Jane Austen's novels

During the coronavirus lockdowns and feverish 2020 election cycle, I decided to read all of Jane Austen's novels. I like her ironic humor, and I was ready to visit another place and time, at least for a while. I had read a few of them many years ago, but it had been so long that I'd forgotten the plots for all except Pride and Prejudice. 

I liked the novels this time more than I did the first time. She wasn't sentimental and she didn't manipulate her readers with maudlin emotions, like Dickens at his worst, though she wasn't quite as funny as Dickens at his best (Pickwick Papers and Bleak House).

Her essential conservatism appealed to me more than when I was younger. She valued restraint, family bonds, loyalty, piety, preservation (even of landscapes and houses), and propriety. She was clear-eyed about her characters' personality flaws and foibles. In many of her books there wasn't a straightforward villain - similar to real life, in my experience.  

Another common theme was uninvolved, weak, or absent fathers, and the bad influence that can have on their children. 

Even the worst Jane Austen is well worth reading, but this is the order I put them in.

1. Northanger Abbey - very funny. "But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."

2. Mansfield Park - what if Elizabeth Bennet didn't have good morals, and a duller girl did? Also, ouch: "In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry."

3. Pride and Prejudice -  classic for a reason. "there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a woman had better show more affection than she feels."

4. Persuasion - struck by this brutal description of a bad son who died at sea "that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross"

5. Sense and Sensibility - somewhat more cookie-cutter than her better novels but still enjoyable. "Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself." 

6. Emma - I enjoyed the scenes with her hypochondriac father

7. Lady Susan - interesting to have a main character be evil. However I don't like epistolary novels. "My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die."

8. Sanditon - only down this far because she could only write 11 chapters before her untimely death. I really liked it though and am trying the best rated completion on Amazon. "I make no apologies for my heroine’s vanity. If there are young ladies in the world at her time of life more dull of fancy and more careless of pleasing, I know them not and never wish to know them."

9. The Watsons - another incomplete work, this one an early novel she left unfinished. She worked in some of the scenes and characters to later books.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

I noticed many parallels between the Biblical story of Job and Billy Parnham. He's a teenager of utter loyalty and honesty, but everyone he loves is taken from him. By the end of the story he can't even feel like a good person, and he's wandering through Mexico and the Southwest in solitude. I noticed that many of the people he met liked to give him long philosophical treatises like Job's friends. Some were profound, but not once was Billy allowed to talk about the painful experiences in his life. He only tried to do it a couple times, and each time the other person would shut down the conversation.

I found it interesting that the book was bracketed by his killing of a wolf and his throwing rocks at an old dog. Each time he felt immense remorse, and the book ends with him weeping in the highway.

About another Job-like figure Billy hears about:

Need one say he was a man without politics? He was simply a messenger. He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely in their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence.

About a priest who had given trite religious advice to someone in suffering:

   And the priest? A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man. Something of a philosopher. Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all. He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred.He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

   There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay His presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So.

A blind gravedigger had some advice for Billy:

He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

Billy had a conversation with a girl who was in love with his brother Boyd:

He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgment. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he'd pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that. 

Here's an example of one of the two times Billy tried to reach out, this time with his brother Boyd:

Talk to me.

Go to bed.

I need for you to talk to me.

It's okay. Everything's okay.

No it aint.

You just worry about stuff. I'm all right.

I know you are, said Billy. But I aint. 

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

I want Ron Chernow to write my biography after I die. After reading his John D. Rockefeller biography Titan I came away with an enormous admiration for Rockefeller. Likewise, I was confirmed as a Hamilton fan after reading this biography. He depicts a man who was a firm abolitionist, a person who took orphans into his home, a foe of utopian schemes, a brilliant communicator, and brave to a fault (thanks, Aaron Burr, you scoundrel).

All his life he lived with people insulting his illegitimate birth and immigrant status. He died in a duel with Vice President Burr, intentionally firing his pistol into the air in order to avoid committing murder.

Through all that, he structured a functioning republic that has lasted over 225 years. The major stain on his record is of course his sex scandal as Treasury Secretary. I am able to forgive it, since afterwards, from all we can tell, he repented and focused all his devotion on his wife and children. His widow Eliza kept his memory sacred for the next 50 years.

On rich and poor.

Hamilton did not think the rich were paragons of virtue. They has as many vices as the poor, he noted, except that their "vices are probably more favorable to the prosperity of the state than those of the indigent and partake less of moral depravity."

Writing to a Frenchman during the early part of the French Revolution.

"I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either with human nature or the composition of your nation." 

Inertia and stability are built in to the structure of our Constitution.

"Whoever consider the nature of our government with discernment will see that though obstacles and delays will frequently stand in the way of the adoption of good measures, yet when once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent. It will be far more difficult to undo than to do."

Seems true.

"Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation."

His temper was a major personality flaw.

Without Washington's guidance or public responsibility, he had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds.

