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies
Would do nothing that might hurt her.

So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled;
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by them troubled.

Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well conducted person
Went on cutting bread and butter.

If it's wrong to receive a story about a promising young dude who idiotically talks himself into shooting himself with his beloved Charlotte's own pistols, ostensibly to "make her life easier," as a hilariously delightful breath of golden springtime, well. . . at least I'm not the first? Werther's crazy emo charm is real, and so is Charlotte's very human equanimity. She's not heartless, and she likes Werther - but life has its way of going on. This story was based partly on a real suicide, partly on Goethe's own hopeless crush on a married friend, and uses the best parts of pity and wry self-awareness.

"We shall see each other again!" I cried. "We shall find each other, we shall pick each other out from among the many. I am going," I continued, "going of my own free will, yet if I thought we were parting for ever I could not bear it. Farewell, Lotte! Farewell, Albert! We shall meet again."
—"Tomorrow, I expect," she countered in jest.

<3

What I'm Reading Now

I didn't give up on the Chronicle, of course! A Solitary War and Lucifer Before Sunrise are both perfectly tolerable 90% of the time, though Henry Williamson seems to have more or less given up on the ensemble cast - as Phil gets crankier and more frustrated, the people in his life fade into catchphrases and cardboard antagonists and one or two pairs of beseeching feminine eyes. The scope of narrative sympathy narrows along with Phil's own. Phil is exhausted trying to live his ideal of honest farm work, whose perfectly predictable failure he is far too inclined to blame on everyone else's decadence. His neighbors spread rumors about him being a German spy, some of which are unfair and some of which he might try to counter by not trying to get other people to listen to his favorite Hitler speeches quite so often. He frets about someday getting the time to sit down and write his generation's War and Peace, and maybe out here beyond the book we're supposed to realize that he has! but it's not enough just being as big a crank as Tolstoy; War and Peace gets its power from its soapiness, and HW is committed to making his narrative as repetitive and nearly joyless as Phil's true experiences of running a farm and failing to write a novel because he's too tired from running the farm. I added that "nearly" because every now and then there is some joy, usually in the form of some grass or a bat or the feeling of being awake at night in an inexpressibly complex living world. HW's nature writing was always his strong point, even back before he developed all these weak points.

There is also Emma Dunning Banks's Original Recitations With Lesson-Talks, an 1896 handbook for the elocution student or dedicated amateur. It's exactly what it says: 54 monologues chosen for their popularity as recitations (as opposed to their literary merit, the introduction is quick to point out - too many budding elecutionists pick their favorite poems only to have them sink like stones because they're too delicate or specific for general audiences) with stanza-by-stanza instructions on how to get the best performance out of each. It's a fascinating look at a lost world.

What I Plan to Read Next

That's the real question! osprey_archer posted about C.S. Lewis' book An Experiment in Criticism a few days ago, so when I was in the library looking for something else, I saw it and took it home. Maybe that! Almost certainly more Phil, until the Phil runs out. Maybe cats who solve mysteries?

Comments

[evelyn_b]

Oh, man, I love Werther so much. I don't think I would have loved it when I was actually young, but that's just one of the many benefits of getting old and growing a sense of humor. I didn't mention that Werther loves Ossian, the fake Gaelic epic poet whose fakeness Sam Johnson was so adamant about. Werther is a pre-debunking-of-Ossian figure who, at the climax of his emo pining, reads to Charlotte a long passage from Ossian, in his own translation. <3 And it is so, so short! You have nothing to lose but your patience. <3

"A writer must, above all, be truthful about himself," Phil writes in his diary, as the introduction to a horrible account of him killing two kittens and then striking his wife over and over again in a blind rage - a peak of violence his own father never reached, for all his selfish cruelty. I agree with the sentiment but I wish honesty were a little more effective as a preventative measure.

Phil's feelings about Hitler are complicated, I think. He's got that writer's craving to empathize his way into everything and it leads to him making some unjustified conclusions about what Hitler is actually like and what his goals are - through analogy with himself and his dead cousin Willie (the other fictional H.W.). The narrative makes some noticeable effort to distinguish Phil's (and not!Mosley's) politics from open antisemitism, mostly by making all the open antisemites with speaking parts oafs. But then Phil will read a quote by Hitler that to anyone reading in 1967, or today, is clearly just an ugly slab of disordered ranting about the Jews - and latch onto the one phrase in it that resonates with his own feelings about brotherhood or craftsmanship or the Great War being a crucible or whatever. And then just not particularly notice the rest - to the point that he's a little taken aback when one of his children asks him, "Are the Jews really to blame?"

Which is something that a lot of people did do at the time - and something that happens in political affiliations all the time, then and now - just thrill to the thing you thrill to and ignore the bits you don't like or don't care about, or don't want to think about right now because the thing you want is more important. I'm reading a bio of Hitler right now (thanks/no thanks to Phil whining about how no one ever bothers to get to know the real Hitler :|) and a lot of the support for the NSDAP in 1933 was like that - some people were really into the whole Nazi message, but there were a lot of voters who didn't particularly like the antisemitic scapegoating or the open violence, but were willing to ignore it because they hated Communism or catastrophic unemployment or the current government more, and didn't care that much about whether some people who were definitely not them got beat up or shot by the SA along the way.

Sorry, that was a long aside. :|

Anyway, I think it's admirable in a way - it's definitely valuable as a historical record - and it's still interesting as a novel, though it can make for some jarring reading and some frustration. I actually suspect HW is being slightly less honest about his past political committments than he is presenting himself as being - but that's just based on how smudged and vague most of Phil's political talk is compared to how specific the books have been about nearly everything else. But that may be unfair. Maybe that's just the way Phil and H.W. both were. (He's definitely streamlined his sexual history, though).

ETA: I am excited about An Experiment in Criticism! It looks like tonnes of fun.

[osprey_archer]

Wait wait. When you say "the other fictional H.W.," does that mean that Henry Williamson wrote a fifteen-volume autobiographical novel, and not content with this amount of self-dramatization, he inserted a SECOND self-insert into the proceedings? Whom he then killed off? I can only hope in an appropriately tragic and dramatic manner, because what else is a second self-insert for?, but from what I've learned about Henry Williamson through your posts + Tarka, he probably killed cousin Willie in some incredibly mundane way.

I'm more familiar with this "thrill to the thing you thrill to and ignore the rest" thing more as a reaction to fiction than political parties, but I could see how someone could come to feel that way about a political party (although generally speaking you'd hope they'd pick a party other than Nazi).

I'm also curious how H. W. streamlined his sexual history for the novel, although I have an unhappy suspicion that he may have simply slept with way more secretaries than he felt able to fit into the narrative.

[evelyn_b]

Haha, sort of, not quite. The Flax of Dream is his tetralogy about Willie Maddison, written long before this beast, in the 1920s. I haven't read it, but second-hand from Phil I have learned that Willie tragically drowned himself for being too consummate a poet and too true a prophet for the cruel world. So yes, that's what a second self-insert is for. In a sense the Chronicle is a massive spinoff sequel to The Flax of Dream.

You know, on second thought he might not actually have streamlined his sexual history all that much? It's possible that it just feels that way. I try to avoid too much biography when I'm reading obviously autobiographical fiction, but the last four volumes from the library all have the same intro by Anne Williamson, his daughter-in-law, with some behind-the-scenes gossip. That seemed more chaotic and cluttered than what happens in the books, but it might just be that the intro is short and the books are long and space out the affairs with plenty of farming and lectures about restoring Britain. I'll find out someday if I read a biography!

[osprey_archer]

He actually wrote nineteen novels about himself???

He should have knocked off one more and made it an even twenty.