Speaking of illustrated books, I finally made it through The Diary of a Nobody, which is a chronicle of a lower middle class striver in Victorian England. This was written by George and Weedon Grossmith. It is generally accepted that Weedon illustrated the Diary, and it is filled with fairly droll pictures. (While Gutenberg does have The Diary of a Nobody up for free, one would be better off searching out a source with the pictures, such as this one, although this source only seems to have a few of the illustrations.) Curiously, George Grossmith had a very successful career on stage and moderate success as a writer. He became a member of the D'Oyly Carte company and originated many of the key roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Truly a bit of a renaissance man.
While some people find the Diary hysterical, I find it is an acquired taste. It depends a lot on how one reacts to British humour, and specifically how one feels about class-based humour. Quite a bit of this humour involves watching social climbers/strivers be humiliated in various ways (Keeping Up Appearances and even Fawlty Towers). While I don't want to be on the side of those who say everyone should stay in their own place, I just cringe when I see these strivers be so obsequious to their "betters" and so bossy to everyone else. I can make it through Fawlty Towers due to its manic energy, but I no longer watch Keeping Up Appearance. In the U.S., too many people would have cut Hyacinth Bucket out of their lives to make the series work, and I surely would have been one of them. This is a bit of a long-winded way to say that I found the Diary kind of exhausting. For instance, Mr. Pooter is invited to a party and is quite put out to find out that the butcher was also invited. Pooter is one of those people who cares enough to try to get his name in the newspaper as an attende of a party, though the paper can't spell his name correctly, and he finally gives up. On top of being put in his place with some frequency, Charles Pooter was an unlucky man, quite clumsy and getting into minor scrapes here and there. Given all the misunderstandings with his neighbours, I couldn't quite fathom why they would still spend almost all their free time together (I guess because even radio wasn't around -- wireless broadcasts didn't really take off until the 1920s in the UK).
Though most of the Diary left me pretty cold, there is one passage on dreams that I find quite amusing (and accurate). This is the second half of Chapter XIX (i.e 19) and by quite a coincidence, it is the entry for April 29, which is today.
April 29.—I am getting quite accustomed to being snubbed by Lupin, and I do not mind being sat upon by Carrie, because I think she has a certain amount of right to do so; but I do think it hard to be at once snubbed by wife, son, and both my guests.
Gowing and Cummings had dropped in during the evening, and I suddenly remembered an extraordinary dream I had a few nights ago, and I thought I would tell them about it. I dreamt I saw some huge blocks of ice in a shop with a bright glare behind them. I walked into the shop and the heat was overpowering. I found that the blocks of ice were on fire. The whole thing was so real and yet so supernatural I woke up in a cold perspiration. Lupin in a most contemptuous manner, said: “What utter rot.”
Before I could reply, Gowing said there was nothing so completely uninteresting as other people’s dreams.
I appealed to Cummings, but he said he was bound to agree with the others and my dream was especially nonsensical. I said: “It seemed so real to me.” Gowing replied: “Yes, to you perhaps, but not to us.” Whereupon they all roared.
Carrie, who had hitherto been quiet, said: “He tells me his stupid dreams every morning nearly.” I replied: “Very well, dear, I promise you I will never tell you or anybody else another dream of mine the longest day I live.” Lupin said: “Hear! hear!” and helped himself to another glass of beer. The subject was fortunately changed, and Cummings read a most interesting article on the superiority of the bicycle to the horse.
I do occasionally bug people about my dreams, but I know they aren't that interesting to others. And generally, I find fiction that really dwells on dreams to be a big cop-out. I realize there are a few classic dreams (the one about boxing in Ellison's Invisible Man for instance), but generally they are a crutch for lesser authors to lean upon. I recall this writer at the writing workshop who felt she was most proud of the dreams in her work, and I knew that I would never be interested in reading the entire piece. I have to admit, I am not really sure I should go back to the writing group.
So I didn't really feel The Diary of a Nobody quite lived up to the hype, and now I am a bit nervous about Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog), but I guess I'll see how it turns out in a month or so.
