literature

A Classic for the 20th and 21st Centuries: The Gulag Archipelago

May 29, 2024 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Fifty years ago, I was a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas Enterprise. In December of 1973, we began receiving a series of alerts from the New York Times News Service, saying the Times had acquired a manuscript of worldwide importance and would be publishing soon. The manuscript was The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was living in the Soviet Union at the time. The manuscript had been circulating in samizdat there, and apparently the KGB had gotten its hands on a copy or a portion of a copy. A considerable amount had already been smuggled out to the West. To protect his friends and family, Solzhenitsyn gave the green light to publishing the work in the West, and it would soon be published in French, its first published language, and an English translation was underway.

A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB and taken to the Lubyanka, the infamous prison in Moscow. The world held its breath to see what would happen, but Western governments were urging the Soviets not to do anything stupid. In February, he was officially expelled and put on a plane for Germany. His family, including his wife, their three young sons, and her mother, followed some weeks later. He would not return to Russia for 20 years.

Under the glare of international attention, the Russians did nothing stupid, however much they may have wanted to.

I had started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novels in high school – Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read August 1914 while a junior in college. Shortly after Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and expulsion, we moved from Beaumont to Houston, where I was working for Shell Oil in its downtown headquarters. When I heard that the English language edition would soon be published, I walked a few blocks to the downtown Cokesbury Bookstore and ordered a copy. When the call came that it had arrived, I think I might have been the first to rush to the shop and buy mine.

I stopped reading whatever it was at the time and started immediately on The Gulag Archipelago. Having read his novels of camp life (for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature), I was surprised to discover that the novels themselves were based on real stories of real people, including Solzhenitsyn himself. He had done something no Russian or Soviet author had ever dared to do: he’d told the real stories of the zeks, or prisoners. And his real point, and the one for which the Soviets couldn’t abide, was that the Gulag had started not under Stalin but under the saint of Communism, Lenin. Stalin had not corrupted communism; he had built upon what Lenin had already been putting in place.

The Gulag Archipelago (Volume 1) is 50 years old this year. It remains a classic of the 20^th century; in many ways, it tells the story of the 20^th century, particularly in Russia. Professor Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University calls it “a masterpiece of our time.” And it is still a contemporary story, with a warning. Governments as they grow and become more powerful have an itching desire to control, and they will use any means at hand to establish that control. I can already see the impulse in our own government, with the desire to control what is communicated on social media, for example, and a press that’s become extremely compliant to elitist thinking.

Yes, Solzhenitsyn was a man of his time, and The Gulag Archipelago was a book for its time. It’s also a book for our time.

“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane

December 13, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If I have one vivid memory of high school junior English class, it would be the classic coming-of-age assignment of The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. In the spring, anyone could spot a sophomore, because inevitably each and every one of us was carrying our paperback edition of the classic novel about the Civil War. It was assigned at the same time we were studying the Civil War in American history.

Crane published the novel in 1895, two years after he’d published the book that put him on the American literary map – Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the story of a prostitute. Crane belonged to the Naturalist, Realist, Symbolist, or Impressionist School, depending upon which critic you ask. The story of a prostitute had not been done before, at least not in a way that made Maggie something of a heroine.

But it was The Red Badge of Courage that turned Crane into an international literary star. The novel tells the story of Henry Fleming, who lives with his mother, who enlists as a private in the Union army. His mother is deadest against him enlisting, and he does one day on his own and then tells her what he’s done.

We follow Fleming in his new army life. Crane depicts the adulation of the townspeople for his patriotism, how much of army life was characterized by waiting, rumors, and boredom, and Fleming’s fear of facing his first battle and behaving as a coward. In his first military engagement, he performs well, and the enemy is sent running in retreat. But the next day, Fleming and his squad face a renewed attack, and this time it’s Fleming and his cohorts who are running in retreat. He finds himself in dense woods, and in of the most memorable scenes in the novel, he stumbles upon the body of a soldier who died in a battle in the same place.

Still in retreat, he learns that the Union side has prevailed and won the battle. He becomes separated from his regiment, and he’s soon hearing the stories from others. The reader sees how courage and cowardice can exist in the same person at the same time. We learn about the universal complaint of all soldiers in every war – the incompetence of commanding officers. And we see that battles and a war are often won less by brilliant military strategy and tactics and more by who can hold out the longest.

What Henry Fleming experienced was life in the army during wartime, and it was (and remains) a far cry from the colorful accounts and government propaganda common to all wars.

In addition to the first two novels, Crane (1871-1900) also published a poetry collection and another novel, based on his experience as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. He published several highly regarded short stories, including “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” With no actual personal war experience, he said that he drew inspiration for The Red Badge of Courage from football games. His short but eventful life ended when he died in England from tuberculosis.

The Red Badge of Courage is a short, intense, and essentially plotless story. It explores the psychology of solders and war, long before the subject became a popular war. It likely influenced every novel about war written after it. And it explored through fiction, the experience of the Civil War, still the deadliest war ever engaged in by America.

Top photograph: An illustration of the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, showing the Connecticut troops standing firm as the battle turns against them.

