“The Color Purple” is an important American Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, a kind of modern “Huckleberry Finn” narrative told in the slang of a young African-American woman growing up in the South. But this novel has been so misrepresented by English teachers assigning it for summer reading that I sometimes wonder if this exercise has payback in it from educators who just want to pull a fast one on parents.
When parents actually read “The Color Purple” instead of just watching their kids read it, they would be the best to know if their children have the maturity level to benefit from this novel about side-road love. So far, most parents I have discussed this novel with seem to think that the title “The Color Purple” has something to do with the exoticism of the African-American experience, not about any purple flags for a sensuous love between an adolescent girl and a very adult woman. My own feeling is that assigning this book so commonly in our high-schools is at best wasted on children who have not been around long enough to see how this book’s message could fit into a larger world of experience.
It’s a shame, but sometimes English teachers seem to create such reading assignments for bragging reasons. They seem to like boasting that their young teenage students are reading “War and Peace,” “Moby Dick,” and whatever cutting-edge literature may have once been recommended by the New Times Book Review section. I think this is why so many intelligent adults cringe at the thought of reading serious literature in the prime of their lives. Their only impressions of such books are of been being tortured by literature when it was way over their heads in high school. English teachers can do much more harm than good by throwing too much heat into the mitts of their children.
Also, reading lists – including my own list here – are intrinsically narrow-minded. We teachers are just recommending our own favorite books for everyone else to read. I think one way that we can break up this provincialism is mixing up various reading lists like a salad. For example, if you have already received a school reading list for this summer from another teacher, maybe you can add my croutons below to those recommendations, to expand the learning possibilities.
.Who was the real Huckleberry Finn?
Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” has been credited not only with becoming the transformer of the 19th Century novel into 20th Century fiction, but its colloquial style has also been thought to have changed the entire way we Americans speak to each other. If Huckleberry’s free and easy way of narrating events had never been exposed to Americans, it is said we would still be talking to each other like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s talking heads.
“Huckleberry Finn” has always been universally popular, except among some violent PTA groups who share with the Taliban hatred of any art or literature that has been created within the past 1,000 years. But even the admirers of “Huckleberry Finn” has been mystified over the decades over what they have seen as an incredibly obvious flaw in the novel. When Huckleberry rescues Jim from slavery, why is it that he doesn’t bring Jim north to the free states? Why instead does he row south on the Mississippi River with Jim into the very heart of Southern slavery?
Only recently with some keen historical investigation by Mark Perry — author of the biographical “Grant and Twain” — has it been discussed that the character of Huckleberry Finn with his slovenly appearance, his ever-present tobacco, his war with his father and alcohol and his funny first name mixed with a simple last name is based on the improvisational genius and unlikely life of Twain’s closest senior friend and business partner, Ulysses S. Grant.
Like Huckleberry Finn, Grant freed slaves from the Jim Crow laws like the “Jim” in the novel while moving methodically south down the Mississippi River, destroying the Western flank of the Confederacy before moving East to mop up against Robert E. Lee. His final reward of receiving the U.S. presidency was the equivalent of Huckleberry’s aunt dressing him up like a gentleman in the novel’s final pages.
“Huckleberry Finn” is called an “episodic novel,” because in place of a plot there is a journey where an isolated new adventure begins and ends with each day. An equally humorous episodic novel that I believe would serve as a great reading companion to “Huckleberry” is Voltaire’s short novel, “Candide.”
How young American women kept America going
A lot of people forget or don’t know that when America lost a half million of our best men during the Civil War, our country was left with a tiny population. The loss of a half million men then would equal to about 50 million American men lost in today’s proportions of the population.
It didn’t escape the attention of the novelist Henry James that it was young American women who kept America going after its terrible losses in the Civil War. They kept up America’s stiff upper lip, they revived our laughter, and they provided for and raised the fatherless children who one day made the United States a super power just in time to save Europe from being taken over by Kaiser Wilhelm in World War 1.
The men in the novels of Henry James are not as strong. They tend to be philanderers or con artists as benefiting men of every age who maneuver their ways out of fighting in war. But the men also serve an important purpose in these books. As living cues they present the marvelous American women and move them so that we can better appreciate these heroines.
