Revisiting Jules Verne, Part II: The Golden Volcano

Rather disappointed by Jules Verne’s Master of the World (1904), I thought I’d give him another try. After all, Raymond Roussel had been so zealous about Verne as to forbid people in his presence from even mentioning the writer’s name lest it be sullied, and Verne’s clever linguistic games – presumably absent in English translation – had been an influence on the complex linguistic underpinnings of Roussel’s own narratives. I knew too that older translations into English of Verne’s works had a poor reputation, so perhaps the fault lay there. Skeptically, I embarked on his posthumous novel The Golden Volcano (1906) – its first complete English translation, issued in 2008.

The Golden Volcano helped revive for me - a bit - the spell I’d once experienced reading Verne. If not exactly a page-turner, the novel provided a moderately engrossing story of two Montreal cousins who inherit a Klondike gold mining claim and head west to see what it’s worth. Adventures ensue. Some of the trudging style from Master of the World persists here: Verne takes a full third of this 330 page book to describe, again in strictly linear narrative and encompassing granularity, the trip from Montreal to the mining claim outside the Klondike capital of Dawson City. A lot of numbers get bandied about in The Golden Volcano - claims, populations, monetary figures, geographical coordinates - amounting to a formidable display of research skills. I particularly liked a lengthy list of prices for commodities and services in Dawson City, culminating in reference to “an ordinary bath” costing $2.50, but a Russian bath costing $32.00 (that’s the one I would have wanted). But this informational accretion also weighs down the narrative, the quest for inclusiveness sometimes resulting in an awkward, Dan-Brown-style grafting of factual specifics onto the story. It’s reasonable to assume that Verne provides such meticulous detail - most of it employed in exposition leading up to his main story - partly to point out the fragility of human endeavors and the folly of greed, since all of that effort, as he illustrates at the end of the novel’s first part, can be wiped out by a sudden, indifferent act of nature.

But it’s clear too that Verne is attempting to transmit an enduring portrait of the hardship and human hysteria involved in the gold rush. I had expected adventure in Verne, but not such sweeping historical and social interest. With an attention to realistic portrayal that calls to mind Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, Verne vividly depicts the difficulties of the trek of thousands of fortune seekers to the remote gold fields of the Klondike, and the wretched conditions of the miners’ camps, boom towns, and perilous routes. While far more laconic than Dreiser (with whose descriptions a reader could have followed the route without need of map, compass or guide), Verne displays a similar attention to the downtrodden, most memorably in this instance, the women and children collapsing along the mountain passes or freezing to death in the towns and camps, completely unprepared for the ferocious Arctic winter.

The second part of the novel departs significantly from this naturalistic account. The cousins, possessing a crudely sketched map and a legend left them by a dying Frenchman (Franco-centrism seems to appear like a watermark in Verne’s books), head north to the Arctic sea in search of a legendary volcano of gold, and also into territory much more like the adventurous Verne that I’d remembered. One of the pleasures of reading Verne, despite his one-foot-in-front-of-the-other narrative style, lies in the fuzzy zone between realism and fantasy, most evident here in his cartoonish description of the volcano itself. Golden Mount, perched at the edge of the Arctic Ocean at the mouth of the MacKenzie river, rises straight from the tundra, with sides of “at least a 70 degree angle” and a flat plateau on top from which the travelers can gaze into a caldera “75-80 feet in circumference” (in other words, a mere 25 feet across), from which smoke belches and flames flicker. Verne’s understanding of geological processes seems comical; an earthquake strong enough to change the course of a river is felt an entire mile away, and the functioning of the volcano seems more akin to a case of nausea than to a geological process (Verne says as much when a character later compares an eruption to an emetic). But the conception is too appealing to dismiss - or would be to young readers, anyway - a volcano that “would throw out the gold-bearing substances, nuggets, and gold dust along with the lava and slag,” such that one could “simply gather them up.” Nifty. Verne seems to have understood what Hollywood special effects makers, decades later, would know so well: that verisimilitude is entirely dispensable if one can manage to induce a willing suspension of disbelief.

