My reading continues apace. I've just completed two early Evelyn Waugh novels, Decline and Fall and Handful of Dust. I last read both of these for a course in modern fiction I took as an undergraduate English major back in the mid 1960s, and my memory was pretty foggy on all but a few details, so my experience this time was almost that of a first reading. But as I read I did begin to remember why I was never a great fan of Waugh's writing. It's not that he isn't a good, or even a great, stylist. He's among the best in the language. But the substance is somehow disappointing, rather like having a meal consisting entirely of desserts.
To say that Waugh's satire is broad is probably to miss the point. His targets are everywhere he seems to look, the people, their behavior, their morals, their tastes -- he ridicules a devotion to Gothic architecture as well as to Bauhaus. His wit is so sharp and piercing that by the end of a story there's very little left to cling to. Looking back on these two rather early works, considered among his best, I find little difference in tone or spirit between Decline and Fall (1928), published before his conversion to Catholicism, and Handful of Dust (1934), published several years after. Both are peopled with self-centered and superficially annoying characters who seem to be an improbable combination of innocence and malice. Or perhaps they are simply indifferent to anything or anyone but themselves.
Waugh also does a good job of capturing the way certain of his contemporaries had perfected the employment of good manners as a weapon of social combat. Perhaps this is more apparent in Handful of Dust, where Tony Last and his cheerfully wayward spouse Brenda, display the best upper class English breeding while destroying their own lives and marriage and wreaking havoc in the lives of those who come anywhere near to them. Whereas Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless hero of Decline and Fall, although he would never think of saying anything unkind or of behaving in a selfish manner toward those whose acts of meanness and indifference bring him low, displays the supercilious good breeding of the scholarship boy. His naive acceptance of the various codes of honor he's been exposed to seems to render him somehow impervious to the troubles and indignities heaped upon him by his so-called betters.
But while the plots and characters in these books are all very amusing, and the targets of Waugh's humor are certainly worthy ones, I still find it difficult to sort out what it was that Waugh might have proposed as suitable alternatives. Some have suggested it was religion, and perhaps his Catholicism is more in evidence as an alternative in later novels, but in these early ones he seems to be entirely under the spell of the dandies and aesthetes he fell in with at university (Hertford College, Oxford). Looked at from this perspective, his targets are the usual ones of the post World War I English establishment, whose values and class prejudices he exposes as empty and frivolous. And most would probably agree, after reading a bit of Waugh's fiction, that it is very difficult to take these examples of the English upper classes seriously. It was a culture teetering before a fall, and maybe Waugh's point was that while it may be ridiculous, it really isn't very funny. Perhaps that's the difference between a Paul Pennyfeather or a Tony Last and a Bertie Wooster. (Yes, P.G. Wodehouse is also on my list, as are Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firbank, Thomas Love Peacock, and E.F. Benson.)
Anyway, that's where I am at the moment, as I continue reading Waugh, but at the same time begin my closer study of George Orwell, another superb stylist, but a writer with a very different take on English class hierarchies and cultural prejudices. (First up is Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.) If Waugh is all desserts, Orwell definitely offers up some meat and potatoes.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Crome Yellow
I was a huge fan of Aldoux Huxley when I was in high school. Of course, the first of his books I read was Brave New World. I thought of it as the flip side of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and where I found Orwell somewhat depressing, Huxley's vision of the future struck a chord. (It turns out they were both prophetic, but that's material for another post.) After reading BNW I went on to other Huxley works in a similar vein: Ape and Essence, The Genius and the Goddess, and Island. All of these were later books; Island was published in 1962, shortly before I discovered it, and not long before Huxley died on November 22, 1963, a date that would be remembered for a very different reason. The next Sunday I donated flowers at my church in Huxley's memory, something that probably would have amused him. It certainly did not amuse the members of my church, who thought a memorial to John Kennedy would have been more appropriate.
My youthful passion for Huxley endured a while longer. The next book of his I read was The Doors of Perception (1954), which had been inspired by his continuing search for enlightenment and his very early experiments with psychedelics. No question about it, so far as I and my friends were concerned, Huxley was hip. But with the passing of time and the coming of more serious pursuits, both in literature and in life, my interest in Huxley began to wane. I did manage to pick up some of his earlier novels (some in first editions), but when I discovered that they were not what I expected, I put them aside and moved on to other authors. In time I realized that Huxley was not really a very good writer of fiction, however much I admired his analysis of human nature. Basically, his books are extended lectures or sermons. He was more a preacher than a novelist.
