Author: Rohan Maitzen

Two Women Writing: Ditlevsen and Toews

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I made my way to the end of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy without ever deciding if I was enjoying it or not. Enjoying might be the wrong word in any case: it’s not really a fun or pleasant story, and Ditlevsen herself does not come across as likeable, so what’s to enjoy? The better question is whether I was appreciating or admiring it, or interested in it. I am undecided on these questions as well. And yet her account of her childhood, youth, and “dependency” (meaning addiction) did exert a kind of pull on me, enough that I persisted to the end. One of the rewards, as I mentioned before, is coming across passages that hit hard. Some samples:

I look up at [my mother] and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other adult women, younger than other mothers, and there’s a world outside my street that she fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back. As we stand there in front of the witch, I also notice that my mother’s hands smell of dish soap. I despise that smell, and as we leave the school again in utter silence, my heart fills with the chaos of anger, sorrow, and compassion that my mother will always awaken in my from that moment on, throughout my life.

Or,

Wherever you turn, you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart. It seems that everyone has their own and each is totally different. My brother’s childhood is very noisy, for example, while mine is quiet and furtive and watchful. No one likes it and no one has any use for it.

Or this, which is such an uncomfortable kind of yearning, perhaps not completely unfamiliar to anyone who was a precocious girl in a world where that quality was not always welcome:

I desire with all my heart to make contact with a world that seems to consist entirely of sick old men who might keel over at any moment, before I myself have grown old enough to be taken seriously.

Or this, once she has grown into a writer:

I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people . . . and since I’m always forming sentences in my head, I’m often distant and distracted.

As these samples show, there’s a hardness, a flatness, to the narrating voice: as often before, I wondered if that affect was intrinsic to the original or an effect of the translation. There’s also an intensity, and a ruthlessness, towards herself as much as towards others. It is a strong voice, but it does not inspire me to look up any of Ditlevsen’s fiction.

I also finished Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace, which is not really a memoir, I suppose, but I’m not sure what else to call it. It is about her life and about writing and about the death by suicide of her father and her sister—which is to say, it is about the same subjects as most of her other books, which is sort of the point, as it is written in response to a question she cannot clearly answer: “Why do you write?”

I did not like this book much as a book, though I admire and sympathize with Toews’s wrestling with questions about how or whether or why to keep returning to these deaths. It’s odd to think that long before I knew that her main subject would become, in a way, my own, I puzzled over my dissatisfaction with her highly autobiographical novel All My Puny Sorrows. One of my thoughts at that time was that she had stuck so closely to the personal that her novel had not offered something more philosophical, something more meaningful. That’s not an obligation for art or artists, of course, but reading AMPS that’s the dimension I felt was missing. In a way, I feel the same about A Truce That Is Not Peace, even as I understand better now how inappropriate it might be, or feel, to move from the personal to the abstract based on one’s own individual experience of this kind of grief or trauma. Certainly that would have meant writing a very different kind of book, and my sense from Truce is that it is not the kind of book Toews would want to write.

What this book communicated to me is a kind of stuckness, a kind of stasis, in her grieving and her thinking about her grieving. I am not complaining that she hasn’t “gotten over” these deaths: that (as I well understand) is not how this works. As she herself is clearly aware, she keeps writing because she isn’t over them, because they aren’t, in that sense, over themselves. Her loss is ongoing. That is a reason, not an explanation, for her writing—if that makes sense as a distinction. It would be nice if writing led to meaning. Sometimes it does, but not always. “Narrative as something dirty, to be avoided,” she says at one point,

I understand this. I understand narrative as failure. Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure. On its own it will always fail to do the thing it sets out to do—which is to tell the truth.

I sympathize with her grief and anger and frustration, and also with her wish, which I think is implicit in her bothering to write this book at all, that maybe, possibly, hopefully, she can say something truthful if she just keeps at it. I was outraged on her behalf, too, when I read this part:

Is silence the disciplined alternative to writing?

A student of English literature, whose class I recently visited, has suggested that now is the time for me to stand back and listen. I’ve had a “platform” long enough.

But what then—if I stop writing? I don’t want a platform. I am listening. What an awful word! Platform.

I didn’t much like this particular book. I found it too fragmented, too random; I wanted Toews to actually write the whole book, not to give us what felt (to me) like scraps of it, a draft of it. I understand that its form reflects a refusal to impose order and meaning where she does not find them, but at the same time I am not sure that if anyone but Miriam Toews had written exactly this, it would have found a publisher. But never mind my personal taste, or what I personally go to memoirs about suicide hoping to find (words in the shape of my wound, to paraphrase a poem that still echoes in my mind). We (generally) want to read it because she wrote it and we believe she is worth listening to. Imagine telling the author of Women Talking that she should shut up now.

Here’s something true in it, something that I think Yiyun Li would appreciate for its bluntness, something Denise Riley also talks about. Toews recounts a conversation with a friend whose child died of cancer:

She hated some of the things people said to her afterwards.

I can’t imagine your sorrow. I can’t imagine your pain.

Yeah, you fucking can! You can fucking imagine it. Go ahead and fucking try.

My friend told me she’d never felt more alone and sealed off in her coffin of grief than when people told her, even lovingly, even with tender hugs, that they couldn’t imagine her sadness.

Try! Stay! Stay with me.

“What will happen if I stop writing, I want to ask the student of English literature,” Toews says, right after this anecdote. Maybe the answer to the question that launches this book is here: she writes so that we will stay with her. 

Recent Reading: Slump-Ish

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up Sarah Moss’s Ripeness, and it isn’t as if I haven’t read anything since then! The problem (for posting, anyway) is that I haven’t read anything that made me want to write about it. I didn’t used to use that as an excuse: I just wrote up everything! And in the process I often found I did have things to say. Let’s see if that happens this time as I go through my recent reading.

