Year: 2011

Recent Reading: Wharton, Dickens, Pym, Heyer

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I have a backlog of books I’d hoped to write detailed posts on, but the time I lost to that evil computer virus–and then to reinstalling and reorganizing everything so that I could get back to work–makes that an unrealistic goal. Still, all of them deserve at least some discussion, so here’s a run-down of what I found most interesting, provocative, delightful, or uninspiring about each of them.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. There’s no denying the elegance and acuity of Wharton’s prose, the fine touch with which she fills in the details of her social drama. My appreciation of this book was undermined, though, by my skepticism about Newland Archer and my uncertainty about how far we were being encouraged to find his thwarted romance with Ellen Olenska poignant rather than pathetic. He’s such a passive wannabe, reading his Swinburne and Pater and fancying himself so different from those around him even as, in all affairs except his own, he is utterly conventional and priggish. His passion for Ellen (and her professed passion for him) seemed based on nothing more than fantasy. It seems that he, too, is the subject (if unwittingly) of Wharton’s satire, but the final chapter suffuses his earlier experiences in a glow that replaces criticism with wistfulness. Is the irony enhanced here (because even at this point he does not recognize the shallow folly of his grand amour?), or are we brought into fellowship with him as he mourns the loss of the man he (thinks he) might have been? The world of the novel also felt very small to me, and while I realize that is consistent with the way Wharton depicts it, as a closed society resistent to change and outsiders, I missed the overt presence in the novel of a wider perspective. To me, it was claustrophobic reading the way Henry James is; I like the “cool draught” that James complained came in through the open door of philosophy in George Eliot’s fiction.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. This is a wonderfully dark, funny novel. Reading it, I was struck by Dickens’s mastery of his own form and by the readerly confidence that I felt, knowing he knew what he was doing. The novel is splendidly diffuse and prolix, but it is bound together by Dickens’s brilliant, all-encompassing metaphorical imagination, the unifying motifs appearing and recurring with symphonic assurance. In the end, though, I was dissatisfied with the novel’s morality, which struck me as false in a highly problematic way. Central to the novel is its critique of the corrupting power of wealth, the insinuating bad effects of greed and vanity and social climbing and conspicuous consumption. And central to this critique is the exemplary story of Bella Wilfer’s reeducation from a shallow, selfish, materialistic girl into a “boofer” lady who learns the value of love, honor, and fidelity. But Bella is rewarded for her transformation precisely by being rescued from any threat of poverty and rewarded with wealth and status. There’s all kinds of thematic fitness to this, and of course all the elaborate machinations of the plot are required to bring about this triumphant conclusion, but it’s hard not to find it a dangerous moral that if you abjure riches, riches will be your reward–or, thinking of the other characters, that if you dedicate yourself to the self-interested pursuit of wealth, you will meet your come-uppance. But nobody can make me laugh or cry while I read the way Dickens can, and no other author that I have read gives off from his pages the same sense of ebullient, irrepressible joy in language. Dickens goes on and on, even when there’s no formal or thematic necessity to his elaborations, not because he is “paid by the word” or doesn’t understand novelistic form, but because he is loving it–how can we resist? Why would we want to?

Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence. Jane and Prudence is a charming read, to be sure, but it doesn’t deserve the effusive comparisons to Jane Austen that litter its blurbs. In its wry social comedy, its limited range of characters and setting, and its precise prose, it resembles Austen’s novels, but I thought this stylistic resemblance was not matched by a similarly rich undercurrent of ideas.

Georgette Heyer, Sylvester. I believe that this is the first Georgette Heyer novel I’ve read, which surprises me a little. But the Regency was never “my” period (the historical fiction I devoured in adolescence was overwhelmingly Tudor, with a sideline in the early Plantagenets, and then of course there was Richard III). I enjoyed Sylvester OK, though I found the writing fairly stilted and the plot predictable–which was fine for most of the book, really, as another way to say “predictable” is that it is true to the conventions of its genre. Towards the end, though, I thought it went off the rails: though it had to happen, the “discovery” that Phoebe and Sylvester are in love was handled clumsily, with Sylvester’s first proposal really coming out of nowhere, and Phoebe’s outraged response seemed forced. I didn’t like Phoebe herself much, actually: she had a good feisty side to her, but I was really disappointed by the way she limped around the novel being embarrassed and apologetic for putting Sylvester in as the villain of her novel. (The heroine of the otherwise ridiculous Lord of Scoundrels, which I read over the summer, was at least more consistent and sure of herself.) I did appreciate this little metafictional moment:

‘But, Phoebe, you don’t suppose he will read your book, do you?’ said Tom.

Phoebe could support with equanimity disparagement of her person, but this slight cast on her first novel made her exclaim indignantly, ‘Pray, why should he not read it? It is going to be published!’

‘Yes, I know, but you can’t suppose that people like Salford will buy it.’

‘Then who will?’ demanded Phoebe, rather flushed.

‘Oh, I don’t know! Girls, I daresay, who like that sort of thing.’

 

Infected!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

In my all happy anticipation about getting back into a regular routine for the fall, including getting back into the classroom, I did not imagine finding myself the victim of a truly evil computer virus that somehow (despite my anti-virus software)  got so deeply into my little netbook that after four days of intensive care with our tech people, it has proved impossible to clean out. Today they are wiping the hard drive, and I hope to have the computer back by tomorrow. Thankfully, it seems that they will be able to preserve a backup of most of my files, but there will still be a lot of reinstalling and reorganizing to do before I’m back in business. As a result, I haven’t been able to do either much work or any blogging in the evenings–hence the sudden silence over here. It has been interesting realizing how much I depend on being properly equipped, not just for my own interests and personal activities, but for getting done the array of work tasks, from e-mail to class prep, that can almost never be completed during regular work hours. As a result, I feel particular strain on my regular work hours right now, which is why this post will be short! As if heading into a three-course term and picking up all the other regular duties of the term wouldn’t be stressful enough without this added complication… and as if dealing with losing what feels like my life-support system doesn’t induce enough frustration without people commenting, “well, you do spend a lot of time online,” as if I somehow had this coming to me for my risky behavior. Anyway, here’s hoping that my next post will be about books or teaching and this will all be behind me.

