Findings

C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the throat, as I’ve come to expect Lewis’s books to do. But this morning, I begin to suspect that first response was misleading, because I’m still reflecting on some of its lines of thought. Perhaps this book is a seed, rather than a storm; its effects will be felt over time, rather than sweeping suddenly and dramatically onto the scene of my inner life.

As its title suggests, this is a series of letters, written to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. It’s the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and it was published posthumously. This site  provides some interesting information regarding the book’s evolution in Lewis’s mind and pen. Notably, the book was welcomed enthusiastically by its publisher, and regarded as his best effort since The Problem of Pain. (I’ve gathered some excerpts from Letters in this post.)

Lewis defined his audience as recent converts with no regular habit of prayer. He felt that existing books about prayer were written for more mature Christians, and he tries in this volume to address what he sees as the most basic obstacles. A few examples: How do you picture God? How do your mental pictures function in prayer? Why ask for things if God already knows? How do you imagine what’s happening when a finite being talks to an infinite Being? What about emotion? Should I use my own words or someone else’s? And so on.

Lewis does a pretty good job of tailoring his ideas to his audience. I was struck here, as I usually am in reading Lewis, by his humility. For a member of the intelligentsia, and surely one of its more brilliant stars, to want to write for laymen at all is noteworthy, and his overriding desire to communicate rather than show off is always evident. He’s not preachy, though at times he tosses off Latin phrases and references to a breadth and depth of reading that, though commonplace to him, won’t be shared by his audience. And although the book is “practical” in the sense that it keeps its focus on prayer, it delves deeply into theology in the course of addressing practical questions.

In my personal valuation of the book, what I appreciate most is the way it views God and his creation (including people) as connected in an ongoing creative act. This was put forth in The Problem of Pain too. Without belaboring a long and ineffective paraphrase of Lewis’s thought, I’ll just say that he has a way of providing imaginative categories for understanding spiritual realities that has the potential to revolutionize one’s prayer life far more than any single argument on a particular point can do.

I’m glad I read this, and I would recommend it to anyone else who may have run aground in the attempt to maintain a meaningful prayer life. When all is said and done, I don’t close the book with a checklist (”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayers,” or “Things to Do to Make God Do What I Want,” or “Heavenly Incantations”). I do close the book with a few very slight alterations in thinking — alterations at the deep level, where the rudder can change the course of the becalmed vessel in such a way as to pick up a whiff of welcome breeze.

I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles for the Decades challenge. It’s a collection of short stories about a colonization of Mars that spans about 30 years. In the introduction, Bradbury cites Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as his literary inspiration, another short story collection centering around a particular locale. At some point I’ll read that, too.

What would humanity do if it could start over on another planet? I didn’t enjoy the answers implied in this book much. The view of humanity is too dark for me. (I believe in original sin, so you know it must be pretty dark.) Apparently I’m in the minority. The front flap is just one example of the more typical response to this work: “Of all the dazzling stars in the vast Ray Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth’s settlement of the fourth world from the sun.”

Why so hyperbolic? Perhaps it’s partly because the book was published in 1950, when the dark view of Earthlings in general, and the American lifestyle in particular, wasn’t as fashionable and common as it is now. Perhaps it’s because it’s a quick read that doesn’t get bogged down in characterization or subtlety (in fact it doesn’t even make an attempt at these things). Or perhaps it’s because even such an unsophisticated sci-fi reader as I can recognize the way these stories crawl under the skin and evoke strong feelings — sometimes laughter, sometimes horror (of the pleasantly shivering variety), sometimes startlement (?) at its novelty. Some of the stories would make great Twilight Zone episodes. (Maybe some have…?)

When earthlings arrive on Mars and are greeted by a Martian woman too busy cleaning her house to be impressed, and when no subsequent Martians improve on her greeting, it makes for some pretty hilarious reading. When humans set up camp in the “New World” of Mars, their flaws and limitations are painfully exaggerated, and that makes for some horrific moments. And when Martians who relate telepathically get mixed with humans who rely on verbal exchange, all sorts of scenarios arise that Bradbury exploits cleverly.

Some of the scenes from this book will stick with me, so I guess that’s a testimony to its power. I may go on to read more Bradbury, then feel ashamed of this first impression of his work. But on the whole I didn’t enjoy it because it’s written from an essentially hopeless perspective. C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, for instance, introduces a Christian worldview and therefore a possibility of redemption for humanity in all its absurdity and vice. But here the view is bleak — at times, maddeningly so, because it preserves its bleakness by shutting out some dimensions of experience. It will be awhile before I know for sure whether this is a good book that I didn’t enjoy, or simply a book I didn’t enjoy. Based on the opinions of those better informed in the genre, I’m willing to withhold a judgment of its quality till I see how I feel about it down the road a bit.  

