Death of the Hired Hand by Robert Frost

Photo: Haymaking, undated, oil on canvas by American artist Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925). Image courtesy of The Athenaeum. (I stole this from the Library of Congress's website of Frost's poem, "The Death of the Hired Hand," which you should read by clicking this link, or the one below.)

So I'm back to the Library of Congress's "Story of the Week," though I'm as behind on them as I am on my work and on my writing. It seems that I'm always behind everything these days, including my sleep. (Though, thankfully, not my mortgage.) Actually, I am very behind on my "Story of the Week" emails, which I have sent directly to me. That causes the backlog, of course, but they are definitely worth it. As far back as I can remember, I've only read maybe five that I didn't care for. (One, recently, was about Henry James's last assistant in his final eight years. I thought she'd have more fascinating things to say about the latter 19th Century's more famous writers, but mostly she just wrote about how he changed a lot of wordy sentences in his most popular works. She says some things that directly contradict what I've read about him; the worst was when she said he never used his fame to threaten or to use against somebody for nefarious purposes--which is a lie.)

Anyway, I just read "The Death of the Hired Hand," by Robert Frost. It's the one with the famous lines: 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.'

This line is meant much more negatively than you might think. It's followed by 'I should have called it/Something you somehow haven't to deserve.' It's said by a farmer whose hired hand keeps taking off on him, so the guy is someone you can't trust, but who you feel obligated to take back in again. Not because you've missed him, but because he's like a lost dog and you pity him. The famous line is said by most (who haven't read the poem) as a line that someone will say about actual family who has to take you in because they're family. But Frost, who was shockingly cold and quite the nihilist, meant it to come from the POV of the farmer saying it, and not from the POV of the one who has to go home. It's not meant nicely, and those who say it like it is, like they have to be allowed in, are missing the point that they're supposed to feel like the pitied, like they'll be let in like the neighborhood's wet mongrel who people just can't leave out in the rain. The line means you'll be taken in not because of family obligation, but because of pity. The hired hand, in fact, had a brother who lived just 13 miles away, but this brother was a banker, and the hired hand didn't want to be pitied by his brother the banker. He'd rather be pitied by the farmer he keeps deserting. Again, the famous lines make more sense knowing the whole poem. And it ain't pretty, and it ain't happy. Frost is rarely either.

Frost is often misread, mostly because of those campfire poetry readings where he came across as a pre-Mister Rogers Mister Rogers.

I've got an English degree, but I somehow managed not to read too much of Frost. I guess I thought it was mostly homespun but drawn-out wisdom, amongst quaint New Englanders, who mostly keep to themselves. Good fences make good neighbors, after all. But there's a lot of genius there, and Frost is a magician who ably hides his literary tricks, which most poets seem incapable of doing. I don't see the obvious alliteration or cadences in Frost that I spot elsewhere, and when I see those, I lose my suspension of disbelief. (I speak like I'm Shakespeare, though my poetry mostly sucks. I've written exactly one that's sold.)

But I've mostly liked what I've read, though I stayed away from his longer ones, like this one. This poem is almost a short story, really, and is almost completely in dialogue, which I don't like in my poems. I also don't like them long, as per Edgar Allan Poe's dictum that all poems should be short--and then he wrote long ones. But I liked this one now, though I didn't when I was younger, perhaps because I didn't get it, or because I felt I might be the one who would have to go home and be taken in--and thereby pitied. Which I kinda was, I think. Best not to think about that now.

At any rate, there's genius here, and a message about human nature. You'll feel like you're the farmer who keeps getting deserted, yet you'll also feel like the hired hand, who keeps deserting, and then coming back with his tail between his legs. You might feel like you're the banker up the street, if you're lucky.

But sooner or later we're all the hired hand who lays down for the last time. And when that moment comes, you have to decide who you're willing to be a burden to.

Like I said, it ain't pretty, and it ain't happy. But it's real, and it's true. That's Frost's genius.

Another Sherlock Holmes -- The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Photo: Book's front and back cover, from kernelscorner.com.

A good Dan Simmons book, though not one of his best (Drood and The Terror are that), The Fifth Heart has a lot going for it, and not too much against it--depending on the reader's level of patience and tolerance.

