Of Old Books and Dead Authors

 

Charing Cross Road in London is famous as the street of booksellers. It is also celebrated in the title of Helene Hampf’s wonderful little book, 84 Charing Cross Road. I bought John LeCarré’s A Perfect Spy on its first day of issue in a store there. Keepers among this writer’s novels are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Smiley trilogy, and that one. LeCarré’s early spy novels are usually free of violence and gratuitous sex scenes. I think Hemingway did the most tasteful job describing sex between his protagonist, Robert Jordan, and Pilar’s daughter, Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with the simple phrase ‘he feels the earth move out and away from under them’. Let me add that was probably Hemingway’s most elegant description of the subject among many.

On the subject of American authors, I have recently been reading East of Eden. I’m about halfway through, about 300 pages. I will grind on through the book in time, but for now I have laid it down. I don’t care for Steinbeck’s style in this book, and many of his metaphors are clunky. None of his books have a ‘happily ever after’ ending, and I don’t expect this one to. For example: Rose of Sharon Joad nurses the starving boy at her breast in a barn in the pouring rain to end The Grapes of Wrath. George has to shoot Lennie in the head so he will not be arrested for accidently killing Curly in Of Mice and Men.  Kino throws his precious find back into the ocean in The Pearl, and in The Winter of our Discontent, Ethan takes razorblades on his walk, following his betrayal of a friend and his own principles. Morality and poverty are common themes for Steinbeck.

Instead, I picked up Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I have had a paperback of this classic for probably 50 years and never read it. I am grateful to have been born in an era without TV or, God forbid, social media.  Reading became a natural part of my life from the earliest book I remember, Johnny’s Machines.  I read avidly until I reached puberty, and then I finally rediscovered them in college. When I was about 12, we were assigned to read The Green Pastures, a parody of Heaven’s characters in the Black dialect. (Imagine that in today’s middle schools!) It was written for the stage by Marc Connelly in 1930. I came across a copy in the Strand Bookstore in 1984 for $5.00. I still have it, of course.

I marvel at the ability of some authors to write in the vernacular, whether it is Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner in his Mississippi novels, James Baldwin in Go Tell it on the Mountain, or Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. They are all classics; they have stood tall over many decades, they are still read, and they will NOT be banned for presenting America as it once was. And if you care, Johnny’s Machines (1949) is still available.