Year: 2011

‘She illuminated everything’: Bowen on Virginia Woolf

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Elizabeth Bowen to Leonard Woolf, April 8, 1941:

Dear Leonard,

It was very good of you to write to me, as and when you did. I do thank you. I have been in Ireland for the last three weeks, so your letter, sent on from Clarence Terrace, reached me here last Saturday. I had not heard anything at all till the Thursday before that, when someone told me what they had heard on the wireless. English papers take nearly a week to come. It meant a good deal, then, to get your letter. You and Viriginia and Rodmell had, for those two days, hardly been out of my thoughts–not by day and not much by night. I had begun to imagine what I learned from you to be true–that she had feared her illness was coming back.

You said not to answer your letter, and above all I don’t want to trouble you with words now. And it is no time to speak of my own feeling. As far as I am concerned, a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world. She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one’s thoughts. To have been allowed to know her and love her is a great thing.

(quoted from The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee)

‘Life would be insufficient’: Sampling Bowen’s Essays

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I couldn’t find Bowen’s “Notes on Writing a Novel” online so I went to the actual library to get it (funny how rare this has become!). It turns out to be kind of rambling and not particularly illuminating, at least for my thinking about The Heat of the Day, but I have been having fun browsing the volume I found it in, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (selected and edited by Hermione Lee). After the careful convolutions of the prose in The Heat of the Day, it’s interesting how direct and frank her critical writing is (including about her own work). This confirms, of course, that her fictional style is deliberate, purposeful. Here are some samples:

From “Out of a Book,” about the influence of childhood reading:

Readers of my kind were the heady ones, the sensationalists–recognizing one another at sight we were banded together inside a climate of our own. Landscapes or insides of houses or streets or gardens, outings or even fatigue duties all took the cast of the book we were circulating at the time; and the reading made of us an electric ring. Books were story or story-poetry books: we were unaware that there could be any others.

Some of the heady group remained wonderfully proof against education: having never graduated these are the disreputable grownups who snap up shiny magazines and garner and carry home from libraries fiction that the critics ignore. They read as we all once read–because they must: without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold. They read as we all read when we were twelve; but unfortunately the magic has been adulterated; the dependence has become ignominious–it becomes an enormity, inside the full-sized body, to read without the brain. Now the stories they seek go on being children’s stories, only with sex added to the formula; and somehow the addition queers everything. These readers, all the same, are the great malleable bulk, the majority, the greater public–hence best-sellers, with their partly artful, partly unconscious play on a magic that has gone stale. The only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective stories.

From her ‘Afterword’ to Woolf’s Orlando:

We, in our twenties during the ’20s, were not only the author’s most zealous readers, but, in the matter of reputation, most zealous guardians. Her aesthetic became a faith; we were believers. . . . We regarded [Orlando] as a setback. Now, thirty-two years later, I wonder why this should have been so. . . .

Most of us had not met Virginia Woolf; nor did we (which may seem strange) aspire to. She did not wish to be met. Her remoteness completed our picture of her, in so far as we formed a picture at all. . . . We visualized her less as a woman at work than as a light widening as it brightened. When I say, ‘She was a name to us,’ remember (or if you cannot remember, try to imagine) what a name can be, surrounded by nothing but the air of heaven. Seldom can living artist have been so–literally–idealized.

Malevolent autumn of ’28–it taunted us with the picture of the lady given to friends, to the point of fondness, and jokes, to within danger of whimsicality. . . . What we loathed was literary frivolity. So this was what Virginia Woolf could be given over to, if for an instant we took our eye off her–which, to do us justice, we seldom did? . . .

That Orlando was beautiful nobody doubted: what we now see is that it is important–and why.

It was important to the writer. She was the better, one feels certain, for writing it; in particular, for doing so when she did. More irresponsible than the rest of her work in fiction, it has the advantage of being less considered and more unwary. This book corresponds with a wildness in her, which might have remained unknown of–unless one knew her. This was a rebellion on the part of Virginia Woolf against the solemnity threatening to hem her in. Orlando is, among other things, rumbustious; it is one of the most high-spirited books I know. . . .

I have a theory–unsupported by anything she said to me, or so far as I know, to anyone–that Virginia Woolf’s writing of Orlando was a prelude to, and in some way rendered possible, her subsequent writing of The Waves, 1931. Outwardly, no two works of fiction could be more different; yet, did the fantasy serve to shatter some rigid, deadening, claustrophobic mould of so-called ‘actuality’ which had been surrounding her? In To the Lighthouse (coming before Orlando), she had reached one kind of perfection. This she could not surpass; therefore, past it she could not proceed. In Orlando, delicacy gives way to bravura, to rhetoric. It was a breaking-point and a breathing space at the same time, this fantasy. She returned to the novel, to The Waves, with–at least temporarily–a more defiant attitude to the novel’s ‘musts.’

Finally (for now, at least!), from the thought-provoking comparison of Victorian and Edwardian fiction that leads off her review of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Elders and Betters:

The great Victorian novelists did not complete their task, their survey of the English psychological scene. One by one they died; their century ended, a decade or two before its nominal close. then–as after one of those pauses in conversation when either exhaustion or danger is felt to be in the air–the subject was changed.

There came, with the early 1900s, a perceptible lightening, if a decrease in innocence: the Edwardian novelists were more frivolous, more pathetic. their dread of dowdiness and longwindedness was marked; content to pursue nothing to its logical finish, they reassured their readers while amusing them, and restored at least the fiction of a beau monde. They were on the side of fashion: to shine, for their characters, was the thing. Competent, nervous, and in their time daring, they redecorated the English literary haunted house. Their art was an effort to hush things up. Curiously enough, in view of that, almost all the novels I was forbidden to read as a child were contemporary, which was to say, Edwardian. They were said to be too ‘grown-up.’ (To the infinitely more frightening Victorians, no ban attached whatsoever: a possible exception was Jane Eyre.) When, therefore, I did, as I could hardly fail to, read those Edwardian novels, I chiefly got the impression of being left out of something enjoyable. Here was life no longer in terms of power, as I as a child had seen it, but in terms of illusion for its own sake, of successful performance, of display.

Even aside from the foolish pleasure I always get from the word “rumbustious” (I think A. S. Byatt uses it to describe George Eliot somewhere, which I love for the sheer surprise of that!) there’s a lot here that makes me want to jump into conversation with her. This is the same effect that, say, Elizabeth Hardwick’s criticism has: not that I’m persuaded to her view of things, but that her view is well-informed, specific, and a little unexpected, so I want to know more about it, maybe argue about it (is it true that the Victorians’ primary “task,” in their fiction, is ” a survey of emotion as an aggressive force, an account of the battle for power that goes on in every unit of English middle-class life”?).

Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

‘Atmospheric’ and ‘evocative’ seem to be popular adjectives for The Heat of the Day. I agree that the book is both of those things; in my last post I highlighted a passage, for instance, that struck me as especially powerful at summoning up not so much the look as the feeling of wartime London, and cumulatively I think the whole novel brings to us the fraught, anxious, oppressive yet inarticulate sense of a world under siege literally but also morally and psychologically.

It’s that shift from the literal world into something intangible and abstract that finally interested me the most about this novel. Bowen’s style overall is very intrusive, by which I don’t mean that her narrator is intrusive (though occasionally that is true too) but that at really no point in the novel could I lose myself in it. The plot is too minimal and develops too slowly to generate suspense the way you might expect of a war novel centered on an accusation of spying for the enemy. And the emotional elements of the novel, though very intense, were too indirect or intellectualized to prompt laughter or tears (though there was the occasional wry chuckle). Throughout, the syntax is difficult and obtrudes on our awareness, so that we have to know at all times that we are reading, and we have to work pretty hard at it, too.

I often suggest to my students that they look for clues about how to read a novel from what the novel itself is doing or emphasizing or sounding like. Though it was not necessarily pleasurable working my way through Bowen’s sentences (though sometimes it was intensely so–again, see previous post!), they were never truly impenetrable and often yielded to slower reading and closer attention. Working through them came to seem to me like part of the point of the book, which is very much about what people are not able to say, or can’t (or won’t) say directly–those layers of meaning behind seemingly innocuous actions and phrases, for instance, but also the ever-present risk of mistaking glib fluency for honesty and accuracy, surfaces for sufficient truths. At every moment, after all, there are all the things you feel but can’t articulate, and maybe aren’t even conscious of yourself: I was reminded of Woolf’s comments about post-Victorian novelists becoming “aware of something that can’t be said by the character himself.” One effect of the war, too, is that it makes open emotion, as well as open conversation, more difficult, potentially even dangerous; to the general human difficulty of understanding and articulating our experience, then, is added the particular pressure of this historical moment. This is the murky verbal territory which this novel seems to be navigating. Wishing it were clearer and simpler is a bit like wishing both life and feelings were clearer and simpler, or at least that the novelist had undertaken to clarify and simplify it for us. There are novelists who do this, and render complexity with superb lucidity. George Eliot comes to mind (I know, when does she not, for me?!)–but Bowen is obviously not one of these, and for reasons that I’m sure have to do both with her place in literary history and with her individual theory of the novel. (I have been trying to get my hands on her essay “Notes on Writing a Novel”: from the snippets I’ve seen, it is quite illuminating about her aesthetic principles.)

When the narrator is speaking in The Heat of the Day–or, since there isn’t really a particularized narrator, when we get direct exposition–the language tends to clears up, limning in contexts or proposing frameworks for understanding the characters’ situations. I thought this passage, describing Stella and Robert as they sit at their coffee, was particularly suggestive about why the book has the components and structure that it does:

But they were not alone, nor had they been from the start, from the start of love. Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day–the day was inherent in the nature. Which must have been always true of lovers, if it had taken till now to be seen. The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time, to what is happening. If this has not been always felt–and as to that who is to know?–it has begun to be felt, irrevocably. On from now, every moment, with more and more of what had been ‘now’ behind it, would be going on adding itself to the larger story. Could these two have loved each other better at a better time? At no other would they have been themselves. . . .

Not just the choices Robert and Stella face are meaningless outside of time, but also their very identities: there is no timeless, universal ‘Stella’ who has to figure out what to do about her suspicion that her lover is a spy, but only Stella in 1940, or 1942, or 1944, her thoughts and feelings and experiences interwoven with, generated by, “what is happening.” In order to appreciate Stella’s actions, we have to accumulate as much as possible about her thoughts and feelings but also about the environment in which they are moving, or by which they are being shaped. There’s a literal sense here, again: the whole issue of leaking secrets to the enemy can arise only during a conflict. But there are more diffuse issues here too, I think: the relationship between our personal and political loyalties, the nature of our identification with our country, our expectations of family, are all things we take for granted but could (probably should) historicize. Victorian novels are sometimes described as historical novels about their present. I think Bowen is doing something similar except that she has zoomed in so that both the history and the present with which she is concerned are tiny moments magnified–and not, again, explained with the magisterial authority of her 19th-century predecessors. George Eliot’s characters are often confused, her readers rarely. Here, I think we too are stymied about just what it is, exactly, that Stella should do once Robert admits his guilt. Interestingly, her action is inaction: she does not try to stop him from heading out by the roof, even though she clearly understands his intentions.

I was intrigued by the abstract way in which Robert’s treason is represented. Again, I am trying to take my cues from the novel to find the significance of Bowen’s choices. It would, surely, have been easy enough for her to spell out his motives much more clearly, specifically, and politically. As it is, I think the words ‘German’ or ‘Nazi’ are never used–only ‘the enemy’ or ‘them’ (or ‘us,’ depending on who’s speaking). He makes a vague, almost Carlylean argument about people’s inability to handle their freedom (arguably, the portrayal of English society in the novel does little to defend democracy against his careless dismissal):

Tell a man he’s free and what does that do to him but send him trying to dive back into the womb? Look at it happening: look at your mass of ‘free’ suckers, your democracy–kidded along from the cradle to the grave. . . . Do you suppose there’s a single man of mind who doesn’t realize he only begins where his freedom stops? One in a thousand may have what to be free takes–if so, he has what it takes to be something better, and he knows it: who could want to be free when he could be strong? Freedom–what a slaves’ yammer!

He associates his disaffection with the retreat from Dunkirk: “It was enough to have been in action once on the wrong side. Step after step to Dunkirk. . . That was the end of that war–army of freedom queuing up to be taken off by pleasure boats.” But his complaints never distill into specific political statements, and they are never attached, either, to political or historical contexts the way, say, Lord Darlington’s fascist sympathies are in The Remains of the Day. So, I conclude, taking my cue as much from what Bowen does not include as from what she does, the spy plot is something of a thematic feint (though on this I would be happy to hear other views): it’s not betraying Allied secrets to the Nazis that’s the issue but a more general problem of betrayal or loyalty, a question of how or why we form the loyalties we do (in Robert’s case, it seems to be something more visceral or temperamental than political, though I thought he remained too enigmatic as a character for us, or Stella, to really understand his motives).

