The Answers, Please

One reader identified the authors of the passages in yesterday’s posting, but confessed to Googling the answers. The first was written by Henry David Thoreau in his journal on Jan. 21, 1853. I’ve been reading a few pages of the journal every day, almost off-handedly, hardly realizing I was plowing through Thoreau’s finest work, with no goal in mind but pleasure. Readers and critics tend to pigeonhole Thoreau as a naturalist, philosopher or political misfit with principles, when essentially he was writer, a vocation large and elastic enough to contain all the others and more. The excerpt I quoted impressed me as morbidly Gothic, and not conventionally Thoreauvian. Though he’s describing a dream, his revulsion is palpable and characteristically rooted in senory details.

The second comes from “Brooksmith,” a short story Henry James wrote in 1891. I chose it as a ringer because it’s so typical of late-middle-period or early-late-period James, or whatever we call the years immediately preceding the Guy Domville debacle. In capsule, it distills the concerns of the late novels, especially The Golden Bowl, with its emphasis on social veneer disguising the horror beneath. And the final, eight-word sentence is very funny, despite James’ undeserved reputation for humorlessness. There’s an exchange early in Daisy Miller, set in Switzerland, when the wonderfully named Winterbourne is speaking with Daisy’s little brother, Randolph, who says:

“`My father’s name is Ezra B. Miller. My father ain’t in Europe – he’s in a better place than Europe .’ Winterbourne for a moment supposed this the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph immediately added: `My father’s in Schenectady. He’ got a big business. My father’s rich, you bet.’”

I lived in Schenectady for six years, and worked five years for the newspaper there. Trust me: It beats “the sphere of celestial rewards.”

The passage from “Brooksmith” also reminds just how popular and influential Byron was in the 19th century. He won my heart when I learned in college of his reverence, against the tide of most of the Romantics, for Swift and Pope. I second what Auden wrote in “Letter to Lord Byron”: “…I have, at the age of twenty-nine/Just read Don Juan and I found it fine.”

Byron also shows up in Daisy Miller. Daisy and Winterbourne visit the Castle of Chillon, set on an island in Lake Geneva, where Byron set “The Prisoner of Chillon.” And when Winterbourne visits the Colisseum in Rome for his last visit with the doomed Daisy, he remembers lines from Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred. They come from the title character’s soliloquy at the beginning of Act III, Scene iv: “upon such a night/I stood within the Coliseum’s wall,/’Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome.”