Classics Club: Favorite Literary Period

The monthly meme question at The Classics Club for March happens to be the question I submitted so I thought I would take a stab at answering it:

What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?

It’s not difficult for me to pick my favorite literary period.  In coming up with a list of my favorite books, by and large, they fall into the category of “Early Twentieth Century”.  Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack London always come to mind when determining favorites, as do J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesteron, Evelyn Waugh and John Steinbeck.  Recently, I’ve discovered Willa Cather and Edith Wharton – while Cather could be included in favorites, the jury is still out with Wharton.   And I can’t forget Margaret Mitchell and her one great novel.

I don’t know who decides which years “Early Twentieth Century” encompasses but I would ask to be allowed to include J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut and Flannery O’Connor in this period, as well as James Baldwin, whom I just read for the first time last week.  These authors all published something in the 1940’s and/or 1950’s which I will still include as “Early” even though several of them continued publishing into the “Later Twentieth Century” and in some cases into the “Twenty First Century”.

Why is this time period my favorite?  That’s the more difficult part of the question to answer.  In some respect, it’s simply that these were the authors I read when I first discovered literature during the summer before 10th grade.  They were the first authors I read when I discovered that there was something more to reading than just an exciting plot – that there was something about the words chosen and the way they were put together.  But one could learn this with any literary time period.

I think another reason would be that from my historical perspective, the “Early Twentieth Century” is on the edge of the old and the new.  It’s far enough in the past to be intriguing but yet close enough to the present to see direct connections and influences to the world in which I live.

Just curious, do you have a favorite literary period?

A Branch of the Service by Graham Greene

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This week I drew the Nine of Spades which corresponds to Graham Greene’s short story, “A Branch of the Service”, on my list for my Deal Me In 2014 project.  I’ve come to the conclusion that a short story can be an excellent format for comedy and humor.  Perhaps the brevity of a short story can keep humor from getting too “old”.

“A Branch of the Service”, in addition to being a short story, uses another format for comedy.  Sometimes joining two elements that one might not think of together can be ripe for a good laugh.  In Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut has a couple of stories where his narrator is a storm window repairman for the rich and the famous such as the Kennedys and the Hiltons.  They are brilliantly funny, as is this story by Graham Greene.

The unusual pairing in this story is a Restaurant and Food Critic who doubles as a spy for the British Government.  Or is he a spy for the British Government who doubles as a Restaurant and Food Critic?  The two are blended together so perfectly that it doesn’t really matter.  The agency for which the narrator works originally was named International Reliable Restaurants Association but this had to be changed due to “Irish difficulties” (IRRA) with the new name being International Guide to Good Restaurants (IGGR).

Through the course of the story, the narrator, with wonderful British sarcasm and dry wit, tells the tales of two of his spy/restaurant encounters.  In the first tale, he makes a name for himself by nabbing a secret document in a manner that would make James Bond proud.  For the second tale, he’s not quite as successful as a risk of being a spy/restaurant critic is eating something that doesn’t quite agree with you.  The narrator graciously spares the reader the “unsavory details” but he makes his point.

It’s a little too early to really start thinking about a favorite short story for the year, but as far as funniest, this is the one to beat.

Kurt Vonnegut: The Powder-Blue Dragon

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One of my most enjoyable reading experiences since I’ve been blogging has been slowly reading through the short stories in Kurt Vonnegut’s collection Bagombo Snuff Box.  I’ve also read his collection Welcome to the Monkey House.  Vonnegut is at his best when he combines social commentary with his biting wit.  Some of the stories from Bagombo that fall into this category are “2BR02B” and “The Package”.  I have also been pleasantly surprised by some of his stories that may not be strong on social commentary but somehow are just brilliantly amusing such as “Ambitious Sophomore” where I first encountered Vonnegut’s recurring and very likeable Lincoln High band leader, George Helmholtz.

