Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“PUDD’NHEAD WILSON” by “Mark Twain” (first published 1894)

A book, about two young people growing up at the same time, that purports to deal with the intimate interaction of different races? This puts me in mind of a book from over a century ago that really does deal with such interaction.

There’s always a danger when I recommend “Something Old” on this blog that I appear to be giving that “Something Old” unmitigated praise. Not so. As you’ll know by now, I’m as interested in things that show the attitudes of the age in which they were written, as I am in things of great literary merit.

This week’s “Something Old” has real literary merit, but it is definitely no masterpiece. Pudd’nhead Wilson, a short novel or long novella, was written late in Mark Twain’s career and some time after Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur (1889), the three books for which Twain (1835-1910) is still best known. All the biographies I’ve consulted also tell me that Pudd’nhead Wilson was written in haste when Twain had debts to pay off. It shows. The texture of the story is lumpy and uncertain, often veering off the point, hastily wrapping up some episodes and lingering too long over others. But there’s still real gold here.

In its framework, it’s a simple satire on the way communities can completely misjudge people.

In one of Twain’s favourite settings, a small antebellum Missouri town (here called Dawson’s Landing) on the Mississippi River, a young lawyer called David Wilson arrives in about 1830. Because he makes an ironical joke which the local yokels don’t get, they imagine he’s a simpleton. They nick-name him Pudd’nhead. This local reputation means he gets very little legal work. The arc of the story has Pudd’nhead eventually (and triumphantly) vindicated. This arc involves a duel, a murder and finally a court-room scene where finger-prints are produced to uncover the murderer – a concept which would probably have been new and exciting still at the time the story was written. The story also includes a pair of aristocratic Italian twins, who excite curiosity in the small Missouri community. Until the last couple of chapters, the twins are very badly integrated into the story. I am not surprised to discover that Twain originally intended to make them his focal point, but he changed his mind as he got more interested in other aspects of his own story. Great creative writers sometimes work that way.

Considered in terms of its structure, Pudd’nhead Wilson is rambling and undisciplined, despite its brevity. Sometimes Twain seems to have included things simply because he couldn’t resist a joke, as in his riotous account of an anti-temperance meeting.

So this is a story poking fun at small-town prejudice. As things turn out, it’s not Pudd’nhead who’s the pudd’nhead, but the community.

But as you read this odd and lop-sided short novel, it is in fact another pair of characters who really hold your attention and make the book the interesting read that it is.

On the same day that David Wilson arrives in town, two boys are born. One is the son of the slave-owner Driscoll, and one is the son of Driscoll’s nurse-maid, the slave Roxy (Roxana). Roxy is “high-yeller” – a woman of such fair complexion that she could “pass” for white. Her baby is even fairer than she is. Mistreated by her master, and threatened with the dread punishment of being “sold down the river”, she reflects on the unfairness of fate that has made her son a slave while the master’s son will grow to a life of privilege. So she swaps the two boys in their cradles. Her biological son Tom grows up to a life of privilege. Driscoll’s biological son Chambers grows up to a life of slavery. Only she knows which boy is really which because (as the novel’s silences ironically imply) wealthy white Southern parents were so ready to pass over child-rearing duties to their slaves that they hardly bothered to look closely at their own infant offspring.

This book will not be taught in high-schools any time soon. The word “nigger” appears even more frequently than it does in Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps more distressing, the loquacious Roxy’s dialogue is in dialect. She speaks thus while switching the babies:-

             “You’s young Marse Tom fum dis out, en I got to practise and git used to ‘memberin’ to call you dat honey, or I’s gwine to make a mistake some time en git us bof in trouble. Dah – now you lay still en don’t fret no mo’, Marse Tom – oh thank de good Lord in heaven, you’s saved, you’s saved! – dey ain’t no man kin ever sell mammy’s po’ little honey down de river now!”

There are pages and pages written that way. For me this creates a fruitful ambiguity. Mark Twain was a Southerner and would certainly have heard black people speaking for much of his life. There’s the strong possibility that Roxy’s dialogue does actually reflect authentic speech. But to our ears it immediately has overtones of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, Jim Crow humour, Amos ‘n Andy etc. It seems as demeaning a convention as theatrical blackface, whatever its documentary basis. We think of those controversies that lasted right up to the time William Styron wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner. What right has a white writer to represent the speech and thoughts of black characters?

If there is fruitful ambiguity in the dialogue, there is even more fruitful ambiguity in the story itself. Roxy is far and away the most interesting character in the story, and certainly the most resourceful. Her interplay with her biological son Tom is what gives the novel interest. She comes to have life-and-death power over the spoilt young man who has grown up white. She tells him, when he is old enough to understand, that she can expose his true parentage and reduce him to slavery at any time. A moment’s reflection tells us that this life-and-death power is the one that slave-owners had over slaves as a matter of course. Roxy simply replicates in her behaviour what the (white) rulers of her society have taught her.

