Favorite books, 1900–1919

In search of lost notes from my sixth form English class

“Literary” in some sense books so I don’t have to pretend to have read the Principia Mathematica; in practice that means prose fiction and poetry (in theory plays should count but I don’t know anything about plays.) No comics: it would be a fun, exasperating parlor game to work out how high Krazy Kat should go. Mostly what you’d expect except no bug story; good but a bit one-note compared to The Trial. Too Anglo-American probably. I haven’t read everything.

1. Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way (1913)

I re-read three of the books listed here for this column, but given that I tackled Swann’s Way twelve years ago and I still haven’t got around to Time Regained I wasn’t going to manage to plough through this again by deadline time. So I read the comic instead. And while it’s not the same without 50 pages of self-involved labyrinthine sentences before we get a crumb of a madeleine, compressing the work into mostly-pictures shows that the narrative is remarkably well-constructed, especially in the long “Swann in Love” section: each Verdurin party does advance the plot. And the concluding coda has what’s still one of the more spiritually amusing plot twists in modernist literature, even when you know it’s coming.

2. James Joyce: Dubliners (1914)

I hadn’t read this in full since high school, and given that I botched my English exam that year (graders don’t like it when you overuse irrelevant parentheticals, apparently) I was relieved to find my understanding at the time wasn’t totally wrong—thanks Mr. Barclay—though it could’ve been deeper. The epiphanies, important as they are, aren’t overplayed, and “and finally they realized they were pathetic” isn’t the entire point—well, not always. The texture of Dublin life is often better realized in the stories where nothing much happens besides old guys nattering on about Parnell or Jesuits or whatever. And the extra length of The Dead opens up a world, with the free indirect speech us nerds love letting Joyce play off character viewpoints and construct a community with all its foibles and unfunny in-jokes and minor bourgeois pleasures. Maybe the guy should write a novel! <J.J. writes Portrait> Okay, maybe the guy should write again and a novel that doesn’t entirely revolve around an annoying protagonist!

3. T.S. Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Intuiting that Romanticism wouldn’t cut it in poetry anymore, Eliot nevertheless wrote in continuity with the Western tradition, and while that would eventually limit him, it opens up astonishing possibilities here. What’s it about, you must ask? Maybe it’s a critique of modernity, but it’s much more clear that Prufrock is horny, and horniness is the through-line that unifies poetry going back to Sappho. Of course the real pleasure is in language, and if it’s fun to namecheck the Boston Evening Transcript then you should namecheck the Boston Evening Transcript repeatedly. I shouldn’t be too sniffy that he never matched this again; arguably no poet writing in English (maybe Juliana Spahr) has since.

4. Willa Cather: My Ántonia (1918)

Hey, Christgau was right. Romanticism remained useful for longer in the novel, and this is both “gee, Nebraska is grand” Romantic and “yeah we know what the narrator’s thinking” Romantic. Ántonia is the great literary hero of the era, avoiding the Germans-be-like-this, Irish-be-like-that cliches that even some of the entries below sometimes lapse into by staying individual (not individualistic), and though she has to suffer—it is the 19th century frontier, not somewhere one would expect to avoid suffering—it’s never gratuitous. The blind pianist scene is Not Entirely Unproblematic but it’s still the best thing in the book until the ending, which is earned.

5. D.H. Lawrence: The Rainbow (1915)

Hard to pick the greatest Lawrence—as Raymond Williams said (in better words) he evolved rather than progressed—but this is my clear favorite having read three of the big four. In Sons and Lovers everyone besides Paul is a little undercharacterized plus Paul’s whiny, in Women in Love the world barely seems to exist outside of the central characters save for nature trying to murder them from time to time. The Rainbow doesn’t match up on the sex stuff, but it’s vivid about the setting that the Brangwens come out of and why Ursula can’t stay in it and why getting out isn’t easy. The classroom scenes are among the most unsettling in literature, as if Dickens had been too nice.

[okay counting only the 1910s work, Krazy Kat would be here]

6. Ezra Pound: Cathay (1915)

It’s genuinely embarrassing that (still) the best translation of poetry into English is by someone who would do about as badly as me on Duolingo Chinese, in addition to that, uh, other stuff he did later. Yet he turns the already great “River Merchant’s Wife” into the greatest English language lyric poem except maaaaybe “To Autumn”, the other Li Bai (aka “Rihaku”, play the Duolingo wrong answer sound) poems are nearly as good, and the ancient Chinese works aren’t out of their league. As for “The Seafarer”, well, the Anglo-Saxons tried.

7. Henry James: The Ambassadors (1903)

Seventh in a twenty-year period is pretty good, but I concede some might find this a bit low since I agree this is his best book. The constructions are dazzling, the psychologies complex, and the subtext hoo boy the subtext. Wells’s line that James was putting eggshells on an altar doesn’t ring true at all here: there are real characters in a real society, and if he wants to express their consciousnesses through sentences with multiple semicolons then that’s kind of cool. So really I just think he did Maria Gostrey dirty.

8. Gertrude Stein: Three Lives (1909)

For incurable avant-gardists, Tender Buttons is Tender Buttons is Tender Buttons. I prefer this Flaubert rip-off. Again, it’s Not Entirely Unproblematic (just copy-paste those words into every entry where I didn’t bother to write them), as you’d expect from a work of this age in which a bougie author writes characters who are working class, let alone Black, but I find it an improvement on A Simple Heart and maybe even Madame Bovary. I almost convinced myself it was because Flaubert assumes an audience reading from a point of superiority (and pushes back against that), whereas Stein writes for a sympathetic audience (who might happen to view themselves as in a point of superiority.) But really it’s because she writes women better.

9. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks (1901)

Having had difficulties with other Mann, I didn’t read this until this year when plotting out this year, and was surprised to find it Actually Great. The details of bourgeois life are lovingly rendered; the details of the arc of family decline are shown as highly contingent even as the overall regression is near-inevitable. Tony is one of the best-realized women in a book by a man up to that point: not merely a coat-rack to hang ironies on, her desires are just as valid as her artsy twink nephew’s.

10. James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

The title implies some irony, and indeed, this is one of the great messy books of the time. Issues of identity are raised and not resolved in any satisfactory way; leave that for the rest of the century’s Black writers to puzzle out. There are concrete pleasures as well, in its descriptions of the narrator’s artificially idyllic-except-when-it-isn’t Georgia childhood and of the chop-suey neighborhoods of Manhattan. Above all, there’s music: ragtime, and whatever the narrator’s equivocations, the book convinces that the style must’ve been It in ways we don’t have the recorded evidence to fully comprehend.

11. Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent (1907)

I admire-not-love the colonial stuff; yes, I know it includes some of the era’s sagest criticism of Imperialism written by a European, but I’m just not that into boats. Being no leftist lets Conrad lay out the Types of Guys you see calling for revolution with some meanness while still admitting he kind of sees where they’re coming from. Willie is less realistic yet exceptionally well-drawn, as Conrad employs all the powers of description he honed on boat stuff to apply them to the big psychological-until-it-isn’t domestic showdown.

12. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900)

The great subject of the 20th century American realist novel was money (tied with race, and maybe English professors dating their students.) Dreiser did as well as anyone at showing you what twenty bucks could mean to a struggling person, and it could do to them. Given this, the ending for the character who hits the big time but discovers Money Isn’t Everything is less convincing than the one for the character that gasses themself.

Previously: Favorite novels 1800–99, 21st century. Next year: 1920–39. Crap, that means I have to at least attempt the Wake, doesn’t it :(