Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country by Joe Queenan
		Rating: • (Read only if your interest is strong)
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	Dull Joe Queenan can write funny, bitter, interesting and quirky prose. Little of that skill appears in his book, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country. A travelogue of his 2002 trip to his wife’s homeland, Queenan Country held great promise, but never delivered. If the things that he bothered to tell us annoyed him were funnier, the book would be better. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 4, “Oh Christ, Not the Mill and the Floss!,” pp. 69-74: Writers, and even ordinary mortals, love to wax philosophic about the books that shaped their intellects. Invariably, by some meretricious act of retroactive precocity, they insist that their lives were changed forever by their exposure to Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, The Idiot, or Madame Bovary, which they read at age nine. I for one am fond of telling people that the book that first sculpted my worldview was Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. In fact, I have never read it. The only reason I have masqueraded for so long as a kindergarten Kantian is because I am a member of the very last generation of Americans that thought you could impress women by using words like prolegomena. As a writer, I would love to report that the authors who sparked my lifelong love affair with the English language— and literature itself—were the titans of British fiction. In doing so, I would be imitating some of my closest friends. One of my colleagues has read Pride and Prejudice nine times, claiming to pinpoint in its coy prose the very key to the relationship between men and women. On three distinct occasions I have briefly fallen in with C. K. Chesterton buffs who took up the cudgels in defense of “the most overlooked prose stylist of the past hundred years.” Once I even had lunch with a troika of bond traders and financiers who covetously groped a metal key that allegedly belonged to the author of the Father Brown books. No Edwardian crime fiction buff, I felt like Judas skulking in the cenacle. My daughter’s fourth-grade teacher once spent a week in Oxford holed up in the house where, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. I have also crossed both paths and swords with persnickety members of the Baker Street Irregulars, intrepid voyagers to Cawdor Castle, and legions of writers who feel compelled to visit Stratford-on-Avon and draw inspiration from the Immortal Bard. As if that would improve their prose. I will not deny that I myself have occasionally engaged in similar pilgrimages of this nature. I once visited Manchester just to see if it was as deadly as A. J. P. Taylor said it was. (I was only there for an evening, but sensed that the great popular historian and disgruntled Manchester native was onto something. Young people insist that there are lots of things to do in Manchester, but mostly what they do is ecstasy.) I also made a special trip to a house outside St. Ives where Virginia Woolf used to wander down from London on the weekends foraging for pocket-sized rocks. Over the years I have come to know and love most, if not all, of the British masters (Thackeray, Tennyson, and Hardy still elude me; Lawrence is an acquired taste I have taken great pains not to acquire; and I loathe Restoration comedy, though it is certainly a vast improvement over Puritan comedy). That said, I cede pride of place to no man in my admiration for Dickens, Shaw, Wilde, Fielding, Boswell, Eliot, Sterne, Smollett, and assorted Brontës and Amises. Still, it would be churlish not to admit that these appetites blossomed rather late in life, and that I, like most American schoolchildren, grew up despising, nay dreading, them all. When I was a youngster, educated by bellicose nuns in parochial schools in the City of Brotherly Love, British literature functioned almost entirely as a punitive pedagogical mechanism. American children were compelled to study authors they could neither understand nor enjoy, simply because these giants were indisputably moral. Though we were never, ever taken to art museums to gaze at the works of the Great Masters, and were never required to listen to classical music, as the Catholic Church doesn’t approve of that sort of thing, we were compelled to memorize poems like “Lochinvar” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and commanded to hack our way through daunting novels like David Coppeifield, The Mill on the Floss, The Return of the Native, and Persuasion. One of the least understood forms of child abuse, Outstanding British Literature wrecked our Yuletide holidays and summer vacations and made us grow up loathing highbrow fiction. In fairness, this brutally uncompromising regimen of British classics was supplemented by comparable North American Horrors like Moby-Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Old Man and the Sea. But at least with the American authors we had a fighting chance of poleaxing our way through to chapter 2. James Fenimore Cooper had his fiendish Indians; Nathaniel Hawthorne had his ghosts and witches; and Hemingway’s geriatric Jaws: The Prequel made few demands on the