The whole situation that Twain sets up ridicules the concept of separation and classification by race. After all, the two boys are indistinguishable. If one can grow to adulthood mistaken for the other, then why should they be treated differently anyway? Isn’t racism patently nonsense?  In this sense Pudd’nhead Wilson is a powerful attack on the institution of slavery.

Yet at the same time, and as a Southerner, part of Twain buys into the very mythology of race that his rational mind is rejecting. When Roxy’s biological son turns out to be a sneak and a thief, Roxy gives him a lecture saying that even though he is 31 parts white [i.e. he would be classified as black on the basis of one black great-great-great grandparent], nevertheless his evil soul must be “nigger”. I have the feeling that Twain partly agreed with this. A drop of black blood morally “spoils” a young white man.

Or maybe not.

The novel’s punch-line is devastating and Twain’s conclusion suggests that upbringing does more to shape character than race or biology – nurture rather than nature. It is also intriguing to find Twain tacitly admitting (as in the two boys’ ancestry) that slave-owners routinely used their female slaves for their sexual pleasure. This is something that the “chivalrous” myth of the Old South would rarely have admitted at the time Twain was writing, although since Twain’s time, detailed sociological studies have considered this aspect of slavery in the antebellum South.

I have come to Pudd’nhead Wilson only recently. I know that Twain wrote it, like Huckleberry Finn, well after the American Civil War had been fought and slavery had been abolished. In one sense he is looking back on his own past (the whole story takes place in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, when Twain would have been a child and young man) and there is an odd note of regret to it even as he fires off his social criticisms. The tone is often urbane and ironical, far removed from the rough cracker-barrel frontier humour with which, fairly or unfairly, Twain is sometimes identified.

A literary curiosity then, and one whose ambiguities outweigh its defects.

Interesting footnote – Look up the Pudd’nhead Wilson Homepage [created by the University of Virginia] and among much else you will find an interesting collection of reviews of this novel which came out when it was first published. My, how some of those old Southern reviewers hated what Twain was saying!

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

IT’S THE WRITING, STUPID

Some months ago I wrote, for a newspaper, a less-than-positive review of a novel that dealt with a Big Historical Event in New Zealand’s history.

I judged it to be a very inept novel. I found the characters thin, the story melodramatic tosh, the style colourless hack-work and the “history” a cut-and-paste affair, with everything drawn from familiar and readily-accessible history books, any one of which was more worth consulting for the “history” involved than the novel itself was.

I concluded that the novel was acceptable as a book for younger teenagers (which was how it was indeed marketed by some booksellers), but could not be considered seriously as a work for grown-ups.

Some days after my review appeared, the newspaper forwarded to me an angry response to my review from one reader.

In his letter, the reader accused me of being an “intellectual snob” and being mean to the novelist, who is apparently a very nice person. But most vehemently of all, he accused me of being heartless. Didn’t I know that real people were involved in the Big Historical Event with which the novel dealt? Didn’t I know that they had suffered, just as the novel said they had? Why, the letter-writer had himself been to the site of the B.H.E., and had reflected on it, and had thought what a scandal it was that such a thing had happened in New Zealand, and thought that we should all remember it and learn from it.

So how dare I criticise a book that dealt with it?

I did frame a reply to this letter, and the newspaper was going to print both the letter and my reply – but in the end, they decided to run neither.

In a way, I’m glad.

The correspondent’s level of argument was pretty silly and replying to him was just too easy. Besides which, I have no objection at all to readers who answer back to reviewers. In fact, I think it’s healthy. It prevents reviewers from imagining that their judgments are unchallengeable.

For the record, however, here is what would have been my main arguments if I had rambled on longer than I actually did.

First, straight insults (such as “intellectual snob”) are not worth answering, and can be left out of consideration.

Second, how pleasant a person an author is has nothing to do with how much talent or lack of it that author has. (Check out my posting “The Song, Not the Singer” in the index at right). Many hopeless writers are very pleasant people.

But most important, in reviewing a book, one is reviewing the book, and not its ostensible subject. How the reader felt – or how I feel – about the B.H.E. itself has nothing to do with how well-written the book itself is, how convincing its characters are, how original the author’s insights are and all the other things that go into making a fair judgement on a book. Yes, I did know that real people had suffered and so forth – but I was not reviewing the historical event. I was reviewing the inept novel about the historical event.

