Classics Read Aloud

“If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”
On New Year’s Day, 1897, the writer Stephen Crane joined the crew of the SS Commodore at a dock in Jacksonville, Florida. Traveling as a journalist tasked with documenting the insurrection in Cuba, Crane watched as the ship was loaded with arms and munitions, like “some legendary creature of the sea.”
As the ship sounded its whistle, the crew of nearly 30 men readied itself for the short voyage to the warring nation, wholly unaware that the battle they would witness instead would be entirely at sea. Less than two miles offshore, the Commodore encountered its first setback. Suddenly enveloped in a thick fog, the ship ran ashore into thick mud and had to be bailed out by a vessel anchored nearby.
Back on track, the crew rallied, ready to make headway like filibusters on a quest for plunder. Alas, fate had other ideas, brewing a powerful squall that “rolled [the Commodore] like a rubber ball.” Before long, it became apparent that there was an issue in the engine room. All hands, including Crane’s, were taken to bail water out of the lower levels, to no avail.
Facing the reality of their plight, the crew attempted to evacuate, miraculously, without panic. As escape mechanisms were evaluated, “the whistle of the Commodore had been turned loose, and if there ever was a voice of despair and death, it was in the voice of this whistle.” Crane found himself on a ten-foot dinghy with the ship’s Captain and two other men, rowing away in silence as they watched the Commodore, along with many of its sailors, sink into the ocean’s depths.
“The Open Boat” is the story of what came next.
Please enjoy…
“♡ Like” this post in gratitude for terra firma.
Primary Color: Mere days after his ordeal, Crane recorded his first-hand account of the Commodore’s brief and tragic journey. It is poignant, raw, and very much worth reading. To avoid spoilers, I recommend saving it until after you’ve heard “The Open Boat.”
Pass the Bottle: One of Crane’s contemporaries and friends was the writer Joseph Conrad, who, amazingly, also lived to tell the tale of his harrowing experience aboard a sinking ship. The resulting story, “Youth: A Narrative,” recommended to me by a well-read listener (email suggestions to [email protected]), is wholly captivating, and makes one begin to appreciate the bravery that was once required to keep the wheels of commerce turning. You can find “Youth” here.
“Spring” from “Jean Gourdon’s Four Days” by Émile Zola, 1874
“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving, 1819
“Hilda Silfverling” by Lydia Maria Child, 1845


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“I ain’t attempting to decry the celebrated moral aspect of parental affection, but we’re dealing with humans, and it ain’t human for anybody to give up two thousand dollars for that forty-pound chunk of freckled wildcat.”
In a memorable episode of the hit PBS Masterpiece show Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham’s valet, Bates, leverages a rather ungentlemanly skill to save not only the day, but also the crown prince’s bacon. Bates, in a previous season, had been imprisoned after being falsely accused and subsequently incarcerated for murdering his first wife—a nasty turn for which he was later exonerated. His time under the thumb of Scotland Yard was not wasted, and he emerged with a finely tuned hand in forgery. When evidence of Prince Edward’s dalliances, made clear in a letter to his lover, fell into the wrong hands, it was Bates’ ingenious idea to use a false letter of permission to enter the ne’er-do-well’s apartment, retrieve the damning evidence, and let Lord Grantham soak up all the credit.
It really is a fantastic show.
Clever fictional British valets aren’t the only ones making best use of their time in the clink. William Sydney Porter, better known as the writer O. Henry, surely didn’t waste his. Incarcerated for embezzlement in 1898, O. Henry emerged after three years as a highly productive writer with mountains of great material. Between 1901 and his death in 1910, O. Henry is said to have written over three hundred short stories, many of which remain well-known and well-loved to this day.
With a sensitive ear and the belief that a good story is held by all he came in contact with, O. Henry shook gold out of the paydirt gathered ‘round the prison yard when he wrote “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Based upon a fellow convict’s predilection for kidnapping the kids of wealthy families, O. Henry’s version perfectly highlights his talent for comic inversion. Here, he takes a construct sure to fill any parent with horror and flips it on its head in a manner sure to make parents of boys tear up with laughter at the final twist.
