The trouble is like if anybody went to see Hamlet, Messiah, The Magnetic Fields or Vermeer on my recommendation, not having seen them before, they would likely come way disappointed because I'd have said they are the best things ever and nothing can outdo that.
Perhaps Le Grand Mealunes lays the heartbreak on rather heavily but I don't hold that against Thomas Hardy. Ultimately, though, what makes it convincing for me is how it's better to travel than to arrive. That something one wants is necessarily a bigger thing than anything one has. Having secured that which he first so desperately sought, Meaulnes is immediately off on another venture as if the seeking is what he really enjoys,
'But how can a man who has strayed into Heaven ever hope to make terms with the earth! What passes for happiness with most people seemed contemptible to me. And when I tried, deliberately and sincerely, to live like the rest of them, I stored up enough remorse to last me a very long time...'
or,
Augustin had at his side the girl he had thought lost to him forever......Why was le Grand Meaulnes at that moment like a stranger, like a man who has failed to find what he sought and for whom nothing else held any interest? ....Why then this present emptiness, this aloofness, this inability to be happy?
Of course, there are people who find deep fulfilment in achieving what they wanted but they don't make for such a story and, I reckon, the sort of people who write stories and poems are those who dwell on things, not those whose happiness obviates the necessity of brooding on it.
It might have arrived at an opportune time to discourage me from wasting the winter in pursuit of the novel I'd be at least in some small way satisfied with. I know it's beyond me, not just the conception of it and the writing of the prose but the sheer hard work and dedication required. I'm a short order sort of writer, at best. But an idea is there, 50 thousand words about a dilettante who only wants to write a novel but can't. Don't tempt me.
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Chekhov's The Shooting Party might be the inverse of Alain-Fournier's classic, an opposite story of less beautiful people. Chekhov is essential without him ever providing an all-time favourite for me. I've been more with Turgenev, George Moore, Gide et al, but we will see about this, his only novel which, at about one third of the way through, has only just kicked into the real action.
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But, 44 years after the fact, it has only just dawned on me how little of my desultory Eng Lit degree depended on the novel. In Victorian Lit, Prof. Carroll set a compulsory essay on Vanity Fair which was very bad news for me and even writing some of it in Cambridge, none of the high scholarship going on there seeped into my work by osmosis. My other Victorian essay was on Mathhew Arnol's poems.
Elizabethan Lit was Richard II/Edward II and England's Helicon. C20th American was Eugene O'Neill/Tennessee Williams and Sylvia. C20th British (to 1939 as they had it then) was Dubliners and I'd have to look up what else. I can hardly believe I took on Eliot. C17th was the Marvell dissertation and I did my own thing on 'British Poetry since 1945' in Independent Studies. That was all the Lit. One novel essay that was, probably generously, given a third.
Perhaps it's taken me until now to realize it was never my medium.
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