#4: Flying too close to the sun

A crossword at the weekend is a morning ritual, straight after coffee and tiffin. It sounds a bit boring but during a pandemic I can assure you, it is rock ‘n roll.

On Saturday 5 June 2021, the clue for 12 down in the Guardian quick crossword was:

“Moby-Dick author, (8)”

I like the Guardian crossword. It sits somewhere between not too easy and not too difficult. It makes me feel smug because I can usually finish it without cheating. I knew the answer straight away: Herman Melville.

I don’t know if my girlfriend was impressed or not, but I secretly hoped she was. The reason I knew the answer was due to the fact that it’s taken me a few weeks to write this blog, despite my initial ambition to be consistent and get one out every week. It all seemed like such a great idea earlier in the year when I was furloughed and bored. But I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately.

So, I’m trying to make up for it by making this one longer.

Anyway, back to Captain Ahab. Knowing about him and his creator says two things about me: there are a lot of books I have never read; but I seem to have the appearance of someone who knows a lot about literature because I’ve read many books.

Except that I haven’t. I just bluff really well.

My brain is somehow able to pick out obscure facts and hand them to me on a plate when I need them. At the same time it trolls me, giving with one hemisphere but taking with the other. Because it’s never anything useful like how to invent a clean and cheap energy source, or even remembering I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday.

Instead, it’s useless information. Like knowing what speed Marty McFly needs to reach in his DeLorean before he can time travel. These facts come from my triviacampus™, the part of my brain I use during a pub quiz and use to bore people with at parties.

What Pantagruel and I have in common with our gargantuan to-do lists is that we both have lots of reading to do, but only so much time to do it in. There is a vast body of literature that I haven’t tackled, but for some reason I think I ought to.

I feel like I should, before my time is up, devote some effort to discovering the joy of those towering giants of literature whose names are instantly recognisable to us all, such as Dickens and Hemingway.

If I’m being honest with myself, the truth is, I probably never will.

I do wonder why I think I should be reading them. Why am I putting that pressure on myself? Surely I should read them because I want to, not because I think I’m expected to or because it makes me look good at crosswords. Perhaps it’s just own ego pushing its own agenda – a stupid intellectual superiority complex.

Some authors and the titles of their works are so famous that even if you’ve never read them, you probably still know something about them.

For example, thanks to my triviacampus, I know that Titania is Queen of the Fairies in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I’ve never read it and I couldn’t describe the plot. The characters from this play seem to be repeatedly portrayed as themes in art history and it has been made into films at least seven times since 1935, so it must be reasonably good and therefore worth reading. Yet, after seeing it in 1662 Samuel Pepys described it as a play:

“…which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.”

Maybe I’ll give it a miss.

Similarly, since 1978 my triviacampus has been able to dredge up that Heathcliff is the main protagonist of Wuthering Heights and someone called Cathy keeps banging on his window – but only thanks to Kate Bush. I know the term ‘Big Brother’ comes from George Orwell’s 1984, that John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, that Shylock wants his pound of flesh in the Merchant of Venice, that Victor Frankenstein is a Swiss scientist and not the monster and that Oliver Twist has the cheek to ask for more. But that’s all – a passing knowledge of these facts and nothing else.

I’ve never read any of them.

So I thought I’d better do something about that. You know, actually start reading some of them. After a very lazy internet search I settled on Penguin’s “100 must-read classic books, as chosen by our readers”, mainly because this was the first result at the top of the page after I typed “classic literature” into Google.

Now, this is hardly a rigorous exercise in academic analysis. What ranks as the 100 best books ever written is a matter of highly subjective opinion – in this case, the view of Penguin’s own readers in a poll conducted by Penguin. Also, Penguin is not going to recommend books it doesn’t actually publish. The top 100 poll is simply a marketing ploy to buy books. From Penguin.

There is no Ernest Hemingway on the list, no J.K. Rowling, no Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling nor Jack Kerouac.

But, whatever. It seems like as good a place to start as any, as 100 books are going to keep me occupied for a while.

Although there are 100 titles, there are 82 authors because some of them obviously appear more than once. Dickens led the board with five. Of those authors, I recognised 55 names – so I’d never heard of the other 27, but not too bad – I knew two thirds. Of the books themselves I recognised 61 titles, so not quite as good as two thirds… but still, well over half.