Included in the difficulties of reading the longer novels of James is the amount of filler he packed them with to fulfill contract obligations for lengthier, longer-winded novels. It is only in his short novels that the real flavor of Henry James comes out, somewhat like how a small grape will intensify its sweetness better than a bigger one. I would recommend to high school students and parents the smaller novels “Daisy Miller” and “Washington Square .” Two other great small novels are a departure. “The Turn of the Screw” is less like a portrait than an brilliant X-ray of a very disturbed woman. Finally, probably the least exposed and least championed novel by Henry James is the wonderful “The Europeans,” detailing a refined European woman’s response to trying to fit into the woodwork of post-bellum America. .
How to detect a Russian tough guy
Contrary to popular belief, it was not the great boxer Muhammad Ali who invented the “rope-a-dope” technique, where a fighter simply covers up and leans back on a boxing ring’s ropes, offering himself to his opponent’s blows until his exhausted adversary finally knocks himself out. The Russians are ancient experts at pulling the rope-a-dope off against their enemies, first rope-a-doping Napoleon in Moscow in 1812 and doing the same to Hitler in Stalingrad in 1942-43. We have to give some credit to the Russian people that their culture and history have prepared them to receive such blows. They have grown used to “leaders” like Ivan the Terrible and Josef Stalin beating them up so much that attacks by Napoleon and Hitler seemed paltry in comparison.
Some of Russia’s greatest authors have live experience in taking these Russian punches. For knowing someone who knew someone on the Czar’s “out” list, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was first marched towards a firing squad and then locked into a Siberian prison for four years, writing about it in “The House of the Dead.” When Alexander Solzhenitsyn took time out as a Red Army officer fighting the Nazis to write a letter to a friend, he was sent to Siberia for eight years for writing disparagingly about moustaches – and Stalin had a mustache. Solzhenitsyn later condensed his prison experiences into the novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
As a journalist, I once interviewed Alexander Dolgun, author of a book called “An American in the Gulag” whose Gulag cellmate was a man sentenced to life in prison for having “anti-Soviet dreams.” The man’s wife informed on him to the KGB because his shouting in his sleep was keeping her awake. Perhaps after reading these books we can better under understand the Russian “tough love” of Russian President and former KGB Chief Vladimir Putin expressed by the poisoning of a Russian expatriate in London in recent years as well as the KGB assassinations of Russian journalists since then who have dared to criticize Putin.
Writing about a dog’s life
When Jack London was writing about dogs around the turn of the 19th Century, he was hoping his readers would see the person inside a dog. The Marxist London hoped his noble dogs would move the reader even further left than did the depiction of “The Noble Savage” by French revolutionist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But something funny happened along the road to Alaskan dialectic materialism. Buck from “The Call of the Wild” was a dog transformed into a wolf, but today we do not see him as a communist. White Fang from the novel in his name was a wolf transformed into a dog, but we don’t see him as a communist today either. Surely, communism has had its day when its literature fails its 19th Century symbols so utterly. What we are left with instead are the stories of two great dogs – or wolves, depending on where you are in the novel – and when you finish these books, you will never see dogs or wolves in the same way again.
Dr. Jekyll and the methamphetamine culture
If you have spent some serious time in socially-permissive Oregon around the Willamette Valley, you probably couldn’t help but notice the very visible methamphetamine addicts stumbling around like the zombies in an old George Romero movie. It seems that after four decades since Tom Wolfe wrote his expose about Oregon ’s runaway drug culture in his “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the chickens have come home to roost in a huge subculture of Willamette Valley meth addicts with shrunken heads, grotesquery faces and violent and felonious mood swings. The English author Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent his last years in the South Seas, predicted the emergence of this culture as he observed the mood-changing and head-shrinking substance abuse in the Pacific islands that ultimately was represented by turning Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The book remains an uncanny prophecy of how tolerance of drug abuse destroys a smug society.
A good companion piece to read with this book is “Ficciones” by modern Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges – whose fiction was inspired by reading both Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe – writes about monsters and ghosts who sneak around very precious literary furniture. Young people seem to love hunting for those ghouls, especially among the arched verbal maze games of writers like Poe and Borges.
