The Maypole of Merry Mount by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Illustration to "The Maypole of Merry Mount" by Bertha C. May, 1900

Friends, readers, mirth makers of every sort, I wish you a Happy May Day!  Come, ye crew of Comus, take a few moments out of your revels and read one of my favorite short stories,   "The Maypole of Merry Mount" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne's dark Romanticism and evocative imagery never fail to delight me.  The tensions between grim and oppressive "civilizing" Puritanism and the suppressed undercurrent of magic, pagan, and supernatural forces allied with untamable Nature form the imaginative underpinnings of his New England stories.  "The Maypole of Merry Mount" is one of his best efforts in this vein.  Here we find the folk customs of Merrie England transplanted to New World soil: a maypole made of pine, harvest maidens fashioned with sheaves of Indian corn, bonfires, animal guizing, and the Green Man all flourish in this New England forest.

Now up with your nimble spirits, ye morrice-dancers, green men and glee-maidens, bears and wolves and horned gentlemen! Come! Enjoy a dance round the Maypole, and worry about that Puritan gentleman with the sword lurking in the shadows on the morrow.  Gather your garlands and raise a glass to the King and Queen of the May!

Classics Club Spin #37

I'm so excited to be participating in my very first Classics Club Spin!  This is a fun game played to determine which classic you will read next.  You begin by creating a numbered Spin List of 20 books remaining on your Classics Club Challenge.  Then, Lady Fortuna spins her wheel and whichever number rises to the top launches the corresponding book on your list straight to the top of your TBR pile.

Here is my Spin List:

1. Kipps - H.G. Wells
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
3. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
4. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
5. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals - Dorothy Wordsworth
6. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
8. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
9. A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe
10. Piers Ploughman - William Langland
11. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
12. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
13. He Knew He Was Right - Anthony Trollope
14. The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy
15. Faust - Goethe
16. Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon
17. Shirley - Charlotte Bronte
18. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
19. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
20. Vera - Elizabeth von Arnim

Since I have just started my Classics Club Challenge, I decided to leave even more up to chance and made use of a random number generator to create my list, making a couple of substitutions when I already had reading plans for the books selected, or when I felt the book was just too long to read in a set time.  I did, however, allow He Knew He Was Right to remain, just to add an Element of Terror to the spin (it's 952 pages long).  

I find out which book I'll be reading on Sunday!

Update:  THE WHEEL HAS SPOKEN!  I will be reading The Travels of Sir John Mandeville!

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

In 1889, Jerome K. Jerome was tasked with writing 'The Story of the Thames,' its scenery and history, for Home Chimes magazine.  In a move worthy of his three protagonists, J., George, and Harris, Jerome inadvertently managed to turn what was meant to be a serious travel guide into one of the great comic novels in English literature.  This little tidbit about art imitating life (or vice versa) somehow manages to make the book even funnier.

Not that the critics found it funny.  While Three Men in a Boat is something of a British institution today,  its initial critical reception ranged somewhere between unimpressed and sneering.  In his autobiography My Life and Times (1926), Jerome K. Jerome reminisced: "One might have imagined … that the British Empire was in danger. … The Standard spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and The Morning Post as an example of the sad results to be expected from the over-education of the lower orders. … I think I may claim to have been, for the first twenty years of my career, the best abused author in England."  

Critical disdain notwithstanding, the book sold like hot eels off a Victorian street vendor.  No longer snubbed as lowbrow and common, Three Men in a Boat has remained perennially popular with everyone possessing a sense of humor and a capacity for delight. This is one of those books I've been meaning to get around to reading for a long time, and I only regret not reading it sooner.  It really is wonderful, and very, very funny.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - to give the book its full title - rests on the simple premise of a two-week boating trip down the Thames.  Three friends, Jerome (called J.), George, and Harris, decide that they are suffering from overwork and determine that the best remedy is a holiday.  This discussion is preceded by J.'s hilarious and hypochondriac perusal of a medical encyclopedia, during which he concludes that he is suffering from every ailment listed, with the exception of housemaid's knee.  J., George, and Harris set off on a boating holiday down the Thames, accompanied by J.'s fox terrier Montmorency.

Three Men in a Boat illustration by 20th century artist Paul Rainer

What follows is a series of anecdotes describing the journey of our three eccentric protagonists (to say nothing of the dog).  There are many digressions about particular foibles of human nature and general life observations, such as the unreliability of barometers and the advantages of cheese as a travelling companion.  The chapter subtitles had me in stitches.  Here are a few: 

Cussedness of tooth-brushes.

Heathenish instincts of tow-lines.

Being towed by girls: exciting sensation.

Possible reason why we were not drowned.