Wow, I didn't know that Thomas Paine hated George Washington. This was his reaction to the famous Farewell Address, which Hamilton largely wrote.

[Paine wrote an open letter] expressing the hope that Washington would die and telling him that "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any."

Aaron Burr also hated Washington.

[Burr replied that] "he despised Washington as a man of no talents and one who could not spell a sentence of common English."

Franklin on John Adams.

"He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." 

Now I need to listen to the rest of the musical, which was inspired by this book.

 

 

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overall this book was a meh. It followed Amory Blaine as a child, prep schooler, collegian at Princeton, and early career man. His friendships and love interests felt disconnected, and as a character, he seemed overly intellectual and self-indulgent. Characters sometimes have long, unrealistic monologues.

These were my favorite quotes.

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

Another, after he had lost his money and carefree college lifestyle.

"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor."

At the bottom:

Usually, on night like this, for there had been many lately, he could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the infinite possibilities of children -- he leaned and listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether something in the brooding despair of his mood had make a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark continent upon the moon....

Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

Though saving money is usually thought virtuous, I think we've lost the concept of miserliness. And maybe that's a problem with the 1%, not that they have so much wealth but that they fail to spend it. Instead it's heaped up in hedge funds and offshore accounts, where it's not doing anyone any good.

Alexander Pope saw miserliness as choking off a country's economic health.

Who sees pale Mammon pine amidst his store,

Sees but a backward steward for the poor;

This year a reservoir, to keep and spare;

The next, a fountain, spouting through his heir,

In lavish streams to quench a country’s thirst,

And men and dogs shall drink him till they burst.

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Jones. It's a good-humored 18th century novel about growing up and making some bad choices along the way.

This early passage foreshadows the story of poor Tom, who is kindhearted, noble, and prone to sleeping with cute girls, even though he loves only Sophia.

Goodness of heart, and openness of temper, though these may give them great comfort within, and administer to an honest pride in their own minds, will by no means, alas! do their business in the world. Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men.

Tom's antagonist is his brother Master Bilfil, who is apparently virtuous but who is actually coldhearted and scheming.

To say the truth, Sophia, when very young, discerned that Tom, though an idle, thoughtless, rattling rascal, was nobody's enemy but his own; and that Master Blifil, though a prudent, discreet, sober young gentleman, was at the same time strongly attached to the interest only of one single person; and who that single person was the reader will be able to divine without any assistance of ours.

Squire Western is the father of gentle Sophia. He was a bluff rustic, hard-drinking and profane, always insisting that he loved his daughter with all his heart and would gladly give her world, on one condition - that she would marry exactly whom he chose. There are shades of Jane Austen in this plot, with a parent determined to make his child's fortune through marriage, disregarding any feelings of love or attachment.

I enjoyed Fielding's side observations as much as the story. This one is about how little philosophy changes people's actions.

Philosophers are composed of flesh and blood as well as other human creatures; and however sublimated and refined the theory of these may be, a little practical frailty is as incident to them as to other mortals. It is, indeed, in theory only, and not in practice, as we have before hinted, that consists the difference: for though such great beings think much better and more wisely, they always act exactly like other men. They know very well how to subdue all appetites and passions, and to despise both pain and pleasure; and this knowledge affords much delightful contemplation, and is easily acquired; but the practice would be vexatious and troublesome; and, therefore, the same wisdom which teaches them to know this, teaches them to avoid carrying it into execution.

Fielding distinguishes between love and lust / hunger. Tom Jones hungered after many women but loved only one, but his many trials eventually taught him to tame that hunger and direct it.

What is commonly called love, namely, the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh, is by no means that passion for which I here contend. This is indeed more properly hunger; and as no glutton is ashamed to apply the word love to his appetite, and to say he LOVES such and such dishes; so may the lover of this kind, with equal propriety, say, he HUNGERS after such and such women.

The essence of wisdom, in his view:

Wisdom, in short, whose lessons have been represented as so hard to learn by those who never were at her school, only teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life, a little farther than that life carries it. And this is, not to buy at too dear a price.

On boring books: "for the dullest writers, no more than the dullest companions, are always inoffensive."


And this almost sounds like a modern day supermodel.

Neither her person nor mind seemed to him to promise any kind of matrimonial felicity: for she was very tall, very thin, very ugly, very affected, very silly, and very ill-natured.

 

Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

Rasselas is a story about a long search for happiness, kind of like an 18th century Eat, Pray, Love. I actually haven't read that one, but I'm guessing it leads the reader to a much different conclusion.

Samuel Johnson's take is that momentary happiness is the best we can hope for. Even the best case, in which we achieve all our hopes and aren't struck down by disease or accident, will lead only to satiety and lassitude. At that point, we'll then set our minds on some new goal or experience that we can work toward.

I do think that happiness tends to come from the side, sort of life's peripheral vision. It's not something you can aim for and then expect like a paycheck. In that sense, I agree with him.

Whether you agree with him or not, his thoughts are well worth reading.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

“For the hope of happiness,” said he, “is so strongly impressed that the longest experience is not able to efface it.  Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable." 