But how many had I actually read? As in, picked up the book, turned the pages and read it cover to cover?

Eleven.

You may be wondering whether I paid any attention during English classes.

At high school we were served up whatever was on the curriculum that year. Education officials decided what formative teenage minds should be digesting and teachers delivered it. It’s entirely possible we might otherwise never have picked up a book at all and spent all of our time trying to beat Donkey Kong instead.

I vaguely recall studying To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I can’t say that either of them lit a fire of passion underneath me at that age. We also waded through plenty of Shakespeare – I remember Macbeth, Hamlet, Anthony and Cleopatra. It was always tragedies for some reason. No midsummer dreaming for us.

Although I was aware of Shakespeare’s cult status in the literary pantheon, I found his words impenetrable. Luckily for me, sometimes we were allowed to watch a video. A cheer went up whenever we entered the classroom and saw a TV set and video player.

Now, when I say TV set and video player, this was the 1980s. I’m talking about a massive CRT television that weighed a tonne and an equally large VHS player, stacked together on a sturdy waist-height metal trolley. It resembled a soft drink vending machine on wheels. It took two kids to go and fetch it from the AV room and push it to the classroom like Egyptian slaves. Then they had to take it back afterwards.

But it meant that we could sit back, switch off and indulge in every teenager’s favourite pastime: sitting in front of the TV. Of course, it wasn’t The Dukes of Hazzard and we still had to watch Shakespeare, but I remember thinking that I had a better chance of understanding it if I saw actors getting the script across with the visual medium of body language and emotional expression to hopefully bring his cryptographic text to life.

We must have watched To Kill a Mockingbird on video too, as I have a clearer memory of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch than I do about the story itself.

Back to the Penguin 100. Although I had only read eleven of the titles, I realised I had seen thirty of them on screen. Perhaps this is where my triviacampus has been getting its book knowledge from. I’ve only ever read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, but I’ve seen many more of his other works on TV or in the cinema. I guarantee most people know the storyline of A Christmas Carol and we all know the name Scrooge, even if he is being played by Bill Murray or a muppet.

I’ve seen film versions of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, and a recent TV series of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I’ve seen at least two separate screen adaptations of Emma by Jane Austen and at least three of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, including the musical one with Hugh Jackman. I enjoyed them all.

Do I need to read them now? Probably not. I did go on to read Margaret Attwood’s The Testaments after watching and very much enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale prequel on TV beforehand, but I never went back to the original novel. I just wanted to know what became of Offred.

So, maybe finding literature by a different route is OK – the point is you still find it and still come to know and love the characters and their stories. Right?

Then again, maybe you don’t… or at least, not entirely…

Furlough gave me an opportunity to look at Pantagruel’s list and start ticking off a few items.

Remember the start of the pandemic? It was such a novelty back then, wasn’t it? We embraced the boundless amounts of newfound time locked up at home with a cheerful blitz spirit, starting that hobby, that new project or pastime. We suddenly took up language classes, started doing yoga online and learned how to play the ukulele, while helpfully pointing out who was still on mute.

I decided to improve my Italian. I had some basics already, but only enough to get by during holidays in Italy so I could say hello, get something to eat and then ask for the bill.

In 2020 I discovered Inspector Montalbano. The eponymous hero is a police detective living in Sicily and his adventures are portrayed in an Italian TV drama that began in 1999 and, at the time of writing, is still being produced. All 37 episodes are feature length, each around two hours long.

It happened to be on TV late one night, which I found purely by chance during a rare spell of channel hopping. I watched three to four minutes and decided it looked interesting with a beguiling Mediterranean setting, so I set it to record. Broadcast by the BBC with English subtitles, it looked like a fun way to open the language up to me.

As I slowly worked my way through the 30-plus episodes on demand over a few months, I also watched the cast ageing twenty years from beginning to end. And so I came to know and love Salvo Montalbano and his pals and therefore the work of author Andrea Camilleri. Every episode of Salvo’s exploits drew directly from his novels.

It made me want to read Camilleri. I decided not to read an English version in case something was lost in translation. Instead, I foolishly bought his first novel The Shape of Water and ploughed straight into the Italian. It was phenomenally difficult. I didn’t appreciate that Italy has so many regional dialects and Sicily has its own patois that differs considerably. My Italian is better now than it was, but I’m still only two chapters into that book. It hurts my brain after twenty minutes.

