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Dirda on Books
Hosted by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Thursday, Feb. 21, 2002; 2 p.m. EST
THIS WEEK'S TOPIC: The saddest book you can think of.
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda took your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.
Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or describing his travels to, say, a P.G. Wodehouse Convention. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts -- just the sort of range you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism (1993).
These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. In the fall of 2000 Indiana University Press published "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments," a selection from Dirda's Book World columns. He hopes to bring out a companion volume soon.
Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He'd also like to spend six months in Florida writing a book that would become a runaway best seller, a critical success, and the hottest cinematic property of the year. A guy can daydream, right?
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Michael Dirda: Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome, to Cabaret--no I mean Dirda on Books. For the next hour, we'll talk about reading, writing, reviewing, etc. And this week our special theme is encapsulated in Ford Madox Ford's famous opening sentence to The Good Soldier: This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Of course, it's always darkest before dawn, so maybe we should do Happy Books next week? Anway, for all you folks in Lenexa, Maitland and Lorain--let us, like Richard II, sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Washington, D.C.:
I recently finished two very sad books -- Michael Cunnigham's "The Hours" and Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance." "A Fine Balance" is a beautifully written book, with incrediby vivid characterizations, and a litany of Job-like sufferings. I was wiped out by the end. "The Hours" just made me want to cry. Such despair in such a small book. I now want to read "Mrs. Dalloway" and a really good biography of Virginia Woolfe. Any suggestions?
Michael Dirda: Hermione Lee's is probably the Woolf biography to read. Quentin Bell's is the semi-standard. You might, though, want to read more Woolf--she is one of the great essayists of the century.
As for the sadness of Cunningham and Mistry--I will take your word for this, as I haven't read them. World enough and time.
San Diego, Calif.:
Michael, I find this topic chimerical. If a book is well-written, even on a sad topic, it is exhilirating for a reader. The only books I find sad are overrated best-sellers or books that I don't want to end. Life is hard enough without slogging through "downer" books.
Michael Dirda: Yes, I know what you mean. But some books are such exhausting emotional experiences that we need to steel ourselves to read them, or when we stop, to return to them. The break up of Nicole and Dick Diver, for instance, in Tender is the Night is such a scene. I once wrote an essay, called "Perils of Fiction," in which I made the case that serious involvement with a powerful book was comparable to involvement with a human being, and that when such a reader witnesses the destruction or abasement or sorrows of characters he cares about, he himself experiences a kind of emotional devastation. If he didn't, he wouldn't be sufficiently involved with the book. When you open yourself to a novel, you open yourself to being affectged by its outcomes, and as these can be tragic. . . THis is one reason why I can't read too many strong novels without resting between them. It would be like falling in love with someone and breaking up with him or her every week. I must say I made this argument more cogently in the essay.
Germantown, Md.:
Well, since I was the one who requested this topic, I guess I should throw in my nomination: "The White Hotel" by DM Thomas.
Also, as honorable mentions, Saramago's "Blindness" and Pressfield's rendition of the Battle of Thermopalaye in "Gates of Fire"
Michael Dirda: Can you explain why sad books so appealed to you?
Buffalo, N.Y.:
The saddest book I've ever read is Henry James's PORTRAIT OF A LADY. I cry every time I read those last pages.
Michael Dirda: yes. I cry at the end of The Good Soldier too, when Ashburnham tells the narrator, just before he kills himself: "I must have a little rest, old man."
SciFiGirl:
Saddest book? Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. God that book is depressing, and I didn't find it in the least romantic.
Michael Dirda: Can someone talk more philosophically about sadness in literature? Do we find it so powerful because we all, secretly, possess a tragic sense of life? Or because of human sympathy? Or because we are relieved, like the Greeks at Oedipus the Rex, that we're not so bad off?
Saddest book...:
My third grade teacher read "Where the Red Fern Grows" out loud to the class, chapter by chapter. The day we got to the part where the dogs die, the teacher was fighting back tears, all the girls were crying, and the boys were trying their hardest not to. I don't even like dogs that much but the story rips me apart every time.
Michael Dirda: I know the book and my kids have read it in school. But I could never read it because I knew the dogs were going to die. I mean, I saw Ol Yeller when I was 9 or 10, and I'll never, ever watch that movie again, let alone read the book. In fact, most animal books seem to me to be designed to elicit tears.
