“A Nomad of the Time Streams”, by Michael Moorcock

 

 

484 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041790

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. A Nomad of the Time Streams was the fourth in this series featuring the character Oswald Bastable, and includes the tales The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar.

 

Strange as it may sound, Michael Moorcock did not, in fact, create the character of Oswald Bastable: in 1890, E. Nesbit (that would be Edith Nesbit, married name Edith Bland) created Oswald Bastable and his five siblings for a series of children’s novels: The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), The New Treasure Seekers (1904) and Oswald Bastable and Others (1905). Moorcock has stated, in response to numerous questions on his website forum, that the name “Oswald Bastable” wasn’t linked to Nesbit’s character but was, instead, linked to a particular “Fabian ‘liberal’ imperialism, still fundamentally paternalistic but well-meaning” that he thought Nesbit aspired to (Nesbit and her husband, Hubert Bland, were among the founders and leading members of the Fabian Society, who sought to establish Socialism in Britain in a gradual manner). So Moorcock’s Bastable books explore various variants on the theme of Imperialism and Colonialism: the British and other colonial empires persisting into the later 20^th Centuries, or conversely collapsing already in the early 1900s, and so on.

 

With all that said, Moorcock’s character is quite a different species: he is Captain Oswald Bastable of the 53^rd Lancers and Special Air Police; the conceit of these books is that Moorcock has discovered a safe, tucked away in the family attic in 1973; within are the lost narratives of Bastable’s adventures across time, about how with English grit and British integrity this brave English airshipman defends the mighty Pax Britannica maintained by the airfleet of dirigibles. The Warlord of the Air takes place on Earth in an alternative 1973: all of the great powers are still intact and keep the peace (more or less) via grand fleets of airships, the mightiest of which is maintained by the still-mighty British Empire (no Commonwealth here), ruled by King Edward VIII and his Queen, Wallis. This is a pretty terrific world-building exercise, a kind of pre-Steampunk creation that influenced much of what came later with the idea that Imperialism is forever. Bastable’s general character arc is that of the lonesome traveler lost not only in time, but in ideology, as well, for while Oswald may be an upholder of the Pax Britannica he still has his doubts about the Empire he serves. Moorcock is no imperialist sympathizer; quite the opposite, actually, although the number of straw men set up and knocked down could be used to thatch the roofs of a whole village. This world of perpetual Empires is stagnant, with Victorian technology, morals and even styles still very much in vogue, and proof that you can’t stop history and, regardless of who are the culprits are, certain things will inevitably come to happen.

 

The Land Leviathan is a framed much like The Warlord of the Air, with Moorcock printing his grandfather’s “introductory notes” in which the long-passed senior Moorcock travels to the Valley of the Morning for adventures of his very own, wherein in comes into possession of the remnants of Bastable’s story. Bastable’s second adventure starts with a return to Teku Benga to see if the place was real or just a dream, but, all too soon, the global political and cultural milieu take center stage in his life, whether he wants them to or not. This time it’s an alternative 1903 and the world has been irrevocably changed by O’Bean, an Irish immigrant inventor living in Chile. Read the story for yourself for all of the technological details, but suffice to say that Moorcock’s leftish re-envisioning of the near-past is what one might expect. The Land Leviathan is a lefty Englishman’s commentary on the (then) contemporary United States and its comeuppance, a kind of Steampunk take on the social and political state of world politics circa 1970-something, with racial and authoritarian motifs emerging to swamp the story. This can get tedious after a (very little) while, but the story is never boring, as we follow Oswald Bastable and his somewhat reluctant quests to uphold the Pax Britannica.

 

Lastly is The Steel Tsar, which imagines a world in which the imperial shoe is on the other foot, as the focus now shifts to Southeast Asia, Japan, Russia and Ukraine. Starting with the usual conceit of a discovered manuscript, Bastable once again finds himself mysteriously arriving at a strange place and time; after locating himself, he (naturally) becomes embroiled in the mightiest political struggles of the day, leading to a conclusion with a (tedious lefty) agenda. The airships from The Warlord of the Air thankfully make a reappearance, but the story all comes down to the Steel Tsar, his identity and motivations, and while the politically loaded conclusion is what one has come to expect from these Bastable tales, it is no less exciting for all of that. The last book in the series, Moorcock reveals not only the secrets behind Una Persson and Bastable’s time travel capabilities, but also is more overt in the novel’s political commentary – just in case readers of the first two novels missed the point.  An alternate history of an alternate history, readers who enjoyed The Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan will find nothing to complain about in The Steel Tsar. As a side note: while it is not necessary to read the three Oswald Bastable books in order, there are certainly benefits to doing so.  Simply put, the over-arching theme and frame story gel when read in publishing order.  So, if intrigued, start with The Warlord of the Air as a test to the series suitability to your interests.  If you like it, then by all means continue with The Land Leviathan, then The Steel Tsar as they are consistent follow ups.