I’ve finished The Ill-Made Knight, the third tale of The Once and Future King. In this story we learn about Lancelot and Guenever, watch Arthur’s England continue to evolve, and observe the ways he continues tweaking his Round Table philosophy. 

It’s difficult to describe T.H. White’s narrative voice: startling, forceful, wry, deeply wise, matter-of-fact. It’s somewhere between Monty Python and… J.R.R. Tolkien? There’s a comic distance from the characters that’s achieved through bluntness, but such a sympathy for them, and such a detailed knowledge of the chivalric era he’s writing about.

There were a couple of storylines that I followed most attentively. One that carried over from the last book was Arthur’s developing theory about how to deal with Might vs. Right. In the last story he formed his philosophy of the Round Table as a way of harnessing the worship of strength and valor (Might), and using it to advance Right (rather than continuing to advance a civilization of knights knocking each other and everyone else around without any justification but sport). In this story he recognizes that the Round Table “must have been a step. Now we must think of making the next one… I ought to have rooted Might out altogether, instead of trying to adapt it.” He comes to the conclusion that the knights should fight for holy purposes: “If our Might was given a channel so that it worked for God, instead of for the rights of man, surely that would stop the rot, and be worth doing?” (Of course I was screaming “Nooo! No crusades!” But they didn’t listen…) All the knights head off in search of the holy grail. But by the end of the story Arthur is poised for another adaptation.

The other storyline is the story of Lancelot and Guenever, both of whose characters are developed magnificently and sympathetically as mixed people. I never did like Guenever much, but White makes a great effort to write about her with compassion. He writes of her aging, of her conflicted love, of her predicament as an aging medieval woman, in ways that are convincing.

Lancelot is more appealing as a truly tragic figure: ugly, moody, deeply religious, supposedly cruel but fanatically legalistic in compensation, prone to madness, superb as a knight, and full of love for both Arthur and Guenever. He’s the ill-made knight of the title, who we first meet staring into a helmet trying to see his reflection. “He was trying to find out what he was, and afraid of what he would find,” the narrator tells us:

The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life — even when he was a great man with the world at his feet — he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.

For the most part, White makes good on his promise not to chart out his characters neatly and reduce them to explanation. These three main characters are all complex mixtures of nobility and fallenness, and it was impossible not to find something I could relate to in each of them. It doesn’t return me to my life with a sense of orderliness, but with a fuller appreciation of the complicated and mysterious experience of being human. There’s one more story, The Candle in the Wind, that will complete the quartet, and I’ll be sorry to see it end. 

T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (193 is spoken of in my Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia as “a witty and erudite fantasy of Arthur’s boyhood, which combines affectionate satire on 20th-century English manners and mores with broad humor and deep knowledge of both nature and the Middle Ages.” Thank you, Benet’s, for capturing my own hyperbolic reaction to the book so compactly, because otherwise I might ramble on and on about what it is before getting to why I liked it. It’s not a children’s book, but it’s the most optimistic and lovingly written tale I’ve read in ages, and sometime before year’s end I’ll read (or reread, because I have a sinking feeling I’ve read them before but have virtually NO MEMORY of them!) the other tales that make up The Once and Future King. Here’s what I liked, in ascending order:

1.) The satire isn’t bitter. Take this short dialogue, in which two infinitely civil British noblemen prepare for a joust, as an example:

“Nice day,” said Sir Grummore.

“Yes, it is nice, what?”

“Been questin’ today?”

“Oh, yes, thank you. Always am questing, you know. After the Questing Beast.”

“Interestin’ job, that, very.”

“Yes, it is interesting. Would you like to see some fewmets?” (Fewmets are droppings of the beast pursued.)

“By Jove, yes. Like to see some fewmets.”

“I have some better ones at home, but these are quite good, really.”

“Bless my soul. So these are her fewmets.”

“Yes, these are her fewmets.”

“Interestin’ fewmets.”

“Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Only you get tired of them,” added King Pellinore.

“Well, well. It’s a fine day, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is rather fine.”

“Suppose we’d better have a joust, eh, what?”