I had put in some holds on some lighter reading options that all seemed to come in at once. The timing wasn’t bad, as I was too distracted by the rush to get the term underway when the lockout ended to dig in to anything very demanding. Even as diversions, though, none of these were particularly satisfying reads: Katherine Center’s The Love-Haters seemed contrived to me; Beth O’Leary’s Swept Away was (as Miss Bates had already warned me in her review) good until it wasn’t; Linda Holmes’s Back After This wasn’t terrible but it also seemed contrived—a reaction that I realize may be less about the books than about my chafing for some reason at the necessary contrivance of romance plots. But I’m rereading Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over now and liking it as much as I did before, so maybe it is at least partly the books’ fault that they seemed so formulaic.

I read Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood for my book club, which met to discuss it on Wednesday. It was the first Modiano any of us had read, and we chose it because we wanted to follow up Smilla’s Sense of Snow with something that offered a more literary twist on the mystery genre. So You Don’t Get Lost certainly does that—maybe, we thought, it goes (for our tastes) too far in the other direction: it is so far away from being plot-driven that, as any reader of the novel will know, following the plot is like pushing on a cloud. I think I would have found it annoying if the novel had been longer, but it’s novella-length, and once I realized all the noir premises and promises of the opening were going to remain unfulfilled, I enjoyed just going where it took me. It is wonderfully atmospheric, and Modiano managed to keep me wondering about what had happened while also frustrating my curiosity at almost every turn. “In the end,” his narrator says, “we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed”—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read Tony’s post.

I read Kate Cayley’s Property, which I thought was well written and artfully constructed but (again, for my taste) too much so, too deliberate, never gripping until its final sequence, which then annoyed me by being manipulative and melodramatic. Kerry liked it better than I did. I didn’t dislike it; I just never really wanted to pick it up again when I’d put it down, and I also kept forgetting which character was which, which in a fairly short book with a tight cast of characters seems like it might not be all my fault.

I read Lily King’s Heart the Lover because I’m reviewing it for the TLS, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I think about it! (I’m still figuring that out as I reread it, anyway: I can say that it is a book that has so far elicited a lot of equivocation from me!)

I am currently reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. This too I am not eager to pick up again after I put it down, but when I do pick it up, I keep coming across hard-hitting gems of sentences (is that a mixed metaphor?) “Wherever you turn,” says narrator Tove, “you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart.” On the brink of youth,

Now the last remnants [of childhood] fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window—and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

It seems unfair to characterize as a “reading slump” a period that includes both this and (in its very different register) the Modiano, and yet that is how the past few weeks have felt. Good thing that today in class we began what will be nearly a month of work on David Copperfield! Dickens has rescued me before and already, six chapters in, I can tell that whether or not I read any other books in the next little while that excite me, he’s going to show me all over again what a great reading experience is like.

“What an Astonishing Hat”: The Relatable VW

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

How I hate the word “relatable,” which is so often a shorthand for “like me and thus likeable,” which in turn is both a shallow standard for merit and a lazy way to react to a character. And yet sometimes it’s irresistible as a way to capture the surprise of finding out that someone who otherwise seems so different, elusive, iconic, really can be in some small way just like me—a writer of genius, for example, who reacts to invitations by worrying that she has nothing nice to wear and doesn’t look very good in what she does have. Yes, the period of Woolf’s diary I am reading is one of great intellectual and artistic flourishing, and this makes it all the more touching as well as oddly endearing that she frets so much about “powder & paint, shoes & stockings.” “My own lack of beauty depresses me today,” she writes on March 3, 1926;

But how far does the old convention about ‘beauty’ bear looking into? I think of the people I have known. Are they beautiful? This problem I leave unsolved.

On March 20 she remarks “a slight melancholia,”

which comes upon me sometimes now, & makes me think I am old: I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

She loves socializing, thrives on conversation, but dreads dressing up for it: “When I am asked out,” she notes in May, “my first thought is, but I have no clothes to go in.” She undertakes to go to “a dressmaker recommended by Todd [the editor of Vogue]”: “I tremble & shiver all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken.” Happily, it goes well:

I went to my dressmaker, Miss Brooke, & found it the most quiet & friendly and even enjoyable of proceedings. I have a great lust for lovely stuffs, & shapes . . . A bold move, this, but now I’m free of the fret of clothes, which is worth paying for, & need not parade Oxford Street.

No sooner is she feeling more at ease, even easy, about how she looks, then stupid Clive Bell has to go and ruin everything:

This is the last day of June [1926] & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom. This happened at Clive’s last night after going to the Sitwell’s with Vita. Oh dear I was wearing the hat without thinking whether it was good or bad; & it was all very flashing and easy . . . Come on all of us to Clive’s, I said; & they agreed. Well, it was after they had come & we were all sitting round talking that Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them like a hare; I never felt more humiliated. Clive said did Mary choose it? No. Todd said Vita. And the dress?  Todd of course. After that I was forced to go on as if nothing terrible had happened; but it was very forced & queer & humiliating. So I talked & laughed too much, Duncan prim & acid as ever told me it was utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that. And I joked about the Squires’ party & Leonard got silent, & I came away deeply chagrined, as unhappy as I have been these ten years; & revolved it in sleep & dreams all night; & today has been ruined.

Thanks a lot, Clive! And you too, Duncan: I bet your hats were all plenty stupid-looking! But seriously, although at the time Woolf really was not “old” (and it is hard for me to think of her as anything but strikingly beautiful), isn’t it hard enough going out in public in this sexist and judgmental world as an aging woman who knows her strengths lie somewhere other than in her looks, without our dearest friends making us wish we’d stayed home?