It's a lot of things, perhaps too many.  It's a thriller in a potboiler vein--like Conan Doyle's work.  (He's often mentioned but never seen.)  It's a mystery of rich people's manners and mannerisms--a la Henry James, perhaps the book's main character.  It's a mystery of deduction and induction--a la Sherlock Holmes, the book's other main character.  It's a historical adventure, like Simmons' Drood and The Terror.

But--and here's where the reader's patience and tolerance comes in--it's also a pseudo-metaphysical work, one that has the characters very self-aware, and pondering their reality: Are they themselves, or are they characters?  The one failure of all this to me is that the characters remain surprisingly productive and un-neurotic despite these philosophical quandaries.  We know that Holmes is a character, but the conceit of the novel is that he is not: He's a real person, and so is Dr. Watson.  Arthur Conan Doyle is nothing more than the editor of Dr. Watson's unfortunately melodramatic scribblings of Sherlock Holmes's adventures.  (Conan Doyle and Watson--both never seen--get a lot of verbal abuse from the many characters.)  The reader has to swallow this.

The reader is also forced to swallow the occasional interruptions of a first-person I / omniscient-writer narrator who never fully shows himself.  Is it Simmons?  Conan Doyle?  Watson?  Or someone else entirely?  It's never definitively shown; the question, in fact, is shied away from.  But we, the reader, are supposed to wonder about it, which seems to be the purpose: to cause philosophical wonder.  This is a drastic break of the fourth wall / suspension-of-disbelief, and so it needs the reader's tolerance. 

This last bit struck me as unnecessary.  The philosophical ponderings of existence, of character / person, of reality, and of unreality are all over this book, so we don't really need the intrusive first-person narrator break.  It's too much. 

Another unwanted intrusion is the much-more-rare Dan Simmons statements.  This single-handedly ruined Flashback, which was really just one long Dan Simmons diatribe.  He really tones it down here.  But you can catch a few times that he elbows his character aside for a moment so he can speak directly to the reader.  The most blatant of these was when Simmons makes his characters talk about the Pledge of Allegiance that apparently came from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  Simmons actually makes a character ask if anything interesting came of a certain meeting between characters.  That question is answered by bringing up the Pledge.  Another character says how barbaric it is to make students say it, and Holmes himself says that making them do so is something that would happen in Germany.  This is a constant Simmons break: He says something disparaging about the American education system as often as he can, in any book.  And so he does here.

However, at the end, this book is a good distraction--which Simmons himself seems to realize, as he constantly has characters refer to badly-written but entertaining mystery-thrillers, clearly referring to himself and to his own book.  This book, like its characters, is very, very aware of itself.  Dan Simmons is always hovering in the shadows over every page, his tongue in his cheek, pleasantly aware and happy about his own literary magic trick.

If you have the tolerance to handle these breaks--which are not as avant-garde as Simmons seems to think they are--then chances are good you'll enjoy the book.  It is as meticulously researched as Simmons's historical novels always are, often to the point of approaching info-dump.  The characters are amusing, though distinct--so much so that you'll wonder why their married or friendly with each other.  The characters had all been real people, and they all get knocked around a bit verbally by the other characters and by Simmons himself.  Samuel Clemens, John Hay, Conan Doyle, President Cleveland, and especially Henry James all get some chiding, some of it quite heavy.  You'll learn more than you'd probably want about the 1893 Columbian Expedition (read Erik Larson's book about that, too), about the horse-drawn carriages of the time, about Mark Twain's foolish financial disasters, and about train schedules.

It all works somehow, and you'll feel like you're really there.  Whether you're able to get back there after the author intrusions and first-person fourth-wall breaks is a big question.  I was able to again suspend my disbelief, but only mostly, and only barely, while watching for the next unwanted and unappreciated break of that wall.  It didn't ruin it for me, but I could understand how it might for somebody.

I still recommend that you try.

"A Matter of Principle" by Charles W. Chesnutt, Library of America

Photo: Charles Chesnutt, at 40.  From his Wikipedia page. The reason I include his picture will be apparent when you read below.

I haven't read one of the short stories sent to me, for free, from the Library of America.  This is a service I recommend, and I've written about a few of the stories (Charles W. Chesnutt's "Baxter's Procrustes," one of my most-read blog entries, can be read here; another, Henry James's "Paste," can be read here).  I've fallen almost two years behind on these, as they're sent to an email I rarely check, and I have trouble finishing things (::cough::--novel-::cough::) besides.

