Vintage Reading (16 page)

Sometimes Freud is prophetic, as when—almost half a century before the discovery of enkephalins in the brain—he posits “substances in the chemistry of our own bodies” that can leave us intoxicated.

Herr Freud on technology: “This newly won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which [we] may expect from life and has not made [us] feel happier.”

Civilization, says Freud, is the arena for the great “struggle between Eros and Death,” between the constructive and destructive forces forever at war within the human species. “And it is this battle of the giants,” he says, in a swipe at traditional religion, “that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.”

____________

By Sinclair Lewis
First published in 1925

Subtle it ain’t.

The characters in
Arrowsmith
, Sinclair Lewis’ novel about medical research, are, well,
characters
. Almus Pickerbaugh is the fervent public health director out to cheerlead and cow his street-spitting fellow citizens to the One True Way of Health. Max Gottlieb is the ascetic researcher devoted to Truth. Gustaf Sondelius is the boisterous, big-hearted, hard-drinking Swedish field scientist who can charm rats into turning over dead in their plague-bearing tracks. So faithfully do Lewis’ characters run true to type that when one of them does not—for instance, the officious research director Rippletown Holabird (love those names?)—you want to cheer.

No, don’t read Arrowsmith for nuances of personality.

And don’t read it for the plot, the twists and turns of which are often telegraphed in advance and are not entirely believable at that. As when the book’s idealistic protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, by now a scientist of international standing, treks off to the Vermont Woods to set up his test tubes untrammeled by bureaucratic overseers, discarding rich wife and child along the way.

Nor will the reader encounter great profundity here. Nor depths of poignancy. Nor sublime revelations.

No, one reads Lewis in general, and
Arrowsmith
in particular, for the chance to view the world through a rare, finely polished lens that shows up, in sometimes painful relief, the frailties of human nature and the superficialities of social intercourse.

Born in the tiny red brick town of Elk Mills in the fictional Midwestern
state of Winnemac, Martin Arrowsmith wants to be a doctor. He enrolls in the state medical school, where he comes under the spell of the great Gottlieb, a cranky German Jew of incisive intellect and driving curiosity. Martin vacillates, as he does all through the novel, between the call of the laboratory and that of the more lucrative examining bench. During his internship, he meets a no-nonsense nursing student, Leora, from a midwestern outback more provincial even than his own, marries her, and sets up a practice in her home town of Wheatsylvania, N.D.

Soon enough, wincing under the lash of small-town life, he lands a minor public health position as aide to the unforgettable Almus Pickerbaugh, poemslinger extraordinaire. There, between arresting public spitters and making up batches of vaccine, he squeezes in a little research. His work comes to the attention of Gottlieb, now installed at the prestigious McGurk Institute in New York. Arrowsmith joins his mentor there, only to find the tensions between the purity of research and the grubby realities of the outside world as strong as ever.

It is an inner story, this battle for Martin’s soul, that might seem ripe for a more “literary” telling, full of dark brooding. But Lewis tells it comically, an ear for dialogue his best instrument for puncturing balloons of pomposity, materialism and superficiality. As when Martin arrives in Wheatsylvania and meets Leora’s mother for the first time.

“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”

“Oh, yes, it was—well, it was pretty crowded.”

“Oh, was it crowded?”

“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”

“Were there? I suppose. Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you - was it very cold in the cities - Minneapolis and St. Paul?”

“Yes, it was pretty cold.”

“Oh, was it cold?”

Later, while working for Pickerbaugh, Martin encounters the cloddish Irv Watters, a classmate from back in medical school. Watters advises him:
“You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve picked up more than one highclass patient there.”

Near novel’s end, now married to Joyce, a wealthy society woman, Martin is caught up in his research, stays all night in the lab and misses yet another dinner party. Joyce is incensed. “Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?”

Arrowsmith
is full of that. It’s grand good fun to sneer and snicker at Lewis’ middle Americans. Until you realize they’re just like you.

____________

By Mark Twain
First published in 1873

Roughing It
is grand fun.

There’s Mark Twain, age 26, starting a campfire. There’s Mark Twain, failing to mind it. There’s a whole pine forest in the Nevada Territory going up in flames.

Another time the distractible Twain releases the bridles of the horses— who wander off, leaving him and his friends without food or water in the middle of a blizzard ...

Lapses like these may well account for Twain’s checkered employment history, as riverboat pilot, grocery clerk, law student, blacksmith, printer. He was, apparently, wholly unsuited to any life’s work—any, that is, but expressing the soul of Middle America in the 19th Century.

Roughing It
is travelogue, autobiography, history and compendium of Wild West lore all in one: The author, accompanying his brother to Nevada in the summer of 1861, stays six years. Beginning with the three-week overland stage crossing from St. Joseph, Mo.,
Roughing It
is the hearty, always entertaining chronicle of his adventures. In the full exuberance of youth, Twain already commands considerable literary powers.

Many of the stock characters of Hollywood Western lore make early appearances in these pages: Slade, the ultimate desperado—cold-blooded killer of 26 men, who ultimately dies on the gallows at the hands of vigilantes grown weary of his excesses of frontier bullyism; Slade’s wife, “a brave, loving, spirited woman,” who rides to the rescue, but too late.

And the Pony Express rider who gallops on alone, astride a “little wafer of a racing saddle,” with letters at $5 postage each strapped under his thighs250 miles
a day across the prairies and deserts. As Twain and the others aboard the overland stage spot him in the distance, “every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.”

Much of the author’s abundant fancy mixes with facts here. And yet with every tall tale, every flight of hyperbole, the reader encounters a telltale clue to set the record straight. Twain gives a man’s name as “Brown,” but is quick to inform us that “any name would do.” He tells us that a toothless old woman first reported as 165 years old may not be: “Being in calmer mood, now, I voluntarily knock off 100 years.” Despite humor and snap, Twain is no journalistic airhead. Wild yarns interspersed with soberly objective reportage yield few doubts as to which is which.