I have encountered this attitude in some readers before. It really is the one that says if a novel deals with an important issue, then it must be an important novel. It tends to go hand-in-hand with the attitude that history is best learnt when packaged harmlessly into bestselling novels.

The answer is very simple.

Novels have merit only inasmuch as they are well-written.

It’s the writing, stupid. 

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“SCIENCE ON ICE – Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica” by Veronika Meduna (Auckland University Press, $NZ59:99)

As a non-scientist, I once again find myself in possession of an accessible book about scientific endeavours, written in language that is not condescending but that can still be understood by laypersons such as myself. In other words, an excellent piece of  what the French call “vulgarisation” [for further accounts of this sort of book, use the index at right to look up postings on Michael Corballis’s Pieces of Mind and Isaac Asimov’s A Choice of Catastrophes].

Science on Ice – Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica is the best New Zealand example of this genre I’ve encountered since Gillian Turner’s explanation of geomagnetism North Pole, South Pole. Trained as a soil microbiologist, Veronika Meduna is herself a science journalist and broadcaster rather than a research scientist. For over a decade she has been a major contributor to Radio New Zealand science programmes and she is a very good middle-person between experts and the literate  uninformed. I belong to the latter category.

To get to what she has to say, however, you must first encounter the book as a physical object.

Science on Ice is a handsome square-set hardback, illustrated with many dozens of colour photographs ranging from the full-page shot of lonesome Barne Glacier on Page 8, to the two-page spread of “brilliant blue” Lake Vanda in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (pp.178-179) ; from the single hunting orca butting its head through shattered sea-ice (pp.66-67) to the action shots of a skua raiding eggs from an Adelie penguin colony (pp.104 and 106); from the glaciologists’ camp set up on the Mount Erebus saddle (pp.20-21) to the aurora australis playing, in a star-drenched sky, above the 10-metre South Pole telescope (pg.209).

Inevitably such images are the first port of call for the browser who picks up this book. Under their impact, it would be easy to mistake Science on Ice for a coffee-table book. But its substantial 200-plus pages of text deserve closer scrutiny than that.

Veronika Meduna’s introduction (in part recounting aspects of her two extended visits to Antarctica in 2001 and 2006) reminds us that  “Antarctica is the only continent without permanent human habitation, yet it may hold the key to our survival” because of the vastness of its ice caps and ice shelves and how much of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in them. She recounts a little of the “Heroic Age” of Antarctic exploration and gives a quick survey of New Zealand’s close involvement in the continent, and of international treaties since 1957 allowing for “peaceful scientific exploration” below 60 degrees South. There is a clear warning that “this book explores many… questions from a New Zealand perspective and with a focus on the Ross Sea region.”

Having established its perspective, Science on Ice then plunges into four long and detailed chapters on different areas of science as practised in Antarctica.

The first, “Uncovering the Past”, concerns the search for the continent’s climate history. It is the story of scientists taking core samplings from sea-floor and from deep ice to determine the age of Antarctica and to reconstruct its early climatic and geological history. When analysed, the cores reveal Antarctica as first having been part of Gondwanaland, then as a drifting continent with a temperate climate, gradually freezing into what it now is, through millennia of fluctuating weather patterns. This sampling and analysis is a multi-national task, but Meduna gives it a distinctly New Zealand slant. She begins with a detailed account of New Zealanders in the field, including the pioneering geologist Peter Barrett, and continues up to the present Antarctic Geological Drilling project, ANDRILL.

“While most of the other 22 countries despatch their glaciologists to the interior of the continent to drill deep into the thicker and older parts of Antarctica’s ice cover,” she notes, “ New Zealand has found its own scientific niche at low-level coastal sites.” Pursuing the theme of climate, this chapter closes with an account of the depletion of the ozone layer and suggestions of the possible consequences for global climate.

The second chapter, “Life on Ice”, is about the work of the biologists and zoologists, and especially the quest to understand the evolutionary adaptation of species to Antarctic conditions. It begins with an account of the survival strategies of emperor penguins and ends with an extended description of a dual study of Adelie penguins and skuas. But it finds more to say about adaptations of fish in Antarctic waters, with antifreeze in their blood. Again observations are based principally on encounters and interviews with New Zealand scientists. Understandably, the sub-section headed “Plunging into the unknown” is suitably respectful about those scientists who dive through metre-thick holes, cut in coastal sea-ice, in order to examine sea-floor life forms. Meduna notes that the Ross Sea has been described as “the Serengeti of the oceans”, so abundant is it in marine life, and she celebrates the NIWA ship Tangaroa’s gathering of new species during the 2008 international Census of Antarctic Marine Life.

