Something to Marvel At

As Beverly and I walked down the sodden creekside trail, sounds of traffic from Interstate 84 behind us became the sound of Latourell Falls ahead of us. The transition was complete when the creek bent east, opening to a sudden view of the falls. We stopped to watch its 250-foot plunge down the north side of Pepper Mountain. Only thirty miles east of Portland, Oregon, the spot felt like a passageway into another world.

Deeper in the woods, the morning darkened and chilled. But like an echo of sunlight, otherworldly bright yellow lichen flourished on the basalt column beside the falls. Ice lingered here and there on exposed rock as if time were moving differently. Provided we did not think about the neatly carved directional signs marking the trail, the weathered benches, a wooden bridge across Latourell Creek, or swarms of tourists chattering and listening to iPods, the scene was almost prehistoric: a damp, densely firred canyon filled with reverberation from the falls, strange hues all around, deadfall hosting swarms of lush life, birds darting through shafts of mist. From just the right perspective, it was a vision of the truly marvelous, a teeming spot where the distant past thrived within the familiar present.

Trained as a geologist and now an impressionist landscape painter and master gardener, Beverly is at home in the natural world. She feels an intimate connection to forms of the earth, appreciates cycles of growth and loss, grasps the history contained within the wild. She liked being there by the falls.

Brooklyn born, a city dweller until I married Beverly and lived for fourteen years with her in the woods of western Oregon, I remain much less in tune with nature. Engaged, attentive, I am warier, detached rather than comfortable. Also, my balance still compromised twenty years after a viral attack damaged my brain, I found the uneven footing beside Latourell Creek difficult, the ups and downs quickly tiring. But I followed as Beverly moved through the woods taking photographs, describing what rocks revealed, naming plants and trees.

Near the frothing pool where the falls crashed with full force, I found myself thinking that this is just the sort of place Jules Verne could have set a scene in his series of sixty-four works known as the “Extraordinary Journeys.” Strange, isolated, out of time, with the outsize power of nature on full display. But without, of course, the smart and beautiful woman. Or the disabled man.

A Verne novel’s calm, masculine hero would be accompanied by a powerful male sidekick and a loyal assistant: harpoonist Ned Land and manservant Conseil following Professor Aronnax onto Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, in Leagues Under the Sea; nephew Axel and guide Hans traveling into a volcano with Professor Otto Lidenbrock in Journey to the Center of the Earth; servant Passepartout attending gentleman Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days; or reporter Gideon Spillet, sailor Pencroff, and his courageous boy Harbert alongside engineer Cyrus Smith and his servant Neb in The Mysterious Island. There might even be a male dog or monkey as well.

And none of them would be at a midday sightseeing destination just beyond a city’s suburb. In Jules Verne’s world, Latourell Falls would be located on an uncharted island or in some far-off outpost at the remote end or the deep core of the planet. Despite the pristine beauty, it would be plagued by threatening creatures and people with evil intentions. The man standing here, looking around, would be, like Cyrus Smith, “very learned, very practical.” He would be “an unusually resourceful person,” someone “ever ready for anything, competent in everything” as he explored the unknown, facing down every threat, making his own way. A man “of great mettle . . . a man of action.” He would, in sum, be unlike me in every way. And any women would be back home, yearning for their men to return, not leading a limping, aging fellow thinking about stories of fictional adventure.

Verne had been on my mind lately, though I had never read any of his books. I had seen the movies Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in 80 Days more than fifty years ago, but all I remembered was a giant squid attack near the end of the former. Giant squid—that was Jules Verne to me. When Beverly and I ordered squid at a restaurant in Provence three summers ago, and the dish consisted of a reeking rubbery white slab instead of the small fried rings we had anticipated, I had set it aside after one taste, saying that it looked like something out of Jules Verne. Based on no direct encounters with the work, I viewed Verne as a writer of things monstrous, tales of the earth and its creatures run amok, a science fictiony/horror hack, a nineteenth-century Stephen King, whose work I also had not read.

But now I was reconsidering him. It had begun a few weeks earlier, when Beverly and I were talking about childhood movies that had made lasting impressions. I named 1954’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a schmaltzy musical western love story I had seen at age seven. I still know its forgettable songs by heart. I also mentioned The Defiant Ones, from 1958, in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts chained together as they flee through the South. I saw it with my brother when I was eleven and he nineteen and someone to whom I had often felt awkwardly shackled as we fled our parents’ rages. Beverly talked about Pollyanna, from 1960, and how strongly she resonated with the Haley Mills character’s positive outlook, the way it changed everybody’s life for the better. She also named Journey to the Center of the Earth, which as a child had fascinated and frightened her, lured and repelled her, its scenes remaining vivid for nearly fifty years. She wondered whether the movie was behind her collegiate desire to study geology.