The Farewell Kid
Probably no one had dressed up farewells so artfully and feelingly as the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in his three plays “Uncle Vanya,” “Three Sisters” and “the Cherry Orchard.” Each play is a different expression of family members leaving their familiar habitat for an unknown fate. On one level, the plays probably reflect the physician Chekhov’s reaction to his own fatal illness as he wrote these dramas. On another plane, he was saying extremely effective goodbyes to Old Russia as the 19th Century turned into the murderous 20th Century. Reading just one play by Chekhov – which takes about a day to read – can give a student all the sense of the power of 19th Russian Century literature which would take a year of reading “War and Peace.”
The great U.S. ladies of literature
Misunderstanding has long been the obstacle against the great American woman’s novelist receiving the wider readership they have deserved. The stereotyping of women’s novelists is practically due to the early English-language novelists like Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott being so effective in creating a championship of manners that protected the women of their age.
But as Edith Wharton proved in her novels, not every woman writer was interested only in championing manners. In fact, Wharton – who was not only one of America’s greatest novelists but also one of America’s wealthiest artists – was more interested in testing and failing those protocols that broke down proper relationships between men and women.
Wharton and modern novelist Toni Morrison reign in my list as the great ladies of American literature, Wharton as the first American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and Morrison as the last American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. They are both teachers of women and men, in that order.
I have to believe that Wharton’s great novels, “The Age of Innocence” and “Ethan Frome,” are really one experiment that underwent two tests. Wharton tested her man and two women in “The Age of Innocence” in the gilded setting of New York high society. In “Ethan Frome,” she tested the same kind of man and the same kind of two women in the opposite deprived setting of the Worcester, Massachusetts area. Both of these books showed how much must be done before the men and women of our country can settle comfortably into the same page. Wharton takes this theme into an even more dramatic turn in her “House of Mirth.” With its unforgettable heroine Lily Bart, this journey into every major underground canal of Lily Bart’s society would have certainly given Wharton as much credit as Victor Hugo received for creating Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables,” if Wharton had been at the time an acceptable man like Hugo.
With the virtual retirement of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that leaves for my money Toni Morrison as the world’s greatest living writer. Her “A Mercy” may be also the first novel she has written that I would recommend for high school students, as she has abandoned her characteristic scatology here but kept up all the magic she used to mix with it. This tale of a young slave woman that has been traded into a 17th Century Maryland household is also the first of her novels I have seen that penetrates a white consciousness as deeply as she represents the African-American experience.
Then I discovered Melville’s other writing side
I don’t want to recommend “Moby Dick” here, because the novel is such an encyclopedia of language, experience, philosophy, psychology and science. I really think any high school student is better off waiting until he or she has reached the age that it took Herman Melville to write it. If it makes anyone feel better, I had tried to read “Moby Dick” since I was a teenager, but I was finally able to move on into completely reading the novel when I was a much older adult. When I was finished a couple of months later I felt like I had never experienced the same kind of unfolding in my own long reading history.
But it turns out that Melville was a lot more than just a great American novelist. He was also a great anthropologist. In this way he bore a deep resemblance to the African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Like Melville, America finally rediscovered Hurston many years after her death for writing a great American novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” But Hurston – a trained anthropologist – also wrote one of the great non-fiction books in that field, “Mules and Men,” about the lingering traditions of African hoodoo in the African-American South.
Melville also wrote an anthropological study in his first book, “Typee,” an authentic account of his being stranded as a young sailor on a Polynesian island with the isolated Typee people. These were truly a Shangri-La people who would have simply disappeared into history if Melville had never written this book about these gentle folk. His single account of how he had introduced an American song to these people which had left the chief leaping to catch the notes in the air is typical of the things that Melville found magical in the people he wrote about.
So what else did Melville write that was wonderful but which everyone in the literary world has forgotten? I would happily recommend to any high school reader a summer reading of Melville’s early novel “Redburn,” which hypnotically takes you on a 19th Century merchant and passenger ship trip back and forth between America’s East Coast and England, with all the physicality of the ocean that draws out Melville’s best artistry.
Chris Sharp – Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.