As most fish, birds and seals move away from the continent during its dark winter months, Meduna gives her third chapter the title “True Antarcticans”, because it deals with those life forms that do not migrate and that spend their whole life in Antarctica  - plants, mosses, lichen – the work of the botanists. As for the fourth chapter, “Oasis in a Frozen Desert”, it concerns those microbiologists who search for microscopic life in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Science on Ice ends with a very short coda, “Beyond the Ice”, on Antarctica as a listening post for astronomers and physicists trying to work out the after-effects of Big Bang, aided by the clean and largely pollen-free state of the continent’s skies.

This book does its expository work efficiently, mixing anecdote (the stories of the scientists) with scientific description and sometimes the personal and emotional reactions of the author to the scale of the continent, its daunting nature and odd gaunt beauty.

Is there anything lacking in this book?

Science on Ice is not a polemic or work of advocacy, so only very occasionally does it comment on current climate change and its impact. More surprisingly, there is virtually no comment at all on the looming threat of Antarctic exploration by licensed commercial firms, with the aim of mineral extraction, even though this threat is now openly discussed in many ecological forums.

I must admit that I read Science on Ice under the impact of having seen David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet series, which recently screened in New Zealand. I was hoping to be told in some detail about the Weddell Seal, the only mammal that remains in the Antarctic throughout the sunless winter months. But Veronika Meduna gives only passing references to the corpulent beasts, apparently because they do not abound where New Zealand scientists work and are not the subject of New Zealand  studies.

Clearly, Science on Ice is not a survey of all the scientific work done in Antarctica. It is, however, a very thorough reminder of the New Zealand contribution, and from this perspective a very handy primer to the scientific potential of the continent.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“WALDEN” by Henry David Thoreau (first published 1854)

The uncolonised, scientifically-explored wilderness of Antarctica is one of the icons of the international Green movement. Reading a book about it reminds me, among other things, of all the ways Green habits of thought now influence us. That in turn sets me thinking about a book that is revered by a certain class of American reader and is, in effect, the Bible of much of the Green movement.

           

It’s very presumptuous of me to find myself in disagreement with a work some people regard as a classic, but that is the position I find myself in with respect to  Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Life in the Woods.

According to many who haven’t actually read it, Walden is the book that shows people how to live simply and serenely, relying on nature and one’s own effort. Add to this the fact that its author was not only a pacifist, but was also an abolitionist at a time when half of the United States still practised slavery, and you have the makings of an unassailable classic. Surely Thoreau’s book must be beyond criticism?

So how bumptious of me to find fault with so much that Thoreau argues.

To clear the ground first, Thoreau (1817-62) was one of those New England intellectuals who found developing industrial society altogether too messy and noisy and vulgar. Being intellectuals, they wanted something that separated them from the crowd and established their credentials as an elite. Something, in other words, that would re-establish the aristocratic ideal, though this time based on intellect rather than inherited property. They found it under the vague name of “Transcendentalism”, which meant developing one’s higher faculties and separating oneself from the vulgar herd. “Transcendentalism” was very cloudy as both a theology and a philosophy, but to some extent it was the logical development of Puritanism. Only the self – the salvation of the individual soul – matters. The community should have minimal control over the individual. This can lead to an admirable concern for individual rights (as in Thoreau’s opposition to slavery) but, I would argue, it also leads to the type of individualism that is unconcerned with others and fails to realize how societies are bound together. It lets individuals ignore how much their individual freedoms and comforts rely on the efforts of others - in other words, on the society at large from which they imagine themselves to have separated.  “No man is an island” etc.

Purely as an “experiment” (he never meant to make it permanent), Thoreau spent two years, 1845-47,  living on his own in the hut on the edge of Walden Pond. He then spent seven or eight years working up his notes and journals of the experience into the book that was published in 1854. Before I read Walden, I had already come across various “exposes” which explained that Thoreau was no real son of the wilderness. Where he lived for two years was within easy walking distance of Concord, Massachusetts, whither he would repair weekly for civilised talk with fellow intellectuals. In his two years, he was in regular contact with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had lent him the land. He was no horny-handed survivalist. He was just a guy finding a quiet spot in which to read, write and reflect. Almost the guy living in the shed at the back of a big garden.

But in fact none of this is grounds for criticism of Walden, as in the book Thoreau openly acknowledges his situation. The text itself records his frequent walks to town. He describes the railway embankment that ran down the other side of the pond, and the fact that nearly every day he waved to the passing engineer (much as he resented the sound of the train whistle for disturbing his solitude). There are in the book many accounts of encounters with hunters and fishers and ice-breakers. This is no man alone.

