Author: Rohan Maitzen

Metallic Thoughts: Helen Garner, The Spare Room

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

A huge wave of fatigue rinsed me from head to foot. I was afraid I would slide off the bench and measure my length among the cut roses. At the same time a chain of metallic thoughts went clanking through my mind, like the first dropping of an anchor. Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

I was not prepared for The Spare Room. It sounds like the kind of book that is sad but uplifting: one friend, dying of cancer, comes to stay with another friend, who has a spare room and lives nearer the treatment center. We know this story, right? We have cried over variations on it in many films and novels, finishing them wrung out but also restored. Death is terrible, but friendship (or family, or love) is strong. Death always wins, of course, but that harsh truth can at least be reassuring cushioned with sentiment—I think (I know!) that is part of the appeal.

The Spare Room is about the strength of friendship, but not one harsh truth is cushioned with any softer emotion in Garner’s gut-punch of a novel. Helen’s good intentions towards her terribly ill friend Nicola are tested from the moment Nicola appears at the airport, “staggering like a crone.” “How long had she been this bad,” Helen wonders, after managing with great struggle to get Nicola into her nightgown and then into bed; “Why hadn’t someone warned me?”

It turns out that worse even than Nicola’s phases of debilitating weakness is her adamant refusal to acknowledge reality. The treatment she has come for is obvious quackery, a scam perpetrated on the desperate. The “medical” staff at the clinic are unqualified, uncaring, rapacious—and even their notes in Nicola’s file show that they know she is a terminal case, though this does not stop them from taking her money for their fraudulent services. What is a friend to do, in these circumstances, when the only honest path forward is to insist on the futility of hope?

And taking care of her is so much work! Nicola is beautiful, charming, extravagant, and in complete denial, including about the burden her visit is placing on Helen, who has to change her bedding repeatedly when she sweats through it or worse; tend to her through nights of wakefulness caused by intense pain Nicola insists on believe is caused by her treatments ‘driving out’ the cancer’; drive her to appointments, wrangle medications, struggle to find food she can tolerate. What kind of life is this, for either of them? “Death was in my house,” says Helen, but Nicola will not see it.

Helen gets some help when Nicola’s niece Iris and her boyfriend come to stay for a while. The logistical assistance is welcome but even more bracing for Helen is the reassurance that she is not a terrible friend, that Nicola’s demands and expectations are truly outrageous, that the rage Helen is feeling is a perfectly reasonable response to the combination of extreme pressure and Nicola’s relentless denial of reality. “Want to hear my theory?” Iris asks;

There’s a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won’t just go away. It can’t, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It’s in the air around her. Like static. I felt it when she walked into the house tonight. It was like I suddenly had a temperature. My heart rate went up.

I stared at her. “You mean it’s not just me?”

It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”

The Spare Room still does not take the easy path: there are tears, but there is no epiphany, no bedside reconciliation or moment of grace.  Or not ‘on camera,’ as it were—not while Nicola is still in the spare room, not before Helen draws the line when Nicola proposes staying even longer while she has and then recovers from surgery:

“Will you fucking listen to me?” I said shrilly. “I. Can’t. Do. It. . . . I’m worn out. I can’t go on.”

Can you even say that, to anyone, much less to your beloved friend who is the one who literally can’t go on? Can you admit that she has asked for too much, that you have no more to give? Does telling her that make you a bad friend, or, worse, a bad person? Garner brings in, proleptically, a glimpse of the future that helps us answer this question kindly, thanks in part to some unexpected generosity from Nicola—who does not die in Helen’s spare room (as I’m sure the Hollywood version would want) but later, after Helen has taken her back to the airport and “left [her] place at Nicola’s side.” “It was the end of my watch,” Helen says; “and I handed her over.” After all they and we have been through, that seems like enough.

