Vintage Reading (17 page)

No matter. It is not to cavil at holes in his logic that we read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It is to stand in the presence of a uniquely engaging character who enjoys himself and his work.

____________

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow First appeared in 1855

Poets, “serious” ones at least, no longer write like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, no longer write epic poems like
The Song of Hiawatha.

Hiawatha is frankly sentimental. It calls up a part of our national story— American Indian life before the white man—that many of us would as soon leave to the two paragraphs our textbooks ordinarily give it. It lacks every trace of the hard-edged cynicism of our age. Its hero is a hero, not an antihero, spy or gangster. And it’s written in a verse form that cries to be read
out loud.

But
Hiawatha
can be quite wonderful—if you, in turn, can suspend your end-of-the-century Hard Times disbelief and confront, like a child again, the occasional nobility of our species; if you’re willing to meet a moccasinclad primitive who talks to birds and prays to the Great Spirit; who tenderly cares for his wife, named Laughing Water; who devotedly loves his brothers-in-spirit, Kwasind and Chibiabos; who seeks only good for his people, the Ojibways, and peace for all the Indian Nation.

Longfellow was “overpraised in his time, underrated in our own,” as one critic sums up his reputation as a poet. But this product of an old-line New England family, who went to school with Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a scholar, too. He taught at Bowdoin College and at Harvard. He was a world traveler, an expert linguist. His Maine boyhood, when local tribes still inhabited surrounding forests, inspired his interest in American Indian culture—though he at first knew little about the history, arts, superstitions, customs or religions, in which
The Song of Hiawatha
is so steeped.

A Mohawk chief named Hiawatha did, as it happens, once live; history
credits him with bringing warring Iroquois tribes together in peace. But there all likeness between fact and fiction ends. Longfellow’s study of the
Kalevala,
a Finnish epic, furnished him with the rhythm, and some of the story, of his own epic. And the writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who for 13 years lived with Great Lakes Indian tribes, at last gave him the locale, the lore and the legends he could weave into
Hiawatha.

And oh, what lovely legends they are: How the four winds came to be, and how Mudjekeewis, the West Wind, seduced the daughter of Nokomis, who “bore a son of love and sorrow/Thus was born my Hiawatha.” How Hiawatha thrice wrestled Mondamin, overcame him and buried him as he had asked to be buried: “Make a bed for me to lie in/Where the rain may fall upon me/Where the sun may come and warm me”—and from whose grave grew man’s first corn.

This is a
song
of Hiawatha, and it draws much of its impact from its music—from the relentless, hypnotic cadence of its unrhymed trochaic tetrameter (“BY the SHORES OF GITCH-e GU-me, BY the SHIN-ing BIG sea WA-ter”); from its insistent alliteration; from its uncannily powerful repetition; from its sense-dripping naturalistic imagery...

There comes a time in reading
Hiawatha
not unlike what one experiences on a camping vacation, about the fourth day out: the abrupt realization that all those meadows, brooks and woods, all those deer and squirrels, herons and gulls, are not just another “attraction” somehow in competition with the city, but things apart, in a world of their own, something unspoiled by man that must remain so. Longfellow’s epic sounds just such a profoundly reverential note.

It’s easy to make fun of all this.
Hiawatha
is like a poem rated “G,” for General Audiences, that “sophisticated” readers may too readily disdain. It does speak of battles and blood, of famine and toil; yet it never submerges the reader in it, keeps him ever at a safe distance. Its terrain is tender sentiments— which, sadly, often leaves
Hiawatha
consigned to the children’s room at the library. As if the rest of us, adults, have nothing to learn from Hiawatha’s goodness. As if we have no business being inspired by the nobility of Hiawatha’s character.

____________

By Abraham Cahan
First published in 1917

“For my first meal in the New World I bought a 3-cent wedge of coarse rye bread, off a huge round loaf, on a stand on Essex Street.”

Our immigrant forebears, any we know yet alive, mostly come to us as wrinkled, creaking octogenarians. How breathtaking, then, to be plunked down into their own time, to meet them as youths newly come to these shores!