I will never stop laughing at the incident of Harris and the swans, the visit to the graveyard, and the creation of that culinary horror referred to as "Irish stew," to which Montmorency attempted to contribute a dead water-rat, "whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say."

Alongside the humor, one finds the ghost of the original travel guide to the Thames haunting the pages.  While some find that these passages detract from the novel, I feel they enhance it.  They imbue the novel with a sense of place, a love of nature, and an appreciation for history that act as a perfect counterbalance to eccentric comedy and mishap.  These elements make the novel a bit sentimental, but I don't see that as a bad thing.  I see a perfect blend of charm, hilarity, and camaraderie.  I think this book echoes through the decades, and may claim kinship with that Edwardian bucolic masterpiece The Wind in the Willows - as well as Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine. 

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

"It is less than three days since we took road together, and it is as though it were a hundred years."

Teshoo Lama speaks these words to Kim, but they could be used to describe my sentiments while reading this book - as long as they are taken in the spirit of snarky weariness in which I intend them.  Perhaps if I were a British schoolboy living in 1900 I might have found this book enthralling.  Or perhaps not. While I did not find the book to be completely without interest,  I know that somehow I failed to appreciate most of its charms.

Kim is the story of an Irish Indian boy who befriends a Tibetan lama, becomes a spy for the British, and must come to terms with his own identity. Born Kimball O'Hara to an Irish soldier and a nurse maid, Kim was orphaned at an early age and raised by a half-caste Indian woman.  He has a dark tan, speaks Hindi/Urdu, and is immersed in the local Indian culture.  In consequence, few realize that he is white.    He supports himself by begging and running errands, earning himself the nickname "Friend of all the World."

Kipling himself was born in Bombay in British India in 1865, and spoke Hindi as a boy - even supposedly often thinking and dreaming in Hindi.  His own conflicted sense of belonging and dual identity are reflected in characters such as Kim and Mowgli in The Jungle Book.  Kipling is a complex writer.  Despite his real love for India, his work often suffers from a romanticized orientalism and imperialism that are problematic for modern readers.

Kim is set against the background of the Great Game, the political conflict over colonial influence between Russia and Britain in Central Asia.  This is where the espionage comes in.  I didn't find this thread of the novel very exciting, though I did enjoy the bits about his spy training.

Kim's identity quest lies at the core of the story.  In the beginning of the novel, he is virtually nameless, known mainly by his moniker "little Friend of all the World."  The nickname reinforces the fact that Kim does not definitively belong to any one group, race, or religion.  Kim meets and befriends the lama, becoming his chela, or disciple.  The lama himself embodies what it means to be "Friend of all the World" in a different sense.  He practices earthly detachment, placing no man above another, and even referring to a cobra as "brother."  When Kim encounters his father's former regiment, they determine to send him to school.  He is given European clothing, communicates in English, and is ultimately trained as a spy.  I found it interesting that working as a spy is a sort of dark parody of "Friend of all the World," as Kim takes on different identities in his work.

Kim's relationship with the lama is one of the novel's strengths.  While Kim's quest centers around the question "Who is Kim?", the lama is on his own quest to find the River of the Arrow, the site where Buddha's arrow landed and transformed into a spring.  Bathing in this river will wash away his sins and free him from "the Wheel of Things" - the material world and the cycles of earthly existence.  The lama's insistence on earthly detachment is challenged by his affection for Kim, who is like a son to him.

The climax of the novel is reserved for the last few pages.  In the end Kim changes his question from "Who is Kim?" to "What is Kim?"  He rests under a tree, connecting with "Mother Earth," and remarks that it feels that he slept a hundred years when he wakes. This is a symbolic death and resurrection in which Kim forges his own identity, not determined by the world's categories.  There are echoes of the Buddha's attainment of Enlightenment under the bodhi tree. At the same time these things are happening to Kim, the lama finds his river.  He falls into the river while in a state of spiritual transcendence, and chooses to return to earthly life to teach Kim, rejecting absolute detachment in favor of human connection.  We are left with the implication that Kim and the lama will now walk upon the Way together.

The strange thing about this book for me is that it has so many interesting themes, but the actual experience of reading it was something of a slog, as many of the plot elements just did not grip my attention.

Read for my 2024 Victorian Reading Challenge, Book published 1900-1901.  There is some leeway in this particular category, I think, as Queen Victoria's reign ended with her death in January 1901.  Kim was first published serially from December 1900 to October 1901.  Also part of my Classics Club list.

Victorian Reading Challenge 2024

A Pleasant Corner by John Callcott Horsley, 1865

Another reading challenge I have in progress is a Victorian Reading Challenge I set for myself.  I have a lifelong fascination with the Victorian era and its literature, and I was delighted to discover some Victorian challenges from years past at Becky's Book Reviews.  I would like to credit Becky and thank her for the inspiration, as I modified and adapted her old challenges to create my list.  