And so when I decided to go back and take a look at Huxley in his youth, starting with his first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921, I brought along with me some considerable baggage from my own youth. And I have to admit that Crome Yellow was pretty much what I expected. It's a country house novel, a popular genre of English fiction, which was experiencing another revival in those years just prior to and after World War I. Huxley's hero, Denis Stone (a young and very innocent poet hopelessly in love with the daughter of the current owner of Crome), spends a few frustrating days at the great house and encounters several familiar English types. What struck me most about the book was Huxley's tendency to break his novel into a number of set pieces, some of which merely advance his plot (what there is of it). But other chapters come across as rehearsals for his later works, as his characters examine human psychology and predict a future for human kind when children will be born in test tubes and raised to join specific social groups destined either to rule or to work for society. It isn't quite yet a vision of alphas, betas, and deltas, Brave New World would not appear for another decade, but those implications are clearly already there in Huxley's own imagination.
They say that the youthful Huxley, fresh from Balliol and a young teacher of French at his old public school, Eton, wasn't very good, particularly as a disciplinarian. But according to Cyril Connelly he had an influence on his students, who included, as well as Connelly, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and others of their set, who were impressed by Huxley's love and knowledge of literature, especially that then being written by his contemporaries. Crome Yellow has a certain appeal: its satire is amusing, and Huxley captures something of the aimlessness and yearning of postwar English youth. He also skewers some of the contemporary fascinations, with spiritualism for example, that appear in other books from that period or a little later, including Anthony Powell's. In fact, Crome Yellow seems almost a sort of primer for Powell's early fiction, particularly From a View to a Death, Powell's own go at country house satire.
But I think, since I don't have a copy of Antic Hay handy at the moment, I will leave Huxley for a time and move on to Evelyn Waugh. More of this later.
My youthful passion for Huxley endured a while longer. The next book of his I read was The Doors of Perception (1954), which had been inspired by his continuing search for enlightenment and his very early experiments with psychedelics. No question about it, so far as I and my friends were concerned, Huxley was hip. But with the passing of time and the coming of more serious pursuits, both in literature and in life, my interest in Huxley began to wane. I did manage to pick up some of his earlier novels (some in first editions), but when I discovered that they were not what I expected, I put them aside and moved on to other authors. In time I realized that Huxley was not really a very good writer of fiction, however much I admired his analysis of human nature. Basically, his books are extended lectures or sermons. He was more a preacher than a novelist.
And so when I decided to go back and take a look at Huxley in his youth, starting with his first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921, I brought along with me some considerable baggage from my own youth. And I have to admit that Crome Yellow was pretty much what I expected. It's a country house novel, a popular genre of English fiction, which was experiencing another revival in those years just prior to and after World War I. Huxley's hero, Denis Stone (a young and very innocent poet hopelessly in love with the daughter of the current owner of Crome), spends a few frustrating days at the great house and encounters several familiar English types. What struck me most about the book was Huxley's tendency to break his novel into a number of set pieces, some of which merely advance his plot (what there is of it). But other chapters come across as rehearsals for his later works, as his characters examine human psychology and predict a future for human kind when children will be born in test tubes and raised to join specific social groups destined either to rule or to work for society. It isn't quite yet a vision of alphas, betas, and deltas, Brave New World would not appear for another decade, but those implications are clearly already there in Huxley's own imagination.
They say that the youthful Huxley, fresh from Balliol and a young teacher of French at his old public school, Eton, wasn't very good, particularly as a disciplinarian. But according to Cyril Connelly he had an influence on his students, who included, as well as Connelly, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and others of their set, who were impressed by Huxley's love and knowledge of literature, especially that then being written by his contemporaries. Crome Yellow has a certain appeal: its satire is amusing, and Huxley captures something of the aimlessness and yearning of postwar English youth. He also skewers some of the contemporary fascinations, with spiritualism for example, that appear in other books from that period or a little later, including Anthony Powell's. In fact, Crome Yellow seems almost a sort of primer for Powell's early fiction, particularly From a View to a Death, Powell's own go at country house satire.
