Bitter, bitter dregs: the complete short stories of Mark Twain
No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it—only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn’t be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession."
---from "The Mysterious Stranger"
And thus, I lose another of my cherished favorite authors whose work enriched my youth.
I had read this collection before, interpreting the legendary pessimism of Twain's old age as dry wit and sarcasm, and enjoying it. Such a sweet Summer child I was, I had saved the short stories as a treat for when I needed some dry wit and sarcasm to help me vent.
It didn't work. Things in this country and in my own life have become so horrible that I failed to find the humor in these stories about people behaving with exaggerated rottenness. I just cried, then bawled.
There's the tale of Edward Mills and George Benton, about the horrible man who destroys his good brother and is praised and loved for it by the Christians who take from the good boy to give to him; The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, which is notable not for the predictable venality of pious small town leaders, but for the fact that even the attempts of some people to do good rebound with pain and harm to innocents and to themselves. A Dog's Tale is one of the most cruel short tragedies this side of Roald Dahl's "The Swan; and the very last story Twain wrote, "The Mysterious Stranger", is an utter, utter condemnation of humankind by a passer-by who may be an angel or a devil, and it doesn't quite matter which.
Reader, the dark "humor" here was more pain than I can currently bear.
Positive Thinking: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocences than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.
I feel refreshed. I've spent most of the decade plowing through philosophical works that are heavy on the "work" part, and works of theology that are several times worse...but William James strikes me as the first who is "modern" in that he writes in a conversational tone to minds that are still marching today. It is not really a "religious" book; it might more accurately have been titled "The psychology of supernatural experience". When it talks of religion, it focuses on things like what goes on in the mind precipitating or during a "conversion". They all seem to happen like a flash of lightning, not gradually over a course of reason. what do we make of the people who behave in a state of grace, and whose characters gain strength and purpose from the belief in a higher power or a destiny? (This is what differentiates James from WK Clifford, who has a contrary opinion on the duty and usefulness of belief without proof. James focuses on those who put themselves beneath their faith and look to it for service; Clifford is more interested in those who put themselves above their faith and look at it for excuses to be cruel).
I was most interested in the chapter on positive thinking. Apparently, even a century ago we had positivity cults in which people were urged to leap out of bed in the morning, suck in a few great lungfuls of fresh air, put on a smile, and live the day with pep, by golly! And if you didn't have a positive attitude, your fault for the Bad Things that happen, for you attract what you think about. It was hogwash then, and it is hogwash now, and watching a great mind like James discuss the hogwash with kindness and pity is a joy to read.
Henry James Horror: "The Beast in the Jungle"; "The Turn of the Screw"; "The Jolly Corner"; The Ambassadors, by Henry James
"You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you."
--from "The Beast in the Jungle"
"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the great thing; you’re, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!
---from The Ambassadors
SPOILER: "The Beast in the Jungle" is a famous story about a man who spends his life dreading some sort of impending doom, only to find at the end that his fate is to be "THE man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened." And I'm not sure whether to admire the storyteller's art here, or to throw the book across the room.
For one thing, John Marcher is hardly alone in the world in that regard--as the story's popularity would seem to show. The earth is populated with those of too much intellect or too little imagination to feel the intensity of experiences. Most of the protagonists of Henry James's other works, unfortunately, seem to fall into this category. It's not as if Marcher, who does plenty of traveling, who has enough money to be an epicure, and who cares enough about the main female character to mourn her loss and visit her grave regularly, does nothing at all. He just experiences nothing intensely enough for it to count. On the other hand, reading it with the foreknowledge of the ending, one feels a delicious sense of irony, and experiences a damning illustration of the ability of a man to fail to perceive clue-bricks that the woman he's talking to is in love with him.
"The Jolly Corner" is a lesser known tale about the same sort of nobody who is haunted by the self he might have been, during a visit to his childhood home. "The Turn of the Screw" has a colorless nobody hired to be governess to two children, and haunted by the ghosts of prior servants from the household. There is supposedly a controversy as to whether the haunting is real or wholly imagined by the governess, which is hard for me to see, given that even the unreliable narrator's description of the ghosts match what they actually looked like in life, when the governess has know way of knowing these details until she asks about them after having seen them.
And then there's the novel, The Ambassadors, supposed to be one of his better works, that just put me to sleep. Here, the nobody is conscripted by some Lady Bracknell relative to go to Paris to bring back the errant nephew who has become embroiled in a problematic romance, and so OF COURSE he gets there and finds that he sympathizes with the nephew and that the lady in question isn't so bad after all, and then he gets involved with someone else, and meh.