I have a lot of questions remaining about the book, about aspects that interested me and seemed significant but that on this one reading did not settle into patterns. There’s the side plot, for instance, about Louie and Connie: why is it there? I ended the book thinking Louie was there partly as a witness to the other story, but the letter Connie writes about her pregnancy also creates a thematic resonance, about lives thrown off kilter by the war and people affected in unexpected, maybe inexplicable, ways: “It is no use,” she writes, “for you or me to judge, you simply have to allow for how anything is going to take a person, as to which there is no saying till you see.” That certainly describes the other characters, so maybe there are further parallels, or maybe the juxtaposition illuminates the central issues of love and loyalty in ways I didn’t pick up on. What does Mount Morris bring, to Roderick, who to Stella’s surprise takes so seriously his role as master of the house? Is it the continuity that matters, given the great uncertainty stalking the rest of his life and indeed much of the wider world? Is it nostalgia for identities that are rooted in one place? Harrison, for instance, is unsettling in part because nobody knows where he actually lives. What about Harrison? There’s something so morally unpleasant about the way he tries to blackmail Stella into intimacy, but in the end he seems steadier, more admirable, if just as enigmatic, as Robert–whose name (in a nice little doppelganger-ish twist) it turns out he shares. What about Stella herself, living under the shadow of a scandal we learn was always founded in error, ending up in scandal again after Robert takes the roof exit from her “luxury” flat? Why does the knowledge (again, imperfect) that Stella is “not virtuous” prove so inspirational to Louie? Finally, for now, what about the war itself? On another reading, I would want to track more carefully the convergence of major events in the war with the more minor cataclysms on the home front. At the every end of the book we get an unusually specific review of military events, from the German capitulation at Stalingrad to “the Russian opening of their great leafy Orel summer drive,” on into 1944, “The Year of Destiny,” and the D-Day landings. We sit in Stella’s new apartment during the “Little Blitz,” and the guns, instead of being threatening, buy her time in the conversation–her relationship to the war itself seems to have changed. And yet it’s Louie who actually ends the novel, watching not the bombers, which “invisibly high up, had droned over” a little before, but swans, “disappearing in the direction of the west.” Is that a hint that the unnatural condition of war is coming to an end, or just another reminder of the omnipresence of time?

This was my first experience reading Elizabeth Bowen. It wasn’t easy, and I was glad for the external motivation of my book group meeting, which helped me make concentrating on the novel a priority. (Unfortunately, I was the only one at the meeting who had finished the novel, which is one reason I still have so many questions lingering! Please, Bowen readers out there, help me out!) The Heat of the Day does not seem to be considered Bowen’s greatest novel: from what I’ve read, just poking around the internet, people seem to identify that as The Death of the Heart. I’m interested enough that I think I’ll look around for a copy of that. In the meantime, it’s back to Testament of Friendship, which has been on hold for too long.

Reading Elizabeth Bowen

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I’m reading The Heat of the Day for my local book group, which meets tonight. I haven’t finished the book yet: that’s my main agenda item for today! This is my first experience reading Bowen and it is going a bit slowly, which is why I’m not done. I’ve had the book for a long time: my copy is inscribed to me from my mother on my birthday in 1987 (the same year she gave me Disturbances in the Field, which I have read probably 20 times). So not only is it going slowly now, but it has taken me a long time to get to this book. But then, it’s a book that goes slowly itself: so far, very little has happened, but always with infinite nuance and weight. Nobody walks across a room without the movement being freighted with significance. As I read, I have had in mind Lauren Elkin‘s comparison between Bowen and Winifred Holtby, that “Bowen seems more interested in the possibilities of form, whereas Holtby seems more interested in the possibilities of message.” This has helped me be patient with the book: when it seems to meander, regress, or just stall, I mutter “late modernism” to myself until I stop fretting. The reward for persisting (besides the accumulating sense that, indeed, the actions in the book are significant, and the characters and their story are going somewhere interesting) is that there are passages of sublimely wonderful writing. The opening pages of Chapter Five, in particular, offer a splendidly evocative, lyrical description of London in the autumn of 1940, “that heady autumn of the first London air raids.” A sample:

Out of the mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. . . . The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phantasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London’s organic power–somewhere here was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, forced itself new channels.

The very soil of the city at this time seemed to generate more strength: in parks the outsize dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun blazoned out the idea of the finest hour. Parks suddenly closed bdcause of time-bombs–drifts of leaves in the empty deck chairs, birds afloat on the dazzlingly silent lakes–presented, between the railings which girt them, mirages of repose. All this was beheld each morning more light-headedly: sleeplessness disembodied the lookers-on.

In reality there were no holidays; few were free however light-headedly to wander. The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache. In offices, factories, ministries, shops, kitchens the hot yellow sands of each afternoon ran out slowly; fatigue was the one reality. You dared not envisage sleep.

It goes on–the next bit about the traces of the dead mingling with the living is also wonderful, and the whole set piece compellingly backs up the claim that “that particular psychic London was to be gone for ever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city.”

Here’s another passage, also intensely descriptive and also evocative of a mood and a perspective:

She was at the foot of the most advancing promontory of the Mount Morris woods, at the point where, borne forward on inside rock, they most nearly approached the river. A rapture of strength could be felt in the rising tree trunks rooted gripping the slope, and in the stretch of the boughs; and there travelled through the layered, lit, shaded, thinning and crossing foliage, and was deflected downward onto the laurels, a breathless glory. In the hush the dead could be imagined returning from all the wars; and, turning the eyes from arch to arch of boughs, from ray to ray of light, one knew some expectant sense to be tuned in to an unfinished symphony of love.

The seeming of this to be for ever was astonishing–until a leaf fell slowly, veering towards her eyes as though she had brought time with her into the wood.

I’m willing to forgive a novelist a fair amount of opacity and even the occasional bout of tedium if the reward is writing like this.

Decided! Books for ‘Mystery and Detective Fiction’

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

As you know, I’ve been tinkering for some time with the book list for this fall’s version of ‘Mystery and Detective Fiction.’ This course presents a special set of challenges for me because the range of options is so wide and because my patience for exploring the options runs out pretty fast.  I’ve also been asked to teach it so often since I first introduced it in 2003, and I’m always torn between the simplicity and efficiency of just using the same books as before and the desire for some change, not to mention the pricking of my conscience about trying to represent as many voices and styles in the genre as I can. After another round of suggestions, explorations, and cogitations, not to mention a very tedious search for a reader that included all of my ‘must have’ short fiction, here’s what I’ve settled on for Fall 2011. The order is in, so don’t you dare tell me what books would work better or what important writer I’m obviously missing. Actually, feel free to tell me. I’m sure I’ll be teaching the course again, probably as soon as 2012-13, and I might as well get the list started for the next round of ideas. Also, I emphasize in class that our list can’t even hope to be comprehensive even as a sampler: the stated goal of the course is to equip them with contexts, critical ideas, and reading strategies that will enhance their reading of any mysteries, so it doesn’t hurt to be able to mention other titles they should look at.

