Year: 2011

Monday Miscellany: Getting My House in Order, Course Prep, & LA Review of Books

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

In part, I mean “getting my house in order” quite literally, in the sense that much of my time in the past week has been spent sorting out a household problem of the most unexciting kind. It sounds simple enough: some time ago our dryer began catching items in its edges and scorching them – not a good thing! So I finally set up a “service call” and, after warning me that if he even stepped across the threshold he’d have to charge me at least the minimum for the visit and it might not be worth it for a dryer that is over a decade old, the nice man from Sears diagnosed the problem, “costed” the parts and repairs, and left us convinced that we didn’t want to fix the thing because to do so would cost very nearly as much as a new dryer. And a new dryer, of course, instead of developing yet more expensive problems, would actually be under warranty. And it might (technological advances being what they are) actually dry clothes more efficiently. Thus was launched the great Washer-and-Dryer quest of 2011 — washer too, because our old set was ‘stackers,’ a decision by our home’s previous owner that had seemed odd to us until we started looking for alternatives that would actually fit inside the closet where the laundry hook-ups are. Hours of internet research followed, and then multiple phone calls and then trips to stores (tape measure in hand, eventually, because it turns out you can’t trust the information you find on the internet!). It’s such a boring thing to spend so much time on, and yet it’s just the kind of thing you don’t want to screw up because you need the darned things to work, preferably for years. It’s a boring thing to write about, too! And this is just the kind of thing that gets the snide hashtag #firstworldproblems on Twitter…so I’ll stop, except to say that our new, pretty basic but, we hope, efficient and effective (and non-scorching) set arrives on Saturday. As most of the appliances in our house are at least that old or older, I fear we are living on borrowed time, especially with our cook-top and oven (original, I believe, with the house, which was built in the late 1980s). I promise not to keep you up to date.

I’ve also been getting things in order at work. A couple of weeks ago I laid out the tasks I need to get done to be ready for the start of classes in September: Blackboard sites, course syllabi, and other assorted paperwork and preparation. At this point I am happy to say the syllabi are ready for all three of my fall courses, including details about course requirements and policies, and, most important, full schedules of readings and assignments. I’ll give these one more thorough examination before I make them official, but I don’t expect to change anything major. I’ve also prepared the Blackboard sites for all three courses. I won’t be using these sites for much besides organization and storage of course materials except for in one class, where we will use the discussion boards for questions and responses. Even so, it takes a lot of tedious work to put the various pieces in place, including setting up and testing links to a range of online resources, uploading handouts, and so forth. There are some bits and pieces I still need to draw up, including study questions for novels I haven’t taught before, and I’ll keep puttering away at those, but those can be added easily enough now that the overall system of tools and folders is in place. I do hate Blackboard: every step is so laborious. But it is helpful having course information centralized in this way as well. I know we don’t have the latest version. I can’t say I’ve found the most recent upgrades improvements, but maybe the next level will give us a more intuitive interface and even (dare I dream?) drag-and-drop capabilities. Though I’m not completely finished with class preparation, there are some things it never makes sense to do very far ahead of time (like actual lecture notes, which I find need to be pretty fresh to be useful), and the panic I was feeling at the beginning of the month has more or less abated.

As for my other work, there too I am getting things in order. I’m actually caught up right now on thesis chapters to read. That won’t last – I expect not only another Ph.D. installment this week but an entire M.A. thesis, for which I am serving as 3rd reader. I must make the most of this little lull and … work some more on my conference presentation for Birmingham! I finished a first full draft version of the Prezi I was building for it (if it even makes sense to talk of a “draft” of something as malleable as a Prezi). Looking at it this weekend I felt that I had found pretty much all the pieces I wanted to include (the accompanying commentary, of course, is what will make it all intelligible, or so I hope) but it still seemed kind of linear and unimaginative given what you can actually do with Prezi’s layout options — it looks as if I took PowerPoint slides, shuffled them up a bit, and laid them out on the table in related clusters. I’m going to spend some time working on my speaking notes separately now, and then go back to the Prezi and tighten it up. I’ve been looking at some of the samples on the Prezi site (like this astronomy one: cool!) and getting a sense of how you can use the zooming functions and the multi-directional layout options more creatively to end up with a presentation that lets you step back and display the big picture as well as come in close and explore the details. In the end, of course, what matters most is that your audience understand your points and the relationship between them. What I have been appreciating about Prezi is that it lets me think about those relationships and play with them right there on the ‘canvas,’ muttering to myself as I go. I know that in PowerPoint you can shuffle slides around, but the slides themselves are both harder to set up and fussier to change than the Prezi, where you literally just slide things around. That said, I definitely want to do a trial run in one of our classrooms that has its own ‘desktop’ computer and a data projector, to check how what I see on my own computer translates to that technology. I think I’m also going to prepare a simple PowerPoint version: the conference organizers have told us to bring PPT presentations on memory sticks to use in the conference rooms, and even though I have double-checked that the available computers will have internet access (which should be all I need to run the Prezi right from the Prezi site), I don’t want to be caught short by some factor I haven’t anticipated. The conference program is up and it looks like it will be a very full three days of sessions. With my departure now only two weeks away, I am starting to feel my usual pre-travel jitters, which I will keep in check by focusing on planning. I’ve just started looking more attentively into trains from London to Birmingham, for instance. Both prices and times for the trip seem to vary enormously. Oh dear: something else to fret about!

In other news, I don’t think I ever mentioned here specifically that the piece I wrote on Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series ran on the Los Angeles Review of Books site on August 5th (link). I’m really impressed at what the folks there have accomplished in what seems like a very short time (though I realize a lot of work went on in preparation for the launch even of this temporary site!), and also at their larger ambitions for the review, which reflect a deep commitment to but also a welcome optimism about books and book culture. If you haven’t been paying attention to them, one piece that is well worth reading because of the way it contextualizes their efforts is editor-in-chief Tom Lutz’s “Future Tense.”  Among the many interesting things he says is this, about their editors and contributors: “Many of us are also supported, as I am, by our universities (however much they, too, are shrinking and under siege), and so we can write and edit ‘for free’ as part of our commitment to the dissemination of knowledge that is integral to that job.” As I noted briefly on Twitter, the kind of writing the LA Review of Books represents is not the kind that is usually required or rewarded by universities (I bet most if not all of the academics who are heavily involved in this experiment in knowledge dissemination are tenured), so if they are indeed being encouraged by their institutions to proceed, that’s a promising sign that at least some administrators understand that there are more ways to use academics’ time and expertise than specialized, peer-reviewed publication.

I’ve been taking kind of a mini-sabbatical from Open Letters Monthly, partly to make sure I concentrated on my ‘must-do’ tasks, partly just to regroup and think about my priorities over there, including how best to balance them against the upcoming term, which promises to be one of my busiest in a while. I haven’t forgotten the essay on Richard III, gender, and genre, but my motivation for it rather sagged, especially given how esoteric it is, really — except for my own quirky interest in it, I couldn’t see the point of it, and it’s certainly not time-sensitive, unlike other work I’ve been doing. I’ll take a fresh look at it when my informal leave of absence is over and see if I feel excited about finishing it, and also if, on sober second thought, it seems like something anyone else would want to read! I also need to be ready to steer a couple of incoming pieces from other contributors through for the September issue, so I hope to be re-energized and back in the editing business soon. Watching the LARB take off has prompted some reflections on how we fit into the broader context Lutz describes: as Ed Champion remarks in his response to Lutz’s essay, there is a pretty extensive array of online review publications already, including OLM. (As a side note, following on the issue of how academics might fit into the ‘new’ order, one of the comments at EdRants says “Perhaps the kind of long-form book reviewing that was the rule in the old print world should be gathered into the fold of academia, and it seems like the LA Review of Books model might be the thin end of the wedge here.” The more I think about these issues, the more they seem to deserve a separate post, as they open up all kinds of questions, including about the role of academics in the wider world of books and reviewing – which were, of course, some of the questions that were most on my mind when I first began blogging.)

And now, I must go put some laundry in, as our old set leaves tomorrow and though the four-day interval before the new ones arrive may not seem like much, it’s not negligible with a teenaged boy in the house! Then I’ll settle in to address the next things on my to-do list.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It was very interesting and somewhat disorienting reading The Last September so soon after Farrell’s Troubles. On the one hand, they inevitably have a lot in common. On the other hand, you almost wouldn’t know it, they are so different in tone, with Farrell’s novel so dry and yet violent, and Bowen’s so indirect and yet humming with emotional disquiet. Probably because I was better prepared for it, I didn’t find Bowen’s prose as difficult as I did with The Heat of the Day. The Last September is 20 years earlier, too, so perhaps Bowen was still discovering how she wanted her sentences to work – or what kind of (or how much!) work she wanted them to be for her readers. Still, they have the same tendency to break up or wander away before coming back around to their main parts, and as in the later novel, that sense of interference between our attention and the point prevents us from imagining that the point is, itself, in any way direct or obvious.

