A Modest Proposal, and an Example

Proposal:

I would like to use this platform to issue a call to action. I believe that contemporary culture has a desperate need, one which we can all work to address. For too long we have outsourced the intellectual and critical work that must be done to understand the world we live in. We’ve told ourselves that we cannot engage in really intellectual discussions, because such things lie exclusively in the province of the thinkers and researchers who live and work in the universities. We’ve allowed the creation of a huge silo, one which we never enter, in which important thinking and analysis occurs.

In my view, this is a big mistake.

Of course, we need universities and the scholars they produce and the research that they in turn produce. But that does not give us license to stop thinking ourselves, to stop considering the works and ideas that, whether we know it or not, affect our lives and help us make sense of the world. What I’m calling for, in other words and in the simplest terms, is the idea of the amateur intellectual.

It’s not such a crazy idea, when you think about it. I mean, we all know what an amateur detective is; half of mystery fiction wouldn’t exist without the likes of Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Father Brown, and Jessica Fletcher. Why not have the same kind of category for thinkers, philosophers, literary critics, historians? Why must we delegate the important intellectual work to others, and not explore works and ideas on our own? One needn’t be a forensic expert to solve a mystery; likewise, one shouldn’t need an advanced degree to make sense of the ideas that swirl around us in this world we live in.

I offer an example below. It’s an idea I’ve had about Frankenstein. In my earlier days (read: before I retired), I’d probably have tried to create a more academic argument out of it, researching what other readers/scholars have said, scaffolding and buttressing my argument to make it airtight and worthy of an academic audience. But I’m done with all that now, and besides, I don’t think it’s right or necessary to let academics have all the fun. I also think it’s an abdication of our own intellectual responsibility, as I said above, to outsource or delegate all the work to a bunch of overworked and myopic academics. We’re all capable of this kind of intellectual play (I refuse to call it “work”), although it may take more practice for some of us to get to the point where we feel comfortable making judgments for ourselves and, going a step further, sharing them with others.

Example:

I will be honest: Frankenstein is not my favorite book. Far from it, and for a number of reasons. Of course, like everyone else in the English-speaking world, perhaps in the entire world, I acknowledge how important the themes of the novel have become, how the ideas of runaway science, intellectual hubris, and regret or guilt about the act of creation itself have become central metaphors of the world we live in. I get that these things are important. I can also see that Frankenstein might lay claim to being the first science fiction novel in English (although there are other claimants), and like everyone else, I am amazed that it was written by a 19-year-old woman, albeit one with illustrious intellects for parents. I love the fact (forgive me), that the self-important and perfidious Percy Shelley has been all but eclipsed by his young wife’s audacity in writing such an important work. I mean, every schoolchild today at least knows about Frankenstein; how many know “To a Skylark” or “Ode to the West Wind” or even “Ozymandias”?

All these things about the novel are important, and they are things I have long appreciated about it. But the novel itself is, to be frank, a mess. It looks back to the amorphous 18th-century English novel much more than it looks forward to the 19th-century novel we all associate with the very form of the novel itself. It’s episodic, for one thing. For another, it’s a hodgepodge in terms of its form. Starting out as a letter, it becomes the first-person narrative of Victor Frankenstein, then it somehow becomes the first-person narrative of the monster itself (never mind how the monster learned not only to speak and understand language without any kind of instruction but actually write as well), then returns to doctor’s narrative. It is, to be brief, all over the place in terms of narrative structure.

Yet whenever I referred to the novel–I don’t think I ever had the temerity to actually put it on the syllabus of any of the classes I taught–I always did so with respect. As I said above, I understand the place it has come to occupy in our culture. It has become a central metaphor, much like the story of Darmok and Jalad at Talagra in that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (second episode of the fifth season) became to the Tamarians. But I would never argue that the novel itself was a stellar example of artistic creation.

Until yesterday, that is, when I had an epiphany.

I don’t know if Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley knew what she was doing, and it hardly matters if she did, but I can now see that the novel’s very structure, that patchwork, rag-tag narrative that bounces from one story to another without any proper cohesion, is exactly what Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is. Just as the monster is a wild assortment of body parts, taken from various villains and paupers whose cadavers Victor Frankenstein managed to appropriate, so the the novel is a wild assortment of stories, sewn together into a loose and rather ugly novel that lacks the grace of any work by Jane Austen or Sir Walter Scott, Shelley’s contemporaries. In other words, Frankenstein’s very structure mirrors the monstrousness of its central character.

And now suddenly I no longer see the novel as one with an important message but a disastrous execution. Rather, I see it as just plain brilliant. Did Shelley see or know what she was doing? I doubt she did; I think it might have been good luck. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s an amazing achievement, whether intentional or not, and is, at the moment, my favorite aspect of the book, and a discovery so thrilling that it makes me wish I was still teaching so I could share it with my students.

And here’s where I return to my proposal: why on earth should we amateurs–those of us not connected to a university or research institution–deny ourselves the pleasure of a discovery like this? If we can read and think, we can do the work/engage in the play. And our lives will be so much richer for doing it.

Amateur intellectuals, unite! It’s time to take up our thinking caps and enter the fray! Or as I would rather put it, let’s enter the playground and begin to have some fun for ourselves. I look forward to seeing your stories of discovery and interpretation.

A Confession

Recently this article appeared in The Atlantic, all about why Taylor Swift is worthy of being the subject of a class at Harvard University. I have to say, I’m not all that impressed by the argument author Stephanie Burt makes. It’s not that I don’t think Swift deserves critical attention; of course she does. Certainly more people know more about Taylor Swift than they do about Jonathan Swift (hint: Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal), and for that reason alone, she is worthy of interest. But Burt seems to think that she’s doing something avant-garde, busting through genres as well as expectations, in offering the class.

I beg to differ.

For decades, many of us teachers have been referring to popular culture in an effort to make past literary works come alive for our students. How many of us compared the Romantic poets to John Denver, with his “back to nature” themes? Or Byron to the Beatles, as the first popular superstar (well, second, since Wordsworth also had to deal with pilgrims landing on his doorstep)? If you’ve spent any time in the classroom at all, chances are you’ve made analogies like these–and whether they are apt or not (please don’t argue with me about mine, because I’m retired now and I really don’t care any more), they succeeded in getting students to look at old works of literature with curiosity and some slight degree of affinity.

What Burt has done, however, is the opposite: she’s using the old stuff to shed light on the new songs that Swift has recently created. As she points out, “I would not be teaching this course, either, if I could not bring in other works of art, from other genres and time periods, that will help my students better understand Swift and her oeuvre.” There is nothing wrong with this approach, either. Interpretation and criticism go both ways, and the very act of exploring one work can shed light on the meaning and structure of another, very different, one. What I object to here is that Burt seems to think she needs to defend a mode of teaching that has existed since the dawn of pedagogy itself, most likely. Perhaps she’s out to blow up the canon; that, too, however, has already been done many times over. I guess my take on the whole subject is that there is nothing new under the sun. Not even Taylor Swift.