Summer Reading Recap

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As the warm days dwindle down to a precious few, so too has time run out on our public library’s summer reading program, and Maddie and I have both tallied up our final scores. Neither of us quite reached the number we’d set as a goal, but we feel good that we read a lot, including a lot of books that we really liked. Since, as usual, the number of blog readers went into a bit of a slump over the summer, I thought I’d help people catch up with a look back at some of the books that were highlights for me, with links to the full posts.

At the top of my ‘best of the summer’ list would have to be the two books I read about the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. It’s hard to imagine two more different books dealing with such similar historical territory.  Farrell’s dry, acerbic absurdity was more immediately engaging, but Bowen’s prose, full of beauty but shot through with both pain and humor, made her novel linger in my mind well after I finished it. Both resist all temptation to melodrama; even the inevitable violence and suffering emerges perfectly (though in completely different registers) from the tone and form of each book.

I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed and admired Jane Smiley’s Private Life. It’s a carefully paced, understated novel, a family saga without any of the grandiosity such books often rely on; it moves us through a tumultuous period of American history and deftly balances attention to the events and complexities of that context against its primary interest in the small-scale achievements and struggles of private life.

Testament of a Generation was everything I’d hoped it would be: sharp, intellectual, passionate journalism from Vera Brittain and Winnifred Holtby. It fed my enthusiasm for one day developing a seminar on the Somerville novelists. Brittain’s The Dark Tide, on the other hand, was a more … ambivalent … reading experience.

Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets took me completely by surprise with its strange, drifting prose and stark confrontations with different kinds of loss. If, as the introduction proposes, it was the Bridget Jones’s Diary of another generation, either I’ve been wildly misreading Bridget Jones’s Diary all this time or that generation had radically different expectations of itself and its books.

I, Claudius was ultimately more fascinating to me for the formal choices Graves made than for the story or characters. It wasn’t easy pushing through some of the longer paragraphs (and if you’ve read I, Claudius, you know that pretty much all of the paragraphs are pretty long!), and I admit I was greatly helped by having watched the BBC adaptation just previously, or I don’t think I could have kept the family tree sorted or felt the drama of the events, which come to us in such abundant yet muted detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, though I wondered after just how much that pleasure came from Gardam’s pushing all the ‘right’ buttons for a reader like me. Yet I had similar expectations of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (that it was just the book for me), and didn’t like it very much after all, finding its flat affect ultimately too flat. I didn’t write up Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, as I finished it while in Birmingham and the moment for posting on it had passed by the time I got home, but I was similarly underwhelmed by it: though Patchett’s writing is wonderfully readable and the story had plenty of momentum during reading, somehow (and of course it’s possible this was in part the effect of reading while traveling) I was never deeply engaged by it emotionally, and at the end I couldn’t really decide where it had taken me intellectually. I’ll hang on to it, and to Brooklyn: I’ll reread them someday, I expect, and maybe I’ll find something more in them then. I haven’t written up The Age of Innocence either. It’s wonderful, of course, and yet I ended it a skeptic about it, feeling the brilliance of Wharton’s prose and the minuteness of her analysis was squandered on Newland and Ellen, neither of whom I liked or believed in at all. More about that, maybe, in a later post.

I read four more early Spenser novels, one of which, The Judas Goat, was so awful that, had it been my first experience of the series, I would not have read any more. But the other three were excellent of their kind. I’m still trying to get ahold of God Save the Child, the second in the series, in which Spense and Susan first meet. I read it many years ago, before I had quite the same interest in how their relationship is handled. By just a few books later on, they are very nearly into their lasting patterns, which in many respects have always epitomized to me the relationship between equals that is (or is it?) the ultimate romantic fantasy.

Finally, of the summer books worth any further comment, there’s Murder Must Advertise, an old favorite but one I haven’t read attentively in some time. I enjoyed rereading it, but the real fun came in writing it up, which was by far the best time I had doing any writing all summer. That’s the feeling I wish I could always having when writing: overflowing with ideas, enthusiasm, and energy, and just happy to be putting it all out there.

Everything else I read was disappointing to mediocre, really, or, in one case, laughably bad. Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a great reading season overall. Happily, I have just finished Our Mutual Friend, though. If I’d reached the end before the library’s deadline, the average would have been raised considerably.  I’m currently feeling a bit overwhelmed with the start of the teaching term, but I’m determined to get a proper post up on that dark, hilarious novel before too much longer.

London Books

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

In the grand tradition of May’s post on Boston by the Books and last summer’s post on my equally bookish expedition to New York, here’s a recap of my book buying adventures in London. First of all, as I have mentioned here a few times, the London Review Bookshop was my top destination for the trip. It was everything I’d imagined. It proves that, when it comes to bookstores anyway, size really doesn’t matter: it’s far from the largest bookstore I’ve ever been in, but every shelf is packed with interesting titles, with no space wasted on the mass-market blockbusters of the mostly disposable kind that fill huge display racks at so many other stores. I could have spent hours more exploring and learning. I didn’t even really go downstairs, except to grab the one Mr. Gum title missing from our collection from their children’s section–this series, much beloved of both my children, is very hard to get on this side of the pond. I was especially looking for a couple of books I hadn’t found locally, John Williams’s Stoner and Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, and sure enough, they were both in stock. I couldn’t resist Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder, which has not been released here yet in paperback, and having just helped edit Michael Adams’s lovely piece on Barbara Pym for this month’s Open Letters Monthly, I leapt on Jane and Prudence when I spotted it. I could easily have bought another dozen titles, but I had to respect not only my budget but also the impracticality of adding too much more weight to my suitcase when I knew I still had to lug it to Birmingham and back. So I made it out of there with only five additions to my library–restrained indeed!