unformed mind, holding out at least a flickering hope that some determined shark might finally put the protagonist out of his misery. Ditto Melville, though with a whale. The Brits offered no such respites from gravitas. It was all the flutter of crinoline, the scent of wisteria. God, how we hated them! A great man once said that a classic was a book you wanted somebody else to read for you. Or a book that you wanted to have already read. Or words to that effect; perhaps the man was not so great after all. What is definitely true about the British classics is that they were never meant to be read by children. Especially American children. They are too long; they are too complicated; they are too depressing; and they have too many characters named Gradgrind. Reading the classics was always a bitter chore and anyone who says that he was smitten by The Barchester Towers or Le Morte d’Arthur before hitting the age of thirty is a liar. There are many of these liars about; a fair few teach literature. But if a writer is honest about the authors who first influenced him, it is almost always the odd, the quirky, the justifiably forgotten, or the just plain awful that come to the fore. At a very early age, I became aware that Great British Literature breaks down into three broad groups: books that are very depressing, books in which nothing happens, and books that are incomprehensible. The first group includes all of Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, and most of Charles Dickens. The second group comprises the work of George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Jane Austen. The third group consists of hoary antiques like Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, and the plays of Ben Jonson, none of which can be understood without enormous amounts of supplementary reading of books written by people who are even more cryptic than Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and whoever wrote Beowulf. Obviously, none of these groups are hermetically sealed: The novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf are both depressing and incomprehensible, and nothing ever happens in any of their works. And some of Dickens’s novels are less lugubrious than others; I always found his cartoonish portrayal of the French Revolution a bit of a hoot, and as Oscar Wilde sagaciously quipped, one must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the plight of Little Nell. C. S. Lewis asserts that we read to know that we are not alone, but the fact is that youngsters often are alone, frequently stuck with a book by C. S. Lewis. The child views literature as an ordeal that must be survived, like a boiler explosion or rabies; he is a shipwrecked sailor cast adrift on the Wide Sargasso Sea scanning the horizon for a cabin cruiser that might be carrying a couple of well-thumbed Philip K. Dick novels. Growing up in a grim North Philadelphia housing project with an alcoholic father and a cadre of pyromaniac playmates, I did not find Oliver Twist particularly inspirational, as the monstrous Fagin and Bill Sikes were no worse than the thugs who lived down the street, or most of my uncles. Many years later, I would come to understand that the popularity of Oliver Twist had helped to bring about much-needed social reforms in Victorian London. Unfortunately, I was not living in Victorian London; I was living in postwar Philadelphia, where the underlying message of Dickens’s work had yet to gain purchase. Today, similarly puzzled black children languishing in dismal inner-city slums are required to read To Kill a Mockingbird, and must wonder, “How come we never get to meet anybody like Atticus Finch?” Bound spread-eagled on the roasting coals of Great British Literature while still a meek, vulnerable adolescent, I began to think of high school reading requirements as a brutal military campaign. The advance guard (A. E. Housman, William Blake, John Donne) first appeared on the foreboding bluffs to the left. Arrayed on the starboard side were William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Richard Sheridan. Suddenly, the onslaught was unleashed, with all three Brontës brandishing their fearsome battle-axes. Having already survived a flanking action by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jane Austen, I was now forced to battle the pitiless oppressors to a fare-thee-well. But just when it seemed the attack might be repelled, the Redcoats wheeled up the siege guns (Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens). Now, all avenues of retreat were cut off by George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, and the ferociously cruel Gerard Manley Hopkins. Forced to surrender, survivors were dragged in fetters to the death camps where John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope sat sharpening their knives. Then, next semester, the ordeal started all over again with Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Algernon Swinburne. The Brits were merciless—and they just kept coming. If after reading this excerpt, you care one iota about what else Queenan has to say, there’s plenty more on the pages of Queenan Country. Personally, I found his writing dull. Steve Hopkins, November 21, 2005
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