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but by too much prudence may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.  This is often the fate of long consideration; he does nothing who endeavours to do more than is allowed to humanity. 

Keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favours or afflictions. 

 

At the end of the story, the wisest people give up purposefully looking for happiness.

Imlac and the astronomer were contented to be driven along the stream of life without directing their course to any particular port.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Some people say this is their favorite novel. I decided to try it because it's set during the Russian Revolution, and I'd heard the CIA was even involved with getting it published during the Cold War.

My favorite parts of the book were his descriptions of nature and his mockery of early Communism.

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

A couple passages making fun of the revolution:

This was the time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up food and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood.

I'll admit that you are Russia's liberators, the shining lights, that without you it would be lost, sunk in misery and ignorance, and I still don't give a damn for any of you, I don't like you and you can all go to the devil.

My least favorite part was, sadly, Dr. Zhivago himself. I couldn't forgive him for leaving his wife and child to have an affair with Lara, however torrid it might be. Since I disliked him, that soured me on the book as a whole.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

Someone said that everyone should read Don Quixote three times, once when young, once in middle age and once when old. I read it in my teenage years and thought it was okay but it didn't impress me like other classics did. Now, as a middle aged person, I read it again and loved it. If I read it again 30 years from now, I wonder what I'll think?

This time I read the Samuel Putnam translation. It was excellent in every way and only costs $1.99 on Kindle. It's well worth the price considering some of the awful and archaic translations available for free.

Don Quixote reminds me of one of my other favorite characters, Pickwick from Pickwick Papers. They're both older gentleman roaming around the county having miscellaneous adventures and encounters. Both are kind, noble, and somehow more innocent than everyone around them.

The great thing about Don Quixote is that it also has Sancho Panza, his down-to-earth squire and friend.

Cervantes wrote it in two parts, separated by 10 years. In the second part, the people Quixote and Sancho meet have read the first part! They're famous in a way, though they're not aware everyone is laughing at them.

Beyond the funny parts, there are interesting perspectives on sanity, reality, and morality.

Fore example, when the bachelor Quixote takes up knight-errantry, he decides he needs a lady love. Lacking anything in that department, his mind transforms a certain peasant girl he hardly knows into the beauteous lady Dulcinea. Although he's always declaring his love for her, part of him questions her reality. In the end though, it's more important to him that he show nobility of spirit, than that he be sane.

“That,” replied Don Quixote, “is a long story. God knows whether or not there is a Dulcinea in this world or if she is a fanciful creation. This is not one of those cases where you can prove a thing conclusively. I have not begotten or given birth to my lady, although I contemplate her as she needs must be.

I found these two passages especially touching, one in which Quixote talks about his friendship with Sancho and vice versa.

Don Quixote about Sancho Panza:

 “On the other hand, I would have your Highnesses know that Sancho Panza is one of the drollest squires that ever served a knight-errant. He is so sharp in his simple-mindedness that one may derive no little amusement from trying to determine whether he is in reality simple or sharp-witted. He has in him a certain malicious streak that seems to indicate he is a rogue, and from his blundering you would take him for a dunce. He doubts everything and believes everything, and just as I think he is about to tumble headlong, owing to some stupidity, he will come up with some witticism or other that sends him skyward in my estimation. The short of the matter is, I would not exchange him for another squire even though they threw in a city to boot."

Sancho Panza having a conversation with a Duchess about Don Quixote (the Duchess will give him an island to govern, as a joke):

As a result of what the worthy Sancho has told me,” she said, “there arises a question in my mind, a certain whispering in my ear which says: if Don Quixote is crazy, weak-minded, crackbrained, and Sancho his squire knows it and still continues to serve him and to cling to the empty promises his master has made him, he must undoubtedly be the more foolish and the more insane of the two; and if this is the case, my lady the Duchess, as I am sure it is, you are bound to be reproached for having given him an island to govern; for if he cannot govern himself, how can he govern others?” 

“By God, lady,” said Sancho, “you’ve spoken straight to the point; but go ahead, your Highness, and say whatever you like, as plain as you like, for I know it to be the truth. I know that if I had good sense I’d have left my master long ago. But this is my luck, my misfortune, and I can’t help following him. We’re from the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, I like him very much, he’s generous to me, he gave me his asscolts, and, above all, I’m loyal; and so it’s impossible for anything to separate us except the pick and spade. And if your Highness doesn’t want to give me that island that you promised me, well, I didn’t have it when God made me, and it may be that your not giving it to me will be all the better for my conscience.

I started the book by laughing at Quixote and Sancho, and ended it by admiring them. I can't think of many books that develop characters like that. As a Cervantes scholar said in the notes, "Don Quixote’s death is as touching and saddening as that of a person who has really existed and for whom we have felt a profound affection. ‘What a worthy madman,’ the reader exclaims to himself, ‘in this rascally world of ours where there are so many wicked ones of sound mind!’"