I enjoyed browsing in a number of other bookstores, including Blackwell’s on Charing Cross Road and two Waterstone’s locations, the one on Gower Street (just up from my little hotel) and the giant one at Piccadilly Circus. There, after much dithering deliberation I picked out another couple of books that have proved elusive locally, Susan Hill’s thriller The Woman in Black and Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel. Again, there were many other tempting choices (including Elizabeth von Armin’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I am still rather regretting having put back on the shelf, and Sebastian Faulks’s One Day in December–though deciding against that one, I think, was probably the right call). But I had already added Avrom Fleishman’s George Eliot’s Intellectual Life to my stash from the Cambridge University Press table at BAVS, and while roaming Waterstone’s Piccadilly I was actually carrying with me, in my trusty Lug shoulder bag, the beautiful book on the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries that I treated myself to at the Victoria and Albert Museum Bookshop, so I was keenly aware of the increasing weight of my luggage! My final book purchase in London was a tiny one, the British Museum’s Little Book of Mummies. Then, having arrived virtuously early at Heathrow for my flight home and checked my heavy bag, I felt at liberty to explore WHSmith, where seeing Mary Stewart’s Stormy Petrel  brought to mind a recent chat with a former student and fellow avid reader about her novels and how much I had once enjoyed them. And now here they all are, just waiting for me!

Both the tapestry book and the mummies book are part reading material, part souvenir: they will remind me of and teach me more about some of the museum exhibits that moved and interested me the most on this visit. In the same spirit, here are two related pictures from those exhibits for you to enjoy!




 

 

Back from BAVS

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I got back Monday afternoon from my long-anticipated trip to Birmingham for the British Association of Victorian Studies conference–and, of course, my stop-over in London for sightseeing and book shopping. I’m now in the midst of back-to-school preparations. Though I am feeling very glad that I did so much work for my fall courses before I left, inevitably there are still details to be finalized, and in fact it’s a good thing I didn’t quite finalize things like my syllabi, as for various reasons (such as the last-minute announcement from higher up that we are not renewing our contract with Turnitin.com for this year–ask me how good an idea I think that is…), a number of sections needed to be tweaked. So I ‘m doing that, and making plans for the actual classroom time on Friday and Monday, updating PowerPoint slides and lecture notes, and making sure I have things like sign-up sheets for presentations and attendance lists. It adds to the excitement that the printer in our main office is defunct: as Dalhousie does not provide individual faculty members with printers (or, more significant these days, with ink cartridges, which typically cost more to replace than the whole darned machine), I rely on the office printer for my course materials, reference letters, and so on, so this is pretty inconvenient. The workaround in place is our new copier, which is “networked” so that we can send documents to it straight from our offices–except that the networking is itself a work in progress, to be completed by the end of September, and my computer remains out of the loop. So there are various extra steps involved any time I want a document sharp enough to copy.  I know, you’re all fascinated by this trivia about the glamorous life of the professoriate! Anyway, bit by bit the pieces are falling into place, the handouts into the folders, the notes into order, the graphics into position.

As for BAVS, I feel good about the experience. It was a big conference, with five parallel sessions running in most time slots and thus there was a lot of competition for everyone’s attention. In my own case, I find that my capacity to listen to specialized academic papers is somewhat limited at the best of times, and so I rationed out my attention a bit stingily, not attempting to attend a panel in every time slot but rather taking one break to go into downtown Birmingham to explore the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (which was wonderful, and topical, too, since it houses a terrific collection of Pre-Raphaelite art), and another to go across the street from the main conference site to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (also wonderful, a real gem, as Ann promised when we met for our very pleasant dinner the night before the conference). The genre of the academic conference paper is, in my view, a somewhat problematic one. Typically, papers are highly specialized, and they are also usually very tightly crafted, polished to a high degree of rhetorical sophistication. As a result, I find it isn’t easy to engage with them, to see how to get into a conversation with (or about) them. If your own research isn’t highly proximate, it’s unlikely you know enough to get into the details, and if you’re interested anyway, you may feel kept at a distance by the effect of closure such a paper generates. I guess I wish conference papers were more like blog posts: preliminary or open-ended (or open-minded) enough that you feel invited into a conversation rather than impressed by a performance. That said, I heard some interesting papers, good things of their kind: they told me things I didn’t know or addressed questions I hadn’t thought of. A highlight for me was Colin Cruise’s plenary on ‘Arranging meanings: Pre-Raphaelite compositions and narratives,’ not only because it was intrinsically interesting and well presented, but because I had only just seen, in the BMAG, many of the paintings he focused on.