I think I was on the right path though, but in the wrong language. I suppose the counterargument here to only ever accessing literature through a screen is that you may never experience the joy of the author’s text and getting inside his or her head as you read it. A screen version can only occupy a couple of hours if it’s a film and even when it’s a TV series, some editorial decisions have to be made.

Sometimes it turns out there was a whole lot you missed. I only read Lord of the Rings after being inspired to by the film and was surprised to find there were large parts of the story and some great characters that had been left out entirely. If I hadn’t read the book, I would never have known they existed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered one of the great American authors and his sixth novel, The Great Gatsby, is held in similar regard as a 20th century masterpiece. I watched the Baz Luhrmann version on a long-haul flight and remember it through the same fog as all films I watch on planes. The triviacampus knew little more than what I have written in this paragraph but recently, more of Fitzgerald’s world opened up to me when I discovered his wife, Zelda Sayre.

Thanks to a moment of weakness during check out from a well-known online retail giant, I ticked a box agreeing to a 30-day free trial for its online video streaming service. I attempted to get the most out of my free month by binge-watching whatever I had time for.

One day, on a whim, I decided to watch Z: The Beginning of Everything. It was a drama series about Zelda Sayre and how she met Fitzgerald, their marriage and early lives together. The series title came from a Fitzgerald quote:

“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

She was a talented author in her own right and a prolific diarist. Fitzgerald plagiarised her heavily by reading her diary and using her ideas for his novels, sometimes lifting passages of text verbatim.

Their married life seemed tumultuous and raucous, fuelled by never-ending parties – much like Jay Gatsby himself. Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, was commercially successful. It meant that at the age of 24 he was a celebrated author and they became a New York celebrity couple.

After getting married they lived at the Biltmore Hotel where they never paid the bill and eventually got kicked out. They were photographed spilling out of clubs in the small hours, swimming in a fountain or climbing on the roof of a taxi, all while considerably inebriated.

Although it seems they were self-absorbed and their behaviour was boorish, they must have been quite a revelation in the 1920s. It was that heady period wedged between the two World Wars where flappers partied hard and pushed social boundaries.

Zelda came across as a wild child and a free spirit, determined to live her own life the way she wanted to, juxtaposed against the backdrop of her conservative southern US family origins and upbringing. It was inspirational to me that someone like her existed at a time when female emancipation was still in its infancy.

In one episode, a quote in a letter written to her future husband stood out. It said:

“All I truly want is to be young always and to feel that my life is my own.”

It really resonated with me. It expressed something that we can all identify with – to be free and to have boundless energy. In this context it came over as a wistful plea from a girl raised in a traditional setting of strict rules and social norms, who yearned to break away from it all to experience complete freedom and self-expression.

In deciding to write about it, I looked it up to get a source for the original quote and to make sure the text was correct. But instead, this is what I found:

“All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.”

Suddenly it didn’t sound so inspirational. In fact, now she just sounded selfish, arrogant and spoiled.

Maybe you shouldn’t meet your heroes. Or read their books.

It was a signpost that it’s perhaps better to find the truth of the original text than depend on an abridged screen version and then go through life thinking that’s how it was intended to be. Imagine how many people I would bore at dinner parties with misunderstood and misremembered facts.

It turns out Zelda got what she wanted. The TV drama ended at a stage in their lives when the party was still going, fuelled by copious amounts of gin and debt, but it felt like twilight was approaching and a massive hangover lay just over the horizon.

It made me curious to find out what became of her afterwards. Despite being self-centred and not taking anything in life seriously, there was something very charismatic about her and the two of them as a couple. American poet and writer Dorothy Parker said:

“They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him.”

The hangover was just around the corner. Zelda may have burned brightly, but then she burned out.

At the age of 24 she overdosed on sleeping pills. The following year she accused her husband of having an affair with Ernest Hemingway, whom she didn’t like. He started having sex with a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. She threw herself down a flight of marble stairs because he was talking to the dancer Isadora Duncan at a party while ignoring her.

Both grew increasingly miserable, erratic and alcoholic throughout the rest of the 1920s. According to Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, while the public still believed they lived a life of glamour, the couple's partying had somewhere gone from fashionable to self-destructive.

