Vintage Reading (7 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
Nana is a vulgar creature of low estate, a product of Paris’s seedy Goutted’Or
district—a fact of which Zola repeatedly reminds us. For while
Nana
stands by itself as a novel, for Zola it was but part of a 20-novel saga, written over 22 years, collectively called
The Rougon-Macquarts: The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire.
In it, Zola assumes the role of scientist, bent on methodically portraying through fiction the effects of heredity and environment on one multi-branched family. Nana, needless to say, is from the bastard side, the Marcquarts.
Her fortunes follow wild gyrations, from gutter to chateau and back again. We see her first on stage, as the Blonde Venus; she can neither act nor sing, but her stage presence is awesome, at least in the nude. She rises to become the toast of the Parisian demi-monde, sinks to streetwalking. Always she is the sexual vulture, preying on the men of Paris—save only for one interlude of genuine passion, when she falls for an actor.
She is not the stereotypical prostitute with the heart of gold. But she is not unremittingly evil, either. She can yell and scream and cruelly taunt, yet in the next breath, seeing her victim suffer, coo him back to glad-heartedness.
Throughout
Nana
, grotesque contrasts abound—the glow of French society against the moral putrefaction underneath. No one exemplifies this better than Muffat, the Catholically upright count, enormously wealthy, chamberlain in the Emperor’s court, who is only too glad to be led around with a leash by Nana—toward novel’s end almost literally so. Indeed, virtually all the characters in
Nana
are obsessed in on way or another, some by the Church, some by gold, some by spectacle, most all by women’s flesh.
Nana
has its defects. Among them is table conversation that sometimes drags interminably. And if one of the novel’s strengths is Zola’s raw view of the underside of French society, with all its vulgarity and seediness, that is its weakness, too—that no character is granted a noble sentiment, that all that seems fresh and pure, in all this sordidness, is Nana’s magnificent young body.
____________
By John Reed
First published in 1919
“My sympathies were not neutral,” John Reed admits in the preface to
Ten Days That Shook the World
, his firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In these pages, foes of the Bolsheviks emerge as stubborn impediments to the onrushing tide of history while Lenin, Trotsky and their proletarian partisans are held up as noble representatives of a higher humanity, aglow with a sense of historical mission.
Some critics at the time complained, as did the
London Times
, that Reed had “swallowed the Bolshevists' propaganda en bloc.” Yet others lauded him, in the words of one, for a “restraint which practically vacuum-cleans the book of any mere rhetorical passages.” Indeed, seen, then, against a swirl of contradictory contentions that the Bolshevik Revolution meant the Millennium, on the one hand, or the Apocalypse, on the other, John Reed's work can indeed be considered “restrained.” For while he made plain his sympathies, he was enough of a reporter to record facts, and to represent views at odds with his own.
The Harvard-educated Reed, in fact, was considered one of the crack reporters of his day. Fresh from chronicling the 1917 Mexican civil war, he went to Russia where, earlier that year, the czar had been overthrown and a provisional government under moderate socialist Kerensky installed. All the while, the Great War raged. While its armies suffered in the trenches and food ran short in its cities, Russia trembled with the choice of just what sort of a revolution it wanted, teetering this way or that with each report from the front or shift in the bread supply.
A tactical dispute as early as 1903 had split Marxists into two factions--the Mensheviks, or minority wing, and the more radical Bolsheviks, or majority. Now, 14 years later, these groups, along with a confusing welter of other parties, struggled for power in the streets and assembly halls of Petrograd and Moscow. Reed was there, to record it.
The scene: The Petrograd Soviet, the hub of revolutionary ferment, following the overthrow of the Provisional Government. It “was tenser than ever...The same running men in the dark corridors, squads of workers with rifles, leaders with bulging portfolios arguing, explaining, giving orders as they hurried anxiously along, surrounded by friends and lieutenants. Men literally out of themselves, living prodigies of sleeplessness and work--men unshaven, filthy, with burning eyes who drive upon their fixed purpose full speed on engines of exaltation.”
Lenin: “A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin....Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange, popular leader--a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached.”
Yet Lenin, Trotsky and the others appear here more as political stick figures, uttering pronouncements and advancing lines of argument, than as fully drawn personalities. The events Reed reported from Russia were, after all, primarily political--debates, proclamations, party caucuses, negotiations. And like politics in more staid settings, the tugging back and forth for Russia's destiny often grew tedious.
Reed makes little effort to spare us the dreary details. Two early chapters supply historical grounding. And a prefatory “Notes and Explanations” section guides us through the committees, councils, unions, and cooperatives that was Russia in 1917; the conscientious reader finds himself repeatedly flipping back to learn that the Vikzhel was the influential railway workers' union, or that the Maximalists were an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
None of this, let it be said, is artfully handled. A more sophisticated narrative might have let Reed introduce names and groups only as needed, and to better sift the wheat of historical significance from the chaff of only transiently relevant detail.
Of course, this is journalism, not history. We hear the Duma in debate, read the latest poster from the Committee for Salvation, stand midst the tumultuous crowds in the Petrograd Soviet as Lenin lambastes the Mensheviks.
Ten Days
may be all it could be, and even all its author intended. Yet the best part of a century after the event, readers may want something more, may miss precisely the kind of insight that only history, and the distance of years, can grant.
____________
By Richard Wright
First published in 1940
It’s hard to imagine a less-appealing character than Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black ne’er-do-well from the Chicago slums who murders the daughter of his high-minded white employer, decapitates her and stuffs her body into a coal furnace. Later, he literally beats the brains out of his girlfriend with a brick and throws her down the air shaft of an abandoned building in which he is hiding from police.