(I don’t think either of the hats in the photos here is the hat! They are both great hats, but neither of them, surely, is astonishing.)

This Week, Back In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

It was just about a month ago that I last posted in this series. At the time, Dal faculty were locked out but we were hoping that a resolution to the labour dispute was close, which, thankfully, it did turn out to be. Still, because the back-to-work protocol rightly included some preparation time, we were ultimately three weeks late starting classes. Another part of the deal was adding a week to the December end of the term, so technically we have lost “just” two weeks of class time, but it has still meant a lot of reorganizing and everything has felt rushed. Some administrative deadlines have been pushed back, but not everything, so all in all, it has been a hectic time.

That said, it has felt really good to get back to class. I have noticed other professors commenting on social media that students seem very engaged this term, and I have the same feeling, that in spite of —or perhaps because of —the forces arrayed against us as we all try to carry on being curious, rigorous, and enthusiastic about literature, they are bringing their best selves to the room. Students IRL are always such a different thing than the abstractions or generalizations that often circulate about them. I mean, of course there are exceptions, but especially in upper-level classes that not one of them has to take, they are there for good reasons and working in good faith. While I am sure some of them can feel the temptation of AI’s false promises, I am even more sure that what they really want is authenticity; if anyone wavers or wobbles, it will be (as has always been the case for ‘shortcuts’) because of time, pressure, or anxiety. What I need to do is not police or surveil them more intensively but work explicitly on process, as I have always tried to do, and then do my best to model for them the kind of reading, discussion, and analysis that I believe is intrinsically valuable, not to mention enjoyable!

Noble aspirations, and already ones I have had a few stumbles living up to, but I have resolved not to spend the twilight years of my career in the classroom assuming the worst and chasing demons. After all, the highest incident of (discovered) plagiarism I have ever had was the dismal year that 1 in 5 of my intro students ended up in a hearing (with a near 100% finding that they had committed an offence)—and this was all cut-and-paste plagiarism of the most discouraging kind (much of it on pass-fail exercises, including supposedly personal writing like reading journals! I still can’t get over that!). Yes, AI is a game-changer, but I refuse to play, and I especially refuse to dedicate a single minute of precious class time to “training” students how to use it “responsibly” (as if there is such a way) instead of using our time on what they and I are actually there for.

Ok, enough of that, but clearly it is on my mind, as it is on everybody’s.

So what have we been talking about? I am on a reduced teaching load this term because I am our ‘Undergraduate Coordinator,’ meaning I chair the committee that oversees our undergraduate programs and also serve as Honours advisor. This means my only class this term is 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens. We started with Persuasion and are now getting well into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I have not lectured on since the winter term of 2020, the term in which we were all sent home. I actually have found going through my lecture notes for courses from that term quite emotional—next term I am teaching the Brit Lit survey course that I was also teaching that term, and my ‘announcements’ notes for mid-March bring up a lot of difficult memories about the “before” times, before the pandemic began and also before Owen’s death, two long-running catastrophes that tend to bleed together when I cast my mind back.

I have taught the Austen to Dickens class since then, but I assigned Jane Eyre. Much as I love Jane Eyre, I think I enjoy teaching Tenant more: its structure is so smart and complex, and the problems it tackles are, sadly, still so timely. I also appreciate that Anne Brontë’s attention is more clearly on social and systemic problems and solutions, while Jane Eyre is relentlessly personal—which is not to say, of course, that Jane’s story isn’t embedded in wider contexts, but her first-person narration focuses our attention constantly on what it is all like to her, on her individual feelings and values and decisions.

Because it has been so long since I taught Tenant in a “lecture” class (I have assigned it in seminars more recently), my old notes still reflect the more controlled (or controlling) approach I have lately been working self-consciously to change, weaning myself off more scripted lectures and trying instead to steer class discussion at once loosely and effectively enough to still hit all the things I think are important. I did always aim to have discussion, of course! It’s about shifting the balance. This term I am also incorporating some very low-key, low-stakes in-class exercises to make tangible the ways I have always wanted students to be engaging with our topics. For example, yesterday I gave them a handout with two columns, one for 1827 and one for 1821, and I asked them to generate some notes about Helen in both timelines so that we could talk about what we are learning, as we go back in time to her diary, about how she became the isolated, prickly, but still passionate woman we (and our ‘hero’ Gilbert) meet in his framing narrative. They then have the option to do a follow-up response that focuses on a specific topic or example. My impression so far is that this is proving a good way to warm up for discussion as well as a useful way to plant the seeds for future work. And of course it has the non-incidental effect of encouraging attendance. 🙂

One of the biggest tasks I have underway at the moment as Undergraduate Coordinator is drafting a first attempt at what next year’s slate of classes will look like. As I pencil in my own courses (or whatever the Excel equivalent is of that!), I find myself reflecting that I won’t be on the timetable for that many more years. When I’m tired and grumpy, I feel some relief about this, but when I have just been in class and riding that adrenaline rush, I feel wistful, even bereft. What will make up for the loss of that energy, of that sense of purpose, of being on the front lines of something that matters, of being pretty good at something? I know there are other things that matter and I am trying to figure out what else I might be good at. Still, this is something that actually causes me more work-related stress than AI. I will try not to make these posts a dreary refrain about either of these topics! And on that note, we have two more weeks to spend on Tenant and then we are on to David Copperfield, and then, thanks to the added week in December, there will still be time for Cranford: hooray!

