The House of Mirth

I read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth yesterday. Edith was the first woman to win the Pulitzer in 1921 with her book The Age of Innocence. I considered substituting HM for AI to count for this blog but decided against it. I didn't want to read AI; I saw the movie and lost my chance to read the book with fresh eyes. I'll get to it eventually, just so I can say "I have read all the Pully winners."

In HM Lily Bart, age 29, is a husband hunter circulating among the elites of old New York. Beautiful, charming, and masterful at self presentation, she gets close a few times and even gets offers but she always, at the last moment, screws it up or declines.

Lily reminds me of Esther from The Bell Jar in that she is keenly observant and reflects upon her own actions shrewdly. On one level, Lily senses that the life she was born into and trained for is unsatisfying. This ultimately leads to -- you guessed it -- her death. In the end, you realize that she could never fully commit herself to the ideals which would have given her a wealthy lifestyle. As a whole, the decisions she makes pointedly suggest a tragic becoming: Lily was aware that she could not be fully satisfied by society life and yet, that was what her upbringing had honed her best to do. At each crisis, she avoids making decisions, prolonging problems until they worsen. The resulting events tell vividly of a woman who is suspended between awareness and habit.

HM was very easy to read. I inhaled it. I enjoy books where events turn quickly and conversations flow easily. In part, I picked up HM as a break from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. I started DF last week and I'm about one fifth into it. Let's just say DF is vastly different from HM and the technicalities on classical music is not a page turning subject.

I plod on.

005 The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway first published in 1952.

I might have read The Old Man and the Sea in high school but I'm uncertain. The title is familiar yet I remember nothing else. I choose this short book -- only 127 pages -- to ease myself back into this blog.

Short, direct, clear prose. An old fisherman pit against a mighty fish --a marlin. After hooking the fish, the old man waits a day and a night for the fish to surface. After killing the fish, he beats sharks off his catch. He returns to the fishing hamlet with a carcass, which is sad yet bringing the skeleton to shore is a heroic feat: it is a visible testament of his trials and of his unyielding resolution.

Two words sum up this book: mental fortitude.

The old man's stream of consciousness narrates events. Fishing alone, he talks to himself, thinks to himself. He is constantly encouraging, planning, preparing himself to handle tasks he must do. Unflinchingly, he makes sacrifices quickly -- cutting the other lines, eating the fish he caught -- to stack his chances to win. He knows well the psychology of battle, and keeps his mind sharp by reason, by rest, by food:

"The punishment of the hook is nothing. The punishment of hunger, and that he is against something that he does not comprehend, is everything. Rest now, old man, and let him work until your next duty comes." p.76

The theme of mental resolution, expressed so poignantly by Ernest Hemingway, is at once noble and horrific. Noble because it is shows how battles are won in the mind. Horrific because someone who knows mental fortitude so well, enough to convey it convincingly in literary form, killed himself.

It begs the question: What is it about modern life or his life that was so unbearable? It is frightening to imagine that someone with the intellectual capacity and, perhaps, fortitude of the Old Man, encountered something that beat him to death.

I mention Hemingway' s suicide because I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar just prior to The Old Man and the Sea. Plath also killed herself.

In The Bell Jar, a small town girl wins a one month internship at a magazine publishing house in New York. Intelligent and keenly self-conscious, Esther's observations of people and events are painfully frank. She is equally merciless to her own thoughts and actions.

You sense that modern city life dulls and suffocates. In short, it kills. The city teems of depth-less people spouting canned conversations, performing gestures which are emptied by repetition. A glimpse of this existence and Esther is changed: her mind sickens and she tries to commit suicide. Esther gets shock therapy and after a session she says:

"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air." p.206

The space under a bell jar is a metaphor for a state of mind touched by the emptiness of modern madness. It is a powerful symbol. You are helpless. You cannot move or breathe. The 360 degree field of vision remains a relentless source of pain; you see in stark clarity and feel razor eyes upon you.

Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, was it this?