Dear classics reader,
In this week’s heaving wicker luncheon-basket you will find:
The launch of our August read-along of Their Eyes Were Watching God;
A hamper-ful of literary picnics;
Birthday wishes to Primo Levi;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
Their Eyes Were Watching God (0 of 3)
‘Ships at a distance have ever man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.’
Those are the wonderful opening lines of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Today we start reading Zora Neale Hurston’s beautiful novel.
All the details of our read-along can be found here.
Before we begin, here’s a little context on Eatonville, Florida, one of the first self-governing black towns in the USA. It was settled in the early 1880s and incorporated in 1887, on land purchased from Captain Josiah Eaton. It originally comprised forty-eight lots over twenty-two acres.
Zora Neale Hurston moved to Eatonville with her family in 1894, when she was one year old, and lived there until she was thirteen. The town features in several of her works, including Their Eyes Were Watching God.
She also describes it in her short 1928 essay, ‘How It Feels To Be Colored Me’:
‘Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
‘The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-go-in’?” Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida.’
It’s a wonderfully vigorous, positive essay about race and includes the excellent line:
‘I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.’
Today, Eatonville has a population of 2,400 and the majority is still black. In 1990 the town founded the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts and the Hurston Branch Library opened in 2004.
Each year the ZORA! arts festival celebrates Hurston’s life and legacy in Eatonville. The next festival launches in January 2027.
I look forward to discussing Chapters 1-6 of Their Eyes Were Watching God next Friday 7th August.
Here are links to our previous Their Eyes Were Watching God posts:
The Schedule (10 July)
Zora Neale Hurston (24 July)
As ever, these weekly read-along discussions of Their Eyes Were Watching God will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.
But if you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
The Pic-Nic Papers
If you subscribe to the Penguin Classics newsletter, you’ll have received a round-up of literary picnics a few weeks ago, which I was delighted to pull together for the team.
Here is a link to the newsletter, which is an abridged version; I am very pleased to share the full piece below.
Picnic season has arrived. The countryside is alive with creaking hampers, popping Tupperware and clanking bottles. Picnics are joyful: as George says in Five Go Off in a Caravan (1946), ‘the meals we have on picnics taste so much nicer than the ones we have indoors.’ The usual rules of etiquette relax at a picnic, which allows for childish fun, young love and sometimes exquisite embarrassment. Picnics can also be mysterious, as in Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), or deadly, as in Lolita (see below). The curmudgeonly narrator of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) complains that ‘nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable, when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home’, but the rich history of picnics in literature is proof, if proof were needed, that most of us love picnic season.
The first picnic in English literature – according to Georgina Battiscombe, in her 1949 book English Picnics – is the garden ‘banquet’ in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). This novel was Charles Dickens’s favourite and he later included a delightfully eccentric picnic scene in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836): the rheumatic Mr Pickwick is deposited by wheelbarrow next to a bulging basket of ‘eatables’ during Mr Wardle’s partridge-shooting expedition, and Sam Weller expounds on the delights of veal pie: ‘wery good thing is weal pie,’ says Sam, ‘when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain’t kittens.’ Dickens subsequently conceived and edited an anthology called The Pic-Nic Papers (1841) to raise money for the widow of John Macrone, his first publisher.
We first learn to love picnics as children, when the novelty of eating outdoors is thrilling and the suspension of normal table rules feels transgressive. ‘Nice for Piknicks’ is the first label on E. H. Shephard’s map of the 100 Aker Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). One of the most charming childhood picnics appears in Leo Tolstoy’s first novel, Childhood (1852), in which Nikolenka accompanies his father on a hunt and they stop for tea, ice-cream and fruit. ‘We noisily expressed our delight,’ recalls Nikolenka, ‘since drinking tea in the wood on the grass and in a place where no one had ever drunk tea before was considered a great treat.’
River-picnics are particularly enjoyable. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) began life as a picnic story, told on a Thames boat trip, and George, Harris and J. pause their rowing on the Thames – in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889) – for a three-course picnic at Kempton Park. As Ratty explains in The Wind in the Willows (1908) – also set on the Thames – ‘there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ He then sends Mole into raptures by producing a heaving wicker luncheon-basket filled with ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—’
Love can burgeon at a picnic. In Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922), Mr Briggs notices how pretty Lotty Wilkins looks, with her ‘freckles, picnic-untidiness and all’, and while Miss Bartlett sits on her mackintosh square above Fiesole in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), Lucy Honeychurch tumbles into a sea of violets and kisses George Emerson. In the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s narrator recalls picnicking on the cliffs above Balbec, fascinated by the enchanting Albertine and her group of friends. The girls eat ‘sandwiches of Cheshire cheese and lettuce’ while he eats apricot tarts.
Picnics can even become amorous. In the 11th-century Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, we learn that ‘If chance supplied a loaf of white bread, / Two casks of wine and a leg of mutton, / In the corner of a garden with a tulip-cheeked girl / There’d be enjoyment no Sultan could outdo.’ Perhaps picnics rouse memories of that prelapsarian garden where Adam and Eve lay on a ‘soft downy bank damasked with flow’rs’, eating nectarines and linking ‘in happy nuptial league’, as Milton has it in Paradise Lost (1667). In Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Leopold and Molly Bloom separately recall the picnic on Howth Head when they passed moist seedcake between their mouths, made love and agreed to marry; and George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), has Winston and Julia escape to what they think is a secluded wood to have sex and eat black-market chocolate.
As well as romance, however, the social freedom of a picnic can engender awkwardness. ‘In all that jumble of napkins, packets, useless scraps of greasy paper floating around in the wind,’ writes Chekhov in ‘The Duel’ (1891), ‘no one knew where anyone else’s glass or bread was.’ ‘It’s so stupid and trivial!’ mutters the morose Layevsky. Dangerous deceptions lie below the surface of a picnic in the Norfolk Broads in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1864) and Dr Aziz’s picnic at the mysterious Marabar Caves – in A Passage to India (1924) – ends in an almost catastrophic misunderstanding. But the most socially awkward literary picnic of all is the Box Hill excursion in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). While the party is enjoying their cold collation, Emma Woodhouse cannot resist a hurtful witticism at the expense of Miss Bates. Emma immediately regrets her faux pas and is reprimanded strongly by Mr Knightley: ‘It was badly done, indeed!’ he says.
Finally, the most dramatic literary picnic – and the most succinctly depicted – must be the picnic in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). Humbert Humbert says, on page two: ‘My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.’ The comic, off-hand way with which he pairs the proverbially pleasant picnic with a fatal lightning strike perfectly captures the twisted tone of Humbert’s narration, as does the fact that he represses what must have been a deeply traumatic childhood experience into two words in parentheses.
The American poet Billy Collins named one of his poetry collections Picnic, Lightning (1998). The poem of the title is a memento mori, so let’s all seize the day, pack a hamper and enjoy a picnic this summer.
Happy Birthday Primo Levi
In other news, today was the Primo Levi’s birthday. He was born on this day in 1919.
Levi was born on the Corso Re Umberto in Turin, in the apartment where he lived for most of his life. Before the Second World War, he trained as a chemist; but when the Germans invaded northern Italy, he escaped to the Alps to join the anti-fascist partisans. He was captured in December 1943 and as a Jew he was deported to Auschwitz. At the time, the life expectancy in the camp was three to four months, but Levi survived for a year, until he was liberated on 27 January 1945.
Returning to Turin, he worked as a chemist in a paint factory for thirty years. He wrote memoirs, short stories, essays, poems and one novel. Calvino called Levi ‘one of the most important and gifted writers of our time’. In 1987, suffering from persistent depression, Levi fell to his death from the third-floor landing of his apartment block. Elie Wiesel commented: ‘Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.’
If This is a Man by Primo Levi (1947)
If This is a Man is Levi’s account of the year he spent at Auschwitz, smuggling soup rations, learning to speak German, synthesising rubber in the camp factory, avoiding hard labour in freezing conditions. It is a chronicle of the triumph of human dignity in the face of human evil. He wrote the book in a flurry in 1946, between shifts while working at the paint factory: one chapter, ‘The Canto of Ulysses’, was almost entirely written during a single, half-hour lunch break.
If This is a Man was initially published with little fanfare by a small press; the publisher Einaudi’s 1958 edition was an international success, however, and prompted Levi to write a sequel, The Truce (1963), about his convoluted, eight-month journey home after the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945. ‘In Levi’s writing,’ wrote Saul Bellow, ‘nothing is superfluous and everything is essential.’
[UK] Abacus | 464 pages | translated by Stuart Woolf | introduced by David Baddiel
[US] Simon & Schuster | 192 pages | translated by Stuart Woolf | afterword by Primo Levi and Philip Roth | as Survival in Auschwitz
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here.
Bonjour Tristesse – in-person book club
The week before last we finished discussing Bonjour Tristesse.
If you would like to continue the conversation in person, please book a ticket for our Bonjour Tristesse discussion at the Hatchards Classics Book Club next week on Thursday 6th August.
We meet at Hatchards bookshop (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but I post a report of our discussion afterwards here on Substack.
Big Think – Summer 2026
I’m very glad to have a piece in Big Think’s quarterly print magazine. The theme of their summer issue is ‘The Opt-Out Nation’. I’ve written about Bartleby the Scrivener and other forms of opting out in literature. You can read my piece here.
Here is some more information about the issue. Big Think is here on Substack. Become a member to get your copy of the print edition.
Annual book subscription
And if you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
