A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.

But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.

One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.

My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.

Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.

What I’ve Reading Now

Nothing that requires a progress report right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.

I’ve been gallivanting through the Newbery Honor books of the 1920s, mostly relying on what is available online, although (bafflingly) my library has exactly one in book form: Padraic Colum’s The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery, which details the Atlantic voyages of Maelduin, St. Brendan, Leif Ericsson, and Columbus. The first two are legendary and the last two are historical, a distinction which Colum never makes in the book itself, although the astute reader might guess it from the lack of talking birds in the latter two tales.

I also read Annie Parrish & Dillwyn Parrish’s The Dream Coach, which you will be delighted to hear shares the same surrealist bent as William Bowen’s 1922 The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure, a literary mode that has mostly fallen out of Newbery favor (although it pops up as late as Ellen Raskin’s 1975 Figgs & Phantoms).

I must admit that I tend to enjoy surrealism more in theory than in practice, and The Dream Coach is no exception. I’m delighted that it exists and was a runner-up for an award, and I love the conceit of the book, the coach that carries dreams to children - but at the end of the day this means that the book is a series of four dream sequences, and that is a LOT of dream sequences by weight.

Also, one of the four dreams is sent to a youthful Chinese emperor, and the portrayal of China is about as enlightened as you would expect for 1925. China was a popular setting in 1920s American children’s literature (Shen of the Sea won the Newbery Medal in 1925), and on the basis of those books, I’m not convinced the American public fully grasped that China is a real place and not a fairy tale kingdom.

(Side note: Annie & Dillwyn were brother and sister, and Dillwyn later married M. F. K. Fischer, who later still became a famous food writer. Truly the world of American letters was small in the mid-twentieth century!)

However, the most racist book in this particular batch is Charles Boardman Hawes’ The Great Quest, set in the year 1826, in which our hero’s uncle is persuaded by the nefarious friend of his youth to sail to Africa in search of a great treasure.

“Is it slaves?” I asked.

First they sail to Cuba, where they acquire some dastardly crew members (one of whom has a sinisterly feminine voice) and also a boat with ample cargo space!

“Is that because it’s a slave ship?” I asked.

The dastardly crew members conspire to get Our Hero and his doughty French friend (who clearly used to be a musketeer or whatever the early 1800s equivalent is, because he has MANY hitherto unsuspected martial skills) impressed by the Spanish navy! But because of the not-musketeer’s presence of mind, they escape, and thus join the dastardly crew in sailing to Africa, where it turns out there actually IS a literal gold treasure… which is in a hut, built atop a king’s grave… where the whole adventuring crew are besieged for days by a lot of African warriors who are VERY ANGRY about the whole “built atop a king’s grave” thing.

(The crew eventually escapes, and our hero muses, “I wonder if the whole performance to which we owed our lives was not characteristic of the natives of the African coast? If therein did not lie just the difference between a people so easily led into slavery and a people that never, whatever their weaknesses have been, have yielded to their oppressors? It all happened long ago, and it was my only acquaintance with black warfare; but surely we could never thus have thrown American Indians off the scent.”)

In their escape, they had to leave the gold behind, but NEVER FEAR, they have a backup plan: illegal slave-trading! I have been expecting this since the words “voyage to Africa” crossed the page, but our hero is shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment. Blah blah blah, some more stuff happens, our hero meets a missionary’s daughter, the VERY ANGRY African warriors run them all out to sea before any slave-trading happens, there is a shipwreck etc. Our hero marries the missionary’s daughter! Happy end! Perhaps Love was the true treasure all along.

After this I need a bit of a breather, which is just as well. There are two more Newbery books from the 1920s still available (Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, which I’m saving for Christmas, and The Story on Mankind, which I’m saving for… well, someday it will just seem like time, I guess) and then I’ll need to wait for the rest to hit the public domain. The 1928 books will become available in 2024. Ample time for a rest!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Marilyn Nelson’s Carver, A Life in Poems, which indeed tells the story of George Washington Carver’s life in poems. This is one of those Newbery books where I feel that the awards committee (and also the publisher) forgot to consider what actual children might make of lines like

“Another lynching. Madness grips the South.
A black man’s hacked-off penis in his mouth,
His broken body torched…”

On a lighter note, I also finished Elizabeth Peters’ The Curse of the Pharaoh. Still kicking myself for not picking up more of the series - indeed, more of any mystery series - while the library was still open. Perfect brain candy for a stressful time.

And I blasted through the last quarter of Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles. About halfway through the book, Colum completes the adventures of the Argonauts, so the rest of the book is just following up on the heroes’ life stories outside of the Argo: the Twelve Labors of Heracles, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason throwing over Medea without whom he would have died a loser who never accomplished anything, etc. etc. (Colum goes for a less-savage version of the Medea story, where Medea merely murders Jason’s new prospective bride Glauce; Medea and Jason have no children for Medea to murder.)

What I’m Reading Now

Therese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, which I’ve been enjoying as a memoir of her childhood - although we’ve now left her childhood; I’ve just gotten to the part where all but two of the nuns in the convent fall ill with influenza, and Therese, as one of the well ones, is worked practically off her feet… but it’s fine, because “I was able to have the indescribable consolation of receiving Holy Communion every day… Oh! How sweet that was!”

I really don’t think I quite get nineteenth-century Catholicism.

I’m taking Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster a bit at a time, because it’s a grueling read. One image that keeps recurring: again and again people comment on the contrast between the natural beauty of the Exclusion Zone and its deadliness, the gorgeous cabbages that have to be plowed right back under the earth because they’re saturated with radiation.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve still got ten library books left, and I’ve also been casting a thoughtful eye on my unread bookshelf. It seems to me that this might be the perfect time to read a Mary Stewart or two; I’ve always enjoyed her ability to make you feel like you’re really visiting the places she writes about, and now is the perfect time for a literary holiday. I’ve got Airs above the Ground and The Rough Magic, which take place in Vienna and Corfu, respectively.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. Larina was not only Bukharin’s widow, but the adopted daughter of an old Bolshevik, Yury Larin, so she grew up knowing a who’s who of the old Bolsheviks. Naturally most of her anecdotes about them are personal rather than political, but in a way that makes it more sobering: it really drives home the extent to which the Bolsheviks all knew each other. Imagine if your friend group took over a country, and then one of the friends insidiously turned the group’s faultlines into unbridgeable chasms and then, once he had consolidated his own position, started accusing the others of ludicrous plots and killed them off in elaborate show trials.

What I’m Reading Now

Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, a 1922 Newbery Honor winner which retells the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, with shorter retellings of Greek myths sprinkled throughout. It’s just a straight-up retelling - no twist like “They’re all in spaaaaaace!” or whatever, just good old-fashioned ancient Greece. It’s been so long since I read a retelling of that kind that it’s actually kind of refreshing, just for variety's sake.

I’ve also begun to read Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is a… travelogue about modern memory of the Great War? I’m only one chapter in, so I offer this description rather tentatively: the first chapter is a lot more travelogue than it is anything else, but hopefully the memory stuff will rise to the surface later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have MANY books on my pile right now, and I need to read some of them, and instead I… well, I’ve been working on revisions, so I have at least been neglecting my books to some purpose, but still. The pile just keeps growing. I should at least try to knock out Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall: it’s so short, and IIRC it was recommended to me as Dark Academia, which I love.