But I think, since I don't have a copy of Antic Hay handy at the moment, I will leave Huxley for a time and move on to Evelyn Waugh. More of this later.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Children of the Sun
I finally finished reading Martin Green's Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918, in which he examines the emergence and eventual dominance of a certain temperament among the young men (and a few women) who came of age just after the first World War. His thesis, which he demonstrates at considerable length and depth, is that this generation rebelled against the accepted norms of their fathers' generation by refusing to accept maturity, and by embracing instead the attitudes of dandies from an earlier era, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Thus he contrasts the dandies and aesthetes who value culture, beauty, pleasure, and theater to those who advocate maturity, morality, and adult responsibilities of duty and patriotism. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but this is the general idea. Green's two most evocative examples of sonnenkinder, as he prefers to call them, are Harold Acton and Brian Howard. Both of these young men were influential leaders, instigators of dandy and aesthete values at Eton and Oxford, the sorts of young men associated with Anthony Blanche and Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
As I've said before, Green's book is very important for me because it provides so much helpful background information on this period, from World War I through to the 1950s, just after World War II. More and more I have come to see this as a discrete historical moment. Whether or not we accept, with Virginia Woolf, that the world actually changed sometime around the end of 1910, we must surely accept that after the devastation wrought by the First World War, there was a decided shift for European and American culture, and much of the energy spent by writers and artists of various media went toward coming to terms with the tremendous shifts being felt in the fabric of life. After the Second World War there would be another somewhat different reaction, but that is a story I have lived and been a part of. What I want to discover now is how that earlier group of authors came to terms with their world, because like our own, it is now a world that is lost and irrecoverable except through brief glimpses we catch in the art and literature that these men and women left behind.
Green does a good job of presenting the evidence, but it is filtered through his own lens -- an instructive lens, but still one that selects those things that fit his dialectic, or dichotomy, dandies vs. anti-dandies. And as with other dichotomies -- classical vs. romantic, Apollonian vs. Dionysian, the beautiful and the sublime, straights and hippies -- there is necessarily much selectivity and classification. Green does a very good job of explaining his criteria and judgments, especially in his final chapter, but as even he admits there is much overlap and some confusion when one looks at specific authors and works. And that is now my project. Digging into the specific works to see what I find. I welcome all I've learned from reading Green's book, but now I want to look deeper into the stuff itself that these interesting writers have left behind. Often, I suspect, they did not realize that they were trapped in their moment, as we all are, but sometimes it seems quite clear that they did realize exactly their predicament, perhaps even when their choices seem so obviously misguided to others, especially with the perspective of time, as with the scandals of Burgess, Maclean, and Philby, who were also sonnenkinder and the products of the British public schools and elite universities. Auden said he understood why Guy Burgess rejected England for Russia, as he had rejected England for America.
And so the story quickly grows complicated. Out of a rejection of the values of an older generation that brought destruction to itself and to much of the world it had made comes a desperate effort to find another world to believe in. It seems that even dandies and aesthetes must make a world for themselves and must believe something, even when those beliefs are founded on rejection. So often when we reject one thing we desire to substitute something else in its place. That is an attitude I have struggled to resist. I have tried to withhold judgment and to stand appart and reject nothing, while at the same time trying not embrace anything too completely, to the exclusion of everything else. Green suggests, I think, that this is the proper attitude of the critic: to study, to inform, to try to understand.
One of my erstwhile colleagues, when I was discussing my reading and current fascination with this subject asked what I intended to do, what my object was, and I said that I have no objective beyond my own education. I find it somehow energizing and comforting to study and learn something about this time and these people who were both so different and yet also so similar to myself. But I don't feel the need to do what Martin Green has done. I don't think I could, anyway, and I don't want to repeat what he has done but with my own slightly different perspective. I think I have the soul of a critic, but not the ambition. I don't feel the need to share, other than perhaps to the extent that I've just done so here. The object for me, at this moment when I have nothing more to prove, is to learn what I can about myself by testing what I know against the experiences of some very interesting predecessors. They watched more or less unhappily as first they helped to obliterate the world they inherited and then were present to experience the disintegration of the world they tried to put in its place. It seems not to have been a very joyous time for anyone, despite the great effort put into seeking life's pleasures. Perhaps the book I should turn to now is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
As I've said before, Green's book is very important for me because it provides so much helpful background information on this period, from World War I through to the 1950s, just after World War II. More and more I have come to see this as a discrete historical moment. Whether or not we accept, with Virginia Woolf, that the world actually changed sometime around the end of 1910, we must surely accept that after the devastation wrought by the First World War, there was a decided shift for European and American culture, and much of the energy spent by writers and artists of various media went toward coming to terms with the tremendous shifts being felt in the fabric of life. After the Second World War there would be another somewhat different reaction, but that is a story I have lived and been a part of. What I want to discover now is how that earlier group of authors came to terms with their world, because like our own, it is now a world that is lost and irrecoverable except through brief glimpses we catch in the art and literature that these men and women left behind.
