Selected Poems.

In my youth I sort of loved Tennyson, and at one point I knew all of “The Lady of Shalott” by heart. These days, I’m with Dorothy Parker:

Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he’s not like Tennyson.
I’d rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.

The Portrait of a Lady. Well. It’s over. It took me about a month to finish, but I did it, and I can’t say I’m sorry. A couple of years ago I listened to an abridged version (not realizing it was abridged; I normally avoid abridged editions) and really enjoyed it despite what felt like some abrupt temporal jumps. It turns out that the jumps are still there in the original novel; what was edited out was all of the words. If you’ve read Henry James, you know what I mean: the man liked his words, and he used a lot of them.

I realize I have a lot of nerve criticizing Henry James, but I am going to do it anyway: there really are too goddamned many words in this book. Sometimes his sentences are just terrible. While I was struggling through the novel earlier this month, I posted this over at the Usual Suspects:

Also, there are too many adverbs, she said irrepressibly. Oh, but the adverbs are the whole point, she replied delightedly.

I hate the damned adverbs. I think James was really brilliant, but I mostly feel that way from reading his essays, because I feel like his execution was flawed. Portrait is almost a perfectly compelling character study, but he doesn’t need to tell me that someone said something “irrepressibly” or whatever. (What does that even mean?) I have just read three thousand words describing this character’s habits and habitat, right down to the last goddamned knick-knack; I can figure out for myself whether she is saying something irrepressibly.

I think his characters are fabulous. His story breaks my heart. I want to read all of his essays and, as a writing professor once recommended, all of his prefaces. I do not want to read any more of his novels.

Dubliners. This took me forever, because I really needed to take long breaks between the stories in order to keep them straight in my head. I read this a long time ago and I’ve reread various stories here and there, some for my various creative writing classes and some as background while I was reading Ulysses last summer. Joyce really perfected the short story, didn’t he? In some ways it seems like it’s been all downhill ever since.

Billy Budd. I am just going to stop forming opinions about anything on a first reading, because I like everything better the second time through. I still don’t love this novel (novella? short story? what in the hell is it?) but I did not hate it like I hated it the first time. I still don’t especially care about Billy, but this is kind of an interesting piece to juxtapose against Whitman and Thoreau and Emerson and all those hopeful, idealistic American romantics.

It’s also totally depressing. I’m glad I finished this one before vacation.

I’m still not sure. I do not have oral argument after all, but I am still not sure if I am going to take the exam. I have been swamped with work the last few weeks, spending nights and weekends finishing a Supreme Court brief rather than reading Portrait of a Lady, so I am not sure I will be ready to take the test. Fortunately all I have to do is just not show up, and I can postpone it to the fall.

It was a little dumb of me to read all the easy and compelling stuff first, I have to say. I am now stuck with Paradise Lost, The Scarlet Letter, Emerson and Thoreau, stupid fucking Billy Budd, “The Wasteland,” and Chaucer to finish in the next two weeks. Not to mention the two-thirds of the Henry James I still haven’t finished.

Bartleby the Scrivener. I love this story. I love it both as the most accessible expression of Melville’s fascinating but sometimes maddeningly obscure “dark transcendentalism,” as my professor put it the other day, and also as just a nearly perfect story.

I have known for a while that this is one of my boss’s favorite stories, and yet I have never once told him that “I prefer not to” do some stupid task. I should start doing that, just to see how it works out for me.

Selected Poems.

Huh.

I have nothing to say about Keats. I just cannot make myself care about the Romantics, not as poets, anyway. I am kind of generally interested in the philosophical background, but their poetry makes me want to cut my throat. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is okay, I guess, except to that whole “beauty is truth” thing I echo the professor who held the review session on this one last week: “What the fuck is that?”

Keats. Whatever.

Selected Poems. We only have to discuss a few of her poems and they are not particularly difficult ones:

“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,”
“I Heard a Fly Buzz”
“The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
“After a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes”
“I’ve Seen a Dying Eye”
“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”

But this was the first time I’d even heard of a couple of those — “After a Great Pain” is not even included in my allegedly-complete poems — and I like these well enough. I confess that I’ve never really gotten Dickinson; she is the kind of tortured genius who makes me a little impatient, even though I know that is unfair given the distance I have from her particular circumstances. Once again, a half-hour review session made me wish I’d read more Dickinson in an academic setting, although I did read quite a bit of her work in college. The problem was that when I was an undergrad, everything was about meter and form and we never talked about what anything meant, and I have never been particularly interested in meter and form.

Great Expectations. The third time is not the charm. I still find Pip so unbearable that I can’t really like this novel. But I now think I would have enjoyed it more had I read it for a class at some point, because last week I attended a very brief lecture that included a discussion of this novel as it demonstrates a change from Romantic to Victorian sensibilities, and that was fascinating.

Pip on his own terms is not so much fascinating.

The Awakening. I was already to talk about how much I hated this book, but then something weird happened in the last 20 pages or so, and I found myself honestly engaged with the story. I have read it before and I really did hate it, and I still am a little unimpressed by the terrible denial of selfhood that comes from being rich and pampered and not allowed to do every single thing you want to do, but this time through I have to admit that the story is a little deeper and more meaningful than that.

This is never going to be my favorite literary era or my favorite type of story; mostly all this languid gentility is just lost on me. But I made it through The Awakening again and I did not completely hate it. Let’s call that a victory.

(The audiobook reader is terrible, incidentally, but the book puts me to sleep if I try to read it the old-fashioned way.)

