This book at first strikes a reader like the humor writing of Mark Twain: nowhere near as funny as it sounds. But gradually it becomes clear that this is a subtle, nuanced satire that does something extremely difficult: it satirizes an elite social class without being cruel, it somehow satirizes with affection and sympathy.
The Late George Apley is a pseudo-biography of a person who never existed, but who represents a typical member of the Boston aristocracy during a crucial period: when that aristocracy lost its near-total control of Boston's social and political environment at the onset of modernity. We get a tour of Boston Brahmin culture from before the Civil War right up to the 1930s (this was the "current day" for this 1936 novel), and we see how this culture, clannish, exclusive and powerful for generations, passed into obscurity as Boston became overwhelmed with mass immigration, as government became increasingly corrupt and bureaucratic, and as the city grew into a gigantic, anonymous megalopolis.
We also see a sentimental portrait of how every person (as well as, collectively, each generation) arrives at a certain age where the world suddenly appears to be moving too fast. To become middle-aged and then old is to become unmoored, lost, adrift in the greater world, as power and authority passes to a new generation that the old generation does not, and cannot, understand.
There are valuable lessons for men of exactly my age in a book like this: if a man is lucky enough to grow old, he then "wins" the booby-prize of losing power and vitality, as, inevitably, he fades into obscurity. Life moves beyond him, even beyond his comprehension. As the author puts it, we are "more and more the spectator watching the world pass by." Some men--and likewise some generations--make this transition quietly and gracefully, some do not.
[As usual, the rest of this post is just a collection of my notes and quotes. Don't bother to read any further!]
PS: Readers interested in this book can find a free public domain PDF copy for dowload here.
Notes:
1) A story of the family's Irish cook, and an inappropriate song she sang while working: "Sometimes in the kitchen Bridget, the cook, would sing snatches of ballads. One in particular dealt with a fiery-tempered young man who went walking with the girl of his choice down an Irish lane. For some reason which George Apley [as a young boy] could not understand, this young man suddenly hit his sweetheart over the head with a club, and threw her body behind the thorn hedge. Later, on his return home, the girl's sister had him tried for murder, and the ballad ended 'And well she might, for she knew the night, when I took her sister out.' Since this ballad-narrative puzzled young George he went to the one source he knew, where the puzzle might be resolved: his mother. After listening carefully, Elizabeth Apley brought him to the library, where his father was arranging books, and there George repeated the story. Thomas Apley also listened carefully and made no comment, but Bridget thereafter lost her gift of song."
2) On the idea that a Calvinist Boston family would value Thanksgiving ("New England Day") more than Christmas; Christmas was to them a "Popish holiday."
3) George's father has concerns about of the kinds of friends George was keeping as he begins at Harvard, whether they were of his own kind.
4) "Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than to the intellect. Hard reading exercises the mind." George Apley sharing with his son, years later, the advice from his mother Elizabeth Apley, "guiding him away from much that was trivial and valueless."
5) "...the writer must now turn reluctantly to a difficult incident in George Apley's private life, which he still feels should be eliminated, in spite of the insistence of George's son, John Apley, that it be aired." His family wants to set him up with Catharine Bosworth, but yet there a bundle of letters were found that his father wrote to Mary Monahan in the interim. George's "indiscretion" was to fall in love with Mary, who was from a lower social caste. George's father quietly puts a stop to this relationship.
6) "The least said the soonest mended."
7) "He was meeting the severe shock which comes to all of us who must reconcile inclination with obligation."
8) During a summer in England and France: "Aunt Martha has bought six canvases by a Frenchman named Monet, of landscapes which are made in blotches. They seem to me quite mad, but Aunt Martha says they will be a good investment."