The characters in The Golden Volcano have limited psychological complexity, but the situations in which they find themselves provide enough mystery, suspense and rich historical detail to maintain a modicum of interest, and enough amusing creative touches (“Stop” – what a perfect name for a dog) to elicit a few smiles. If revisiting Verne may have been disappointing overall, I could nonetheless appreciate that I might well have loved these books - The Golden Volcano in particular - if I’d read them at the right age. That age gap intrigues me; after all, other books from childhood - Treasure Island, Captain Blood, Tove Jansson’s Moomin books – have held up well under rereading. Jules Verne’s magic, however, seemed to me relatively diminished. Maybe I’ve become relatively diminished. In any case, I found enough engagement on this second attempt to eventually try one of Verne’s works in the original French. After all, there’s an entire bookshop in Paris devoted to him, and perhaps those French readers, even those lacking Raymond Roussel’s fanaticism, are accessing something I am not. 

Revisiting Jules Verne, Part I: Master of the World

I had assumed that my days of reading Jules Verne ended when I was about 12 years old. However, he’d been floating about in my head since I read of Raymond Roussel’s obsession with him, and a bout of insomnia one night prompted me to pull out an old, unread Airmont paperback of Master of the World featuring an overblown cover illustration of a man in an orange jumpsuit piloting what looked like a toilet.

I was surprised to find that the book took place in the U.S., and more surprised to find that it began in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, where I had spent much time during my youth (having somehow never noticed a volcano Verne places there).[i] The novel then ranges around the nation, from Wisconsin to Cape Cod, from Washington, D.C. to Kansas, from Niagara Falls to the Gulf of Mexico, following the appearances of a mysterious, superfast hybrid contraption, “The Terror.” “The Terror” ruffles the placid surface of American life and sends ripples of concern into the top echelons of the federal police. M. Strock, a police inspector, is assigned the task of investigating, partly due to his insatiable curiosity. In fact it’s this curiosity that helps drive the novel, since Strock is irresistibly drawn towards resolving the mystery even as he faces the danger of pursuing the megalomaniacal, self-described “Master of the World” revealed, in a series of letters, to be behind the events. At one point finding himself on the mysterious vehicle itself, Strock alternates between safety and curiosity: “…to escape without having learned anything of the Terror’s secrets would not have contented me at all.” Strock hunts down his prey across America while at the same time manifesting an inquisitiveness  about the mad genius’ futuristic invention that threatens to distract him from his aim.

Like his main character, Verne appears irrepressibly and contagiously curious about the future. This curiosity is evident in Verne’s trademark anticipatory enthusiasm for science: “So this machine fulfilled a four-fold use! It was at the same time automobile, boat, submarine and airship. Earth, sea and air – it could move through all three elements! And with what power! With what speed!” More interesting to me, Verne’s curiosity is also evident in Master of the World’s occasional, pointed commentaries concerning the United States, the character of its people and its future. Verne seems alternately fascinated and repelled by the new nation, predicting its ascendency to world power - “It goes without saying that America does things on a magnificent scale” - yet daunted by its steamrolling energy and rapaciousness, noting, in reference to an automobile race, that “the death of men is but a detail, not considered of great importance in that astonishing country of America.” A kind of fervor for exacting detail is also manifest in Verne’s keen attention to geographical particulars; were he alive today he’d certainly be gaga over Google Earth (and would likely have avoided the one glaring misstep in his otherwise careful research for Master of the World: placing a vast mountain lake some 40 miles west of Topeka, Kansas).