Jousting is an absurd tradition, the narrator seems to say, but you can’t help but love these good-natured old “fellahs” who have time for polite conversation as they prepare to try and ram one another through. It reminds me of a kinder, gentler Monty Python. At first passages like this bothered me a bit, because they’re very leisured and slowed me down. I’ve become (to my irritation) someone who’s always in a hurry to get through this book and on to the next one, and this book doesn’t consent to being “gotten through”; it meanders. Once I was reconciled to that, I found myself smiling and chuckling often. The book is filled with eccentric characters, and passages like these, that acknowledge the silliness of much of human life without getting riled up about it. The fun is broken up periodically by moments of startling pathos, and these episodes show that the book is more than a lighthearted romp; its optimism is convincing because it includes the whole spectrum of experience.

2.) The philosophy of education makes me wish I were a wizard like Merlyn, the tutor in this story. Want to learn about aquatic life? Become a fish, like Merlyn causes the Wart to do. (The Wart is a mere boy in this story, but destined to become the legendary King Arthur.) Birds? Become a hawk for a night. Or an ant. Or a goose. Or, in the culminating chapter on the Wart’s education, a badger. No notebooks. No textbooks. No, I take that back; there are a few schoolroom subjects, but they’re not at all the meat and potatoes of Merlyn’s instruction. There’s a running comparison between the “first rate eddication” of Sir Kay (the Wart’s nobleman peer), and that of the Wart, that continually pits book-learning against the far more effective and high-stakes school of experience. The Wart’s education is part of what distinguishes him, for Merlyn doesn’t give Sir Kay the same advantages.

As a homeschooler supposedly following the classical model, I find Merlyn’s style of teaching-by-zapping mighty appealing. So does the Wart: “I think I ought to have some eddication,” he tells Merlyn on one particularly dreary day. “I can’t think of anything else to do.” Merlyn is offended: “You think education is something which ought to be done when all else fails?” he demands. “Well, some sorts of education,” the Wart replies miserably. I love this perception of education as entertainment! But by the end of the story, the badger hones down the purpose of learning to two goals: “So Merlyn sent you to me to finish your education,” he remarks to the Wart. “Well, I can teach you two things — to dig, and love your home. These are the true end of philosophy.” I like the badger’s perspective, living as I do in an age when education is often seen as the mere acquisition of information. The badger suggests we need to desire knowledge enough to dig for it, and then let love dictate how we put it to use.

3.) Third and last, I like the novel’s concept of heroism. The Wart is thoroughly convincing as a young boy. He’s distinguished from Sir Kay and others in the story not as a superhero gifted with unusual strength or wisdom, but as someone who’s curious, humble, honest, polite and brave, haunted by a persistent wish to be a knight even though he’s destined for most of the story to be a mere steward. At his defining moment, when he’s faced with the sword in the stone, what comes to his aid is not bravery or strength but love: all the animals he’s met appear at the edges of the scene and shout encouragement. “Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer,” calls a bird. The Wart’s qualifications to be king include a deep understanding and respect not just for human life and affairs, but for all the living world. His defining act that proves his mettle as a king is public and undisputable. And his power and position come to him unsought, by surprise. In the midst of this year of presidential candidates vying for power, Arthur’s fitness to lead represents quite a contrast. An Arthurian president would be just the thing: undisputed readiness to govern, excellently balanced education that doesn’t lean in a sickly way toward either theory or practice, and an ability to rally all voices in the natural world. I know it’s childish, but if only the choice in “real life” could be as clear-cut as it is in this fantasy tale.  

Embedded in the rollicking fun of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone is this gem: 

“Sometimes,” he said, “life does seem to be unfair. Do you know the story of Elijah and the Rabbi Jachanan?”

“No,” said the Wart.

He sat down resignedly upon the most comfortable part of the floor, perceiving that he was in for something like the parable of the looking-glass.

“This rabbi,” said Merlin, “went on a journey with the prophet Elijah. They walked all day, and at nightfall they came to the humble cottage of a poor man, whose only treasure was a cow. The poor man ran out of his cottage, and his wife ran too, to welcome the strangers for the night and to offer them all the simple hospitality which they were able to give in straitened circumstances. Elijah and the Rabbi were entertained with plenty of the cow’s milk, sustained by home-made bread and butter, and they were put to sleep in the bed while their kindly hosts lay down before the kitchen fire. But in the morning the poor man’s cow was dead.”

“Go on.”