“Treasure Island”, by Robert Louis Stevenson

 

328 pages, Rand, McNally & Company

The Fraser Public Library has a book sale every summer, at the end of which I was asked to throw out the books that patrons had donated but that did not sell – like this one, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, part of the Canterbury Classics line and published in – are you ready? – 1903! Now, I understand probably why it didn’t sell, being that its in rather rough shape and all, but it is still intact and able to be read. So I took it. Why, you ask? Why pick up a 120-year-old edition of a book I could get brand new…anywhere? History, Dear Reader, history; as in personal history, for this copy has all sorts of notes and jottings from past owners that add a certain something a new book doesn’t have. Alva Frederick, whom I presume was the original owner, wrote her name in the front, while Paul Kiesling added his sometime later. Someone scribbled notes on personal hygiene found in paragraphs 168 and 186, while on the back page can be found jottings…that I can’t decipher. Was it Alva who wrote these? Or Paul? Or someone else entirely? Don’t know. But the mere fact that this century-plus old book contains the writings of people long gone is a detail that sends shivers up my spine and reminds one why used books are the best books.

So there. Anyway, am I ever glad that I took this book for, while I was, of course, familiar with the tale, having seen the 1972 version in which Orson Welles played Long John Silver (and even the animated 2002 adaptation, Treasure Planet), I never appreciated just what a fine piece of fiction Treasure Island really is. This edition was of the Canterbury Classics line by Rand, McNally & Company and was intended as a teaching tool, edited by one Theda Gildemeister, who was the Training Teacher in the State Normal School in Winona, Minnesota (birthplace of one Winona Laura Horowitz…er, Ryder). As such, it was intended to “bear its share in acquainting school children with literature suited to their years”. Quite. But just what kind of kids are we talking about here? This kind:

 

That childhood is poor that has not had for friends many of the goodly company represented by Hector, Achilles, Roland, Sigurd, My [El] Cid, Don Quixote, Lancelot, Robin Hood, Percy, the Douglas, Gulliver, Puck, Rip Van Winkle, and Alice in Wonderland. College class-rooms, where Dante and Spencer, Goethe and Coleridge are taught, speedily feel the difference between minds nourished from babyhood up, on myths of Olympus and myths of Asgard, Hans Christian Anderson, old ballads, the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’’, the ‘Arabian Nights’, the ‘Alhambra’, and minds which are still strangers to fairyland and hero-land and all the dreamlands of the world’s inheritance. Minds of this later description come almost as barbarians to the study of poetry, deaf to its music and blind to its visions [emphasis added].

In these few sentences, Katharine Lee Bates (of Wellesley College) described the modern college know-it-all who is ignorant of so much of the Western canon. How many of our “woke” darlings of today spent “goodly company” with the heroes of their culture’s past? How obvious is it that they are barbarians because they know nothing of the myths that nourished their ancestors’ hearts and minds? How many are so intellectually stunted and have nothing but needless and destructive hate towards the culture that raised them and are indeed “deaf” and “blind” to their own cultural inheritance? It’s frightening to think of the numbers of these masses that our universities have churned out in the name of passing fads and intellectual fashions that will not stand the test of time, unlike the classics that they denigrate so, out of recognition of their superiority, I suspect.

So what is it about Treasure Island that has made it a timeless classic, popular with generations of readers since its original serialization in 1881/82? That it’s a Boy’s Own Adventure featuring pirates, voyages, danger, treasure and all the rest goes a long way to explaining its appeal. But there’s something more than that, a deeper meaning underneath the piratical razzmatazz. Stevenson illustrates that the search for treasure and the pursuit of avarice pale in comparison to the pursuit of self-knowledge and the search for wisdom; characters led by their greed for material wealth are drawn down paths of treachery and violence and suffer devastating consequences as a result, while those seeking personal advancement – exemplified, of course, by Jim Hawkins – attain pride in substantial accomplishments in growth and learning.