What is it that I love so much about Victorian literature?

The Victorian era stretches one hand out to tentatively brush fingers with our modern world, while the other reaches backward, clinging fondly to the traditions of a fading rural past.  Fed by the twin streams of aesthetic Romanticism and Enlightenment rationalism and innovation, the landscape of Victorian art and literature is one of contrast, contradiction, and permutation in which anything may happen.  The luminous beauty of a pre-Raphaelite painting graces a stylish and well-polished drawing room, while mere blocks away, buildings smeared with coal dust crumble to ruin, cholera lurks in the water - and Mr. Hyde may be just around the corner.  Gaslit streets, typewriters, and phonographs are wonders of modern invention - yet your neighbor may still turn out to be a vampire. Detectives begin to practice scientific deduction and forensic investigation, but ghosts, cursed diamonds, and madwomen in the attic are not entirely off the table.  The age of industrialization brings us novels of social concern over poverty and pollution in the northern mill towns, while other writers trade union meetings for harvest festivals and seek to capture the seasonal rhythms of a vanishing agrarian life.  Writers begin exploring social questions about marriage, class, education, and the role of women.  Characters begin to be developed more fully, and we see the stirrings of psychological interest.  Add to this the vivid and descriptive prose of some of the greatest masters of the English language. 

I have chosen 24 books for 2024!  I may never read this many Victorian novels in one year again, but I really wanted to immerse myself in Victorian literature this year.  This challenge is truly a labor of love for me.  The categories are helpful in ensuring that I read broadly across the era.  Without further ado, here is my list:

Book published in the 1840s - Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Male Author - Esther Waters by George Moore 1/15/24

Female Author - Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

Book with a name as the title - Trilby by George du Maurier

Book published in serial format - Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Book published 1837-1840 - Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 2/26/24

Book published in the 1850s - Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Children's Book - Black Beauty by Anna Sewell 1/13/24

Book of YOUR choice - The Beetle by Richard Marsh 1/12/24

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

Book set in England - Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy 3/15/24

Victorian Nonfiction - The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Book published in the 1860s - The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Reread of your choice - Silas Marner by George Eliot 2/9/24

Anthony Trollope - The Warden 1/9/24

Mystery, Suspense, Sensation - Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Book over 400 pages - Middlemarch by George Eliot

Book published in the 1870s - The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone 3/11/24

Book published in the 1890s - The Odd Women by George Gissing

Book that has been adapted into a movie - The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

Book published 1900-1901 - Kim by Rudyard Kipling 3/17/24

Collection (poetry, stories, etc.) - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Book published in the 1880s - Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

I have already completed 9 titles.  Many of these books are going towards my Classics Club Challenge, and I have also counted Silas Marner as my re-read classic for the Tea and Ink Society Challenge.  Currently reading Three Men in a Boat and reveling in the humor!

Tea and Ink Society 2024 Classics Reading Challenge

I really love all of the wonderful offerings from the Tea and Ink Society, and I am excited to be participating in their 2024 Classics Reading Challenge.  I'm taking a break from Saturday spring cleaning this afternoon to plan out some of my reads for the challenge. (Today's tea: Bengal Spice with milk and honey.)  Here are the categories:

January: A classic you’ve read before
February: A Nordic or Scandinavian classic
March: A novel with a place or house name in the title
April: An epistolary novel
May: An L. M. Montgomery novel or short story collection
June: A novel or short story collection from the American South
July: A utopian or dystopian novel
August: A children’s classic
September: A pastoral novel
October: A spooky classic or short story collection
November: A classic recommended by a friend
December: A Shakespeare play

And here's what I have so far:

January: Silas Marner by George Eliot

February: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

March: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

April: Evelina by Frances Burney

May: Anne of Windy Willows by L.M. Montgomery

June: The Awakening by Kate Chopin

July: News from Nowhere - William Morris

August:

September:

October: The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre - John Polidori

November: 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne

December:

Two of these I finished before I started this blog, and I will try to blog about them in due time.  Silas Marner was my re-read, and I chose The Summer Book by Tove Jansson for my Scandinavian classic.  I'm currently in the middle of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I can't wait to talk about that one.

I was a bit daunted when I saw "epistolary novel" for April, because this is not a format I typically enjoy, with the exception of Dracula.  I have settled on Evelina by Frances Burney, because it was a favorite of Jane Austen.  If Jane loved it, it must be good, right?   I might have chosen Austen's own Lady Susan, were it not for the fact that I read it in 2022.