“They walked all the next day, and came that evening to the house of a very wealthy merchant, whose hospitality they craved. The merchant was cold and proud and rich, and all that he would do for the prophet and his companion was to lodge them in a cowshed and feed them on bread and butter. In the morning, however, Elijah thanked him very much for what he had done, and sent for a mason to repair one of his walls, which happened to be falling down, in return for his kindness.

“The Rabbi Jachanan, unable to keep silence any longer, begged the holy man to explain the meaning of his dealings with human beings.

“‘In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably,’ replied the prophet, ‘it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness God took the cow instead of the wife. I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered the treasure. Say not therefore to the Lord: What doest Thou? But say in thy heart: Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?’”

“It is a nice sort of story,” said the Wart, because it seemed to be over.

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a brussels sprouts book for me. For some reason the M.A.S.H. episode where Radar is in love with someone musical, and Hawkeye Pierce coaches him that he should respond to anything said about Bach with a knowing “Ahhhh, Bach!” comes to mind. This is one of those well-known books I’d like to be able to discuss with a knowing “Ahhh, Mrs. Dalloway!” But instead I can only say that I appreciate at least part of its literary artistry, I can feel its heartbreak, but I can’t say I’ve plumbed its depths or, truth be told, come away feeling satisfied or enriched from reading it.

Clarissa Dalloway is planning a party, and the entire novel takes place in this one day in London, narrated from within the perspective of several characters: Clarissa, her husband Richard, her old flame Peter, rigidly religious Miss Kilman, and a ravaged, suicidal war veteran named Septimus Smith. I read somewhere that Smith is the character into which Woolf pours her own suicidal consciousness, having struggled with depression and attempted suicide herself more than once by the time of the novel’s writing, and destined to die eventually by drowning herself.

The novel was a difficult read partly because of its style, a modified stream-of-consciousness that keeps us encased in the private thoughts of its narrators. It wasn’t as bad as Ulysses; there’s at least some syntax here. But this type of narrative forces us to wade through the associational ways that minds work, jumping from one subject to another, and from one temporal context to another, without explanation. My copy was from the public library and was not annotated, so it’s possible that the characters were alluding to significant historic events that I just didn’t pick up on without footnotes. But much of it seemed like, uh… drivel. (As is the case with most of us, if someone could capture our thought processes on paper!) It takes real work to stay focused on the text — work which I sometimes did, sometimes didn’t, do.

Here are some of the themes I did pick up on, most of them pretty sad. One is the failure of marriage in every instance. Why do the marriages fail? Peter and Clarissa both reflect on the way women become mouthpieces for their husbands and lose themselves, so there’s a commentary on patriarchal society and class restrictions. Another reason — Clarissa’s reason — is that in order to escape this, she chooses a kind, wealthy, appropriately classed man who gives her space. “For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house,” Clarissa reflects early on. On the face of it that sounds like wisdom. But it turns out that in choosing Richard Dalloway, Clarissa rejected Peter Walsh — who loves her passionately and would have ended up a much more intimate companion than Dalloway.

The novel takes place years after their marriage and finds Clarissa still solitary. “She could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet,” the narrator tells us:

She could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. 

The brief reference in this chapter to her possible homosexual tendencies isn’t revisited. It’s not a book about that. This is one of a few passages where Woolf seems to be trying to make the point that Clarissa was once undiscriminatingly passionate, not always the frigid, varnished surface we find her now. It’s the idea of contact, or rather the lack thereof, that the story is preoccupied with.

In any case, she still spends great mental energy justifying her marriage choice. Peter too spends most of the novel thinking about her, and clearly still in love with her. But they are separated now by marriage and by the direction their lives have taken. Similarly Clarissa’s husband Richard, though they live together amiably, can’t tell her he loves her, and doesn’t share a room with her.

Failure to connect seems to be the central theme of the story. Septimus Smith isn’t given compassionate medical attention. Characters think obsessively about each other, but don’t make actual contact beyond unbearably superficial conventions. No one has the resources to deal with humanity. Maybe that’s why Big Ben is such a presence throughout, punctuating the day with its chimes, marking the contrast between the private, associational time of the characters as they struggle to make sense of the past, and the outer, sequential time of the clock.

It’s a good metaphor for the way conventions impose a mold on humanity in the story, but relentlessly, failing to acknowledge any of the unpredictable depths of real people, and failing to provide any way for them to meet and find meaning. For Clarissa, solitude = independence, and she lives as a shiny shell avoiding human contact, convincing herself that her mere impressions of others are the same as relationship. For Septimus Smith, death is preferable to any of the options presented. But for me, finishing the novel and closing it with a sigh was enough!

How would a society composed exclusively of women function? This is the question Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes up in Herland  (1915), a tale about three male adventurers who go exploring (and are held captive) in this unique, highly civilized, well-protected country. I chose this title for the Decades Challenge because “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the most gripping short stories I’ve ever read, and though this novel doesn’t rise to the same level, it proves an intriguing meditation on femininity, masculinity, motherhood, and what it takes to make a healthy society.

Herland is a utopian novel in the same vein as Thomas More’s Utopia, or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Most of the stories in this tradition, it seems to me, work best as satires - they expose our foibles by poking fun at them. The three young men in this tale are extreme male “types”: the narrator, Vandyck Jennings, is (conveniently) a sociologist; his companion Jeff Margrave is an emotional, artistic doctor; and Terry Nicholson is a hyper-masculine conquistador and chauvinist interested in “facts” and “ologies.”

These three seek out Herland deliberately, compelled by visions of harems and fluttering eyelashes. What they find instead is a tribe of Valkyrie-like women: strong, athletic, stern, kind, nonviolent (which is where my Valkyrie comparison falls apart), and unfailingly patient. Their solidarity is impenetrable. They’re Gilman’s ideal of motherhood, which is the gravitational center of Herland. “You see, they were Mothers,” Vandyck tells us, “not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere ‘instinct,’ a wholly personal feeling; it was — a religion.”  

What does this mean for the kind of femininity they exude? This is a subject of ongoing debate among the three young men. Jeff worships them; Terry despises them, insisting that they’re all old maids; the narrator struggles to make up his mind about this breed of women that never argue (they think in terms of “we”), are never jealous (there are no men to incite competetiveness), and are utterly self-sufficient physically. They’re strong, they’re highly intelligent, and they are “progenetic” - i.e. they reproduce by virgin birth. Population control? They’ve got it covered. Agriculture? Medicine? Philosophy? History? Covered. All of it. They’re even more highly evolved than Stepford - and they operate by a scale of values that couldn’t be more different.

In this country of women, men are not needed for any of the essentials. So what happens to them in Herland? Do they have anything to add? Are they able to appreciate a highly organized, cooperative, brilliantly designed, perfectly cared-for culture created by women? What about sex in a land where it’s neither necessary for reproduction nor part of the relational texture of the culture? Gilman plays with all of these questions, critiquing the attitudes and characteristics of maleness and male-centrism.

I didn’t mind the book, but I wasn’t sorry to finish it. Unlike “The Yellow-Wallpaper,” which is narrated convincingly from within a female point of view, this story’s male narrator never develops into more than a mouthpiece. Herland is so perfect it seems ponderous after awhile. And as someone who adores my children, but doesn’t swoon over idealized Motherhood, I wasn’t enthralled with Gilman’s vision. Though there are a few insights into the tension between male and female that made me chuckle, on the whole the story goes on for too long. I value it as a snapshot of America from an early 20th century feminist lens. But despite having a premise that could make for a fun story, it’s too heavy-handed, and too lacking in true satirical wit, to be very enjoyable to read.  

I know it’s famous. I know it was a successful movie. But I had settled into grim dislike for it and was bearing down on the final pages before it suddenly and surprisingly won me over.

I chose E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) because I expected to like it. It’s a novel about inner passions in conflict with outer social constraints, and we accompany Lucy Honeychurch as she comes to terms with her own feelings and makes a decision whether to marry George Emerson (slightly unconventional and slightly beneath her class) or Cecil Vyse (your basic snob, and her mother’s choice for her). What I struggled with was Forster’s flippancy. His narrative voice seemed to look down on his thoroughly British cast of characters as trivial people. Surely at some level they are, particularly the brittle clergyman Mr. Eager, and Lucy’s spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett. But they were so predictable they seemed to belong in a cartoon, and I couldn’t understand where Forster got his reputation as an expert at drawing psychologically true characters.

He certainly won my respect, because even though my mind was made up to dislike the book, I found myself arrested starting in chapter 14 (out of 20) by sentences like these:

A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle but bewildering to practice…

But Lucy had developed since the spring. That is to say, she was now better able to stifle the emotions of which the conventions and the world disapprove.

He’s only for an acquaintance. He is for society and cultivated talk. He should know no one intimately, least of all a woman.