But having read Verne as a child, I was disappointed, reading him as an adult, to find what a dull writer he could be in this boyish boy's tale. In part, this stemmed from a linear narrative in which details amassed along the way as though Verne were afraid to move from Point A to Point B without stopping every five feet. It also arose from that most maddening fault a mystery writer can commit: letting the reader get ahead of the detective, such that the former spends tedious paragraphs, and sometimes pages, waiting for the latter to catch up to a conclusion already known from a single preceding sentence. I can also add that the book ended in a heated rush, as though Verne (perhaps having nodded off over his map of Kansas) had finally decided to call it a night and just slapped on an expedient ending borrowed from a previous novel (Robur, the Conqueror), a dissatisfying conclusion that saps the novel’s sense of mystery and implies serious memory lapses in his detective.

Reading Master of the World served as one of those curious experiences of getting to know an author again for the first time and having to revise one’s childhood impressions via an adult looking glass. I marveled that I could ever have found him so enthralling. The elements of the fantastic that had so enchanted me reading 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea so many years ago here seemed but mildly engaging, not quite enough to hold my interest for long. And while I could admire Verne’s forward thinking as well as his admirable model of a curiosity so intractable (at least as reflected in his narrator) as to place strong value in a high degree of risk-taking, I found it hard to muster much enthusiasm for Master of the World - as a novel, anyway. As a soporific, it worked wonders.

Tomorrow: a second attempt at Verne.

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[i] However, The Great Eyrie, as described by Verne, bears a striking resemblance to Mount Pilot, further north in the state near the town of Mt. Airy, most famous as the model for Mayberry R.F.D. in the old Andy Griffith television series, a link I did not expect to find with Jules Verne.

Angharad Price: The Life of Rebecca Jones

Maesglasau Valley, Wales (source: Wikipedia)

Memories, like one’s dreams, may be most interesting to one’s self, which might explain my general lack of appreciation for the memoir. Or maybe it’s that the genre offers such a ready-made subject, calling to mind that canard about what it takes to be an English teacher: “Ever have a feeling? Write about it!” The potential for indulgence seems to exert tremendous gravitational pull, occasionally leading towards a gauzy, nostalgic recitation of sensations and events or, opposite direction, a wallow in the sordidness of one’s past (unforgettably limned by Adrian Mole diaries author Sue Townsend in her giving to an imagined book of this sort the title, A Girl Called Shit). Perhaps my distaste merely springs from my becoming a cynical old codger, scowling at the wasted years.

Or, just maybe, it’s that most writers of memoirs are not Angharad Price.

While reading Price’s The Life of Rebecca Jones, I thought of an acquaintance whose mentor in a creative writing program told that her uninteresting writing was less problematic than her uninteresting life, a charge I can’t imagine being leveled at Price. Her book did not entirely win me over to the memoir genre – it offers an abundance of nostalgia and inward turning towards the sharp sensations of childhood and home, and taken in isolation some of her simple sentences could seem as subtle as a brick (“They tell me the village is changing”) – but its signature strength rests with the author herself. Not everyone who sets out to write about the past can claim, like Price, to come from an uninterrupted chain of generations inhabiting the same valley for 1,000 years, an attribute that lends The Life of Rebecca Jones a depth and authority with regard to its backward glance that few writers could ever hope to summon, given what its narrator can rightfully claim about “continuance.”

To be fair, The Life of Rebecca Jones is actually not a memoir of Angharad Price; rather, it’s a hybrid memoir/novel, based loosely on one of Price’s relatives, a kind of first person narrative experiment in the autobiography of another, a questioning of what “self” can mean in a person - Price and the protagonist whose life she recounts - so profoundly anchored to history.

Written in Welsh in 2002 and published in English in 2012, The Life of Rebecca Jones begins and ends in the Cwm Maesglasau, the steeply walled valley where the Jones family first arrived in 1012. Beginning with her 1905 birth, Rebecca Jones traces, for the nearly 100 years of her life, events impacting her family: births and deaths, tragedies and glories, the frustrated hopes of a young woman weighed down by tradition and obligation, the occasional intrusions of the outside world into the secluded valley. This use of fictional memoir to filter an epoch through a character whose life it spans is has been done: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, G. B. Edwards’ The Life of Ebenezer LePage, and - closer in tone, period and thematic concerns to Price’s work - Sicilian writer Goliarda Sapienza’s colossal, semi-autobiographical novel, The Art of Joy (recently translated into English). Price’s economy of language and tight, frugal writing also align her to such concentrated evocations of family and place as Annie Ernaux’s moving, autobiographical novella, A Man’s Place.