I think my own presentation went well. Our panel on ‘knowledge dissemination in Canada’ offered snapshots of three quite different projects, one the well-established Disraeli Project based at Queen’s University, presented by its director, Michel Pharand; another the Affect Project, a large-scale interdisciplinary endeavor recently launched at the University of Manitoba under the leadership of my good friend Arlene Young; and the other my adventures as an academic who blogs. We had a reasonable audience, considering the number of alternatives they had (if I’d had the choice, I too might have been at the Carlyle panel!)–around 20 people, maybe? I’m terrible at estimating these things, especially when I’m buzzed from nerves, as I always am when speaking in public. My prezi worked fine, which was a relief, after all that time spent on it, and I was even able to do a little last minute tinkering and get in a snippet from the Guardian piece that went up just that morning in response to my earlier post about Leonard Cassuto’s dismissive attitude towards blogs. There was some pretty lively discussion after. I was not surprised that the first couple of questions were, let’s say, skeptical–one of them was prefaced with a hope that it wouldn’t sound “too adversarial.” I didn’t think so, but I did think it skipped past a number of the quite careful framing statements I had made in order to present a kind of extreme worst-case scenario the logic of which, to be honest, I didn’t completely grasp. The concern seemed to be that somehow if we started doing something besides the conventional, highly structured and hierarchical and gated forms of academic publishing, we were heading down the slippery slope to having all our research funding and graduate programs cut — because (and this part of the question, or response, I do remember quite clearly) “in that case why would we need to do research or train graduate students?” As one of my main points was that the non-academic writing I’d been doing was closely integrated with, or reliant on, expertise acquired through my own specialized research, I don’t think I did, myself, offer evidence that such research was irrelevant or beside the point beyond the gates of the traditional publishing models. In fact, to the contrary, I was trying to make the point that such research has more value outside those gates than we typically believe, or at least than we typically let it. As for training graduate students, well, as readers of my blog know, I have a lot of doubts about whether we should continue to train graduate students in quite the way we have been doing for the last several decades, and it was really in service to those concerns that I emphasized my own belief that we need to make a place for (and make the case for) the value of unconventional scholarly practices including blogging in the overall landscape of recognized academic activities.

It struck me, listening to the more dubious voices in the audience, not just that they gave some signs of the defensiveness people like Alex Reid have written about, but also that they tended to talk about “the system in which we are embedded” as if we have no agency in that system. Has Foucault made cowards of us all? Who makes up the academic system, after all, if not the people who embody it? To be sure, there are all kinds of people in that system, often people with administrative or executive powers, who show no appreciation for the academic humanities. But if we really believe we can change our profession for the better, surely we should advocate for those changes, and seek to explain them in the strongest and clearest and most aggressive ways, rather than condemn ourselves–and, more pressingly, those coming after us–to persisting in a system we believe is dysfunctional. It may also be that breaking open the current rigid paradigms of academic scholarship and publishing will help us make the case for the value of our work to those administrators by showing it to be less insular, to serve a broader public. This is part of the logic behind the support structure for the new Los Angeles Review of Books, as I understand it; Tom Lutz, the founding editor, noted in his powerful essay on the state of book reviewing that academics are able to contribute to “as part of our commitment to the dissemination of knowledge that is integral to that job.” In any case, the questions were not, really, “adversarial,” but curious and eager to consider the further implications of the fairly modest proposals I specifically made, and it seemed worthwhile to have stimulated that kind of discussion. I think it’s telling that quite a number of young scholars, mostly continuing Ph.D. students, came up to me later to express their interest in what I’d said. Maintaining the status quo is not, overall, in their interests, I think, and their eagerness to think about how else things might be done was energizing.

Unusually for me, the conference felt most useful as an opportunity to have these informal exchanges, and also to meet people I knew from blogs or Twitter or the long-standing VICTORIA listserv, or from reading their scholarship, to make the personal contact that moves conversations and relationships forward — networking! It was a real pleasure putting faces to names, especially Rosemary Mitchell, whom I have ‘known’ for many years (since we both wrote essays on 19th-century needlework and historiography and decided we would be not competitors but allies) but never met in person. David Skilton was there! I was able to tell him how useful I have found his book Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries. And I met Regenia Gagnier, whose book Subjectivities was one of the first critical books I bought when I was a student at Cornell, and Lyn Pykett, whose work on sensation fiction I rely on, and I was able to reconnect with one of my very best former students, now completing her Ph.D. in the UK (hi, Emily!).  I could wish there had been a bit more time for simply mingling, as we were either in sessions, standing in the crowded atrium eating the (very good) lunches provided, or seated at tables for dinner. Perhaps if I hadn’t been too tired from traveling to go to the pub …

Next up: some self-indulgent posts about my eagerly awaited visit to the London Review Bookshop and other bookish haunts.

“The Measure of Blogging”: More from Leonard Cassuto

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Leonard Cassuto has published some further thoughts on blogging at the Guardian, with some specific attention to my response to a couple of his earlier comments in the live chat back in July.

I don’t have time to reply in detail right now as (ironically) I am at a conference in Birmingham heading off to give a presentation about blogging as knowledge dissemination. I will quickly say that the “critical error of fact” he points out (that “[his] writing for the Chronicle is in fact a column, not a blog”) doesn’t seem that critical to me, really, but I accept the correction. The difference between the two as he explains it has to do with only two things: where in the Chronicle his writing appears (including that it appears in the print version), and that it is edited by others (including fact-checked). That process, he notes, “almost always” improves the product. It’s true that my blog is not fact-checked except by me, and as it turns out, my attempt to identify just what the process was for his pieces was not thorough enough – I didn’t altogether rely on the statement in the Guardian that identified his pieces as a blog post for the Chronicle, but when I looked around the online version I didn’t see anything that clearly contradicted that description.  I guess the Guardian doesn’t fact-check very thoroughly either. In any case, it seems only fair to retract the suggestion of hypocrisy about that example. Now that he’s posted a declared blog post, he has also softened his general stance on blogging: “I mostly don’t read blogs. I’m reading this one right now, and I’m even posting to it.”

But the point of my previous post is not to determine exactly the right label is for Cassuto’s writing (as Cassuto acknowledges, “the world does not turn” on that question). The Chronicle publishes a lot of articles I think are surprisingly poor (many seem like nothing more than link-bait), despite whatever editing they have received, and by far the most valuable resource it offers, in my opinion, is the Profhacker blog. I don’t decide what to read based on the form or label.

There’s more I’d like to say, including about the model of “authority” Cassuto gives (how does “going viral” confer “authority,” for instance?) and the value of “visibility” (an argument which reproduces existing publishing and prestige hierarchies) as well as the assumption that to succeed, graduate students and junior faculty are best advised to continue in the most conservative way possible in their work. As senior, “established,” faculty, we are the ones in a position to encourage alternative models of productivity and scholarship, and if blogging is valuable to me in the ways I described, there would be real hypocrisy in my case if I didn’t consider it valuable work for people at earlier stages of their careers and work to recognize it as such when they do it.

