ELIMINATE DOWN - MARCH 2023

Crime and Punishment/Where Angels Fear To Tread/The Blue Hammer

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

Translation by Sidney Monas (1968)

My copy of Crime and Punishment was my mom's, a 1968 trade paperback edition translated by Sidney Monas. It declares itself as Unabridged, sounds good to me! After graduating high school, I tried reading it in while on the road and thought it was funny and surprisingly modern. I could parse clear as day where some of my favorite works had sourced their influences from. Yet, I put it down within the first two-hundred pages. The book nagged at me though, I always wanted to pick it up and its decaying paperback cover mocked me on the shelf for years.

Until now! The primary reason I went with the permutation of Eliminate Down's mysterious Book List that I did - and it was the first randomization - was because it hit me with the most perfect line-up of books to start with. So far, we had The Fuck Up, The Instant Enemy, Stoner, Pitch Dark, Pattern Recognition and Crime and Punishment. That is, in order, a book I was reluctant to read, a book I knew would be premium pulp, a recently rehabilitated cult classic, two books by authors I knew I already liked, and a lengthy, stodgy Poe's Raven of a book that taunted me for a half-decade. Crime and Punishment would be my first hurdle, if I could clear that - and the following book - it'd be ten more books till I think "aw hell, why'd I get this." And I gotta say, Crime and Punishment went down relatively easy. It took me a while but it should be smooth waters for a moment and that's good because I'm behind schedule.

Given that Crime and Punishment is among the most widely read pieces of narrative fiction in modern history, I find writing about it a particularly daunting task. I assume this entire project to be a crash course in how to read, these monthly write-ups are just ungraded assignments that are specifically due, albeit to no penalty (besides self-critique) if they aren't. That said, I vehemently dislike the notion that when I write about something that I should just describe it and with a book as well trod as Crime and Punishment, it feels like a particular waste of everyone's time to draft a book report. A textual analysis of Crime and Punishment is something you do in a college class (or a particularly ambitious high school, not that my school's English program dared us with lengthy Russian literature) and I have a well-reasoned anxiety that any analysis I could develop would be about as novel as any hungover college freshman's.

Something that I kept thinking about while reading was the translation. Thinking about the impact a translator has on the interpretation of the original text is nothing new, translators think of it all the time, but I think readers often take for granted just how much influence a translator can impart on the experience of reading a book. Coincidentally, I was listening to the podcast SFUltra, a book podcast wherein a self-professed science fiction hater reads one-hundred science fiction novels he bought, and in his review of Vladimir Sorokin's recently republished and translated Blue Lard, he reignites the age-old argument of whether or not a translator could or should be considered a co-author. The argument for Sorokin and his translator, Max Lawton, is evident. Lawton and Sorokin live concurrently, eight of Sorokin's books are being translated by Lawton, and Lawton acts as interpreter for Sorokin at press events. It can be reasoned that without Lawton, Sorokin's material could be interpreted in totally different fashions.

The gaps in time between Sorokin's novel (pub. 1999) and translation (2024) and Dostoevsky's book (1866) and the translation I read (1968) are obviously hugely different and serves mostly to muddy an otherwise clean argument. I wouldn't consider Monas to be a co-author of Dostoevsky, however, Monas's translation does build off the translation work performed by others like Constance Garnett (1914) and David Margarshack (1951.) Garnett's is the most widely available, being public domain and Margarshack's was used by the Penguin Modern Classics label for about a half-century. Monas's translation seems to be a ruddy one. Having not read much Russian literature, I have little to compare it to but I thought it was occasionally labored but otherwise eminently readable. The general opinion on it is "yeah, it's fine." I wade into these unfamiliar waters because thinking about the differences translations could have sent my head spinning and given its age and legacy, Crime and Punishment is one of the best books an English reader can use to study the changes.

