The First American Novel

Clarissa Harlowe being abducted by the villain Robert Lovelace

If I had been asked what was the first American novel to be published, I don't know what my answer would be - but it would not have been The Power of Sympathy.

That novel was published in Boston in 1789. The full title of the novel was The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth. The author is William Hill Brown, although he published it anonymously. 

It is an epistolary novel, told entirely through the letters that the characters write to one another. Brown modeled its form after earlier novels such as Pamela by Samuel Richardson.

It tells the rather scandalous for the time story of a young New Englander named Thomas Harrington who has fallen madly in love with a girl named Harriot. Unbeknownst to him, Harriot is his illegitimate half-sister. This forces Thomas' father to have to decide whether to reveal this secret. He knows that if he does not the couple - and he - will suffer eternal damnation for incest.

Spoiler Alert (not that you were planning to read the book but just in case) It does not end well for Harriot or Thomas. But we would expect that for a moral tale from 1789.

The author got inspiration from a Boston scandal of the time around a woman named Fanny Apthorp who was a neighbor. That story involved an affair with her sister’s husband, pregnancy, and Fanny's suicide. Though Brown changed the names and the setting, he still thought it safer to publish anonymously. Many people at the time believed that the author was Sarah Morton, the betrayed wife. Eventually, Brown’s niece confirmed that her uncle had written the novel.

I haven't read Brown's novel but I had to read Pamela in a college course. The description of it shows that it is certainly in the same virtuous vein as Brown's book. Though my professor gushed over poor fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, who is "relentlessly pursued by her dead mistress’s son," I found the novel less than engrossing. 

Pamela is a good girls who "holds out against his demands and threats of abduction and rape, determined to defend her virginity and abide by her own moral standards." I suppose the psychological aspects and ideas of sex and power certainly would have caused a sensation when it was first published. 

If you really can't get to sleep at night, stop staring at a screen's blue light and try reading another Richardson novel - Clarissa...

The title alone will make you drowsy: Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage.  It is another epistolary novel (a form I despise) by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748. 

Poor young Clarissa Harlowe's quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her newly wealthy family. 

The book is considered one of the longest novels in the English language (based on estimated word count) but the nine volumes for 99 cents on Amazon Kindle. are a bargain (based on estimated word count!). 

It is generally regarded as Richardson's "masterpiece." 

No comment from me as I have not read it.

Has anyone read any of these books?
I'd love to read your comments here.

Imaginary Places

 
A view from Watership Down towards Nuthanger Farm
Image by  Peter S and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

When I was teaching, I often had students create maps for fictional "imaginary places." Some settings in novels are so real that we might think they exist in reality. Many authors create imaginary places but base them on real places they know. 

We did some quite detailed maps of the half-real/half-fictional Tulsa, Oklahoma in the young adult classic The Outsiders. Creating settings maps required very close reading and a lot of critical thinking and sometimes some research into an author's life and real maps. 

The mystery writer Harlan Coben was a student of mine when I taught in Livingston, New Jersey. He often uses that town and part of New Jersey (he still lives not that far away) in his writing, but things are changed as needed. I recognize people and names (including my own) on those pages. When he describes a street he's driving down, in my mind I can see that street. 

I know from my child psychology classes that the creation of imaginary worlds and people is an important part of child development. As a young reader, I loved books that had maps in them. Some books had a map on the inside covers. I had a Treasure Island and a Lord of the Rings that had maps. I also had a copy of Richard Adams' 1972 novel, Watership Down, that had a map.

  

Page from a picture book adaptation of Watership Down

That book is about a rabbit named Hazel who leads a group of his kind out of a dangerous place through an even more dangerous place. Their original home was being taken over by humans. The dangerous place they travel to is dangerous because of the rabbits that live there.

I love that novel and read it multiple times. I have always felt a connection to rabbits. It has been more than just liking these cute, fuzzy creatures. I feel some higher connection to them.

The rabbits finally reach Watership Down which is a chalk hill in England's North Hampshire countryside. Adams lived in the nearby town of Whitchurch. He would take walks with his children to the top of Watership Down and, like some other authors such as A.A. Milne with Pooh - he told them stories about the rabbits who lived there. Eventually, he wrote them down and so the book was born. 

All of the locations described in the book are real places and you could do a tour of the settings using the map in the book. I have looked the place up online and apparently, it is a popular spot with cyclists, walkers, and exercising horses along Wayfarers' Walk. A section of  Watership Down is a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest. Going way back, the Down is in the midst of an area is with Iron Age burial mounds, enclosures, and field systems. 