Bigger is the creation of Richard Wright, a novelist hailed as “the most impressive literary talent yet produced by Negro America,” born on a Mississippi plantation in 1901. “The day
Native Son
appeared,” wrote critic Irving Howe, “American culture was changed forever.” Wright dares to deliver his powerful social message not through a warm, sympathetic victim of injustic, but a “victim” who, by every outward sign, is a brutal killer bereft of human feeling. Understand even Bigger Thomas as the harvest of pervasive racial oppression Wright so much as says, and the black condition in America generally can likewise be understood.
Native Son
is not stylistically elegant. Like its central character, it is brutal, nervous and crude. Some of its scenes verge on melodrama, and its concluding pages, where a brilliant left-wing lawyer makes Bigger’s case before the jury, reads less like novel than social polemic. But the book’s overall effect is so shattering, its point of view so relentlessly etched into the reader’s consciousness, that it leaves its mark as indelibly today as when it was written almost 60 years ago.
As the nearly 50 translations and foreign editions appearing in the wake of its first printing testify, its significance
was
widely recognized then. While
rightly decrying it for melodramatic and propagandistic excesses, one critic after another admitted these were more than outweighed by its sheer power. The book was frequently compared to Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. And, again, to Theodore Dreiser: “
Native Son
does for the Negro,” wrote Clifton Fadiman in the
New Yorker,
what Theodore Dreiser in
An American Tragedy
did a decade and a half ago for the bewildered, inarticulate American white. The two books are similar in theme, in technique, in their almost paralyzing effect on the reader, and in the large, brooding humanity, quite remote from special pleading, that informs them both.”
It takes nothing from its significance as social document to report that Wright’s book is, as a reading experience, thoroughly engrossing—especially if you go for blood, gore, decapitations, authentic dialect, flight and capture. Compare it to Dostoyevsky and Dreiser all you like, but
Native Son
is, for much of the 396 pages of one of its early Modern Library editions, a real thriller.
“Brrrrrriiiiiiiing! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room,” the book opens, and from that to the final working-out of Bigger’s relationship to himself, his lawyer and his crime, the book simply won’t be put down. True, as in other thrillers a notch or two down from Olympian literary heights, you sometimes feel manipulated. And all those pages in the close company of psychopathic murderer Bigger Thomas, as he stalks the streets of Chicago killing and running, desperate and fearful, can scarcely be termed enjoyable. Still,
Native Son
is one classic you never feel you’re dutifully slogging through.
For all the antiquity of its slang, for all its dated cast of characters—the red-baiting police chief, the “Front Page” era reporters, the left-wing dogooder, the aristocratic racist—you come away feeling immersed in a world as current as the morning paper. True, the years have wrought changes, from Brown vs. Board of Education and Black Power to Martin Luther King, Jr. and an evergrowing black middle class. Yet
Native Son
remains sadly applicable to at least one slice of black experience—and to white understanding of it. Yes, it’s hard to imagine any novelist creating the likes of Bigger Thomas
today; but that’s because the novelistic challenge Wright tackled first has been taken up by many other writers since, and
not
because of any dearth of truelife models from which to draw. Bigger Thomas is alive and running scared in the run-down black ghettos of every American city. And just as persistent are the conditions which spawned him.
Richard Wright never “defends” Bigger, never justifies his crime. He explains it, but does not explain it away; he says, in effect, “What do you expect?” Subject an entire race first to slavery and then to economic colonialism, pack them together under desperate conditions, deprive them of their human dignity, and Bigger Thomas is the more-than-occasional result: As stimulus breeds response, and oppression breeds crime, so do three centuries of racism breed Bigger Thomas.
Books That Shaped
the Western World
The Wealth of Nations
— Adam Smith
An Essay on the Principle of Population
— Thomas Malthus
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
— Edward Gibbon
The Origin of Species
— Charles Darwin
The Federalist Papers
— Hamilton, Madison, Jay
The Annals of Imperial Rome
— Tacitus
The Peloponnesian War
— Thucydides
Democracy in America
— Alexis de Tocqueville
_________________________________
Why be surprised when these tomes, represented as shapers of Western thought and among those products of the human intellect most worth reading and rereading, prove to be just that? Not all are easy. But after 200 or 2000 years, they amply repay any extra effort they require. In Herodotus, we meet the first historian. In
The Federalist Papers
, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay virtually think a nation into being. Darwin and Adam Smith advance some of the most powerful ideas of the past two centuries. And Montaigne? He is the brother and friend a lot of us wish we had.
____________
By Michel de Montaigne
First appeared in 1580
“This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant,” wrote Michel de Montaigne of his
Essays
.
What he meant was, first, that he was himself their subject. And second, that instead of following a line of lockstep logic to some one end, he chose instead to let his thoughts float freely where they wished, however hesitant or contradictory the results might be.
He begins one essay, for example, by distinguishing between goodness and virtue, the first being natural and effortless, the second difficult to achieve; he comments on how—even in his day!—the words goodness and innocence had taken on a tinge of contempt; he notes an Italian’s assessment of the soldierly qualities of the French, Spanish, Germans, and Swiss; he tells of how he abhors most of the more brutal vices—but that had he been born with “a more unruly temperament,” he’d have likely yielded to them: “I have never observed any great firmness in my soul,” he writes, “that would be capable of resisting even the mildest of passions.” He goes on to offer a glimpse at his own sex life; gives graphic descriptions of the kinds of torture and execution prevalent in his day—pointing out that whatever cannibals might do is less barbarous by far. And closes with a comment on man’s relationship to animals: “I am not ashamed to admit,” he says, “that I cannot easily refuse my dog when he offers to play with me.” Grand conclusion to all this? None.