Classic Crime Stories: 13 Tales from Edgar Allan Poe to Lawrence Block, ed. James Daley

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2)

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Ed McBain, Cop Hater (1956)

P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Terrorists (1975)

Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only (1982)

Walter Mosley,  Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)

McBain, Sjowall and Wahloo and Mosley will be brand new “preps” for me. I left An Unsuitable Job for a Woman off the list for this survey class last time, but it’s one of my own favorites and when I saw I could work the schedule to allow time for one more book, I decided to give it to myself as a treat as well as to the students as a striking contrast in theme and style to the greater minimalism (and testosterone) of McBain and the increase in hard-boiled tough stuff that comes with adding Mosley. This will be the first time I’ve offered the course without Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses, and I’ll miss that one for its blend of procedural conventions and literary material (it’s usually a student favorite, for the creepiness, too). And I’ve dropped Paul Auster’s City of Glass for now, with some regrets because it’s so darned clever–but that’s also the reason I won’t miss it. Looking at this list in chronological order I realize I’m not doing well at bringing it right up to date (1990 seems a lot more recent to me than it will to my students!). Oh well.

Weekend Miscellany: Other People’s Points of View

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I was a bit snarky about both A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Professor. Other people have read them quite differently–or at least more favorably. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Olivia Laing’s recent review of The Professor in the Guardian:

If the spleen only went one way this sort of thing would be vindictive, even nasty, but Castle is too self-aware a critic to carry out anything so brutish as a hatchet job. She persistently casts herself in ridiculous, demeaning roles (“I, her forty-something slave girl from San Francisco”), yelping at one point: “Caveat lector: Lilliputian on the rampage!” The self-belittling reaches its apotheosis in the most substantial essay here, “The Professor”, an extraordinarily gleeful account of Castle’s damaging relationship with a much older woman when she was a grad student in the midwest.

In this real-life retelling of Bluebeard, The Professor, complete with “the Very Weird Long Grey Braid; the Withered Leg, the Loaded Pistol in the Bedside Drawer; the Room in Her House One Was Never Allowed to Enter”, is pitted against the youthful “T-Ball”, a naive and horribly intellectually ambitious baby dyke. The result, predictably enough, is carnage, albeit of a kind that anyone who’s ever loved and lost might experience considerable cathartic pleasure to encounter. (read the rest here)

Laing concludes, “As Castle says of her period of academic specialisation, the 18th century, one can sense beyond the “rococo lightness and drollery… a deep moral seriousness humming away at the core”. That same hum is certainly audible in these pages, though you might be hard pressed to catch it over your own delighted cackles.” I was hard pressed to catch it, but because I was recoiling from the page, not cackling delightedly. I agree more with Elaine Showalter’s earlier Guardian review (here). Though Showalter too is more appreciative of Castle’s “vengeful side” than I am, she identifies aspects of the collection that I too thought were interesting and engaging:

Castle is not limited by the malicious muse. In other essays she writes stirringly about the first world war, and the feminine fascination with and envy of male heroism, as well as about 9/11 and its impact on popular culture. She contends frankly with her fear of “being swept back – annihilatingly – into the world of ‘my mother’s taste’.” In a wonderful sentence about her mother, Mavis, she sums up an entire feminist dilemma: “my whole life up to now . . . has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things.”

In The New Republic, Ross Posnock celebrates Castle’s “turn to memoir”:

Castle partakes of the culture’s sense of entitled contempt of the “English professor,” while also complicating that entitlement. Her essays turn her painfully won capacity to see herself and the world “mock-heroically” into a source of bracing truth-telling that, in turn, becomes an unexpected source of insight into the power of literature, art, and music in shaping a life. . . .

Castle learned mock-heroism the hard way—above all, as the title essay recounts, by surviving a humiliating, scalding, passionate affair as a graduate student with a self-intoxicated, regal, promiscuous female professor—a “connoisseur, a sensualist, skilled in the arts of homosexual love,” a wounding eventually and partially healed by abundant reading in eighteenth-century satire. . . .

Getting dirtied and staying dirty encouraged Castle not only to take a “debunking attitude toward the self,” but also to become insouciant about seriousness and easy about “self-burlesque.” She can be absolutely hilarious. And this suppleness puts her on both sides of the public/academy conflict: she expresses the general public’s contempt for the academic literary intellectual and the genteel sense of superior refinement that the profession cultivates in its members. At MLA she bristles at a “drifting throng of rabbity academics”—an “unprepossessing” mass of “tweedy jackets, sensible shoes”—and also describes herself as an “effete little twit” full of “aristocratic disdain” not only toward her collegial brethren but particularly, in her youth, toward her earnest lesbian separatist sisters.

I think Posnock is right that the book’s appeal (for those who like it) lies at least partly in Castle’s participation in anti-academic satire. I’m not as comfortable with what he calls her “suppleness,” however: another word for that could be “inconsistency,” or even “hypocrisy”. And I honestly don’t see how it is the case that this book

understands more about the academic vocation, and the art of self-examination, than the shelf of grave and socially responsible studies of and by professors that have appeared in recent years. It is a superb weapon for tearing up that soul-destroying cardboard figure of fun its title names.

Nothing in it that spoke to my own experience of “academic vocation,” and if Posnock’s last comment about “that soul-destroying cardboard figure” refers to the English professor as a general identity rather than a specific English professor such as the one with whom Castle had her awful love affair–if he means all of us, in other words, then I resent the implication and Castle should too, except that I don’t see where in The Professor she has done anything to show English professors as soul-enhancing.

