Recent Readings

Some of the books I have finished this month...

Bob Champ

_The New Aristocrats_ (1960) by Michel de Saint Pierre.

1950's schoolboy angst, French style. Seventeen-year-old Denis
Prulle-Rousseau, son of a wealthy, hard-driving surgeon, attends
exclusive Pierre Favre College, a Jesuit-run high school. Lacking
parental direction, Denis turns into a rebel against the authority of
school and church, directing his anger at his newly installed
philosophy teacher, Father Philippe Maubrun, an obvious father figure.
When Denis writes a blasphemous article in a self-published
"newspaper," he faces expulsion. For him the prospect is terrible
since, not surprisingly, he finds the school the only place where he
really feels at home.

This novel is beautifully translated by Anthony and Lewela Burgess.
Saint Pierre himself seems to be the fatherly sort (there's a picture
of him and his son on the back-cover), and he is much in sympathy with
Father Maubrun, who struggles valiantly to understand his most
recalcitrant student on the one hand and works against his expulsion
from Pierre Favre on the other. The goodness and validity of the
Catholic position are never doubted, though some of the priests are as
distasteful as any in Joyce. Marxism has a hard road to go in the
book, and likewise--though to a lesser degree--existentialism. There is
a good deal of talk about the crisis of "today's youth"--apparently a
universal topic in the late '50s--and the way in which parents are
failing them. A good subtitle might be: "Rebel Searching for a Cause."


_O Pioneers!_ (1913) by Willa Cather.

While not as rich in plot, characterization or descriptive power as
Cather's later _My Antonia_ (1918), this short novel has, in Alexandra
Bergson, a heroine every bit as strong as Antonia Shimerda, If
anything, compared to the sometimes vulnerable Antonia, Alexandra is
more independent and resourceful. The farm she runs with her two
not-very-bright brothers flourishes under her care, and eventually she
becomes one of the biggest landowners in the Nebraska county where the
novel is set. Cather introduces her usual cast of
characters--immigrant Swedes, Norwegians, along with a handful of
French, and describes the hardships attendant on their getting good
crops out of a country that is at times ungiving. Alexandra does
suffer a great blow in the novel, but seems on the road to recovery by
the end. She is one of those indombitable characters of the kind we
assume constituted the pioneers. Cather stresses both Alexandra's love
of the land and her loneliness as she struggles against
land-speculators, her pig-headed brothers, and the harsh climate.

I came to Cather's work late, and have grown very fond of her. She is,
in my view, an underrated novelist. Besides _O Pioneers!_ and _My
Antonia_, I have read _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ and _The
Professor's House_, and I plan, very shortly, to start _The Song of the
Lark_. Cather is a wonderful stylist, and brings the immigrant
experience alive as few other writers have.

_Chronicles: Volume 1_ (2004) by Bob Dylan

The first volume of Dylan's memoirs bypasses his great years of fame
and productivity--the 60's--to concentrate on his pre-fame days in
Minnesota and New York's Greenwich Village. There is also a long
section describing the recording of an album in the 1980's-"New
Morning," I believe. Dylan touches the 60s only briefly, as when he
describes a meeting between himself and, of all people, Archibald
McLeish, who wanted Dylan to write some songs for a play. Dylan wrote
the songs but McLeish didn't consider them "dark" enough for his
purposes.

Dylan sees himself primarily as a musician, not the poet/philosopher
with guitar, which is the way many of us perceived him. Much of the
book discusses vocal and instrumental techniques, along with influences
like Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, Dave Van Ronk, Kurt Weill, and
bluesman Robert Johnson. Dylan doesn't talk much about his love
affairs, apart from Susie Rotolo, and even she occupies only a few
pages. We do see a good deal of Dylan the husband, Dylan the family
man-the Dylan who was not very happy being known as the "voice of
his generation."

The book is fairly well written, though Dylan explains too much and
still seems to be haunted by the folk-singer's contempt for the
graceful and correct. There are no illustrations, I was sorry to find.