“John Brown’s Body” by Stephen Vincent Benet

December 6, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

It’s likely the most successful poem in American literary history, selling more than 130,000 copies. And it’s epic in length.

In 1925, the highly regarded poet Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943) applied for a Guggenheim Foundation grant to write a long historical poem about the Civil War. The foundation came through with a $2,500 grant that supported Benet and his family. Along with a bit of freelance writing, while he researched and wrote. They moved to Paris for him to write; it was cheaper than living in the United States. He thought the effort would take seven years; in fact, it took only two. John Brown’s Body was published in 1928, catapulting Benet into literary stardom.

The poem contributed to Benet being the most read American poet between 1918 and his death in 1943. His other poems and short stories were widely popular as well, including the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Book One of a planned nine-volume narrative of the settlement of America, entitled Western Star, was published after his death and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The epic of John Brown’s Body, or “cyclorama,” as Benet called it, begins with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Even more than the Dred Scott decision, this is the event that the poet indicates was the point of no return. The raid horrified the South and electrified the North; in Benet’s hands, national unity was not possible without a war. In the poem, this first section includes some of the most vivid and dramatic imagery of the entire poem. (And I didn’t know that Brown took hostages, including the great-grandson of George Washington.)

John Brown’s Body seems rather curious today, curious in that it isn’t a rant or filled with pious superiority and virtue signaling. It’s almost scrupulously fair to both sides in the war, depicting both historical and fictional characters as they themselves would have seen and experienced the war. His main fictional characters, Jack Ellyat of Connecticut and Clay Wingate of Georgia, are drawn to popular type, Ellyat being a yeoman Connecticut farmer and Wingate being the son of a large plantation owner in Georgia. They and their families will experience the war in radically different ways.

Benet moves the story from the Harper Ferry’s raid to the firing on Fort Sumter, battles like Bull Run and Antietam, Gettysburg, and finally the surrender at Appomattox. In addition to the fictional characters living the story, historical characters like Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, Ulysses Grant and others describe what is happening. Most of the poem covers the period up to an including Gettysburg; the last two years are rather abbreviated, focusing on Appomattox. But Benet does devote a section to Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea.

It’s rather astonishing that Benet completed the poem in two years. It still makes for an enthralling read as he tells the story of what is (the present moment notwithstanding) the most divisive period in American history, a time when America was torn apart over four years.

Writing years after the poet’s death, historian Bruce Catton said that if you wanted to understand the Civil War, you could read the 120 volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, or you could read John Brown’s Bodyby Benet. Benet makes for much more concise and entertaining read.

Top illustration: A drawing of U.S. Marines storming the engine house at the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal (National Park Service).

A Reflection on “Winesburg, Ohio”

April 26, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.

This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.

What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story. And yet Anderson, during the period itself, was considered a major figure in literature. He had a significant influence on both Hemingway and Faulkner, and especially Hemingway, who would eventually write an “anti-Anderson” novel to prove he had broken free and become his own writer.

I recently read Winesburg, Ohio and reviewed it over at Faith, Fiction, Friends. I knew little about it, other than it was a collection of connected short stories that had established Anderson as a significant writer. This edition has an introduction by the writer and literary critic Irving Howe, and it was Howe who helped me understand what had happened to Anderson and even perhaps why he was little mentioned by my English teachers.

What happened was that, in 1941, the year Anderson died, critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) wrote an essay that became hugely influential. It was an essay about Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio, and it dismissed the work as something less than great. Howe wrote that the Trilling essay relegated Anderson to something less than the first rank of American writers. It’s not a surprise that my teachers, in college during the period when Trilling’s essay was making its waves, might possibly have discounted Anderson in general and Winesburg, Ohio in particular and instead focused on more lauded writers.

The collection was published in 1919. As I read it, I was surprised by how contemporary it sounded. It’s a clean, simple prose, very straightforward and matter of fact. It’s also almost entirely devoid of dialogue. Its ease of reading is deceptive; you have to read carefully and closely to understand all of what’s going on in the stories.

The characters are all what Anderson called “grotesques,” what Flannery O’Connor in a later generation might have labeled “misfits.” In fact, I wondered if O’Connor must have read Winesburg, Ohio, just like Anderson himself must have read Spoon River Anthology, published four years earlier than Anderson’s collection. I could see how Anderson had influenced Faulkner, and how Hemingway adopted and adapted at least some of Anderson’s bare bones writing style.

The fictional Winesburg is loosely based on the small town of Clyde, Ohio, southeast of Toledo. The stories are all set in the late 1890s, or around the turn of the century, about the time Anderson enlisted in the army and fought in the Spanish-American War. It’s a town still experiencing the lingering effects of the American Civil War and the burgeoning influence of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the stories are about farmers and their family members, storekeepers, bankers, the newspaper reporter, and other community pillars. While the characters are generally drawn in an unflattering portrait, you do come to known them and even like them, flaws and all.

To this day, Clyde proudly proclaims itself as the Winesburg of Anderson’s stories. The author put the small town on the literary map, and the town never forgot it. I suspect the town also didn’t think much of Trilling’s assessment of its most famous son.

Top photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time in which Winesburg, Ohio, is set.

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