Talking Big

The Rover, Joseph Conrad
Opens in 1796 with a vibe like Treasure Island. The rover Peyrol wants to retire from the seafaring pirate life and settle on French soil near where he was born. In the time since he’s been there, France has much changed. There’s intrigue, and he’s concerned he’ll be a wanted man. The book abruptly jumps eight years forward to 1804. Here is the real story. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Might be my favorite of his novels after The Secret Agent. Peyrol is a great character. Possibly something of a self-portrait in Conrad’s old age? I like the buoyant and impressionistic style of prose. It’s not influenced at all by the experimentation of hard-core modernists. It reminds me most of Scott’s Waverley (1814), which I read last year or the year before. A historical novel with the advantage of decades of hindsight.

It’s a spoiler to say this, but the plot follows the ethical beats of A Tale of Two Cities. The book’s (Peyrol’s) take on the Revolution is clear. Good stuff and bad stuff. In Chapter 7, Peyrol says, “There must have been something in it. But it doesn’t seem to have done much for you people here.” In Chapter 9, “An uneasiness came over the old rover, a sense of the endangered stability of things, which was anything but welcome.” I’m reminded of Pynchon’s comments about the Oceanick Feeling in Mason & Dixon. Best stay out of the way. Of the three Revolutionary slogans, Peyrol declares fraternity the most important.

A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
Here’s an article by Matthew Bruccoli that could go in a catalog of evidence proving Harold Bloom was correct about everything. Fitzgerald’s defensiveness is extremely telling.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402223

Willa Cather was an amazing talent. This is really a novella or even a long short story. It’s the story of the end of an epoch. The men are the conservatives in this. The lady at the center, Mrs. Forrester, the lost lady of the title, was not lost when this era began to pass away. She never belonged to it. She was always out of place.

This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,–these [Niel] had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,– and this would always be his.

Niel is just like Nick Carraway. Or Nick is just like Niel. He’s an ordinary professional man who has a sensitivity to something untouchable and beautiful on the edge of his life.

Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one’s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. “I know where it is,” they seemed to say. “I could show you!” He would like to call up the shade of the young Mrs. Forrester, as the witch of Endor called up Samuel’s, and challenge it, demand the secret of that ardour; ask whether she had really found some ever blooming, ever-burning, ever-piercing joy, or whether it was all play-acting. Probably she had found no more than another; but she had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.

That’s the passage in question in the Bruccoli article. It’s near the end as Niel sums up his ever-shifting take on Marian Forrester. The proto-Lacanian insights that I always thought were great strengths of Fitzgerald’s work might not have been his own. The way this book sends off Mrs. Forrester also reminds me of the end of Tender is the Night. Cather had gifts with description. Sadly marred by some of what seems like genuine dislike of people of color.