Finally, I’ll note that I disagree with Cassuto’s conclusion that ‘if Dr Maitzen’s blogging is “unofficial,” then it doesn’t deserve the same kind of attention that her “official” publication does.’ I used “scare quotes” around “official” in my earlier comment for a reason: I don’t like that distinction, and one of the points I’ll be making today in my presentation is that I think we, collectively, as a profession, need to broaden our understanding of what counts as real, official, scholarly work. But more important, I think my blogging deserves as much, if not more, attention than my other publications. It’s more interesting and wide-ranging and intellectually curious, and it’s relevant to a wider audience. In many cases it is better written, too. It does indeed “demand a fair amount of attention” to follow blogs and to participate in the conversations that a post can generate. On that note, I think it’s interesting that Cassuto chose to publish his reply as a blog post in the Guardian but never engaged in the discussion that unfolded in the comments after my post went up last month.

 

Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The blurb page of my edition of Brooklyn is full of praise for Toibin’s style. Words like “simplicity” predominate, along with “spare,” “delicate,” and “elegance.” I can imagine a review of Brooklyn that would describe similar features but with less enthusiasm: instead of “spare,” perhaps “sparse”; instead of “delicate,” “flat” or “colorless.” It’s a book that is strangely without affect, so deliberately underwritten it’s as if Toibin was determined to keep not just himself off the page but his characters and readers too. Is elegance dependent on such effacement, such careful subordination of elaboration or enthusiasm? Can there be no pulse, no poetry, in it? The negative review I imagine is not, quite, the review I would write, but I finished the novel feeling still held at a distance. Eilis Lacey, for instance: who is she? What is she like? She’s barely there, though the novel is, I suppose, told from her point of view. Even accepting what I take to be the premise – that she lives remote, somehow, from her own emotions, almost even from her own experiences – she’s an oddly insubstantial figure, the sum of actions she takes and things she says more than any rich conception of character. Like Eilis, the story too is a sequence, this and then this and then this. The writing precise, each detail placed just so, but the pacing is so steady that if I were writing that negative review, I’d call Toibin’s style “pedestrian.” Maybe even “plodding.” I’m not writing that review, though, because I’m not sure that’s so, only that it struck me as so, that I was expecting something urgent and illuminating to emerge from behind the cool narration and was left disappointed. Something can be perfect of its kind and still not be the kind of thing we love: Brooklyn has a certain minimalist perfection, but if I weigh it against, say, Leaving Brooklyn, also a story about self and place, about growing and seeing, about loving and choosing, Leaving Brooklyn is the book for me. (I realize there’s no intrinsic necessity to that comparison, but it occurred to me throughout my reading of Brooklyn.) I’m surprised at my own reaction because I like my books cerebral. Maybe I was in the wrong “head space” myself to appreciate such an austere approach.

Have you read Brooklyn? What did you think?

Stress!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

You know that house I was getting in order, just a little while back? Well, right now it feels pretty wobbly, not for any one big reason but just from the combination of lots of little things that, cumulatively, are making me feel stressed out and distracted. I leave on Monday for my trip to the UK, for instance. In lots of ways I am really looking forward to this: a chance to meet up with friends and colleagues, to see and learn things, to be in London again and in Birmingham for the first time. But much as I enjoy being other places, I’m a terrible traveler when it comes to getting to other places (particularly by air, though I also abhor car travel). In addition to the flying itself, there’s the fun of airport security, in which you have your option of ways to have your privacy invaded, and a great deal of hurrying up in order to wait. I usually distract myself as best I can from thinking about the unpleasantness to come by keeping busy with planning, and in this case there’s plenty of that to do, along with finishing my conference presentation. But that is the source of its own kind of stress, as after all this time working out what I wanted to include and in what order and what degree of detail, I’m feeling dissatisfied with what I’ve got. I also did a practice run of the current version today and ran almost 10 minutes over what I believe to be my allotted time. I wanted to do a more informal talk, but it’s so hard to make sure you stay on point (and hit every specific point you want to) if you don’t script things pretty carefully!

I’ve been developing my Prezi in tandem with working out my speaking notes, and though I remain enthusiastic about Prezi as a concept and a conceptual tool, there too I am feeling dissatisfied: the current version doesn’t really use the special features of Prezi in a very creative way, and I’ve been wondering if I should have just saved a lot of time and done some straightforward PowerPoint slides — which I might end up preparing anyway as a back-up because I am paranoid that something (what? I don’t know!) will go wrong using Prezi (a firewall keeping me from getting to the site? an incompatibility between the design of my presentation and the projector I use? I don’t know! I enjoy technology but I don’t altogether trust it, at least not when I know people will be watching me use it!). It is not entirely calming to reflect that every conference paper I have presented in the past has been quite sparsely attended and has been the focus of far more concern to me than to anyone in the audience. The disproportion between my anxious preparation and the usual underwhelming but friendly reception in a way adds to my stress, because I feel I must be doing something wrong. I particularly recall two papers I sweated bullets over, both of which I thought dealt with quite controversial material in a somewhat provocative way. Oh, the questions I braced myself for! The micro-edits I put on them trying to anticipate and shape responses from hostile, or just better-informed, listeners! And in both cases there were maybe 9 or 10 people there besides the panelists, and no challenging questions at all. A relief? In a way, but also a let-down. One possible (and comforting) interpretation of this past experience is that I prepared such good papers they were (to quote from the cute new ‘Welcome to Dalhousie‘ song) “hater-proof.” But maybe the opposite was true and nobody wanted to be mean to me. I don’t think a paper about blogging and knowledge dissemination will be controversial, but I do want to have thought about the issues I raise well enough that I can answer questions about them, give appropriate references or clarifications, and address any skepticism I encounter…

So there’s that. And there’s the prospect of being on my own in London, which is at once exhilarating and a bit scary — it’s so big, and there’s so much to do and see, and I have so little time, too. I don’t feel so overwhelmed by New York because I’ve been there so many times (one perk of going to graduate school “up-state”), but I’ve been to London only twice and always with others. It will be nice not having to negotiate plans or meals, or just the pace of things, and I reassure myself that if I get lost, well, at least I (more or less) speak the language.