Ripeness is All: Sarah Moss, Ripeness

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You must have a plum. Or three. Only they’re so ripe some of them burst when you pick them. Ripeness is all, I said. Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. I’d managed to get it into my Oxford entrance exam, my idea that Lear is a darker play than Hamlet. Readiness is all, Hamlet says, and readiness is voluntary, an act of will, where Lear’s ripeness happens to us as to plums and pears, regardless of agency or volition.

I had hoped to do a “proper” review of Ripeness but it didn’t work out. (Honestly, you’d think some editor might have thought of me for it, instead of my having to scout for a venue, given that I have not just read all of but also reviewed several of her books, including Ghost Wall for the TLS – which, sort of ironically, is why there was no chance I’d be reviewing Ripeness for them, as they have a policy that you can’t return to an author you’ve already reviewed, which means no more Sarah Perry or Emma Donoghue or Jo Baker for me there either, sadly.) Of course, I wanted to read it anyway, as Moss is one of my favourite contemporary writers. And I admit: alongside my peevishness about the non-review I now feel a bit of relief, because I think it would have been challenging to think through what to say about it in the kind of tight, unified way a “proper” review requires.

I don’t mean it would have been hard to express an opinion about its merits. I would not say I loved the novel, but I have never read anything by Moss that isn’t both meticulously crafted and convincingly intelligent. Every book of hers has left me appreciating the undercurrent of ideas in it, the sense throughout that something interesting is at stake. The same is true with Ripeness, on both counts, and in addition I think there is more lushness in her prose this time than in either Ghost Wall or Summerwater, both of which left me wishing she would return to the more expansive scope of her 19th-century series.

This is at least in part because half of Ripeness takes place in a villa in the Italian countryside, which for Edith, narrating her youthful experience there, offers many contrasts with her staid, bookish life back home. A sample:

Lucia set me on the path leading across her meadow. It was full of flowers I couldn’t name and grazed by small pale cows with dramatic eyelashes who watched me with mild curiosity. The day was warmer now, but still I caught the seasons turn on the air like Maman’s perfume after she had left a room. As the path rose, I looked straight over the lake to the more serious peaks on the other side, where patches of snow lay between rocks and clouds tangled around cliffs. I had never in my life been so high up, never seen water from so far away. I stopped to listen: wind, birds, faint goat bells. I could tell where there were boats on the lake from the lines their wakes and the folding of the water, traces, trails, passage.

On, up, until there was nothing behind the hill rising in front of me, until I came out on the top and could see in every direction, across a sea of summits, over the other lake into Switzerland, hill calling to hill, a new country at altitude. I turned slowly, delighted to be me, delighted to be there in that hour. I found a rock and sat on it, turned to the call of a bird and saw some great hawk, something that could have been an eagle, turning and passing below me. To see from above a bird in flight, to see the sunlight on its dappled back, to see the spread of its wings above the earth!

Is it just me, or is there a clear echo there of Hopkins, both the “dappled things” of “Pied Beauty” and the sigh of “ah, bright wings!” that so movingly concludes “God’s Grandeur”? There are several more explicit allusions to Victorian texts in Ripeness (including to Middlemarch), so this doesn’t seem like a stretch.

Edith is in Italy to help out her sister Lydia, who is in a kind of moral as well as literal exile because she is unmarried and pregnant and it’s the 1960s. Their mother has made “arrangements”: when the child is born, the nuns will spirit it away and pass it on to its new family. Lydia is fine with this: the pregnancy is not just unwanted and awkward but the result of an assault, and all she wants is to be done with it and return to her life as a ballerina. She and Edith are not close and are not drawn closer by this interlude. When it is done, she returns to her dancing; it is Edith who is haunted by the baby she cared for when Lydia would not, and who writes her account of those strange months “for Lydia’s son to find if he comes looking.”

That (though we don’t know it at first) is the premise of the chapters of the novel that are narrated in first-person by Edith, in retrospect. These chapters alternate with chapters in close third-person, following Edith decades later, divorced, retired, living in Ireland now, enjoying her lover Gunter and her friendships. One thread in this section is an uncomfortable encounter she has with her good friend Méabh, who she happens upon protesting outside a hotel that has been designated as housing for African immigrants—”it’s not right,” she explains to Edith, “there’s been no consultation,” it’s not like the Ukrainians, “we all understood that,” and though “Edith knows her lines” and says what she can to counter Méabh’s bad faith justifications for this public display of bigotry, she’s left “shaky, nauseous.” “Can she still be friends,” she wonders, “with someone who thinks the problem is refugees?”

The answer, it turns out, is yes, and other main plot element in this later timeline also turns on Méabh, who is contacted unexpectedly by a man who has discovered by way of DNA testing that he is her brother, given away by her mother for adoption long before she became Méabh’s mother. He wants to come to Ireland, to meet her and see the place he is from, to reclaim his Irish identity, though what right he has to it is the subject of some pithy comments.

If I were properly reviewing, I would reread the novel until I could explain better how the parts hang together. Big words like “belonging” or “identity” feel relevant but also too general. Lydia and Edith’s mother was herself a refugee, sent away from France just in time to save her from the fate the rest of her Jewish family met. She thought often of her own mother and sister, who were put on trains and then put to death. Whose claims to refuge are met with kindness and whose with protest? Who has the right to say that they are “from” anywhere? What does it mean to be separated from your family, by violence or by the kind of cold pragmatism that removes tiny Gabriel (named by Edith, as Lydia refuses to care, or at any rate to acknowledge her care, for him) and sends him off to strangers? But then, as Méabh’s new-found brother’s story highlights, how much does it matter where you were born, or to whom, if that has never been your home and they have never been your family?