And the final offering in my sample of other people’s opinions of The Professor, is Sam Anderson in New York Magazine (here). Anderson pairs The Professor with Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (which I also read and didn’t much like–though for different reasons):

Part of the pleasure of these books is seeing a figure of genteel cultural authority—the literary scholar—comically reduced. Castle, in particular, is vulnerable and neurotic. She blows writing deadlines and suffers from “astronomical credit card debt.” She describes herself as “moody and mean-spirited”; “pale, criminal, a bit bloated”; a “japing, nay-saying, emotionally stunted creature”; and a “bullet-ridden blob.” She has a panic attack in a rental car and explosive diarrhea in the sea off Sicily. (“I am breaking every law of God and Man,” she thinks.) She decides, after a waiter calls her “sir,” that she is destined to “suffer the lonely death of the sexual pervert.” (In a recent interview with The Nation, Castle described her persona in these essays as “self-burlesque … a conscious casting off of a sort of authority or pedantry or certainty.”)

Both Batuman and Castle come across as supremely lovable dorks. As a grad student, Castle used to write some final papers during the first week of class, then brag about it to her classmates. (She seems less proud of this today.) Batuman once brought her bathroom scale to the library to weigh Tolstoy’s Collected Works, ten volumes at a time. (It weighs, apparently, as much as a newborn beluga whale.) Even their faults are lovably dorky.

Here we go again with the anti-academic thing: why exactly is it such a “pleasure” to comically reduce the literary scholar, I wonder? Is it just a grown-up manifestation of the typical childish rebellion against teachers? A kind of erudite adolescent angst? What does it really have to do with anything that the woman who Castle became so disastrously involved with was a professor?

None of these reviews makes me keen to reread The Professor. Similarly, none of the pieces I’ve looked up on A Visit to the Goon Squad will send me back to it–yet, anyway. I’ll hang on to it, of course. Maybe it’s moment will come for me. Maybe. Some prettty energetic discussions of it took place in the posts and comments at The Morning News’s Tournament of Books. Here’s a bit from Anthony Doerr’s judging round, in which Good Squad was thrown in the ring against another book world favorite, Skippy Dies (which would have got my vote):

Egan’s book is a terrific feat of ventriloquism, composed of 13 short stories that seesaw back and forth through time and interconnect multiple characters, particularly the lives of a music producer named Bennie and his assistant, Sasha.

But it’s so much more than my lame synopsis—and more than a sum of diverse narrators and characters. The structure of Goon Squad reminds me in many ways of Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, a lovely collection of six stories in which a minor character in one story becomes the narrator of the next. In Goon Squad, Egan focuses on multiplicity as well as totality; her approach isn’t about eliminating everything that’s irrelevant to a central narrative in the way so many novels are. It’s more about dropping a giant, rotating, mirror ball into a pair of lives and watching it turn.

Silber called her book a “ring of stories” and that’s how I began to think of Goon Squad—as a ring. As you travel around the ring, you watch Bennie and Sasha be kids, compromise, grow up, fail, have kids, make strides, fail again. “Time’s a goon, right?” Bennie says at one point. “You gonna let that goon push you around?”

By the time I got through the book’s penultimate chapter, a breathtaking short story told entirely through PowerPoint slides, there were tears in my eyes.

Elif Batuman took on Goon Squad vs. The Finkler Question in the quarter-finals. At first she reacts a bit as I did, with skepticism about the power of the form of interlinked stories. But like many other reviewers I read, she was won over:

In the middle of Goon Squad’s fourth story, which involves a love triangle with a couple and their guide on a safari—a play on Hemingway’s “Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—I suddenly realized that I was reading a brilliant and wonderful book. The “goon” in the title, it turns out, is time—time that brutalizes, and ravages all things. Most of the recurring characters experience serious reversals and undulations of fortune—successes become spectacular failures and vice versa—in a way that somehow seems not artificial, but incredibly true. Egan makes you feel how time bends stories out of shape, gives them new, incongruous, beautiful, retrospectively inevitable endings. This is the kind of feeling you get from Proust or Tolstoy, but over hundreds, thousands of pages. I don’t think I’ve ever felt it from a short-story collection. “Virtuosity” is actually an apt word: You feel that Egan got so good at the form that she managed to get it to transcend itself—to make it historical, to make it do the work of the novel.

It’s also very much “a book of our times,” a book of our historical moment. I’m thinking less of the story told entirely in PowerPoint than of the character who predicts the coming of Facebook: “The days of losing touch are almost gone,” he says. “We’re going to meet again in a different place. Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us. I picture it like Judgment Day. We’ll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form.” Goon Squad shows how, in a certain sense, we can’t lose track of people anymore—even as, in another, older sense, we eventually lose everything and everyone. It’s a beautiful, valuable achievement.

Huh. Then in the Zombie Round, Rahdika Jones says the PowerPoint chapter made her cry. Maybe I’m just not a reader of our historical moment? If it’s a “book of our times,” why does it have so little in common with anything I know or care about? Maybe the New Yorker story origins are a hint: there’s something almost cliquish about Goon Squad and its fans that relies on a knowingness and a taste for a certain flavor of fiction (clever, artful, self-conscious, and hip). I did appreciate C. Max Magee’s description of Goon Squad in his judging of the Championship Round (in which he ended up giving the nod to Freedom):

Calling Goon Squad a novel in stories, as it is sometimes billed, does it a disservice. The book is more like a scaffold. Each story is a platform connected by the structure Egan has erected, but, in the form of little bits of exposition within the stories, she also sends ladders shooting higher and ropes hanging lower, moving the characters decades into future where they may or may not meet again. The scaffold suggests the heft of a much larger design behind it. And, to extend this metaphor further, isn’t it true that an intricate, possibly hazardous scaffolding is sometimes more interesting to behold than the massive building to which it is affixed?

That’s nicely put, a persuasive way to describe the book’s structure. My answer to his final rhetorical question, though, is “no”–or at least, not unless the building is a failure, in which case our interest in the scaffolding is partly that of a pathologist. What I really want is the edifice, not the artifice.

Terry Castle, The Professor

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Here’s a passage from Terry Castle’s “The Professor”–what genre  is it? essay? novella? screed?–that displays most of the qualities that made me dislike it so much:

So what to say about the Dear Lady herself, now that more than three decades have elapsed? True: one feels a bit like Sir Walter Scott putting the question so sententiously. One imagines a title: Dumped: Or, ‘Tis Thirty Years Since. Also true: that the matter evokes contradictory feelings in me. Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length [she’s not kidding–the piece goes on for almost 200 pages], I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness. As I expected, revisiting Ye Olde Journals has indeed been lowering–not least because they tell such a dreary old-hat tale. Who hasn’t clawed at one’s pillow in anguish at a lover’s faithlessness? Had one jumped off a cliff that long-ago winter–Sappho of Lesbos-style–one would simply have ratified it: one’s lack of originality; one’s tedious by-the-bookness.