The title evokes a moment,  and that’s how the whole novel feels, poised on the edge of something. Lois, whose novel it mostly is, is poised on the edge of adulthood: it’s her last September as a girl, though at the same time she is already not a girl even though she hasn’t defined herself, or claimed her identity, as a woman. Those around her impede her development, offering her no meaningful guidance into what it would mean for her, or could look like for her, to move beyond her current unformed, unsettled self. “What they never see,” she says near the end, “is, that I must do something.” That desire to claim an occupation, even as she cannot see what it might be, puts in her in good company: inevitably, I thought of Dorothea (“What could she do, what ought she to do?”). In some ways Lois’s situation seems even worse than Dorothea’s, despite her being more modern, because Lois has not even an imaginative ideal to motivate her. Though Dorothea’s yearnings and fantasies of a noble life only get her in trouble, at least she has a sense of nobility, an aspiration. I guess that’s part of what marks her, and her novel, as Victorian.

Lois’s world too is poised on the brink: the novel is suffused with the threat of violence, but because it is kept so much more on the periphery than in Troubles, it is more shocking when it finally intrudes unequivocally. The tensions run throughout, and reports of “incidents” trickle through, but Lady Naylor’s attitude explains how the novel will treat them: “From all the talk, you might think almost anything was going to happen, but we never listen. I have made it a rule not to talk, either.” Neither not listening nor not talking is a useful or realistic strategy, of course, and inevitably the margins become the center of the story, though Bowen holds them off until nearly the very end.

I was surprised to find myself chuckling at many points in the novel. I don’t remember finding any humor in The Heat of the Day (though it’s possible I just wasn’t attuned to it). The absurdity of the denial exhibited by some of the characters provides from some wry amusement, but there were also moments that made me think of Wilde. “We must seem ridiculous to you, over here,” Lady Naylor says to young Gerald Lesworth, “the way we are all related”:

“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at all; that must feel so independent.”

“I have dozens.”

“Indeed? All in Surrey?”

“Scattered about.”

“That sounds to me, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless.”

The prose also, while occasionally convoluted to a point past patience, very frequently gave me a frisson of readerly pleasure – on nearly every page I marked a passage or sentence that I lingered over because I wanted to, not because I had to to make sense of it. A couple of examples:

Recollections of Laura were now wiped for him from the startlingly green valley, leaving the scene dull. Not a turn of the rocks with the river, not a break-down of turf along the brink, not the Norman keep with perishing corners (where they leaned and quarrelled till Laura had wished aloud it would fall on them) gave back to him what they had taken of that eroding companionship. He and she might never have come here; they were disowned. The sharp rocks breaking out from the turf, the impassive speed of the water, were naked and had to be seen as themselves, in some relation excluding him; like country seen from the train, without past or future. And, having given proof of her impotence to be even here, Laura shrank and drew in her nimbus, leaving only – as in some rediscovered diary of a forgotten year – a few cryptic records, walks, some appointments kept, letters received and posted.

Bowen is brilliant here, I think, about the complicated way memory and association, psychology and emotion, affect our relationship to landscape. And here’s a little bit that is more simply poetic:

An escape of sunshine, penetrating the pale sky in the south-west, altered the room like a revelation. Noiselessly, a sweet-pea moulted its petals on to the writing-table, leaving a bare pistil. The pink butterfly flowers, transparently balancing, were shadowed faintly with blue as by an intuition of death.

 

Jane Smiley, Private Life

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Back when I was doing my survey of ‘books about books,’ one of the best I read was Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, which I admired for its balance of elegance and erudition. My relationship with her fiction, however, has been both limited and not so happy. I read A Thousand Acres and remember finding it compelling, but that was in the dark days before blogging, so I have only vague memories and nothing to consult to remind me why, or how far, it worked for me. I picked up Moo at Doull’s more recently (but still not recently enough to have blogged it, it turns out), and though it sounded like something I would enjoy, I ended up putting it aside unfinished. It’s not that it wasn’t well told, but that (as I recall) it turned out to be arch, and that became irritating. I don’t mind funny, or ironic, or wry, but I like my humor underwritten with sincerity, and so arch is not for me. When I came across Private Life while browsing in a bookstore last weekend, I’m not sure what instinct prompted me to take a closer look. I think I read at least one review of it, when it was freshly out, that suggested it was more my kind of book than Moo and that had stuck somewhere in the musty bookshelves of my mind. Anyway, I did examine it, it did look good, and so I bought it, and I finished it this morning very glad I had given it a chance, because it’s excellent.

Private Life is formally unassuming, even old-fashioned: it proceeds by direct,  methodical exposition, without even much extended dialogue. We are just given one sentence after another as we follow our group of characters across a span of history marked with major public, “world-historical” events including the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the First World War, and then, as the book concludes, the Second World War. Our perspective is almost exclusively that of Margaret Mayfield, a bookish girl from Missouri who grows into what looks like certain spinsterhood until she attracts the notice of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an eccentric astronomer. They marry and move to California, where Andrew tends to a small observatory at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo. In their marriage, he is very much the larger force, which only gradually comes to seem not just unnatural but unjust and insupportable to Margaret. It’s not a novel of rebellion and liberation, however, but a patient account of Margaret’s experiences, particularly as her wifely allegiance to Andrew is tested against his mania for scientific theorizing and his incessant demands that she serve as amanuensis, secretary, and chauffeur. Margaret is naturally self-effacing, to the point of often feeling herself a spectator at events in her own life. That and her learned expectation that a wife subordinates her interests and time to her husband’s make her disillusionment a slow process, but also an especially painful one, as despite her eventual realization that she is married to an absurdity, she cannot, or will not, repudiate him, even though one consequence of his near-delusional thinking is that he accuses Japanese friends of hers of spying, leading to their arrest and internment.

At one level the novel is just what the title suggests: a story of private life. But it also artfully evokes the complex interplay between that individual experience and the broader narrative of history. It tells an alternative history of America from 1883 to 1942 that makes everyday life and, more particularly, women’s lives central and thus renders more traditional historical subjects peripheral. Thus Smiley contributes to the history of those who “rest in unvisited tombs,” who get through every day and do nothing spectacular, nothing that gets reported or documented – who do nothing except live as best they can in the circumstances they meet. One theme of the novel is that “just living” is not as easy as it sounds, something we all know, in our own ways. Margaret’s sister-in-law Dora, whose life as a reporter involves her much more directly in the turbulence of the public world, eventually writes a column called “My Life Didn’t Prepare Me For This,” a title that resonates with Margaret: “Dora was writing about the mysteries of the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. Margaret was thinking about everything in the whole world.”

The “private life” of the title also refers more specifically to Margaret’s experience: though we know she develops a circle of superficial friends through her knitting circles and card playing afternoons and charity work, she does not share her intimate life – her thoughts, her dreams, her emotions – with any of them. Even through the agonizing and beautifully told death of her only child, her grief is controlled and internalized; much later, when she finally speaks about it to a friend who becomes, briefly, her lover, she breaks down and weeps, relieving us, too, of some pent-up emotion. The novel’s impact depends on the strength of these reserved feelings, on our awareness that Margaret is capable of much more than she is saying or doing. “There are so many things I should have dared before this,” she says bitterly at the novel’s end.

Smiley sets Margaret’s intensely personal experience of life up against her husband’s preoccupation with the universe in general. One exemplary (and also quietly profound) sequence focuses on Margaret’s discovery of a family of coots on a nearby pond. Margaret returns again and again to the pond to watch the chicks growing under the watchful eyes of their parents. Finding beauty and tranquility in this tiny piece of nature, she brings her friend Mr Kimura to the pond to paint them (the resulting scroll painting becomes an important symbol for her of what she actually loves and values, and also of what she is unable save or achieve in the world). Returning from one of her visits, overwraught with her realization that the chicks are being preyed on, their numbers slowly diminishing, she finds Andrew obsessing as usual over “larger” issues. “It seemed to her that if he said the word ‘universe,’ she really would scream,” she reflects. “The universe, of course, was the very thing that circled around those chicks, vast and senseless.” Margaret feels the largeness of things as oppressive. Andrew, in contrast, believes passionately in the theory that the universe, far from being empty, is filled entirely with “ether.” In fact (as Margaret sees by this point) what fills it, or at least fills his consciousness of it, is his own ego: Andrew’s “life force” is endless, ceaseless, overpowering; it crowds Margaret so that she always happy when he leaves the house. His supreme self-confidence makes him a poor scientist, more determined to prove himself right than to pursue the truth. There is perhaps something too neat in the way Smiley divides up her fictional universe between the hyper-masculine, monomaniacal, ultimately delusional, but also pathetic Andrew and the passive, inward-looking, domesticated Margaret: they are emblems of a gendered division of attention that reflects a historical division of education and labour but also repeats a version of the ‘separate spheres’ myth reflected throughout so many 19th-century texts – and rejected so eloquently in, say, Aurora Leigh. I longed for Margaret to fling off her opressive but also just plain annoying husband with Aurora’s cry, “I too have my vocation, work to do!” But there’s more Dorothea than Aurora in Margaret (and plenty of Mr Casaubon in Andrew, though in a louder, more clanging register), absent the moral yearning that makes Dorothea’s mistakes heroic, but with the same moral paralysis inflicted by an essential generosity that makes it near impossible to admit, to her friends and family much less to Andrew, that she knows perfectly well he is a fool. Smiley’s answer to the problem of such essentializing views of gender and gender roles is not to defy them by creating a modern heroine to satisfy us, but to guide us towards recognizing the heroism in surviving Margaret’s life.

