Tag: last novels

Chips from the Hanging Spar – Melville’s Last Works

Melville would seem to have had a fairly miserable old age, ending with his death of cardiac failure at the age of 72.  No wonder his heart gave out.  After an initial success with books about sailing in the South Seas (Typee, Omoo, among others), Melville struck out with Moby-Dick (the greatest American novel that the NYTimes misspelled the title of in his obituary) and then again with Pierre (“Herman Melville Crazy” read a headline).  At the age of 38, he seemed to be washed up.  His last full novel, The Confidence-Man, didn’t help his reputation.  It is, however, a novel worth reading and a book of our time, of illusion and disillusion.  Not long ago, Philip Roth said that “the relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”

The characters in Melville’s novel are either scammers or those who are just asking to be scammed.  It asks the brilliant question as to why we are so prone to believe what we want to believe and not to look for the truth.  One of the most interesting passages in this regard involves an old person and is worth quoting here.  A “confidence man” is talking to a man from Missouri (no one seems to have names) about the conning of an old man on the steamer they all are traveling on.  The Missourian has just finished telling the old sick man that he shouldn’t trust in the natural remedies sold to him by the doctor/con man and the con man argues that it would be “pitiless” to take away the old man’s hope:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you [the old man].  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

Truth is too hard to bear in old age – and so we turn to religion, medicine, what? One might think of Jung’s call for religion as a source of “psychic hygiene” for one approaching death.  But of more interest here is Melville’s disillusionment with life.  There is none of that in Moby-Dick.  While there is the evil of Ahab, Moby-Dick is a tale of the cooperative effort of a shipload of very different men who work together to a common end.  Something has changed for Melville with time and age.  The taste of life has gone sour. 

But this was not Melville’s final statement.  I prefer to think of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd as his last judgment on life.  There is still disillusionment, but there is also handsome, honest, innocent Billy.  Billy Budd has been called “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance” of life as it is (Fogle).  It has also been called a work of tragic irony.  I prefer to think that, after being buffeted about for decades, Melville shows us he remembers innocence, he remembers Eden.  And he has accepted that it is inevitably lost.  One thinks of Beethoven’s inscription to the last movement of one of his last works (String Quartet Opus 135): “The Difficult Decision.”  Over the notes he wrote the question, “Must it be?”  He then responds to himself as the movement lightens and quickens: “It must be.”

In Melville’s story, Billy must be hung even though his action was provoked by a psychopath and the whole crew is on his side.  But in the British Navy one could not get away with flaunting the rules.  It would be bad for discipline.

Melville flaunted the rules and paid the price in many ways.  I have no idea whether he had regrets in his old age, but it seems he was not particularly content.  In 1850, he had written an enthusiastic piece about Hawthorne (whom he had yet to meet), and in it he talked about how great writers did not avoid difficult topics.  And he says that “he who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.  Failure is the true test of greatness.”  Melville himself was about to be tested.

He wrote the piece about Hawthorne in 1850, while he was working on Moby-Dick.  That great novel was published in 1851 to mediocre (at best) reviews.  In 1852, he published Pierre, which induced reviewers to doubt his sanity.  The Confidence Man  – Melville’s last full novel – was published in 1857 when Melville was only 38.  Eventually unable to sustain himself as an author, he took a job as a customs inspector in 1866 and worked at the New York Customs House for 19 years.  And then he started Billy Budd, which was published many years after his death.

According to the biographers, Melville entered a long silence at the end of his life.  Some thought he was crazy; but he was writing Billy Budd and, perhaps, came to the conclusion that we are all crazy and had to be to live this absurd life.

Melville had early success, which dwindled into an undeserved neglect and failure in his old age.  It happens.  We all have things (or marriages or children) which did not turn out as we hoped.  The question is what we do with all of that in our old age.  I wish I could tell Melville how much I love Moby-Dick; how well he read human nature in The Confidence Man, and how Billy Budd is one of the grandest of tragedies.

 In Billy Budd, the spar that Billy is hung on turns into a holy relic of sorts, with sailors chipping off bits surreptitiously because they know that there died a noble soul.  I have no chips of the spar or the true cross, but I have Melville’s books.

 If you are interested in thinking about what to do with a sense of failure in old age, you might look at my stories “A Balm in Gilead” or “A Perfect Ending.”  Or you might look at an earlier post, A Dimished Thing?.

Huxley’s Last Utopia – Island

Sometimes, the books of an author’s old age comment on or continue the work of their younger years.   Almost everyone knows how Aldous Huxley thought the world might go wrong from his 1932 Brave New World; less often read is his description of a (doomed) utopian society in Island, published thirty years later and not long before he died.  Huxley describes for us a peaceable kingdom on the island of Pala, which is about to be upended by contact with and exploitation by the outside world.  Unlike Hesse, Huxley is not writing an individual’s life, but, rather, the life of a culture from its beginning to its apparent imminent demise.  And we get Huxley’s vision of how life might be lived in a society which was supportive rather than exploitive.

Huxley was heavily influenced by Buddhism, and his island culture spun out of Buddhist beginnings to a place where mynah birds are trained to call out “Attention” to get listeners to pay heed to the present moment.  Sex is open even to children; this makes for uncomfortable reading today as adults on Pala sometimes “teach” young people the finer points of physical love.  There is a large extended family structure, allowing children to move between households.  Huxley was obviously influenced by Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa on both these traits.  But the main emphasis in Pala is on cultivating mental health.  My favorite scenes involve teaching children the tricks of mind control.  They are, for instance, told to imagine different animals or people, to multiply them in their mind, and then wipe them away in an exercise to show the youngsters how they can control their own minds and not be victim to random and hurtful thoughts.  We could all use that lesson.