What don’t I like? First, the Capital Letters. This is a trick Castle uses frequently in this volume when she wants to use terms she knows are trite and so decides to code as ironic: “Core Emotional Truth Time,” Still Too Much Going On,” “Trial of Taste,” “The Worst Song Ever Written,” “Wild and Fun and Oh-So Grown-Up.” It’s self-mockery, sure, but also a parade of intellectual superiority (“don’t worry, I know better than this“). Then the pronoun: why, in such an intimate tale, switch to the pompous “one” when the subject is clearly, as in every essay here, Castle herself? Again, it’s self-mockery, but the sententiousness is not any less because of the off-hand and unjustifiably condescending reference to Scott. (Scott’s version of Dumped would have been far less obsessively whiny and self-absorbed: think how foolish Our Hero Edward Waverley looks as he mopes about after Flora MacIvor!) Then the faux-apologies for the triteness of the tale told–faux, because she takes 200 pages to tell her side of the story, and while the visceral energy of the piece is undeniable, she’s right that it’s not, or is not made into, something extraordinary: there’s no broader implication, no lesson learned (for her or for us), no strong attribution of cause and effect between the miserable affair and her understanding of relationships or her development as a person or an intellectual. “Ye Olde Journals”? OK, we get it: you are keen to distance yourself from the woman you were when you wrote them. There’s no need to be so arch about it. And the Sappho allusion is the pretentious cherry on this dreary sundae of self-pity and vengefulness. Though I’m not nearly as interested in Terry Castle as I would have to be to find these nearly 200 pages truly compelling, I would at least have preferred that she write them with less effortful self-conscious posturing and more sincerity. Perhaps it’s the Victorianist in me confronting the 18th-century satirist in her, but there’s no sense that she got anything intellectually or morally out of either the experience or the narration of it. Fair enough, but then it’s hard to see what we can get out of reading this, except sordid voyeuristic excitement.

I liked the first essay in the collection much better: that’s the one I quoted from before, that includes her thoughts on Vera Brittain. I was mildly to moderately engaged by the other ones, though “Desperately Seeking Susan” also struck me as self-absorbed and unpleasantly voyeuristic–I was left with the feeling that Castle is kind of a difficult person to know, and certainly a dangerous person to cross or disappoint. I really enjoyed parts of “Travels with My Mother,” but in the end I couldn’t forgive Castle her overt condescension–again, being self-conscious about it does not undo it. She’s just so pleased with herself for being able to like Georgia O’Keeffe in spite of herself:

But something odd is happening. The paintings, when I get to them, are not, I notice, as huge and blowsy as I was expecting. Several in fact are quite small. Not Vermeer small, but definitely smallish. And one or two, I have to admit, are pleasing, especially the pre-New Mexico ones from the 1910s and ’20s. Hmmm. Addled connoisseur-brain starts gently powering up again, trying to process the unanticipated subtleties of the situation. Okay, they’re all still flowers, but aren’t some of them at least as good as ones by those American Modernists you like so much? You know: Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth? If you didn’t know they were hers, wouldn’t you be impressed? Aren’t you being hard on her–as is your perverted wont–because she’s a woman? I keep looking for more of the expected monstrosities–lewd river basins, vaginal canyons–but have only intermittent success. A few throbbing pink and yellow horrors float in and out of view in the distance, of course, but the worst offenders in the O’Keeffe Anatomical Fixation Department don’t seem to be here…

And she’s so pleasantly surprised to learn that her mother (who does crafts–the horror!) shares her enthusiasm for Agnes Martin, the “anti-O’Keeffe” who serves as her “ultimate Connoisseur’s Good Taste Vaccine”: “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Southwestern Style, I will fear no evil.”

To my surprise … [my mother] is an Agnes Martin aficionada. . . . My snob-self is frankly stunned at this unexpected display of maternal hip: it’s as if Wally and Charlie, my dachshunds, were suddenly to begin discussing Hans-Georg Gadamer.

The flourishes of knowingness, the display of recondite expertise, the distancing irony, the snide self-mockery supplementing but never supplanting the self-absorption: the impression I get from this volume is that these qualities are not stages in Terry Castle’s life but define her personality. Judging from the effusive blurbage on the book, for people who like this sort of thing, this is really the sort of thing they like, but that turns out not to include me.

Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

It seemed appropriate to come back from Boston with a copy of Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf Manuscript. Though I’m sure I’ve read it before, it wasn’t in my own Spenser collection–which is actually pretty small, since I originally read them from my family’s copies back in Vancouver. The ones I own myself (and thus reread often) are all quite recent.

It was very interesting, therefore, to go right back to the beginning of the series. Right away, I was conscious of differences, particularly in the writing style. Over time Parker’s prose got more and more spare, especially his dialogue (I have joked that he seemed to be aiming for a book in which nobody actually has to talk at all, as they understand each other so well). The Godwulf Manuscript is downright verbose by comparison. There’s a lot more description of the setting and characters, with particular attention to what people are wearing:

Under one of the saplings a boy and girl sat close together. He was wearing black sneakers and brown socks, flared dungarees, a blue denim shirt and a fatigue jacket with staff sergeant’s stripes, a Seventh Division patch, and the name tag Gagliano. . . . The girl had on bib overalls and a quilted ski parka. On her feet were blue suede hiking boots with thick corrugated soles and silver lacing studs. . . .

A black kid in a Borsalino hat came out of the library across the quadrangle. He had on a red sleeveless jumpsuit, black shirt with bell sleeves, high-heeled black patent leather boots with black laces. A full-length black leather trench coat hung open.

There’s really no need for us to know any of this, unless it’s to establish how observant Spenser is. (Of course, for some of us, there’s a little nostalgic potential in this evocation of a college campus in the early 1970s–if it’s possible to feel nostalgic for flared jeans.) Spenser also talks to (and about) himself more, and he doesn’t act quite like the Spenser we know later on. He’s already a smartass and a good cook, but he’s more conventionally hard-boiled: a loner, a heavy drinker, and not too principled to sleep not only with the young student he’s supposed to be protecting but with her mother as well (to be fair, the mother comes on to him pretty aggressively, but the later Spenser would, I think, have resisted, and not just because of Susan). This is a bleaker Spenser, too, and now I’m curious about whether there’s any overt connection made between the ways he develops and his relationship with Susan–whom he meets in the second book, God Save the Child (which I now must find and reread as well).