Arlington, Va.:
Here's a second vote on Michael Cunningham as a sad writer -- although I admired "Flesh & Blood," I couldn't finish it. Life is too short to spend time with a book that melancholy.
Michael Dirda: But to avoid such books doesn't seem quite right either.
Sad:
Saddest book I've read recently -- Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. Made sadder by the fact that it was a true story. What a waste of life. We don't thank our young men and women in the military nearly often enough.
Michael Dirda: Yes. Think of All Quiet on the Western Front. You know, this may not have been the best choice for a topic. At the best of times, I'm hardly happy go lucky these days. How does that opening to Rilke's Duino Elegies go: Who among the numberless ranks of angels would hear my cry, if I cried out? I don't do it justice.
In fact, I'm just put in mind of a whole genre of sad poems: medieval and renaissance dawn-songs, or aubades. There's a huge anthology of them called EOS--dawn in Greek. THey all have the same theme: lovers' parting at morning.
Takoma Park, Md.:
When I try to think of sad books, most of what I come up with are plays.
Does that mean that emotion and catharsis are better handled in drama, or is it Just Me?
Michael Dirda: WEll, what are your sad plays? Death of a Salesman--"And we we're home free"? Hamlet: "Absent thee from felicity a while... and tell my story." Lear: "Never, never, never, never, never." Others?
Arlington, Va:
I think there's satisfaction when you see that a book has accurately and gracefully captured a common human experience -- no matter how dark that experience may be. It's sometimes hard to appreciate this, though, unless you have some distance from the experience. The well-depicted sadness can be too overwhelming.
Michael Dirda: Yes. But why do we read more than one such book? To add different sorts of salts to our wounds? Once you know that people marry the wrong people, or that love doesn't always work out the way it should, or that people drag on their lives as shells of what they were because of some emotional devastation---well, why read more than a few of these? Shouldn't we all be reading RIght Ho, Jeeves instead?
RE: Greek tragedy:
Right on, Michael.
"Sadness" is necessary for art to resonate. In his Poetics Aristotle used the term "psychogogia" (a moulding of the soul) to describe the state of the the spectator in the theater whose mind is "enthralled,"
"entranced," "absorbed," and "transported."
Empathy + Catharsis = Psychogogia
Michael Dirda: Many thanks. I'd never heard the term psychogogia before, even though I've read English trnaslations of the poetics three or four times.
Arlington, Va.:
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I
was in college when I read it, but I wept at
the final pages with Maggie and her
brother Tom in the flood. One of the few
books that made me cry (the other one
was "Where the Red Fern Grows," and I
was a fourth-grader then.)
Michael Dirda: Ah, the Red Fern again. Do their teachers know what they are inflicting on our innocent children?
Why do we like sad literature?:
Well, it's not because of schadenfreude (or however it's spelled).
I enjoy reading well written sad literature (such as "All Quiet on the Western Front") because it moves me profoundly. It educates me about the human condition. At the same time it reminds me that I am part of the flawed and beautiful human race. None of this happens in a solipsitic fashion, or a sort of "oh, poor me, I so enjoy a good cry." Rather, for me it is a way to empathize with the deep pain and suffering that is such an integral part of life. Again, not to say that suffering is an end in itself, but it is very much a part of the journey. Reading beautifully written sad literature helps one to understand that journey better.
I will add, however, that people who live in abject misery and poverty would probably scoff at what I've just said, and I wouldn't blame them.
Michael Dirda: RAymond Queneau once said that true stories were about food and made-up stories were about love.
Delray, Va.:
Personally I enjoy sad stories for much the same reason I enjoy comedy -- because I am constantly amazed that man has the power to string a few words together and dramatically shift people's emotions. It is God-like manipulation in my eyes.
Michael Dirda: Yes. But do we actively want to suffer? I do think the poster who talked about suffering adding roundness and body to a novel was on the right path. I mean most comic characters do tend to be two-dimensional humors.
Takoma Park, Md.:
Sad play list:
Hamlet
Lear
Antigone
Oedipus Rex
in the first rank.
Measure for Measure in the second rank, plus various Ibsen and more Greek tragedies. They don't call 'em tragedies for nothing.