Unfortunately, his story “The Powder-Blue Dragon” just didn’t fall into any of the above categories.  I think part of my problem with it comes from the plot line that just didn’t go where I thought it would or where I thought it should.  Kiah Higgins, a young kid, works a number of odd jobs and manages to save up enough to buy an expensive sports car – the powder-blue dragon mentioned in the title.  Many of the people he encounters after his vehicle purchase are quite surprised that he was able to buy the car.  This part of the premise I thought was great.  The surprise and bewilderment from people who are shocked that a kid could work enough to buy an expensive car could have made for a ton of laughs.  It also would have been fun to have put myself in the place of the kid (just a reminder, this is fiction).

Once Kiah buys the car; however, none  of what I thought would happen does.  It was a bigger disappointment than I was expecting.  But I will continue with the stories in Bagombo as this is the first disappointment of this sort that I’ve encountered.  Vonnegut’s still brilliant in my book.

Bagombo Snuff Box

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Where is Bagombo, anyway?  In Ceylon.  Where is Ceylon?  Africa? India? China?

I couldn’t help but like Eddie Laird.  He not only suckered his ex-wife and her current husband in to believing he was a wealthy world-traveler, but he suckered me into believing it, too.  I really felt like I was sitting in Amy and Harry’s living room. What an impression Eddie made on these two with his small bejeweled gift from his travels!  Looking back on the story, it’s funny how easily impressionable Amy and Harry were in comparing their suburban family life to Eddie’s stories.

Then, of course, their little brat, Stevie, comes in to ruin it all!  How dare a nine year-old enter the room and demand to know where Ceylon is?  Or to question the small tag on Eddie’s gift?  As the reader, the realization of what Eddie’s stories were didn’t dawn on me until Stevie and his parents go get an Atlas while Eddie makes a run for it.

The phone call Eddie makes at the end of the story could have been simply sweet and sentimental, but the air of sadness in it made me like Eddie all the more.  Vintage Kurt Vonnegut!

The Cruise of the Jolly Roger

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I was in the mood for some Kurt Vonnegut brilliance and I wasn’t disappointed with his short story “The Cruise of the Jolly Roger”.

Nathan Durant, a war veteran, sets sail in his cabin cruiser named The Jolly Roger to visit a few small New England coastal towns.  During his first visit, he encounters a group of artists that invite him to lunch.  He doesn’t exactly fit in and even though they make some feeble attempts to show respect, their attitude tends to be, in a word, snooty.  They condescendingly laugh at the name of his boat considering it too cliché for their tastes.

Durant moves on to the next town where he searches for people who knew an old army buddy killed during the war.  In spite of it being his buddy’s home town, not many people remember him.  However, his friend does have a small patch of grass in the middle of town named after him.  And as it’s Memorial Day, children are paying their respects to those who have died.   In struggling to come to terms with the situation, Durant listens to a grade school boy’s speech:

“He died fighting so we could be safe and free.  And we’re thanking him with flowers, because it was a nice thing to do”

The boy’s sentiment seems a little simple, a little cliché – but simple and cliché are not always bad.  It worked for Nathan Durant.  And it kind of works for me.

Kurt Vonnegut: Thanasphere

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The King of Diamonds this week brought me to Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Thanasphere” from his collection Bagombo Snuff Box.  It’s one of the type of stories that has gotten Vonnegut the reputation of being a science-fiction writer, even though he has written some brilliant stories that would not fall under this category.

I wish I could say that I liked “Thanasphere” better than I did.  Perhaps it was the fact that the story involves the first man to orbit the earth and the story was written before anyone had really orbited the earth.  I had a “been there, done that” feeling while reading it. Although, if I was interested in conspiracy theories (which I’m not), the story might make me wonder what I don’t know about space travel.  What secrets are out there and who really knows about them?

I enjoyed the conversations between the three major players:  Major Rice, the astronaut in space; Dr. Groszinger, the scientist involved in the mission; and General Dane, the military man in charge.  Both science and  the military have to deal with some unsettling discoveries from Major Rice.  Discoveries in the form of “voices” – but maybe not voices one would expect to hear in space.  I think I’ll just leave it at that.  Feel free to read the story to find out more.

Welcome to the Monkey House

I’ve come to greatly appreciate the short stories of Kurt Vonnegut.  Here are some ramblings about his short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House.  