I haven’t read Garner before. I picked up The Spare Room at the library after listening to Claire Lowdon talk about her recently published diaries on the TLS podcast (which I always enjoy a lot). Lowdon confessed herself not a huge fan of Garner’s fiction, but she singled out The Spare Room as exceptional. I can see why. If any of you are Garner enthusiasts, which novel would you recommend I try next?

Uncategorized

A Wobble: Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

You decide to water the little tree. You plan what is to be done. Take your walking cane for extrabalance security when you reach the ground cover and the rocks between the gravel and the faucet for the house. Then out the door, down the stone steps, turn right on the gravel, walk with cane thirty to forty feet to the spot at the corner of the house . . . 

Done. Then cross over carefully, still with cane, and bend down to grasp the faucet. Twist to the right.

Now for the retreat. Stepping cautiously backward through the thicket of vinca, avoiding the rocks.

You muster resolve. Gravel lies in front of you. Step into it with cane, and turn right towards the little dogwood tree.

A wavering pause. A doubt, a loss of nerve. A wobble through space, and you’re falling forward.

On June 6, 2022, novelist Gail Godwin, then 85 years old, went carefully out to her garden to do a mundane chore: watering a small dogwood tree. Wisely, she was using her cane for extra stability; unfortunately, her cane proved insufficient to save her from a fall. She landed face-first and broke her neck.

Godwin was not paralyzed: that was the good news. But a broken neck is still a significant injury, especially for someone at an age where bones are less likely to heal. She wore a neck brace for months, went through months of rehab, including a stint in a live-in facility, and eventually also had surgery. This was all, as you might imagine, extremely challenging not only physically but also psychologically and existentially.

Getting to Know Death is a record of Godwin’s experiences and thoughts as a result of her accident, though as its subtitle, A Meditation, signals, it is not a straightforward memoir. It is more episodic than unified, including recollections of the illness and eventual death of Godwin’s good friend Pat, of the deaths by suicide of her father and brother, and of the death of her husband Robert. It includes thoughts on writers and writing, incidents from her time in rehab, diary entries about her daily life—in other words, it is kind of miscellaneous.  I found the book interesting, because Godwin herself is interesting and—at least as important—interested, in what is happening to her and in other people and what happens to them. I am not entirely convinced of its substance or depth, though. Can you ask, about book like this, whether it deserved publication, whether it is or does enough to deserve that, to deserve our attention? Is that a fair question? It seems almost rude, given what the book is about and how personal it is. I am not sure of my own answer, although because I was reading them at the same time it is hard not to compare Getting to Know Death to Woolf’s diaries, which were never intended for publication and yet, cumulatively at least, seem richer or more resonant.

One thing from Getting to Know Death that I will carry with me from now on is the idea of the “year’s mind,” a term I had not encountered before:

Too many ideas to catch and hold. This is the countdown to April 22, Robert’s “year’s mind.” It will now be twenty-two years here by myself in this house. “Year’s mind” went out of popular use five centuries ago, but the phrase still survives in the Episcopal Liturgy. “We remember Robert Starer, whose year’s mind falls on this day” (April 22) . . .

“Year’s mind” means the day of one’s death.

“Anniversary” has always felt like the wrong word to mark the day of someone’s death, which is a day of remembrance, not ceremony or celebration; now I have a better one for the day that will be here again all too soon.

“Almost Motionless”: 1917

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Sunday 9 September

An almost motionless day; no blue sky; almost like a winter day, save for the heat. Very quiet. Over to picnic at Firle in the afternoon. Nessa & 5 children came after we had done; sat outside the trees. Walked home over the downs. Red sky over the sea. Woods almost as thin as winter, but very little colour in them.