There is a tree that was planted at the north end of the wood to mark where the rabbits choose to make their new warren. That tree replaced a beech tree that was destroyed by a storm in 2004. The roots of that beech tree is where the rabbits' warren is in the novel. I have read that the wooden fence protecting the tree has been, perhaps understandably, "vandalized" by visitors who have carved the names of some of the rabbits from the novel, such as Bigwig, Fiver, and Hazel. 

I had a shelf in my classroom with some novels that had maps in them and a few books about imaginary places and creating imaginary worlds. (click on the book covers below for info).  I always had a few students who would fall into those books and linger longer than necessary in them and sometimes ask if they could borrow one over the weekend. 

I was such a dreamer thinking and sometimes drawing maps of Atlantis, Xanadu, Shangri-La, El Dorado, Utopia, Middle Earth, Treasure Island, Wonderland, Freedonia. These days I'm sure readers and watchers have been imagining Jurassic Park and the world of Harry Potter - although movies kind of ruin imaginary places by making them seem "real."

I always thought that one day I might walk Watership Down with Karen, my longtime friend and fellow rabbit person. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe just in our imagination.

                 

cross-posted at Weekends in Paradelle

His Dark Materials

Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (1489–90) was one of Pullman's inspirations for his dæmons

The BBC released a teaser video for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. I haven't seen any post about when the series will premiere and I'm sure that it will be in the UK on BBC One before I get to see it on BBC America, though I heard Apple and Netflix might run it here.

His Dark Materials is Philip Pullman’s trilogy of the novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. The series will be directed by Tom Hooper and star (so far) Tyler Howitt, Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ruth Wilson.

The trilogy is the coming-of-age story of two children discovering their identities and destinies while journeying through parallel universes. Their alternate world is one where people are accompanied by manifestations of their souls. These manifestations are shapeshifting animals called daemons.

Lyra and Will are two ordinary children moving through these otherworlds with witches and armored bears, fallen angels and soul-eating specters. As with other trilogies, the stakes are high: the fate of both the living and the dead will rely on them.

That brief description makes His Dark Materials sound like a series for children or young adults. I would have been attracted to it at that age, but I read it as an adult and (lso like some other trilogies) there are parts that will fly over that young audience's heads.

Pullman uses concepts from physics, philosophy and theology and a strong criticism of religion. Some people compare parts of it to an inverted Paradise Lost. The title of the series comes from poet John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Jesus as geometer in a 13th-century medieval illuminated manuscript

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.
(Book 2, lines 910–920)

God as architect, wielding the golden compasses by William Blake

An early name for the series was The Golden Compasses, which is also an allusion to Paradise Lost. The golden compass is what God uses as a drawing instrument to establish and set the bounds of all creation.

Then staid the fervid wheels, and in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure
(Book 7, lines 224–229)

This teaser shows the girl Lyra and other characters - but no daemons. There is a flash of a most magical item in the story: the alethiometer.

The trilogy was going to be adapted for film back in 2005, but the first installment, The Golden Compass didn't do well even though it starred Nicole Kidman, Ian McKellen and Ian McShane. The second and third novels - The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - were never adapted, so the television series has new ground to cover.

                      

Robinson Crusoe

In 1709, a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk was rescued from an island where he had been marooned for more than four years. He probably was at least partially the inspiration for the character of Robinson Crusoe in the novel by that name.

As a young man, Selkirk worked as a privateer. That was a nicer word for a pirate. But it was a pirate sanctioned by the British monarchy so that they could harass and loot Spanish and Portuguese ships. Like any other pirates, their goal was to bring home as much wealth as possible.

Selkirk sailed under Captain William Dampier on a voyage in 1703 to South America. After a year at sea, his ship sighted three islands, the Juan Fernández Archipelago, about 400 miles off the coast of Chile. It was good place to stop and restock as they found fruit, turnips and fresh water.

Captain Stradling ruled the ship Selkirk was on, Cinque Ports, and the sailors stocked up on food. Stradling didn’t think they should waste time repairing the ship, but some of the sailors, including Selkirk, strongly disagreed. Selkirk thought the ship was in such bad condition that it would sink if not repaired. Alexander argued publically with the Captain.

Finally, Selkirk said he would stay on the island if the ship was not repaired. The rest of the crew agreed with Alexander, but were not willing to stay on the island.

Selkirk was left with a few weapons, a cooking pot, tobacco, rum, cheese, and the Bible. The story is told that at the last minute Selkirk panicked and begged to be let back on board, but then Captain Stradling refused and sailed off.