I finished up John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, and in the end I really disliked it. It was such an unstructured novel with Wideman going in 3 or 4 directions (including the obligatory scene of a Black man dealing with a son he had more or less abandoned) and not resolving anything. This is not an exaggeration: the novel focuses on a writer named Cudjoe who has returned to Philadelphia (from Greece) to learn more about the city deciding to firebomb the headquarters of MOVE and whether this particular boy survived the fire,* this quest seems to be abandoned or at least it doesn't come to any definitive conclusion.
While it may have been inspired by Invisible Man, it ultimately felt to me like one of those saggy postmodern novels without an ending. It could have been quite something if he had just picked one thread and saw it through, but jumping around so much was just annoying and (to me) pointless. I can't really tell if the last section (about a apocalyptic Philadelphia overrun by gangs of children) is meant to be taken literally or just metaphorically, and it is implied that the boy that survived is some sort of gang leader, but it is anything but clear that any of this is "real." About the only section that worked for me was one where Cudjoe is trying to interview a former friend who has gone from a bit of a street hustler to working for the mayor. A book that tracked this transformation and dealt with the ins and outs of urban politics might have been interesting, but not the one that Wideman turned in.
I thought John A. William's !Click Song was far better than Philadelphia Fire, but the ending was still a cop-out. {SPOILERS} The narrator, Cato Douglass, has been getting more worked up about danger to his person and just in general getting anxious about life in New York to the point he carries a piece most of the time. The novel ends with a vignette where three cops come into his apartment (about some silliness about him adding Afro-centric labels to museum exhibits) and one starts some trouble and this ends in Cato pulling out his gun and going out in a blaze of "glory." But it turns out this is just a nightmare, perhaps the most vivid of a series of nightmares that Cato suffers through (he seems to have some undiagnosed PTSD from his military service). So the real ending is a bit of a damp squib as Cato is finding life as a low-selling author in the late 70s and 80s is getting more and more difficult, and he may not be able to place his next novel. Hardly an epic ending...
!Click Song is somewhat more interesting than The Man Who Cried I Am, which was more about Black literary politics in Paris and the US in the 50s and 60s, but fundamentally I don't really find writers writing about writers to be terribly compelling. At least Cato Douglass doesn't suffer from writer's block, which is a truly deadly subject to take on. I'm honestly not sure if there has been a great novel written where the main character is suffering from writer's block. I guess one could argue that Proust's opus fits the bill, though it isn't until relatively late in the game that he truly tries to become a writer, and of course I really didn't like this either. Barton Fink might qualify, though that didn't actually start out life as a novel. Perhaps Nathaniel West has a writer suffering from writer's block, since that is a recurring aspect of life for writers out in Hollywood (at least in the 40s and 50s), but I can't recall the details of his novels well enough. Well, they are short, and I'll reread them one of these days.
Anyway, the larger point is that !Click Song goes into great deal about the literary politics of New York in the 60s, 70s and even the very early 80s (before the arrival of the "Brat Pack" (Ellis, Janowitz and McInerney) shook things up again) and how this impacted Black authors, but this may or may not be to one's taste. I found it kind of boring. I also didn't like how a major plot point (about one of Cato's illegitimate children) was left unresolved, though I suppose the outcome was known, just not acknowledged, by Cato. I'm glad to finally have gotten through two of his major novels, which I have carted around for decades, but he was incredibly prolific (having written 12 novels) and I am pretty unlikely to read any more down the line, having a decent working knowledge of what they will cover.
And that pretty much covers April. I just started Of Human Bondage, and the beginning strikes me a lot like other English novels where the boy, Philip, goes off to boarding school and is unhappy, but it is starting to diverge into new territory, as Philip is nearing his 20s and has moved to London. I think the closest novel is probably Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. I don't much care for Philip, but I don't insist on liking a main character to enjoy the novel, though I suppose it often helps, particularly if one is deciding to reread a novel. This is a long novel (over 700 pages) and I am not sure I would spend that much time on a second go-round if I still am out of sympathy with Philip by the end. I guess I'll find out relatively soon.
* This is an event that really did happen, incredibly enough. This PBS special is far more informative, including a short segment about a boy that did survive the fire, and is thus far more satisfying than Philadelphia Fire.
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