There is a lot of love for L.M. Montgomery over at Tea and Ink Society, which I find very sweet as she was my favorite author when I was a girl.  For the L.M. Montgomery selection in May, I'm going to read Anne of Windy Willows, the UK unabridged version of Anne of Windy Poplars, which is the version I'm familiar with.

June's category will stretch me a bit, because I don't often read Southern fiction.  I'm going to take this opportunity to read The Awakening by Kate Chopin, which has been on my reading list for a long time.

Utopian or Dystopian novel in July is quite a fun category.  I felt that I had read several of literature's great dystopias, so I went for something different and chose William Morris' utopian tale News from Nowhere.

August is the month for a children's classic. I am still undecided on this one, but I know I want it to be something by E. Nesbit that I haven't read yet.

A pastoral novel is a lovely choice for September.  I'm still mulling that one over, but I'm picturing myself with a mug of cider leaning against a hay rick reading Adam Bede by George Eliot in between weaving corn dollies.

One of the best things about this challenge is that we are quite rightly told to read a spooky classic or short story collection in October.  There is nothing better for October than eerie ghost stories or Gothic tales of terror.  I've chosen The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori.  I've read "The Vampyre" a couple of times, but the other tales of the macabre will be new to me.

November's classic is a book recommended by a friend.  My daughter Fiona has told me I should read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne for years now, so in November I take my chances with Captain Nemo.  Something about that Nemo fellow makes me nervous.

And we round off the year with Shakespeare for midwinter!  I love Shakespeare and have read all of his plays at least once, some multiple times.  I'm honestly just going to see which one I'm in the mood for when the time comes.  Perhaps a re-read of Cymbeline or Pericles?

Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

 

Pastoral, Romantic, and rooted in the landscape and folk customs of the West Country, Under the Greenwood Tree is a gentle portrait of English village life in a bygone era.  This was Thomas Hardy's second published novel, and there is a sweetness and simplicity to this story quite unlike the later complex and tragic novels which people are most likely to associate with the name of Hardy.  

Under the Greenwood Tree is such a lovely title, but if we give it its full name we learn something of Hardy's intentions and the evolution of the book - Under the Greenwood Tree, or The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.  The novel is concerned with the doings of the Mellstock parish choir, focusing on one of its younger members, Dick Dewy, and his romantic pursuit of the new schoolmistress, the gloriously named Fancy Day.  Hardy's original inspiration for the story was drawn from a real-life conflict between his grandfather's string choir and a new vicar who wanted to replace the choir with organ music.  

I went down a bit of a rabbit trail about west gallery music, in trying to understand the practices of the Mellstock quire.  This was a type of church music common in English parish churches ca 1700-1850.  The choir would perform in a wooden gallery typically constructed at the west end of the church.  Stringed instruments accompanied the singing, along with flutes, clarinets, and bassoons.

The Village Choir by Thomas Webster, ca 1847.  While I think this painting is helpful in picturing the scenes of the book, some of the members of the all-male Mellstock quire would have deplored the presence of these "brazen hussies" and those infamous clarinets.

Hardy's second subtitle, A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, is such a beautiful touch.  Dutch rural painting, from the Baroque era through the 19th century, is known for naturalistic scenes of country folk going about their daily lives, with a touch of atmospheric Romanticism which elevates the everyday bucolic to art.  This, for me, is an apt metaphor for Thomas Hardy's writing.

A painting of the Dutch school

The book's main title is taken from the song "Under the Greenwood Tree," sung in the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's most pastoral play, As You Like It, thus firmly linking Hardy's novel with the English pastoral tradition.  Under the Greenwood Tree has been described as a "prose idyll," and I cannot think of more fitting description.  I love the way that the book's divisions are named for the seasons, progressing through Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn.  We are treated to snatches of rural customs and folk belief in each season of the year, from gathering honey to going nutting to visiting a "witch" who surely echoes such celebrated figures as the Cornish wise woman Tamsin Blee.  We are always aware of inhabiting a lost world while immersed in these pages, and the sense of old ways passing away imbues the book with just a hint of that bittersweet melancholy longing for days that cannot come again.  It somewhat reminded me of Lark Rise to Candleford, a book which I have dipped in and out of many times and have committed to reading in its entirety for my Classics Club Challenge.  

Hardy's writing is at its evocative and descriptive best, so I will close with this passage about the Greenwood Tree:

"The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day’s premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous extent, though having no great pretensions to height. Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree; tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at its bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of its forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots. Beneath and beyond its shade spread a carefully-tended grass-plot, its purpose being to supply a healthy exercise-ground for young chickens and pheasants; the hens, their mothers, being enclosed in coops placed upon the same green flooring."