But here’s a counterargument to the article, one which may or may not be valid. Does Swift really need interpretation? Isn’t it pretty easy for people to understand and appreciate her work? It’s likely that people need more help understanding and seeing the value in Shakespeare’s works, or Charlotte Bronte’s, or Virginia Woolf’s than Taylor Swift’s songs–works which, separated from us by time and circumstance and perhaps even language itself, remain alien to us, despite the fact that we know they had enormous influence on the writers who came after them.

Still, I’m all for teaching Taylor Swift’s works (as long as we can avoid the trap of criticism, making sure we do not “murder to dissect,” as Wordsworth put it). What really bothers me, I think, is that I appear to be one of the few people on the planet who don’t really “get” Taylor Swift. I don’t dislike her songs; I just am not forcibly struck by them, or powerfully moved by them, either musically or thematically. And this despite asking my 25-year-old offspring to perform exposure therapy on me using a Spotify playlist. I realize this is probably a defect in me, a matter of faulty taste or lack of experience of some kind. After all, I felt the same way about Hamilton.

Now that the secret is out, I give all my readers permission to stop reading here. I am so clearly out of step with the times, so serious a victim of what I call “century deprivation,” that nothing I say is viable or important. I accept that designation, with what I hope is humility, bafflement, and only a small amount of FOMO, or rather COMO (Certainty Of Missing Out). As proof of the fact that I am completely out of step, I offer the following things I do find endlessly amusing. If I could, I’d offer a class on these clips alone, working to introduce students to media in its infancy and the role of comic relief in the twentieth century.

I’d start with this little snippet from the BBC Archives, in which Lt. Com Thomas Woodrooffe, reporting on the Royal Review of naval ships in 1937, inadvertently revealed that he had imbibed a bit too many toasts with his former shipmates earlier in the afternoon, as evidenced by his incoherent but hilarious commentary.

Then I’d move to this wacky clip from the dawn of television broadcasting, an almost-lost skit from the Ernie Kovacs Show. I don’t know why I find this so funny, but perhaps it has to do with the music behind it. I will freely confess that this little jewel was instrumental in getting me through a good deal of the pandemic three years ago.

And finally, here’s the Vitameatavegimin episode from I Love Lucy. I would often use this to teach my public speaking students how to give a persuasive speech using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, a five-step formula that was often used in advertisements. (The five steps are: grab your audience’s attention, set out a problem, solve the problem, visualize the solution, and urge your audience to action.) Some of my students had never seen a single episode of I Love Lucy, which I found mind-boggling. I’d wager that most of them probably still remember this episode much better than they do Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, which is fine with me.

To all the Swifties out there, I apologize for being tone deaf. I fully understand your pain and disappointment, and I share in it. The clips above are offered as nothing more than a kind of peace offering or compensation to make up for my failure.

As my grandmother used to say, there’s no accounting for taste!

Bah Humbug: Some Thoughts on A Christmas Carol

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons

I finally sat down yesterday and made myself read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As a scholar of Victorian literature, I should have read this story long ago, back when I was in graduate school, if not well before, but I don’t think I ever did. And really, why should I have? It’s not considered Dickens’s best work by Victorian scholars; in addition, it’s entered our culture so thoroughly, in so many forms, that it hardly seems necessary to read the original because we all know the story and characters so well. Like the story of Adam and Eve, we’ve imbibed so many versions of the original tale that we might not even recognize the original if we were, for some reason, to take it up and read it for ourselves. (Back when I taught English literature to community college students, I would make them read the part of Genesis that dealt with Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden before we tackled Milton’s Paradise Lost. The original was a tiny passage–just a few lines long–compared to Milton’s magnum opus, which is undoubtedly more familiar, at least in the way it presents the main story, to us than the original.) For most of my life, I have been content to ignore Dickens’s original story, perhaps thinking that watching the Mr. Magoo version was good enough.

So what prompted me to correct this defect in my reading at this late date? Simply this: I encountered an advertisement for an online course that promised to reveal A Christmas Carol as a story of Christian redemption, and I immediately bristled at what I thought was a misguided interpretation of the whole thing. Of course, you can find anything you want in anything you read: I was once an academic, so I can attest to this. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Presenting an entire course for the purpose of forcing this reading on Dickens’s tale seemed wrong to me, because I believed something like the opposite is more likely to be true. And so, to check my theory, I decided to read the original myself and that’s what brought me, a person who long ago tired of Christmas hoopla, to engage in that most Christmas-y of Christmas activities: reading A Christmas Carol.

It’s well worth the read, but I realize I’m probably not going to convince anyone to spend a couple of hours reading a story written 180 years ago. And also, some people–the fact astounds me–some people simply don’t like Dickens. But that’s no reason to go around saying his best-known work is something that it really isn’t. I’ll freely admit that Dickens wrote a story celebrating what he considered the spirit of Christmas: an antidote to the greed and lack of empathy, a story designed to combat the misery produced by industrial capitalism that gripped much of Victorian London. (Indeed, a mere two years later, Friedrich Engels would produce his seminal study, The Condition of the Working Class in England, focusing on Liverpool and Manchester instead of London.) This much is clear: Dickens intended to, and succeeded in, writing a powerful story that drew on the emotional appeal of Christmas.

So why do I refuse to consider the novella a Christian story? My argument is a simple one, and in fact I’d argue that the very popularity of the story (go ahead and try to determine how many recorded versions exist–I gave up, but not before I became distracted by one that must have taken place during COVID lockdown, in which surviving members of Dark Shadows read it through on a Zoom call) does much to prove that I am right.

So here’s my argument: Dickens witnessed the greed and heartlessness in the world around him. He recognized the need for a correction of sorts, and he determined that spreading the spirit of Christmas–an idea that he himself largely willed into existence–was one such creative measure to provide this correction. True, there’s a link from Christmas back to Christianity and Christ, but by the Victorian period, that link was growing ever more tenuous in an age riddled with religious doubt. Thanks to Dickens (with a bit of help from Prince Albert, who brought German Christmas traditions to England), by the end of the century, people who were not devout Christians, or not Christian at all, would be able to to take part in Christmas festivities without feeling profoundly uncomfortable.

Dickens’s genius was that he recognized that the original Christmas story, the one celebrated in many Christmas carols (pa-rum-pa-pum-pum), was rapidly losing its cachet; it was no longer performing the function it needed to in order to make society more livable. Thus, genius that he was, he set out to create a new Christmas story, one for his time. He succeeded beyond even his wildest imagination. Readers caught hold of his story, which then entered into the culture and disseminated what he had called Christmas spirit–to wit, generosity, good cheer, lovingkindness–throughout a society corrupted by industrial capitalism, in order to administer a corrective, if only for a few days at a specific time of year. In other words, A Christmas Carol was created because the original Christmas story had begun to lose its hold on an England that was no longer uniform in its Christian belief (and perhaps never had been) and had therefore lost its power to influence society.