Edith herself does not idealize or romanticize family or motherhood. If anything, what she witnesses of Lydia’s childbearing and birthing alienates her from the whole process. Looking through the book that has been her only guide to what to expect and do, she is put off by its critical tone towards women who “might take childbirth as an excuse to rest and slack off the housework”:

It was the first time I thought that I would not have children, that I would rather go to my grave without the blood-wrestling of birth and the appalling responsibility of infant care . . . [and] I’m not sure I was wrong. I have not been good at motherhood, certainly not in the Irish fashion. I was not a good wife. I did the correct things, mostly, but I did not give myself. I did not merge myself with my son, there was no abnegation.

“I remained,” she reflects, “more of a narrator than a participant. Self-centred to the end, you might be thinking. I am. I narrate.”

I would say, though, that Edith’s narration does not show her as self-centred, even if she is “the main character,” even if, as she proposes, “the scratches in the mirror centre around the candle of my version” (see, Middlemarch!). Maybe the Edith who leaves her account for Gabriel (“To be opened after my death“) is a construct—all narrators are, but also, all of us are, in some sense, right?—but the tenderness she shows to her sister’s unwanted baby hums through that account, which conveys with both delicacy and poignancy the astonishing fact of a new person coming into being, having needs, having hungers, having them met or not. The older Edith of the other chapters is not particularly warm, but she’s always thinking things through. She has that in common with her author, and that makes her good fictional company.

The title is obviously a clue to how to read Ripeness, to how to make sense of it as a whole (how many times have I said that to my students, that novels teach us how to read them, an enterprise that begins with their titles?). I found Edith’s comparison between ripeness and readiness thought-provoking, but I can’t quite figure out how it organizes the novel’s different elements. Lydia was ripe but not ready, I suppose, but it’s Edith’s novel, isn’t it?  I don’t mind that I’m left with questions, with things to think about myself.

Faded, Fatalistic & Aged

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

But this slight depression—what is it? I think I could cure it by crossing the channel, & writing nothing for a week . . . But oh the delicacy & complexity of the soul—for, haven’t I begun to tap her & listen to her breathing after all? A change of house makes me oscillate for days. And thats [sic] life; thats wholesome. Never to quiver is the lot of Mr. Allinson, Mrs. Hawkesford, & Jack Squire. In two or three days, acclimatised, started, reading & writing, no more of this will exist. And if we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, & trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt, but already should be faded, fatalistic & aged.

You thought it was me who felt that way, right? But instead it is Woolf, feeling and thinking and, especially, thinking about feeling.

The parts I am most likely to bookmark as I am reading through the diaries are the ones about writing, the ones probably mostly already included in the Writer’s Diary Leonard compiled (I have it and have mostly read it, in the past, but am not cross-checking.)  I do find Woolf the writer endlessly fascinating, especially now that she has / I have reached a point where she knows she is finally writing as herself, in her own way. “If this book [Jacob’s Room] proves anything,” she reflects,

it proves that I can only write along those lines, & shall never desert them, but explore further & further, & shall, heaven be praised, never bore myself an instant.

Imagine that: I bore myself constantly, especially when I’m writing in my own journal! By the end of Volume II of the published diary she is well along in Mrs. Dalloway (“in this book I have almost too many ideas,” she says, but excitedly, not with anxiety), and she is feeling it, not growing into her voice but now at last (her sense of it) finally using it, with a consciousness of freedom (“I’m less coerced than I’ve yet been,” she says about the writing process).

But at the risk of creating a dichotomy where there shouldn’t be one, Woolf the person is at least as interesting, partly because she is not so sure. She is thin-skinned, sensitive, doubting. She waits on tenterhooks for reviews, especially in the “Lit Sup,” where, she complains, “I never get an enthusiastic review . . . and it will be the same for Dalloway.” She is elated by a generous commentary from “Morgan” (E. M. Forster) and irritable about how long it takes for the Common Reader to get any notice at all—although we might wonder at her expectations: “out on Thursday,” she says petulantly, “this is Monday, & so far I have not heard a word about it, private or public.” Shouldn’t a genius be above this kind of fretting? But if courage is not the absence of fear but acting in spite of the fear, perhaps genius is not the absence of self-consciousness or doubt but writing exactly what you want in spite of those feelings, living venturously, trembling over precipices, braving depression—as long as you can bear it, anyway.

“This diary writing has greatly helped my style,” she says in November 1924; “loosened the ligatures.” I wrote before about how she seemed to be seeking or practising looseness through the relative formlessness of her entries. I’m into Volume III now, already done 1925 because that’s a very short year, and while there is still a lot of meeting and visiting and housekeeping, there are also still what seem clearly like practice sessions for her fiction, little set pieces like this one which, while in a way “just” records of something that happened, somehow do more, or go further:

I am under the impression of the moment, which is the complex one of coming back home from the South of France to this wide dim peaceful privacy – London (so it seemed last night) which is shot with the accident I saw this morning & a woman crying Oh oh oh faintly, pinned against the railings with a motor car on top of her. All day I have heard that voice. I did not go to her help; but then every baker & seller did that. A great sense of the brutality & wildness of the world remains with me—there was this woman in brown walking along the pavement—suddenly a red film car turns a somersault, lands on top of her, & one hears this oh, oh oh.

And yet she still continues on “to see Ness’s new house,” which they go through “composedly enough,” as we all do, if it isn’t our particular catastrophe.

I’m looking forward to 1926, when Mrs. Dalloway is published. In her introduction to Volume III, Olivia Laing notes that it covers “perhaps the most fruitful, satisfying years” of Woolf’s life:

[it] opens as Woolf is revising her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and her first volume of criticism, The Common Reader, and closes as she is editing The Waves. In the intervening years she writes To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own, plus a formidable battalion of essays and reviews.