Please enjoy…
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Untold volumes have been written about T. S. Eliot’s seminal work, “The Waste Land.” For over 100 years now, scholars and enthusiasts have mined the poem’s 434 lines for literary and historical allusions, biographical clues, and coded phrases, all in the noble pursuit of unlocking the work’s brilliance.
Ironically, the intensity of analysis was perhaps originally triggered by Eliot himself when he included his “notes” in a 1922 edition of the poem, published in book form. The publisher, Boni & Liveright, requested a set of additional poems to fill 16 pages that would otherwise be blank (a quirk of the nature of the pages-per-sheet printing method at the time). Instead of poems, Eliot provided his notes, which have intrigued and confounded readers ever since, some of whom believe he was using them to intentionally misdirect interpretation.
This exhaustive, endlessly detailed inquiry is enough to make many traditional readers of novels think, “Poetry? This poem? Not for me.”
I’ll be honest, I felt the same. I’m just a reader. I love being delighted, surprised, enlightened, inspired, and even disappointed by the stories I read. I look forward to losing all sense of time, turning page after page. I don’t often feel compelled to interrogate the dickens out of what I’ve read, but I do love the sound of words.
As it turns out, that’s enough. A love of words, an imagination, and some life experience are all that is needed to come away with something worthy from a poem as substantial and revered as “The Waste Land.”
In a sense, I think the open lattice of suggestive scenes linked throughout the poem offers something interesting without interpretation: The blank, unexplained spaces make room for our own completion. Each of us will bring our history, education, empathy, and economics to these lines. You’ll get an image separate from mine, and because so much is suggested and little explained, where those images take us will be distinct and whole all at once.
I hope you’ll give it a try.
Please enjoy…
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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson
“Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”
I had the explosively beautiful Spring chapter of “Jean Gourdon’s Four Days” by Émile Zola all teed up for this week’s reading. Alas, as the temperatures hover in the 30s in my world, and the wind howls, and the rain feels a touch too icy to be properly called rain, I just can’t bring myself to publish it. The vibrance of Zola’s spring imagery deserves better. It deserves May (I hope!).
With the grey cold overstaying its welcome, one can start to feel a little unsettled…a little crazed by another day of the same shivers and the many layers donned. Rather than fight it, I’m going to lean in with a rather unusual story.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” snares us into the psyche of a woman retreating to a country home with her family so that she may recover the steadiness of her mind. Through Stetson’s masterful narration, we witness the narrator disappear and reappear on the spectrum of sanity, as she is kept almost entirely isolated in one room in the spirit of getting well. As we see so often in our own therapy-speak-laden culture, focusing on the restlessness of the mind to the avoidance of the work of living is destined to backfire.
Please enjoy…
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The End of the World: A Vision by James Kirke Paulding
“In the course of my wanderings, methought I encountered the celebrated Fire-King, who was sitting at home, quietly smoking his cigar, and calculating that being the destined survivor of all his race, he would succeed to an immense landed estate, and become lord proprietor of the whole earth.”
In the early months of 1843, a wave of Judgement Day fanaticism swept across the East Coast of the United States. Building on a close inspection of biblical texts, a lay preacher and farmer named William Miller had predicted that the end of the world would arrive sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844. Miller began working on his theory in the early 1820s, and in 1831, he was asked to fill in at the pulpit of the Baptist church in Dresden, New York. Miller used his time centerstage to share his beliefs for the first time publicly. The Dresden congregation was mesmerized, Miller was invited by neighboring parishes to spread the word, and Millerism was born.
By 1840, the Millerite flock had grown beyond the proportions of obscurity. Thousands would come to hear Miller speak, and all manner of unfortunate events were being pinned on the movement, a sure sign of having “made it.” By the time it reached Philadelphia, the opening date of Miller’s prediction loomed large, and all that was left was to laugh.
Laugh is exactly what penny papers like the Public Ledger did. James Kirke Paulding’s satirical piece, “The End of the World: A Vision,” published among those pages in 1843, contains the withering observations of a man bearing witness to the last day of the world, April 1st. Granted a reprieve from the screaming heat by some unnamed deal with the devil, our narrator perambulates from place to place, recording his field notes for our amusement of all the many human reactions to the world melting down in judgement.
The world Paulding describes is due for a reset, a stage decline confirmed by the realization that none of the inhabitants seems to be anticipating ascension in their direction of travel.
Please enjoy…
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