I know just
enough about cricket to believe those who say it’s an idiosyncratic,
subtle, perpetually fascinating sport. My conversion is based on
a day last January at Newlands in Capetown, where South Africa was
hosting India in a five-day test match. I was fortunate to be seated
between two cricket aficionados, one Indian and one South African,
and to be well-supplied with cold Castle Beer, which unlike stadium
beer in the States could be had for less than a gold brick per glass.
My inclination to like the sport rose steadily right up to and beyond
the time the players broke for tea. Yes, cricket is a game where
you break for tea. The match we were watching was in its third day,
and was expected to continue another two. "Who’s going to win?"
I asked. "Probably nobody," shrugged my Indian friend.
Nobody??? This struck me as aggressively un-American. If Dick Cheney
decides one of his corporate friends needs to bomb cricket pitches
in the service of freedom, it won’t come as too great a surprise.
In any case, cricket is a game that can go on most of a week, and
for all that end in a draw.
There is talk,
not surprisingly, of streamlining the game, and a faster, more dynamic
one-day version of cricket (in which there is always a winner) has
in fact been gaining popularity. "Less boring, less time-consuming,
more convenient," say its advocates. Perhaps. I would like
nothing better than to lay down half a page of anachronistic, reactionary
grousing at this point, but will only say: Fine, go ahead and fix
what wasn't broke on two conditions. First, call it cricket lite
or cricket castrato if you like, but don't call it cricket. And
second, at least consider the possibility that the game itself is
not to blame for being too long or too boring; rather our attention
spans are too short, the pace of our lives too frenetic, and our
cult of Convenience too consuming to encourage our appreciation
of just about anything we consider "demanding" (which is just
about everything). In short, we have become too boring for cricket,
not the other way round.
A sinner who
likes five-day cricket might be expected to like Moby-Dick
too, and I’ve just read it a third time through. The first was in
high school (largely clueless), the second in graduate school (largely
joyless). This time was the charm, as third times are said to be.
D.H. Lawrence was right. Moby-Dick takes you on "a wonderful,
wonderful voyage" and is "a surpassingly beautiful book,"
"one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world."
Lawrence calls Melville a "deep great artist." At the
same time he calls him a "solemn ass," and grumbles at
a style he variously considers "clownish, clumsy, sententious,
amateurish, and spurious." Yet for all that, it is obvious
that Lawrence would rather die than change a word of Moby-Dick,
whatever the inconvenient demands it made on him as a reader.
Times have
changed. The news recently carried a story about Orion Publishing's
plans to introduce a series of gelded classics, one of which will
be Moby-Dick. "We realized that because the books were
so long we were never going to read them," Malcolm Edwards,
deputy CEO at Orion, explains. Thus, books like Anna
Karenina, David
Copperfield, and Moby-Dick are to have words, sentences,
paragraphs, and sometimes entire chapters snipped away to make them
30–40% less "long, slow, and repetitive." "Moby-Dick
must have been difficult in 1850 – in 2007 it’s nigh-on impossible
to make your way through it. But with our 350-page version the story
and the characters emerge." Oh? Is this to suggest that the
story and characters don’t emerge in the 750-page version
– that the Orion gelding is a step up from Melville’s stallion?
Too much "padding"
in Moby-Dick say the folks at Orion Publishing. It’s possibly
not so much their problem as ours. We’ve become a people with time
and inclination to follow the Paris Hilton "story," but
not enough of either to be inconvenienced by the "nigh-on impossible"
likes of Melville’s. One-day cricket and a 350-page Moby-Dick
is all we’re up for, apparently. Maybe we deserve castrated classics
but the artists who gave birth to them don’t. And there are other
objections to the cutting:
Orion claims
its selected classics are "sympathetically edited" down
to 300 or 400 pages. But don’t readers do this sort of sympathetic
editing anyway? Don’t a reader’s eyes and mind zero in on the
meat of a book and trim away the fat naturally? Besides, what’s
wrong with "padding"? I happen to want to watch the
full tennis match, not the 15-minute Euro-Sport reduction that
just shows the "interesting" bits. Who decides what’s
interesting? If it’s a question of Moby-Dick, I’d rather
decide than have Orion’s editors, no matter how sympathetic, do
it for me. Would they take away Melville’s chapter called "Chowder,"
for instance, or the one called "Ambergris"? They might,
and if they did, it would be a crying shame.
Orion says:
"We realize life is too short to read all the books you want
to read…" Of course this is true. I have never read War
and Peace or Anna Karenina, and possibly never
will, though I aspire to get it right someday. Yet just as Orion
says, life may be too short. And even if I beat death to the Tolstoys,
there will still be Finnegan’s
Wake and a thousand others. The Orion approach suggests
that if only War and Peace and Anna Karenina were
shorter, I’d have time to read them before the funeral, and a
neutered Finnegan’s Wake to boot. I see it another way.
It is not the fault of time or death if I don’t read War and
Peace, Anna Karenina, or Finnegan’s Wake. And
it is certainly not Tolstoy’s or Joyce’s fault either. It’s nobody’s
fault, or possibly it’s my fault, for wasting such a large chunk
of life on crossword puzzles, cricket, and Castle Beer. I think
of Edward Abbey in Desert
Solitaire, when he objects to the asphalting of wilderness
in national park areas to allow elderly and/or tenderfoot visitors
access to the most remote places. If they didn’t have the wherewithal
or interest to get to those places when they were young or physically
capable, contends Abbey, that’s too bad, but that’s how it is.
They missed it. They need not be accommodated at the expense of
the very wilderness they have belatedly come to see, but cannot
properly experience through a Winnebago window in any event. It
may sound harsh, but I think Abbey’s view is sensible. And if
death gets to me before I get to Anna Karenina, tough.
That’s the breaks. I’d have missed it. Better to accept that reality
than try to cheat time by reading face-lifted versions, in my
opinion.
Orion says:
"We are trying to make these books convenient for readers…."
The word grates. Literature simply is not convenient. It is challenging,
demanding, mind-altering, sometimes life-altering. Orion goes
on, apparently to reassure people like me: "….but it’s not
as if we’re withdrawing the original versions. They are still
there if you want to read them." That’s some consolation,
but how long will they be there? How far will the tampering go?
How out of touch will the readership become? In Fahrenheit
451, The
Martian Chronicles, and many of his stories, Ray Bradbury
foresees a time when books will be burned, or changed, or "corrected"
– when Poe and Shakespeare will have the soul cut out of them.
It is a frightening and sad thought, and frightening and sad as
well to consider how prophetic Fahrenheit 451 has already
shown itself to be. While Orion’s decision to cut the classics
is hardly a fulfillment of Bradbury prophecy, one wonders if it
might not be a nod in that direction, a nudge towards a time when
our greatest authors will not be given enough consideration to
keep their books as they were written. The classics, Orion counters,
are not "religious icons," after all. Changing them
isn’t a sacrilege. I’m not so sure I agree.
It boils
down to a question of respect for an author and his or her work.
"Of course [the whale in Moby-Dick] is a symbol,"
Lawrence wrote. "Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly.
That’s the best of it." This is a wonderful, respectful reading
of a wonderful book. If even Melville didn’t know just what it
all meant, how will the sympathetic editors at Orion? I cannot
imagine Melville being pleased to learn that the "padding"
would one day be pulled from a work he put so much of his soul
into. "No great and enduring volume can ever be writ on the
flea, though many there be who have tried it," Melville remarks
in Moby-Dick. One wonders what will be left of lines like
that when 30–40% of the whale has been taken out.
June
15, 2007
John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.