Would I have ferreted all of that out if I had read this book as a kid? Um…sure (although I rather suspect not). No doubt I would have reveled in the search for hidden treasure and the race against pirates and the approval of adults that are all to be found in Treasure Island. The deeper meaning may have passed me by, but maybe, just maybe, I would have grown along with Jim and seen the truth behind the idea that the search for the treasure of the world pales in comparison to the search for the treasure of the spirit. Perhaps I would have seen the dangers of avarice and the rewards of generosity and become a better person before my time. And perhaps, just perhaps, the Woke Mobs who populate our university campuses and spew hate on all and sundry would have grown too if they had read Treasure Island and other classics of the Western canon they despise.

“All Quiet on the Western Front”, by Erich Maria Remarque

 

175 pages, Crest/Fawcett Publications, ISBN-13: 978-0449005460

Way back in junior high, when I was in study hall and had nothing better to do (what, I’m gonna study? In study hall?) I came across All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and figured “Eh, what the hell”. And man, am I glad I did. The author (actually Erich Paul Remark; not sure why the name change) was a German novelist with fifteen novels and five other works to his name including this, his most famous piece by far. All Quiet on the Western Front (or Im Westen nichts Neues, “In the West Nothing New”) tells the story of Paul Bäumer, who belongs to a group of German soldiers on the Western Front during The Great War. After his and his comrade’s initial patriotic enthusiasm to fight for Kaiser und Vaterland has worn off, Paul and the other men in his unit find themselves fighting a war they no longer believe in for a cause they no longer support. All Quiet on the Western Front, then, tells the all-too familiar story of men caught in a catastrophic situation not of their making and their futile attempts to escape it – with the only escape possible typically being death.

There are several themes that Remarque tackles across these mere 175 pages, but he does so with such brevity and insightfulness that each powerfully strikes the reader. One is the horror of modern, industrialized warfare, in which men are thrown into the maw of battle like so much raw material in a factory, only instead of churning out products, the war machine produces only corpses. Set in the final years of the war, the novel is famous for its extremely graphic depictions of life and death in the trenches where fighting was grueling, inefficient and pointless and in which the point of battles seemed not victory over the enemy but rather the capture a few hundred yards of land that cost the lives of thousands of men. Those who survived direct attacks often suffered catastrophic shrapnel injuries, losing arms, legs and even faces, to say nothing of the deep psychological trauma they suffered. Soldiers, like those in Paul’s regiment, became detached from the men they killed, and the threat of a vague, unforeseeable death hangs over them all; as Paul observes repeatedly, no one can survive the war completely unscathed.

This leads to another theme of the novel, the simple need to survive the Front. Soldiers must be prepared to act unthinkingly in battle, no matter how horrifying these actions might have once seemed in their long-dead, civilian lives. The men revert to animal instinct under fire, suppressing all higher thought and where emotions like pity, grief, or disgust are fatal to them, as they might cause any one of them to hesitate or second-guess themselves. Paul’s calm, neutral attitude towards his experiences is almost as disturbing as the carnage he describes, but as Paul himself explains, becoming desensitized to the horror around him is the only way he can keep going. Only rarely is an event traumatic enough to briefly break down these mental barriers, as, for example, when Paul is trapped alone for hours with the body of a French soldier he has killed – the only soldier he kills face-to-face, as it happens – or when his best friend Katczinsky (Kat) is killed by a shrapnel fragment. Desensitized, dehumanized, with only the basest desires still intact; that is the life of a soldier on either side of the Western Front.

The soldier’s desire to fight – not for Kaiser or Germany or whatever – for the man next to him is another theme. For Paul, the one positive aspect of the war experience is that it forges extraordinarily strong bonds between soldiers as the men of the Second Company are comrades-in-arms, closer than family or even lovers. They have seen unspeakable horrors and endured unimaginable suffering together, experiences they will never be able to share with those who did not fight. While the war creates sharp distinctions between soldiers and civilians, it also erases other distinctions; well-educated young men, like Paul, fight and die alongside peasants, like Detering. Comradeship is such an intense bond that one would expect the death of one soldier to trigger strong emotional reactions from the others, but grief is a luxury these battle-hardened soldiers cannot afford. Apart from brief outbursts of rage or sorrow, the men are unable to properly mourn their fallen friends, and Paul becomes increasingly numb to these losses over the course of the novel until the novel’s final paragraph suggests that Paul welcomes his own death.

