Whirlwind and Whimper Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

Henry Williamson is a frustrating writer. I guess you knew that already and are probably tired of hearing about it. NEVERTHELESS, here I am to talk about it some more. The Gale of the World has some of his best writing, when it comes to heartbreaking failed family relationships and heartbreaking fish fungus outbreaks, and some of his boldest, most ranting rancid lyricism. It's also chock full of Nazi apologism, and Phil being sad because people keep jumping to mean conclusions about him based on his Nazi apologism. It includes an entire chapter in which Phil gets a copy of Hereward Birkin's new book The Alternative, which is an exact copy of a book by the same name by HW's friend Oswald Mosley, so that Phil can write what is presumably the same review of it in fictional 1947 as HW wrote in real 1947 and the reader can watch. There is YET ANOTHER bright-eyed teenager who throws herself at Phil under the approving eye of her mother. She started out planning to study the Great War at Oxford, the better to understand her idol Phil, but now she thinks she would be better served by moving into Phil's cottage and doing all his typing for free. Because he's a master! Of writing! Then her incestuous father comes back and ruins everything. Life is terrible if you're not a bird, and even the birds destroy one another.

I was expecting this to take me more than a week to finish because I got very tired of Phil early on, but then somehow it didn't, and I am now done with A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight forever. What can I say? When it was good it was very, very good, and when it was bad it was horrid. In the end the melting polar ice caps bring an apocalyptic storm to the moors (heralded by thousands of flying ants descending onto a cricket match, in a handful of paragraphs more memorable than the storm itself). Phil and his little dog get struck by lighting trying to help some hobby pilots land. The little dog dies but Phil lives; his notes for a long novel sequence are destroyed but it doesn't matter, because the storm has broken a dam inside him and he can finally, FINALLY begin to write the truth with love in his heart for all men and women, seeing them as the sun sees, without judgment. THE END.

I also finished Elsie Disnmore, which I was somehow expecting to have more of a climax. Is it in the next book that Elsie converts her father by almost dying? This one is full of horrifying Horaceisms, but eventually settles into a warm pool of syrup when I was expecting a final crisis. Horace Dinsmore is the devil in human form and should not be allowed to talk to children unsupervised, let alone make up a lot of dietary restrictions for them and forbid them to sit on the floor because it looks sloppy. He's just nuts. Where did he get his ideas about total obedience? (Oh, right, he tells us: England, where they know better than to let children eat jam on toast before the age of 10). Poor Elsie fits right into the canon of isolated outsiders in children's lit, whether the rest of them like it or not.


What I'm Reading Now

Disowned by my father— I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother's womb from a pregnant universe— I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by their unsuspecting secretaries)— yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique idenitity out of this defective jigsaw.

Moving right along in 99 Novels - not chronologically for now but based on what I already have on my shelves— The Unlimited Dream Company (by J. G. Ballard) has to be read to be believed. I've already recommended it to two people, and I'm only on Page 21.

I'm also enjoying An Experiement in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, which might just as well be called A Treasury of C.S. Lewisisms.

What I Plan to Read Next

Here's where I need some advice. Should I stick to the 99 Novels theme with A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (acquired by accident of the the library's adopt-a-book shelf), read a SciFi Dudebro Classic (Neuromancer by William Gibson), or read Faust, a tale in RHYME by my gifted new friend from the past, J.W. Goethe?

Comments

[liadt]

Ah Goethe! The plays about eight hours isn't it? I used to live near a Steiner theatre so I've seen a shortened version. Have you read the snake one? This week has been full of blasts from the past for me.

Or read the dudebro classic and I might read it for book bingo (no promises;p)

[evelyn_b]

Is it a play? *checks book* Yes, I opened this book just enough to know that it rhymed, but not enough to realize it was a play! (I would have figured it out eventually).

I have not read the snake one! What is the snake one?

[liadt]

The Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lilly, which also comes as a play. It features talking animals and plants. I think there was a moral about not judging by appearances.

[osprey_archer]

You finished A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight! *throws confetti* And it sounds like it didn't end with Phil sitting down to write the first sentence of the first book in the sequence, which is probably all to the good and yet also a little disappointing.

Yes, the second Elsie Dinsmore book is the one where she disobeys her father and he shuns her and she nearly DIES and then he is CONVERTED and all is well, insofar as a world that prominently features Horace Dinsmore can be well. Does he start letting her eat jam on her toast again? I can't remember.

I vote for continuing 99 Novels because anything 99 Novels is always a trip (although possibly sometimes a trip you wish you hadn't taken), although Faust does sound tempting too. Too many good choices! How many 99 Novels do you have left at this point?

[evelyn_b]

And it sounds like it didn't end with Phil sitting down to write the first sentence of the first book in the sequence, which is probably all to the good and yet also a little disappointing.

Almost! Not quite. It doesn't eat its own tail in an obvious way like Finnegans Wake and The Outsiders, but he does declare his intention to start right away! and we know he does it because we've just inexplicably read the whole thing.

I doubt very much that Horace is going to let Elsie eat jam on her toast until she reaches the arbitrary age at which it is wholesome for children to eat jam on their toast. There are burdens on the heart that Christ can lift and burdens that are there to stay. Horace hasn't stopped being a ridiculous crank in Elsie's Girlhood or obsessing over Elsie's total obedience that I can recall.