There is, however, a level of evasion in the book about the reason for Thoreau’s withdrawal into semi-solitude. Recent research [you can easily find it on-line if you type in the words “Thoreau” and “fire”] suggests that, far from spontaneously deciding on his withdrawal, Thoreau was virtually run out of town for his part in (accidentally) setting fire to some woodland and destroying many acres of forest. There is also evasion about some of the necessities of life. Walden contains many passages on planting and getting food, but very little about how he, in solitude, disposed of his human waste. There is also no mention of his regularly taking his clothes to town to be washed at a laundry, another detail of his life in the woods that has recently been confirmed.

But none of the above is the reason why I take so negatively to much of Walden. My real reason is that I find Thoreau guilty of a feeble and inadequate outlook on life. Repeatedly as I read, I found ideas and phrases worthy of his spiritual descendants, the hippies. Ostentatiously claiming to draw his inspiration from Indian philosophy (he often refers to the Bhagavad Gita), with its ideas of unity and oneness, he in fact produces a repugnant variety of individualism. Sitting (semi-)isolated from humanity, he casts judgement on humanity without ever testing his theories in the rub and jostle of social intercourse.

This is most clearly the case in the long opening chapter called “Economy”. With ingenious and enticing arguments, Thoreau introduces the anarchist thesis that most toil is wasted labour to earn luxuries that we do not really need; that we need no more housing than a box to shelter us from the rain; that we can get by with the simplest food, clothes etc. – and that if we could only bring about this spiritual revolution we would be able to do away with the oppressive power of the state.

Some of his methods of arguing are attractively witty. I enjoyed his paradox that it is always faster to travel on foot than in a vehicle, because if one travels in a vehicle, one has to add to the journey the time it took to earn the fare for the ride or the price of the vehicle.

Yet hiding behind all this declared “simplicity” there is an undeclared Puritanism. Thoreau never acknowledges that it is part of being human to desire more than the essentials; to derive joy from an elaborately-constructed house and an elaborately-prepared meal. Nobody desires mere subsistence – not even people with simple and unpretentious tastes – and if subsistence was enough then societies, technology, culture, art and the literature that Thoreau enjoys reading in his hut would never have developed. Repeatedly, reading these sections of Walden, I found myself remembering the lines from King Lear “Allow not nature more than nature needs/ Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”

More tellingly, Thoreau (like hippies!) does not make the connection between himself and society. His simple life is possible only because there is a complex society supporting him. The cabin he builds is made of the prepared timbers he bought from somebody else’s shanty. He eventually (for reasons he never explains in the book) finds it preferable to return to society. Haughtily – and in a scene I find particularly repugnant – he presumes to tell the unlettered Irish labourer John Field how to farm and how to raise a family, and claims to derive humour from the Irishman’s obtuseness in not accepting his advice. But this only shows how few responsibilities Thoreau, as a single man, really has. Having himself no family to support, having no beloved others in his life, he can condescend to those who make an effort for the sake of people to whom they have made a commitment. Like libertarians of later date, Thoreau also rejects the Christian concept of Charity. He argues that it only makes people dependent on other people, and nothing should stand in the way of rugged individualism. Roll on Ayn Rand.

Having said these negative things, though, I am left explaining paradoxically why I find Walden as a whole an attractive book. It is because (apart from its revival in the “Conclusion”) the limp and untenable philosophising gradually fades out of it. Despite Thoreau’s implicit assumption of his superiority to other people, Walden largely becomes what it is best at being – a book of nature descriptions. Its best philosophy is a vaguely Wordsworthian sense of serenity in the simple scenes described – not in the pages which Thoreau thinks are philosophy.

Hence, this book is best enjoyed for such individual and disconnected moments as  

• the description of the train’s smoke, vivid above the disappearing train
• the terrific account of the ferocious battle between red ants and white ants which Thoreau includes in the section called “Brute Neighbours”
• the description of ice-cutters at work on the frozen winter surface of Walden Pond, taking away huge slabs to be stored under hotels in those pre-refrigeration days.

My pen was kept busy noting down choice examples of Thoreau’s descriptions and saws, and in some cases choice examples of his stupidity.

Of course there is the famous “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” There is the aphoristic “But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools” compounded by the anarchistic “I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freerer.”

In the section on “Readings” he declares truly enough that “To read well – that is, to read true books in a true spirit – is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” He also truly notes that “What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.”

I revelled in his account of sitting alone at night watching the firelight making shifting shadows on the ceiling of his cabin. He comments “Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?”

And then, regrettably, we are back to the sententious stupidities such as “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary for the soul.”

Which I translate as “Somebody else is paying for me, and my mind is free on the back of somebody else’s toil.”