Was Dickens aware of how ambitious his project was? Almost certainly not. He was simply trying to create a compelling story that would capture his audience’s attention and sell lots of books. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t on to something really big. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, he was setting out to create a mythology for the people of his time, since he recognized, at least at some level, that the one they had inherited had lost much of its power. But there’s an important difference between Tolkien’s project and Dickens’s: Tolkien was deliberately trying to create a new mythology for Britain and was aware of what it was he was aiming for. Dickens, I’d argue, was not. His new mythology was thus tacked onto the existing one, as a kind of appendix that would someday come to supplant, or at least threaten to eclipse, its predecessor.

So, in the end, A Christmas Carol may well have a Christian message, but if so, it’s a pretty wide definition of “Christian,” so wide as to be ultimately meaningless. Rather, its message is a critique of industrial capitalist society, subtle enough to co-exist with that society without causing too much friction. In writing it, Dickens created a new parable, actually replacing and not merely reinforcing the original Christmas story.

My takeaway from this? Stories are important. They influence the societies we live in. Our capacity to get caught up in them, to believe in them and their messages, have profound effects on societies, on culture, and ultimately, on the arc of human civilization. Sometimes, as with A Christmas Carol, a story comes along with such resonance that we are able to see, in real time as it were, how very important they can be, and how some stories that were once powerful in their own time can be supplanted by others when they begin to lose their influence. In the end, it behoves us all to understand how stories work, and how they not only describe, but actually create, the world we live in.

On Reading

I think a lot about reading–and not just my reading, but reading in general and how fascinating and miraculous an activity it is. I think about how reading (and writing, of course) has been used to transmit ideas from one generation to another, encompassing thousands of years. In fact, on my spacier days, I’ve even considered writing/reading a kind of alternate existence. Certainly it’s common to think of reading as a way of time travel, or as a way of living a life completely different from one’s own, but this isn’t quite what I mean by “alternate existence.” I’m talking about writing/reading as an actual different life form.

Bear with me, because this view requires some athletic imaginative leaps, but I think it’s worth it, if only to defamiliarize ourselves with writing/reading as an everyday function and look at it in a new light. To make my view clear, I need to start with a crazy premise: writing is a life form in and of itself. Think of it like this: you’re in a Star Trek Universe, and you’ve met another life form that you can’t see or touch, but you know it’s there. You can see its effects on the physical environment. So naturally, you have to expand your notion of what a life form is in order to identify and describe this one.

Now that I’ve prepared the way, let me make my argument for writing as an alternative life form. When human beings began to write their thoughts and stories down, they took the first step towards creating a different form of life, one made of the intersection of thought and the squiggly lines we call writing, grafted onto paper in a process similar to how lichens occurred: a fungus and an alga got together and, through symbiosis, united to create a new, independent life form that has characteristics of both its predecessors. How is writing like that? Take human ideas and stories, graft them onto the remnants of trees, and you get something that didn’t exist before: books. And these books, as we all know, go on to have lives of their own. They influence human events long after their initial publication dates; they take on a kind of incorporeal existence that despite its lack of physical substance, nevertheless exerts an effect not only on individual people, but on whole cultures. In a science fiction-type way, these creations could be seen as having some kind of life, although of course we’d have to define life differently to get there.

I’m not really arguing this, although I confess I do think it’s fascinating to delve into this way of looking at books and writing. I’m simply suggesting it as a thought experiment to help us see reading/writing as the kind of miracle it really is. For one thing, all the forms of long distance and long term communications we enjoy today are derivatives of this writing/reading model. This electronic blog you’re reading right now comes directly from papyrus sheets and Gutenberg. That TikTok video you watched and laughed at on Instagram this morning? Though admittedly transformed, it’s also the honest descendant of the first books compiled by Greeks, Romans, Babylonians. In fact, I would argue that human existence probably remained pretty static, with minimal changes from generation to generation, until the advent and spread of reading and writing, which allowed communication unfettered by place and time, and this in turn allowed men and women to improve upon the ideas and practices of the past, giving rise to steady change until we got to where we are today.

So why is this important? As I said, I think it’s an interesting thought experiment, but it’s more than that. When we talk about writing and reading these days, we tend to think about the publishing world: what’s getting published, what’s been published, who’s reading what, who’s writing what. The emphasis seems to be on the book, not the reader. I’d like more people to take the opportunity to look at the act of reading to see what a miracle it is, and by extension, how we can refine our reading skills to become better, more thoughtful readers. C.S. Lewis (who I’d argue is horribly undersold as the author of the Narnia series and low-grade Christian propaganda) suggested in a little book called An Experiment in Criticism that we divide readers into two categories: “Users” and “Consumers.” A user, if I remember correctly, is a reader who thoughtfully reads a book and considers it seriously. A consumer simply reads a book and sets it aside. It is the most common thing in the world for a user to re-read a book not once but several time, whereas a consumer will not re-read a book unless s/he has forgotten the plot. Users make use of their reading; consumers use their reading as mere escapism.

I don’t mean to bash reading as escapism; it has its time and its place and can be very useful, even healing. I’d rather focus instead on making all readers capable of both kinds of reading. In short, I’d argue for teaching reading not as it is taught now, as a basic skill required of all citizens, but rather as a higher level thinking skill, one which demands interaction with the text.

And here we return to the idea of the act of reading as a special miracle, one which somehow unites written thoughts from previous ages and long-dead writers, from disparate places and situations, with a reader who is enriched by experiencing different points of view, different ideas, and, to be succinct, completely different existences. Think of it this way: last week I read a book by Georges Simenon, a detective novel featuring Inspector Maigret, in French. I am not bilingual, not even fluent in French, although it’s true that I majored in it in college (about forty years ago!). But I could make my way through the novel and follow the plot for the most part. The situations and characters were conveyed to me in a language completely foreign from my own. That, I think, qualifies as a kind of miracle. When we read works in their original languages, when we slow down to enter the world of the text, whether it’s Beowulf or Candide, we engage with the text in a way that simply takes us out of our world into a completely different one. And when we return to our own world, we see with different eyes, think with a different mind. It is reading that makes this possible, since it provides us with a gift that for much of human existence has been absolutely unthinkable: the gift of transcending our own private existence.

Can we expect to make the most of such a gift with just the basic tools of reading? Shouldn’t we work harder to deserve this gift and enjoy it in all its glory?