And I'd say that All Quiet on the W. Front and Black Hawk down are more anger-inducing than sad.
Michael Dirda: I've never thought Oedipus Rex that sad--Antigone yes. But Oedipus is so unlikeable that one simply watches to see how he will be brought down.
Sadness in Literature:
I find the saddest books take place during wars. The added context of the futility and inevitability of a war seems to make characters' choices that much more poignant.
Michael Dirda: Yes. Dr. Zhivago, for instance.
Silver Spring, Md.:
The same argument can be made about reading funny books. If you want to laugh, just remember some of the knock knock jokes from school. It isn't about getting new experiences (we know how to laugh, we know that sad stuff happens). It's about something else, perhaps such as having MORE emotional experiences than we can pack into one life.
Similarly why go to thrillers or tearjerker movies or funny movies? Same arguments I think.
Michael Dirda: So, does this mean that one good tragic love affair in real life is the equal to Madame Bovary or The Great Gatsby?
Terra Bibliofilia:
Sir Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople. (Cambridge University Press, 1965)-- about the sack of a city that had stood for 1000 years as the center of Western civilization. A cautionary tale for our times.
Michael Dirda: Yes. Runciman--there's a life, and a long one too.
SciFiGirl:
I think that most books that make us cry do that because we identify in some way with them. As the person who mentioned Where the Red Fern Grows says, that book makes you cry. The death of an animal or character you like, because it has a basic innocence (think of Johnny in The Outsiders). And because we identify with it. I think that books are sad on two levels, the first are the tear jerkers where you cry and cry when something happens, and the other are deeper and more thoughtful, probably along the lines of The Hours (which I haven't read), or The House of Mirth, where Lily sinks deeper and deeper into poverty and a life she cannot sustain. Her saying "I am a useless person" was the saddest statement I've ever heard a character utter, but who of us hasn't entertained that thought at least once in our lives?
I hope we talk about happy books next week. This is very angst-provoking.
Michael Dirda: Ok. Let's do Happy Books next week. Your remark--but who of us hasn't felt such things makes me wonder: Do the books show us the dangers of life, as warnings? There but for the grace of god. When my father lay dying I read the most worldly maxims and aphorisms I could for consolation, to steel myself by adopting as steely and cold an attitude as I could, because otherwise I would be crying every night. Those who follow such things should note that I'm doing the Oxford Book of Aphorisms for a Book World Book Club selection in a few months. Hasn't worked as well this time.
Alexandria, Va.:
Here's an odd one: I can't decide if I think Ask The Dust is sad or inspiring.
Michael Dirda: Don't know this book.
Laurel, Md.:
I think sad books happen as a combination of the content of the book and the time it is read. After a round of lay-offs at my company, I sat in a restaurant and read a murder mystery by Rosemary Edghill, The Bowl of Night which had a sub-theme about loss. I sat and wept into my chips and salsa. I couldn't stop reading but I couldn't stop crying either.
And now, re-reading the book causes me to cry all over again. Combination of theme and circumstances, I guess.
Michael Dirda: Yes. I get a lump in the throat at the end of All the King's Men, when Jack says "ANne STanton, now my wife." That "now my wife" carries such impact because of all that has gone before: their near love affair when young, Anne's becoming the governor's mistress, Jack's various betrayals and uncertainties. It's like Lear's great phrase to Cordelia: "Pray, undo this button."
Washington, D.C.:
Michael -- You ask for a more philosophical look at the powerful emotions evoked by "sad" books. For me, these types of books often give me a feeling of "there but for the grace of God go I," which makes me feel relieved. Yet, I often go out of my way to avoid "sad" books because that relief is secondary to my gut feeling that these books do reflect our human condition. There is so much sadness in the world. So I tend to prefer to escape by reading "happy" or at least upbeat books, like Wodehouse novels, the books of Laurie Colwin, Jane Austen. These books affect me, but not with such a punch to my emotional center. Does this make sense?
Michael Dirda: Perfectly. It's why I have a taste for artificial fiction, for novels that are patently artifacts, rather than slices of life. One engages solely with style, rather than with reality. ONe is an obsrever, rather than a participant. But these are, nonetheless, secondary works compared to the others.
wiredog:
"does this mean that one good tragic love affair in real life is the equal to Madame Bovary or The Great Gatsby?"