I’m still here. I’m vaguely hanging in there. I have been skipping anything that threatens to bog me down, like Chaucer and Milton. I don’t know why I was having so much trouble with Chaucer this time, but I can’t afford to spend a week falling asleep over the Wife of Bath, so I set it aside until later. I am done with the plays and I am really just working on the novels now. I will do the poetry last; it will stick with me better that way.

I just finished Wordsworth’s very irritating “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” and I still need to finish James’s “Art of Fiction” before my study group meeting tomorrow night. Right now I am listening to Great Expectations and it is boring me to tears. Meanwhile I am reading Dubliners and it is the Wife of Bath all over again: it’s not hard, it’s not boring; it’s just putting me to sleep.

But I’m here. I’m reading. I’m going to pass.

Jane Eyre. I almost hate it when this happens, when my mind changes so abruptly after I have reached a firm and well-reasoned opinion. The first two times I read this book, I hated it a whole lot. My first review looked like this:

I don’t want to tell you how many times this book was assigned to me in college, because then you’ll really think less of me when I tell you that this is the first time I’ve read it. A question: am I supposed to like Mr. [spoiler]Crazy-Wife-in-the-Attic[/spoiler] Guy? Because I do not. He strikes me as one of those game-playing guys whom all the women love, and about whom smart women make foolish choices, and they tell you that you just don’t understand him, because he’s all tormented and smart and stuff, and anyway he loves the [spoiler]not-crazy not-wife who’s not in the attic[/spoiler] for her mind, and the guys are all, “You dumb bitch, he’s got [spoiler]a crazy wife in the attic[/spoiler]! He’s just trying to get in your pants! Damn, why didn’t I think of that [spoiler]crazy-wife-in-the-attic[/spoiler] shit?”

I like Emily better than Charlotte.

My second reading left me a little more hysterical:

I hate Jane Eyre. Let’s get that out of the way right up front: I hate it. Until last year I could never get past the first section of this book no matter how many times it was assigned to me, and I’ve never made it through any other Charlotte Brontë work, either. I hate pretty much everything about this book: the smart-woman-foolish-choices central love story, the narrative structure, the first-person point of view so that we mostly only understand Jane through her version of other people’s opinions about her (which, I guess, is part of the point, but I don’t like it and I think it ultimately amounts to a character who isn’t really much of anything). I hate the preacher. I hate the spoiler-in-the-attic. I hate Mr. Rochester. I hate Jane’s stupid fits and her visions and all the crap about God. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

And I was prepared to hate it all over again, but then … I didn’t. I liked it. The book has a lot of flaws, and Virginia Woolf points out the major one in A Room of One’s Own: the reason that Jane sometimes makes no sense as a character is that sometimes she isn’t Jane at all; she is Charlotte Brontë breaking through the text in a little literary temper tantrum. I still don’t care for Jane or for Mr. Rochester, but right up to the “happy” ending I appreciated Jane’s sense of self, which seems to come from nowhere and which is damn near inextinguishable.

But Charlotte Brontë knew nothing about men and women and how they interact together, did she? Jane’s subservience to Mr. Rochester continues to ring false to me; it reads like a spinster’s ideal of a loving relationship. The same goes for the ending, in which Jane and Mr. Rochester never fight and always live together in perfect harmony because they are so perfectly matched in temperament and because they love each other so damn much. That’s not merely unlikely; it’s false to Brontë’s own characters.

So, not perfect, and not even really in the same ballpark as perfect. But I didn’t hate it this time, and I will probably read it again, and maybe next time I will find something more to like.

Pride and Prejudice. This book, on the other hand, is perfect. Maybe even a little too perfectly mannered, with not one moment of authorial intrusion or any glimpse of anything beneath the surface except for what Austen intends for you to see. But who cares? Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are the best lovers in literature. I hate love stories but I love this book so much that I almost said to hell with the exam and turned around and started it over again.

Hamlet. I did not get around to reading Hamlet until I was in my thirties; somehow it was never assigned to me in high school or college. (Or in grad school, for that matter.) Thirty-something was too late to read this play, or maybe the twenty-first century was too late. It is nearly impossible to read the play, and particularly the soliloquies, on their merits, because every line is a cliche. Every line is the title to some other work, and just like the “to-morrow and to-morrow” speech in Macbeth makes me think of Benjy and Quentin, my attempts to read Hamlet are confused by all the later works that quote it.

And also by Gilligan’s Island, since for many years everything I knew about the play came from that one episode where they turn Hamlet into a musical:

Hamlet, dear, your problem is clear,
Avenging thy father’s death;
You seek to harm your uncle and mom,
But you’re scaring me to death.
While I die and sigh and cry,
That love is everything;
You’re content to try to touch,
The conscience of a king.
Since the day when your dad met his fate,
You just brood and you don’t touch your food;
You hate your ma, mad at my pa,
You’ll kill the king or some silly thing.
So Hamlet, do be a man, let rotten enough alone.
From Ophelia no one can steal ya
You’ll always be my own,
Leave the gravedigger’s scene, if you know what I mean.
Danish pastry for two, for me, for you.

I have had that song stuck in my head for approximately thirty years now.

A Room of One’s Own. I did not read this until about five years ago. I should have read it much sooner; I should have read this in college or in high school. A whole chunk of women’s history was a mystery to me for a long time, after women had finally gotten the vote but before they entered the work force. I think this book is a reasonable primer on that missing time, although Woolf is only concerned with upper class women and my own grandmother was probably working in a factory when this book was published.

What is more interesting to me is reading this now, after having read some feminist theory, and seeing how in many ways she is not saying anything different than what Irigaray (who even shares her narrow socioeconomic focus) and some of the other French feminists said decades later; she just says it in a way that doesn’t make me want to jump out of a window.