9) George goes to work for an uncle who deals in cotton, this job was supposed to teach him business, even to perhaps groom him for running the family's business empire, but he badly blows his first cotton buying deal. His uncle writes withering criticism about George to George's father, it's worth quoting in full: "The greater part of my life up here has been spent in weighing the possibilities of men. The foremen and minor officers I have selected are almost invariably a success. I have seen George and I do not think that he is a businessman. If he succeeds me here at Apley Falls [the family's textile business] I am convinced the Mills' earnings will show a corresponding drop. He is popular with the men but he is too easy-going. As a cotton buyer he has not the shrewdness of soul, and when he sells he lacks the pliability, so necessary. He lacks also the capability of understanding the other party's intentions. I regret to say besides that there is an erratic streak in George. It is my experience when someone 'goes off the handle' once he may very well repeat the process. I am much afraid that in him the Apley stock is running wild. It is my belief that he should be set up in a law office without too much responsibility, where he can eventually become a trustee with the advice of effective junior clerks. I am very sure that George would be a successful guardian of other people's money, but not of his own. What little he might inherit I strongly advise should be put in trust, rather than under his own management."
10) More withering subtext here in a letter from George's father on his engagement: "Catharine, whom I am looking forward to greeting as my daughter, has always seemed to me a very noble girl and her position and yours in the scheme of things are such that there will be none of the frictions due to divergent backgrounds, which might occur for instance in a New York and Boston union. You have shown the good sense, too, to realize that beauty is only skin deep and that there are more important elements in the holy bond of matrimony." [The reader can't help but read this and think whatever Catharine is, she is clearly not hot.]
11) George writes a paper that is received highly: "Jonas Good and Cow Corner": this is the author satirizing Boston Brahmin intellectual culture.
12) The Pequod Island chapter, chapter XV, is interesting in part because it shows George Apley able to transcend class in some ways, but not in other ways. This chapter scratches at an interesting theme: the ability to mask yourself as a different type of class as needed, or interact effectively with people across class and/or cultural divides. This is a superpower today in the modern era.
13) "Dear John: I am sorry that you consider it advisable not to be with us here at Pequod Island for your usual month this summer but instead to visit your college friends at Bar Harbor. There is an atmosphere of money at Bar Harbor which I, personally, have never liked, and I hope that you are not going there solely for that reason. It seems to me that you and the other young people whom I know are not as contented as I used to be at your age. I suppose it is because the world is moving faster. I was aware myself of this change when your mother and I gave up our carriage and began using an automobile."
14) Now the narrative moves on to the first decade of the 20th century. A period of subtle change, when Boston's upper caste was in a sense "threatened" by "certain vicious phases in the city government." "...for the first time I realized that Boston has indeed become a melting pot." A discussion here of dealing with a number of ill-bred men, mostly Irish, who were unjustly trying to win a city contract--at a much higher cost to the city--for a company run by their friends. "... a species of organized corruption which had reared its ugly head in other American municipalities was only too apparent in Boston also." George is appalled by this, he gets involved in a "Save Boston" association to try to stop this sort of thing. One of his uncles warns him: "You are biting off a good deal more than you can chew. I am pretty familiar with the type of person you were trying to attack because I have had a good deal to do with him. You do not understand him; he is too much for you and, mark my words, sooner or later he will get you into trouble. He doesn't care a button for anything you think..."
15) George Apley as an adult (ironically) finds the younger generation at Harvard wanting: "Something seems to be very wrong with Harvard athletics. For some reason the teams do not seem to have the fighting spirit which they had when we were young. The players seem soft, and I am sorry to say almost effeminate. I wish that you could come back before the Yale game and give them a talk."
16) More satire of Boston Brahmin intellectual culture, this time with a story about a possible discovery of one of George Washington's hairs: there is a hair found in a book George Apley discovered by chance in his house library, a book his great-grandfather purchased from George Washington's library, signed by Washington himself. George sends the hair to the library of Congress (!) "Many persons outside the Apley family must still remember the interest caused by this episode, which the Congressional Library also shared, although it was proved later that the hair came from another and unknown head."
17) Interesting take from a Boston "elite" about the evolution of New York into the loud metropolis that it became in the early 1900s, with hardly any horses and loud motor cars and horns and neon and as George apley puts it "gilded ostentation and shallowness." If these guys could only hear the jackhammers, garbage trucks and sirens there today.