Selkirk thought a ship would appear soon to rescue him, but he ended up spending four years and four months there.

He learned to survive and used the vegetables he found and relied on goats on the island for meat and milk. At first, he shot the goats for meat, but after he ran out of bullets, he would chase them down.

The island was infested with rats that had come on earlier ships that had anchored there. They would bite Selkirk during the night, so he adopted some feral cats.

He made clothing and a shelter from goatskin. He set himself on a hilltop so that he could look for ships. He did not want a Spanish ship to find him because he feared being captured and tortured. Spanish ships did come ashore for food and water and he hid.

On February 2, 1709, a British ship called Duke sailed into view. The captain, Woodes Rogers, was amazed but doubtful of the story of the bearded wild-looking man who could barely speak coherently. But also on board was Selkirk's former captain, William Dampier, who knew Selkirk.

Captain Rogers liked and helped Selkirk, and Selkirk helped nurse Rogers’ diseased men on the island.

Selkirk learned years later, that he had been right about the Cinque Ports  ship's condition when he abandoned ship. It sank off the coast of Peru shortly after he was left on shore. Only a few men survived, but they were captured by the Spanish and tortured in prison.

Robinson Crusoe with his Man Friday
after he had freed him from cannibals

The novel based on Selkirk's story, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, is written as the autobiography of a castaway. Though fiction, some readers believed it was a true story. Much like more modern books and movies, it is "based on a true story." It was first published in 1719.

We do not know how British writer Defoe learned of Selkirk’s story. I read that Defoe may have met Selkirk at a pub, but he probably only read news reports about him.

Defoe filled in most of the details from his own imagination. In the novel, the castaway spends 28 years on a remote, but not deserted, island in the Caribbean. Crusoe is shipwrecked on the island, as this excerpt shows:

"Nothing can describe the confusion of thought which I felt when I sank into the water; for though I swam very well, yet I could not deliver myself from the waves so as to draw breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me, a vast way on towards the shore, and having spent itself, went back, and left me upon the land almost dry, but half dead with the water I took in.

I had so much presence of mind, as well as breath left, that seeing myself nearer the mainland than I expected, I got upon my feet, and endeavoured to make on towards the land as fast as I could before another wave should return and take me up again; but I soon found it was impossible to avoid it; for I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy, which I had no means or strength to contend with: my business was to hold my breath, and raise myself upon the water if I could; and so, by swimming, to preserve my breathing, and pilot myself towards the shore, if possible, my greatest concern now being that the sea, as it would carry me a great way towards the shore when it came on, might not carry me back again with it when it gave back towards the sea."

That last paragraph is one hell of a sentence!

It wasn't until after Defoe’s death in 1731, that the idea that the novel was inspired by Alexander Selkirk took hold. But most literary scholars now do not believe that a single person inspired Crusoe and that Defoe combined multiple other buccaneer and survival stories.

I first read Robinson Crusoe as one of the Classics Illustrated comic books. I loved it. Reading that and Swiss family Robinson made we fantasize about living on a tropical island. I didn't want to be there like Tom Hanks in Castaway. I wanted that awesome Robinson family treehouse and all that stuff they took off the sinking ship to use. 

Daniel Defoe also wrote Moll Flanders (1722), a novel that is also written to seem like the true account of the life of the Moll from birth until old age.

If you want to visit Selkirk or Crusoe's island, the three Juan Fernández Archipelago islands are now officially named Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk, and Santa Clara. Robinson Crusoe island was formerly known as Más a Tierra (Closer to Land) and is the second largest of the Juan Fernández Islands, situated 670 km (362 nmi; 416 mi) west of San Antonio, Chile, in the South Pacific Ocean.

Source: The Writer's Almanac

Dystopian Fiction

“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it” - Ray Bradbury

Two genres of speculative fiction that you probably read in school at some level are utopian fiction and dystopian fiction. Both explore social and political structures.

The word "utopia" was first used in direct context by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. The word resembles both the Greek words "no place", "outopos", and "good place", "eutopos". His book presents a vision of an ideal society. Plato's The Republic also presents an ideal society and its political system.

Dystopian fiction is "the opposite" - a world that is flawed to the extreme. Though it may resemble in some ways our present world or society, the projection of the future is negative.

Utopias and dystopias are often found in science fiction and other speculative fiction genres. Dystopian worlds often show mass poverty, public mistrust, police states, totalitarian rule, oppression and technology that is advanced and abused.