What matters more, public life or private? Private Life builds towards the commonplace but still uneasy idea that the two are never truly distinct. History happens to the people in the novel in the form of cataclysms and catastrophes  – earthquakes, fires, assassinations, bombings. But at the same time the people in the novel are the ones making history. Smiley’s novel works in the tradition of social historians and women’s historians, blurring the boundaries between public and private or around the definition of “event.” What is the San Francisco earthquake, after all, as a historical event, but the accumulation of stories of people who lived through it, suffered during it, or died from it? What is the “event” we call “Japanese-American internment” but the actions of all those who conceived of, contributed to, and carried out this shameful policy, as Andrew contributes to it by writing paranoid letters that lead to the arrest and internment of the Kimuras? Private Life proceeds quietly, but it pulses between these levels of engagement and lets Margaret, so quiet herself that it is an effort for her to speak, be fully herself and yet much more than just a woman in private.

Not Quite Cricket: Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Murder Must Advertise is my fourth favourite Dorothy Sayers novel, after Gaudy Night (first, of course!), Busman’s Honeymoon, and Strong Poison and Have His Carcase (tied at third, because though neither of them is as good as I could wish, both do have Harriet Vane, and that’s such a lot for any novel to have). Harriet is around, in Murder Must Advertise, though never seen; she’s mentioned, very briefly, as Peter Wimsey heads off to “keep his date with the one young woman who showed no signs of yielding to him.” Though, as Sayers blithely remarks, “what he said or did on that occasion is in no way related to this story,” one reason Murder Must Advertise is as good as it is, is that Sayers wrote it after reinventing Peter as a character worthy of Harriet.*

Murder Must Advertise is a clever mystery, with plenty of clues and threads to amuse the devoted puzzle solvers among us. I’m not one of those, myself: I almost never try to figure out whodunit, which is probably why I am so comfortable with the police procedural as a form (no use trying to solve the crime before the police have collected all the evidence, after all), and the interest I do take in the crime and its solution is almost entirely the result of (or proportional to) the interest I take in the characters, setting, and situation of the novel — which is certainly why my preferred mystery writers are those who lavish care and detail on these elements: P. D. James, Elizabeth George, Ian Rankin. As I’ve often remarked here, I’m not really a fan of mystery novels as such. When I really like a mystery, I like it as a novel: I read it with the same attention and attitude as any other novel. The mystery just provides the skeleton, as a marriage plot provides the underlying structure of many other novels, or some version of the Bildungsroman the basic outline of yet more. In some cases, there’s too little flesh on the bone: when the generic framework is too exposed, covered in only the thinnest pretense of novelistic substance, I lose interest. At other times, I get frustrated when the mystery intrudes on the other aspects of the novel–or I wish the characters could escape for a while from their form and just get on with their lives! I love Gaudy Night because for me, it integrates its mystery perfectly – both structurally and thematically – with the other aspects of the novel. Sayers too thought it was something pretty special.

Murder Must Advertise is a very different book than Gaudy Night, much more satirical in tone and digressive (or, perhaps, experimental) in style. It seems to me to have its own thematic unities, though, arising from – or making apt – its setting in an advertising agency (a setting Sayers knew about first-hand). It’s a novel about money, I think, more than anything, and more specifically about the relationship between money and class, and between money and consumption, and how both of these are related, as means and motivators, to aspiration. It’s a satire on the folly of believing you can buy everything you want, from health to happiness, and it’s an exposé of the ruthlessness with which some people will feed and profit from that dream:

All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING – NUTRAX FOR NERVES – CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER – EAT PIPER PARRITCH – DRINK POMPAYNE – ONE WHOOSH AND IT’S CLEAN – OH, BOY! IT’S TOMBOY TOFFEE – NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX – FARLEY’S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER – IT ISN’T DEAR, IT’S DARLING – DARLING’S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES – MAKE ALL SAFE WITH SANFECT – WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER – ASK YOUR DOCTOR – ASK THE MAN WHO’S TRIED IT – MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN – HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY – HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES – WOMEN! DO YOU REALISE? DON’T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different. Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going – and if you can’t  Try Nutrax for Nerves!

 The device of putting the über-aristocratic Peter Wimsey undercover at Pym’s Advertising Agency allows for some comic fish-out-of-water material in the early chapters, but the situation gets darker and more complicated as we see and feel – and Lord Peter sees and feels – the difference between his “ordinary” life and the realities of life for his colleagues at the office (and, just by the way, the novel is also an astute and sardonic portrait of office life and politics). It’s a harmless game to him at first, a pleasant charade laden with unthinking condescension:

‘So you have become one of the world’s workers, Peter,’ said Lady Mary.

‘Yes; I’m pulling down four solid quid a week. Amazin’ sensation. First time I’ve ever earned a cent. Every week when I get my pay-envelope, I glow with honest pride.’

Even Lord Peter seems surprised at how far he is transformed by his experience, which initially he is able to shrug off with ease:

In a taxi rolling south-west, Mr Bredon removed his spectacles, combed out his side-parting, stuck a monocle in his eye, and by the time he reached Piccadilly Circus was again Lord Peter Wimsey. With a vacant wonder he gazed upon the twinkling sky-signs, as though, ignorant astronomer, he knew nothing of the creative hands that had set these lesser lights to rule the night.

He is drawn into his new identity, however, by the simple necessity of having to do the job of writing advertising copy. It’s work for which, with his literary education and natural wit, he is actually well suited, despite being one of the people for whom (as he notes at one point to his brother-in-law Chief Inspector Parker) advertisement “does not exist,”people who are “not of the advertising sort”  – that is, he’s above either the lure of or the need for advertising by virtue of already having, or being able to afford, whatever he wants. He becomes fascinated by the cycle of yearning and imagining and manufacturing and advertising and selling and buying that sends money around and around in the modern world:

If this hell’s-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetising dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realised the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built on, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

Far from bringing some kind of other-worldly values into play to challenge or even trip up this “vast superstructure,” he is drawn into it, ultimately initiating a great advertising “scheme” that anticipates today’s AirMiles-type points plans: “Whiffling Round Britain.” He has just hit upon the basic idea for this plan and “written the word ‘WHIFFLE’ in capital letters an inch high” on his scratch paper when a call comes from CI Parker asking him to call him at the Yard: “Lord Peter Wimsey was so intimately in the skin of Mr Death Bredon that he said ‘Damn!’ loudly and heartily.” He’s frustrated when a turn in the case makes it impossible for him to return to work: “But that won’t do. I’ve got to get that Whifflets campaign finished. Armstrong wants it particularly. And besides, I’ve got interested in the thing.”

But of course it’s a temp job for him, a fling; when it’s done, he understands something else about how the world turns, but it’s not until Gaudy Night that he is really forced to confront the limits of what his wealth can buy, and the challenge it poses to creating equal relationships. Harriet hates his wealth and the power it gives him. The mystery at Pym’s, in contrast, turns on the need for money, on the insidious way just the kinds of desires stoked by advertising can lead someone into debt, then erode their moral fiber as they struggle to conceal and protect their position. “You don’t know, Bredon – Wimsey – you don’t know what it is to be stuck for money,” the murderer says during his painful confession; “you marry and start paying for your house and furniture, and you must keep up the instalments…” His need for money made him vulnerable, and he became involved with a ruthless ring of drug smugglers, who connect the Pym’s storyline to another in a world at once remote and fundamentally similar, full of people whose yearning for amusement and distraction make them eager customers, with different but no less damaging results. Round and round it all goes, and there’s always someone there making a profit, turning someone else’s weakness or fantasy to their advantage. “We want to get women down to serious smoking,” kindly Mr Pym says as they prepare to launch the Whifflet campaign. “Too many of them play about with it. . . You can smoke a lot more [Whifflets] in the day without killing yourself. And they’re cheaper. If we increase women’s smokes by 500 per cent – there’s plenty of room for it – ”

Wimsey’s presence at Pym’s, then, lets Sayers go a little bit ‘Mork and Mindy’ on the advertising world, but also on the world it serves, both those who produce its goods and services and those who consume them. Wimsey’s class sets him outside this “desperate whirligig.” The novel does not seem to me to be interested in fiercely critiquing his position of privilege, but the juxtaposition of his pampered life with Bunter in the Piccadilly flat with the goings-on at Pym’s certainly exposes that privilege, and along with it, Wimsey’s casual superiority in pretty much every respect (looks, wit, education, clothing) as accidents of circumstance. “I could be a good woman if I had £5000 a year,” reflects Becky Sharp, and what special virtue can Wimsey claim for himself, never having faced the kind of petty catastrophes that come with being “stuck for money”? And yet if there is an underlying moral code at play in Murder Must Advertise, I think it is what might be called the “public school code,” something to do with fair play and honor, that’s central to Wimsey’s character and identity.  “I suppose that’s . . . the public school way out of it,” says the murderer, as he braces himself for what Wimsey presents as his best alternative, the only way he can extricate himself from the situation without leaving a legacy of scandal and shame for his wife and new baby. Their exchange refers us back to an earlier debate at the office about which schools really count as “public” schools, and whether it matters where someone was educated. There’s a painful self-consciousness on all sides about how schools act as class indicators, with those who went to Harrow and Eton (and perhaps Winchester, “a decentish sort of place . . . if you’re not too particular”) downplaying the significance of it all: “if only you people could get it out of your heads that these things matter a damn, you’d be a darn sight happier,” as “Mr Bredon” says. “I am quite aware,” Mr Smayle later says irately to Mr Tallboys,

that I never was at a public school, but that is no reason why I shouldn’t be treated with ordinary, common courtesy. And from those who have been to real public schools, I get it, what’s more. You may think a lot of Dumbleton, but it isn’t what I call a public school.