Green does a good job of presenting the evidence, but it is filtered through his own lens -- an instructive lens, but still one that selects those things that fit his dialectic, or dichotomy, dandies vs. anti-dandies. And as with other dichotomies -- classical vs. romantic, Apollonian vs. Dionysian, the beautiful and the sublime, straights and hippies -- there is necessarily much selectivity and classification. Green does a very good job of explaining his criteria and judgments, especially in his final chapter, but as even he admits there is much overlap and some confusion when one looks at specific authors and works. And that is now my project. Digging into the specific works to see what I find. I welcome all I've learned from reading Green's book, but now I want to look deeper into the stuff itself that these interesting writers have left behind. Often, I suspect, they did not realize that they were trapped in their moment, as we all are, but sometimes it seems quite clear that they did realize exactly their predicament, perhaps even when their choices seem so obviously misguided to others, especially with the perspective of time, as with the scandals of Burgess, Maclean, and Philby, who were also sonnenkinder and the products of the British public schools and elite universities. Auden said he understood why Guy Burgess rejected England for Russia, as he had rejected England for America.
And so the story quickly grows complicated. Out of a rejection of the values of an older generation that brought destruction to itself and to much of the world it had made comes a desperate effort to find another world to believe in. It seems that even dandies and aesthetes must make a world for themselves and must believe something, even when those beliefs are founded on rejection. So often when we reject one thing we desire to substitute something else in its place. That is an attitude I have struggled to resist. I have tried to withhold judgment and to stand appart and reject nothing, while at the same time trying not embrace anything too completely, to the exclusion of everything else. Green suggests, I think, that this is the proper attitude of the critic: to study, to inform, to try to understand.
One of my erstwhile colleagues, when I was discussing my reading and current fascination with this subject asked what I intended to do, what my object was, and I said that I have no objective beyond my own education. I find it somehow energizing and comforting to study and learn something about this time and these people who were both so different and yet also so similar to myself. But I don't feel the need to do what Martin Green has done. I don't think I could, anyway, and I don't want to repeat what he has done but with my own slightly different perspective. I think I have the soul of a critic, but not the ambition. I don't feel the need to share, other than perhaps to the extent that I've just done so here. The object for me, at this moment when I have nothing more to prove, is to learn what I can about myself by testing what I know against the experiences of some very interesting predecessors. They watched more or less unhappily as first they helped to obliterate the world they inherited and then were present to experience the disintegration of the world they tried to put in its place. It seems not to have been a very joyous time for anyone, despite the great effort put into seeking life's pleasures. Perhaps the book I should turn to now is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Welcoming the New Year: 2012
I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that this will be a big year for me. In this first full year of retirement, I'm hoping to begin feeling more retired and less like I'm on permanent vacation. I don't yet know what that means, but I've heard that most others who retire also have a period of adjustment. Being productive in retirement is different from being productive at work, where someone else (or just general circumstances) sets your agenda for you.
The year has begun well with two days off. My birthday, on which I generally take a holiday anyway, was a holiday for many others as well, since New Year's day, like Christmas, fell on a Sunday this year. So in some respects, I feel that today is really the first day of the new dispensation, and I'm celebrating by going to the doctor: to have a pre-cancerous spot removed from my nose. This is the second one in less than a year. At this rate, I'll have had a complete nose job in a couple more years. But once the doctor's appointment is out of the way, my intentions are to go full steam ahead with plans to relocate back to Texas. I don't want to spend all my time recording the minutia of my move, but when milestones are reached, perhaps I'll make a note.
My other wish for 2012 is for continued good health (including my nose). With that I'm ready to meet other challenges as they may come. Remember: you can't always get what you want, so best to want what you get. Anyway, that's my resolution for all new years.