Shortly after that conversation, we watched a new made-for-television version of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Starring Rick Schroeder, Peter Fonda, and Victoria Pratt, it was set in 1870s Alaska rather than 1860s Iceland and transformed Verne’s story of a scientist’s quest to discover the earth’s core into an abandoned woman’s search for her missing husband. Throughout the program, Beverly kept saying we should be sure to see the 1959 version that she knew and loved, which I had missed altogether.

I went online to order a copy at amazon.com and looked around at other material by Jules Verne. That was when it struck me: not only had I never read his work, I had never read Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, H. G. Wells, or Alexandre Dumas. None of the great authors of boyhood adventure classics. Never read Gulliver’s Travels, King Solomon’s Mines, The Red Badge of Courage, or Robinson Crusoe either.

Though I was an English major in college, and have a master’s degree in English, I never caught up with those books along the way. And over the last twenty years, despite frequently feeling the need to find in reading an escape from the confinement and limitations that accompany long-term illness, I had not thought of trying them. Why not start now, at sixty, with Jules Verne and his stories of escape to the middle of nowhere?

Beverly’s enthusiasm for the movie version of Journey to the Center of the Earth also made me speculate about whether I had been missing something essential in my reading, something similar to what gripped her about the movie. The irresistible pull of traditional storytelling, the full absorption that comes with being enthralled by a fictional world. I wondered if Jules Verne could return that to me.

I was aware that my reading had undergone a steady shift away from fiction, and that I felt a desire for refreshment of my thirst for novels. Going back to my reading diary, I saw that in the year 2000, I had read 102 books, and 68 of them—exactly two-thirds—were novels. The next year, I read 106 books, and 55 of them were fiction, so the percentage of my reading devoted to fiction had dropped to just over half. It was a trend that continued in a straight line throughout the first eight years of this century. By 2004, I was down to 43 percent fiction. Last year, of the 85 books I read, only 24 were fiction. Just 28 percent.

This had been an unplanned but sure alteration of my reading habits. I think that as I neared sixty, and completed the second decade of my illness, something changed about the spell novels cast for me. I was starting and abandoning novels, failing to sustain imaginative connection, and was turning toward literary biographies, narrative nonfiction, memoirs, cultural histories. Either something was missing in the fiction I was reading, or something had changed in me. I still had a substantial shelf of novels but was not drawn to them when the time came to select a new book. I was, though, still longing for the pleasure of direct, unadorned storytelling and character development. I just was not finding it in the contemporary novels at hand. “The human mind,” Jules Verne wrote in Leagues Under the Sea, “is always hankering after something to marvel at.” Reading fiction, which had for so long satisfied that hankering in me, was not doing so anymore.

To tell his most compelling stories, and create his most convincing characters, Jules Verne relied on a simple recurring premise: isolate a small group of individuals and have them undergo fantastical adventures in a dramatic, threat-filled natural setting. “A world apart,” he called it in Leagues Under the Sea, where the limited cast must rely on fortitude, ingenuity, agility of spirit and body, and teamwork to survive extreme conditions. No drawing rooms, no domestic dramas, no offices in Jules Verne’s best fiction.

He worked variations on this fundamental setup, which in essence is the deserted island motif. In my favorite Verne novel, The Mysterious Island, it is a literal unmapped, deserted South Seas island to which five balloon-borne escapees from a Confederate prison camp in Richmond, Virginia, are blown during a long and ferocious storm. In Leagues Under the Sea, it is a submarine equipped to be self-sustaining as it wanders beneath the oceans without a home port, its only contact with other humans hostile and warlike. The craft itself is a mobile, submerged island. Journey to the Center of the Earth is set primarily within the planet’s imagined underworld accessed from inside a volcano located in “that barren landscape of Iceland at the edge of the world.” A network of caverns and passages permits the cut-off characters to wander through Earth’s vast hidden corescape without encountering other humans. In Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg and his manservant, Passepartout, embark on an intensely self-contained expedition that, while not literally stranding them in isolation, maintains them as a separate unit seeking to avoid any contact that might delay their progress toward circumnavigation of the globe in the specified number of days. They are a kind of traveling island. Or they are, as Passepartout observes, “journeying in a dream” through their surreally insulated quest.