But I get back only a couple of days before my classes begin, and literally the day before my kids start back at school, so there’s a lot to try to be on top of before I leave. I’ve done one round of shopping for school supplies (I swear, I won’t be surprised if pretty soon they ask us to provide toilet paper for our kids) but am still waiting for a reply from the other school about what is needed. Then Dalhousie just announced some changes to their parking system which will make a difficult system a lot worse (unless I’m one of the lucky ones who “wins” a permit for a lot newly designated for reserved spots only — at more than double what I paid for my permit last year). So that’s stressful, as I contemplate scenarios that involve 45-minute walks with the kids through typical Maritime fall or winter weather (pouring cold rain, sideways wind, ice pellets) carrying all the gear we need for our days, and no easy way to get around if there’s some kind of problem that requires picking them up early — not to mention getting to routine after-school activities and appointments. Oh, and a hurricane is threatening to arrive the day I’m supposed to be flying out, which in a best case scenario means it will be a bumpy trip.

Sorry for venting. I’ll calm down eventually. Tomorrow I have some practical things to see to, and then I’ll do another round of tidying-up revisions on my speaking notes, and then on Friday I’ll have one more go at the Prezi, just to be sure that at least it includes all the illustrative bits I want, and to keep improving the transitions to avoid making my audience sea-sick. (My efforts towards this last point account for the increasing linearity of the prezi: big turns and lateral movement seem to be the most disorienting.) And tonight, I’m meeting two of my favourite former students, just for a coffee and a chat — that is definitely something to look forward to. Maybe I’ll even do some serious reading again soon: I’ve been too distracted for much besides yet more early Spensers.

Update: Better now. I really enjoyed chatting with my students (can I still call them this, even though they have both graduated – twice – from Dal?). Interestingly, we all talked at length and with much animation about the books we’ve been reading lately. This is interesting to me because I have noticed that at social functions with my professorial colleagues, we almost always end up talking about which TV shows we are watching. Maybe to English professors, book talk is too much like shop talk? But it’s also my colleagues who always say they have “no time to read.” I’ve taken another look at the prezi and it at least seems usable, though I do still want to tweak it (and cut the talk down). So I feel better about that, if not entirely satisfied. And now a glass of wine and maybe a dose of Our Mutual Friend, and that should keep the other anxieties at bay until tomorrow.

Vera Brittain, The Dark Tide

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

There are books that are bad in uninteresting ways and books that are bad and yet somehow still interesting. The Dark Tide, Vera Brittain’s first novel, is in the second category. In saying this I am basically repeating what seems to have been the critical consensus about The Dark Tide since its publication in 1923: its flaws seemed conspicuous (though there was not universal agreement about just what they were), but yet it had an energy and intellectual determination that made it something more than a failure, something other than forgettable. To her credit, Brittain herself is both frank and intelligent about the novel’s weaknesses: “the crude violence of its methods and the unmodified black-and-whiteness of its values.”  The Dark Tide, she says in her preface to the 1935 reissue,

still appears a surprisingly melodramatic and immature production for a young woman who had seen four years of War service and three of University training. It stumbled towards a technique which I have since repeated with possibly better results – the relation of an individual story against a larger background of political and social events – but the story was over-emphasized and the background lamentably inaccurate and incomplete. Yet, by the time I began the book, I was well into my twenties; I had passed through a veritable lifetime of annihilating experience; and I was not, I think, exceptionally unintelligent.

She goes on to suggest that the very “annihilating experience” she had been through had impeded her intellectual development even as it artificially accelerated her emotional development. The resulting asymmetry she proposes between head and heart does seem to me a plausible explanation for the extraordinary unevenness of The Dark Tide,  in which crudely-drawn characters careen around the story, knocking into each other like conceptual bumper cars. They deal only in extremes of passion or commitment, or, on the other side, of passivity and submission. What matters most to them all is how they feel about everything — and this, to me, was entirely unexpected, as it reverses the priorities and emphases of Brittain’s autobiographical writing. The Dark Tide doesn’t sound like Brittain at all, and clearly she didn’t think it did either. Though she wrote other novels (one of which, Honourable Estate, sounds like the next one I should read), there seems to be good reason why she is best known for her non-fiction, which she wanted to be “as truthful as history, but as readable as fiction.”