The year has begun well with two days off. My birthday, on which I generally take a holiday anyway, was a holiday for many others as well, since New Year's day, like Christmas, fell on a Sunday this year. So in some respects, I feel that today is really the first day of the new dispensation, and I'm celebrating by going to the doctor: to have a pre-cancerous spot removed from my nose. This is the second one in less than a year. At this rate, I'll have had a complete nose job in a couple more years. But once the doctor's appointment is out of the way, my intentions are to go full steam ahead with plans to relocate back to Texas. I don't want to spend all my time recording the minutia of my move, but when milestones are reached, perhaps I'll make a note.
My other wish for 2012 is for continued good health (including my nose). With that I'm ready to meet other challenges as they may come. Remember: you can't always get what you want, so best to want what you get. Anyway, that's my resolution for all new years.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Reading in 2011
I can see that in retirement this blog is turning into a reading journal, which is fine. Reading has always been my main vocation. Now two of my favorite pastimes are reading and playing my guitars. However, of late, guitar playing seems to have plateaued. I probably need the stimulation of playing with friends to get me moving in a more ambitious direction. In relative isolation I think I've only learned two new pieces on my classical guitar this year, although I have several in various stages of "perfection," which for me means simply being able to play them all the way through without stumbling too much over the notes. I practice regularly, but not with sufficient dedication to see significant improvement. Perhaps in the new year I will do better.
But as for my reading program, there I have been able to gain some traction recently on books from the early 20th century. It has long been established that the first world war changed everything, especially for the European countries most engaged in the fighting. It took most of the rest of the century to come to terms with some of those changes. In England the generation that came of age just after the war was much affected by the trauma of the war. Martin Green, in Children of the Sun, suggests that the result for the educated classes was a flight from maturity into aestheticism and decadence. At the moment, that is where my reading is focused. I'm still working my way through Green's study, but also reading Huxley, and looking forward to Waugh, Orwell, and others, having just completed Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.
But in addition to this continuing fascination with 20th-century writing, I've also found time to read some more recent work: Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. And a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Curt Stager's Deep Future at the Alexandria library and enjoyed learning more about the long view of global warming. A little earlier in the year I got myself distracted by another library book, Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's Letters, a book I had been curious about after reading several reviews. Bellow got me interested in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, and earlier I had read Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness, books in my own collection I had been meaning to read but needed some impetus to push me in their direction.
The book that refocused my attention on the early 20th century was Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I had intended to read that one last year when I read McMurtry's memoirs, but for some reason got distracted by other things. McMurtry mentioned Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise and Graves's Good-Bye to All That, both books I'd long meant to read but hadn't yet got around to. In fact, I'd also been reminded of Cyril Connolly earlier in the year when I was reading William Boyd's Nat Tate and Any Human Heart. Boyd's Logan Mountstuart, had he actually existed, would surely have known Connolly and others in his circle, including Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming, who does make an appearance in Any Human Heart.
Two books I read this year have a rather peculiar relationship to my 20th-century project. One, Harold Nicolson's Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, was a sort of continuation of an earlier fascination with English gentlemen. A friend had lent me the book a couple of years ago, when I was reading Anthony Powell and Noel Annan's The Don's and David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. I suppose those were the first signs of my lastest fixation on this period. Realizing I should return the book to its owner, I quickly finished reading it. Then later in the year I returned to Nicolson when I decided to do some background reading on Harold and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, two prominent members of my group of authors; and so I read their son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage.
But while much of my reading has lately been focused on this single obsession with a rather small group of English authors of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, I began my year, following an earlier concentration on biographies and memoirs, with Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions, and Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life. After finishing the latter, I went back and re-read Salinger's Nine Stories, having realized their significant relationship to his war experiences as well as their importance for his apprenticeship as an author.
The only other book I recall reading this year, which would make nineteen if I counted correctly, doesn't seem to fit in any specific category. Just before I retired I picked up a reference somewhere to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and realizing that this was one of those major gaps in my life reading list, I decided to sit down and read it then and there. It turned out I really enjoyed the book, the plot was entertaining, if ridiculous, and the characters were engaging. I gained new respect for Goethe and determined that I should read more, only to discover that The Sorrows of Young Werther were not much to my liking.
