Oliver Goldsmith | Thornfield Hall

Until the millennium, I read only one book at a time. I would finish Philip Roth’s American Pastoral before pouncing on my beloved Jane Austen’s Persusion.

Now it’s Liberty Hall here; I have several books going at once. After too much screen time, I fall on my books like a graduate student with 1,000 pages to read before sunset: Moby Dick from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., Catullus from 10 to noon; Mrs. Dalloway from 1 p.m. to 2, and Don Quixote before crashing with a cozy mysery.

This week, I have chosen some excellent books. I chortled over Oliver Goldsmith’s witty play, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and raced through the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian novel, The Memory Police (2019).

I am mad about Goldsmith’s charming novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, and giggled uncontrollably over She Stoops to Conquer. The plot pivots on a practical joke played by Tony Lumpkin, the doting Mrs. Hardwick’s son by her first husband. The smart-alec Tony declares his intention of going to the alehouse instead of staying home to dine with two dinner guests, one of whom is a potential suitor for his half-sister, Miss Hardwicr.

Tony can’t wait to leave, but Mr. Hardwick doesn’t mind: he is tired of the havoc wrought by Tony, whose practical jokes include burning the footmen’s slippers and frightening the maids. But Mrs. Hardwick is concerned about Tony’s health: she insists that he may be consumptive.

Mrs. Hardcastle: The poor boy was always too sickly to do any good…. When he comes to be a little stronger, who know what a year or two’s Latin may do for him?

Hardcastle: Latin for him! A cat and fiddle. No, no, the alehouse and the stable are the only schools he’ll ever go to

Tony is lumpen, but he is also very funny. When the Hardwicks’ visitors get lost and stop at the alehouse to ask directions, Tony directs them to the Hardwicks’ house, but tells them it is an inn. Misdirection leads to mistaken identity: The guests believe that Hardwick is the innkeeper. Later, the potential suitor mistakes Miss Hardcastle for a barmaid.

So enjoyable!

On the other hand, we have Yoko Ogawa’s serious dystopian novel, The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder, and a finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Published in English in 2019, it was first published in Japan in 1994. And that puts it in dystopian context, I think. There are allusions to Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

Ogawa’s strange, spare, lyrical novel is a grim critique of fascism and police surveillance, which I read with fascination and horror. The Gestapo-like Memory Police interrogate anyone who stands out from the crowd, but they attack the entire population’s memories by “disappearing” random objects.

The objects are “disappeared” for no reason: birds, ribbons, buttons, music boxes, bells, emeralds, stamps, and harmonicas. One day all the rose petals blow into the sea, and there are no more rose gardens. And there is a series of scary book=burning scenes, which allude to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The unnamed narrator – Ogawa does not name the characters – is a young novelist who lives alone. She and a friend, referred to only as “the old man,” build a secret room beneath her study to hide her brilliant editor, R, from the Memory Police.

R tries to bolster their hopes as the tension builds. At one point the Memory Police searach the narrator’s house, but don’t find the secret room. Unlike other people on the island, R remembers all of the disappeared objects. But when he tries to explain the purpose of those objects, the narrator and the old man cannot understand, because their memories have been wiped and their feelings blocked.

There is a stillness about this novel: the people are quiet so as not to draw attention. And the spare style is perfect for the descriptions of the rise of stark, bleak chaos and fear. The narrator’s voice is unemotional, but we feel her terror. We also get to read the novel she is writing, and it is a horror story, a kind of parallel fable. A typing teacher seduces and abuses the narrator, a typing student, and then locks her up in a room full of typewriters. He steals her voice: all the typewriters are broken, so she can’t even type. In some ways he stands in for the Memory Police in this alternate world.

Do I recommend this novel? Yes, but beware: it will haunt you. I have seldom been so disturbed by a book. In a way, there is magic realism at work, too, but it is not the charming magic realism we know from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude.

I’m in the mood for gentle comedy. Not Netflix comedy, but the literary kind. I’ve been frazzled because I had a computer “emergency,” a broken keyboard with sticky a’s, v’s, b’s, d’s, and x-es. As for my 11-year-old tablet, it has lost its little electrronic mind. It is, however, an excellent kitchen timer.

And so I decided to go semi-Luddite. I sat down and read Oliver Goldsmith’s gentle comedy, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). It is not hilarious, like his play, She Stooped to Conquer, but it’s sweet and funny. Some of the plot elements are over-the-top, but Goldsmith’s style is graceful, and the Vicar’s gentle voice is appealing. And he is such a kind-hearted man that even when the villainous squire sends him to prison, he makes friends with a trickster who cheated him in the past. Goldsmith obviously influenced Dickens: In Little Dorrit, an entire family lives for years in a prison because of Mr. Dorrit’s debts.

Goldsmith’s style is polished and agile, and the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. I love the vicar, who is also the narrator: he is earnest, naïve, and generous, and has some eccentric views about monogamy. He believes that it is unlawful for a priest of the Church of England to remarry after the death of his first wife. The vicar has written many tracts against this practice.

He and his wife, Deborah Primrose, lead an idyllic life in Wakefield with their six well-behaved children.. They have a small inheritance they have invested, and thus are able to give away the profits of his living to widows and orphans.

But, alas, they lose their fortune. It is stolen by the merchant who invested it. He left the country to escape bankrupty, and now they are penniless. They can no longer afford to live at Wakefield. The vicar accepts a more modest living in a neighborhood of farmers. On their journey, they meet Mr. Burchell, a philanthropist who becomes a famiy friend. But Deborah and her two daughters are infatuated by the squire, the rich, charming Mr. Thornhill, who is actually a calculating seducer. The two girls are deliberately coquettish and conscious of being on the marriage market. Alas, alack! Some truly sinister things happen. Yet we know there will be a happy ending, and so it is ultimately a cozy.

The novel was published because of Samuel Johnson’s imtervention. According to James Boswell, Johnson received a note from Goldsmith saying “that he was in great distress, and… begging that I would come to him as soon as possible.” When Johnson arrived, he learned that the landady had arrested the penniless Goldsmith for rent. Johnson asked Goldsmith if he had any finished manuscript to sell, and Goldsmith handed over The Vicar of Wakefield. And so Johnson sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. Four years later in 1766, it was published.