Price’s book distinguishes itself not only by its claim to historical continuity, but also by the congenital blindness of three of Jones’ four brothers, dividing the family’s six children into a tragic symmetry. Many family chronicles could rest their entire weight upon a calamity of this magnitude, but it’s a testament to Price’s ingenuity that while she affectingly conveys the tremendous strength required of the family (all the brothers go on to remarkable careers), her narrative ranges beyond particular circumstance to encompass wider concerns: the power of place (readers are unlikely to forget Cwn Maesglasau as evoked by Price), the lives of rural women, the tension between individual aspirations and age-old traditions, and especially the pivotal role of language and literature supplied by a family line of poets, historians, bards of the earth and lovers of literature from Cwn Maesglasau and across Wales. Price firmly situates Rebecca Jones in the Welsh literary tradition – even providing a crash course illuminating some key figures – and some of the novel’s most memorable phrases come not from Rebecca’s own narrative but from the passages she recalls from time spent reading, memorizing literature, and listening to stories despite a life dominated by chores of the farm, sewing for extra income, and caring for her siblings, their children and her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother. The centrality of language is no cheap literary device, but like the brothers’ blindness, among the irrefutable facts of Jones’ life: a chest of treasured books handed down through generations; relations who were noted writers and thinkers; the critical significance of language even among those who, like Jones’ father Evan, eschewed books but reveled in stories. Even the book’s structure is shaped by excerpts from a 16^th century book on animal husbandry written by Jones’ ancestor Hugh Jones that offer memorable, stylistically curious observations about the valley where, 500 years later, life remains in many ways unchanged.

The novel contains a handful of photographs of the Cym and of the family, leading one cover blurb to compare Price to W. B. Sebald. While it now seems axiomatic to invoke Sebald whenever a novelist uses photos, Price’s treatment of the past and her subtle interrogation of how photographs juggle with the truth make the comparison appropriate.

Only in the final pages of The Life of Rebecca Jones does the modern world truly begin to intrude, with its electrical turbines, telephones, jet planes, and the degradation of traditions into novelties: packaged, theme park representations of the past. While any number of books bemoan the losses incurred by modernization, few offer such a heavy counterbalance in terms of the volume of history at risk, so much of it, in Price’s case, intensely personal:

I know this way as I know myself, and there is no need to grope. I have walked this path almost daily for nearly a century. Perhaps I have become the path itself – my steps, at least – as the flow of water becomes a stream. I could walk this path even if I too were blind.

Price could have opted for a straightforward memoir, but by focusing on Rebecca Jones, whose world entwines her own, she captures what has been lost already in what has come down to her in a life both enriched and burdened by such continuity. As the custodian of this millennium of family history, what is Price to do amid the impingements of the modern world? The Life of Rebecca Jones, and its surprising, complicating ending, attempts a moving answer to that question. As an autobiographical experiment, it also, with a haunting, nagging persistence, calls into question the entire enterprise of the conventional memoir and of representing the past. 

2013 Recap

December 1^st, 2013 marked the third anniversary of this blog (well, technically it was November 17th, but I don’t count that first “test” post). I’ve liked writing the blog, and I’m grateful to all of you who have indicated that you’ve liked reading it. 2013 turned out to be a terrific year of reading, if perhaps not as good a year for writing. I managed only 19 posts, though if I subtract the time I spent away this year on various travels, my low production rate seems not significantly different from the two previous years. I can tell myself that, anyway.