The Rise of David Levinsky
has been called an “unrivaled record of a great historical experience.” Through it, the Lower East Side which the immigrant Jews filled to the bursting with their numbers and their energy reaches us as they themselves experienced it—their youthful faces turned in hope, and some anxiety, toward their American future.

All the cliches of the immigrant experience come alive: David Levinsky arrives in New York, at the receiving center known as Castle Garden, fresh from a little town in Russia, and is immediately swept up into the city’s streets. His head is full of Talmud, that many-volumed body of rabbinic commentary that speaks of the relationship of man to man and of man to God. His heart is with his dead mother, killed by town rowdies back in Russia. He must find a place to sleep. He must find means of livelihood.

Whatever he was, he can no longer be; America is too different. “The scurry and bustle of the people were not merely overwhelmingly greater... than in my native town. It was of another sort. The swing and step of the pedestrians, the voices and manner of the street peddlers, and a hundred and one other things seemed to testify to far more self-confidence and energy, to larger ambitions and wider scopes.”

So America takes this pious Talmud student and makes of him a
millionaire manufacturer of women’s dresses.
The Rise of David Levinsky
chronicles just how—and tells of the price he paid in loneliness, severed roots and diminished spirit.

This is a story of our grandparents and great-grandparents, of what America did to them and what they did to it; it is a story of our middle past, that magically compelling interlude of years every generation possesses... The distant past, of Crusades and Renaissance, comes to us straight from the history books, and so may forever remain remote. The recent past—the times we ourselves remember, like the moon landing or the O.J. Simpson trail—suffer from overfamiliarity. It’s the middle past—that time just beyond our own that we read about in books and also hear about from those who have lived it—that is most apt to be left awash in feeling. Such a time may cast a bewitching spell—but also become prey to sentiment and nostalgic distortion.

This is what
David Levinsky
—“a minor masterpiece of genre realism,” Irving Howe has called it—so adroitly sidesteps. Written by journalist Abraham Cahan, who for half a century edited what was arguably the premier Yiddish newspaper in the world, the
Jewish Daily Forward
, it works by piling up journalistic detail—even if the piling is done with little stylistic grace.

There is no pining away for abstractions like “the Old Country” here. Rather, Levinsky longingly recalls the “huddle of ramshackle one-story houses” known as Abner’s Court in which he lived with his mother. The crowded streets of the Lower East Side live in Levinsky’s memory concretely, in the image of “a big, florid-faced huckster shouting at the top of his husky voice: ‘Strawberri-i-ies, strawberri-i-ies, five cents a quart!’”

There’s much more to
Levinsky,
of course, than this. Like the poignant story of a failed romantic life standing beside magnificent business success. And the implied indictment, in Levinsky’s ultimate loneliness, of a soulless America. Finally, in the way the book recalls how Jewish immigrants, almost by themselves, built the modern ladies’ garment industry, it stands, as John Higham once wrote in the introduction to a 1960 edition, “among the best novels of American business.”

Mr. Higham noted that since its publication, “this memorable novel has received more respect than attention.”
Levinsky
is memorable and deserves the respect—but also, for anyone wishing to understand the American Jew at century’s end, the attention.

____________

By Joseph Hergesheimer
First published in 1918

Java Head
is set in the New England port of Salem in the mid-19th century. It is a time when swift new clipper ships are transforming the shipping business, when smaller, less commercially aggressive towns like Salem are being left behind by Boston and New York. The whole story takes place here, on land, yet is tinged with the romance of the sea and the mystery of the Orient.

The Ammidons are a prosperous shipping family who live in a home that the crusty old patriarch of the clan, Jeremy, has built and named “Java Head,” with its intimations of safe harbor reached after a storm-tossed voyage. His son William lives there with his wife Rhoda and their four daughters, and runs the family business, through he’s scarcely set foot on a sailing vessel. Jeremy’s other son, Gerrit, is a ship’s captain with little interest in the business side of shipping, and little use for the weary conventions of the land. As the book opens, he and his ship,
Nautilus
, are months late in returning to port.

Then Gerrit does come home, which is when the trouble begins. For he brings with him a wife. Her name is Taou Yuen, and she is a Manchu princess.