Woolf’s diaries start up again in August, 1917, after the long recovery from her breakdown in February 1915. “For long time,” the editor notes, “there was no question of her writing at all, and then she was rationed, as it was thought to excite her.” (Readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are familiar with this theory—and with its debilitating effects.) This edition includes, as an Appendix, the “Asheham Diary,” briefer daily records covering some of the same period as her ‘real’ diary, where the entries also begin as quite brief, almost perfunctory logs of mostly mundane things: the weather, walks, mushrooming, taking letters to the post. Yet it’s still Woolf writing, with her observer’s eye:

We meant to have a picnic at Firle, but rain started, as we were ready, & so we went to post at Beddingham instead. Left my macintosh in the hedge, so it came down hard, & we were very wet. [I love that “so” there, as if—as we all probably feel sometimes—she had jinxed the weather by going without her raincoat.] It rained hard & steadily the whole evening & was raining violently when we went to bed. This is the first bad day we have had; even so, the morning was fine. The high wind of the last few days has broken leaves off, although only a few of the trees have begun to turn. Swallows flying in great numbers very low & swift in the field. The wind has brought down some walnuts, but they are unripe; the wasps eat holes in the plums, so we shall have to pick them. My watch stopped.

And so it goes until they move back to Richmond in October. At that point, the length and especially the energy of the entries picks up again, along with the Woolfs’ social life. On October 14 she reports “much argument . . . old arguments,” which the footnote explains “concerned VW’s thirst for social life and LW’s anxiety lest she should over-strain or excite herself.” What if the very thing that sustains you also exacts a price?

At first I was thinking that not much was really happening in this section, but then it struck me that of course there is a war on, as we are reminded by several passing references to German prisoners working on the nearby farms: “To picnic near Firle,” she reports on August 11, for example, “with Bells &c. Passed German prisoners, cutting wheat with hooks.” Also during this period Leonard is called up to military service, and their efforts to have him excused on medical grounds are repeatedly mentioned. Once they are back at Richmond, they are constantly on edge about air raids: on December 6, she is “wakened by L. to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed.” They retreat to the kitchen passage then go back to bed when the danger seems passed, only to be once again roused by “guns apparently at Kew.” The raid, the papers tell her the next day, “was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons, and 2 were brought down.”

In the midst of this, the Woolfs are setting up their press and beginning to print. It is amusing to follow their frustrations with the apprentice they take on to “help” them with this work. “Our apprentice weighs rather heavily upon us,” Woolf notes, wondering if the discomfort she induces is because of her youth, or “something highly polished so as to reflect without depth about her.” She is “nice, considerate,” but not good at her job:

Today has been spent by L. in the futile misery of trying to print from one of her pages which wont lock up. As the other page had to be entirely taken down & re-set, her work amounts to nil; less than nil, considering L.’s time wasted.

The Woolfs also acquire and then lose a dog, Tinker, who goes missing the same day Leonard gets his papers stating he is “permanently and totally disabled,” so their relief at his security is “rather dashed by the loss of the spaniel whom we had come to like.”

The intermingling of different kinds of events and preoccupations—war and picnics, air raids and printing presses, soldiers and servants, book reviews and mushrooming—is one of the most interesting features of the diaries so far. In itself it is not, of course, surprising or unusual: we all live that way, after all, in the midst of events much larger than ourselves that affect us both directly and indirectly; whatever else is going on, we still somehow mostly keep up whatever counts for us as ordinary life. Sometimes we rise to the occasion, meeting history as best we can on our own terms, and other times we recede into pettiness. It’s reassuring to see that this is true for geniuses too. “I must again register my complaint that people wont write to me,” Woolf mopes on November 13; ‘I dont write to them, but how can one?” Fair! Especially if “one” is so busily writing one’s diaries. 🙂

Playing Us: Richard Powers, Playground

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Where does it come from, all the fire and ice, the subtle wisdom and the unearned kindness? Every mechanical algorithm has vanished in compassion and empathy. You grasp irony better than I ever did. How did you learn about reefs and referenda, free will and forgiveness? From us, I guess. From everything we ever said and did and wrote and believed. You’ve read a million novels, many of them plagiarized. You’ve watched us play. And now you’re playing us.