The Dark Tide is organized around two characters based, quite obviously, on Brittain herself and Winifred Holtby. Neither portrait is ultimately flattering, and as Mark Bostridge remarks in his introduction to the Virago edition, the identifications loosen as the novel goes on: he argues that “the two main female characters become increasingly representative of the different sides of Vera’s own personality.” Daphne Lethbridge has Holtby’s energy and outgoing personality, but lacks intellectual subtlety and social refinement; Virginia Dennison has Brittain’s petite elegance, intellectual seriousness, and social conscience. They disdain each other for reasons that make neither of them look good, and like Brittain and Holtby in real life, but under very different circumstances, they outgrow their hostilities and find each other unexpected allies. But the feminist principles and political engagement that make the Brittain-Holtby friendship distinct and inspiring are completely lacking here. Instead, the conflict between Daphne and Virginia is focused on their entanglement with their tutor Raymond Sylvester, who loves Virginia but is loved by Daphne. Full of thwarted desire and smarting from the blow to his ego when Virginia rejects his proposal, Raymond asks Daphne to be his wife, and from that spiteful moment the novel’s catastrophes unfold. Poor Daphne, thrilled at first to think her love is reciprocated, withers away under Raymond’s bitter dissatisfaction with her. Virginia renounces her intellectual ambitions on the grounds that they encourage her to be selfish and self-satisfied; she becomes a nurse. The women meet up again and Virginia (guilt-ridden by her part in Daphne’s unhappiness) offers her friendship which, by that point, Daphne desperately needs.  In the meantime, Raymond, still obsessing about Virginia, fixates on an opera singer who resembles her. His infidelity makes him resent Daphne’s clumsy affection and pathetic attempts to please him more and more (in this, Brittain is at least psychologically astute, though the writing is almost unbearably hyperbolic). Eventually he lashes out at her and leaves, unaware that his blow has sent his pregnant wife crashing into the fireplace and left her unconscious on the floor, where she is discovered an hour later, bloodstained and in premature labor, by (you guessed it) Virginia. The baby lives but is somehow crippled by the accident. Sad as this is, Daphne’s decline seems almost sadder still, as the crude energy that made her attractive in a blundering sort of way at the outset of the novel has evaporated entirely by the end: her only ambition is to make up to little Jack for his misfortune (for which,distressingly, she blames herself as much as her abusive husband). Then, adding ideological insult to literal injury, Raymond’s mistress appears to urge her not to pursue a divorce as Raymond’s political career is finally taking off but he is campaigning primarily against a proposed new divorce act – one which would actually make Daphne’s case against him easier and surer.  A divorce would show him up as a hypocrite and scuttle his chances of eventually becoming Minister of Arbitration. Thus private values and public service come into direct conflict, and Daphne decides that she will sacrifice her right to be rid of him rather than deprive him of the chance to do something good in the world. Daphne sees her decision as a “sordid compromise,” but Virginia applauds it in a long speech about the moral beauty of giving things up for “the weak and the wicked and the undeserving.”

There is material here for a great, if still problematic, novel about competing values: about women’s aspirations at a time of profound social and political change, about marriage and how its demands are affected, in their turn, by new ideas about women’s independence and intellectual and moral integrity, about private life and public morality – or, in a different register, about love and obsession and cruelty and submission. This is part of what I mean when I say that the novel is bad and yet interesting: that despite the clunky prose and plotting, the heavy-handed speechifying, and the cringe-inducing melodrama, the novel gives the sense of a rich (if confused) intelligence trying to get something done, or maybe to get something out. One example will be enough to get across the flavour of the novel. Here’s a bit of the turbulent proposal scene between Raymond and Virginia:

‘Miss Dennison!’ he burst out in a sudden overwhelming flood of passion, ‘you know what I’m going to say – you know what I want, but all this term you’ve been just the little devil that you are – aggravating, alluring, torturing – driving me nearly mad. And never, never would you let me get hold of you alone – till now. That in itself makes me hope – makes me hope just a little bit more. I love you – Virginia – I can’t sleep or work or think for loving you! I want you till I feel mad – mad – mad! . . . I don’t want you to give up any of the things you like doing – I only want to find you work to do – work for your splendid gifts – but with me – with me! Virginia – my dear – my beloved – wonderful, wonderful little girl – say you care for me a little – say you’ll come to me – marry me!’

Virginia waited for the torrent to subside a little. ‘No,’ she said very firmly.

Sylvester, white and trembling, looked at her with blazing eyes.

‘You don’t mean that! You don’t, you don’t! It’s another of your cruel tricks – your maddening wiles – Virginia!’

Finally convinced by her resolute refusals that her ‘no’ actually means ‘no,’ and insulted by her comments about his low moral standards, Sylvester turns on his beloved:

‘So that’s what you think of me, is it!’ Sylvester exclaimed. ‘That’s the sort of reputation I’ve got? Very well then, I’m going to live up to it. I’m going to make you kiss me before you go, you little devil! I’ll have that much satisfaction at any rate.’

He seized both her hands as he spoke, pulled her out of her chair, and began to draw her towards him. With a tremendous effort she managed to get one of her hands free – the one in which she still held her paper. [Oh yes, this is all during what is supposed to be a “coaching” session.] Summoning all her strength she lifted it above her head, and struck him violently with it in the face. He let her go immediately and staggered back, with eyes watering and one cheek crimson from the blow.

Yeesh, right? And yet fending him off with her paper is surely symbolic of the deeper contest between the feminine submission he wants (in the guise of romance) and her determination to achieve things with her life that she believes (as Brittain believed) were likely incompatible with marriage. He’s a sexual bully as well as the incarnation of masculine privilege in a context marked by women’s aspiration to claim their share of the authority that comes with education and the degrees that formally recognize it. If only the novel continued to beat him up; if only he had to pay, not just for his violence against Daphne, but for his regressive attitudes and his sheer, unmitigated meanness — and by that I mean, for things like being angry at Daphne for fainting during an ‘at home’ he insists on her hosting at short notice even though she is heavily pregnant and generally unwell and unhappy. If only Daphne had grabbed the poker during the miserable confrontation and struck him down, instead of being struck down herself … or if only Daphne and Virginia had united against him and formed the kind of genuinely mutual friendship Brittain and Holtby had, settling in together to raise Jack into a different kind of man than his father (in the true Bronte tradition, crippling him at birth would have been a helpful step in that direction).