It’s all very well for Wimsey to take the signifiers of class so lightly, but only someone in his position can imagine that class doesn’t matter. Perhaps, also, only someone in his position can imagine that it shouldn’t matter. After all, he’s already in the class people like Smayle and Tallboys assume (correctly) has all the advantages. Lord Peter, though “not of the advertising sort” himself, is an advertising fantasy for everyone else: he embodies and lives their aspirations. He both is and has what they want.

This, I think, is where the cricket match becomes particularly interesting. I’ve been thinking about the relevance of the cricket match ever since a careless question about it at a recent Ph.D. exam I was involved in. Though I know next to nothing about cricket, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed the cricket chapter in this novel. It’s brilliantly told, with lots of energetic detail; all the various Pym’s people play their part, and all the lurking tensions and resentments and all their hopes and fears give the actual cricket all kinds of human interest. The best part, though, is when Mr Death Bredon, who has planned to play an unobtrusive game that won’t give his own game away, that will give no sign of “the Peter Wimsey of twenty years back, making two centuries in successive innings for Oxford,” gets hit by a ball right on his funny-bone, at which point he “suddenly and regrettably forgot himself”: “He forgot his caution and his role, and Mr Miller’s braces, and saw only the green turf and the Oval on a sunny day and the squat majesty of the gasworks. The next ball was another of Simmonds’s murderous short-pitched bumpers, and Lord Peter Wimsey, opening up wrathful shoulders, strode out of his crease like the spirit of vengeance and whacked it to the wide.” What follows is pure sport, pure fun, and total exposure, as old Mr Brotherhood corners him: “Aren’t you Wimsey of Balliol? . . . You have a late cut which is exceedingly characteristic, and I could have taken my oath that the last time I saw you play it was at Lord’s in 1911, when you made 112.” An elaborate cover-up follows, but Wimsey’s double-life is over, the suspect is warned, and the sordid, unhappy conclusion follows soon after.

I suppose not everyone would necessarily enjoy the cricket match for its own sake the way I always have, but there’s no doubt that it plays a crucial role in the novel by bringing everything to this crisis point. But why do this through a cricket match? I actually think my colleague, in spite of himself, was asking a very important question about the central premises of Murder Must Advertise. One place to start with an answer is, again, with money and class, and also with national identity. Is there any game more English than cricket, for one thing? Or any sport more strongly associated, historically at least, with the British public schools like Eton and Harrow (which have held an annual match since 1805)? To play well (to show up in the right ‘flannels,’ even) is to stand up for something, or to stand out as something – something that seems, from the slipshod performance of most of the Pym’s players, to be out of date or out of reach. Cricket represents one form of aspiration for everyone involved, but it’s a backward-looking, nostalgic kind, a yearning for a certain vision of themselves, maybe even their country. Then there’s the more general idea of sports. “I can’t help feeling,” Mr Hankin remarks to Bredon, “that the cultivation of the team spirit would do this office good.” “Evidently, thought Bredon, Mr Hankin had realised that something was on the breaking point.” He too is struck by the uneasy contrast between the ideals Pym’s peddles (“EVERYONE EVERWHERE ALWAYS AGREES ON THE FLAVOUR AND VALUE OF TWENTYMAN’S TEAS”) and the realities:

In this place, where from morning till night a staff of over a hundred people hymned the praises of thrift, virtue, harmony, eupepsia and domestic contentment, the spiritual atmosphere was clamorous with financial storm, intrigue, dissension, indigestion, and marital infidelity. And with worse things – with murder wholesale and retail, of soul and body, murder by weapon and by poison. These things did not advertise, or if they did, they called themselves by other names.

At Pym’s, Wimsey goes around as something besides his best self. He plays at indifference, callousness, even crass commercialism – plays so well he finds himself becoming the man he pretends to be. Rapped on his funny-bone by a fast pitch, he breaks out of this adaptive inferiority, casting off “Mr Death Bredon” and appearing in his full glory as “Lord Peter Wimsey.” His class, in other words, re-asserts itself – and that, ultimately, is what begins the real process of restoring order and achieving justice. The revelation of Wimsey’s real identity brings the murderer to his flat; his moral authority sends the weaker, poorer man out to meet his dark but welcome fate: “We’ll show ’em that [we] can achieve the Eton touch. Why not?” It’s a grim and dubious responsibility Wimsey takes on here: who is he, after all, to play judge and, if indirectly, executioner? Or, to look at it from a different aspect, who is he to urge a murderer to circumvent the due process of law? It’s the time-honoured privilege of the amateur detective, though, to act on principle, and also to decide which principle to act on. (“When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it,” Sam Spade intones in The Maltese Falcon.) “The first thing a principle does,” Lord Peter says in Gaudy Night, “is kill somebody,” and then later, “I admit the principle and the consequences must follow.” In that novel, the relevant – indeed, the central – principle is integrity of the mind. What principle holds the corresponding position in Murder Must Advertise? I’m tempted to say, cricket does. Cricket’s not a principle, you say? Well, it is when we use it metaphorically, as in “It’s not cricket,” which my trusty Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains means “It’s not done in a fair and sportsmanlike way.” That, as I understand it, is what is meant by “the public school way” too, and that’s the principle that the various criminals and liars and cheaters in the novel have violated by playing on others’ weaknesses. How far is advertising implicated in the same creeping kind of villainy? Not completely, I think – as Miss Meteyard says, “if we didn’t do it, what would happen to the trade of this country?” But just because avarice and envy drive the economy forward doesn’t make them any less morally debilitating.

And yet there’s something uncomfortably high-handed about Wimsey’s role in this case, and something disingenuous at best about letting an aristocratic fantasy figure set the tone in a morality play about the dangers of social aspiration. “I’m damned sorry, old chap,” he says at the end, and to be sure, he is, but he’s not remorseful, and he’s not in any significant way reformed or transformed: his wealth makes him immune to the petty temptations that have done so much damage. I suppose it’s only fair to acknowledge that it opens up other temptations to him, including the sybaritic pleasures that prove pretty destructive to the characters in the other plotline, such as the languidly decadent Dian de Momerie. But here too he interferes playfully, and though his interference has fatal results, he remains essentially above it all. Unlike the people who really work at Pym’s, Wimsey can walk away from the whirligig, away from the lives lost or ruined or changed because of his field trip into the working world. Now that doesn’t seem quite cricket to me! On the bright side, though, Wimsey isn’t entirely happy with the way things worked out either. “Lovely,” he says, “with a spice of bitterness in his tone,” when Chief Inspector Parker calls to report that the case is nearly all cleared up. “I don’t feel quite like celebrating.” He’s pretty pleased with the results of his Whifflet idea, though: “with a few idle words on a sheet of paper he had touched the lives of millions.”

*When I next get to my office I will complete this post with a quotation from her essay on Gaudy Night, in which she writes eloquently about this point. Funny how odd, and rare, it is to be foiled in mid-post by wanting a text I have only in hard copy and only in one location!

This Week in My Class Prep: Details, Details!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Sometime Sunday afternoon it really hit me that in just a few weeks I will be right back in the midst of teaching. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I’m looking forward to it, as I’ve said before. But I also need to be ready for it, and while I’ve been thinking about and in a general way preparing for next term since the beginning of my sabbatical in January, as classes approach the specifics get much more important. I have colleagues who refuse to do things like syllabi and Blackboard sites before the end of August–or, another way to put it, refuse to put aside their research, deferred (more or less) throughout the teaching year, until they must. I understand this attitude, and if I were in the midst of a deep, specialized research project I might feel the same. But I hate doing things at the last minute, and this year in particular I feel I need to be well organized in advance because I leave for England on August 29, not returning until September 5–with my first class of the term at 9:30 on September 9th. Imagine working on Blackboard sites while jet-lagged! No thanks. I want all the logistical stuff in order before I leave, so that when I get back I can get on with the readings and other actual content for the first class meetings. I’m sure I’ll miss (or need to change or fix) a few odds and ends, but here’s what’s on my to-do list:

  1. Blackboard sites. I’ve just completed one of three, for Mystery and Detective Fiction. This is the one that required the least revamping, since I taught the class not long ago and plan to use the same assignment sequence. Still, I’ve changed the reading list, so a lot of links had to be taken out or put in (I include a selection of links to related online content, such as author interviews or sites, topical blogs, etc.). Handouts needed to be updated – and in fact I still need to add new sets of discussion questions for the books now on the list for which I have no back-file of teaching materials. I haven’t put entries for each class meeting in the calendar tool yet (that’s an incredibly laborious task, but I think it’s probably worth it since it helps provide prompts to everyone, including me, about what we are supposed to do when). Basically, though, it’s up and running, and I’ve put in a request for the registered students to be given access to it, in the hopes that this will divert some of the inevitable emails about  the book list and so forth, and help students make up their mind about whether they want to stay in the course. (There’s a waiting list.) The two other sites are still pretty jumbled, but I can’t sort them out until I finish my work on …
  2. Course syllabi. Again, one of three is completed, but the other two are still in progress, because I’m still having debates with myself about which assignment sequences to use. Note that expression “assignment sequences”–this reflects my effort to think of course work as a set of interrelated tasks or projects, rather than as discrete exercises or displays, which is more or less how I approached things like term papers when I began teaching. I like to use small, low-stakes assignments (like in-class writing, journals, or question sets and responses) that let students learn and practise the kind of analysis that they will be expected to do in their larger, weightier assignments (papers, presentations, and/or exams). I wrote before about the letter exchanges I’ve used in my 19th-century novels courses. I am almost certain I will use it again this year, but based on the discussion on that post, I think I will give up on doing them electronically and revert to old-fashioned paper. I think. I’m reluctant, only because I had made a real commitment to going paperless and had appreciated many things about it. But I can see that in this particular case, having letters in hand might solve several of the logistical and technological problems that arose last time. Once I settle this for sure in my own mind, I can finish that syllabus up and get the Bb site sorted accordingly. I don’t think I have big decisions left to make for the upper-level seminar on the ‘woman question,’ but there I’m still sorting out the schedule so that there’s a reasonable rhythm between long and short texts, and a reasonable pattern for group presentations. Details, details.
  3. Course materials, research. Not everything has to be in hand by September, but the more notes and handouts I have filed away the less panic I will experience as the term rushes by! For books I have taught before, I have folders already stocked with old discussion questions, group exercises, lecture notes, and PPT slides. But this year I have added several all-new texts to the mystery class, so there in particular I feel I need to do some more advance work. I’ve got some articles downloaded on Walter Mosley, and I’ll read those as I reread Devil in a Blue Dress and work up some draft study questions. I also want to look around at the scholarship on Ed McBain, and on Sjowall and Wahloo, for The Terrorists. For all of these, I have some ideas already, of course, but I know I have more to learn. I may also need to read (or at least read about) Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, as Devil in a Blue Dress has been described as “a suggestive inversion (and perhaps an intentional critical parody” of that novel, at least in parts.
  4. Paperwork. Every year it seems I let myself be taken by surprise by administrative paperwork: attendance sheets and records, grade sheets, evaluation forms, sign-up sheets. Not this year! It’s true that the long add-drop period makes it desperately annoying handling attendance for the first two weeks of classes, but I can at least have the spreadsheets ready to paste the latest versions of the Registrar’s class lists into, and I can make some advance decisions about how to track and record those “little” assignments.

I have set up a ‘task list’ on my Google Calendar to get the anxiety under control: this kind of work is so cluttered, because it involves so many small and often moving parts!

Of course, before I leave for England I also need to have my conference talk prepared. I’ve been working on that, using Prezi, and I am really appreciating the way that Prezi lets me brainstorm and conceptualize the topics I want to cover and how they can be connected without committing me to the more elaborate and inflexible design process of PPT. And, last but not least, I didn’t get my Richard III-and-gender-and-genre piece in order for the August issue of Open Letters…so if I can, I’ll get that done before I leave as well. Oh, and the Ph.D. thesis chapters keep on coming in, and I’ve also agreed to be third reader on an M.A. thesis, expected to land in my box August 15. I feel the anxiety going up again…so it’s time to stop planning and start doing.

J. G. Farrell, Troubles

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

In 2010, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles won the “lost” Booker Prize. Farrell had already won the Booker once, for his later novel The Siege of Krishnapur–also part of the Empire Trilogy, which concludes with The Singapore Grip. Though it is certainly debatable how far literary prizes succeed in identifying the “best” novels of any given year, they undoubtedly succeed at drawing attention to those that are nominated. In this case, I suppose I might have come across Troubles anyway, but it probably would not have stood out to me without the buzz generated by its belated Booker win. The bland cover on my edition would not have helped, either! Nothing in that cool, flat scene suggests that inside the book will be moments like this one:

Then he noticed again, more strongly than before, the sweetish, nauseating  odour he had decided to forget about earlier. It was an awful smell. He could not stand it. . . . A small cupboard stood beside the bed. He wrenched open the door. On the top shelf there was nothing. On the bottom shelf was a chamber-pot and in the chamber-pot was a decaying object crawling with white maggots. From the middle of this object a large eye, bluish and corrupt, gazed up at the Major, who scarcely had time to reach the bathroom before he began to vomit brown soup and steamed bacon and cabbage. Little by little the smell of the object stole into the bathroom and enveloped him.

This is one of our (and our protagonist Major Brendan Archer’s) first encounters with the comic grotesquerie that characterizes the Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. The Major, physically hale but carrying the emotional and psychological scars of his war service (he wonders, at one point, if he has lost his sense of humor, and it’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t have) has traveled to Ireland to sort things out with Angela Spencer, daughter of the Majestic’s staunchly Unionist father. He got engaged to Angela during a short leave and since then their relationship has flourished primarily on the basis of her letters, which are full of such detail about Kilnalough and the hotel that the Major feels he practically knows the place already. Well, there’s nothing like a decaying sheep’s head in one’s chamber-pot to defamiliarize one’s surroundings! It doesn’t take long before we understand, as does the Major (though he never quite articulates it) that enveloping decay is not just the state of things at the Majestic but a metaphor for the state of Anglo-Irish society at this time of the ‘troubles.’ The sheep’s head epitomizes the many ways in which the crumbling, mouldering, collapsing, overgrown, over-run hotel symbolizes an era well past whatever glory it once had, gradually losing even the facade of respectability, never mind beauty. The tensions running between English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, Auxiliaries and Sinn Feiners, manifest themselves at the Majestic through the roots working their way through walls and floors (“the wooden blocks of parquet flooring bulged ominously upward like a giant abscess”). Nothing is stable, nothing is to be depended on, and yet Edward Spencer and his motley assortment of guests, mostly old ladies in various stages of decay themselves, hang on, charming, bemused, perverse, fearful yet defiant.

Though every element of the novel is presented and supported realistically (there is, for instance, a reason there’s a decaying sheep’s head in the Major’s chamber-pot: it’s not there just to be symbolic), cumulatively the novel’s absurdities eventually take us beyond the realm of realism: living in its world, we must accept one implausibility after another, starting with the basic premise that anyone would – could – live at the Majestic in the conditions Farrell describes with such deadpan glee (indulge me as I quote at length, because its details are too delicious, and characteristic, to cut):

The thing that most worried the Major was that the Majestic was literally beginning to fall to pieces. . . . Meanwhile, no matter how much they might grumble, the residents adapted themselves remarkably well to the nomadic existence of moving from room to room whenever plumbing or furniture happened to fail them.

True, the amenities had gone from bad to worse (not that the Major really noticed any more). The foliage evacuated from the Palm Court now looked like taking command of the residents’ lounge; the mirrors everywhere had become more fogged and grimy than ever; the gas mantles which had until recently burned on the stairs and in the corridors had now stopped functioning, so that the ladies had to grope their way to bed with their hearts going pit-a-pat; the soup in the dining room became clearer and colder as the days went by, and as the cook was left more and more to her own devices bacon and cabbage followed by baked apples appeared more frequently on the menu; outside in the grounds a tall pine keeled over and flattened a conservatory with such a terrible crash that two ladies (Miss Devere and a Mrs Archibald Bradley) packed their bags then and there; on the few remaining tennis courts a peculiarly tough and prolific type of clover continued its advance, so that if anyone had been thinking of playing tennis (which nobody was) they would have found that even the most firmly hit service would never rise more than six inches. . . .

One unseasonably warm day the giant M of MAJESTIC detached itself from the facade of the building and fell four storeys to demolish a small table at which a very old and very deaf lady, an early arrival for Christmas, had decided to take tea in the mild sunshine that was almost like summer. She had looked away for a moment, she explained to Edward in a very loud voice (almost shouting, in fact) trying to remember where the floral clock had been in the old days. She had maybe closed her eyes for a moment or two. When she had turned back to her tea, it had gone! Smashed to pieces by this strange, seagull-shaped piece of cast iron (she luckily had not recognized it or divined where it came from).

 We also have to live, as the Major does, with brutality strangely laced through with comedy: Farrell excels at a ruthless sort of slapstick, provoking laughter even as he makes you flinch. In one scene, for instance, a cheerful whist game is interrupted when one of the hotel’s many resident cats is “tantalized beyond endurance” by a decorative pheasant on one of the old ladies’ hats. What follows is at once, uncomfortably, completely hilarious and entirely awful:

the cat sprang from Mrs Rappaport’s lap, hurtled through the air in a horrid orange flash, and pounced on Miss Staveley’s black velvet shoulders, sinking its hideous claws into the bird’s delicate plumage. Miss Stavely uttered a shriek and sank forward on to the card-table while the cat, precariously balanced on her shoulders, ripped and clawed savagely at her headgear in an explosion of feathers. There was pandemonium. The ladies cried out in alarm. The men voiced gruff barks of astonishment and leaped to their feet. But still the beast savaged its prey. At last Edward and the Major, knocking chairs aside, stumbled to the rescue. But before they could reach Miss Stavely the tutor sprang forward and dealt the beast a terrible blow on the back of the neck. It gave a piercing wail, thin as the shriek of a child, and dropped senseless to the carpet.