18) Apley is disturbed by the changes he sees in Boston, especially at Harvard and Cambridge; the subway is built, which means it only takes twelve minutes to get to Cambridge, when before it was an hour; he doesn't like the big dorms being built at Harvard, etc. It feels to him that events and matters were moving too fast for him.
19) Noteworthy and quite beautiful segment here from a letter that George writes to his son John (see page 216ff). George encourages his son to be who he is and not struggle against convention. "Do not try to be different from what you are because in the end you will find that you cannot be different." [Note that this advice is given in the narrow, patrician context of remaining a member of his class. But thought of more broadly, this advice actually works on a few different levels, and it is objectively good advice, advice that I did not follow myself in my own life. When you're young you think you can be different from your parents, from your family. But usually you're not, and worse, you may burn many years of your life trying to be something you cannot be. Every parent wants to warn the generation behind about things like this, but that generation won't listen to the warnings, they can't hear.]
20) In the chapter on World War I we find George Apley constantly talking about the war, being aggressively anti-German and advocating aggressively for US military involvement in Europe. It's powerfully ironic because here he sounds like a tone-deaf Boomer media pundit from the modern era. Think Tom "The World Is Flat" Friedman foolishly (and wrongly) advocating for the Iraq War, or a modern media pundit making foolish statements about the Ukraine conflict a year ago, like that Russia was about to run out of bullets. Apley writes to a friend: "It is quite clear, from the information we are able to gather through several informal committees of which I am a member, that this country is riddled with German spies and the brains of the system are actually located beneath a very shadow of the Capitol Dome in Washington... I believe it is absolutely true, as it is rumoured, that concrete emplacements are being built on the hills around here for heavy guns and that there are a number of wirelesses along the coast which signal to submarines." [Remember, this is World War I] ... The book's narrator continues: "When the Lusitania was sunk on the seventh of May, 1915, [George Apley] breathed a sigh of relief, for it was his opinion that his country would at last stand for the right." [I wonder, did the author mean to parody here the emotional involvement of the elites in the war, or was he pointing out the economic benefits the elites would get from entering this war--which was obviously a war that they themselves would not fight? It's worth remembering also that it's almost certain that the Lusitania was a false flag event created by the United States in order to justify involvement in WWI. Also, note also that earlier in the novel the author mentions that Apley's ancestor paid a replacement to fight for him in the Civil War. (!) The elites never seem to fight the wars they are always in support of.]
21) Apley becomes increasingly uneasy, paranoid even, with how the Catholic Church is buying up high ground around the city and writing and a letter to another friend "these sites have been chosen with suspicious military accuracy" as he believes the "Irish elements" of Boston were in sympathy with Germany. [Old man yells at the Catholics, old man yells at the Irish, old man yells at Bitcoin: it's all the same.]
Don't do this
22) George Apley also uses his financial control to prevent a divorce between his first cousin and his first cousin's wife, this very much impresses his (previously critical) uncle: "In putting the screws on him you did, of course, the only thing possible. I would not have known you were so capable of it, but now I know you are your father's son." Later, George writes to his son: "You are reaching a time when you will find out what my own father pointed out to me at a very trying time in my own career: that family is more important than the individual, that a family must be solid before the world no matter what the faults may be of a single member, that a family has a heritage to hand down which must be protected." [This is not a wrong philosophy, and the characters in this novel are very sincere in their views, however, this philosophy also results in various examples of people from this caste being shunned, sent away, their names never mentioned again in Boston. Thus this is an admittedly harsh way for an aristocracy to preserve itself across the generations, but maybe we can't blame them for it. Nietzsche certainly wouldn't.]
23) Interesting passing reference here to the Mexican Border Wars between the US and Mexico 1910-1919, this is a whole rabbit hole.