Few themes appear to tie this year’s crop together; as usual, my reading has been unfocused and promiscuous. If I had to come up with an element to provide some cohesion, I might refer to this as my wandering-in-the-desert year, since I count ten books set in the desert (or maybe 11, if Lao She’s weird Chinese science fiction novel Cat Country, with its dusty gray and desolate cat people planet, can count). 

João Guimarães Rosa and his fictions in and around the grand Brazilian sertão rank as this year’s biggest project; I read everything by him I could find in English as well as all but two works I could find in French that didn’t overlap the English ones. He may well be untranslatable, but I still found the challenges of gaining at least a tilted glimpse into this talented writer’s work to be worthwhile and fascinating, and I am deeply obliged to the other participants in this year’s group read of Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands): Miguel, Richard, and Rise (links to their posts are listed at the bottom of the page here).  

Casting a profound shadow over the rest of the year was Vassily Grossman’s monumental Life and Fate. Only a novel this masterful and important could live up to a title like that, but its breadth and deeply intimate account of the Second World War, from a Russian writer uncannily present at many of the war’s most significant events, make it one of giant novels of the 20^th century, one that feels utterly indispensible. I have not written about it – yet. But please check out outstanding posts by other bloggers, again conveniently linked at Caravana de Recuerdos.

If one other novel from this year might challenge Grossman’s pre-eminent place, it is surely Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Books like The Betrothed (are there any books like The Betrothed?) are why one reads literature, and I’ll consider myself immensely lucky if I find another novel as rewarding as this one in the coming year.

Another highlight of the year was Raymond Roussel, whose Impressions of Africa had been on my to-be-read list for two decades. I was baffled, bemused, and bewildered – and ultimately enthralled - to read this strange, captivating, premonitory work.

Other authors new to me from whose work I emerged with great enthusiasm included Leonora Carrington, Paul Scheerbart, Barbara Pym (a huge thanks to Levi Stahl for steering me her way), Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Lewis, and Jacques Yonnet. Among my favorite new discoveries is early 20^th century British writer William Gerhardie. The two of his books I read this year, Futility and The Polyglots, rise easily into the cream, with their acutely literary, Chekhovian family sagas set in the odd corner of history occupied by the Allied intervention in Siberia and East Asia in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Gerhardie proves a rare writer capable of both scathing and gentle wit, enormous charm, sentences one wants to eat with a spoon, an adept diplomat’s perspective on politics and history, and a humanist’s moving views on war, love, and nutty families.

Speaking of the Far East, a journey through southern China in October prompted a re-entry into some Chinese literature. I gained a new appreciation for Nobel prize winner Gao Xinjiang’s Soul Mountain, which I’d read when it first appeared in English and not liked very much, but which now, thanks to my marginally improved understanding of China and its minority regions, seemed a far more intriguing work. I also had occasion to revisit Mo Yan’s darkly comic Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, and to discover that Lao She, perhaps most famous as the author of Rickshaw Boy, had also written a surprising dystopian novel, Cat Country, capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with Animal Farm or Brave New World, but with a particularly Chinese angle. I plan to read more Chinese literature this year and hope that some other bloggers may want to join in.  

I succeeded in revisiting some writers I was determined to revisit: 19^th century Portuguese master novelist José Maria Eça de Queiroz; the razor-sharp Caroline Blackwood; Swiss modernist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (whose novel Beauty on Earth has recently been translated by Michele Bailat-Jones, so you should all run out and get a copy to support her efforts to get more of this marvelous writer’s work into English); the inimitably quirky Jane Bowles; volume two of Karl Knausgaard’s epic My Struggle; another delightful César Aira novella; a new Javier Marías; Shirley Jackson’s creepy-funny The Haunting of Hill House; and another reading of Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. I also returned to Jules Verne for the first time since childhood, and that’s about all I will say about that for now.

