The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Jungle seems to be one of those books that is often referred to but rarely read. I knew that it contained graphic descriptions of filthy and unsafe working conditions in the meat industry of the early 20th century, but it somehow escaped me that this was a novel and not a journalistic exposé.

One of my colleagues recently read The Jungle as well as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (the basis of the Daniel Day-Lewis film There Will Be Blood) and spoke highly of them. The Jungle turns out to be not only a well-researched look into the horrors of the Chicago stockyards but a grim, relentless, and well-told story of immigrants ground down by an unregulated and unscrupulous business monopoly.

The book does have some memorable descriptions of how cattle and pigs are converted into meat. Not surprisingly, one of the worst concerns the making of sausage (p. 134 of the Bantam edition):

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white — it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

What struck me just as much, however, were the scenes describing how the hero, a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis, and his family are victimized by a century-old version of deceptive mortgage lending. Hoping to avoid the trap of endless rent, Jurgis buys what he is told is a brand-new house for a down payment of three hundred dollars and a monthly payment of twelve dollars until the full price of fifteen hundred dollars has been paid.

It is only after the contract has been signed that he finds out about the charges for interest and insurance, and learns that the supposedly new house has been sold again and again to buyers who could not keep up with the payments and were put out on the street when they fell behind. Each time the house is simply repainted, and some superficial repairs made.

One of the most wrenching scenes in The Jungle comes when Jurgis is released after a month in jail and walks homes for miles across Chicago in bitter winter weather. At last he arrives at his own street:

Jurgis went closer yet, but keeping on the other side of the street. A sudden and horrible spasm of fear had come over him. His knees were shaking beneath him, and his mind was in a whirl. New paint on the house, and new weatherboards, where the old had begun to rot off, and the agent had got after them! New shingles over the hole in the roof, too, the hole that had for six months been the bane of his soul — he having no money to have it fixed and no time to fix it himself, and the rain leaking in, and overflowing the pots and pans he put to catch it, and flooding the attic and loosening the plaster. And now it was fixed! And the broken windowpane replaced! And curtains in the windows! New, white curtains, stiff and shiny!

Then suddenly the front door opened. Jurgis stood, his chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. A boy had come out, a stranger to him; a big, fat, rosy-cheeked youngster, such as had never been seen in his home before.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte

Two of my colleagues went to Costa Rica in August, and since I don’t have any interesting trips on the horizon myself, I think I probably picked up The Tapir’s Morning Bath out of rainforest envy.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath is about the scientists who live and work on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, studying spiny rats, fruit bats, spider monkeys, and other flora and fauna. Before I even began the first chapter, I had already learned something. I had imagined that the Panama Canal was a long concrete trench that stretched all the way across the isthmus, but a map of the Canal Zone shows that ships actually pass through the sizable Gatun Lake during a large part of their passage. Barro Colorado (meaning Red Mud) is the biggest island in the lake. It’s what remains of a ridge of land that was flooded after the damming of the Chagres River in 1910. The island is protected from hunting and development, and a laboratory (now run by the Smithsonian Institution) has been operating there since 1923.

Elizabeth Royte spends a year on the island, off and on, and attaches herself as a field assistant to several scientists. She not only gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to confront a wild peccary on a remote forest trail, or to disentangle a bat from a mist net, but lucidly explains the theories each scientist is setting out to prove. She regrets the passing of naturalists with a big-picture understanding of the interactions of plants and animals in favor of ever more specialized number crunchers, but she recognizes that once in a while even a seemingly useless bit of data completes a missing piece of the puzzle and even offers some practical benefit to medicine or science. And sometimes it just blows a hole in someone’s cherished theory.

