Summer reading

I have just returned from a lecture tour-cum-research trip to Asia—the reason behind of my silence at CLIOPATRIA. While I was in China, my supply of English-language books ran out and so I went to local bookstores to find what I could. This meant I had some unaccustomed leisure to read various classic British novels, even as I was lecturing about the United States and discussing American life with Chinese friends and with students. The intersection of these interests led me to reflect on the views of Americans expressed in these various works, often in passing.

One book I selected is Anthony Trollope’s THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. Trollope is, of course, quite famous for his various portraits, usually unflattering, of Americans, such as in his AMERICAN NOTES or his novel THE AMERICAN SENATOR. The hard-driving, jackleg businessman Hamilton Fisker is no exception (His name is presumably a play on that of then-U.S. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish). What interested me particularly was the terminology employed in Chapter X when Fisker is at a London Club with his English partners, a set of dissolute gentlemen, and proposes that they play cards. Trollope comments “[Lord] Niddondale, who did not understand much about the races of mankind, had his doubts whether the American gentleman might not be a ‘heathen Chinee,’ such as he had read of in poetry.” Trollope, publishing serially in 1874, was clearly confident that his readers would understand the reference to Bret Harte’s poem, written 4 years earlier, and the racial libel on Chinese. More, he evokes in a stroke the tension between Harte’s own satirical purpose—that the American who is complaining of being cheated wished himself to cheat—and the popular absorption of the poem, with the message that Chinese were particularly and universally crooked. (I might add that there are other intriguing examples of Trollopian language: In Roger Carbury’s reference in Chapter XV to a Catholic priest, Father John Barham—when asked whether the father is a gentleman, he replies: “Certainly he is a gentleman. He took his degree at Oxford, and then became what we call a pervert, and what I suppose they call a convert.”)

Meanwhile in E.M. Forster’s HOWARD’S END, Chapter 5, there is a discussion of the final movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony as the composer’s way of dispersing the “goblins” who cause fear and make trouble for people. Forster then contrasts this to the very conventional and practical-minded vision of the Wilcoxes, one of the families in the novel: “And the goblins? Had they not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better.” It is quite interesting to imagine what Forster evoked for his British readers in 1910 in presenting Theodore Roosevelt, with no further introduction, as a quintessential worldly, no-nonsense type. The worldwide celebrity of TR in his own time, like much of his writings, has disappeared from American popular consciousness.