Silence fell. Everyone in the room froze. In the sudden stillness the crackling of a log in the fireplace seemed unnaturally loud. The tutor stooped and picked up the cat. For an instant, as he held it high over his head, there was a savage rictus on his white pocked face. Then he hurled it across the room with terrible force. It smacked against the wall with a sickening thud and dropped lifeless to the floor. There was a sharp intake of breath, and everyone peered at the shapeless marmalade bundle.

If you were laughing at first at the spectacle of “cat attacks hat,” I bet you aren’t laughing now. If Troubles were ever adapted for the screen, it would need a special warning that “no cats were harmed in the making of this film”–they feature largely in the novel, including in at least two other quite gruesome sequences (let’s just say, of the first one, that Edward and the Major resolve to reduce their numbers, which are multiplying uncomfortably amidst the neglect and decay of the hotel, with grim results, and of the second, that it has some relation to the “tiny white skeletons scattered around” the shell of the hotel described in the prologue). The tutor, Evans, who hates his employers and everything they stand for, later leans over a parapet to “vomit copiously, a thick yellow fluid” that splatters on the glass roof of the hotel ballroom as “the black and white gentleman on the other side of the glass continued to revolve mechanically with the softly flowing silk and taffeta of the ladies.” “You’re disgusting,” the Major says, dragging him back, but the scene is, again, both disturbing in its violence and unfortunately funny because it literalizes the visceral (sorry) and irreconcilable antagonism between the republican Irish and those they see as their occupiers.

The whole of the novel, in one way or another, embodies this conflict, with people’s personal troubles humming with or somehow reiterating the political troubles that are devastating the country. Thus, for instance,  the Major’s fitful, irrational, unsuccessful love affair with the beautiful sort-of crippled Sarah Devlin – “D’you know that I’m a Catholic? Of course you do. But do you even know what a Catholic is?” she demands, when he finally gets her, in fulfillment of his fantasies, alone into the linen cupboard where he has made himself a bizarre sweaty retreat from the hazards and tensions of the household. Farrell brings the literal, historical ‘Troubles’ into the novel through interspersed news clippings: I don’t know if they are authentic (they certainly feel so), but as the novel goes on their terse announcements of murders and reprisals are like the ominous bass notes to the chorus of mingled frivolity and despair that increasingly marks activities at the Majestic.

To some extent the novel has the form of the country house or ‘big house’ novel, but in the end, it’s important that the Majestic is not a house but a hotel. This setting means that we are continually reminded that the characters’ stay there is impermanent–at best they are guests, at worst interlopers, in a place where they were never really invited. How different is the situation of the Anglo-Irish (or just plain English) at the Majestic from the more general human condition? “All this fuss,” muses the doddering old Dr. Ryan of Kilnalough near the end: “it’s all fuss about nothing. We’re here for a while and then we’re gone. People are insubstantial.” We’re here for a while and then we’re gone: true enough. But Troubles clarifies that, transients as we may be, we are still bound to live together as best we can, and in the novel as in real life, one  of the most important courtesies we can display – one of the safeguards of civility- is knowing when it’s time to go. If there’s something lost, something to be mourned, however awkwardly, among the “charred rubble” which is all that remains of the Majestic at the end, the novel also leaves us in no doubt that time had come for the English in Ireland.

Summertime doldrums, or, I hate the idle pleasures of these days…

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Bluhm PergolaWell, OK, that puts it a bit strongly — but I find I don’t flourish in the summer, despite being happy (who could not be?) to have some warmth and sunshine. I find the relative formlessness of the days difficult: I do better with more of a routine, including a routine that gets me out of the house and into my office on a regular schedule. I have an office space at home, but for years now my “real” workplace has been on campus, and though I use my home office for lots of things, from marking to blogging, still, there’s something psychologically useful to me about being “at work” rather than at home. That includes the absence of domestic distractions: being at work in a predictable way really helps me feel less torn when I am at home between wanting to appreciate being with my family and give my children the time and attention they deserve, and trying to get work-related chores and projects cleared away.

I realize that I am fortunate that the nature of academic work makes it possible to be home a lot during summer vacation, and my children are finally old enough to occupy themselves a fair amount, but I still don’t find it easy to concentrate, and the feeling of time drifting away amidst what we like to call (in honour of Mr Casaubon) “desultory vivacity” becomes nerve-wracking to me after a while. We also find that the city empties out during the summer as people head to their cottages. Neither of us was raised with the whole cottage phenomenon, and we aren’t interested in pursuing it now. We invested in a home in a very quiet and pretty part of town partly to obviate the need to rush away as soon as the weather turns nice, and we find one property quite enough to take care of (not to mention, to pay for). For various reasons, our family is also not particularly portable, so mooching off our friends at their cottages is not a live option. And so summers also feel quite isolated. Heck, even the internet is quieter in the summer!  I need to make a deliberate effort, in these circumstances not to prove a villain and get all restless and snarly. Waterhouse Shalott

To make sure I am in fact staying on top of my to-do list for work, I’m trying to focus on tasks that are more or less mechanical, like re-organizing my class syllabi and setting up Blackboard sites. I’m making progress here: two of my three fall syllabi are basically ready. All three fall Blackboard sites are in progress, though there’s a fair amount of housekeeping to do on them, because I’ve changed reading lists and am also revising assignment sequences since they were last used. I hate Blackboard. Everything about it is unbearably slow and clunky to manipulate. I also have the perhaps foolish idea that the course sites should be attractive, and should in some way reflect the themes and readings for each course, so that students feel that they are in a space that is an extension of our class time. I’m not computer-savvy enough to mean anything that elaborate by this, but I do choose colour schemes and custom icons and graphics to suit. For the Victorian ‘woman question’ seminar, for instance, I made a banner for the heading that is all different paintings of the Lady of Shalott, and at some point in the term we will reflect on the various representations in the context of our discussions of things like Victorian women as artists, problems of women entering the public sphere, idealizations of sick or dead women, and so on. I suppose I could just do the whole thing in a strictly utilitarian way and save myself time and grief (you don’t want to know how annoying it was getting that d–n banner made and then inserted–a process not helped at all by the painful sloth that comes over my otherwise zippy ASUS netbook when I’m inside the Blackboard interface).  I wonder if the students either notice or care how we set these things up. In any case, the tedious pointing and clicking of adding files, assignments, calendar entries (that’s the worst!) and links to things like the university’s academic integrity site as well as relevant web resources all has to get done by September, and it’s not the kind of work that gets thrown off too much by invitations to play MarioKart, demands for lunch, or doing taxi service to or from play dates or camps.

blogger-logoThe other work project I’m puttering away at is my presentation for the conference in Birmingham, which suddenly does not seem far off at all! I leave in just over a month. I’ve been learning Prezi, because what I’d seen of it (e.g. here) made it look just right for the kind of wide-ranging, open-ended talk that seems appropriate: the panel is on “knowledge dissemination in Canada,” and I was invited to talk about my experience as a blogger. I intend a short preamble to the more autobiographical / anecdotal part that will address some principled reasons for academics to think about and maybe even try blogging — the state of academic publishing, debates about open access vs. ‘gated’ scholarship, the potential value of academic expertise in the public domain — and also a bit about academic literary criticism and its relation to the wider book culture. But I’m not going to be trying to prove one particular point or argue for one particular value or approach, so the linearity of PowerPoint doesn’t suit. I did use PowerPoint the last time I spoke on these issues, to my departmental colloquium back in 2007, so I do have some graphics I may be able to recycle! But Prezi is an intriguingly different beast and if I can get the hang of it, I think it will work well for mapping relationships between all these different but interwoven threads. Also, it’s fun to play with–which I’m pretty sure nobody has ever said about PowerPoint. And it comes with a warning that it may cause motion sickness in your audience if not handled with care. Now tell me you aren’t longing to try it! Imagine the effect some uncontrolled zooming might have on a batch of unsuspecting first-year students…

troublesI’m reading, too–right now, Troubles, by J. G. Farrell, which won the “lost” Booker a while back. I am loving it: it is brilliantly, mordantly, funny, with a current of uneasy violence running through its main storyline that is perfectly suited to the novel’s historical context, the Irish “troubles.” It’s yet another book (like Old Filth or Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand) featuring a retired servant of the empire — though in this case Major Archer is retired from active service but still a young man — yet it does not give me the same uneasy feeling that I’ve been through these moves before. We’ll see if I still feel that way at the end of the book. When day is done and I can’t even putter any more, I am watching Downton Abbey. This does seem familiar (wasn’t it called ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ the last time?), but it is also very well done. I’ve just finished watching the Emma Thompson / Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Oliva Manning’s The Fortunes of War, which was excellent: I was most impressed that the series kept the oddly understated quality of the novels, which for some viewers might have made it unbearably slow in its pacing, which it is (slow,  not unbearable). While I watch these, I work on my bookshelf sampler, which I now believe I will actually finish by the end of the summer! I have just a bit more gilt for the book bindings and one final garland and then it’s time to mount and frame it.

My summer doesn’t sound so idle when I lay it all out like this! Add in that I’ve done some serious housecleaning (including, just this morning, taking everything out of the fridge, cleaning all the shelves and drawers, and putting everything back in all nice and orderly) and enjoyed such genuine summery activities as strolls in our beautiful Public Gardens, not to mention plenty of quality time with the kids doing other activities, and I feel quite pleased with the balance of work and play after all. Yet I will still welcome September, with its bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils* and the return to what feels–to someone who has, one way or another, been in school for nearly 40 years–like normal life.