This is classic, venerated literature, but I just can't with it. I'm a philistine and a bad person!
Old White Man Who Won't Shut Up: The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.
This isn't OW Holmes the Supreme Court Justice; it's his father, who wrote down for posterity all of the bloviations he excreted around the dining table at a boardinghouse. And yes, the book is famous because a lot of what he said was worth saying. You'll find poetry like "The Chambered Nautilus", "What We Think" and "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay", though I'm pretty sure Holmes didn't compose those extemporaneously at breakfast. there's an insightful chapter on getting older, supposedly contributed by his friend the professor. And plenty of genuine bon mots like the one quoted above.
It's too bad he tried to be both Boswell and Samuel Johnson to himself. he utterly lost me early on in the (brief) book, when he declared--apparently in all seriousness--that "verbicide" was a crime of equal magnitude with homicide, and that no jury ought to convict one who murdered another for making insufferable puns. At least, I hope that part was a joke, but his tone was comparable to that of people who really mean it. He also has a "you kids shut up and listen to your elders" thing going, that pops up fairly frequently and causes one to have to work to focus on the gentle parts that don't have that, to realize that they're there. Such are the dangers inherent in putting down everything one thinks, without the aid of the editor. You see not only the good stuff, but the shameful episodes that one maybe outgrew years ago and should have confided to the therapist only.
The Edwardian Murders: A Monstrous Regiment of Women, by Laurie R. King; The Lion in the Valley; the Deeds of the Disturber, by Elizabeth Peters; Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings, by Oakley Hall
"You know me now, don't you, my friend? You made a mistake. I am not the lady you took me for, but the Sitt Hakim, wife to the great magician Emerson, Father of Curses, and no less dangerous to evildoers than Emerson himself! My eye is as keen as the vultures overhead, and like them I lie in wait for criminals."
--from The Lion in the Valley
Not until the previous summer had I realized that our disguises were treated as a communal scheme by the villagers, who made it a point of honour never to let slip their suspicions that the scruffy young male farmhand who slouched through the streets might be the same person who, dressed considerably more appropriately in tweed skirt and cloche hat, went off to Oxford during term time and returned to buy tea cakes when she was in residence.
--from A Monstrous Regiment of Women
"I do not admire young gentlemen that I could take down in a wrestle," she said, chin raised scornfully.
"You are very strong?" I asked, although it was clear that she was.
She grinned at me and made muscle-flexing gestures. "Strong and beautiful," she said, adding in pidgin, "You no mess wid me, haole!"
I said I wouldn't dare to mess with her.
"Unless I tell you to," she said.
--from Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings
More of the very good period pieces that enrich my historical studies with crime solving. I continue to admire both King's Mary Russell as Holmes's smarter and spunkier sidekick, and the entire Amelia Peabody family in Egypt. I was glad I kept going with Peabody after the first few Scooby Doo plots; by the fourth in the series, they seem to have come into their groove and found worthier adversaries than transparent artifact thieves using spooky legends to scare people away from their plots. Deeds of the Disturber, maybe requires a content note for a subplot involving childhood bullying that was so distressing to me that it distracted me from the main murder plot. Hall's Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings is a colorful period piece set in San Francisco as it is visited by petitioning Hawaiians in the years during colonization immediately before annexation.
Pink Freud: Selected Papers on Hysteria, by Sigmund Freud
A young woman who had only one child after five years of married life complained of obsessive impulses to throw herself from the balcony, and of fears lest at the sight of a shap knife she might kill her child. She admitted that the marriage relations were seldom practiced and then only with caution against conception, but she added that she did not miss this as she was not of a sensual nature. I then ventured to tell her that at the sight of a man she conceives erotic ideas, and that she therefore lost confidence in herself and imagined herself a depraved person fit for anything; weeping, she soon admitted her long-concealed marital misery, and then mentioned painful ideas of an unchanged sexual character such as the often recurring sensation of something forcing itself under her skirts.
This, one of the longer works in the Great Books set's Freud volume, takes a longer time to say what the "Five lectures' I read in January said, with the distinction that it is full of case histories that depressed the living shit out of me.
Many of them involved inability to function in the world due to repressed trauma, almost all of it solved by Dr. Freud through his deduction that sexual neuroses were at the core of all of them. I found myself wondering how different the history of psychoanalysis might have been if Freud had been obsessed with hunger for food, or with the will to power in a form other than sexual dominance. The doctor self-reports a high cure rate, but I'm skeptical that his tendency to see what he wanted to see affected the outcome. see also, most or all psychiatrists today.