I’ve started to pick up various editions of Crime and Punishment so I can study how the translators interpreted the passages and how these translators either softened or hardened the material. I have not gone so far as to teach myself Russian Cyrillic but there should be a future Hyperfix wherein I dig deeper into the translations of this book. Look forward to it. In the mean time, if you haven’t already, read this book and make note of who translated it.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - E.M. Forster (1905)

After finishing Crime and Punishment, I was majorly dreading the randomizer's next pick, E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread. Most of this had to do with its age and my general ignorance of the author. I have owned Where Angels Fear to Tread for about a decade now. I acquired it in a Penguin Classics inventory purge wherein a person could fill a bag of their books for $20.00. I did this four times and did not use the prescribed bag. I took in a lot of books that I knew I'd like (Mary Shelly's Frankenstein), books that I thought I might like (Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum), and books that I knew I should like (Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) I did not grab every book at my disposal. I did not grab Morrisey's Autobiography. This first taste of book hoarding at seventeen formed a backbone of western canon for my developing collection. I picked up a few books because I liked the name and cover, giving no thought to the plot details on the back jacket. Where Angels Fear to Tread was one of those. In college, I learned about A Passage to India during an early primer on Orientalism. A Passage to India was also written by E.M. Forster and was enormously popular in its day and into the following decades, receiving a film adaptation by David Lean in the 1980s. It also trafficked heavily in exoticized tropes that suggested an atavistic honor and primal sexuality in the Indian people. It was not until this year when I actually took it off the shelf that I connected Forster's two books.

Coming from Crime and Punishment, an oakenly dense book with sentences so solid you could use them to build furniture, I feared that this book would further slow me down. Furthermore, I feared that the drop in quality from the Dostoevsky to this British somebody would be too steep a decline. For this project, I have refused the idea that I skip a book for taste alone so I knew that if Where Angels Fear to Tread proved sticky, it could have gummed up the rate of the project even more than Crime and Punishment did. I am elated to say that it did not and that I found it to be an immensely enjoyable contrast. It likely functions best as an aperitif to a major piece of literature because, despite its Penguin Classics binding, Where Angels Fear to Tread is no major piece of literature.

Far be it from me, the person writing a monthly column about books from a self-professed and oft-repeated place of ignorance, to declare this book "not major" but this seems to be the attitude of this edition's editor, Oliver Stallybrass. The notes on the text express frustration with Forster's poor handle on human anatomy, his careless edits, and his illegible handwriting. Stallybrass writes about the book like he's stitched it back together after the horrible accident of its publication. It is refreshing to see pretension discarded with one of these classics, clear admissions that even if the author went on to write better things, they still started unhewn.

Where Angels Fear to Tread is a good stab at a crisis of manners tale, one that delightfully trots out comedy and melodrama in equal measure. The balance that Forster strikes is notable. His distaste for the preppy Herriton family is clear from page one, the de facto protagonists get it worst of all. They snipe at each other with cold, dry sarcastic remarks, their emotions are purely reactive, and their adherence to proper English tradition has ground down their empathy to a nub. The way in which Lilia, the widow who’s impulsive vacation kicks off the story, treats her new Italian husband Gino as an extension of that sojourn provides the novella’s hardiest theme. The English use the rest of the world as a canvas for self-actualization that they never achieve and in doing so, they degrade the quality of life for those in the spaces they occupy.

Throughout the book, Forster indulges in tourist speculation, that mood of the colonial vacationer looms large. Although Forster resents his characters, he still imparts enough of himself and actual observations he made during a vacation to Italy into Philip, that the book functions as a valuable window into seeing how British aristocracy perceived anything outside England. There is some autocritique in his recounting, Philip’s passages are laced with acrid irony, though in his writing on the Italian Gino, Forster leans into the familiar atavistic tropes common to the era. He’s swarthy, overly emotional, sensual but brutish, and represents a sexual other to the demure English. Forster leans on similar othering techniques in A Passage to India wherein he gestures sincerely towards realized humanist portrayals of other cultures but his own Anglocentrism prevent him from fully accomplishing his goals and in fact, make prominent the most sulfuric indulgences of the era. Seeing these tendencies arise in his earliest story, one that’s set in mainland Europe, gives a modern reader a richer sense of how the pall of Pax Britannica cloaked even its most well-meaning writers.

The book remains very funny in spite of the dated spirit of its time. Phillip Herriton, the book’s primary protagonist, is a hapless stooge for his domineering mother but deludes himself into believing that he’s above his own family’s petty squabbles. This is in part because he has also been to Italy and believes that what he learned in Italy has imbued him with a richer sense of history and aesthetic than his family back home. Upon returning to Italy, the country begins to work its magic again, breaking him away from the demands of his family and opening his heart up to the possibility of love. A romance is teased with Lillia’s friend Caroline throughout the back half of the book and is ripped away with such clear comic force that it could be repurposed today and feel every bit as clever. Forster exploits his characters’ willful myopia, their chronic inability to explain their own feelings, to brilliant comic effect.