At 30 she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and admitted to a sanatorium. Zelda was released a year later but shortly afterwards returned to living in a psychiatric clinic. She spent the rest of her life in various stages of mental illness, in and out of hospitals into her forties. She produced novels in the creative and productive periods between admissions.

In 1948 while checked into Highland Hospital, a fire broke out. Zelda was locked in a room awaiting electroshock therapy. At the age of 47 she died in the fire and had to be identified by her dental records.

Zelda Fitzgerald, née Sayre, 1900-1948

F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t fare much better. The two spent increasing amounts of time apart towards the end and he was embittered by his lack of success and money troubles. At the time of her death, he was already dead following a long struggle with alcoholism and a sudden heart attack seven years previously, at the age of 44.

I’m fascinated by her. And I think we are all fascinated with characters like her, real or imagined, that burn so brightly and brilliantly but then are so suddenly snuffed out. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Marc Bolan.

Where did they go wrong? Were they punished for breaking the rules? They, and Zelda, make me think of Icarus. She disappointed her father, ignored the rules and chose her own path. It was a path that ultimately led to her own downfall.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus constructed the Labyrinth on the island of Crete for King Minos, to imprison the Minotaur – a half-man half-bull monster. Daedalus got in trouble when he helped the king’s daughter, Ariadne.

She had fallen in love with Theseus, the enemy of Minos, and gave him a ball of string so he could find his way around the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur. Minos wasn’t happy about that and the fact that Daedalus gave her the string, so he imprisoned him in the Labyrinth too.

Daedalus decided to escape by making two sets of wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son, Icarus. The plan was to strap them on and fly out of Dodge. Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow a safe middle path behind him.

Icarus had ample guidance on what not to do, a clear set of instructions to work with, but he ignored his father’s advice. The elation and giddiness of the sensation of flight overcame him and he soared into the sky, basking in the glory of the brilliant sun as the wax in his wings melted and he plummeted to earth.

He lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse.

Whether it’s accidental or self-inflicted, we are somehow drawn to the light that seems to radiate from characters like this and, as long as they are around, the party never seems to end. We feel like their brilliance is shining directly on us and it makes us feel good.

Is it tragic that they died young? Might it be better to look at it by saying that they achieved twice as much with half the lifetime? They left us a legacy we enjoy today, so their shorter lives were worth something – they were impactful, right?

Characters like this have great stories that draw us in, but they don’t have lives that we actually want to live. They are salutary tales of what not to do. They soar into the air, touch the flames and then they fall – so we don’t have to. We can learn from their mistakes. Zelda Fitzgerald burned brightly and short. She flew too close to the sun. She illuminated us, even if that didn’t work out so well for her.

This gets me thinking about my own mortality. Yes, we can make good or bad choices in life, but we never really know how long we’ve got. There could be a zombie apocalypse around the corner.

But I don’t know it’s as simple as saying it’s a straight choice between having a short and brilliant life, or having a long and dull one.

I’m trying to draw some conclusions from these blogs, lessons I can learn from my own musings and apply accordingly. What can I learn from characters like Jay Gatsby or Zelda Sayre, either leaping off the page or out of history?

Memory is definitely something for me to work on. It was because of the Penguin 100 that I was reminded of Herman Melville. I’d forgotten he wrote Moby-Dick. If it wasn’t for that, the triviacampus would have been empty when it came to the Saturday crossword and I wouldn’t have been able to wear the self-satisfied grin of scholarly authority.

What’s the good of reading all these books if you can’t remember them? It would be nice to retain some of it. It could really come in handy later.

Time is the other emerging theme – one of the main reasons I started this blog. It’s a finite resource in terms of the span of my natural life and yours. There’s only so much of it and it’s really up to me how I use it. I control it. I make the choices.

So I’m going to start working on finding ways to free up more of it, and ways to use it more productively. If I really want to discover all those interesting people and stories that I suspect are lurking around every corner, I need a better way to take in, process and store information.

Those productivity gains should help in freeing up more time without reducing other time-consuming, but necessary, things. Like sleeping, emptying the dishwasher and doing what my employer wants me to do.

Otherwise, I’m never going to find out if Robert Persig ever fixed his motorcycle.

The Lament for Icarus (1898) by Herbert James Draper, Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom