by Floyd Skloot
One of the few classics I’d read outside of school was Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, given to me by a kindly man who came to our house to draw blood one summer when I was sick with mononucleosis. Those months, when I was eleven and sequestered in bed, would have been the perfect time to read Jules Verne, to escape my bedroom and journey to distant, exotic places, have thrilling escapades, be reminded that, as he wrote in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, “hope is so strongly rooted in the heart of man!”
Despite bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, I never caught up with those boyhood adventure 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 those boyhood adventure books. 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’d been missing something essential in my reading, something similar to what had 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 it. Going back to my reading diary, I saw that in the year 2000, I’d read 102 books, and 68 of them—exactly two-thirds—were fiction. 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, reindulging my childhood passion for baseball books. Either something was missing in the fiction I was reading, or something had changed in me. I still had a substantial shelf of fiction, but was not drawn to it 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 wasn’t finding it in the contemporary fiction at hand. “The human mind,” Jules Verne wrote in 20,000 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 an alien, dramatic, threat-filled natural setting. “A world apart,” he called it in 20,000 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 novels.
He worked variations on this fundamental setup, which in essence was the deserted island motif. In the case of my favorite Verne novel, The Mysterious Island, it was 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 the case of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it was a submarine, the Nautilus, equipped to be self-sustaining as it wandered beneath the oceans without a home port, its only contact with other humans hostile and warlike. A mobile, submerged island. Journey to the Center of the Earth was set primarily within the planet’s vast underworld accessed from inside a volcano located in “barren landscape of Iceland at the edge of the world.” A network of caverns and passages permitted the cut-off characters to wander through earth’s 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 are, as Passepartout observes, “journeying in a dream” as they pursue their surreally insulated quest.
The premise alone didn’t, of course, ensure success. Many of Verne’s lesser tales made use of it too: the early novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, involved 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 hadn’t yet learned to incorporate his prodigious research into his 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 believability 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 pyrotechnics—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, most dire threats to integrity of mind, body, and soul. At his best, Verne also channeled into his provocative situations and settings a sense of 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 he 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, explained: “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 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 Professor Otto Lidenbrock’s resonant existential message, given 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 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, as with the Klondike of The Golden Volcano, a late novel published posthumously, or the meticulously detailed underwater landscape, the “wonderland” fu
ll of “liquid light” in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Not a man of action, he created a series of men of action wholly believable in their mix of ingenuity, bravery, conviction, and compulsion.
Verne’s inner life, to judge from his finest fiction, was all about being other, going elsewhere, escaping from the life he was leading. Applying what he knew and imagined in ways that he couldn’t manage in his daily life. It was about honoring in his writing the wildest of those imaginings, or, as he has the manservant Conseil, an otherwise carefully constrained character, explain in 20,000 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, he 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 made Verne’s best novels compelling for me.
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 manmade 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, the allure of travel, exotic escapades, extraordinary voyages, escape. The urge to travel would, Butcher writes, become “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 this 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 Network’s Biography video, “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, a study of the Paris Salon exhibition of 1857, a study of Edgar Allan Poe, music criticism, 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—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), 20,000 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 or 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 and flight dynamics and ballistics and mathematics linked together 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 over 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, in part, due to Verne’s own desire and capacity for work, but also to 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 powerful influence on the contents of his bestselling novelist’s work, censoring political or romantic content, cultural observation, character traits, 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 20,000 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 dream-like 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 planes. 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 wouldn’t have been as irritated as I was by the delays and cramped seating
and bumpy ride, or the forty-degree temperature difference between northern Oregon and Southern California. And he wouldn’t have spent his flight time reading a novel. He’d be doing research and conjuring adventures so that 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 couldn’t talk his way into the cockpit, he’d be wandering the cabin to look out windows on both sides, front and back, studying the skies and ground, making calculations, distracted only by the information about airspeed and 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, 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 Beverly. At first, all I could see were the ways in which 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 “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 kidnapping the heroes temporarily. 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 Henry Levin not have the characters in Journey to the Center of the Earth escape an erupting volcano by riding on the molten lava in a kind of asbestos teacup.