Ah–but the question is how to do this. I have no doubt that if we start thinking about this and addressing it, we will come up with many different answers, some of which I hope to consider in future blogs. Until then, we can always improve with practice!

Happy Reading!

What I Read this Summer: Five Books I Liked, and One I Didn’t…

It was a busy summer here on the farm that is not really a farm. We had many projects, most of them incomplete, and lots of visitors–so my reading kind of slowed down a bit, but I did make a few discoveries. Almost all of my reading choices are directed by sheer accident: my reading habits resemble nothing so much as a bumper pool table with the cue ball randomly making contact with other balls, the bumpers, the edges, and not infrequently, hopping off the table onto the floor and rolling around there for a while. In other words, I’d caution my readers not to look for any kind of systematic rationale for reading in this list, because I am what I’d call the champion of random reading.

But I find, on looking back on the last few months, that a few of the books I read do stand out, so here’s a list of them, in no particular order.

1. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2012), by Mary Gabriel . Like most of the other books on my list, I read this on Kindle, and I’m glad I did, because it is a mammoth book, coming in at over 700 pages. I am a veteran reader, but even I might have been daunted by the size of this tome. My wrists would surely have been stressed by the weight, and honestly, who hasn’t been beaned by their book when they drop off to sleep unexpectedly while reading in bed? Had that happened with Love and Capital, I might have sustained serious injury. But this book had to be this long, because it’s extremely thorough, well researched, and full of interesting facts. It also provides a very cursory introduction to some of Marx’s ideas. Gabriel wrote a masterful biography of Karl and Jenny Marx, their lifelong friend Friedrich Engels, and their children. In addition to the information on Marx and his circle, it also gives an excellent picture of the places they lived, in particular Victorian London.
2. Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser. Let me start by admitting that in my younger days, I was a literary snob. I read American literature only when forced to, and I kicked and screamed the whole time. Now, in some cases this is justified; I defy anyone to say, for example, that they actually enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter. I tried to reread it about twenty years ago and, following Dorothy Parker’s advice about another book, threw it against the wall with great force. (“This is not a book to be set aside lightly,” she is reported to have said. “It should be thrown with great force.”) Be that as it may, a lot of American literature is actually good, and I have learned to overcome my Anglophilic snobbery. Case in point: I read Sister Carrie in my first year of graduate school, and I hated it. I made fun of it. I said it was a stupid, predictable book. But now, reading it again some forty years later, I freely admit I was dead wrong. This is a good book, and it is not predictable. It passes one of my tests for a good book: I can remember scenes from it clearly. In addition, Dreiser created a female character who lived by her wits and survived–more than survived, in fact, because Sister Carrie actually thrives. I feel I should apologize to Dreiser for misjudging his work, so here goes: Sorry, Ted. I done you wrong.
3. Le Debacle or The Downfall (1892) by Emile Zola. Most of us have never read anything by Zola, and if we have, it’s probably the letter he wrote in support of Alfred Dreyfus entitled “J’Accuse,” published in 1898, which resulted in Zola having to flee to England for a year to avoid arrest for libel. But The Debacle is not about the Dreyfus Affair, although that episode in history would offer great fodder for a novel. It’s set during the Franco-Prussian War, which admittedly most of us know little or nothing about. So actually I suppose it’s not surprising that it’s not read much. But I’d argue that’s a shame, because this is a book that deserves to be read. It has some of the best descriptions of war I’ve ever seen, made sharper by the attitude of the author/narrator, which is not hard to discern: that all war, and this one in particular, is a foolish and tragic enterprise. I was engrossed by the novel, and found even the translator’s footnotes fascinating, albeit intrusive. Why hasn’t someone made a musical/opera/miniseries out of this book? I mean, I like Jane Austen as much as anybody else, but it’s time to spread our wings a bit, isn’t it?
4. My Cousin Rachel (1951) by Daphne du Maurier. Here’s the deal about Daphne du Maurier: some of her stuff is great, like Rebecca and “The Birds.” Some of it is so-so; I’d put Jamaica Inn into this category. But some of it is awful, or at the very best, lackluster. It may not be popular to say so, but I was unimpressed by The King’s General, and I couldn’t even get through The Loving Spirit, her first novel, because it was so creepy. My Cousin Rachel is, like Rebecca, a great novel. The first sentences draw you into the novel, very much as the first scene of Great Expectations does, and although you know where the story is going, you’re compelled to keep reading to the end. My pet theory is that Rebecca is a response to or inversion of Jane Eyre, while My Cousin Rachel is an inversion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Read it yourself to see if you agree. As a bonus for reading this far into my blog post, here’s a link to an interesting interview with du Maurier.
5. The Queen of Hearts (1859) by Wilkie Collins. This is a collection of short stories, strung together with a nice Victorian framework narrative. Three elderly brothers live together in rural Wales and unexpectedly wind up with a young woman, dubbed “The Queen of Hearts” by her friends, as a long-term visitor. Just as she is preparing to leave and return to society, however, the narrator receives a letter from his son, who has been wounded in the Crimean War and is coming home. The young soldier asks his father to retain his visitor long enough for his homecoming so that he can propose to her. The result is that the three old men work together to create a series of stories so enchanting that the young woman is lured to stay to hear the next one. The stories are varied in theme and texture, and the narrative framework is fascinating as well.

So, that’s five books that I liked quite a bit. The one I disliked? Sorry, American lit fans, but it has to be John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935). The only thing I liked about this book was the setting. I found Steinbeck’s tone towards his characters distractingly patronizing, and just about everything in it made me uncomfortable. This is, I’d argue, a book that actually deserves to be forgotten. I’d willingly trade it in for any of the ones listed above.

Feel free to make a comment if you disagree or feel I’ve overlooked something. I’m always willing to engage in discussion, and I usually learn a lot from people with differing points of view.

And now, as we move further away from the memory of summer days, here’s to a winter filled with writing, reading, and doing whatever else brings you hygge!

More Thoughts on Poetry

I have had a breakthrough in my thoughts on the nature of poetry. To recap, in the last episode of this blog, I stated that over the past twenty years or so, I had somehow decided that unless I really knew what poetry was, I had no business writing it. Despite having taught more poetry than you can shake a spear at, I didn’t feel I could actually define poetry. It couldn’t be just the use of creative language, because that’s used in the best prose; nor could I say it was in the idea of moving the reader to feel a specific emotion, because that’s the motivation behind all different kinds of prose, too. What was left was simply the form of poetry, which meant that a poem is a poem because the person who created it says it’s a poem and delineates its appearance, using line breaks and stanzas, in such a way to suggest that it is a poem.

That’s fair, of course, but not very satisfying. So I came up with the idea of busting apart the entire idea of genre, and asking if it really matters what we call a piece of writing. Whether it’s prose or poetry, if we feel moved by it, if it elicits a vivid picture or sensation or thought, then it’s good writing. But something in me was left unsatisfied, and so I did what I always do when I have a tricky little intellectual problem: I simply tried to forget about it.