The Lost Generation is another theme, illustrated best when Paul, though often dreaming about his life before the war, knows that he can never return to it. The war has destroyed an entire generation of young men, leaving them “lost” and unable to physically and psychologically recover or unable to readjust to their past lives. Paul experiences the jarring effects of this transformation most clearly when he briefly returns to his home village on leave: while the village hasn’t changed, he has, and so he feels completely out of place there. His old interests in literature and art, represented by the shelves of books in his childhood room, now seem childish and unreal; he feels alienated from his father and his former teachers, who expect him to play the role of the heroic young soldier. Only his ailing mother seems to understand his reluctance to discuss what has happened to him (leave it to Mom to suss out the truth). When his leave ends, Paul is almost relieved to return to the front as his trip home reinforces his conviction that the war has created an unbridgeable divide between the young men who fight and the communities they have left behind.

Last is the hypocrisy of the old generation that sent the new to war. When the war began in 1914, many Germans viewed the conflict as an opportunity for Germany to prove her worth against the other nations of Europe. Young men were expected to support the national cause by signing up for active duty, but these soldiers were volunteers in theory only, according to Paul, for the reality was that most had no say in the matter. Under immense pressure from parents, teachers, and politicians, young men had to enlist or risk being accused of cowardice (one of Paul’s teachers, a patriotic older man named Kantorek, even marched his class down to the local recruitment office to volunteer). Paul feels that these authority figures deceived his generation, filling their heads with romantic ideas about patriotism but failing to prepare them for the horrors of battle. He is disgusted by the hypocrisy of those who preach the virtues of sacrifice, yet are content to let other men die in their place. Even when it has become obvious that Germany cannot win, those in power stubbornly prolong the war, blinded by greed and pride.

Many of the themes in All Quiet on the Western Front are to a great extent universal and appeal to people regardless of race, creed, nationality or what have you. Remarque wrote a humanist novel that all people can recognize and identify with, which explains its longevity.

“Doctor Zhivago”, by Boris Pasternak

 

495 pages, Reader’s Digest, ISBN-13: 978-0895773425

Admit it: the instant you read the title Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, the Maurice Jarre theme popped into your head quite on its own. Naturally, like many (most?) people, my only exposure to this work was through David Lean’s 1965 epic historical romance (I would add tragedy to that mix), with its sweeping vistas, earth-shaking events, personal catastrophes and moving soundtrack. But of course, without Pasternak’s novel of revolution and forlorn loves, none of that would have happened, so thanks, Boris, for giving Hollywood access to one of the most romantic and tragic (but then I repeat myself) stories of them all.

Speaking of which, some background: Doctor Zhivago was first published in Italy in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – the Italian publisher, businessman and left-wing political activist – after he was shown the manuscript by an Italian journalist (and after being told by his Slavist advisor that not to publish it would “constitute a crime against culture”; well done, sir. Well done). While parts were written in the 1910s and 20s, it was completed in 1955 and submitted to the literary journal Novy Mir (New World) the next year. Perhaps Boris had faith that the Commies would recognize great work when they saw it or, just perhaps, he was naïve.

For the Soviets refused to publish Doctor Zhivago because Pasternak’s concern for individuals over society and, by extension, of the Soviet state as a whole was obvious to anyone who read his novel (his subtle criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, the Gulag and Socialist Realism didn’t help, either). Not that it helped to deflect the novel’s popularity in the West, especially after Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature for his role in “continuing the great Russian epic tradition”, to which Pasternak responded that he was “[i]nfinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed”.

Fat lot of good it did him, for the KGB surrounded Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino and not only threatened him with arrest but also vowed to send his mistress Olga Ivinskaya back to the gulag, where she had been imprisoned under Stalin; it was further hinted that, should Pasternak travel to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union. As a result, Pasternak officially declined his Nobel Prize, to which the committee responded in turn that “[t]his refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place”.