The premise alone did not, of course, ensure success. Many of Verne’s lesser tales make use of the island motif too: the early novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, involves the crew of a ship, the Forward, led from Liverpool by the doomed, monomaniacal John Hatteras on a demented journey in search of the North Pole. But Verne had not yet learned to incorporate his prodigious research into the fictional narrative, or to use dialogue as a means of propelling action rather than providing information, and the novel failed to sustain momentum. Similarly flawed by belabored scientific and geographical data, sketchy characterization, and patchwork plotting was the bare, undeveloped late novel, Lighthouse at the End of the World, in which a trio of men deployed to manage the new lighthouse on uninhabited Staten Island, near the South Pole, found themselves combating a gang of piratical malefactors.

While his desert island formula might be guaranteed to captivate boyhood readers, to work on a skeptical sixty-year-old man in a fiction-reading slump, it had to offer depth of character and believ-ability of action. It had to offer more than the surface razzmatazz of scientific, natural, or geographical exotica. For me, what made Verne’s work riveting—almost despite its sci-fi or adventure pyro-technics—was its deft, convincing consideration of isolated characters under duress, thrown back on their essential selves in order to survive.

I know this had something to do with my own situation as a reader, but I think it has attraction for a wide range of other readers as well, captivated by the basic confrontation of man and the most extreme conditions, the most dire threats to integrity of mind, body, and soul. At his best, Verne exposed his own loneliness and detachment, yearning for shared adventure and small-group solidarity, wealth of scientific knowledge laced with concern over how science would be applied, and fantasies of escape. He took the time to explore personality, not just sketch figures, as he told the rip-roaring tales of adventure that captivated his mind, and avoided the lecture hall mode—the dispensation of information—that often had crippled his other narratives. Verne’s achievement was to anchor the incredible in bedrock credibility of detail, the Romantic in straightforward naturalness, isolating characters under intense pressure and finding out what qualities sustained them.

Not a scientist, Verne taught himself enough science to ground his stories in the latest discoveries, speculate on what further discoveries might follow, and project how they might alter human behavior. He convinced himself that science offered answers to everything, as Cyrus Smith, hero of The Mysterious Island, explains: “I don’t believe in chance, no more than I believe in earthly mysteries. There is a cause for every inexplicable event.”

Not a philosopher, Verne still found his way to a few profound ontological insights that he was able to express in fictional action, or in his characters’ thoughts, such as the resonant existential message that Professor Otto Lindenbrock gave to his acrophobic nephew, Axel, as they prepared for their explorations in Journey to the Center of the Earth: “Look down carefully! We must take lessons in abysses.”

Not a world traveler, though he did spend eight days in America —his only journey outside of Europe—and certainly not an explorer, Verne imagined credibly the most remarkable, state-of-the-art journeys to unsettled, distant places and brought them to vivid life. The Klondike of The Golden Volcano, a late novel published posthumously, or the meticulously detailed underwater landscape, the “wonderland” full of “liquid light” in Leagues Under the Sea, feel as real as the Paris of Émile Zola.

Not a man of action, he created a series of men of action wholly believable in their mix of ingenuity, bravery, conviction, and compulsion. He escaped himself to go deeper into himself.

Verne’s inner life, to judge from his finest fiction, was all about being other, heading elsewhere, escaping from the life he was leading. He applied what he knew and imagined in ways that he could not manage in his daily life. He honored in his writing the wildest of those imaginings, or as he has an otherwise carefully constrained character, the manservant Conseil, explain in Leagues Under the Sea, “Don’t reject the existence of something just because you have never heard of it.”

Willing himself out of the trap of himself, Verne found a kind of joyful freedom in the dream of fiction, the convincing creation of the marvelous. As Professor Lidenbrock said, facing almost certain death while trapped in the erupting core of a volcano: “As long as the heart beats, as long as the flesh pulsates, I can’t admit that any creature endowed with willpower needs to be overwhelmed by despair.” All this, the combination of learning and imagination, the escape that forces us deeper into the real, the journey outward and away that brings us further inward and home, the balance of individual and communal interests that enable us sometimes to meet extreme challenge, is what makes Verne’s best novels compelling.

That he managed to write four enduring novels at all was an act comparable to the staunch triumphs of his dogged, ingenious protagonists. Jules Verne was born in northwest France in 1828. His father was a lawyer from Nantes, his mother a well-educated Breton, and Verne grew up on human-constructed Feydeau Island, where the Loire River flows through Nantes, with a view of the harbor and sea.