Now that’s a streak. Does she shake off those worries about how her work will be received, I wonder? I suspect not, as I know from other research I’ve done that years later she was pretty fretful about both the writing and the reception of The Years. In 1925, she’s daring to imagine, though, that she “might become one of the interesting—I will not say great—but interesting novelists.” As she turns her full attention to To the Lighthouse, she’s also rethinking whether she’s a novelist at all: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel” A new——by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”

Winifred Holtby’s chapter on this period of Woolf’s life is called “The Adventure Justified”: “she was more sure now,” Holtby writes, “both of herself and of her public. She dared take greater risks with them, confident that they would not let her down.” It’s a wonderful chapter, rising almost to ecstasy about Woolf’s achievement in To the Lighthouse:

Its quality is poetic; its form and subject are perfectly fused, incandescent, disciplined into unity. It is a parable of life, of art, of experience; it is a parable of immortality. It is one of the most beautiful novels written in the English language.

But in November 1925, Woolf is feeling faded and fatalistic: “Reading & writing go on. Not my novel though. And I can only think of all my faults as a novelist & wonder why I do it.”

This Week (Not) In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It has been very quiet here lately, for reasons that may seem counterintuitive: I have had very little going on, because (long story short) the faculty at Dalhousie has been locked out by the administration since August 20, and while I am not in the union (I’m a member of the joint King’s – Dalhousie faculty) I have been instructed to do no Dal-specific work while the labour dispute continues. You’d think that this would mean I have all kinds of time to read books and write about them here, and yet what has happened instead is that the weird limbo of this situation has prolonged my usual summer doldrums and overwhelmed me with inertia. At this point I can hardly imagine summoning up the energy to stand up in front of keen young people and sustain a lively discussion—and yet at the same time there is nothing I want more to do, especially because if we were in classes this week we would be wrapping up our work on Austen’s Persuasion, my favourite of her novels. The two sides are at the bargaining table again this evening: who knows, maybe by the time I press ‘post’ there will be news of a deal.

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I have done some reading since O, the Brave Music, but nothing that really stuck except William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is as good as everyone said it was, bleak but somehow not depressing. I have just started Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships, which I am enjoying even though it is not at all what I expected: for no good reason, I suppose, I thought it would be more like Dorothy Dunnett’s novels, or Hild, but it is not nearly so dense or expository but is rather more like a chronicle, with a faintly antique cadence as if it is being told rather than written / read. Maxell’s novel deserves its own post but is not going to get one—score one for inertia!—but when I finish The Long Ships, I resolve to write it up properly! In between I have been rereading Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis, most recently The Edge, which is one of my favourite of Francis’s novels and also helps to sustain my dream of one day taking a cross-country train trip.

I have also been continuing my read-through of Woolf’s diaries. I am into 1923 now. 1922 seemed like a slow year and then she published Jacob’s Room and read Ulysses, both of which events generated a lot of interesting material. I am fascinated by her self-doubt: we meet great writers of the past when that greatness is assured, and also when their writer’s identity is established, but Woolf is not so sure on either count, and is hypersensitive—as George Eliot was—to criticism, especially when she felt her work was misunderstood, not just unappreciated. Jacob’s Room is significant because it is the first novel that, to her, really feels like her own voice: “There’s no doubt in my mind,” she says, “that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” I am always fascinated and inspired by accounts of artists of any kind who find their métier and know it; I still think often of Mary Delany, and when I reread that post I also reflect on the expanding confidence I felt at the time and wonder where it went and how to recover it. Well, as Molly Peacock tells us in her wonderful book, Mary Delany was 72 when she discovered and fulfilled her own artistic purpose, so I will try to think of myself as “only” 58 and take heart, again, from her story.

Another paradox around my lack of posting is that for whatever reason, this is the writing I like doing the most. All summer I have been struggling to get something, anything done on a couple of other projects, and while I did meet a couple of small reviewing deadlines and submit something to a CFP for a special issue of a journal (I won’t know for a while if anything comes of that), my larger plans keep fizzling out because I can’t shake the feeling that they are futile: even if I completed exactly what I imagine they could be, the odds that they would find a publisher or an audience seem so slim. When nobody is asking for something and there’s no extrinsic need or reward for it, you really have to believe in it to actually do it. Perhaps my lack of conviction is a sign that these are not in fact the right projects for me . . . but then what is? These have not been good years for trusting myself, partly because of the legacy of my failed promotion bid. Oh wait, that’s where that surge of optimism and confidence went! and in fact that’s exactly right: I’ve been struggling to rebuild ever since, and I was making some progress when COVID hit and then all the hard personal stuff of the last few years. At some point, of course, explanations shade into excuses—and I have in fact been getting lots of other things done, and would be getting more done if I were back in my classes now, as I should be and hope to be soon. Teaching is almost always restorative for me, and this term—when it finally starts—should be especially so as due to an administrate release I have just one class, 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens.

Cross your fingers that a fair deal is struck soon, not just so that I can get out of this dreary purposeless limbo but so that I don’t have to cut Cranford from our reading list because we don’t have enough time for it. And whatever happens with the negotiations, I will try to stop malingering.

Almost Perfect: Dorothy Evelyn Smith, ‘O, The Brave Music’

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Sometimes I think that was the happiest day of my life, those hours of heat and silence and colour, alone with David high up on the moor. But then I remember that I have said that of many other days, so I cannot be sure. This I know—that it was almost perfect. Not quite, for perfection is dull: it took the serpent to make Adam and Eve appreciate their garden.

I have had the nice British Library Women Writers edition of O, The Brave Music on my shelves for four or five years. I chose it as one of my samples when the series was launching because I remembered my mother saying it had been a childhood favorite of hers, but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet; Shawn’s enthusiastic mention of it in a recent episode was just the nudge I needed. What a treat it was! I really enjoyed it.

