Fifty years ago, your Editor, a few friends and I were drinking strong black coffee at a nice little café in the Montparnasse district of Paris. I was studying music composition and — frankly — had never read anything other than texts on music (with the exception of Theodore Dreiser, a high-school independent study project).
The conversation was filled with author names which were totally unfamiliar to me — James Joyce, Henry Miller, and David insisted that I also read some good poetry, like Apollinaire and Mayakovsky (not to be confused with Nikolai, the composer).
Having never gone to college, this started me on my journey with literature. (Thank you, David!)
A few years later, Stanley Kubrick released his masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, based on the novel by somebody named William Makepeace Thackeray. The film had extensive narration, which sounded like it was lifted straight from the book.
Fast forward to this century, and I had seen the film Vanity Fair, written by the same dude with this weird name. I had to check it out. As is my wont, I decided to go for the guy’s complete works. I found this slightly mildewy 1903 edition on Ebay:
I devoured Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair and just yesterday completed Pendennis, written in 1849-50.
The book begins with Arthur Pendennis at 13, away from his country home at College (I guess that’s what they called Junior High back then). He is an average student — deficient in Greek — and is plucked! (dismissed) …
Ashamed and demoralized, he determines to set himself right. There is his saintly mother, Helen; his step-sister Laura, his severe uncle, The Major, retired on half-pay from service in India and a host of other characters who one gets to know intimately through the nearly 800 pages of this two-volume edition.
We are swept along with events in London and the countryside as Pen eventually reaches the age of 26. Thackery masterfully keeps things moving, ending chapters on a cliffhanger and abruptly changing scenes and characters.
The classism and misogyny are to be expected, I suppose. But even there, Thackeray has great fun with some minor characters of a lower (but only slightly) strata in “society.”
A great read and a tremendous morality tale.
P.S. Myakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers is an awesome poem!
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Author: Lewis Saul
