Fighting Words

In the past few months I've been trying to catch up on my reading of the "classics" of American literature. I've found that once people learn you majored in English, you often are expected to be well-versed in all such works. Unfortunately, in my case, I was a fairly disingenuous English major (I like to emphasize the '-writing' part of my English-writing degree, as I generally shunned the traditional American canon--and that of Europe, Asia, Africa or anywhere else, for that matter). In truth, the zenith of my belletristic consumption during those years lay somewhere between back copies of Sports Illustrated and copy from the back of my cereal boxes.

I generally avoided the likes of Baldwin, Steinbeck, Mailer and Whitman, except, of course, in those instances when I was without other recourse (such as my senior seminar that focused solely on the works of only one writer -- Emily Dickinson). To the surprise of some, I received exemplary grades in my literature courses. However, to the surprise of few, such achievement has thus far been of little value in the job market. (That includes my experiences applying to work, in part, for the Emily Dickinson museum and another job for which I interviewed with a hiring manager who wrote her senior thesis on the Nun of Amherst.)

There was one class I particularly enjoyed, ironically titled "Classic Fiction." We took on works such as Lolita, Slaughterhouse-Five and Lord of the Flies. But certainly outside of class, my literary intake was limited.

But now, while I have an abundant amount of free time, a shelf full of unread books and an inkling that pursuing graduate school may linger in my near future, I have decided having a slightly deeper reading repertoire may not be such a bad idea after all.

I started a few months ago with the granddaddy of all American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As for a review, I agree largely with Hemingway's assessment of the book, though I don't think it's THE best (but as for what is better, I'm not sure):

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' If you read it you must stop where the N***** Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

Next I worked through most of an old anthology of short stories from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thurber, Barthelme and the like. I liked some of it. Mostly the wittier ones. After that, I delved for the third or fourth time into Catch-22, and this time I did manage to finish it. The first chapter is, unfortunately, a bit like finding the pot of gold before seeing the rainbow. I think that is what thwarted my prior attempts--I was absorbed at the beginning only to have the war-story fold in on itself so many times over its 400-plus pages I just couldn't stomach it. Heller's wordplay, which proves at the onset playful and bouncy, soon becomes tiresome and flat. But over a few weeks, I made my way through it and found the last hundred pages or so, when the storyline begins to move forward again, quite enjoyable.

After that, I took a break from war-torn and forlorn fiction and took up a piece of modern non-fiction, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. A shorter and sparser work, I devoured it in about three days. It chronicles the tragedy that killed more than a dozen people on Mount Everest in 1996. Not exactly light subject matter, but it was told compellingly, and at least the subject was people who put themselves in grave danger by choice, not by draft, as was the case in Heller's work. It is probably the best non-fiction book I've read.

But now, alas, I've been deployed again to wartime writing. I'm about a quarter of the way through Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, not enough yet to form a real opinion of the story. I'm torn over his writing style. I tend to have a preference for authors who previously worked as journalists, such as Hemingway, Vonnegut, David Halberstam and Mitch Albom. Their literature tends to reflect their news training, with generally simple sentence structure and brevity, yet great aptitude for describing setting and building character, presumably honed by having to make the printed word compelling on newsprint in a limited number of column inches. However, Hemingway's is almost so devoid of any unnecessary words that it is at times halting and less than reader-friendly. We'll see, though.

The original point of this post, actually, was to discuss the large volume of war literature that has become regarded as classic. I suppose, in short, that's due to the range of human emotion felt during war by so many different parties. But that will have to suffice, because I've already written some 800 words and buried the lead. And that doesn't fly in the blogosphere.

*Image from wikipedia.*