I used to teach “The Fun They Had,” an Isaac Asimov story from 1951. This was written at a time when computers were new and home computers were non-existent, even in predictions. Home schooling was not a common thing. Online learning wasn't even a term, as online had no meaning. Even television was in its early days. But all that is what the story combines. It is about children who are educated completely at home in front of a screen.

The story's conflict occurs when the computers break down one day. No lessons. During this down time, they are told about the way kids had once gone to schools. They were in rooms with lots of other kids their age. They had a human teacher. There was a playground. They left home every school day.

When I taught this story to middle school children, the irony wasn't always obvious to my students when the kids in the story think about those kids of the past (our present) and "the fun they had" back then.

Asimov's prediction/warning hasn't come completely true. We still have schools for the vast majority of kids, but they certainly spend a lot of time in front of screens in school and at home doing schoolwork.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon (an anagram of "nowhere') is an interesting example. Erewhon isn't a utopia but it is not a dystopia. It is satirical utopia, like Gulliver's Travels (1726). Both books satirize the British Empire of their time.

         

Two popular dystopias that you may have read in school are George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell gives us Oceania, a country at perpetual war, with a population controlled through propaganda. Even people who haven't read the novel (or seen a movie version) have likely heard of the novel's Big Brother.

Aldous Huxley's novel world apparently started as a parody of utopian fiction. He created a "perfect" world of 2540 that he based on what he saw beginning in the industrial and social changes of 1931. In this utopia,the population is divided into five castes and accepts it because they are happily drugged and have been programmed since their birth in test tubes. No problems with old people - the World State kills everyone 60 years old or older.

         

Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, became much more known when Stanley Kubrick made it into a film. It was (and probably still is) a film that shocks. I had a college professor who cancelled a class because she had just seen the film and was so upset by the treatment of women and violence that she said she could not each. The story is set in a future England where there is a extreme youth violence. The society's method of trying to rehabilitate those criminal youth is equally violent.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale describes a future United States governed by a totalitarian theocracy, where women have no rights. The TV series adaptation has made this tale more real, as Kubrick's film did earlier.

Young adult dystopian fiction has become a big business in print and on screens. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, Divergent, Insurgent by Veronica Roth, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, and Delirium by Lauren Oliver.

Like Asimov, when Ray Bradbury wrote his short story, “The Veldt,” televisions were just coming into homes. But he thought they were already changing a lot of things, including parenting. Television did become a babysitter, and sometimes it was a teacher.

But in “The Veldt,” Bradbury describes a family “nursery” that is what we would call  a very sophisticated Virtual Reality that is highly interactive. Not only does it babysit the kids, it raises them and becomes more and more seductive. Too seductive, according to the parents, who decide it needs to be shut down. The children don't like that one bit, and with the help of the African veldt they take revenge on their parents.

Bradbury was warning about what might happen if parental guidance was lost. I can easily imagine the stories he would be writing today about the state of TV and video games. What might he say about video games that are actually dystopias, such as the Fallout series, BioShock, and the later games of the Half-Life series.

Dystopian fiction is the worst visions of the future. That would appear in apocalyptic literature. "Apocalypse" is a Greek word that does not mean the end of the world. It means "revelation", an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known. As you might suspect, the earliest apocalyptic writing comes from the literature of Judaism and Christianity. It encompasses writing that begins in the centuries following the Babylonian exile through the close of the Middle Ages. But those are tales for another day.

The Last Picture Show

They say no one wants to come to picture shows no more. 

Set between WWII and the Korean War, Peter Bogdanovich's film The Last Picture Show is about the end of an era in a small Texas town.

Though it wasn't my era, I could identify with this coming of age story and the film as Film meant a lot to me when it came out in 1971.

The story centers on Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and his friend Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges)and the cast includes Cybill Shepherd in her film debut, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid and John Hillerman.

It was one of the first films to have used a contemporary popular music soundtrack, and for aesthetic and technical reasons it was shot in black and white, which was unusual for that time. But it feels right.

The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and four nominations for acting: Ben Johnson and Jeff Bridges for Best Supporting Actor, and Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. It won two: Johnson and Leachman.


I have never read the book the film is based upon. The Last Picture Show (1966) was written by Larry McMurtry. He is the author of 29 novels.

I suspect he is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. That book was a television miniseries. That was a format that foreshadowed the limited series that are now common on places like Netflix. I loved that series and it sent me to the book. Of course, the novel and TV film are totally different experiences. In this case, both were good ones.