The year was also filled with a few more guilty pleasures: George Simenon’s alcohol-fueled  "American" novel, Feux Rouges (a nod to Joel Dicker’s La Verité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert primarily for its sending me back to Simenon); Hugh Edward’s off-center, completely absorbing fireside tale, All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, about which one might build a small, secretive cult; and above all, “folk artist” writer Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose work provoked much laughter and a grateful appreciation for the dumbfounding poetry of her wonderfully illogical sentences. I’ve been gradually making my way through her second novel, Delina Delaney, for at least six months now, and though it’s only 350 pages long, about a paragraph at a time is all I can seem to manage.

Scattered about the rest of the year were other diverse literary adventures, including a very few relative duds. However, each of those featured something worthwhile, and my only regret about my reading this year is that I didn’t read more.  

Finally, I should mention the widely-reviewed final volume recounting the voyage the late Patrick Leigh Fermor took when he set out from England as a 17-year-old in 1933 and walked across Europe to Constantinople. The Broken Road, published last year nearly 80 years after the travels it relates, traces the final leg of Fermor’s journey, from the Iron Gates of the Danube to Constantinople, also containing his account of a subsequent sojourn among the monasteries of Greece’s Mount Athos. Though the book was left unfinished at Fermor’s death, his biographer Artemis Cooper and writer Colin Thubron helped to finish it, and it fulfills its promise as the culmination of one of the great travel accounts in English. Less commented upon in the many reviews of the book, The Broken Road also conveys, movingly and with great courage and grace, the writer’s forbearance with the inevitabilities associated with aging and memory.

As for the year ahead, I doubt that I’m finished wandering through the desert. But whatever the year brings, I’m certain its literary offerings will continue to provide a multitude of fertile oases. Thank you for reading.

John C. Van Dyke: The Desert

Valley - © Steven DaLuz, All Rights Reserved

Used by permission. More work by Mr. DaLuz may be seen here. 

I’d thought I was prepared for John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert. I’d heard of it for years, and it had come up in two works I’d just read. Jay Paul Minn, translator of Pierre Loti’s book of the same title published in 1895, a mere six years before Van Dyke’s work appeared, had noted the strong influence of Loti on Van Dyke. Reyner Banham, in Scenes in America Deserta, claimed Van Dyke’s book as the desert book he most revered and devoted a section of his own to it. But the fervor of Van Dyke’s vision and the exquisite language of this extraordinary prose poem still took me by surprise.

Loti traveled the Sinai and Petraen; Van Dyke roamed the Sonoran, Colorado and Mojave deserts. Different deserts, different books, yet a similar monomania bubbles up out of the confines of both writers’ more-or-less conventionally structured narratives.  But following Loti’s indulgent, romantic, neophyte’s infatuation, Van Dyke's ardor ascends to levels undreamed of by Loti. He comes off as something of a madman-poet-scientist-sage, with a keen knowledge of and nearly fanatical devotion to the region he explored for three years, alone save for a pony and dog. “The desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has in me only a lover,” writes Van Dyke. Loti may be awed before the silence and light show, but Van Dyke, a former professor of art history who seems more like some ancient being born from the sands, craves both the show’s enchantment and knowledge of its magic’s backstage mechanisms.

Many desert scientists can and do go into endless technical detail about the subjects of their studies, but Van Dyke (who claimed his book was an aesthetic rather than scientific appreciation) merges the scientist’s powers of observation with the vision of the artist, then combines these qualities with the zeal of a prophet. What strikes one most about The Desert is the passionate poeticism of its prose, so fiercely tenacious that one can barely find a place for shade in the burning flow of its narrative. Picking out seductive passages is easy, as they appear on nearly every page:

The dunes are always rhythmical and flowing in their forms, and for color the desert has nothing that surpasses them. In the early morning, before the sun is up, they are air blue, reflecting the sky overhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating in the heated air; at sunset they are often flooded with a rose or mauve color; under a blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in the northern seas…

…the moon – the misshapen orange-hued desert moon. How large it looks! And how it warms the sky, and silvers the edges of the mountain peaks, and spreads its wide light across the sands! Up, up it rises, losing something of its orange and gaining something in symmetry. In a few hours it is high in the heavens and has a great aureole of color about it. Look at the ring for a moment and you will see all the spectrum colors arranged in order. Pale hues they are but they are all there. Rainbows by day and rainbows by night! Radiant circles of colored light – not one but many. Arches above arches – not two or three but five solar bows in the sky at one time! What strange tales come out of the wilderness! But how much stranger, how much more weird and extraordinary the things that actually happen in this desert land.