For all his culture, Cecil was an ascetic at heart, and nothing in his love became him like the leaving of it.

And last but not least, this terrific passage:

It did not do to think, nor, for that matter, to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters - the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.

By the time I read these lines I cared about what happened to Lucy. I’m not sure if Forster cared for her himself all along and I just missed it, or if he developed more sympathy for her himself as he wrote, but by the end I was much better able to appreciate his tale and his insight into character.

This is a story about pushing through “muddle” (a phrase repeated several times) and attaining the courage and self-possession required to see life clearly, and therefore appreciate a room with a view. Next step is to watch the movie, which somehow I’ve completely missed.

What does evil do to a soul? And how would you live if the only marks it left were preserved visibly in a secret work of art? Apparently for Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the answer is, “as decadently as possible.” The story’s vapid pretty-boy protagonist prays for eternal youth in exchange for a painting that bears all the burden of his soul, then spirals downward through various forms of degeneracy until he finally commits murder and (by accident) suicide.

Reading this brought similar stories to mind. For instance, it takes up the same question as Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, which tells the tale of a wealthy optometrist who has his mistress murdered, then lives in terror that he’ll be found out. He believes “the eyes of God are everywhere.” But no one ever catches him, and he lives happily ever after.

Interestingly enough, he has a counterpart in this story: Lord Henry Wotton, a wealthy playboy and esthete who worships superficial, value-free beauty. (In this book there is such a thing.) Moral goodness bores him. He instills this value in young Dorian Gray, who carries it to such an extreme that evil eventually becomes “a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”

But while Lord Henry seems comfortable with his decadence, and never suffers any real consequences, Dorian Gray never quite makes his peace with it. Lord Henry knows how to walk the line without losing reputation, and even makes a name for himself as a naughty boy for his witty and heartless epigrams. But Dorian, though his appearance remains youthful and unspoiled, and though he has the advantages of wealth and social standing, develops a reputation as a truly evil man. We don’t get graphic examples of what this means, but we do learn that everyone close to him either commits suicide or grows to despise him. Finally he murders Basil Hallward, the artist who painted his picture in the first place. Then, in trying to destroy the picture, he ends up destroying himself.

Did I enjoy reading this book? Well, as one of my more sophisticated professors used to say, “It has its langeurs.” Translation: it’s got a big dead spot in the middle, full of tedious descriptions of Dorian Gray’s eccentric hobbies and collections. And the experience of reading the book forced me to hang out longer than I ordinarily do with people I don’t like (i.e. this cast of characters). “Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence” when the novel was published, reads the flyleaf. “A few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment.” Given the story’s severe moral verdict on Dorian Gray, who dies as a result of his sins, it’s ironic that Wilde himself is similarly destroyed by a work of art.

I’m tired tonight. My mother in law took the girls and I to see Disney Princesses on Ice– where I saw 6 or 7 versions of the same story.

Now I’m reading Dorian Gray. (I’m about halfway through it.) And I find myself face to face with the worship of beauty again. This time it’s through the character of Lord Henry, an esthete who’s made it his business to corrupt the young and charming Dorian Gray, who’s sold his soul to a work of art, asking for eternal youth in exchange for his portrait taking the brunt of his aging and decadence. (Wow. I just counted, and there are 50 words in that terrible sentence.)

It’s interesting to me how all of his upper crust friends are shocked by Lord Henry, but all adore him. He’s never at a loss for dinner invitations. The more shocking he is, the more sought-after he is. He’s really a beastly man. Beauty of a soulless, brittle, surface variety is his supreme value. Or maybe value isn’t the right word, because he doesn’t seem to truly value anything. As Dorian Gray points out, he “cuts life to pieces with his epigrams.” Even when Dorian first sees that his portrait is changing, and tells Lord Henry, “I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous,” the only response Lord Henry can make is, “A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it.”

I’m familiar enough with the basic gist of the story to know that Dorian Gray is the one headed for tragedy. But I’m curious to know what happens to Lord Henry, the representative of fashionable society. Will he develop a soul? Does Wilde want him to? Is he a bad guy– or a good guy in Wilde’s eyes? Why is it that the young and tender Dorian Gray seems pointed toward disaster, while Lord Henry is the picture of the well-accepted, suave society man? He could get away with murder, and people would say, “You naughty man! You shock me! Won’t you come to dinner on Tuesday?”

Now that I have some questions, I’m off see what my trusty Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia has to say (if anything) on these matters. (Some more intelligent people might have done this first. But.)