The family, the whole town, are flabbergasted. If America already trumpeted its pluralism back then, Salem did not. And Taou Yuen, in her white powdered face and flowery silks, with her emotional reserve and heathen ways, is enough to leave the locals speechless. No one can believe Gerrit has actually married her. Indeed—and this forms a central premise of the story— most don’t consider their union legitimate at all. “What I can’t understand,” says brother William, “is why you call it a marriage, why you brought your woman here to us, to Rhoda and the children.”

One townsperson, however, reacts otherwise. Edward Dunsack, son of an old shipmate of Jeremy, has spent years in China and become infected with its mysteries. Edward speaks Chinese fluently, sees himself as far above Salem’s crude Occidental sensibilities, fancies himself more spiritually congenial with the Manchu noblewoman—and sets out to steal her from her husband.

To do that, he turns to Nettie Vollar, the illegitimate daughter of his sister and the visible object of Gerrit’s attentions last time he was home. Their relationship broken up by Edward’s Bible-thumping father, Nettie has been left emotionally crippled. Now Edward plots to enlist her, and her anguish, in his efforts to gain Taou Yuen for himself.

The anchor to the story—solid, constant, immutable—is Salem and its denizens. Yet only William, among the main characters, truly fits in—and he’s portrayed as lackluster and self-righteous. Virtually all the other major characters cling to the fringes of town life. Gerrit is more at home on a heaving quarterdeck than mid the “nauseous hypocrisy, the pretension of a piety covering commercial dishonesty, obscenity of thought and spreading scandal” of Salem, and seems ineffably drawn to those the town rejects. Such as Tauo Yuen, heathen and foreigner. Or the notorious Nettie, largely excluded from Salem’s social life. Edward, meanwhile, safe in his darkened room, smokes opium and dresses in black silk Chinese robes.

Java Head
, then, is about individuals at war with their time, and their surroundings. The house of that name embodies the tension—between all that’s safe and familiar, on Pleasant Street and the dark appeal of foreign places and foreign ways.

Hergesheimer’s story employs two special vocabularies—that of the sea and of the Orient. But while he’s plainly studied up on them, he consigns them to ghettos within the book. We witness Taou Yuen’s elaborate make-up rituals; Dunsack’s reveries on Chinese wisdom; Jeremy’s salty sea monologues. But they feel alien, incompletely integrated into the book. This intriguing novel retains the stamp of Salem far more than it does that of the Orient, or of the sea.

In a myriad of ways it says,
You are the place and the circumstances out of which you came, and never any other.

____________

By R. Austin Freeman
First published in 1930

Why do so many otherwise gripping murder mysteries keep you in suspense for 300 pages and then, in the final paragraphs, leave you feeling cheated?

R. Austin Freeman’s
Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight
proves it needn’t be. Here’s a mystery with the ultimate in satisfying endings. The reader’s faith is rewarded, his questions answered. Everybody gets what he or she deserves. Love conquers.

Of course, considering that the murder occurs at the outset, and that we know who did it, and why, this is one murder mystery that’s no mystery at all: A loathsome, lumbering bear of a man, James Lewson, calls at the quiet country home of Marcus Pottermack, a clean-featured gentleman of lively intelligence. Blackmail is Lewson’s game; Pottermack’s past can stand no scrutiny. But Lewson has come calling one time too many. Pottermack won’t pay. Lewson rages. The men fight. Pottermack knocks him against the stone edge of the garden well, killing him. Lewson’s body slides down the well. “From the black pit issued vague, echoing murmurs, followed presently by a hollow, reverberating splash; and after that, silence.”

Chapter 2, of 18, is not yet over.

The next day, it’s discovered that a clerk named Lewson has absconded with bank funds; no one suspects him dead. Dr. John Thorndyke, a medicallytrained detective, takes an unofficial interest in the case. Soon, he’s poking around Pottermack’s gate (and spying on him over the garden wall with a periscope camouflaged as a cane). The book is barely a third through and Thorndyke’s hot on the scent. The plot is unraveling entirely too quickly, it
seems, to sustain for long.