Speaking of Susan, it was also interesting to note which of Spenser’s people are here right at the beginning: we meet Quirk and Belson right away, which I hadn’t remembered, but there’s no Hawk, for instance–is their meeting part of the plot of one of the early books, does anyone know, or is Hawk just there at some point? There’s no Rita Fiore yet, no Healy, no Farrell, no Vinnie. I think my favorite thing about the series is that it takes the lone cowboy model of its hardboiled predecessors and gives us instead a community of tough but righteous people who know by instinct what to do and are fearless about doing it. Spenser may go down the mean streets pretty much untarnished, but he’s not alone. Do you remember the original ads for ER, about these being the faces you’d want to see on the worst day of your life? That’s sort of what the Spenser group makes us feel, isn’t it, that if we were in some terrible, dangerous place, they are the ones we could trust to get us out alive, and then to see justice done? Their methods can be as ugly as their antagonists’ and there’s nothing particularly reassuring about a world in which this is the group you rely on, but they live by an unspoken code of honor that is always viscerally satisfying.

The Spenser-Susan relationship is my other favorite thing about the series. It’s as good an attempt as I know to imagine a fully adult relationship in which neither partner makes any compromises but instead each one consciously (if not always flawlessly) works to let the other be fully themselves, without apology. It’s true that it is, ultimately, Spenser’s series, and we follow Susan only in relation to him; there are also many occasions when she needs to be protected from physical harm by Spenser or, more often, by his associates (as he’s off solving the case, of course)–but then, there are also many occasions when her counsel is important to Spenser, and the strength of her psychological insight is often acknowledged and used. Their personal life is not the focus of the series (these are crime novels, after all), but Parker likes to mix it up a bit, as in Small Vices, which I recently reread, where Susan proposes that they have a child. Rather than using this as an opportunity for a dramatic change in either the characters or the basic commitments of the series, Parker makes it one more test of their commitment to letting each other be. That’s no small thing. In fact, in most relationships I know anything about, that’s one of the central challenges. I find it interesting that they keep their own homes. That means it is always a choice, an affirmation, when they are together; it also suggests that even romantic partnerships (and theirs is, undoubtedly, romantic!) need to have boundaries, and allow some time and space for complete autonomy.

I realize that it is possible, and not unjustified, to find this series repetitive. To some, its fidelity to its own formula even reaches the point of tedium–or worse. Recently at The Millions, for instance, Bill Morris gets pretty scathing:

the most rabid fans tend to insist that their favorite writers not only stick to their chosen genre but produce the same book over and over again.  That’s why we keep getting robotic, risk-averse re-writers like the late Robert B. Parker.

Predictably, as a fan (though not a rabid fan) I don’t think that’s entirely fair. The books are intensely similar but they are not the same, and the variations Parker plays on his themes show ingenuity and skill. Repetition also has its own significance: people do bad things for a narrow range of reasons, and setting things straight looks about the same every time. How could it not? One of the underlying points of all mystery series, too, is that a case may conclude, but crime never does. That said, I admit that one of the attractions of reading a new instalment in the series was always knowing basically what it would be like. It was like visiting old friends–and after all, do we expect our old friends to transform each time we meet them? One reason the late books could be so sparse and elliptical is precisely that we all knew each other so well: there was no need to explain. Why shouldn’t the successful establishment of that kind of trust and intimacy be counted a literary virtue as much as the ability of a writer to surprise us or subvert our expectations? Well, OK, I agree that it’s a greater achievement to do the latter, but it’s still no small achievement to do the former. No doubt it’s partly nostalgia that makes me defensive here: I’ve been reading the Spenser books for decades, after all–not quite since 1973, but since the 1980s for sure, and so it feels as if he and Hawk and Susan just belong in my life, somehow. But I wouldn’t have kept on reading and rereading the books if I didn’t think they were worth it, and I trust myself enough as a reader to believe that if they were no better than “robotic,” I would have noticed.

*Before some rabid fan points this out, let me say that I do know Spenser’s office is not at Berkeley and Boylston in The Godwulf Manuscript: he moves there later. I did not go so far as to tour all the Spenserian locations in Boston, though!

The Goon Squad visited; I was not at home.

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

goon_squadWhat to do when you read a critically acclaimed, award-winning, highly successful and popular novel and are unmoved?

That’s my problem on finishing Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad—finishing belatedly, because (and this is a symptom of my reading experience) I read the penultimate chapter (and I should say “read” the penultimate chapter, as it’s the one “written” [“composed” seems a better term, but Egan talks about “writing” it] in PowerPoint slides) several days ago and then the book sat around giving me no sense of urgency about getting to the end—so tonight I whipped (a bit carelessly, I admit) through to the end so I could get back to Testament of Friendship and then move on to Cakes and Ale without guilt.

It’s not that I didn’t like the novel. Mostly, I enjoyed it. It’s written in polished, sometimes evocative, often witty prose. The characters are well drawn. The structure is ingenious. The shifts in point of view and the manipulation of chronology are technically skillful. The PowerPoint chapter is ingenious—but the whole time I was going through it I kept thinking of my 7th-grade autobiography project. One required component was a character sketch, and (feeling ingenious) I inserted several line drawings (sketches!), outlines of a girl’s shape (I traced a paper doll, I think), on which I wrote key words that I thought described my character. In her evaluation, my teacher wrote: “Character sketches: original. However, you have the talent to write this interestingly in paragraph or story form.” So does Jennifer Egan.

So what am I missing, or what is the novel missing? Though it’s a reasonable 340 pages, Goon Squad felt insubstantial, to me, which is not an issue of length so much as an issue of ideas. What’s the idea of the novel? Where’s the depth? It reads like interlocking short stories—which is fine (and kind of trendy, I guess, recalling Olive Kitteridge, which also, now I think about it, won the Pulitzer, and which I also found fine but not great)—but it also bespeaks a certain disengagement from the form of the novel as something distinct, doesn’t it? Is this a hopelessly old-fashioned idea, that novels are at their best when most themselves? (I know–that’s a question that can only get me into trouble, considering how amorphous the definition of “the novel” is, and how many dissimilar forms the category happily embraces.) But consider A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, for example. The heft of it! The fearless exposition! And the commitment to telling us what happens, what it means, how it feels, and to crafting all the profusion of details and characters into something artistically and intellectually solid. Novels don’t all have to be as heavy as The Children’s Book, but that feeling of repletion is something I appreciate in a novel. Leaving Brooklyn gave me that feeling too, in a completely different way, both aesthetically and formally. Goon Squad kept me interested moment to moment, but it felt more like the pleasures of a tapas bar than the satisfaction of a full meal. Its unities arise from the characters, whose stories persist and overlap, and from what I take to be the book’s central thematic interest in the relationship between our past and our present–and in the moments that crack them together, unsettling our sense of our own identities, releasing sparks of often poignant memory. (Yes, I saw the epigraphs from Proust.) That all works…and yet it didn’t really work for me at that visceral level where you say “this is a book for me, a book of my life.”