Despite his decision to decline the award, the Soviet Union of Writers continued to denounce Pasternak in the Soviet press; furthermore, he was threatened at the very least with formal exile to the West. In response, Pasternak wrote directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, saying “Leaving the motherland will mean equal death for me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work” (after being ousted from power in 1964, Khrushchev at last read the novel and felt great regret for having banned the book at all).  As a result of this and the intercession of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Pasternak was not expelled from Russia, where he ultimately died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on May 30^th, 1960.

And all this for writing a book – but, man oh man, what a book, a book the Soviets were right to be concerned over, seeing as, through subtle descriptions and in-depth characterizations, Pasternak upheld the dignity of the individual against the privations of the State, whether Czarist or Soviet. This is a message that can and did resonate with the people of the Soviet Union and their never-ending struggles merely to live normal lives underneath an oppressive regime that was determined to allow them to do anything but. For during the misbegotten lifespan of the Soviet Union, it was the State and its inhuman ideology that were of paramount importance, not the person.

As to Doctor Zhivago’s appeal outside of the USSR, that should come as no surprise, for this self-same message serves to inspire any and all who seek personal freedom from the hands of any all-controlling apparatus, be it communist regime, socialist state, fascist nation, religious autocracy – hell, even a democratic republic; for any and all forms of controlling authority seeks to ever-expand its own power at the expense of the individual, even if said expansion is seen by the Powers That Be as being for the individual’s own good and even if – ESPECIALLY if – the individual in question sees no need for this “help”.

Doctor Zhivago is, ostensibly, a romance, being the tale of one man and his struggle between his wife Tonya, the woman he has pledged his honor to, and his mistress Lara, the woman to whom he has given his heart. But it is so much more than that, as it describes the fall of one society and the rise of another, of the destruction of an old culture and the creation of a new, and especially of all of the people caught and, too often, destroyed during the whole – people like Yuri Zhivago and all of those connected to him; “small” people for whom the sweep of history has no interest and yet exist all the same, asking only to live and be free. People like you and me.

“Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice

 

368 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: 978-0345281265

If you ask me, Anne Rice shoulda stopped with Interview with the Vampire; this book, all on its own, is an excellent work of gothic horror that stretches its aesthetic to include romance, historic fiction and tragedy. Really, it’s a good book…as to the others in the so-called Vampire Chronicles – which, as of this writing, included twelve sequels, not including New Tales of the Vampires or Lives of the Mayfair Witches – what was a fine stand-alone work has become this bloated travesty in which it was obvious that Rice didn’t know how to quit. I get wanting to expand your literary universe and to tell the tales of other characters you have thought up, but each book is a marked disappointment compared to the original. Ah, well…we all know what they say about sequels.

So then…Interview with the Vampire is the 200-year-long story of Louis de Pointe du Lac as told by him to a reporter referred to simply as “the boy”. In 1791, Louis is a young indigo plantation owner living in Louisiana. Distraught by the death of his brother, he seeks death in any way possible, which is when he is approached by a vampire named Lestat de Lioncourt, who desires Louis’ immortal company. Lestat turns Louis into a vampire and the two become immortal companions. Lestat spends time feeding off slaves while Louis, who finds it morally repugnant to murder humans to survive, feeds from animals. Louis and Lestat are forced to leave when Louis’ slaves begin to fear the vampires and instigate an uprising.

Louis sets his own plantation aflame while he and Lestat also kill the slaves to keep word from spreading about vampires living in Louisiana. Gradually, Louis bends under Lestat’s diabolical influence and begins at last to feed on humans, slowly coming to terms with his vampiric nature, but also becoming increasingly repulsed by what he perceives as Lestat’s total lack of compassion for the humans he preys upon. Escaping to New Orleans, Louis feeds off a plague-ridden, 5-year-old girl whom he finds next to the corpse of her mother. Louis begins to think of leaving Lestat and going his own way but, fearing this, Lestat then turns the girl into a vampire “daughter” for them, to give Louis a reason to stay. She is then given the name Claudia. But enough spoiling…

What to make of Interview with the Vampire? Perhaps the most obvious lesson taught is that being a vampire is not all its cracked up to be. Eternal life and youth sound like great ideas, but at the cost of taking innocent life after innocent life and how that corrupts and destroys one’s soul (for lack of a better word). In Lestat we see one possible result in his utter ruthlessness; in Louis we see another eventual outcome in his world-weariness and regret at what he has become; and in Claudia we have a bit of both, in that she is as ruthless as Lestat but as regretful as Louis. So immortality sucks, as one can never change or build or create something that will outlast you. You do not live. You do not die. You…just are.