In an introduction written by Vonnegut’s son for another book, he states that his father was an optimist trying to be a pessimist.  I continue to find this to be the best way to describe Vonnegut’s work – especially his short stories.  In spite of some biting satire aimed at the world we live in and at institutions cherished by many, the twinkle in Vonnegut’s eye seems to always make its way into the stories.  Though world-weariness often takes the stage, the innocence of Paul, the boy trying to bring his fighting neighbors back together through a radio dedication in “Next Door”, never seems far behind.

For sheer comedy, I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did when Vonnegut’s storm window salesman-narrator pays a call on Commodore Rumsfoord, a Goldwater Republican who lives next door to the Kennedy Compound in “The Hyannis Port Story”.  On his way there, he stops at the First Family Waffle Shop where the menu items are named after the Kennedy family.  He has “a thing called a Teddy – and a cup of Joe.”  The same storm window salesman installs a bathtub enclosure (because storm window salesman do that, too, as he points out) at the home of Gloria Hilton and George Murra in “Go Back to your Precious Wife and Son”.  While both of these stories have characters that date them in the early 1960’s, the comedy and humor is timeless.

I personally enjoyed the character of Harry Nash in “Who Am I This Time?”.  While a mild mannered hardware store clerk, he quickly turned into whatever character he needed to be when auditioning for the community theater – and helped his fellow thespians find their characters, also:

When he faced us again, he was huge and handsome and conceited and cruel.  Doris read the part of Stella, the wife, and Harry bullied that old, old lady into believing that she was a sweet, pregnant girl married to a sexy gorilla who was going to beat her brains out.  She had me believing it too.  And I read the lines of Blanche, her sister in the play, and darned if Harry didn’t scare me into feeling like a drunk and faded Southern belle.

One of Vonnegut’s stories that I’ve heard others talk and post of frequently in the past as being one of his best is “Harry Bergeron”,  a funny story with some more serious undertones.  He brilliantly has the government controlling exceptionally intelligent people by planting in them a hearing device that blasts loud noises into their ears to distract them from thinking anything too intelligent.

A couple of his more serious stories included “All The King’s Horses” , where a Colonel is forced to play chess with his troops and family as live chess pieces.  While their lives were on the line, I still couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation where chess pieces could literally question the Colonel’s moves.  “The Manned Missiles” touchingly presented two letters from fathers who had lost their sons – one father was American and one was Russian.

I found “Adam” to be the most poignant of all the stories.  Heinz Knechtmann’s wife gives birth to their first son; however, he has no one with whom to share the happy news as the rest of their families were killed in Nazi concentration camps.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a story where loneliness is portrayed quite this way.  I’m still not sure, though, about the significance of the title.  The baby is named Peter.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “The Kid Nobody Could Handle”.  Another story about the incomparable George M. Helmholz, the Lincoln High band leader.  As the title implies, Helmholz uses his love of music to help a troubled youth from his neighborhood.  A line from this story beautifully describes why Helmholz appeals to me so much:

And then, Jim, I remember I’ve got one tiny corner of the universe I can make just the way I want it!

This collection includes a total of twenty-five stories all written in the 50’s and 60’s.  I read them all within a few days, unlike Vonnegut’s collection Bagombo Snuff Box, which I’ve read a few stories at a time and with which I’m still not finished.  It brings up a question about short story collections:  is it better to read them all at once or separately?   I may have to read Welcome to the Monkey House again – only this time read it a story at a time.  Each one was so good, I want to appreciate it by itself.  Does anybody have any suggestions as to when to read short stories individually and when to read them as a collection?

 

 

Summer Reading Plans

It may not  be officially summer, but with Memorial Day weekend behind us, I started thinking of what I will potentially be reading for the next few months.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has taken me longer than I had planned.  I am on page 506 out of 536.  Look for a final post within the next few days.

Non-fiction tends to always be a little scarce on my reading list so I am going to start out the summer with two non-fiction titles that I’ve wanted to read for a while.  One of them is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.  Over the last year, this title seems to pop up frequently.  As I’ve heard that Cain’s focus tends to be introverts in the business world, I’m very curious about what she has to say.