Such selective quoting, though, fails to convey the grandeur of Van Dyke’s fugues and flights of thought, nearly Blakean in their vision, the sermon of a desert saint to the winds and sands and stars. A profligacy with the exclamation point, that most expendable of all punctuation marks, may initially annoy, but one quickly gets swept up by Van Dyke’s exuberance. This is the salt and light sermon on the mount of desert writing: a manifesto extolling the desert’s fierce, contradictory beauty:  

…the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but do-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.

Van Dyke structures his book into a dozen chapters, the titles of which, excepting those dedicated to flora and fauna, tend towards the abstract. Beginning with the first, “The Approach,” they become increasingly cerebral, reaching their apogee in three central chapters that overlap in dealing with the atmosphere. “Light, Air and Color” would seem to take care of the subject, but is followed by “Desert Sky and Clouds,” then by the almost mystical “Illusions,” which might well stand on its own as a great text of phenomenology. Here Van Dyke poetically and scientifically plunges into tricks of light produced by reflection and refraction, by heat and distortion: persons, wagons, animals, whole cities hovering in the air, and of course, the common mirage of water:

…its illusiveness adds to, rather than detracts from, its beauty. Rose-colored dreams are always delightful; and the mirage is only a dream…only one of nature’s veilings which she puts on or off capriciously. But again its loveliness is not the less when its uncertain, fleeting character is revealed. It is one of the desert’s most charming features because of its strange light and its softly glowing opaline color.

The later chapters devoted to plant and animal life lose this ardent edge a bit, though Van Dyke still acquits himself as a master of simile and metaphor. An antelope’s legs “seem to open and shut like the blades of a pocket knife.” A mule-deer’s feet “seem to strike rubber instead of stone; for he bounds like a ball.” But that Van Dyke is most at home amid the uncertain metamorphosis of color and light is evident when, in a late chapter on geology, he leaves the earth behind and again gets deliriously lost in a glorious haze, only still later to lose himself in the dome of the sky. It’s notable that the only time he makes the reader the least bit aware of himself as a living body is in the first pages, where he climbs a rise to gain a better view; most everywhere else in the book, he might as well be a disembodied perceptive apparatus.

The cadence of Van Dyke’s prose is occasionally – and deliberately – Biblical (“All, all to dust again; and no man knoweth the why thereof”). His narrative is also shot through with images of war, conflict, and death (“…at every step there is the suggestion of the fierce, the defiant, the defensive…"). Van Dyke reserves his most scorching language for man, the “one great enemy,” against whom Nature – “all of it good, all of it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all of it beautiful” – will undoubtedly prevail. Reyner Banham critiques Van Dyke’s vision of the desert as something that should remain pure, untrammeled by human beings (other than Van Dyke, presumably). But despite this misanthropic puritanism, it’s difficult not to fall under Van Dyke’s spell enough to concur with his assertion that “The deserts should never be reclaimed. They are the breathing spaces of the west and should be preserved forever.” Were he alive today to see the sprawl of Phoenix or the exponentially growing resort communities of the Coachella Valley, he would be mortified. An early passage describing desecrations of landscape across America by captains of industry provides as succinct and devastating a summary of American environmental destruction as I’ve encountered. After listening to Van Dyke’s testimony begging for a “proper angle of vision” to admire the desert’s mesmerizing qualities, contemplating a similar fate for the desert could turn anyone into an environmentalist.

But whether or not one adheres to Van Dyke’s purity of vision, his book stands as a brilliant, engulfing piece of prose, as fervent an appreciation of landscape as one is likely to find.