Interview with the Vampire may have started the trend that’s still around today of seeing vampires as tragic and romantic beings more to be pitied than feared, and to an extent that is true. But many of the other messages found throughout the book seem to have been lost on these later-day writers, for if one comes away from this novel wanting to actually become a vampire then one is whacked. While Lestat and, to a lesser extent, Claudia revel in their existences, their unlives are irrelevant, a fact that the much-despised but more-enlightened Louis understands all too well. It is us mere mortals that have something to live for, for our all-too-brief lives are, in fact, to be envied and cherished, unlike the meaningless existences of vampires. Just ask Louis.

“The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I”, by Roger Shattuck

 

397 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0394704159

The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I by Roger Shattuck – an American writer who was best known for his books on French literature, art and music of the 20^th Century – is his history of La Belle Époque, and what a history it is, too. This is one of my favorite eras in history, and to have a masterful historian such as Shattuck write this history is a rare treat, indeed. There are few other persons with Shattuck’s breadth of knowledge who could have accomplished this feat: the man’s working knowledge of French music, poetry, painting and theater were all impressive, but his familiarity with the behind-the-scenes scandals and drama that affected their development gives his study a legitimacy that few other works can equal. Shattuck’s understanding of what the French avant-garde represented wasn’t a style, per se, but rather “a way of life, both dedicated and frivolous” whose significance was not to be found in the work of the most celebrated talents but, rather, in the aspirations of original talents that hadn’t yet been recognized. As the man himself said:

 

Only by cutting below the most prominent figures is one likely to find men both representative of the era and significant in their own right. Their artistic identities are most discernible against their background rather than removed form it into a new context of individual greatness. Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire: is this grouping less arbitrary than any other? They make, in fact, a singular team. Rousseau, a true artisan, painted with a combination of insight and awkwardness that earned for him double standing as both modern and primitive artist. Satie’s music partakes of the same simplicity, yet he lived in a series of scandals on the forefront of the artistic scene in Paris. Jarry’s play ‘Ubu Roi’ made him notorious at twenty-three, and within ten years he put himself in the grave with overwork, poverty, and drink. Before he died during the closing hours of World War I, Apollinaire had written some of the finest lyric poetry of the century and had assumed the leadership of Paris avant-garde. All four had colorful, significant careers, careers that might separately be ranked in the second magnitude of the epoch. Why, then, do they convey, in combination, the interplay of forces that steadily pushed the arts toward what Apollinaire called the New Spirit? The reasons are simple. Their entwined careers in Paris exactly span the period 1885-1918 and suggest a unity in artistic conviction and practice that is less clearly expressed in any single figure or in a general survey of the era. Chronologically and in spirit they set its limits. In addition, their originality and persistence worked upon more stable artists and obliged them to take into account the most audacious and sometimes foolish aspirations of the age.

 

I apologize for the long-ass quote, but sometimes its better just to let the author speak for himself rather than butcher his ideas. Speaking of which, one may legitimately ask – especially if one is French – how it is that this definitive chronicle of the French avant-garde came to be written by ce maudit américain. Perhaps, sometimes, it takes an outsider to properly discern things that are hidden or overlooked by insiders. Furthermore, while The Banquet Years was originally written way the hell back in 1968, it still wafts through one’s mind like a cool summer breeze, what with its many deft analytical anecdotes that do more to enlighten even the most dedicated historian of the age as any turgid academic history could. This is true, as well, of the thumbnail sketches of his principal subjects: the post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau; the composer and pianist Erik Satie; the symbolist writer Alfred Jarry; and the poet, playwright, short story writer and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire – four outcasts who were barely noticed by the pointy-head longhairs of their time who nevertheless ushered-in 20^th Century modernism (for good and ill).

Can a 400-page scholarly review of French avant-garde artistic achievements legitimately be called a literary classic? It can, if it’s Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years.