But The Dark Tide offers neither complex realist analysis of the social conditions (and conditioning) that lead both Raymond and Daphne to act as they do, leaving us productively dissatisfied, nor a feminist revenge fantasy. Instead, it turns into a weird treatise on the value of self-sacrifice, leaving me worried that Brittain has been influnced too much by my least favourite aspect of George Eliot’s moral philosophy: the imperative articulated in The Mill on the Floss that “the responsibility of tolerance lies with those of wider vision.” At the end of the novel Virginia talks for nearly three pages about the greatness of Daphne’s decision not to divorce Raymond, on the grounds that “It’s never for the people who deserve it that we’re called upon to sacrifice ourselves”:

No, it’s for the weak and the wicked and the undeserving that we have to give things up. Look at the lives of people like doctors and nurses; more than half their days are spent on patients whose diseases are due to their own sins and follies.  Look at the teachers of boys and girls in schools; they don’t wear out their gifts and their energy on the brilliant and the ambitious, who’d get along all right without any teachers at all. No; they give their best work to the lazy and the backward and the stupid, who either can’t or won’t learn. Just in the same way the clergyman in a slum parish spends al his time and thought on the people who drink and swear, and beat their wives, or are unfaithful to their husbands. . . . You’re one of them now, Daphne, one of the children of the Kingdom, who because they save others lose the chance to save themselves.

Yeesh again, I’m afraid, first of all because this long speech really comes out of nowhere. I wouldn’t declare absolutely that no character ought to speak for three pages straight, even didactically: there might be a right time and place for it, a right novel, the right novelist. But surely the speech ought to feel organically part of the novel, something that everything else in the novel has prepared us to hear, and if The Dark Tide is about the beauty of self-sacrifice on behalf of the wicked and undeserving, this is the first we’ve seen of it. It seems telling that Daphne’s not convinced, also – but I don’t sense that Brittain is using the gap between Virginia’s conviction and Daphne’s disappointment to do anything in particular except continue distinguishing between them as characters, at Daphne’s expense as usual.

The sudden introduction of what seems a new theme, and the intrusive and inartistic way it is handled are both reasons to object to this part of the novel. An equally good, if not better, reason is that the doctrine is so ethically problematic. If the better are always to serve the needs and interests of the worst, doesn’t that mean that in the end, the wicked win? What’s the long-term good of self-sacrifice that serves only to prop up someone like Raymond? It’s enabling, that’s what it is! It’s exalting within limits, perhaps, and it may even be theoretically necessary, because if you put your own needs first, you blur the line between yourself and the undeserving. But it lets the bad guys win. George Eliot is uneasy about this too: think of Lydgate, whose better nature makes him tend to Rosamond at the cost of his own highest aspirations. What’s sad there is that precisely because he is the better person, he has no real choice. The same is true of Dorothea’s promise to Casaubon: she has to say yes, or she wouldn’t be Dorothea. It’s her best self that leads her to the brink of a sacrifice we all (including her) know he does not deserve. Eliot rescues Dorothea by killing off Casaubon, saving us all from the misery of watching Dorothea live out the consequences of her own moral elevation. The novel in which she does that would be utterly disheartening. If Viriginia is speaking for Brittain in The Dark Tide, she seems quite prepared to inflict such a doctrine on her character, but it’s impossible to believe Brittain would have accepted such terms for Holtby in real life.

Overall, it’s a strange, puzzling, annoying, unsatisfying novel. What it is not, on my reading, is what Bostridge calls it: “an amusing period piece.” It’s far too dark for that. Brittain quotes a contemporary review of it that concludes “Some day she may write a good book.” That seems fair. A Dark Tide is not a good book, but there’s something about it (including quite a powerful section about Daphne’s growing isolation and self-awareness in the early weeks of her marriage) that tells us the writer has a good book in her.

My tremendous writings — not!

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I got a spam comment here today that made me laugh:

Hey, you used to write great, but the last several posts have been kinda boring… I miss your tremendous writings. Past several posts are just a little out of track! come on!

Usually the spammers use honey rather than vinegar in their attempts to get us to click through and buy a little of what they are selling; this crew probably thinks that if they rile us up, we’ll come after them–and then they’ll have us! But it also made me laugh because it’s a little close to the mark: posting has been slow around here, though I do hope that what has gone up is not terribly “out of track.” It’s not that I’m not reading. I finished two Spenser novels over the weekend, for instance, part of my look back at the earlier ones in the series. Mortal Stakes seems to me particularly good, because it sets up and then challenges the moral terms on which Spenser pursues his code (which, as he notes, does not work in this instance). Looking for Rachel Wallace is interesting in different ways: again, it features Spenser coming up against some of his limitations, but in this case they are ideological more than ethical: Rachel Wallace is a “radical” feminist Spenser is hired to, but fails to, protect, an while he has to make up for his initial insistence on overriding her decisions in service of his chivalric standards (which leads her to fire him, leaving her to be kidnapped), she also has to confront her own inability to defend herself. Both are zippy reading and good, stylish examples of their kind. But I chose them to read because they fit well into the interstices of my other weekend projects, and so writing them up in detail was beside the point.

The other books I’m reading will almost certainly get their own proper posts, but I have to finish them first! One is Our Mutual Friend, which I am rereading after a gap of more than 20 years. It’s great. It’s also long! And I’ve been interrupting it with other things, including Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, which I am puttering along at times when concentrating on Dickens is not realistic. The Rest is Noise is fascinating, but I can’t altogether get past the frustration of its not being a hypertext edition with music samples. (There’s a companion blog, but coordinating reading with being online and listening has not proved practicable.) Reading about music without listening to it is like reading about food without eating any — or substitute your choice of sensory activities that are best experienced directly! Still, it’s making me curious about music I never wanted to listen to before, and it’s lucid, lively, and full of great anecdotes. Finally, Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide just arrived via “document delivery” (in my day, we called it “interlibrary loan”) and the lending library has given me only until September 7th, so I thought I’d best get right to that. No point imagining a seminar for 2012-13 on the Somerville novelists if I haven’t actually tested the charm of the idea against the reality of their novels, after all, and South Riding is not a very big sample.

So. I’ll have more tremendous writings up again soon, I promise.