If you are the sort of reader who prefers to avoid spoilers (or grumpiness), you should not read any further. 🙂

Richard Powers’s Playground pretends to be a novel about oceans, but it’s really a novel about AI: surprise! OK, it can be (and is) about both, but for me anyway, the twist at the end of the novel that exposes its artifice sucked the life out of the ocean parts for me. I wanted to say “duplicity” instead of “artifice” even though I realize that these are both kind of strange words to use about fiction. My negative reaction to the game Powers turned out to be playing reminded me of my frustration with Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which similarly undermined its own storytelling with some trickery at the end, even though that too was arguably (and my colleagues at Open Letters and I did argue about it during edits!) an unreasonable objection. The difference is that Atkinson had effectively “played on my emotions” before betraying her trick, while Powers’s novel never really engaged me, so I was annoyed both at the gimmick and at the novel’s own dullness. (Maybe that was part of the gimmick, to show that AI-generated fiction can do many things but not spark that kind of connection with its readers? If so, I think we needed a bit of a signal, to be quite sure we would not mistake AI’s failings for Powers’s own.)

The twist made Playground more intellectually interesting, in a “hey it’s actually a kind of metafiction” way, and maybe if I had been loving the novel to that point I would have felt less irritation at it. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the big reveal I was pretty tired of how plodding the whole exercise seemed, like a concept being executed under deadline, with very little life to it. The most energy Playground has is in the descriptions of underwater life we get from oceanographer Evelyne Beaulieu, whose experiences as a rare woman in a typically male-dominated scientific field make up one strand of Powers’s interwoven narratives:

At times she treaded in place, swarmed by the wildest assortment of Dr. Seuss creations—indigo, orange, silver, every color in the spectrum from piebald nudibranchs to bright, bone-white snails sporting forests of spines. The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs. She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see. At night, with underwater lights, when the coral polyps came out to feed, the reef boiled over with surreal purpose, a billion different psychedelic missions, all dependent on each other.

This kind of stuff is fun just on its merits: due credit to Powers for his pictorial skills, for making these infodumps vivid in a way that the novel’s plot and people are not. Evelyne herself never came alive to me as a character: again, she seemed more like an animated concept—raising again, given the final twist, the possibility that this is a deliberate failure of characterization. Even if that were true, though, it would not make up for the deadening experience of plodding through her story.

Worse, and not theoretically excusable on the same “AI can’t actually write good fiction” grounds, is the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, the genius mastermind of the whole tedious exercise. It couldn’t have read (to me, YMMV, etc.) more like a writer with a deadline going through the motions in order to get done what he had planned for his novel. Or maybe the flatness of Todd’s voice is also meant as a symptom of his deficiencies? It’s his friend Rafi, after all, who is the poet, though Rafi came across to me as the worst cliché of all, his exchanges with Todd sounding almost excruciatingly inauthentic. Is this also Todd’s fault? How many “maybe it’s actually really clever” excuses am I supposed to come up with on Playground‘s behalf?

As you can tell, I’m not going to walk through the plot of the novel or even do a more patient inquiry into how its different parts do or do not add up to something meaningful about modernity, climate change, capitalism, or artificial intelligence. If you are interested in any of these themes, you may well find Playground worth reading. Many readers seem to have found it powerful in ways I simply did not. I was so disappointed. I thought Bewilderment was extraordinary. I didn’t like Playground at all, and it has put paid to any lingering desire I had to read The Overstory.

 

“W.C.’s, & Copulation”: Starting Woolf’s Diaries

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

I recently treated myself to the complete Granta editions of Woolf’s diaries. I wanted to mark the finalization of my divorce last month, and this felt right, somehow—more a reflection of the life I am trying to build now, in this room of my own, than, say, jewelry would be. I thought, too, that reading through them would make a good summer project for me, especially if I made writing about reading them a bit of a project as well. I say “a bit of” because I don’t have big ambitions for it. I don’t necessarily want to tie myself to a schedule or make promises, if only to myself, that I then don’t keep but feel bad about! But I do think it will be motivating to have the intention to post updates of some sort. We’ll see what unfolds.