But a few days ago I had an idea about the motivation behind writing poetry. Perhaps, I postulated, that’s what really differentiates a poem from a prose piece: the writer’s motivation. By chance, I was helped along in this line of thinking–about the whole idea of why we write and read poems–from, of all things, a very fine science writer named Ed Yong.

You might remember Yong from his insightful articles on the Covid-19 pandemic, which were published in the Atlantic. I knew Yong to be an excellent writer, so when I saw his book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us (2022), I picked it up and read it.

But how does a book on natural science relate to poetry? Bear with me a few minutes and I’ll explain.

Yong’s book is all about the way in which animals’ perceptions are different, sometimes starkly, from our own. It’s also about how human beings have misunderstood and misrepresented the way animals perceive things for millennia because we’re so immured in our own self-contained perceptive world. In other words, by thinking of animals in purely human terms, we limit our view of them.We also limit our view of the world itself. What we perceive, Yong argues throughout the book, determines in large part what we think and how we feel–and, most important of all for my point here, how we process the world we live in.

Yong uses the term “Umwelt” throughout the book to refer to an animal’s perceptual world, a term that means “environment” in German but has taken on a new flavor thanks to the scientist Jakob von Uexküll, who first used the word in 1909 in this specific sense. A dog’s “umwelt,” then, reflects the way it perceives the world, a world in which different colors are highlighted, scents linger in the air long after their source has moved away, and so on.

So how does this all relate to poetry and why we read and write it? Simply this: I propose that a poem’s primary task is to present an Umwelt for its reader. To do this, the poet creates a piece of writing that closely reflects (if she is lucky) the way she sees the world and presents it to the reader as a gift. If the reader accepts the gift, his reward for reading the poem attentively is being able to glimpse the world afresh through an Umwelt that is different from his own. In other words, the reader gets to see the world, or at least a piece of it, through a different perceptual grid, an experience that can be entertaining, sometimes unsettling, often thought-provoking, and, at its best, revelatory.

Is this different from prose? Perhaps not too much, but I’d argue that the very choice to write a poem instead of an essay, short story, or novel indicates something–I’d say something vitally important– about the writer’s Umwelt. The other forms of writing have messages they want to relay. The poem, however, exists simply to allow its reader to step into its author’s Umwelt for a few moments in order to experience the world differently.

So there you have it. For me, at least for now, discovering why we write poems has given me a new understanding and appreciation of poetry. It means I don’t have to decide whether I like or dislike a poem, nor do I have to justify my reaction to it. Poetry simply is; there’s no more point in arguing whether a poem is good or bad than there is in arguing with my dog Flossie whether her way of experiencing the forest we walk through every morning is better than mine, or whether mine is better than hers. If I got the chance to experience the world through her senses, you can bet I’d take it. Curiosity alone would drive me to it.

At the most basic level, then, I write poetry to demonstrate how I experience the world. I read poetry to discover how other people experience the world. In the end, we read and write poetry to bridge the gap between ourselves and others. It’s about sharing our Umwelten, which, in the end, means it’s all about breaking out of our own little self-contained worlds and joining together to form a bigger, better sense of the world we live in.

Some Thoughts on Writing Poetry

Photo of Northern Michigan Woods in springtime, taken by
Dan Shumway

As I wrote in my last blog, during most of the month of April (National Poetry Month, as declared by the Academy of American Poets in 1996) I took part in a local poetry workshop. Somewhat dubious as to the outcome of my immersion in the discipline after a twenty-some year sabbatical, I had hoped only for a kind of jumpstart to my creativity, a willingness to engage in writing in a purely creative mode after many years of prosaic endeavors–by which I mean writing in prose. My writing in this blog is largely critical, relying on some degree of brain power to make connections and arguments; to a certain degree, this is the kind of writing I feel most comfortable engaging in, which is, I suppose, why I keep doing it.

But lately I’ve felt the call to be more expressive, more creative in my writing. And I suppose I should admit that that call also beckons me to be more personal as well. Yet I was stymied. After a score of years in which I wrote largely essays (of the critical or academic flavor) or comments on student papers, or–when I felt daring–novels, I found that I was very much out of practice at the task of writing poems.

Because, whatever else people say about poetry, writing it is a task. It takes some discipline as well as creativity. We can’t all be John Milton, who said that the lines of Paradise Lost came to him in the night during his dreams, fully formed and ready to be set down. I have always understood and accepted the discipline of poetry–that part of the craft made sense to me. But over the past few years, the inspiration for poetry seems to have fled from me.

And yet that’s not quite true, either. I realize now that the inspiration was there all the time. Yet I set these poetic ideas aside in order to concentrate on the prose. The reason, I told myself, went something like this: I don’t fully understand what makes a poem work, so I’d better not delve into the art until I had a better grasp of how it works. And once I began to think that way, it wasn’t long before I lost every bit of confidence I ever had in my ability to write a poem.

But I’ve had a change of heart and a change of perspective.

Something drove me to sign up for that course, and once in it, I became the pesky student who asked too many questions. But my fellow students didn’t seem to mind; in fact, they welcomed my sometimes obnoxious comments. More than that, they showed me that that virtually no one really knows what makes a good poem work. So there went one problem out the window–I was down one excuse for not writing the poems that I felt strangely called upon to write.

This morning, five days after the workshop has ended, I realized that there was always another reason I had felt incapable of writing poetry again. It’s a little complicated, and somewhat personal, so I hope the few readers I have will allow this indulgence; I think it’s important to articulate my thought process so I’ll remember it in the future, and this blog is as good a place as any to set down my analysis.

When one retires and looks back on one’s work, it’s easy to see it for what it is: pretty much unremarkable. The few things I’ve written that have been published are largely forgotten (probably deservedly so); those that are unpublished are floating around somewhere, unloved and unread. That seemed to me to be a kind of cosmic rejection of my literary endeavors, and consequently I felt I didn’t have any right to try my hand at poetry again, since it would be a waste of time.

Now, to be fair and honest, I’ve not really tried all that hard to get published. In these pages, you’ll find several posts in which I declaim that publishing is possibly the enemy of a writer. (I still believe that can be the case.) Yet while saying that publication should not be the goal of a writer, I think a part of me still believed it should be, and that the test of a decent writer was whether or not she’d been published.

I know I will be wrestling with this question for the foreseeable future, but that’s not the point here. This silly argument had the effect of feeling that I somehow didn’t have the right to write poetry, since I didn’t intend to work to get it published. It’s a ridiculous argument, made more so by the fact that my life as a professor was spent convincing people that they had both the right and the duty to raise their voices, whether as public speakers or writers. In my dissertation, which was on the representation of female insanity in Victorian novels, I argued that insane women (in life and in art) were all too often shut away and shut up because what they said was too uncomfortable to hear.