The other non-fiction title I have on my list is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.  This book is perhaps the book that has been recommended to me the most that I still have not read.  I also thought it would coincide well with our family vacation to Philadelphia and New York City in about a week.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

It’s also time for my third annual summertime Heinlein/Hemingway match-up.  I started this tradition inadvertently during the summer of 2011 prior to blogging.  A friend of mine recommended Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and my then book club The Indy Reading Coalition had selected Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as our book for June of that year.  I didn’t think anything of it until last summer (2012) when I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land just before rereading Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls.  It was then that I decided to do the same thing this summer.  My plan is to read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.  I’m looking forward to both of them.

I also want to finish Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and read Kurt Vonnegut’s collection Welcome to the Monkeyhouse.  

I could possibly throw in a newer book such as Khaled Hosseini’s And The Mountain’s Echoed.  I enjoyed his novel The Kite Runner a number of years ago.  I want to at least read one of Salman Rushdie’s novels this year.  The summer might be a good time to do that.  Midnight’s Children is the one I’ve got my eye on.

As usual, the best-laid reading plans can change in an instant, if a different book catches my interest.  We’ll see how the summer plays out.  How about you?  What are your plans for reading this summer?

“The Boy Who Hated Girls”

Bert Higgens has issues with his girlfriend, Charlotte, because she thinks Bert’s band teacher is nuts.  His band teacher is none other than Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional Lincoln High faculty member, George Helmholtz.  This story is also found in Vonnegut’s collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

In “The Boy Who Hated Girls”, Helmholtz has a striking revelation that a number of his star pupils look to him as a father figure – especially the ones that don’t have fathers, like Bert.  When Bert is promoted to another teacher, he begins to slack off, showing up drunk for practice, and generally doing whatever he can to get back under Mr. Helmholtz’s tutelage.

This Helmholtz story has a slightly more serious tone and I didn’t think it really worked as well as the other stories I’ve read with this character.  I had grown to enjoy the light-heartedness of the misadventures of Vonnegut’s band leader.  At one point, Helmholtz realizes that many of these students went on to become alcoholics and drug addicts.  This struck me as funny but it took a couple of days of thinking about the story before the thought crossed my mind “Oh, that was funny.”  The story also doesn’t seem to stand on it’s own as well.  It seemed to be a part of something larger.  When the story ended with Helmholtz making some confessions to the school nurse, Miss Peach, I wondered whether this story line would continue somewhere else.  And I wondered whether Miss Peach would show up again somewhere – she could be just as interesting as Helmholtz.

For an interesting post about George Helmholtz, check out this one from Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

“The No-Talent Kid”

I’ve grown to like George M. Helmoltz, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional Lincoln High band teacher.  He knows who he is and knows who he isn’t.  He goes for the gusto within these limitations -and usually gets it!  I’m only basing this observation on two stories that include Helmholtz, both contained in Vonnegut’s collection Bagombo Snuff Box.  If there are more, I look forward to reading them.

In Vonnegut’s “The No-Talent Kid”, Helmholtz tries to pass this view of life on to Walter Plummer, his C Band clarinet player who likes to challenge the A Band members.  Plummer eventually understands Helmholtz and they both help each other get what they want.  The wheeling and dealing between the high school teacher and his student amused me.

As in the other Helmholtz story I read, “Ambitious Sophomore”, the light enjoyment gained from reading this story is  just as much a testament to Vonnegut’s brilliance as some of his stories that have more of a social commentary attached to them.  I found this paragraph interesting as it gave a small inkling of Vonnegut’s World War II background:

While members of the C Band dropped out of the waltz, one by one, as though  mustard gas were coming out of the ventilation, Mr. Helmholtz continued to smile and wave his baton for the survivors, and to brood inwardly over the defeat his band had sustained in June, when Johnstown High School had won with a secret weapon, a bass drum seven feet in diameter.

Perhaps Mr. Helmholtz had been in the army during World War II?