 This morning I started on Volume 1, which covers 1915-19. I read the foreword by Virginia Nicholson; the editor’s preface, by Anne Olivier Bell; the introduction by Quentin Bell; and then, finally, the first section of diary entries, from January 1915. They end abruptly because, as the editor’s note explains, Woolf “plunged into madness” in February; the diary does not pick up again until 1917. It seems inevitable that one key effect across the whole of the diaries will be this kind of dramatic irony: after all, it is impossible not to know, now, how her life ended. At the same time, and I think this is not as obvious as it maybe sounds, it seems important that she did not know this. When someone ends their own life it is hard not to see that as the most significant and meaningful thing, not just about them as people, but about the life they lived up to that decision. I’ve always been very moved by the conclusion of Winifred Holtby’s memoir of Woolf, which was published in 1932—Holtby did not know, and would never know (as she died in 1936), about Woolf’s suicide. “For all her lightness of touch, her moth-wing humour, her capricious irrelevance,” Holtby says,

she writes as one who has looked upon the worst that life can do to man and woman, upon every sensation of loss, bewilderment and humiliation; and yet the corroding acid of disgust has not defiled her. She is in love with life. It is this quality which lifts her beyond the despairs and fashions of her age, which gives to her vision of reality a radiance, a wonder, unshared by any other living writer. . . . It is this which places her work, meagre though its amount may hitherto have been, slight in texture and limited in scope, beside the work of the great masters.

“She is in love with life”: it would be too simple to say that this is exactly what the diary communicates so far, but it is certainly very full of living. A central preoccupation at this point is the search for new London lodgings that ends with the Woolfs leasing Hogarth House, where they also then launched the Hogarth Press. During this period The Voyage Out is moving towards publication, but she mentions it explicitly only once that I noticed; the editor suggests that nonetheless it was very much on her mind and that the stress of its impending release contributed to the collapse of her mental health.

Something that is immediately notable to me is how populated Woolf’s world is. I am torn so far between checking each footnote explaining who somebody is and just taking the cast of characters for granted, as she obviously does. It is interesting to know, but distracting to keep finding out, because Woolf mentions so many different people. My mother, whose interest in Woolf long predates my own,* explained once that part of what drew her to the diaries, in addition of course to Woolf’s voice—about which more in a minute—was being plunged into that community. I already see her point: everybody just seems so interesting, so busy with art and politics and love affairs. There is so much bustle, and while much of it (like the house-hunting) is quotidian and familiar, there is also something extraordinary about the way Woolf and her circle of friends wanted to be in the world, as intellectuals and creators and radicals—which is not to idealize them, or her, or to deny the privilege and snobbery that occasionally show through.

There are two related but separate things, I suppose, that make these diaries worth reading. One is Woolf—who she was as she wrote them and who she became. The other is the diaries themselves—what they are like to read, what they offer us as (if you’ll forgive the word) texts. Lots of people have kept diaries that are primarily of documentary interest; Woolf’s diaries, on their merits, are also of literary interest, or so I think it is generally agreed. It seems odd to say “they are great examples of the form” when that form is something so personal. The goal of keeping a diary is not generally to publish it, after all, and there can hardly be a model for how to write about and for oneself. But  Woolf is a good writer no matter the form or purpose of her writing, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the kind of good writer Woolf is suits the darting, episodic, idiosyncratic form of a diary. Already the entries are shot through with evidence of her brilliance, from vivid bits of description (“the afternoons now have an elongated pallid look, as if it were neither winter nor spring”) to moments of acid social commentary:

We went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall, in the afternoon. Considering that my ears have been pure of music for some weeks, I think patriotism is a base emotion. By this I mean … that they played a national Anthem & a Hymn, & all I could feel was the utter absence of emotion in myself & everyone else. If the British spoke openly about W.C.’s, & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats & fur coats. I begin to loathe my kind, principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red beef & silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon.