Bret Weinstein studies bats that build shelters out of leaves, apparently to give them shelter near their feeding grounds so they don’t have to fly home every night. Bret has also noticed that a male bat keeps several mates in a sort of harem, going to considerable effort to maximize the chance that he can pass on his genes. When the author tells him another scientist has found that female bats often mate in the forest, regardless of what harem they belong to, “a look of consternation” crosses his face. The author thinks of an observation attributed to Mark Twain (though I haven’t been able to find the source): “Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

Margaret Drabble and the present tense

I’m usually not a fan of the present tense in fiction. It might be great for screenplays or crime fiction, where action in the moment is everything, but it can seem artificial if not done really well, and it can be an awkward anchor when you want to introduce a flashback or a thought about the future. 

Margaret Drabble, though, glides in and out of the present tense so fluidly that I rarely even notice, and achieves effects that might be available in no other way. Here’s a short example from The Gates of Ivory.

Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.

He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.

Drabble often starts a new scene with the present tense, as she does here. The little jolt of immediacy helps remind the sleepy or inattentive reader that we’re in a new place now, with a new character. But although she may drop the present tense inside a paragraph, she often continues with it for many pages. She may be somewhat more likely to use the past tense for past events, and somewhat more likely to use the present tense for scenes of great emotion or violent action, but she’s far from consistent in this. It seems that she shifts tenses by feel, in the way that people I met in Zimbabwe would shift from English to Shona and back again in their conversation, based on which language fit the subject best.

Earlier today I put down a novel after laboring through a couple of chapters of careful writing-school prose where every verb was active (sometimes too active) and every sentence studded with clever observations. Reading Drabble, who has long since earned the right to play with the conventions of the novel, makes me feel I can breathe again. 

A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble

A Natural Curiosity, the novel from which I borrowed the name of my blog, is the middle volume in a trilogy that begins with The Radiant Way and ends with The Gates of Ivory. I’ve been a fan of Margaret Drabble since I was in high school, when I picked up a copy of The Realms of Gold at the library, more or less by chance. I first read her trilogy as it was coming out in the late ’80s and early’90s, and now that I’m rereading it I find it just as funny and strange and insightful and compelling as I did the first time. I’m not sure why it isn’t on everybody’s list of great works of the 20th century.

The trilogy centers around three well-educated Englishwomen in their forties and fifties: a psychiatrist, a social worker, and an art historian. Liz Headleand, the psychiatrist, is the first among equals, and The Radiant Way begins with a grand Tolstoyan party that she throws in her Harley Street home on the eve of 1980. Liz takes center stage in the last volume, which largely concerns her search for her friend Stephen Cox, a writer who has disappeared while on his way to Cambodia to research the life of Pol Pot.

I had remembered the middle book, A Natural Curiosity, as being a thin transition between the fatter volumes that begin and end the trilogy, and I was pleased to return to it and see how well it stands up on its own. Like most of Drabble’s novels, it is notable for its odd coincidences and authorial interjections. These drive some critics crazy, but I enjoy them, and they correspond to my sense of the unpredictable and unknowable way the world works. This is from page 141 of A Natural Curiosity:

Secrets, pigeon-holes, little plots. As a solicitor, Clive Enderby is aware that there are far more family secrets in the world than most people know of — well, if they knew of them, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? People don’t want to think about these things. So they don’t. People want to believe in an ordered, regular world, of faithful married couples, legitimate children, normal sex, legal behaviour, decent continuity, and they will go to almost any lengths to preserve this faith. Any suggestion that ‘real life’ is otherwise tends to be greeted as ‘melodramatic’ or ‘implausible’.

Solicitors know better.The police know better. Social workers know better. Doctors, especially since they emergence of AIDS, know better. The subplots fester, break out, infect strangers. Dark blotches spread. Life is more like an old-fashioned, melodramatic novel than we care to know.

Earth’s axle

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau today features one of my favorite passages from Thoreau’s writings on animals. For Thoreau, the sound of the cricket was the pulse of the awakening earth. He heard its creaking call as the creaking of the earth’s axle, and credited the cricket (and other creatures) with helping to keep the earth turning through the seasons.

“The year is in the grasp of the crickets, and they are hurling it round swiftly on its axle,” he wrote on August 7, 1853.