I would submit that one good tragic love affair -in real life- is superior to any in literature.
Michael Dirda: Yes, but. The tragedies of Lucien de Rubenpre (remember Oscar Wilde who said that his death haunted him all his life), or of Fitzgerald's heroes sometimes linger with us longer than our own experiences. They are shaped experiences, and they work their mojo whenever we reread them. In life, we gradually forget emotional anguish until it becomes a kind of nostalgic wistfulness, almost pleasureable to recall. Otherwise we could never go on living. Of course, some love affairs are more powerful than others and we do know that ever after nothing after will ever be the same, to slightly paraphrase Faulkner on Eula in The Town.
Nani, Tex.:
I'm not as well-read as most of you and am quite hesitant to post, but it seems rude to simply read your chat every week and not make a contribution.
Saddest book: Mother never limited us to school or children's books. We could select any book we wished from her small library/reading room. Consequently, I read the first chapter of John Steinbeck's The Red Pony at an age far too young to cope with the heartbreak of loss, of loving someone too much, and the realization that those we trust most can sometimes fail us. Whehn Jody found his beloved pony up in the mountains, dead from pneumonia, buzzards flocking about its head, I was devastated and almost physically ill with grief. I flung the book aside and ran crying to Mother. Her efforts to soothe me with assurances that Jody gets another pony later in the book were futile. She didn't seem to understand that I WAS Jody; Gabilan Mountains was MY pony; I'd been certain that Billy Buck's valiant efforts to nurse Gabilan back to health would succeed. Grief eventually turned into anger at Steinbeck and then to bitter resolve to never read another of his books. Ever. Many years later, reminiscing in Mother's library, I picked up Red Pony. Carefully avoiding the first chapter (childishly squinting as I flipped through those pages so I wouldn't see the hurtful passages), I finished the final three chapters and forgave the author. I've since read many of his books, appreciating the descriptive passages and deceptively simple stories filled with love and pain. Still to this day, I cannot think of the Red Pony without a twinge of that long ago sorrow.
Michael Dirda: Beautiful posting. It's sad just to read.
I nearly forgot:
Your own book club choice, "Housekeeping" is profoundly sad. The thin membrane between life and death for the aunt and the niece who follows her (I'm bad with names) and the necessary parting from them of the niece who saves herself are both powerful. Interesting how a book can be both sad and (for the other niece) hopeful. Similar is the ending of "The Man Who Loves Children" -- a death and a liberation.
Michael Dirda: Thank you.
SciFiGirl:
And there's a sub-genre to Saddest Books, and that is: books where you as a reader know that what is coming cannot be good, but the characters don't know it. My case in point is a Simple Plan. But maybe books about stupidity are different from books that are sad.
Michael Dirda: Yes. It would be interesting to htink about how irony fits into all this.
Madison, Wis.:
Most comic characters tend to be two-dimensional? No more than most tragic characters. For every Hamlet there's a Falstaff, for every Madame Bovary there's a Don Quixote.
Michael Dirda: I would submit that Falstaff is as much tragic as comic, as is Don Q. I was thinking of perhaps less grand ocmic figures like those in Wodehouse. I do recall how comedies do emphasize stock characters: Miles Gloriosus, the helpful servant and all that.
Ask the Dust:
Ask the Dust is by John Fante... written in the late 30s... you might pick it up sometime...
Michael Dirda: thanks. There is a John Fante Reader recently published.
Fairfax, Va.:
Washington DC wrote, "For me, these types of books often give me a feeling of "there but for the grace of God go I," which makes me feel relieved."
That is how my wife feels, too, as she wades through another real-life account of a serial killer or a child abuse victim or a parent who lost their children in some awful tragedy. She says it makes her appreciate her situation more. Personally, it has the opposite effect on me, but to each her own.
Michael Dirda: I'm with you.
Germantown, Md.:
We return to these books for their honesty and their empathy. The only other emotion that can come close to this level of power is Love, but Love is often personal. And stories of love are more then often stories of romance which differs even more from person to person. But grief and loss and pain and shame and scorn and despair are universally human. They remind us that what we feel day to day is part of a collective whole. That what we suffer others have suffered before us and most often have suffered worse. Love and other happy emotions need no validation or support. People in Love shouldn't even have time to read and if they do, they don't need literature to let them know how good it is and how blessed they are. But those who are despondent and hopeless can wring a cathartic balming effect out of even the darkest or most disturbing of books.