The irony is glaring. Silly me: I had become my own warden, censor, caretaker–whatever you want to call it. I shut myself up here on my farm and declined to raise my voice. Rather than Bertha Mason Rochester, whose words were incoherent to Jane Eyre but nonetheless shouted aloud, I became Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville’s antihero who responded to all prompts by saying, “I would prefer not to.” I refused to allow myself the pleasure of wrestling with words purely because I was worried about them not being accepted or understood, despite the fact that I knew–or should have known–better.

This is a powerful realization. And I owe it to the people in my workshop, who as I said above, put up with my questions, my doubts, my outbursts, and, more than that, who encouraged me to find my voice again. I am incredibly grateful to them for their help and their support. (I also had a good friend who did me the favor of reading long emails filled with endless questions and doubts and who was also incredibly helpful and supportive. Thank you, John.)

I’m not sure how many more poems I’ll be able to write. But I have a list of poetic subjects to contemplate, and the most important thing is that I’ve given myself the freedom to write about them. Perhaps “freedom” is the wrong word to use in this case; I like to think that I have the responsibility to write these poems, if I choose to accept that responsibility.

And on this sunny morning in May, I really think I will.

Smith versus Shelley: A Tale of Two Poems

Yesterday, I co-led a poetry discussion group at one of the area retirement communities, something I’ve done for the last few years. It’s been a really interesting experience–there’s so much to learn and discuss about even mediocre poems, and I enjoy hearing the participants share their ideas about the poems, as well as the stories and memories these poems evoke.

I choose the poems at random, with very little rhyme (pardon the pun) or reason to my choice. One of the poems yesterday was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Yes, I proffered that old chestnut to the group, even though I’d read it thousands of times and have taught it in many classes. I just wanted another look at it, I guess, and it’s fun to do that with company. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was my co-leader bringing in another poem on the same exact topic, written at the same time.

It happens that Shelley had a friend, the prosaically named Horace Smith, and the two of them engaged in a sonnet writing contest, on the agreed-upon subject of Ancient Egypt and, presumably, Rameses II, also known as Ozymandias. We remember Shelley’s poem: every anthology of 19th-century British literature probably contains it. However, Smith’s sonnet is largely forgotten. In fact, I’ll offer a true confession here: despite having taught Brit lit for decades, I’d not heard of Smith’s version until a couple of days ago.

It turns out that Smith was himself an interesting fellow. He wrote poetry, but was not averse to making money, unlike his younger friend Shelley. Smith was a stock-broker, and made a good living, while also, according to Shelley, being very generous with it. He sounds like a generally good guy, to be honest, something which Shelley aspired to be, but was really not. For all intents and purposes, Shelley was a masterful poet but a real asshole on a personal level, and a bit of an idiot to boot. (What kind of a fool goes sailing in a boat that he didn’t know how to operate, in a storm, when he didn’t even know how to swim?) Smith knew how to make and keep friends as well as money, two things that Shelley was not very good at, by all accounts.

At any rate, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two poems. Of course, we assume Shelley’s poem will be better: it’s the one that is in every anthology of 19th-Century British literature, after all, while I–with a Ph.D. in the subject, for whatever that’s worth–didn’t even know of the existence of Smith’s poem until a few days ago. But maybe, just maybe, there’s something valuable in the stockbroker’s poem that has been missed–and wouldn’t that make a fine story in and of itself?

So here are the two poems, first Shelley’s, and then Smith’s.

Ozymandias (Shelley)

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias (Smith)

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Now, I’d say Shelley definitely has the advantage in terms of poetic language, as well as the narrative situation. His words are sibilant and flowing, and it’s a stroke of genius to make the story come from not the speaker of the poem, but from a traveler from an antique land; it makes the scene seem even more authentic. The alliteration in the last two lines (“boundless” and “bare” as well as “lone” and “level”) is a deft touch as well.

I’d also say that Shelley’s choice of the half shattered face is much better than Smith’s. There’s something much more poetic about a sneering face, even if it’s a half of a face, than a gigantic leg. There’s no way on earth Smith could have made a gigantic leg sound poetic, and that hampers the poetic feel of his sonnet, which is a bit of a shame.

Or is it?

Perhaps Smith wasn’t going for poetic feel here at all. In fact, I’d argue that he definitely wasn’t thinking along the same lines Shelley was. There are obvious similarities between the two poems. We still get the empty site, the desolation of the “forgotten Babylon” that powers so much of Shelley’s version, but it turns out that Smith is interested in something completely different. Where Shelley’s poem comments on the nature of arrogance, a human pride that ends in an ironic fall, Smith’s presents the reader with a different kind of irony. His version is much grander. In fact, it’s a cosmic irony that Smith is grappling with here, as the poem comments on the inevitable rise and fall of human civilization. What I find astounding is that in 1818, just as England was beginning its climb up to the pinnacle of world dominance for the next two centuries, Smith was able to imagine a time when the world he knew would be in tatters, with nothing remaining of the biggest city on earth, save as a hunting ground for the presumably savage descendants of stockbrokers like himself. Smith’s imagination was far more encompassing that Shelley’s, given this kind of projection into the far future.

All told, Shelley’s poem is probably the better one: it’s more quotable, after all, and no matter how much I love Smith’s message and projection into the future, he just doesn’t have the choice of words and rhythm that Shelley does. But need we really limit ourself to just one of these poems, anyway? I’d say we’ve gleaned about as much as we can from Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Perhaps ours is an age in which we can appreciate Smith’s vision of a far distant future. Empires rise and fall, waters ebb and flow, and civilizations come and go. Smith, with his Hunter coursing through what was once London, paints this idea just as well as Shelley does with his decayed Wreck. There’s room for both of these poems in our literary canon.

The Best Dickens Novel You’ll Never Read

Maybe that title is a little risky. I mean, a lot of people don’t like Victorian literature, and maybe a lot of people haven’t read any Dickens novels, or maybe they hate every Dickens they’ve ever read, which means that there simply can’t be any “best” Dickens novel. Be that as it may, I often champion lesser-known books by famous authors (one day I’ll do a blog on why C.S. Lewis’s last novel is better than anything he ever wrote before it), so today I’m going to go to bat for Dickens’s fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge.