O, The Brave Music follows young Ruan Ashley on her bumpy road towards adulthood. We first meet her when she is seven, living in the Manse with her stern preacher father, her beautiful mother, her older sister Sylvia, and her little brother Clem (“will he walk and talk soon,” she asks her father, “like other babies?”). Ruan’s story exemplifies the trend Anita Brookner so aptly describes in Hotel du Lac, by way of her romance novelist protagonist Edith:

In my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically . . . hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.

Ruan’s youth is full of hardship and loss, but Smith is definitely pitching her story to the “tortoise market” as it is clear from the beginning that (though Ruan herself is not always sure of this) it is better to be smart than beautiful, to love books more than boys, to be wild and free than to be (as Sylvia basically is) conventional and safe. Ruan is the direct descendent of Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver (though without their passion or rage) and an avatar of her most likely readers: other bookish girls who know they don’t quite fit the mould and long to be told that they will nonetheless win the game.

The promise of ultimate victory for Ruan is embodied in David, her playmate, companion, and beloved. I give Smith credit for dangling the possibility that he will not, in the end, be true to Ruan: that her dream will turn out not to be his. Perhaps that would have been a more interesting novel, as it would have put their long alliance into a different light, undermining Ruan’s point of view (the novel is told in her voice)—but Smith spares her, and us, that disappointment. That said, the novel’s ending is surprisingly ambiguous or ‘open,’ and while Ruan is certain that happiness will come for her, “hand in hand with David,” I was reminded of the evasive ending of Villette.

Though the plot is well enough told and I was engaged throughout finding out what happened to Ruan and her odd collection of family and friends, what I liked best about the novel was how beautifully Smith (through Ruan) describes the moor, where Ruan is always happiest:

Now it would be lying asleep, dun and sere under sullen November skies, inimical to many, but never, never to me! Soon the snow would come; here, in these sheltered dales, a mere matter of an hour’s Christmas-card prettiness, followed by days of slush and mud; but oh, how different on the moor! My heart quickened at the memory of mile upon mile of untrodden purity, white as angels’ wings on the uplands, blue-shadowed in the hollows of air like bright sharp swords that you could almost see . . . of the solemn beauty that awed you when you peeped under your blind at night; so still, so vast and pure in the light of the moon, that a lump came in your throat because so much loveliness was not to be borne.

Even in deep grief, the moor brings Ruan life:

Up there, in the pure, clean moorland air, the pattern of life showed more clearly; on a larger scale. I lifted my eyes to the hills; and I perceived how minute, how unimportant, a portion of that pattern we made, all of us, and we no longer seemed to matter greatly.

Things do matter greatly to Ruan—the tension between that uplifting, unworldly liberty and the pull of both love and responsibility marks her maturation and gives the book, which is somewhat episodic overall, some unity and and also some depth. I think today we would categorize O, The Brave Music as “YA” fiction but like other examples of ‘books for younger people’ from an earlier era, it feels more sophisticated to me than much current YA fiction (as do the Pennington books, for example, which were favorites of my childhood and which I still reread with genuine interest).

A side note: the title of Smith’s novel comes from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (“O, the brave music of a distant drum!” is the line). Many years ago one of my teachers gave me an illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat, inscribed “To Rohan, a ‘rara avis.'” In retrospect, it was perhaps an odd choice, as I was in elementary school at the time. I just thought it was fanciful and beautiful; I was used to reading things I didn’t completely understand and picking out what I liked about them. What mattered most to me about it was that I felt seen, that I felt that being bookish could actually make me stand out in a good way rather than a bad way. I was (and am) very much a tortoise too!

“The Beautiful Lotus Flower of Music”: Riku Onda, Honeybees and Distant Thunder

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Probably most of the audience here knew the piece. But knowing it only made them eagerly anticipate the high point all the more. Masaru’s heart beat faster. And as always it struck him: What a truly emotionally rousing melody!

It could be performed thousands, tens of thousands, of times, and this melody would never ever wear thin. It moved you, no matter how many times you heard it. It struck you right in the heart.

The highest form of human achievement was music. This is what he thought.

Human beings might have dirty, repulsive aspects to them, but out of the sordid swamp that was humanity—no, it was precisely because of this chaotic swamp—the beautiful lotus flower of music would bloom.

Reading Riku Onda’s Honeybees and Distant Thunder was a very odd experience: I found it both lovely and boring, not at different points but all the time, at the same time.

The novel follows four pianists through all of the rounds of a prestigious competition. They are very different characters, from different backgrounds and with different styles of interpreting and playing their pieces. I have read other novels about musicians—Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field is a particular favorite—but I have never read one in which so much time and so many words are spent conveying, through description, metaphor, and storytelling, what pieces of music sound like: what images they convey or animate the performer, what moods or emotions or sensations they create. A sample:

The music shifted to the second piece in Estampes, ‘Evening in Granada.’

The audience was transported in a moment to a world redolent of Islam.

The word Granada conjured up all sorts of associations. It was in Andalusia, in southern Spain, a region where Christianity and Islam had intersected. The clear dark blue sky was being absorbed by the gathering twilight. The white pillars, evenly spaced down a hallway, were steeped in the glow of the setting sun, and the word infinite came to mind.

The rhythm of the habanera. Women with raven-dark hair, clutching fans, dancing.

Something here, too, raised its head from the sea of emotion lying deep within. An uneasy, cheerless late afternoon.

Twilight, where the blessings and curses of life merged.

It was completely imbued with this.

A rose madder hue lay over the audience as this evening shone down from the stage.

Kanade was riveted to her seat.

Something like a huge wall of energy was thrusting out from the stage, literally pinning her to her seat.