24) George Apley discovers that "in spite of his most generous efforts certain of his own kin harbored for him a tacit resentment that bordered dangerously on dislike." A conflict over some distant relatives choosing his branch of the family's place in the family plot to bury their mother under a garish pink granite headstone. Another uncle weighs in, giving him some much-needed perspective. "I want to tell you something that it won't hurt to remember. I know that I have forgotten it often enough myself, but here it is. Most people in the world don't know who the Apleys are and they don't give a damn. I don't intend this as rudeness but as a sort of comfort... When you remember it, you won't feel the necessity of taking the Apleys so seriously."
25) Eleanor, George's daughter, gets caught going to a bar after dark with a young gentleman while ostensibly on the way to visit her aunt; George is appalled; note that when George's son John returns home from service at the Mexican border he says to her, "'El, we have to get out of this before it gets us too.'" The children (at their age, early 20s) want no part of this stuffy Boston family stuff, they can't stand it.
26) The kids understand that times have changed, the parents can't. Also son John Apley ends up marrying a divorcee.
27) Interesting also to hear the perspective of increasingly powerless middle-aged men during a time of war: George Ashley writes to his friend Mike Walker, "It is hell to be old in these days and to be able to do so little. I should be glad to be where John is [meaning at the World War I front] and so would you. In some sense it would allow me to vindicate myself. This has been denied us and instead we find ourselves with the women and children indulging in the trivialities of meatless days and gasoline-less Sundays."
28) John returns, he was injured in the leg at the front. He comes back very reticent, not willing to talk much about his experiences "over there" and this dismays his father.
29) Another fascinating historical reference to the 1919 Boston Police Strike: there was a fair amount of lawlessness throughout the city, it was blamed on Communist/Leninist operatives, and this gave rise to the political fortunes of Calvin Coolidge who was governor of Massachusetts at the time.
30) Son John Apley refuses to accept a place at his father's law firm and instead accepts a job at a New York City law firm. [What's interesting here is how war disrupts the social fabric in many ways, it kills people in the most obvious form, but it also makes people somehow unwilling to maintain their familial traditions once they come back from such a traumatic experience: they're unwilling to submit to a narrow existence in their hometown anymore, and in the case of this family, it disrupts any kind of lineage this long-lived patrician family might maintain over the generations. The reader can see that this family is about to die on the vine. The father asks: "Who will look after Hillcrest [the family's Boston compound] when I am gone?"]
31) Also sad to see as George gets older, the reader sees the increasing incomprehension in the letters he writes to his son in New York. See for example this quote from a letter after George makes a visit to see him... "I am still a little bewildered by my trip to New York, but not so bewildered that I cannot thank you for it. To me it was an amazing experience, amazing... my impressions are chaotic, and no doubt the world has moved beyond me. I know now that it is a mad world but I hold the belief that New York is not an American city."
32) The father starts to lose more and more touch with what's going on, he asks his son about a certain doctor named Sigmund Freud, "Have you ever heard of this man?"
33) George gets trapped in a controversy trying to expose detectives who had been blackmailing people; he gets lured into a hotel room where he is framed for being with a woman, and then is unfairly arrested for soliciting prostitution. The dirty detectives here have set up a sort of "Eliot Spitzer"-type trap, where they can then accept a bribe from the "john" so he can avoid public embarrassment. But Apley, in a genuinely fascinating example of old-school Brahmin-caste ethics matched up against modern ethics [literally exactly what Nietzsche was talking about in the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals, where an elite's word would unquestionably his bond]. Apley flatly refuses to play ball with the corrupt cops and instead demands to be taken directly to the police station. His name goes in the papers as a suspected john, everything happens to devastate his reputation, but he takes it all the way into to court, publicly, to clear his name in old-school gentlemanly fashion. It's so out of step with corrupted modernity that cops trying to entrap him are completely shocked by the total irrationality of it. We see here two completely different classes and generations of people, running two completely different operating systems, colliding in a really interesting way.
34) As he enters a period of ill health near the end of his life, he writes to his son: "It seems to me that, although I have tried, I have achieved surprisingly little compared with my own father and his father, for instance."
To Read:
Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels
D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essay On Self-Reliance