Uncomfortable History: Century of Dishonor, by Helen Hunt Jackson
Bounded on the North, south, and east by snow-topped mountains, and on the west by shining waters; holding in its rocky passes the sources of six great rivers; bearing on its slopes and plains measureless forests of pine and cedar and spruce; its meadows gardens of summer bloom and fruit, and treasure-houses of fertility--lies Oregon; wide, healthful, beautiful, abundant and inviting. No wonder it was coveted and fought for.
Content warnings are appropriate here. First published in 1884, this book documents episode after episode of indigenous North Americans cheated out of their lands by Christians, who made treaties they had no intention of honoring. Treaties made in trust, followed by puzzled complaints from the tribal peoples when they never got their money, followed by massacres. Again and again and again.
Some of the stories (Cherokee, Nez Perce) are well known in American history. Others (Poncas, Winnebagos) I had not known before this book. All are extremely discomforting, but we owe it to the betrayed nations to read about them and remember.
Econ Reform Nonfiction: Economic Sophisms, by Frederic Bastiat; Progress and Poverty, by Henry George
If it were true that land had always been treated as private property, that would not prove the justice or necessity of continuing so to treat it, any more than the universal existence of slavery, which might once have been safely affirmed, would prove the justice or necessity of making property of human flesh and blood. Wherever we can thrace the early history of society, whether in Asia or in Europe, in Africa, Asia or Polynesia, land has been considered as common property. That is to say, all members of the community had equal rights to the use and enjoyment of the land of the community.
--from Progress and Poverty
These two relatively brief tracts make simple cases for economic reform in the mid-to-late 19th century. From my reading of history, both were about as influential as Thomas Pyketty's Capital in the 21st Century is now. Both were made into subjects of heated social debate among the literate classes for a time, and then forgotten. It's a pity. Seems to me, if their doctrines had been put into practice, we would have seen a lot less attention paid to Karl Marx in the century that followed.
Bastiat is especially topical right now, as the United States descends into tariffs. The central theme of the book consists of various ways of showing the ultimate uselessness of tariffs and other "job creation" laws that screw the consumer and the working poor. His most famous "modest proposals" are (1) the suggestion that, if requiring the new railroad to make stops in Orleans will be good for commerce in Orleans, then we should do even better by requiring it to make further stops at all other points of travel, nay, make it stop at every point along the railroad and have a "negative railroad", and (2) the plea on behalf of candle-makers for legislation to require all houses to block up their windows to prevent unfair competition from the sun.
Henry George's thesis amounts to "The Rent is Too Damn High", arguing that rent is what keeps wages down and making the case for public (government) ownership/stewardship of the land, taxing it by occupancy. Considering property taxes and the power of eminent domain, it would seem that over time, western governments have come to establish at least a part of such a system.
Econ Reform Fiction: The Iron Heel, by Jack London
And so perished father's book. We were to see much of the Black Hundreds as the days went by. Week by week more of the socialist papers were barred from the mails, and in a number of instances the Black Hundreds destroyed the socialist presses. Of course, the newspapers of the land lived up to the reactionary policy of the ruling class, and the destroyed socialist press was misrepresented and vilified, while the Black Hundreds were represented as true patriots and saviors of society. So convincing was all this misrepresentation that even sincere ministers in the pulpit praised the Black hundreds while regretting the necessity of violence.
Jack London is known for stories of Darwinism in a state of nature--wolves in the wild; muscular ship captains from whose authority no appeal is possible--and here, where the wealthiest one percent are absolute owners of society and any who resist them are ground up economically, and then physically, while the politicians, clergy, the schools, the press, and the society Beckys sit at the top and enable the ownership class to do what it wants.
Amazingly, my local library calls the book "science fiction". The first half of the book is no more science fiction than those works of Dickens that highlight the plight of starving workers, and the majority of the arguments come straight from Mill, Henry George and Marx, usually quoted as such. And the civil strife then and now changes names but describes events that really happened, with the distinction that nowadays, a goodly portion of the proletariat is rising with its pitchforks and torches to guillotine "liberals" and destroy society to obtain lower taxes for their overlords. (Did I say "overlords"? I meant "job creators".) Only the second half, when the US armed forces are actively mowing down peasant uprisings, can we call it "dystopian fiction" as opposed to just "dystopian mirror of Republican America, as foreseen in 1910".
The "Black Hundreds" referred to in the quote above, are poorly named, as their hoods are, of course, white. Such very fine people.