Classics Read Aloud

“The thought that some day—perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five—all this world would be taken away from him, before he had exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an injustice brooding over his horizon. If anything came after this life, it wouldn’t be what he wanted; not Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and pretty faces—too few, even now, of those about him!”In 1906, John Galsworthy published Man of Property, the first novel in his acclaimed and oft-adapted The Forsyte Saga. It was met with the best sales and reviews of his career. (My reading of an excerpt from the book can be found here.) Despite its immediate success, Galsworthy was not quick to follow up The Man of Property. It took him 12 years to return to the Forsytes, a period he spent writing unrelated novels, putting on plays, and campaigning for various political causes.By the time Galsworthy finally revisited his most iconic creations, the world had changed dramatically. The First World War had upended much of the social order that produced families like the Forsytes, and the new generation of writers that emerged in its wake was not kind to his tales of the old aristocracy. The Man of Property would soon be called feeble, bloodless, and fake, though great literature always weathers such criticisms.Perhaps motivated by his advancing age—he was too old to serve in the army and felt that he was not contributing enough to the war effort—or perhaps by the suspicion that there would soon be little interest in a family like the Forsytes, Galsworthy returned to their story with both a rapid pace of work and a reflective mood.“Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” the 1918 interlude that preceded two more novels in the saga by 1921, focuses on patriarch Old Jolyon’s recognition of aging and his anticipatory grief over losing the things he holds dear. Looking out over the expanse of his acreage, the old man observes that “the orthodoxy he had worn in the ’sixties, as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance, had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone—beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty.” It is shortly after this that Old Jolyon comes across a surprise visitor who is the embodiment of Beauty itself, and the two revel in each other’s company, while we, the reader, become uniquely aware of the shared grievance these two have for the temporary nature of life’s most precious happinesses.Galsworthy took note of such shifts in his own life, commenting on the departure from one set of priorities to another as an “endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature.” Was this Indian Summer interlude an opportunity to work this duel out on the page? Or was it, perhaps, Galsworthy’s attempt to soften the interpretation of his aristocratic position in the public eye by going in-depth on a character both representative and sympathetic?The Forsytes may be departed from the world, but there is still much to appreciate in Galsworthy’s depiction of this struggle, which plays out in various forms for every successive generation.Please enjoy…Headline Image: Sunset at Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, 1894Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting “et cetera” tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

“He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more—he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back to France.”Every so often, youthful American audiences are treated to a “voice of their generation,” and in the Jazz Age, that voice was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. In 1918, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter, “I know I’ll wake up some morning and find the debutantes have made me famous overnight.” Two years later, with the publication of his novel This Side of Paradise, his expectations became reality.Rather instantly, Fitzgerald was showered with money and attention—all the trappings of celebrity and success enjoyed by those who so perfectly capture the zeitgeist of their time. The last writer I recall being heralded as the voice of the generation was Lena Dunham… fifteen years ago, perhaps? Time flies, and she wasn’t my generation, so I didn’t recognize the voice. I have since stopped paying attention, and I wonder if today’s generation can possibly contain a voice true enough to resonate over the devouring hum of rapid-fire TikTok videos.I digress.Fitzgerald had his glorious days in the sun—too many, and he eventually let himself get burned. This was the roaring twenties. Having spent ghastly sums on a fast-and-loose lifestyle of booze and high society, Fitzgerald eventually found himself a debt-laden alcoholic. His time as Icarus was hardly unique; many were left gasping for second chances.“Babylon Revisited” is the story of Charlie Wales, one of the poor gasping souls. We find him returning to Paris after the dust of his debauchery has settled, looking to rebuild a life on solid footing. The city has changed, he has changed, but as we all well know, change alone often isn’t enough to erase the damage of the past.Please enjoy…Before you float off to enjoy the story, please help Classics Read Aloud grow by “♡ Liking” this post and sending it to a friend—word of mouth is more powerful than any algorithm. Thank you!Savoring: A story like this demands a repast with a hint of repentance. M. F. K. Fisher wrote How to Cook a Wolf in 1942 to inspire home cooks limited by the wartime shortages imposed on their pantries. Fisher is irreverent and indulgent; the book is a treat for anyone who enjoys the art of the practical, fortifying family meal. Her dish “Eggs in Hell” is simmering, rich, economical, and far more delicious than anyone repenting has any right to deserve.Listening: Life is full of transitions, some smooth, some, like Charlie’s, jarring. February is a month that begs for transition. Tired of winter, tired of grey, I’m all too aware that the hints of spring remain quite out of grasp. I’m gravitating towards the instrumental albums in my collection that offer their own hints of life; something a little jazzy, something with a provocative, ambient vocal pleasantly interjecting here and there. Transit, the 2019 album from FloFilz has been in steady rotation, breathing a bit of life into this purgatorial season.“The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson, 1921“Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville, 1853Little Women, An Excerpt, by Louisa May Alcott, 186 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

“Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries.”Guy de Maupassant was like a flash of lightening on the literary scene. He had a short life and a shorter writing career that left a slowly fading echo of light in the night sky. As Maupassant himself acknowledged, “I entered the literary life like a meteor and I will come out like a love at first sight.”Love at first sight, in Maupassant’s world, comes to a lonely, regrettable end.In his ten intense years of writing, the author created over 300 short stories and six novels, among a number of other creative pursuits. Maupassant called himself a naturalist and pressed beauty right up against pain and suffering in stories that quickly won the fawning attention of readers who were ready for a radical departure from the romanticism that reigned in the first half of the 19th-century.Friend and fellow naturalist Emile Zola called Maupassant “the happiest and unhappiest of men.” It is easy to see this deportment take shape in a story like “The Necklace,” in which a beautiful woman, desperate for a beautiful life, is served a slice of her soul’s desire only for it to digest into years of penance and misery.“The Necklace” remains one of Maupassant’s best-known works, and we can surely appreciate why once we experience the painful twist of his ending.Please enjoy…Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting “et cetera” tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

The Hounds of Fate by Saki (H. H. Munro)“Three pounds goes but a little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point.”Hector Hugh Munro had an eye for irony and the humbling tricks that the universe is inclined to play upon its fallible occupants. One gets the sense in reading “The Hounds of Fate” that the story is less about the circumstances that befall this particular man, but rather that there are a million inevitabilities unfolding at any given time, and we’ve simply been handed a microscope to observe this one.Born in British-ruled Burma (now Myanmar) in 1870 and left motherless at the age of two, Munro was sent back to England to be raised by two “strict and puritanical aunts.” This twist of fate is one he never fully recovered from and continued to include snarled, grim, loveless aunts as characters in many of his stories.Writing short stories that hone in on life’s absurdities and cruelties, Munro adopted the pen name Saki, allegedly borrowed from a 12th-century Persian poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. In it, “The Eternal Saki” is the cup-bearer or Minister of Wine that fills the cups of existence, comparing all of humanity to the “millions of bubbles” unceasingly poured:‘Tis but a Tent where takes his one day’s restA Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;The Sultan rises, and the dark FerrashStrikes, and prepares it for another Guest.And fear not lest Existence closing yourAccount, and mine, should know the like no more;The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour’dMillions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.Was this a signal from Munro that the reader should not take his stories too tragically—that the universe is infinite in its creation and destruction? Is he aligning with the poem’s thrust that life is precious, but none particularly so? Is his stance one of acceptance or rejection? Or, is here merely entertaining, himself as much as us?These are fascinating questions to consider as you listen to this poignant story unfold.Please enjoy…Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting “et cetera” tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