I’m open, as always, to the possibility that it’s my fault—that I’m not reading this particular book well, whether because it confounds or subverts my pre-existing expectations or preferences for fiction or for some other reason. I understand that Egan wasn’t trying to write like Byatt or Schwartz and failing at it, and indeed that kind of realism is probably something she avoided deliberately, though in many respects Goon Squad is a conventionally realist novel that just plays a little with chronology and point of view (first person! second person! third person!)—and form or genre, what with the slides, and the magazine article (with footnotes!) and so on. One point of disconnection for me was certainly the general context of the stories: the punk music scene (and the musical allusions) are unfamiliar territory and hold little interest for me. Is it as simple as that? I couldn’t love the novel because I didn’t “relate” to it? I hope that’s not all that inhibited my appreciation—I like to think I’m a better reader than that!

This post is very much a first response, too: I’ve only just put the book down, and though I’ve browsed back through it as I puttered away here to freshen and test my recollections of it, I know I haven’t given it the kind of attention I would give a book I were ‘officially’ reviewing. The bottom line, though, is that while I’m not sorry I read it, I have no urge to go back to it. There are books I’ve read once and become immediately, intimately bound up in them, and A Visit from the Goon Squad is just not one of them. Still, I’m curious enough about the mismatch between my experience and the buzz that I’ll probably go look up some reviews, and maybe the Tournament of Books posts about it: I feel the need for a little of what Wayne Booth calls “coduction.”

Have any of you read A Visit from the Goon Squad? What was your reaction? Are there any reviews or blog posts about it that you found particularly apt or provoking?

Some Boston Highlights

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Why did I not know what a beautiful city Boston is? As I prepared for my trip, I realized that I had no particular mental picture of Boston. Not only had I never been there in person, but I know hardly any books set there, or movies or TV shows set (much less filmed) there : there’s Cheers, of course, but we almost never get any shots of the city, and there’s Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, and The Bostonians, and Death in a Tenured Position for Harvard…and as far as my own reference points go, that’s about it. Of course, now that I’ve said that you’ll probably all be able to point out other obvious examples, including ones I do know but have forgotten! But compared to New York, Boston was unfamiliar territory for me, so I approached it with a real sense of discovery and enjoyed it thoroughly. This is not the place for a detailed travelogue (and I have no Eat, Pray, Love-style revelations to make!), but here are a few of the highlights.

My favorite place was definitely the Public Garden. We have a Public Gardens here in Halifax, which is smaller but also more formal and ornate than Boston’s. Both are lovely oases in the middle of the city bustle. My B&B was just down Commonwealth Avenue from the gates, so I was able to visit the Garden often; if only the weather had been a bit less drizzly, I would have spent even more time roaming around enjoying green thoughts in the green shade. Of course, I had to pay my respects to my oldest Boston literary friends:

Another thoroughly delightful place, one that I might not have thought to visit if it weren’t for my host, is the Boston Public Library. Completed in 1895, it is a monument (as all public libraries should be) to the value of reading, with an elegant marble vestibule opening into this spectacular entrance hall:

The main staircase is “ivory gray Echaillon marble,” my flyer tells me, and the walls are “richly variegated yellow Siena”:

Here’s the beautiful reading room, Bates Hall:

Shouldn’t being in a library always be this much like being in a temple? The library also has a pretty courtyard with a fountain, a peaceful spot to enjoy your coffee and your book.

Of course, I had to visit Harvard. I kind of wished I had worn my Cornell sweatshirt, as a small gesture of resistance to the overwhelming, well, Harvardness of it. But Harvard Yard was very leafy and pretty in the sun:

Even prettier, though, was the Esplanade along the Charles River, the perfect place to spend the one really bright sunny afternoon I had on the trip:

Other places I enjoyed (besides the bookstores mentioned in my previous post) included the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, two very different museum experiences, the first a glut of beautiful things, the second more orderly and managed but just as full of provocation and beauty. At the Gardner, the building itself is nearly as remarkable as what it houses. At the MFA, I was particularly compelled (and, in part, repelled) by Turner’s Slave Ship, which is grimly spectacular–and also smaller than I somehow imagined it would be. I enjoyed the Mary Cassatt paintings at the MFA but sadly Mrs Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading (see blog banner, above), though in the collection, did not seem to be on display. I am always especially interested in any needlework on display; there was a spectacular example of needlepoint, as big as a tapestry, inthe Dutch room at the Gardner, which I would in fact have mistaken for a tapestry if I hadn’t mentioned my fondness for embroidery to one of the attendants, who then pointed it out to me. At the MFA, one of my favorite items was also pointed out to me by a helpful guide, who understandably identified this serene couple as two of his most cherished friends in the collection:

As many people told me before my trip, Boston is a very walkable city, and I had fun puttering around Back Bay and Beacon Hill, as well as taking a soul-soothing stroll through parts of Forest Hill Cemetery. Of course, I stopped at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley where Spenser has his office, and I took a classic tacky photo of the entrance to Cheers. Finally, on my last day, after a deliciously over-indulgent brunch at Amrheins and a quick tour of the North End, I played tourist at Quincy Market.  With all this and the important Open Letters Monthly summit meetings that were the occasion for the trip in the first place, it was a full five days, and though I certainly didn’t see or do everything, now I feel I know at least something about this lovely historic city.

One final trip-advisorish note for anyone who might be headed to Boston themselves any time soon. I stayed at the College Club of Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue. It’s a charming old building and the rooms are decorated to suit (if a little shabbier than they look in the photos–in my little quarters, I felt a bit like a Victorian gentlewoman fallen on hard times but keeping up appearances, like one of the older Madden sisters in The Odd Women). The location is amazing, and the prices are reasonable, especially if you’re willing to share a (nicely renovated) bathroom. However, I have never experienced such creaky floors in all my life, and every door stuck and therefore had to be tugged open and slammed shut. It’s not a good place to come back to if you’ve been out a bit late (say, drinking wine and talking books in Jamaica Plain, just hypothetically)–not, at least, if you’re the type to feel awkward about waking everyone else up. And it’s a terrible place to stay if it’s really important to you to sleep well–for the same reason. That said, I might well stay there next time. After all, sleep is hardly a top priority when travelling, right? And being a stone’s throw from the Public Garden and walking distance to the Brattle Book Shop is awfully nice.