Few people have read this novel, even among Victorianists. It actually seems to have been a bit of a flop from the get-go. Dickens had planned this novel at the outset of his career, back in 1836. If he’d gone ahead and written it, it would have been his first novel; instead, he completed The Pickwick Papers, and then went on to write Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop first, and he didn’t get around to writing it until 1841. Incidentally, he actually wrote it concurrently with The Old Curiosity Shop as a serial novel, an incredible accomplishment. Perhaps this accounts for Rudge’s lack of popularity; The Old Curiosity Shop was extremely popular. Indeed, the first thing one reads about it in its Wikipedia entry is that New Yorkers stood on the docks of the city waiting for the final installment of the novel to be delivered by steamship. So it’s a real possibility that Barnaby Rudge was eclipsed by Dickens’s other, more popular creative work, its twin sibling, so to speak, from the moment of its birth.

And that’s unfortunate, because while The Old Curiosity Shop has not stood the test of time–most readers find it sentimental and melodramatic today–Barnaby Rudge is a novel for the present time. In fact, it’s been really interesting to read it as the January 6 hearings are taking place, because at the heart of the novel lies a riot, an insurrectionary movement perceived as so dangerous that it threatened the rule of order in England. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel (2002), John Bowen begins by saying that “Barnaby Rudge is the most untimely of historical novels.” However, perhaps it isn’t the novel that has to find its time, but rather the time that must find its novel. In other words, I’d argue that Barnaby Rudge may not have been the novel for its time, but it is the novel for our time, a novel whose time has, after nearly two hundred years, finally arrived.

Throughout his career, Dickens wrote only two historical novels–this one and, of course, A Tale of Two Cities, another novel that has eclipsed it, perhaps only because it’s shorter and easier to put on a high school syllabus. But instead of pitting Dickens’s novels against each other, let me just explain why Barnaby Rudge is worth reading:

• As I’ve already indicated, it contains striking parallels with our own time. The central action of the novel (though not necessarily its focus) is the Gordon Riots, a period of anti-Catholic unrest in June of 1780, which resulted in anarchy in London for several days. Prisons were attacked and their prisoners released; stores, residences, foreign embassies and Catholic chapels demolished by frenzied mobs; and the army had to enter London to restore order. Trials and executions ensued. All this, mind you, a full nine years before the French tried the same thing–successfully–at the outset of the French Revolution.
• The eponymous hero of the novel, Barnaby Rudge, is seriously mentally challenged. His mind is disordered and his development delayed. Although 23 years old, he is “simple,” something that almost everyone around him both understands and accepts. I am not aware of any author trying this before Dickens: perhaps my readers can shed more light on the depiction of the intellectually disabled in a somewhat positive light. Dickens’s portrayal of Barnaby is much more sympathetic, on the whole, than one would expect of a Victorian writer, and making him the centerpiece of the novel is an act of creative genius.
• Barnaby has a pet raven named Grip (Dickens himself also had a pet raven named Grip) who so “gripped” the imagination of another writer across the pond that he wrote an entire poem about a raven. No kidding–quoth the Raven, nevermore.
• Dickens examines the origins of the riots a little, but what he excels at most is in demonstrating that the people who participate in riots have their own individual aims and desires, few of which have have much to do with the general cause at hand. This is important because when we look at history, we tend to forget this; Dickens makes it clear in this novel that historical movements are created from many disparate people pulling together into one action for a limited period of time.
• There are the usual loveable (or despised, depending on your view of Dickens’s work) plot points and characters: the thwarted lovers, the carping wife, the happy and bluff old father figure offset by several really rotten father figures, the sassy beauty, the wheedling servants. Dickens paints good portraits of them all.
• In addition, there are a surprising number of physically disabled people in the novel (two), a fact with which I could do all sorts of things in terms of theorizing about amputation and the body politic, but since I’m retired, and since someone else probably has done it or is doing it better than I care to at the present time, I’ll just leave it at that.
• There are all the usual themes about secrets: murders; survivals; illegitmacy; nature versus nurture; generational conflict. These are themes we see in other Dickens novels, and they’re all here, pretty much right on the surface. It’s as if Dickens wrote this as a blueprint for many of his other novels, which makes it all the more interesting for anyone who’s read them.

I could go on, but I want to end by emphasizing how reading this novel now, at this moment in U.S. history, has affected the way I’m watching the January 6 hearings. I think I understand better how small people can get caught up in large events, and how people who have nothing but a sort of odd charisma can get others behind them in such numbers that really frightening things can ensue.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about the novel is that in the world that Dickens creates, the story has a somewhat (but not totally) happy ending: people are punished, order is retored, and most of the good characters live somewhat happily ever after. Barnaby Rudge may not be a Bleak House, but I think it’s a better, more interesting novel than The Old Curiosity Shop. I predict that in about ten years’ time, we’ll see a brave soul who recognizes its value decide to stop working on endless re-makes of (something resembling) Jane Austen novels and try a film version of this novel, which would be a wonderful thing, in my opinion.

Finally, there are a couple of really good podcasts on the novel by Dominic Gerrard and guests. Look for Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire on Apple podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/charles-dickens-a-brain-on-fire/id1599241462

Private Clavel: My Private Marathon

One of the things that kept me going through the dark days of following Trump’s election was translating an entire French novel, as I wrote about here. I started my translation at the end of November, 2016, and finished it in December of 2017, so it took slightly more than a year of work. Yet I never knew quite what to do with my translation. I made a few half-hearted attempts to publish it, submitting a chapter to several reviews, but nothing took, and so I put it high up on my shelf and tried to forget about it.

However, last summer I discovered that a translation of the book had been published, back in 2019. I greeted this news with mixed feelings, as can well be imagined. I had long determined that no one else was interested in Leon Werth’s Clavel Soldat, that it was too dated or obscure for publication. I also knew that I was a novice translator, and that my chances of publication were very slim. But seeing that someone else had managed to get their version into print still evoked a spasm of writerly envy–short-lived, true, but envy nonetheless–and made me, for the about a day or so, sullen and bitter.

Then, however, I did what any honest writer/translator would do: I ordered the book from its publisher, Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd. Then, in the brightest days of summer, I crushed my sour, envious attitude, and when the book arrived, I placed it on my desk, determined that when winter came and I wasn’t busy with gardening, hiking, mushrooming, and visitors, I would read Michael Copp’s translation (which he calls Private Clavel’s War on War) and compare it to mine, word for word. I was convinced that there would be much to learn from this exercise, and I felt that Mr. Copp, as well as Leon Werth, deserved this much attention from me.

For the last two months, I’ve been engaged in this activity, and I have indeed learned a great deal. True, there are times when I thought it seemed a pointless exercise, but then I realized that many people engage in pointless activities for fun and for health. As an example, consider running. Lots of people run several times a week, working to increase their endurance. What was I doing, if not working to increase my mental endurance, my ability to use every atom of intelligence and memory and reasoning I had in my poor, beleaguered brain in order to make it stronger? So I compared what I was doing to training for a marathon. After all, most runners never expect to win the marathon races they enter–merely finishing is the point. For me, finishing my translation of Clavel Soldat had to be the point, not publishing it, and reading Copp’s translation in conjunction with mine would prove that I had, indeed, completed my own private marathon.