These Library of America emails highlight a short story, short novel, article, or other piece of writing that the Library of America has collected in a volume of that author.  I own a couple of these, and can say that they are worth the price--though a high price it is.  I didn't say I could afford it; I just said each was worth it.  Anyway, these are high-quality and important stories, diary entries (soon I'll read Gideon Welles's diary entries about his first-hand knowledge of Lincoln's assassination) and other things.  They're short, often between five and twenty pages, so they don't take long to read.  Sign up for this service here.

The story of this blog entry, Week 264 (like I said, I'm several years behind) is Charles W. Chesnutt's "A Matter of Principle."  (The Library of America apparently loves Charles W. Chesnutt.)  You can read this story on your own here--but before you do, read the following disclaimer.  The story is about what, at the time, was called...Well, here's how the Library of America introduced the story, and its author:

Several of his stories and novels deal with the comic—and occasionally tragic—effects of the social confusion and legal complications that result from attempts to determine or avoid this “color line.” As a light-skinned African American, Chesnutt particularly reserved what he called “a very kindly irony” for those of his fellow Cleveland residents who were regarded as black by white society yet who presented themselves as superior to their darker neighbors. Or, as biographer William L. Andrews writes, Chesnutt satirized “an assimilationist philosophy among upwardly mobile, light-skinned Afro-Americans which implied ‘absorption’ into the white race as its goal.”
Why would Chesnutt write about this, and what exactly is it?  This explains it, from Chesnutt's Wikipedia page:

"Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (née Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder and, based on his appearance, Chesnutt likely had other white ancestors. He claimed to be seven-eighths white, and identified as African American. Given his overwhelming European ancestry, Chesnutt could "pass" as a white man, although he never chose to do so. In the 19th century and in many southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt was considered legally white. Under the one drop rule later adopted into law by the 1920s in most of the South, he would have been classified as legally black because of having some known African ancestry."  Check out Chesnutt's Wikipedia page for other interesting things about an interesting guy during interesting times.  A talented and creative author could not make up the "one drop rule."

Back to my disclaimer: The story is all about race, which some people find iffy, and it contains language that is simply not acceptable today--more stinging in this story, to me, because it's used by African-Americans in judgment of other African-Americans.  Chesnutt's writing was written in a light-hearted way, and this story was meant to be seen that way when it was published in 1899.  It may not seem light-hearted to the reader today; or, at least, some of its words and tone may not.  So consider yourself forewarned.

Anyway, the bottom line for this blog entry is this.  I got to thinking that the main characters of this story, as well as the Congressman in it, and the story's author, Charles Chesnutt--and, say, Derek Jeter--would have had no problem at all walking into a southern restaurant, in the 50s, let's say, that had a sign saying it would not serve African-Americans.  Why?  Because they didn't look African-American.  But what does that even mean?  (This is the essential question behind Chesnutt's story.)  One could legally answer that question, apparently, by using the 1920s "one drop rule" of the South.  But, I mean, what does it mean, really, since one can't always tell, by sight, who is, and who is not, African-American?  If Chesnutt, or Derek Jeter, or countless others who don't look African-American, can walk into a restaurant that didn't serve African-Americans--and then get served--well, then, the whole racial divide is unnecessary and undefinable, isn't it?  If it's possible that you can serve an African-American, and not know it, then what's your problem, exactly?

Now fast-forward to today, to some states, like Arizona, where, by law, businesses don't have to serve any member of the lesbian, gay, trans-gendered community.  Or to Kansas, where, by law, business owners don't have to hire someone (or, they can fire someone) based solely on his sexual orientation.

(I know you can see where I'm going with this.)

It's the same thing, isn't it?  Can you always tell who's gay and who isn't?  Is anyone's gay-dar that perfect?  Isn't it possible that some gay men and women could walk into a bakery that won't serve gay people--and get served?  If so, then isn't the whole thing as unnecessary and undefinable as the situation above?  If a gay person who doesn't "look" or "act" like a gay person can walk into a restaurant that doesn't serve gay people--and then get served--then isn't it all ridiculous?  If it's possible that you can serve a gay person in a business you own, that you proudly exclaim doesn't serve gay people, and still not know that you're serving gay people, than what's your problem, exactly?

Doesn't sound reasonable or logical to me.