Drugs are presumably bad in Brave New World (soma makes you feel good, but it also controls you).  By the time we get to Island, drugs are put to better use, with all young people going to through a rite of passage that includes the use of a mescaline-type substance (called moksha) that makes them cognizant of their place in the universe.   Long passages relating drug experiences could and should have been edited out of this otherwise interesting book.  Other people’s drunken or drugged adventures are seldom interesting.

The thinking process that got Huxley to Island can be traced through his non-fiction.  Thirteen years after Brave New World, he wrote the brilliant Perennial Philosophy, where he tried to pull together the convergent ideas of many of the world’s religions (called the “ultimate anthology” by the New York Times).  It might have served as a Bible to the residents of Pala.  In 1954, he wrote the less brilliant Doors of Perception, which encouraged the use of mescaline for enlightenment.  Huxley himself asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed  in 1963.  (Sidenote: President Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day, meaning the latter two got very little press upon their demise.)  Huxley apparently never gave up the idea that chemical assistance was a part of the life well lived.

Huxley’s Pala is doomed, however.  There is oil on the island and the capitalists are at the door.  The people are peaceable and have no weapons, no standing army.  They are going to lose control.  So, while this is the picture of a utopia it clearly reminds us that the real world is anything but.

Here’s the thing though – the people know it is coming and they are rational enough to know they probably can’t stop it.  Their training, however, makes them sure that they will cope (“even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom”), and, as the tanks roll in, the last thing we hear is a mynah bird telling us to pay attention.   At this point, the reader is at once deeply sad for the lost utopian vision, but heartened by the realization that, perhaps, all utopias are in the heart and the way in which we relate to the world. 

And Huxley gives us other words of truth here.  “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances and cars, but to the planet that nurtures us.

Novels of old age do not usually offer happy endings, nor do they conclude that the human race is perfectible – or even good (think of Melville’s The Confidence Man).  Old people know these things.  I would not trust an old person who hadn’t realized that the Eden of childhood was not recoverable.  The question is how to live within the world as we find it.  Not to say we shouldn’t try to improve it, but denial is the worst kind of soma.    

Last Novels – Hesse’s Glass Bead Game

I will go back to last poems at some point, but let’s talk about a few “last” novels over the next few weeks.  There is even a list out there of “best” last novels.  Many of the novels I will talk about here are on the list, but there are also some omissions (Mann’s Dr. Faustus for one).

First, let’s admit that a writer’s last work is not always their best.  One might think of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which is surely not up to her standard.  But great authors who have lived to old age have had a long time to hone their craft and to think about what they want to say.  And that can make for very interesting reading.

I have been re-reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game,  and – as many times as I have read it – it always and inspires.  Glass Bead Game was Hesse’s last book and probably his best.  It earned him a Nobel Prize and the acclaim of his peers.   Last novels have various forms, but many are “lives” of fictional characters which allow the older writer to survey the whole of life.  Hesse follows the life of his main character, Joseph Knecht, through childhood to his ascendency to Master of the Glass Bead Game and on to the end of his life. 

Hesse was writing in Switzerland in the late thirties and early forties; he seems barely aware of radio and other media.  The novel takes place in the 23rd century, in a world that collapsed in the twenty-first century after an era of continuous warfare and cultural breakdown.  Even though Hesse did not envision anything like computers and the internet, he blames the collapse on a shallow culture of distraction and a culture of “untrammeled individualism.”  More freedom “than they could stand” led to the Age of Feuilleton – the latter word meaning the section of a European newspaper devoted to light entertainment – stories about celebrities, “a major source of mental pabulum for the reader.” Sound familiar?  The newspapers also provided games for distraction.  “These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems….”   Freedom was the watchword, but loss of religion led to a   “passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom.”   We want to do what we want, but we want to be sure we are doing the right and approved thing.  A paradox to be sure.  Civilization was saved by an elite group of scholars who formed a sort of monastic/academic order from which they rescued the educational system and reworked the culture to give it a sense of discipline and purpose.  Hesse’s main character rises in this fascinating structure, but, in the end, realizes its limitations.

One of the things that is intriguing about the education of the elite in Castalia, Hesse’s world of learned renunciates, is students and teachers are encouraged to write a certain kind of life review periodically – however, they are encouraged to set the review of their life in another historical period.  Hesse has appended three of these life reviews – purported to have been written by his protagonist – at the end of The Glass Bead Game,  and any or all of them are worth your time if you do not want to tackle the whole novel.  I haven’t exactly tried this kind of life review yet, but it would make for an interesting exercise for those of us who think things out through the written word.

And on the topic of writing, there is this description of the kind of writing that the older Joseph Knecht tells a younger character he is going to undertake once he escapes from Castalia and his duties as Master of the Glass Bead Game.  He describes such work as a “booklet, a little thing for friends and those who share my views”:

…the subject would not matter.  It would only be a pretext for me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of leisure.  The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the solemn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have learned… I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in mind.  

This description from a fictional retiree (of sorts) aligns pretty well with the reasons I write this blog.  My blog is always offered as a kind of “friendly communication and discourse.”  And it is also a “pretext for seclusion” – not that we need any pretexts these days!

I will look at some other last novels over the next few weeks.  Please feel free to let me know what your favorites are.  If you are interested in Hermann Hesse (who had much to say about old age), you might refer to my earlier blog posts: Becoming and De-Becoming and Yes and Hesse and Old Age.