I have indeed learned a great deal from this exercise. First of all, on a purely practical level, I learned to use the Immersive Reader / Read Aloud tab on MS Word. This function allowed me to listen to my version of the translation at the same time that I read Copp’s book, speeding up the whole process. I can see how the Read Aloud function would be a real benefit to anyone proofreading their own work and I’m sure I’ll use it again.

As far as the actual translation goes, here are a few things that I’ve learned. Most important, translation is an art, not a science. This is a truism, but it bears repeating here. I will just post two versions of the same passage from Chapter VII (page 182 of the original) to illustrate:

The next day, Clavel receives a package of newspaper clippings. He knows. Those who write far from the front lines fight in their logical citadels, everyone for his or her own lie. He knows now that there is nothing but an immense vertigo within a great cataclysm. He is in the midst of this cataclysm that the people look at from a distance, like a tourist watching the eruption of a volcano from several kilometers away.

The next day Clavel received a packet of newspaper cuttings. He knows. Those who write in the rear carry on their fight in their citadel of logic, each one supplying his own lie. He now knows that there is only a great frenzy in a great catastrophe. He is in the middle of the catastrophe that the people in the rear contemplate, as a tourist contemplates the eruption of a volcano from a distance.

And another, longer, passage, this one from the last page of Chapter XV (page 300) of the original:

The division headquarters, with its gleaming officers and its clerical workers. A field near the cemetery is chosen for the execution of Private P., from the colonial infantry.
“What did he do?...”
“He didn’t want to go into the trenches…”
It is dawn. Six hundred men are lined up: his company and parts of other units.
An ambulance wagon has been prepared in case Private P.  faints or resists.
The wagon is not needed. Private P. walks to his spot. Twenty men, bayonets at the ready, escort him. He has just as much the look of a soldier as the other men. The only difference is that he doesn’t have a rifle. He looks straight ahead. He has the face of a sick man being taken out of the trenches. 
Private P. and his escort come to the field where the troops are waiting at attention. 
Private P. is there with the other twenty men. No one has come yet to take him. 
A warrant officer orders: “Left side, line up…”
Then, “Right side, line up…”
And Private P., who is going to die, seems bothered only by not knowing how to stand. He turns his head to the right, puts his left fist on his hip. Private P. follows the order “Right side, line up” with the other soldiers.
Twelve soldiers have fired. Private P. is dead.

It's the division with its gleaming officers and its pen-pushers. A field near the cemetery has been chosen for the execution ceremony of soldier P.... of the colonial infantry.
'What did he do?'...
'He didn't want to go to the trenches'...
It is dawn. Six hundred men are drawn up; his company and parts of other troops.
An ambulance has been prepared in case soldier P.... should faint or resist.
The vehicle is not needed. Soldier P....marches to his rank. Twenty men, with fixed bayonets, escort him. He looks a soldier, just like the others. He has no rifle, that's all. He looks straight ahead. A sick man, coming back from the trenches, has this look. 
Soldier P...is there with the other twenty. They haven't yet come to take him. 
An adjutant gives the order: 'Left turn'...
Then: 'Right turn'...
And soldier P...., who is going to die, seems bothered by not knowing where to stand. He turns his head to the right, puts his left fist on his hip. Soldier P...., along with the others, carries out the order: "Right turn."
Two soldiers fired. Soldier P... is dead.

The differences are minimal, but they are there. The only major difference is a bona fide mistake in the second selection, where the French “douze” is translated as “two.” This is something I noticed by comparing translations: mistakes do happen. Sometimes words are mistranslated, and not only when there is debate or obscurity about what the word means. Even more unsettling, sometimes whole lines or short paragraphs are left out: both Copp and I are guilty of this error. Translating an entire novel is a laborious task, so it makes sense that such mistakes happen.

But this led me to another discovery, one that unsettled me more, if possible, than finding that someone else had beat me to the punch and had published an English translation of Clavel Soldat. Mistakes such as the ones I noted above are inevitable in a long scholarly work, but editors should be able to find and eliminate them; after all, that’s what they’re payed to do. Why had this not happened in Copp’s translation? The answer is simple: I believe Copp had no editors, because it turns out that Grosvenor House Publishing Limited is what was once called a “vanity press”: it is essentially the same as self publishing on Amazon (which I have done myself and, to a certain extent, now regret), and there appears to be little quality control. This discovery floored me, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But regarding the errors in the text, I’d still argue that Copp did an excellent job on his translation. The fact that it differs from mine attests to the finesse and subtlety required in translation itself. Like so much in life, there are no right or wrong answers, and it is important to remember that diversity is a gift, not a curse. What this does mean, however, is that any time we read works that have been translated, the translator has made choices, most of them unconscious, that reflect how he or she sees the world, and this inevitably skews the purity, so to speak, of the original words. Again, that is not necessarily a problem; it’s just important to be aware of it when reading literature in translation. When a translator creates a translation, it’s as if all his or her past reading, thinking, even life experiences, work to color the words he or she chooses, and so it makes sense that each translation would be as individual as the person who produced it.

What more have I learned from this grand, marathon-like exercise of mine? I still think Clavel Soldat is a good book, and an important one. Leon Werth created a character who despised war and dared to write about it during the war. His depiction of life at the Front in 1914 is ruthless in its clarity and in the sense of betrayal Clavel feels as he witnesses both the horrors of war and the hypocrisy of those participating in it. I understood the First World War much better after reading the novel, and so I am despondent and, to be honest, disgusted about the fact that its translation appears to be unpublishable today and that self publishing is the only recourse for a novel of this type. Consequently, few English speakers will ever read it. My conclusion — which I hope is not the result of a sour-grapes attitude — is that publishing, like so many things today, is a grand game of popularity and attention-grabbing. In times past, there was room for less popular works, if they were deemed important. Now, however, we live in an attention economy, and important works are bypassed for those works that get a bigger, louder splash.

We lose so much by this. History fades away, covered up by the clamor of contemporary voices, all competing for the biggest slice of an economic pie that really doesn’t matter in the long run. What we lose by this is access to history, is the abililty to understand, so to speak, what the long run is and how it affects us. We become more provincial in our thinking and less capable of forming big ideas because we are only able to access those works deemed most liable to get the biggest bang for publishers’ bucks. It’s a tragic situation, and I’m not sure what we can do to fix it.

In the end, I have to be selfish and say that I’m glad I spent a year plowing through Clavel Soldat, as well as the six additional weeks comparing my translation to Michael Copp’s. True, it may be time that I’ll never get back, but it was time well spent, because it has enriched my knowledge of history, literature, and not least of all, the art of translation. All of these things are valuable, and because of that, I’m satisfied.