That’s important: Because as entertaining as all this is, the book’s 79 little chapters also come down to us as a potentially invaluable resource on Americana. Even offhand comments reveal much: For instance, wearied of hearing the same Horace Greeley story half a dozen times, Twain pleads with yet another prospective teller to “rather tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change”—suggesting how legendary
that
story had already become.

And has any historian ever given us a better-drawn portrait of the American boom town than Twain’s of Virginia City and the other towns of the Comstock Lode? Has any naturalist better briefly captured the beauty of a still-virgin Lake Tahoe? Has any linguist offered a funnier celebration of Western slang than the scene in which “Scotty” Briggs makes funeral arrangements with the new pastor just in from back East?

Twain explores terrain almost wholly male: To read it, one would think these lusty boom towns had no dance-hall girls, no wives, no mothers,—no women in any capacity whatever—and that neither sex nor the thought of it distracts these fortune hunters. How much this betrays what one critic has called Twain’s “sexual prudishness,” how much the true absence of women, and how much the single-minded hold that silver exerted on men’s imaginations is not clear. Clear only is that Twain loved it: “It was a wild,
free, disorderly, grotesque society!” he writes. “Swarming hosts of stalwart
men
—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine anywhere!”

But making good sport of the silver-lusting world around him, Twain never places himself outside or above it. He is a participant, charged with the same fever. Once, prospecting for gold, he mistakes a piece of mica-encrusted granite for the noble metal, and is promptly swept away with dreams of riches. He adds later: “Like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.”

Roughing It
is not mica, yet not gold, either; it doesn’t “weigh” enough. Think of it, instead, as a string of pearls—fine, fair and lustrous.

Good Reads, Best Sellers

A Study in Scarlet
— Arthur Conan Doyle

The Song of Hiawatha
— Henry W. Longfellow

The Rise of David Levinsky
— Abraham Cahan

Java Head
— Joseph Hergesheimer

Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight
— R. Austin Freeman

A Bell for Adano
— John Hersey

The Martian Chronicles
— Ray Bradbury

Gentleman’s Agreement
— Laura Z. Hobson

_________________________________

None among the volumes in this group makes serious claim to inclusion in the Great Canon of Western literature. Each, rather, occupies a smaller niche, being read today for its contribution to a particular genre, such as the detective story; or for how it illuminates a special moment in time or place; or for the few moments of fame it enjoyed as a best seller. These are, in short, lighter, smaller works. Of course, as Daniel Webster said of his alma mater, Dartmouth: “It is, sir, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.”

____________

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
First published in 1887

He never lived, say the miserly in spirit. Yet now, with the Victorian London in which he never lived 100 years gone, he lives.

A brand of English spring water immortalizes the address, 221b Baker Street, at which he never lived. A remark he never uttered introduces a chapter about memory in an American psychology text. The Late Movie dramatizes exploits he never performed.

Sherlock Holmes, the turn-of-the-century English detective, was the creation of one physician’s imagination. Yet Holmes has gained so devoted a following, has become so much part of our cultural vocabulary, that it seems to us as if he did live. (In
The People’s Almanac
, in fact, a biography of him appears, along with those of such other historical figures as Superman, Tarzan and the Lone Ranger.)

It is in
A Study in Scarlet
, first in a series of four novels and 56 short stories, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle breathed life into Holmes, and in it many of the elements of the Holmesian legend can already be seen: The hansom cabs clattering along cobblestoned London streets. Holmes’s blustering counterparts at Scotland Yard, Gregson and Lestrade. The landlady forever admitting to his quarters in Baker Street the makings of some new twist of plot.

And above all, Holmes himself. The miracle is that even after all the Basil Rathbones have played him in film and on the air, after countless successors to Conan Doyle have milked him for one new story after another, after a thousand magnifying glasses and ten thousand deerstalker caps have passed before our eyes as the veritable signature of the sleuthing profession, Holmes
remains as fresh as ever. That he’s not stale with age and overexposure by now testifies to the sheer magic of the Conan Doyle creation—a magic that rests not on such trappings as a deerstalker cap and inverness capes but on Holmes’ very character.

“I have found it! I have found it!” exults Holmes over a laboratory discovery he’s just made as Dr. Watson is introduced to him for the first time. “Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shown upon his features,” remarks Watson. Surely this boyish enthusiasm, this single-minded concentration on the matter at hand, this unselfconscious joy at simply doing what he’s doing, is part of what makes Holmes unforgettable...

Ah, but let us not forget the story in this short novel; there
is
a story, and rather a good one in this, Holmes’ and Watson’s first case together: An American from Cleveland is found dead in a vacant suburban house, with the inscription RACHE written in blood on the wall above the corpse. At the end of Part I, Holmes himself apprehends the murderer in a scene that looks as if it were written for the movies, though it preceded the first commercial motion picture by almost a decade. Part II transports the reader into the American Far West for the origins of the crime, and in the final pages Holmes tells how he deduced the identity of the culprit.

Sometimes, I am bound to report, it all seems a little far-fetched. The basis of the Holmes method is that the smallest clues may reveal important truths, and that one need only proceed through a series of logically connected steps to arrive at a solution. But does the mere appearance of a wedding band at the scene of the crime imply, as Holmes insists it does, that “Clearly the murderer had used it to remind his victim of some dead or absent woman?” Does the appearance of blood, when signs of struggle are not otherwise evident, give reason to think the perpetrator of the crime had sprung a nosebleed in his excitement and so is “a robust and ruddy-faced man?”