He came by his lifelong fascinations early, simply by looking out the window or wandering the streets. According to William Butcher in Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography (2006), “quayside ships literally overshadowed the front door,” and young Verne could watch the tides bring in everything from sardine boats to lost porpoises. He “learned about nautical operations at an early age.” Feydeau Island was a place where Jules Verne’s sensibility was shaped by local tales of adventure in far-off locales, by images of water and ships and islands and floating cities, by the allure of travel, exotic escapades, extraordinary voyages, escape. The urge to travel would become, Butcher writes, “the alpha and omega of Verne’s writing and life.” He read and was compelled by The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe, dreamed of being a castaway, even tried to stow away on an oceangoing vessel at the age of eleven. In tandem with his obsession over remote travel, an obsession never acted upon in real life, Verne encountered make-believe all around. Even the island he lived on was fabricated. “All the books he wrote,” says Verne’s great-grandson, Jean, on the A & E Television Networks Biography video of Verne, “it was the life he dreamed to have when he was a boy.”

Seems like the ideal situation for a writer in the making. But Verne’s family wanted him—expected him—to become an attorney and join his father’s practice. No rebel, Verne tried to comply. He moved to Paris, studied law, dabbled in commerce, attempted the civic life. But he found himself gravitating toward and coming to love the literary life instead. He attended salons and became close friends with both Alexandre Dumas the elder and Alexandre Dumas the younger. He met editors, publishers, and critics, met painters and musicians. Soon he began to write plays, several of which were performed. He also wrote short stories, studies of the Paris Salon exhibition of 1857 and of Edgar Allan Poe, and music criticism, and then branched out into novel writing. Verne’s father disapproved but eventually agreed to provide some support while his son struggled.

Verne also discovered a passion for study. He loved going to the library to research ideas, teaching himself as much as he could about the new developments in science that were changing the world around him. Evidence of man’s ingenuity, and of relentlessness in its pursuit, fascinated Verne throughout his creative life. He admired it in others and sought to practice it in his writing. Butcher remarks on Verne’s “remarkable capacity for sustained work,” a quality that would enable him to write several books each year for more than forty years. In addition to showing us the romance of the imaginary journey—the incredible expedition—Verne “opened our eyes to the romance of science,” as producer and screenwriter Gavin Scott says on the A & E Biography video.

After two apprentice novels, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (early 1864), things quickly came together for Verne as a fiction writer. Between late 1864 and 1875, when he was between the ages of thirty-six and forty-seven, he published the four novels on which his literary achievement rests: Journey to the Center of the Earth (late 1864), Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in 80 Days (1873), and The Mysterious Island (1875). It was an impressive heyday, on a lesser scale of accomplishment but comparable to Thomas Hardy’s sustained excellence between 1886 and 1895, when he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.

It was also an inconsistent heyday, unlike Hardy’s, since Verne also published seven far lesser novels during those years. From the Earth to the Moon, for example, appearing in 1865, was remarkable for its predictions about space travel—including a satellite launch from southern Florida and a projected splashdown in the ocean— but was marred by a ham-handed satire of America, a lack of fully developed scenes, unconvincing characterization, and long disquisitions on the science of launch and flight that extensively interrupt the story’s flow. It hardly seems conceived as a novel but rather as a series of essays about planetary bodies, flight dynamics, ballistics, and mathematics linked by the barest outline of a narrative. Also published in this period were such long-forgotten novels as Adventures of Half a Dozen Savants, The Great Eastern, and Journey to the Fur Country.

Not just during Verne’s eleven-year peak but throughout his long career, his achievement was obscured by the great quantity of lesser work. During his lifetime, he published more than fifty novels as well as books of short fiction and nonfiction. After his death, another ten books appeared, often in versions revised by his son, Michel. This astonishing productivity was a result, in part, of Verne’s own desire and capacity for work but also because of a contractual arrangement—almost inconceivable for a trained lawyer to have signed—which obligated him to at least two novels annually with meager compensation. So he was working for the paltry money as well as to satisfy his contract and his own drive. And, again like Thomas Hardy, he worked as an alternative to spending time with his mismatched wife. Verne’s publisher, Jules Hetzel, also exerted a powerful influence on the contents of his best-selling novelist’s work, censoring political or romantic content, cultural observation, character traits, and storyline.

But in his four best novels, Verne overcame these limitations, overcame as well his problems with incorporating research into the narrative line and his tendency toward despair when considering how human beings would mess up the glorious possibilities he envisioned for scientific advance. The novels read like sustained dreams, and Verne seemed to lose himself in the sheer joy of going away, imaginatively, to his various worlds apart.