And so Johann Wolfgang Goethe will have to remain on the shelf a little longer, while I continue to explore the writing of early 20th-century Britain. Next up is Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, a book I started earlier this week, to be followed by a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, both of which I last read when I was an undergraduate. I fear I was too young and inexperienced then to appreciate such brittle humor and satire, so I'm looking forward to reading them again in the context of Huxley, Connolly, Powell, and all the rest of that little group that left such a big imprint on British literary culture. I may even return to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, realizing now that the character of Fleming's hero very likely owes much to a group of rogues and dandies he knew in public school. Perhaps that is why I always thought Roger Moore, with his combination of wit, charm, and rakish humor, captured more of Bond than any of the other actors who attempted the role. But these are thoughts for another year and perhaps a different sort of reading obsession.
But as for my reading program, there I have been able to gain some traction recently on books from the early 20th century. It has long been established that the first world war changed everything, especially for the European countries most engaged in the fighting. It took most of the rest of the century to come to terms with some of those changes. In England the generation that came of age just after the war was much affected by the trauma of the war. Martin Green, in Children of the Sun, suggests that the result for the educated classes was a flight from maturity into aestheticism and decadence. At the moment, that is where my reading is focused. I'm still working my way through Green's study, but also reading Huxley, and looking forward to Waugh, Orwell, and others, having just completed Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.
But in addition to this continuing fascination with 20th-century writing, I've also found time to read some more recent work: Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. And a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Curt Stager's Deep Future at the Alexandria library and enjoyed learning more about the long view of global warming. A little earlier in the year I got myself distracted by another library book, Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's Letters, a book I had been curious about after reading several reviews. Bellow got me interested in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, and earlier I had read Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness, books in my own collection I had been meaning to read but needed some impetus to push me in their direction.
The book that refocused my attention on the early 20th century was Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I had intended to read that one last year when I read McMurtry's memoirs, but for some reason got distracted by other things. McMurtry mentioned Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise and Graves's Good-Bye to All That, both books I'd long meant to read but hadn't yet got around to. In fact, I'd also been reminded of Cyril Connolly earlier in the year when I was reading William Boyd's Nat Tate and Any Human Heart. Boyd's Logan Mountstuart, had he actually existed, would surely have known Connolly and others in his circle, including Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming, who does make an appearance in Any Human Heart.
Two books I read this year have a rather peculiar relationship to my 20th-century project. One, Harold Nicolson's Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, was a sort of continuation of an earlier fascination with English gentlemen. A friend had lent me the book a couple of years ago, when I was reading Anthony Powell and Noel Annan's The Don's and David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. I suppose those were the first signs of my lastest fixation on this period. Realizing I should return the book to its owner, I quickly finished reading it. Then later in the year I returned to Nicolson when I decided to do some background reading on Harold and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, two prominent members of my group of authors; and so I read their son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage.
But while much of my reading has lately been focused on this single obsession with a rather small group of English authors of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, I began my year, following an earlier concentration on biographies and memoirs, with Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions, and Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life. After finishing the latter, I went back and re-read Salinger's Nine Stories, having realized their significant relationship to his war experiences as well as their importance for his apprenticeship as an author.
The only other book I recall reading this year, which would make nineteen if I counted correctly, doesn't seem to fit in any specific category. Just before I retired I picked up a reference somewhere to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and realizing that this was one of those major gaps in my life reading list, I decided to sit down and read it then and there. It turned out I really enjoyed the book, the plot was entertaining, if ridiculous, and the characters were engaging. I gained new respect for Goethe and determined that I should read more, only to discover that The Sorrows of Young Werther were not much to my liking.
And so Johann Wolfgang Goethe will have to remain on the shelf a little longer, while I continue to explore the writing of early 20th-century Britain. Next up is Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, a book I started earlier this week, to be followed by a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, both of which I last read when I was an undergraduate. I fear I was too young and inexperienced then to appreciate such brittle humor and satire, so I'm looking forward to reading them again in the context of Huxley, Connolly, Powell, and all the rest of that little group that left such a big imprint on British literary culture. I may even return to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, realizing now that the character of Fleming's hero very likely owes much to a group of rogues and dandies he knew in public school. Perhaps that is why I always thought Roger Moore, with his combination of wit, charm, and rakish humor, captured more of Bond than any of the other actors who attempted the role. But these are thoughts for another year and perhaps a different sort of reading obsession.
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