The Blue Hammer - Ross MacDonald (1977)

Back into the familiar arms of Ross MacDonald, we've got The Blue Hammer. I actually was trying to read this one not right away but the randomizer chose and so I read. The Blue Hammer is the last Lew Archer book MacDonald would write before developing Alzheimer's. I'd read five of the seventeen Lew Archer books and I faintly wish that I could have saved this final one for the last stretch though coming off of it, The Blue Hammer feels noticeably slighter than his other books and struggles to achieve the same political texture or pulp dynamism that animates his better novels. Throughout the 1970s, it was privately known that MacDonald was facing serious memory issues. According to biographer Tom Nolan, MacDonald's lapses in memory began in 1971 beginning with dates and gradually worsened as the decade went on. As hesitant as I was to echo a GoodReads review saying that the book's rambling tone is a faint sign of developing cognitive issues, I think the diagnosis is correct. The initial publication of the book included several amateur errors in continuity, something that would have been unthinkable in the Swiss Watch tight plots of his other novels.

Before reading The Blue Hammer, I lent it to a coworker. Emboldened by The Atlantic's recent listing of MacDonald's The Zebra Striped Hearse on their Great American Novels lists, I thought "hey, I'll share the wealth." As they were reading it, I asked if Archer was working for a rich family to find their troubled child and if it there was an implication that the child was using drugs. The answer to all three questions was "yes", with a corollary that drug use wasn't implied and that the daughter was explicitly smoking pot. MacDonald was nothing if not an innovator. Knowing that I had fallen into something familiar after two books where I was truly unsure what to expect gave me a shot of confidence and I blitzed through the book in a weekend. In this one, Archer is investigating a stolen painting which may have been painted by a missing painter, presumed dead. As bodies start to turn up, Archer gets the hunch that this "missing painter" story might not be the whole truth and sets out to link the missing painter to the deceased.

Reading The Blue Hammer made me think of Poodle Springs, the unfinished Phillip Marlowe manuscript Raymond Chandler left behind which Robert B. Parker "finished" at the request of the Chandler estate. Before Parker took over, Chandler had finished four chapters which see Marlowe living out rare domestic bliss before class differences and the pressures of his work drive a wedge into his new marriage. Those first four chapters are pretty good and seeing Marlowe married is a novel spin on the lonely detective character. But after those were written, Chandler died and the drafts sat around for twenty five years accruing a legend as they gathered dust. Parker hazards a guess at what Chandler would have written using notes and outlines but the back chunk of the book is a patchy chameleon job by a loyal, loving fan. It's not worth reading.

The Blue Hammer is assuredly written by MacDonald, albeit in decline, and suffers similarly for it. It has the beats of a Lew Archer novel, like how Poodle Springs has the beats of a Chandler novel, but the attention to detail is missing. Distressed frame houses, seedy motels and imperial cliffside California palaces still dot Archer's Southern California but there is no texture to these locales. They feel repurposed from previous novels. The Archer series is reliably repetitive but each of the books I've read were able to offer small commentaries on observed sea changes in the social fabric of Los Angeles. The Drowning Pool wove in details about the decline of Old Money power, The Instant Enemy expressed concern for how this developing metropolis was discarding and isolating its residents, and The Far Side of the Dollar explored the role psychiatry was developing in the burgeoning generational conflicts of the 1960s. The Blue Hammer is more concerned with Lew and how Lew is feeling. Short of some wallpaper details on decaying suburban infrastructure, the 1970s may as well have not happened.

MacDonald had wanted to wrap up the Lew Archer character going into The Blue Hammer and you can tell that he's making strides to do so here. This case is more personal for Archer as he falls in love with a journalist, a woman so dedicated to uncovering the truth that her passion echoes Archer's own Arthurian gallantry. She's lightly written, a fantastical, sexy woman inelegantly torn between idealized daughter figure and fated lover. What starts as a case on commission awkwardly bridges out into a bizarre pursuit for truth and historical justice. Throughout the book, his benefactors repeatedly chastise him for wasting their money but Archer rambles his way into them expending checks out to Tucson, paying for motel rooms and other oddball detours. It's a disjointed book, one that shows MacDonald in an unfortunate place of weakness in his career. One hopes that their favorite writers can go out strong, that their memory and other faculties will hold up to the last. The Blue Hammer, despite moments of strength like the surreal meeting with a business-minded cult leader in the Arizona desert, is a reminder that its the body of work that matters, not the final piece.