P.S.--This is why literature is important.  A story from 1899 will have relevance to racist America, 1930-1960 (rough estimate), and also have the exact same relevance to something happening today.

I'm just sayin'.

Library of America--Paste, by Henry James

Photo: "Portrait of Henry James," an oil painting by Joseph Singer Sargent, on James's Wikipedia page.

Nice little story, written very stiffly and badly, of course, by a very Victorian writer who could never seem to get out of his own way.  The language is of the supreme upper echelon of society, as are the mannerisms, which may have turned off the readership masses--if the poorer could afford books at the time, which maybe they couldn't.  In that case, James knew his audience very well and wrote directly to them.

This story is a mirror image of Guy de Maupassant's (righteously) more famous "The Necklace."  In that one--and if you haven't read it, you should; it's short and written better--a young woman, very poor, borrows a necklace from her much richer friend, then loses it after a ball.  Thinking it was real, she and her husband sign their lives away and work to exhaustion for ten years.  Finally coming clean to her friend, she's informed that it was paste (fake) and that she'd made herself even more of a pauper for nothing.  And, if she had just admitted she'd lost it, the friend would have told her.

James's story is about a young woman of better means who is given a necklace by a man of much better means, who tells her it's a fake piece of her now-dead aunt's.  This woman's friend, Mrs. Guy (Get it?), tells her it's real, and says she's a fool for wanting to bring it back to the guy who gave it to her, who has mistakenly thought it fake.  If it's real, you see, that means his aunt had to receive it as a gift from someone not her husband, as he had been very poor.  And this woman had been an actor, which in the story explains the moral situation very well.

So the young woman does the moral thing and tells the guy it's real.  He's aghast and affronted, and says she can't have it back, that he'll get it appraised and tell her that he was right after all.  What he does instead is sell it, because it was real, and the young woman's friend, Mrs. Guy, buys it for, as she says, at a good price.  So the one honest character, the young woman, ends up with nothing to remind her of the dead aunt, and with none of the money that the thing was worth.

I tell you all this to save you from reading the story.  Read "The Necklace," or James' "The Turn of the Screw", which is just as stilted, but much more famous.  As it should be.  Very scary and psychologically chilling.

And I'll leave you with this connection.  After my second deviated septum operation, I was given a bottle of pain meds that are quite popular.  I hate taking pills, and told some friends that I wasn't sure I'd ever take them.  Every single well-to-do or of-average-means friend, in total seriousness, told me to sell them if I didn't take them.  I ended up taking them, as I'd been in a lot of pain, but I've never forgotten their responses.

There's another short story in there somewhere.

Speaking of short stories, I finished one recently, an 11-page zombie story called "Too Dumb to Die."  Yeah, I like the title, too.  ("Hide the Weird" was good, too.)  I'll keep you informed.

P.S.--Okay, while getting a picture for this post, I read a really long article about James on Wikipedia, and I'm forced to admit that my terseness maybe was a bit overwrought about his work.  He obviously wrote some great things, not just "The Turn of the Screw," and I'm going to have to get a copy of his Complete Works.  But I'll be damned if I know how I'm going to get past the brick and mortar of his writing.

A Winter Haunting--Dan Simmons

Very effectively creepy.  Reminds me a lot of an Aidan Quinn/Kate Beckinsale movie, Haunted, and John Gielgud, in which everyone's a ghost, and everything's haunted, and that the beautiful mansion he saw was actually a decrepit wreck of a former mansion.  Both this book and that movie have an almost sex scene, too.  No, check that--Quinn and Beckinsale have a scene, maybe the first nude scene with a "ghost" ever on film.  And the dead talk to each other, and there's animosity...Well, anyway, both are credibly creepy, hard to do these days, when we all know the tripes of horror and ghost stories.  That this book succeeds despite that is deserving of applause in of itself.  But perhaps the best thing to say about it is that I read all 371 pages in half a day, and this after finishing another long novel, Straub's A Dark Matter, today as well.  Not feeling well, physically and psychically.  Anyway, a good psychological tale that tips its hat to the works of Henry James, and a few other works of creepiness...though I could have done without the Egyptian gods parts, and the extensive Beowulf references, but you need something to set your writing apart, right?  The ending of the occasional ghost-narrator taking over the recuperating, and coma-resting, body of the main character is sort of inspired, and not believable, and a nice touch, all at the same time.  Another Dan Simmons winner.