*Sorry: I couldn’t find a clip with that actual line in it! But it’s near this point in the movie, I’m sure.

Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets: Bridget Jones’s Purgatory

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The front cover of my Virago edition of Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets prominently displays Carmen Callil’s comment that “The Weather in the Streets was our Bridget Jones’s Diary.” This is one of the most disingenuous marketing moves I have seen: anyone led by this to expect some frothy fun along the lines of Helen Fielding’s clever, witty, insubstantial comedy will be startled (as I was) by Lehmann’s dark, drifting narrative of erotic infatuation, disappointment, and psychic pain.

In the context of her introduction, Callil’s line makes a bit more sense: “Clubbing may have replaced the wild parties of 1930s bohemia that constitute Olivia’s world, but the pangs of the heart are the same.” Still, what is emphatically not the same is Lehmann’s refusal to let either us or her characters enjoy the fantasy of true, if forbidden, love. Bridget lusts after a cad but learns better and is rewarded by happiness with her Darcy. Olivia lusts after a cad (though Rollo isn’t quite the shallow playboy  Daniel Cleaver is) but all along has a hovering awareness that their relationship is self-limiting: he makes no promises, expresses no intention–not even any desire–to leave his wilting wife. Their relationship isolates Olivia literally as well as emotionally, due to the necessity of keeping it secret; much of the novel expresses the psychological strain this puts on Olivia, especially as she’s astute enough to have no dreams of a future with Rollo to sustain her. Their idyll has already begun to wear and fade when she realizes she is pregnant. Unable to reach Rollo, and unsure anyway about whether she wants him to know and be involved, Olivia broods and suffers and finally resolves to end the pregnancy. She becomes very ill from the abortifacients she tries but they don’t ultimately work, so she asks her flighty roommate if she knows a doctor who could help out ‘a friend.’ Their conversation has no place in Bridget Jones’s world:

Etty was silent.

‘He won’t take any one unless he knows who’s sent them,’ she said at last. ‘You see, it’s fearfully dangerous for him. If you’re caught it means prison . . . in spite of his being, of course, a public benefactor really. I suppose he’s saved regiments of unfortunate erring women from ruin . . . ‘

‘You mean,’ said Olivia, ‘ he might refuse to do it – if she just went out of the blue?’

Silence again.

‘You could give my name, I suppose . . . ‘ Etty stirred. Her slightly protruding eyes between curly doll’s lashes became fixed with a certain wild blankness on her cousin. ‘Only it was so long ago . . .’

‘Did you go to him, Ett?’

‘My dear, once. Wasn’t it shattering?’ The colour came up in her fragile egg-face, painfully, from neck to brow. She laughed, rather shakily. ‘The wages of sin, darling.’

‘Poor Ett.’

Amazing. A shock, definitely. That narrow miniature body, that, too, trapped, subjected to the common risks and consequences of female humanity. It only showed, for the hundredth time, how little one knew about anybody, particularly one’s nearest . . . Seeing only Etty’s marionette surface, allowing one’s intuition and mere circumstantial evidence to decide that never – however much she might dally with preliminaries – would she have brought herself to face ultimate physical issues.

‘Did you go alone?’ Olivia asks a bit later. ‘Well, no,’ Etty replies; ‘Mona was just a saint – she simply arranged everything. You see, she’d been to him just before, poor darling.’ ‘Mona too!’ reflects Olivia. ‘She began to feel fatally cosy and consoled, the seals of arduous secrecy, of solitary endurance melting, melting . . .’ and she is tempted to confession (‘Enter into the feminine conspiracy, be received with tact, sympathy, pills and hot-water bottles, we’re all in the same boat’) but she’s too anxious about revealing her affair and so this consolation, like Rollo, remains out of reach and Olivia endures her appointment alone. Lehmann’s account is quietly harrowing, not just because of Olivia’s physical trauma, but because, to her own surprise, though she recovers physically she is haunted by her decision: ‘I’ve never stopped minding – and longing for it. I suppose it’s Dame Nature’s revenge; one’s body cheated . . .’

In the end there’s no baby, there’s no Rollo, there’s no consolation prize in the form of another, more deserving, lover. In fact, throughout the novel Olivia cherishes an idealized love for another man, Simon, also already married, and far from emerging to provide her with a happily-ever-after (no matter the cost to others), he dies of typhoid just as she is finally breaking up with Rollo. Yes, Olivia goes to some wild bohemian parties, but under the circumstances they aren’t much fun, especially the last one where everyone we know who’s there is mostly worried about how Simon’s widow is doing. Bridget Jones’s Diary is the quintessential ‘chick lit’ novel, with its cheerfully facile problems and solutions and its mantra of loving Bridget “just the way she is” (now that’s a fantasy that puts Bridget’s erotic ones in the shade, isn’t it?).  The Weather in the Streets has a vaguely similar protagonist and plot structure, but its account of “the pangs of the heart” is entirely more cruel and disillusioning. There’s love, but it brings no guarantees: ‘It was only that the word love was capable of so many different interpretations.’

For me, that was the first surprise about The Weather in the Streets, then: that it so ruthlessly reduces its romantic story to such stark elements. The second surprise was Lehmann’s style. Most of the parts fluidly and a bit unnervingly combine third-person narration with Olivia’s own perspective, not through Austen-like free indirect discourse, but by drifting into first person and then out again with no signals:

She glanced at him. ‘I think that was the last time I saw you too . . . ‘

‘I remember.’

‘Do you? We didn’t speak.’

‘No, we didn’t.’

She looked away. A bubble of tension seemed to develop and explode between them. He watched me from the other side of the room. I thought once or twice we looked at each other, but he was too busy, caught up in his own world, to come near: sleek, handsome-looking in his wedding clothes, being an usher . . . I was still in the chrysalis; engaged unimpressively, without a Times announcement, to Ivor, and my clothes were wrong: a subsidiary guest, doing crowd work on the outskirts, feeling inferior, up from the country.

‘I followed her career in the Tatler,’ she said. She smiled . . .

One section is completely in first-person, which I think confirms the purposefulness of Lehmann’s approach here, though I admit I haven’t figured out quite what the purpose could be when first-person seems best suited to the book’s preoccupation with Olivia’s perspective and emotions. Is this as unusual a strategy as it seems to me? Of course I’m aware of novels that intersperse different forms of narration (like the alternation between Esther and the third-person prophetic narrator in Bleak House), but I can’t remember another one that drifts in this way between the two.

One thing that Lehmann can do in the third-person sections that wouldn’t really work in first-person is long passages of descriptive prose. Many of these are highly evocative, and also, bound up as they are in our vicarious experience of Olivia’s feelings, freighted with emotional resonance in a way that reminded me (in effect, not in particulars of style) of Bowen’s The Heat of the Day:

London in the scorched irritable airless end of day was an extension of the mind’s loathing and oppression. Petrol fumes were nausea; the traffic a fatuous, reluctant, laborious progress towards a pointless destination; the picture-houses, with mock-oriental fronts proclaiming within a blend of cool darkness and hot passions, were tawdriness, satiety, cynical sham and cheapness. The main thoroughfares looked empty and discouraged. Only in the by-streets, where mews and slum just touch, just unaggressively nudge the more classy residential quarters, groups of children, submerged in the fuller season, had come up and overflown upon the pavements: London’s strident August undergrowth, existing like cactuses in waterless stone; shouting, running, taking communal licks at ice-cream cornets; deprecated by the charitable passer-by, wish-transferred with spade and bucket to the seaside, where it would be better for it them to be . . .

In many ways, the places in the novel were more vivid to me than the characters, despite the pervasiveness of Olivia’s consciousness — Olivia herself, really, remained the most elusive, and this is where Lehmann lost me a bit. Olivia is completely preoccupied with herself and with Rollo, and in both cases in an entirely ruminating, sensual way. She has no other commitments: her job is of little interest, she is politically unengaged, she doesn’t read books except when she’s sickest, when she turns to “her old Oxford copies of Victorian novelists” (I can’t imagine finding Villette comforting when in her situation, but Vanity Fair seems apt enough, if, again, hardly comforting). I didn’t care much what happened to her and Rollo, because their whole affair is based on the shallowest kind of infatuation. “You’re so young,” he whispers to her as they kiss for the first time; “You’re like a young, young girl.” And she accepts the terms he sets: secrecy, furtive outings, expensive gifts, no promises. Olivia’s emotions are, indeed, described and even recreated with great immediacy and poignancy, but I’m impatient with making so much of feelings, as if erotic love and its presence or absence is what matters most. Probably this feeling that Olivia should get up and do something useful with herself is the result of reading so much Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby–even though Sarah Burton is struck by Cupid’s arrow as well, her love is more complex and her life is dedicated to much more than moping about it.