38 books left!

[osprey_archer]

I read a much later book in the Elsie series as research about the Chicago World's Fair - so much later that it's focused on Elsie's grandchildren - and while no one is particularly concerned with sweet grandma Elsie's obedience anymore, Total Obedience is still a huge thing. One of the granddaughters once sort of pouts a little when her father tells her to go to bed early and then feels so guilty that she apologizes gushingly the next morning for not obeying with instantaneous cheer.

I am even MORE impressed with that 38 books left because I know the 99 novels are actually like 150 novels or some ungodly number. You're down to just single novels now, no more giant series?

[evelyn_b]

144, if I haven't miscounted!

Chronicle was the last of the giant series (and the longest novel sequence in English, according to Jonathan Law? but I'm almost certain Wheel of Time is longer if walking by parts of it in the bookstore are any indication. What's the difference between a sequence and a series?). Nothing but smooth single-novel sailing from here on out!

[thedoubtfulguest]

Congratulations on knocking off a giant chunk of the 99+ Novels! Do you think Burgess read all of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight?

My first thought was, oh no, I hope that bright-eyed teenager isn't supposed to be Ann Quin, and in an attempt at finding the answer, I discovered this article:

http://thedabbler.co.uk/2012/10/tarka-the-rotter-the-gale-of-the-world/

"In 1969 BBC TV broadcast a respectful interview from his farm, in which he holds forth on the evils of pollution and city life. He comes across as a sweet old boy: but they had to tweak the footage, to hide the giant swastika he’d painted on his barn."

Oddly enough, Tarka is only the second most depressing British otter film.

(My vote for next book is Neuromancer because I've already complained about it to you several times, but didn't go into details because spoilers. It's a fast read, unless you are me and constantly throwing it across the room in frustration. I think I enjoy it more now that I'm not reading it than I did when I was reading it.)

[evelyn_b]

That is a good summary of the Chronicle (and I'm glad someone else made it through The Gale of the World), and that part you quoted

He comes across as a sweet old boy: but they had to tweak the footage, to hide the giant swastika he’d painted on his barn.

. . . sums up the Henry Williamson Experience very neatly.

I wouldn't be surprised or blame him if he skimmed some, but I think Burgess probably read more or less all of it. He seems to have read huge numbers of books all the time as a matter of course and to have a lot of patience with weirdness. Though his warnings about "a pro-Fascist tone prevail[ing]" in the later books now feel like hilarious understatements, probably not because Burgess was holding back but just because it's not possible to be prepared for HW's Cinnamon Roll Hitler.

I'll get to Neuromancer soon even if I don't get to it next! I can tell because I've moved it off the Dudebro Sci-Fi Classics Stack in the living room (a very short stack consisting of Neuromancer and Stranger in a Strange Land, the other DSFC I've been meaning to read for 25 years) and into my workspace where it can chastise me all day long with its presence.

[osprey_archer]

Thank you for linking to that article; I ended up reading not only it but the other two Williamson articles linked to it. The one about Williamson's vision of Hitler as almost a reflection of himself (but a powerful, ubermensch kind of reflection, carrying out the agrarian reforms Williamson himself couldn't accomplish) particularly interested me.

[evelyn_b]

Me, too! (and of course Anne Williamson pops into the comments to complain that people keep harping on the Nazi thing. This guy probably gets HW as well as anyone is ever going to, but it is not actually possible to read these books without harping on the Nazi thing; sorry Anne). I'm glad Law talks about the Christmas truce - it's this beacon that guides all of HW/Phil's ideas of German-English brotherhood, so naturally(???) he assumes that it's the same for Self-Insert No. 3, and it's not. Using his own feelings and experiences to imagine himself into other lives works very well for HW's fictional parents but not at all for Hitler.

I am very sad to learn that HW actually REVISED his Willie tetraology to shoehorn Hitler and his "truest eyes" in after the fact. I was planning to maybe read it sometime - I might still read it, but only if I can get the original version. :(

[osprey_archer]

I am in awe (and perhaps slightly appalled, but in an admiring way) that you're still on board to read more Henry Williamson. Four more novels of Henry Williamson's self-inserts!

We should probably all be glad that he didn't end up writing a Hitler biography, because clearly Hitler would have ended up being an HW self-insert too.

[brigdh]

Oh, man, I want to vote for Naipaul AND Neuromance AND Faust!! How can I choose??

I quite enjoyed Neuromancer when I read it as a teen, though I suspect it would come off as more Dudebro-y now. Naipaul's writing can be weirdly pro-European colonialism, but his writing is definitely worth checking out. And more Goethe with Faust! How can you miss out on that combo?

[evelyn_b]

You can vote for them all! Eventually I'll read them all.

As far as what to read first, narrative momentum solved the issue for me: I opened up A Bend in the River to see what the writing was like and now I'm 1/3 of the way through. Those pro-colonial attitudes are definitely visible, but first person narration covers a multitude of sins and Naipaul is good at it in an interesting way - which I'll try to say something more specific about on Wednesday, if I don't miss Wednesday due to work.

[brigdh]

I'm looking forward to it!