My recommendations this week are Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry, and Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.
But first:
Literature Links
A list of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite books includes Buddenbrooks, which we review today. Check out the list here.
A befuddled William F. Buckley interviews Jack Kerouac (and others), trying to make sense of hippies in 1968.
Affecting footage of a beaming Alexander Solzhenitsyn returning to Russia in 1994 after 20 years of exile.
Jane Austen once said “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Find out what provoked this disingenuous disclaimer here.
Books Worth Reading
1) Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, 203 Pages
Larry McMurtry is most famous for Lonesome Dove, which is a great classic of American literature, perhaps the last great classic. (Yes, I can see the David Foster Wallace fans suddenly getting agitated) Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is a different book, part memoir, part literary criticism, and part examination of storytelling as art. The books conceit is McMurtry sitting in a West Texas dairy queen, reading the essays of Walter Benjamin, a German writer who lamented the decline of storytelling.
Quotes:
“Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.”
“Sudden death, particularly death on the highway—as much a part of that culture as football—lodged in people’s memories, whereas about almost everything else they were vague.”
Why is it worth reading? Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen isn’t at all like Lonesome Dove, but it’s very much worth reading, especially if you want to understand McMurtry as a novelist.
It’s a memoir about many things, including the author. Also featured heavily: books. Reading Lonesome Dove, I didn’t guess that McMurtry was such a bibliophile. Books aren’t all that prominent in the world of Augustus and Call, Lorena and Jake.
But in McMurtry’s world, books are everywhere. Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Proust, Barabara Tuchman, and many more lurk in the corners of his mind.
There’s a certain kind of author that likes to write more than they read - perhaps to avoid the corruption of influence described by Harold Bloom that we talked about in an earlier newsletter. That’s not McMurtry. He is not only aware of his place in literature as a disciple of Steinbeck and Stegner, but also aware of seemingly all the directions and influences in other schools as well.
Not surprisingly, he became a bookstore owner and spent years scouring the country for old books to buy and sell. More suprisingly, this nerdy literature geek persona doesn’t show up in his best known work.
There’s a reason for that. McMurtry is more famous for his non-literary side - as a scion of a deteriorated West Texas ranching family, he grew up cowboying, and learned that books weren’t welcome among cowpokes. He himself was more interested in books than cows, but would never dare to show it around “his people.”
Archer County Texas, as described by McMurtry, is characterized by emptiness - of people, of culture, and of stories. At the same, it is part of a great story, the story of the American West, of the pioneers, of the pulp novels, of Lonesome Dove. McMurtry has immortalized this story in his novels, but it’s revealing that it took a conflicted character to bring it out. He seems to be saying that only a person that rejected the taciturn, non-storytelling ways of his people, could show them to the world.
I’ve said before that the conflict between adventurers and more bookish types is not inevitable - there are many examples of literary men of action, from Napoleon to Teddy Roosevelt. McMurtry lived in both worlds, and his ruminations about the conflict between them are worth hearing.
2) Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, 595 pages
Buddenbrooks is a fixture of most Top 100 novels lists, but I would guess that it’s less read than most.
It’s somewhat of an outlier in literary history, written in 1901.
It doesn’t fit neatly into modernism or Victorian writing.
It’s by a German - and while Thomas Mann is an all-time great, German literature is overshadowed by German philosophy and music. There are a lot less readers of German literature than Russian or English.
All that can lead to Buddenbrooks being overlooked. That’s a shame, because it’s very relevant and a charming read as well.
Quotes: “You are a Buddenbrook. We are not born to live for what we might take to be happiness with our short-sighted eyes. We are links in a chain. You, too, are unthinkable without those who have come before us.”
"Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest."
Why it’s worth reading: The book stretches over several generations of an upper middle-class German merchant family of the Hansiatic league. Without giving anything away, it’s a novel of decline and disintegration. But it’s also full of joy too - a paradox that is very true to real life.
If there’s any society that that fully passed away, erased from reality AND memory, it’s pre-20th century Germany. Germany in 1901 was on the cusp of massive changes, and also on the cusp of damaging it’s reputation forever with the ugly spectre of Nazism.
That makes parts of the Buddenbrooks’ jolly world seem entirely alien; there’s a steroetype of German history in modern minds, but this isn’t it.
All the same, it’s a novel of decline. Buddenbrooks is focused on the ruthless forces of modernity eating away at the stability and traditions of a comfortable bourgeoisie family. Nothing is safe from change, not money, not marriage and social norms, not an ingrained way of life.
It’s very very familiar story in 21st century America, and Mann brings true genius to the work of examining these changes. It’s very sad, and very thought provoking, and maybe a bit of a cautionary tale to those of us struggling to preserve a little of the culture and world that our parents gave us.
Poem of the Week: Woodbine Willy by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, better known as Woodbine Willy, was a British chaplain, decorated war hero, and poet of the WWI era. He got the Woodbine Willy nickname from his habit of handing out cigarettes to the troops on the Western Front, a habit that they likely found at least as endearing as his poetic efforts.
Unlike many chaplains, Kennedy didn’t stay behind the lines - instead taking his place in the trenches with the men. He was decorated in 1917 for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire, but survived the war unharmed.
His poetry is often termed “trench poetry” and some of it is doggerel or humorous, but he also had a serious streak in him. This is one that has always stood out to me:
They gave me this name like their nature, Compacted of laughter and tears, A sweet that was born of the bitter, A joke that was torn from the years Of their travail and torture, Christ's fools, Atoning my sins with their blood, Who grinned in their agony sharing The glorious madness of God. Their name! Let me hear it -- the symbol Of unpaid -- unpayable debt, For the men to whom I owed God's Peace, I put off with a cigarette.
Old Book Advice
“IN CONVERSATION, TRIFLING OCCURRENCES, such as small disappointments, petty annoyances, and other every-day incidents, should never be mentioned to your friends.”
― Isabella Mary Beeton, The Book of Household Management
“Men who pride themselves on being shrewd in discovering the weak points, the vanity, the dishonesty, immorality, intrigue, and pettiness of others think they understand character. They know only a part of character. They know only the depths to which some men may sink; they know not the heights to which some men may rise.”
― William George Jordan, The Kingship of Self-Control: Individual Problems and Possibilities
Book Looks
See you next week!
Books Worth Reading is an email digest that allows busy people to connect with great minds - without wading through thousands of pages to do so. I’ll recommend books, as well as highlighting a poem or two, some quotes and articles, and perhaps some discussion of great literary figures or movements.
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