Robert Graves, I, Claudius: Telling and Showing

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I, Claudius is the complete antithesis of the shallowly sentimental historical fiction I’ve been reviewing and complaining about recently. There’s something almost ruthless about Graves’s approach as a historical novelist: he simply refuses to pander to his readers with rhetorical flourishes, dramatic scene setting, even dialogue. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, rolls by with hardly any relief from long unbroken blocks of text. We are carried along not by emotion (except, occasionally, suspense) but by morbid fascination and curiosity about what happens next. And to make matters worse, or better (depending on what kind of reader you are) our curiosity is impeded by the sheer voluminousness of the information he gives us, starting with the endless citation of names, all very much like one another–there’s Agrippa and Agrippina and Agrippinilla, Livia and Livilla, Gaius, Gallus, Gemellus, at least two each of Nero and Drusus and Drusilla…and these are only a few among the most prominent or more lasting characters, as nearly every anecdote includes a roll call of more and more. Events pile on one another in the same relentless fashion:  ascensions to – then falls from – power, children, marriages, affairs, rapes, murders, wars, accidents, deaths, brutalities and obscenities, and the very occasional tenderness. The effect is of a crowded and rapidly moving procession to which we, through Claudius, are passive, sometimes bemused, often horrified, spectators.

This is a novel (more properly, a history) so full of incident, none independently more engrossing or significant than the others, that it is at once too easy and very difficult to find an exemplary passage. This one will do:

The close of the year was marked by the banishment of Julilla on the charge of promiscuous adultery – just like her mother Julia – to Tremerus, a small island off the coast of Apulia. The real reason for her banishment was that she was just about to bear another child, which if it were a boy would be a great-grandson of Augustus, and unrelated to Livia; Livia was taking no risks now. Julilla had one son already, but he was a delicate, timorous, slack-twisted fellow and could be disgreagrded. Æmilius himself provided Livia with grounds for the accusation. He had quarrelled with Julilla and now charged her in the presence of their daughter Æmilia with trying to father another man’s child on him. He named Decimus, a nobleman of the Silanus family, as the adulterer. Æmilia, who was clever enough to realize that her own life and safety depended on keeping in Livia’s good books, went straight to her and told what she had heard. Livia made her repeat the story in Augustus’s presence. Augustus then summoned Æmilius and asked whether it ws true that he was not the father of Julilla’s child. It did not occur to Æmilius that Æmilia could have betrayed her mother and himself, so he assumed that the intimacy which he suspected between Julilla and Decimus was a matter of common scandal. He therefore held by his accusation, though it was founded rather on jealousy than on knowledge. Augustus took the child as soon as it was born and had it exposed on the mountainside. Decimus went into voluntary exile and several other men accused of having been Julilla’s lovers at one time or another followed him: among them was the poet Ovid whom Augustus, curiously enough, made the principal scapegoat as having also written (many years before) The Art of Love. It was this poem, Augustus said, that had debauched his granddaughter’s mind. He ordered all copies of it found to be burned.

To paraphrase SNL, it goes on like this for 300 more pages. Probably 80% of the novel tells us what happens in just this kind of direct expository fashion. Graves’s prose is lucid and emphatic, energetic but without elaboration, very nearly without anything identifiable as a personal style, or even a personality, which is particularly strange and unexpected because the entire narrative is first-person narration, by Claudius himself.

Claudius is a bit player in most of the action he recounts, a witness more than a participant. He speaks as an outsider and aspires to a historian’s objectivity and detail: this accounts for the cool, persistent tone of the narrative. Yet we are learning more about him than we think, as we read along, and that’s the other 20% of the book: just by this aspiration to honesty, he distinguishes himself from the self-seeking liars and schemers who populate his world and the novel, and his self-deprecation – repeated and amplified by the scornful way he is dismissed as foolish and insignificant by almost everyone around him – does express his personality, as does his relegation of himself to the sidelines. Tacitly, implicitly, through the story he tells, Claudius shows us the man he is. For Claudius, of course, is no fool – as even Livia, his deliciously ruthless and conniving grandmother eventually sees. “Do you want to live a long busy life, with honour at the end of it?” inquires the historian Pollio, after a surprising encounter with young Claudius in the Apollo Library. “Then exaggerate your limp, stammer deliberately, sham sickness frequently, let your wits wander, jerk your head and twitch with your hands on all public or semi-public occasions. If you could see as much as I can see, you would know that this was your only hope of safety and eventual heroism.” This is precisely Claudius’s strategy, though to call it a ‘strategy’ is to impute to him more self-directed cunning and self-control than he allows himself in his own text. Still, we realize, as he does, that he survives because he represents no threat, issues no challenges, raises no defenses. All around him, men and women die horribly by sword or poison, starvation or torture, while Claudius lives on. He survives even the reign of his brilliantly psychotic nephew Caligula, who believes himself to have apotheosized into a God and amuses himself by, among other things, appearing as Venus “in a long gauzy silk robe with face painted, a red wig, padded bosom and high-heeled slippers,” or by organizing a brothel in the Palace at which his sisters Agrippinilla and Lesbia prostitute themselves. Caligula’s sister Drusilla, whom he loves as his wife, has died by this time – “I am certain in my own mind that Caligula killed her,” Claudius remarks, “but I have no proof” – but perhaps the most infamous scene in the remarkable BBC adaptation, in which Caligula (memorably played by John Hurt) aborts and devours her child by him, is not in Graves’s novel, unless I somehow missed it! The delightfully bizarre story of Caligula’s great battle with Neptune, however, and his victor’s bounty of sea shells, is here in full.

There’s nothing heroic about Claudius’s survival: he stands by helpless and dismayed as those he loved were banished, betrayed, and murdered; when he does interfere or help, he evades punishment only because he is considered too pathetic to be held responsible; he panders to those in power, particularly Caligula. Yet what is a man of some basic decency to do in a world so thoroughly corrupt? What Graves doesn’t do that I think another kind of historical novelist might have done is engage this moral problem directly, making it an explicit theme rather than a lurking practical question. Doing so would have required making Claudius a philosopher rather than a chronicler, though, and Claudius (and / or Graves) is a historian above all.

Against Generalizing: A Cautionary Tale

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I’m often puzzled and annoyed by comments about “the Victorian novel” that purport to make a general – typically dismissive – claim applicable to all novels from the 19th century, often in order to praise “modern” fiction for being more experimental, various, risk-taking, or whatever. Sure, there’s plenty of pedestrian expository story-telling in 19th-century novels, just as there is in a certain class of fiction today, but put a paragraph of, say, Vanity Fair next to a paragraph of Wuthering Heights next to a paragraph of Mary Barton, all published in 847-48 (or pick your own examples if you prefer) and you will find your comfortable assumptions about Victorian “realism” – and just about anything else – grinding to a halt. Generalizations serve their purposes, but often these purposes are somewhat suspect, tendentious, or simply utilitarian.

I am thinking about this issue because I am currently reading two books from almost exactly the same historical moment: one was originally published in 1934, the other in 1936. In case I needed this lesson, they are teaching me to be every bit as wary about even the most tentative generalizations about “novels of the 1930s.” Here’s a characteristic excerpt from each:

I.

‘But it’s not like any kind of life!’ she cried out, in a kind of helplessness and distressed reluctance. ‘Not like any that comes your way, I’m sure.’

‘How d’you know what comes my way?’

Not that kind of waking anyway and getting on a bus, and mornings with Anna; not bed-sitting-rooms and studios of that sort; not that drifting about for inexpensive meals; not always the cheapest seats in movies; not that kind of conversation, those catch phrases; not those parties and that particular sort of dressing, drinking, dancing . . . . Not the book taken up, the book laid down, aghast, because of the traffic’s sadness, which was time, lamenting and pouring away down all the streets for ever; because of the lives passing up and down outside with steps and voices of futile purpose and forlorn commotion: draining out my life, out of the window, in their echoing wake, leaving me dry, stranded, sterile, bound solitary to the room’s minute respectability, the gas-fire, the cigarette, the awaited bell, the gramophone’s idiot companionship, the unyielding arm-chair, the narrow bed, the hot-water bottles  I must fill, the sleep I must sleep . . .

II.

Livia wrote the recommendation for banishment in very strong terms. It was composed in Augustus’s own literary style; which was easy to imitate because it always sacrificed elegance to clarity – for example, by a determined repetition of the same word, where it occurred often in a passage, instead of hunting about for a synonym or periphrasis (which is the common literary practice). And he had a tendency to over-prepositionalize his verbs. She did not show the letter to Augustus but sent it direct to the Senate, who immediately voted a decree of perpetual banishment. Livia had listed Julia’s crimes in such detail and had credited Augustus with such calm expressions of detestation for them that she made it impossible for him ever afterwards to change his mind and ask the Senate to cancel their decision. She did a good piece of business on the side, too, by singling out for special mention as Julia’s partners in adultery three or four men whom it was to her interest to ruin. Among them was an uncle of mine, a son of Antony . . . I believe that the charge of conspiracy was groundless, but as the only surviving son of Antony, by his wife, Fulvia – Augustus had put Antyllus, the eldest, to death immediately after his father’s suicide, and the other two, Ptolemy and Alexander, his sons by Cleopatra, had died young – and as an ex-Consul and the husband of Marcellus’s sister, whom Agrippa had divorced, he seemed dangerous.

I’m sure you recognize, or can guess at, the second: it’s from Robert Graves’s acclaimed historical novel I, Claudius. The first is from Rosamond Lehmann’s rather more obscure The Weather in the Streets. What a contrast between the pedantic literalness of Graves’s chronicle-like narrative (which has its own cumulative charm, but which feels not that much like a novel) and Lehmann’s idiosyncratically drifting voice. More reasons to proceed with caution: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was published in 1931, Winifred Holtby’s South Riding in 1936.