Michael Dirda: But aren't many, if not most, of the great sad stories those about love gone wrong? I mean who cares to read about Happy, happy love, about Darby and Joan, or the Folks who live on the hill? We want Tristan and Isolde, Swann and Odette, Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel, et al.
Towson, Md.:
I agree that drama handles sadness better than novels. Cyrano, of course, all of Tennessee Williams, the incredible pain in Antigone, Eugene O'Neil, Sam Sheppard even. Perhaps the act of seeing someone else survive it, even if it's make-believe, helps us deal with those issues. With a novel we are might sit and stew and never get through the catharsis on our own. Sorta like funerals get us started on the recovery of our lives. Maybe we need the focussed drama of a funeral, of a play.
Michael Dirda: Maybe.
Arlington, Va.:
I wonder if the theme of sadness in literature has shifted somewhat as our sense of tragedy has been mangled by the elevation of victimhood as a badge of honor. Whereas previously we may have felt sympathy for the spurned maiden, we now reserve those feelings for characters whose plight corresponds most directly to our personal plights.
Michael Dirda: I do think that identification plays its part in all this. Certainly, one rereads sad books with a greater attention to their mechanics and less to their tugs at the heart. But still, even though I know Humbert is a creep, and a self-justifying one at that, I still get the de rigueur lump in the throat at the last pages of Lolita.
Philosophy central:
Are you asking whether reading sad books is a form of escapism, just not blatant?
Escaping our unemotional, stable lives? Getting some red-hot emotion secondhand?
Our own sadness is either overwhelming or formless. Being taken through sadness from another sort has a kind of cathartic effect, I'd say.
Michael Dirda: Not sure what I"m saying. Just thinking aloud.
Washington, D.C.:
I haven't finished the book yet (in fact, I've just started it), but I think I can say with some certainty that Humbert Humbert is going to take a pretty sad fall in Nabokov's Lolita.
Michael Dirda: Yes, but so is Lolita.
Pentagon:
I think the saddest books I ever read, I read as a child. I don't think I have cried over any books as an adult the way I did as a child over Where the Red Fern Grows. (Hysteria might describe it.) My baby sister became so upset over Shel Silversteins' Giving Tree (was that the name) that she would not let my father finish reading it to her and never picked it up again. Somehow sad books just don't have the same impact now that I am all grown up. That in itself is sad!
Michael Dirda: I'm surprised your sister understood the message of the Giving Tree--mostly kids just see it as a tree who helps his friend. It's the parent reading it aloud to his child, who weeps, who sees his or her own destiny in its pages.
Herndon, Va.:
I think Jim Thompson deserves at least an honorable mention here: noir as Greek tragedy, it's hard to get any sadder.
As for the saddest science novel ever: tie between Robert Silverberg's "Book of Skulls" and "Dying Inside." At his best & most literary, he can really slug you.
Michael Dirda: Good recommendations, both. Dying INside--his best book, I think.
Lenexa, Kans.:
Mr. Dirda, Limp-Back-to-the-Library Heartache
I cry all the time reading and at the theaters -- even at track meets (someone giving an "all-heart" stretch run). List follows:
Compson drowning at Harvard in the "fading of honeysuckle"
De Vries's The Blood of the Lamb
Majorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Sojourner
Dirda's Listening to My Father -- "I never, ever doubted..."
Singer's "blind suicide" in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Charlotte Bronte's Villette
Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest -- once "soared on a swing"
Douglas Bauer's The Book of Famous Iowans
The sculpturesque Eula Varner's suicide in the Snopes' Trilogy
Michael Dirda: Wonderful list. The Dirda item and the Eula item have more in common than you know. Oh, seeing that reference to Eula makes me want to cry right now. My own damn fault. Sorry to be so enigmatic.
I too weep at movies, even Shirley Temple moveies, but then I'm such a sentimentalist.
Well, that's our time for this week. In a better world we could do this all afternoon. But next week we'll leave Il Penseroso and turn to L'Allegro: Happy books. Till then, keep reading! And I'm sorry if I never got to your positng--I can only type so fast.
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