Ending It All

Now finished both Hibbert's biography of Garibaldi and Keithley's narrative poem about the fated Donners and their companions in misfortune. Both good reads; both with striking, powerful, melancholy endings.

If you didn't know the Donner story in advance, and I didn't until reading the appropriate page on Wikipedia, I think you'd struggle to make any sense at all of the ending of his poem. Having said that, Keithley plays fast and loose with the recorded facts of the case, and, possibly surprisingly but to fine effect, actually plays down the real horror of the cannibalism. The motif is introduced quietly near the beginning of the third section of the poem, so quietly I think you'd miss it if you weren't aware of what made the story so notorious in the first place. Certainly I found myself having to re-read the lines in question to check they implied what I thought they implied. In fact, it's in the third section that the poem becomes most obviously that, a poem. The prosiness, necessary in the early part of the poem, is left behind for a distinctly hypnotic deployment of the resources of the writer's version of a plain man's American English. I'd certainly be interested in reading more by Keithley and having just conducted a useful bit of googling on him and his writing I may just be able to do that not too soon.

But first I'll need to clear a backlog of reading, which will be focusing soon (in fact, it is now) exclusively on recently bought material. Along with The Donner Party, Garibaldi And His Enemies was almost at the foot of my list of Books I've still got to read which I'm embarrassed about not reading enough to put on this list drafted earlier this year. (The only book on the list not completed is Merwin's narrative poem The Folding Cliffs which I made a false start on a while back and which I don't feel I have the energy to mount another assault on at this time - hence my equivocation earlier in the paragraph on whether the exclusivity of my current reading re having been recently purchased will be maintained.)

I enjoyed Hibbert's book so much I'm puzzled as to what took me so long to get started on it. The final section, dealing with the years after 1860, when Garibaldi's greatest success receded into a glorious but concluded past, evoked a huge measure of sympathy for the great man - and I use that phrase advisedly. Hibbert makes the faults of the man, and there were many, abundantly clear, yet in a curious way they add to his stature. It was wonderful to read of his reception in England and how, especially in his early days in London, it was very much a working class affair. And when it came to the bit about the poverty he readily accepted as his lot, as he had throughout his life, I found myself wanting to cheer. It made the bonus-seeking bankers we are saddled with look even more pathetic than they usually do (which is pretty pathetic.) I'll miss the man.

But since I'm already thoroughly enjoying David Cairns's Mozart And His Operas and just making a start on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, last read when I was a very young teenager - which is when Bradbury should first be read, I suppose - I’ll get over old Giuseppe. Faithfulness is rarely, if ever, a characteristic of the rampant reader.