So, I should go back after almost 50 years and read the book of The Last Picture Show. I guess like a lot of people, I'm always a bit afraid to read a book after seeing the film version, or see the film when I have loved the book version. I don't want one to ruin the other. Most times that is what happens. It is great when one complements the other.

One of those complementary occurrences is the novel and film of The World According to Garp. I love the book. I love the movie.

Seeing The Last Picture Show film the year I graduated high school and started college made it mean a lot more. I'm not sure what this old man will think about the story now. I suppose I may identify more with Sam and the older characters and it will be a new story.






Watch a clip with critical commentary at Critics' Picks: 'The Last Picture Show' - The New York Times:

Man Pursuing the Horizon: Stephen Crane

I have been a longtime reader and fan of novelist and short-story writer Stephen Crane. I first read him when I was an impressionable 13 years old and diving into serious literature.

He was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. I was also born in Newark.

On the 100th anniversary of his birth year, I visited his New Jersey grave on the day of his death - June 5.

My first encounter with Crane was via some of his short stories. I knew that "the book" to read by him was The Red Badge of Courage. I read that the summer before my senior year in high school. It was fast read, but I didn't really enjoy it.

That summer I also started to read more about Crane's life. He never went to war. The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by someone who never went to war.

As a young man, Crane wanted to be a professional baseball player. He played catcher on his prep school team in a time when a catcher wore no protective gear and the mitt was basically a gardening glove with some extra padding. Stephen was known for being somewhat reckless, but able to catch anything, even barehanded.

Crane at 17 in a school military uniform

He bounced from school to school. He was at the Pennington School in NJ (his father had been principal there), but after 2 years he transferred to Claverack College, a quasi-military school.

He did one semester at Lafayette College and then transferred to Syracuse University. He played baseball at all these schools.

Crane (front center) with his Syracuse teammates 

Stephen Crane (front row, center) sits with baseball teammates on the steps of the Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, 1891. (Photo courtesy of the SU Special Collections Research Center)

During summer vacations until 1892, he was his brother Townley's assistant at a New Jersey shore news bureau.

I had read Catch 22 and seen the movie M*A*S*H  the year before and my mind was filled with anti-war and anti-Vietnam news. I was thinking about how I had to register for the Selective Service and how I would be in the draft lottery when I got to college.

I went back and reread The Red Badge of Courage that fall through the lens of it being an anti-war novel written by someone who probably equated war with his own sports experiences.

That sounds naive, but it worked for me that year.

Crane cut classes and was spending a lot of time in New York City, especially the poor tenement streets of the Bowery.

He began writing for New York City tabloids while he was still a teenager.

His first novel was Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). It was considered scandalous and unseemly, and booksellers wouldn't stock it. He gave away about a hundred copies and burned the rest.

He had read a series of reminiscences of Civil War veterans published in newspapers and had met some veterans as teachers in his schools that became the research for his own Civil War story.

In The Red Badge of Courage (1895), we follow Henry Fleming, who signs up for the 304th New York regiment. Henry wants to experience a war that matches the glory of battle that he had read about in school.

The novel made him famous. It was considered to be the most realistic war novel ever written, despite the facts that the author was only 24 and had never been in battle himself.

I have read more recently that some Civil War veterans wrote in to newspapers claiming that they knew Stephen Crane and had fought beside him in various Civil War battles.

Crane admitted to fellow writer Hamlin Garland that he had used his own experience as an athlete as inspiration for the battle scenes.

The novel's success led to Crane spending the rest of his life working as a war correspondent.

On New Year's Eve in 1896, the boat he was on traveling to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War hit a sandbar and sank.

He barely survived in a small dinghy with three other men. They spent 30 hours at sea, then finally in desperation, dove in and made for shore.

From that experience, Crane wrote his short story "The Open Boat" which was the first piece of fiction I had ever read by him.

Sadly, that time spent adrift at sea and swimming severely damaged his health and contributed to his death from tuberculosis (TB ) just 4 years later at the age of twenty-eight.

Stephen Crane, 1897

It wasn't until college that I read Stephen Crane's poetry. He is considered a minor poet and his Complete Poems includes all 135 poems, published and unpublished during his lifetime. I like Crane's short poems and his use of irony and paradox which were influenced by his reading of Emily Dickinson's verse. They are generally very accessible poems.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this; 
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried, 
And ran on.


His life was short, but his output was impressive for that short time that he wrote professionally. I think we could have been friends in another timeline. We would have at least played some pickup baseball together.

Cross Posted on Weekends in Paradelle