Near the end of Leagues Under the Sea, Verne had its narrator, Professor Aronnax, speak for the author and his achievement when he told us, “I am a writer whose business it is to record things that appear impossible yet are incontestably real. This was not a dream. I saw and felt what I am describing.” His stories work when their dreamlike quality strikes the reader as utterly real, when their fundamental escapism seems like a passage to discovery. When, through fullness of characterization and directness of narrative, they sustain the spell cast by their inventiveness.

I read Journey to the Center of the Earth during a two-day February trip from Portland to Los Angeles, getting through most of it on the two plane rides. As I read, I kept thinking how much Verne would have loved air travel. Portland to Los Angeles in two and a half hours! He would not have been as irritated as I was by the delays, cramped seating, and bumpy ride, or the forty-degree tem-perature difference between northern Oregon and southern California.

He also would not have spent his flight time reading a novel. He would have been doing research and conjuring up adventures so novel readers might experience something to marvel at. So that we might be liberated from our over-familiarity with things of this world, and be made to see them, and thereby ourselves, freshly. If he had not been able to talk his way into the cockpit, he would have been wandering the cabin to look out the windows on both sides, front and back, studying the skies and ground, making calculations, distracted only by the information about airspeed, altitude, and temperature on the computer screen in the seatback before him. In 1876, when Verne was forty-eight and had written several books about balloon travel, he finally took a brief flight in one himself, but otherwise his airborne journeys were limited to pure imagination, an imagination that envisioned airplanes, guided missiles, and even the space satellite—though in From the Earth to the Moon, the satellite is launched by a large cannon rather than a rocket—long before their actual invention.

After our return to Portland, Beverly and I finally watched the 1959 film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth that had made such an impression on her. At first all I could see were the ways Hollywood had changed Verne’s story, from the characters’ names (Sir Oliver Lindenbrook instead of Otto Lidenbrock, making him Scottish instead of German), relationships (transforming nephew Axel into the unrelated student Alec McEwan and, as played by Pat Boone, having him croon “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose”), and motivations to the plot that added a female to the exploration team, a pet duck named Gertrude, and a Swedish treasure hunter who temporarily kidnaps the heroes. But with Beverly’s help, I got past my kvetching and began to enjoy the cinematic imagery—particularly the recreation of Verne’s imagined underground ocean and storm—that was the film’s truest connection to its literary source. I also began to accept the characters, especially the resourceful and monomaniacal Lindenbrook as played by James Mason, rather than comparing them to the original versions. I surrendered to the suspense of the journey despite knowing that all would end happily. So I got into the Jules Verne zone, learning to overlook the film’s flaws and experience the combination of escape and discovery, fact and invention, possibility and preposterousness, that are so crucial to his work. After all, if Verne could write of a space launch propelled by a cannon in From the Earth to the Moon, why could director Harry Levin not have the characters in Journey to the Center of the Earth escape an erupting volcano by riding on the lava in a kind of asbestos teacup?

As I began working my way through nine Verne novels, and watching movie versions that wildly distorted four of them, I came to appreciate Verne’s great gift for portraying mixed motives. He was a master of the paradoxical pull between loneliness and companionship, risk and security, the ties of home and the freedom of travel, capturing these tensions in moments of great resonance: Captain Nemo, sealing himself off from the world but treasuring the company of his small crew, shattered by their deaths and ritually honoring each with a sacred burial on the sea floor; Phileas Fogg risking his wager to rescue Passepartout, who had been captured by Indians after risking his life to save Fogg; the castaways of The Mysterious Island yearning for rescue even as they love the life created together on their island. At the end of that wonderful novel, the rescued group of survivors sets up a colony in Iowa so they can continue living the life apart together.

I also came to appreciate the ways in which Verne, on occasion, did cast the spell I had been looking for when reading fiction. I found myself drawn back each time I put down the book, found myself immersed. I was unaware of the writer or the writing, maintaining imaginative connection to the characters and their story, marveling at the revelations of character and scene.

At the same time I was reading Verne, Beverly was painting a twelve-by-sixteen-inch picture called “Latourell Creek in Fall.” It now hangs where we most often sit to read together. Inspired by our visit to Latourell Falls and the photographs she took while we were there, Beverly created a painting that is an impressionistic response, full of broken forms, shifting patterns, and vivid autumn colors that suggest both the energy and fleeting light within the scene. Exciting, exotic, a remote landscape, it also conveys a feeling of calm in the presence of such force, and a deep familiarity with the hidden underlying geological structures. It captures the place but also captures Beverly’s response to it. I easily lose myself in it, as I lose myself in reading Verne, and it reminds me of the impetus to begin reading Jules Verne at age sixty, my desire for a fresh appreciation of something I had been missing, the marvel of original storytelling.