"Leave It to Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse“’Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them.”If you have never experienced a Bertie & Jeeves story firsthand, you are in for a treat. This is comedy, pure and simple. Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse did not set out to make satire or social commentary, nor was he concerned with wisdom or subversion. Wodehouse was an entertainer, and he conducted himself in the elevation of this artform with such finesse that we can hardly appreciate the difficulty as we consume it. As he humbly confessed in a 1961 interview, “I haven’t got any violent feelings about anything, I just love writing.”And, oh, to be loved by Wodehouse, what decadence is bestowed. The author churned out stories of this yin-and-yang pair over nearly 60 years, bringing together the sensibilities of both his inherited English culture and his adopted American one. Bertie, the English gentleman through whose eyes we see the world, is a sort of vapid, bumbling man-about-town. His style of speech is “a blend of [English] clichés, public schoolboys’ tags, and upper-class slang, curiously enriched by a good deal of postwar American slang.” A swell chappie with a social life that is positively brimming and a Rolodex of calls that are always answered.Meanwhile, Jeeves, Bertie’s butler, is the very picture of refined deportment; judicious in taste, behavior, and intellect. He is a reliable foil to poor Bertie, and the pair are simply topping. While Bertie’s idiocy gives necessary credence to the ridiculous situations introduced by the cast of characters parading in and out of each episode, it is Jeeves that eventually stole the show—Wodehouse called upon him for more and more stage time as the years progressed.Today’s reading is of “Leave It to Jeeves,” the very first fully developed Bertie & Jeeves story published. Wodehouse hits right off the bat with Jeeves advising Bertie, in his own insistent way, against the error of donning a checkered suit in the modern style (“Injudicious, sir.”). With wardrobe decided, Bertie and Jeeves are thrown into helping Bertie’s pal Corky, a destitute would-be portrait painter, convince Corky’s uncle (and importantly, his only source of income) to accept his marriage to a chorus girl, the aptly named Miss Singer. (“Muriel Singer was one of those very quiet, appealing girls who have a way of looking at you with their big eyes as if they thought you were the greatest thing on earth and wondered that you hadn’t got on to it yet yourself…. What I mean is, she made me feel alert and dashing, like a jolly old knight-errant or something of that kind. I felt that I was with her in this thing to the limit.”)It’s jolly good fun.Whether you’re having a bad day, are stuck in bed with the flu, or are in a literary rut, some time in Wodehouse’s world may be just the ticket. His characters are winningly simple, the stereotypes hysterically on-point, and the plotlines unapologetically frothy. It takes great talent to have created such an effect and maintained it over so many years; the result of true love, clearly.Please enjoy…Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting “et cetera” tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian AndersenWith today’s reading, I’d like to focus your attention on Andersen’s dazzling imagery. This adventurous tale is a treat for our senses and creative instincts.Andersen, naturally, opens by setting the stage with an enchanted challenge that must be overcome. One day, devilish sprites create a mirror whose every reflection is a twisted and frightful distortion. They revel in their mischievous creation, flying up into the air with delight. “The higher they flew with the mirror, the more terribly it grinned.”The sprite’s antics end with a crash as the mirror slips from their control and is dashed into “a hundred million and more pieces” that wreak havoc far and wide.Two splinters of mirror find their way into the heart and eye of a little boy named Kay. He and his dear friend, Gerda, live beside each other—“They were not brother and sister; but they cared for each other as if they were”—and meet often on the roof between the two garrets where “the tendrils of the peas hung down over the boxes; and the rose-trees shot up long branches, twined round the windows, and then bent toward each other; it was almost like a triumphant arch of foliage and flowers.”With two sharp pains, the lodged shards afflict Kay. He rejects all that is good and pure, including Gerda, and is soon taken captive by the powerful Snow Queen, whose kiss “was colder than ice; it penetrated to his very heart.” In his mirror-twisted vision, it is she who becomes beautiful and clever to him.“On they flew over woods and lakes, over seas, and many lands; and beneath them the chilling storm rushed fast, the wolves howled, the snow crackled; above them flew large screaming crows, but higher up appeared the moon, quite large and bright; and it was on it that Kay gazed during the long long winter’s night; while by day he slept at the feet of the Snow Queen.”Little Gerda, full of innocence and determined dedication to her friend, strikes out to find him amidst the vast unknown, leaving behind everything she knows. All manner of fauna and flora awakens to her goodness—“…when her warm tears watered the ground, the tree shot up suddenly as fresh and blooming as when it had been swallowed up”—and royal chambers open to her solicitation—“The ceiling of the room resembled a large palm-tree with leaves of glass, of costly glass; and in the middle, from a thick golden stem, hung two beds, each of which resembled a lily. One was white, and in this lay the Princess; the other was red, and it was here that Gerda was to look for little Kay.”The fearless Gerda makes her way, mile by mile, from the cherished gardens of her hometown through the frozen great North to rescue Kay, buoyed always by her earnestness and purpose—“’I can give her no more power than what she has already. Don’t you see how great it is? Don’t you see how men and animals are forced to serve her; how well she gets through the world barefooted?’”This is just a small taste of the banquet laid on Andersen’s narrative table. Surely, Andersen’s story has influenced many a modern cinematic tale, but none capture the glory of that which exists in our mind’s eye, as guided by his words. His expressive scenes breathe life into the many dichotomies suggested in this tale that pits good against evil and logic against faith.Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting "et cetera" tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, 1843In December of 1843, Charles Dickens gave fresh life and tradition to the celebration of Christmas. The first print of his cherished novel, A Christmas Carol, sold out in a mere five days, and its popularity has continued at a fevered pitch for nearly two centuries.While there are interpretations and adaptations of his work at every turn, there is no substitute for soaking in the words of the original: the mouthwatering foodstuffs, the magical bells, the mirthful Fezziwigs, the inimitable Scrooge, and the many humble scenes awakening Scrooge’s humanity down to his very marrow.Of all the entertainments bombarding you this holiday, there isn’t a more worthy one on offer to delight, nourish, and bind your family to the spirit of the season. To borrow a turn of the author’s, if that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it.I relish in reading this story aloud, just as Dickens himself did, giving hundreds of performances across Britain and America over several decades. The whole endeavor exhausted him, but he took immense pleasure in bringing his characters to life for packed auditoriums, continually revising the text to maximum impact in such settings.I am grateful to have had two of my loved ones joining me “on stage” to bring this cast of characters to life and can understand what must have drawn Dickens to the art of live readings…suffice it to say we are already excited to sharpen our characters for another go at it next year!Please enjoy…Subscribe to Classics Read Aloud to receive future readings, including commentary and interesting "et cetera" tangent links, right to your inbox: https://classicsreadaloud.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit classicsreadaloud.substack.com