The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

When confronted with aphoristic pearls like these from the middle of the 20th century it’s hard to keep going. We may ask ourselves in a fit of despondency, What happened to the literary world? In T. S. Eliot’s time wasn’t literature an entirely different enterprise? Weren’t books and their authors greater than anything we could now conceive in the modern world?

The brilliant, albeit slightly creepy, T. S. Eliot

In my disappointment with the modern world my first impulse is to agree. Of course the answer is that education has failed. Of course we deal with “the distractions of the Internet… the vanishing seriousness of university literature departments… and the allure of the pervasive entertainments of popular culture.” One of the most popular writers today is Stephanie Meyer. Of course our reaction is to say that modern literature is in decline. Where have our heroes gone? Again, as a reader of mostly dead authors, it’s hard to believe anything else.

You may have heard someone say over a stiff drink, Can’t it be like the good old days? Those days were different, weren’t they? Of course they were different. Today we have modern technology, increased awareness of cultural differences, countless readers all over the world following the latest news on their favorite authors. On second thought perhaps things haven’t changed. Advances in technology aside, T. S. Eliot’s literary world and the literary world as we see it today have much in common. Readers today follow their favorite authors on Twitter. In the 1930’s they followed them in newspapers. In a bookstore today all one initially sees is the light reading—the crime novels, the courtroom dramas, romance and beach reading, memoir after memoir. It’s easy to believe that our world is hopeless and depressing and lost to drivel but in truth today’s readers aren’t so different. The average American in the mid 20th century did not read Eliot just as they did not read Joyce or Faulkner or Woolf. Instead they read their crime novels, their courtroom dramas, their romance and beach reading, memoirs of their favorite celebrities. In fact the only possible change is that in today’s world the most erudite and “literary” works are perhaps read by more readers than ever before. The ivory tower in today’s world has become more accessible.

Epstein concludes his article on a rather somber note:

If the literary culture that T. S. Eliot, at his best, represented is over and done, a thing of the past never to be recovered, the loss is of a seriousness beyond reckoning.

Again, when I read this my first instinct is to mourn, to become morose and weep for the greatness that we’ve lost. Instead I grin. With household names like Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison; with incredibly perceptive critics along the lines of Martin Amis and Harold Bloom; with lesser known writers like Anne Carson and Eula Biss performing thrilling literary experiments, we have nothing short of a wonderfully diverse and enriching literary world. Epstein’s article only shows his unproductive and twisted nostalgia. And what do we know of nostalgia? In One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez reminds us of its true nature: “Sometimes, over a watercolor of Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers.” In today’s world, a lover of the literary arts has a chance at greatness even if he or she couldn’t afford to go to Harvard or Oxford. In fact it’s what most of us are banking on. Things are only going to become more exciting from here.

Having just finished it on my lunch break, I can honestly say it’s a great work of short fiction. Read it. Here are two passages:

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thoughttormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might without exaggeration be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

and

She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing at the kerbstone bidding the others goodnight. She leaned lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now after the kindling again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side: and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.

For January I have chosen a short story by James Joyce (which also sometimes qualifies as a novelette due to its length): “The Dead”. It’s his most well known short story and I think we should give it a shot. Don’t let it scare you: this is long before Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. From what I can see (I haven’t read it yet, and am excited to do so), it’s fairly traditional in its style.

Stop by and talk about it. I’ll make hot chocolate.

| Forum Topic |

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

I’m not going to claim that this quote perfectly sums up Hemingway’s first novel, because if I did, you would know everything already and there would be no point in reading it, and in a strange display of understanding on my part for Hemingway, I want you to read it. I am, however, going to say that it’s a very succinct quote that is quite representational of most of the characters: lifeless and mechanical on the surface and displaced and tormented underneath. I’d have to say that the duality each character possesses is the strength of the book—the way everyone’s pain is so hidden but so accessible, so very human.

This is my second time reading Hemingway, the first being A Farewell to Arms a little over two years ago. My impression then was that the book was a monumental waste of my time: I saw what was coming, the characters had little to offer me, and everything just felt very tedious. I’m not sure if I would feel that way again on a second read, as The Sun Also Rises felt quite similar at times, but overall it just left me cold. This, however, had me intrigued from the start. It still felt like I could have been unconscious for several parts during the book and missed nothing—sort of like it just trudged along at a steady, automatic pace—but every so often there was something that caught my eye, mostly involving a sudden revelation of character depth that was somehow more rewarding than it is in most books, most likely because it happened so sporadically.

Hemingway’s technique elicits a multitude of reactions from me—mainly fascination, annoyance, and boredom. It’s certainly an easy read in the sense that there aren’t laborious, multi-clause sentences or narrative devices that require a lot of concentration, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an easy book: as aforementioned, there’s a lot to pick up on, especially with the characters. As a writer, there were a few interesting things I noticed that are somewhat unique to Hemingway, one of which being the way dialogue is arranged. I found it strangely effective that, in groups of three or more speakers, the tagless dialogue was hard to pinpoint. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter who was speaking, so long as those words were being said. I’ve never thought of attempting anything of the sort, having always been a believer in well-paced and clearly-assigned dialogue, and I probably wouldn’t try to incorporate it into my own writing, but it’s an interesting distinction.

In the end, I can say that I’ve definitely had a change of heart where Hemingway is concerned. Before I was mostly certain that his work wasn’t worth my time, but this book has proved me wrong. If there’s anyone else out there who is feeling on the fence about this particular author and you haven’t read his first major work, it might be worth doing so, even if you still end up on the critical side.

Ernest Hemingway at Wikipedia | The Sun Also Rises at Wikipedia

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;	250
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,	255
And puts a record on the gramophone.

and

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.	30

and

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings	380
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is, of course, not a book, but a poem–a notoriously difficult one at that.  Don’t let that discourage you, however, from sharing your thoughts and at least attempting to wrap your pretty little heads around it.

You will find the poem available online and the discussion thread here.  Hope to hear from you!