Booknotes 5.15

I am so behind on these!

Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the war. Recommended. Also: war is evil.

Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac, published 1835, translated 1890s by Ellen Marriage, fiction, 383 pages. My first time reading Balzac. Shallow society, lots of unhappy marriages and surface-level affairs. And yet in spite of all that (which to be fair is only a small part of the novel), I quite liked the book and found myself looking forward to picking it up again each day. I don’t know that I’ll read his whole Human Comedy — there are a lot of volumes — but a few more, certainly.

Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, published 2007, biography, 684 pages. Quite good. Compelling and readable. Bronson was an odd character, egotistical (“my genius is epic” — who says that?!) and weird (the whole Fruitlands episode, for example), with some obsessive journaling on parenthood. “Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa’s seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper.” She was two or three at the time, if I recall correctly. Ha. Emerson and Thoreau show up fairly often, which was fun. On the less fun side of things, I hadn’t known about Louisa’s disability and health issues that seriously affected her last couple decades. Another casualty of the Civil War. And of course it was interesting to see which parts of Little Women were more autobiographical. Speaking of that and, more candidly, of the trail of deaths of her family toward the end of the book: biographies often leave me with a feeling I don’t get from any other kind of book, the feeling that a friend has died.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell (who was six years older than Charlotte and was her friend), published 1857, biography, 684 pages. So good. Tragedy after tragedy, though, with her mother dying at age 39, her two oldest sisters dying at ages 11 and 12, and then, later on, Branwell, Emily, and Anne all dying within eight months of each other at ages 31, 30, and 29, and Charlotte herself dying a few years after that at age 38 while pregnant. The father outlived them all and made it to age 84. A family haunted by death. My wife’s ancestors, by the way, were from Keighley and Haworth, and we visited Haworth as a family a few years ago, so it was fun to read about it. Except that Haworth back then was a bit of a death trap: “And thus we find that illness often assumed a low typhoid form in Haworth, and fevers of various kinds visited the place with sad frequency.” The autobiographical elements of Jane Eyre were striking — I didn’t realize Helen Burns was basically her older sister Maria. Or how her father’s near-blindness and her own extreme nearsightedness surely led to all the references to sight and eyes. The biography includes lots of letters, which I found very effective in drawing me into Charlotte’s world. Some passages that give a feel for the book, and the first two are Charlotte’s words:

A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have, who have seen all drop round them—friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone.

And:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency, but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness, nor witnessed their last moments: it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. At the end of all, however, exists the Great Hope. Eternal Life is theirs now.

And:

Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of Jane Eyre in which she hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, “But it is a true thing; it really happened.”