She felt parched and hesitated even to breathe.

Typing that passage out, it struck me even more strongly than it did as I was reading through the book that the other reaction I sometimes (maybe too often) had was that it was a bit ridiculous: overwritten, trying too hard, straining after both effect and affect. I’m wary about judgments like this with works in translation: perhaps in the original Japanese there is a cadence or a poetry that hasn’t quite come across in the English version.

A lot of the novel is this kind of fanciful description highlighting either the performer’s point of view or that of the audience in general or, as here, a particular listener. I appreciated the concept—is it even possible to convey the experience of music in words?—a lot, but I also got tired of it because it just didn’t work for me. I was not rapt or moved or ecstatic; I was never brought into a state where I shared in a different medium the delights of those involved in the performances. And yet there was something delightful about the attempt itself.

There is also something just nice about the book, because the four characters it highlights care about music more than about competing. They are rivals in the competition but become caught up in each other’s playing. It’s not as simplistic as them rooting for each other instead of for themselves; it’s that as they listen to each other, they hear possibilities that excite them, idiosyncrasies that surprise them, and beauty that inspires them. It’s sweet. Their intersecting stories provide some structure for the novel as a whole, and by the end I was curious to find out who would win and why, but the outcome seemed almost beside the point by the novel’s conclusion—which I think is the point. After all, as one of the judges reflects, “could you really score art?”

I picked up Honeybees and Distant Thunder because it is Women in  Translation month. I hadn’t heard of it before I found it at the bookstore, but it has apparently been a huge bestseller in Japan and has even been made into a movie. I’m intrigued by that: a movie would bring back the music itself, replacing the abundant (possibly over-abundant) descriptions of it. What would be left? The personalities of the players: that’s really all, along with the relationships that develop between them. Adaptations of novels always lose the language, the writing. In this case I guess I would consider that both a loss (because turning music into words is what the novel does) and a gain (because in the end I would rather listen to music than read about it).

That’s Life: Richard Flanagan, Question 7

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

We watched this meeting with its strange weight of human dignity and goodness. I could not ever have believed that saying sorry might mean so much. None was their government. None bore responsibility. No one spoke for anyone other than themselves. Nothing said or done had any national consequence. Yet in that strange communion lay liberation. What other answer can any of us make to the terrible question of history?

19.

Thomas Ferebee’s body was lit up like a neon tube, his body is lighting up like a neon tube, his body will always light up like a neon tube as until the end of all things the suffering of the dead illuminates the living.

That’s life.

Question 7 is an odd, powerful, poignant, frustrating, beautiful, and perhaps slightly incoherent book. I say “perhaps” because although for me it was a bit too fragmented to be wholly satisfying, it seems possible, even likely, that a rereading would unify it more. It has a lot of moving parts, pun intended: many parts of it are emotionally affecting, and it is composed of a lot of different pieces so lightly connected that at times it felt like I was drifting from one to the next, or that Flanagan’s topics were drifting and only occasionally coming into direct contact with each other.

You can probably tell that I am struggling to figure out Question 7, or how to talk about it. To be honest, something I thought often as I read it is that Flanagan is only allowed to write a book like this because he has earned readers’ trust with his other writing. I don’t mean that it is not a good book: actually, I think it is a very good book. But it is very loose: Flanagan does not do the expository work of tying everything together. Insofar as Question 7 has a unifying idea or argument it’s “that’s life,” which says at once everything and nothing. And by “that’s life” Flanagan does not mean “this is the answer” but “this is the unanswerable question,” or “these are questions we can never answer—that is what it is like being alive.”

Question 7 is a meditation on the strangeness of it all. It is about the atom bomb, and its makers, and their ambition and hubris and, in some cases, their profound regret. It is about H. G. Wells, accidental instigator of one of modernity’s great catastrophes:

without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan project . . .

In this grim version of If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, Flanagan continues on to Hiroshima and the bomb that killed thousands of people but also probably saved his father’s life and thus made his own possible:

without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with it.

Question 7 is, I think, Flanagan puzzling out how to live in a world (the world) where these are the conditions of his own existence.

Question 7 is part memoir, part ghost story (Flanagan himself died at 21 in a kayaking accident but then was revived). It is part tribute to his father, a POW who was enslaved in a Japanese labour camp (and whose experiences lie behind Flanagan’s harrowing novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North). It is also a memorial to his mother: his account of her dying, which he says was “one of the most beautiful things I ever saw,” is itself beautiful and sad and comforting. The book is part meditation on war and part lament for the devastations of climate change. It is about—and here I risk making it sound trite, which it is not—accepting moments of grace, such as the meeting in my epigraph, between Flanagan’s father and three Japanese women, “committed to exposing Japanese war crimes,” who visit him to apologize. If that sounds like a lot, well, it is, and yet the book is not dense or even, despite these difficult topics, heavy.

I said that Question 7 doesn’t tie everything together; that is clearly intentional. In its form as well as its spirit, Flanagan’s book is a rebuttal to the idea, too prevalent, he believes, “that life is infinitely measurable,” that everything can be reduced to metrics. His title comes from a story by Chekhov that is also a rejection of the desire to oversimplify in order to achieve certainty: “Wednesday, June 17, 1881,” the story goes,

a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

This reminds me of Sissy Jupe refusing to answer her utilitarian teacher’s questions on the terms they have set:

‘Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me again.  And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year.  What is your remark on that proportion?  And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.  And that was wrong, too.’

“Who?” asks Flanagan, picking up Chekhov’s question:

You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?

That’s question 7.

I will be thinking about this book and its connections and juxtapositions for a long time, and we should probably all be asking ourselves question 7 and trying to get the people in power to answer it better, or differently, then so many of them are currently doing.