My favorite bit in this first instalment was this thoughtful observation:

Shall I say “nothing happened today” as we used to do in our diaries, when they were beginning to die? It wouldn’t be true. The day is rather like a leafless tree: there are all sorts of colours in it, if you look closely. But the outline is bare enough.

Looking closely, seeing all the colours in an ordinary day: that sounds like an artist’s job to me, a painter’s but also a novelist’s, and it is something anyone can practice by writing in their diary, though the results are unlikely to be as scintillating as hers.

*Just as my father’s love of Trollope and the other Victorians predates mine—I am so fortunate, as I often now reflect, both in my parents themselves (much love to you both, if you are reading!) and in their literary influences on me. Their bookshelves were always both inspirational and aspirational to me when I was growing up, and important as it was that they read to us, I think it was even more important that we always saw them reading all kinds of books.

A Sadness: Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The car, the moon, Eric’s face . . . were all changed. She looked at him, his concentration (there was ice out there), his frowning into the onrush of night. She might just sit there, do nothing, say nothing, but it no longer felt inevitable. Her anger, at that precise moment, was absent. The anger, the fear, the shame, the wound that had to be tended like a wayside shrine. And what had replaced them? Only this: the rattling of the little car, the whirr of the heater, the shards of light beyond the edges of the road. A sadness she could live with. Some new interest in herself.

I greatly admired Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free and The Slowworm’s Song, so my expectations were high enough for his latest, The Land in Winter, that I treated myself to it in hardcover. For a while—nearly the whole first part of the novel, actually—I wasn’t sure if it was living up to them. I was liking it fine: Miller knows how to conjure both characters and settings with the kind of concreteness and specificity that I always appreciate. But it felt slow-moving. The novel never really changes its pace, but all the pieces so carefully assembled in Part One are put into motion in Part Two, the characters’ lives—fully of tensions, secrets, and lies as well as hopes and desires—intersecting in ways that become increasingly fraught, both for them and for us as we wonder how it will all play out. By the end I was thoroughly engrossed and, again, admiring.

The novel takes place during the legendary winter of 1962-63 in the UK. Bill and Rita live on a farm; Bill has stepped away from his family’s questionably acquired money and Rita has left behind a life of clubs and dancing and performances—also a bit questionable. Their closest neighbors are Eric, the local doctor, and his wife Irene. Each of them is uneasy in their own way: Eric, for example, is having an affair, while Rita, we learn, hears voices, which is particularly unnerving for her as her father is a patient at a nearby asylum. Rita and Irene are both pregnant. Across their current lives lies the shadow of the war, recent enough to have lingering effects; its horrors are most explicitly present through Eric’s colleague Gabby Miklos, who oppresses Bill at a party by cornering him and telling unwelcome stories about persecution and suffering:

When Gabby began again—Häftling, Sonderkommando, Judenlager—Bill, staring at an abandoned cheese stick on the tablecloth, began to withdraw his heart. He did it as subtly as he could, an inching back that might, with luck, seem no movement at all, a disappearing act, a party trick . . . but all was glass to Gabby Miklos and he sensed it at once. He looked up and smiled at Bill. It was, after all, not his first failure.

I wondered for a while if Gabby was meant to be providing an interpretive key to the rest of the novel. “How it happens is perfectly understood,” he says to Bill; “There is no mystery. So please, tell me, what is the question we must ask instead?” It is easy to imagine a novel that explores possible responses to that question, and to the problem Gabby embodies of how people are supposed to carry on, to re-engage, “normally,” after what has happened, after what he has seen and knows. As The Land in Winter went on, though, that didn’t seem right to me. I’m not really sure, in fact, that the novel has any such focus or thematic core, that it’s trying to answer (or ask) any particular question.

This is not a complaint or a criticism at all. Some novels work that way; others don’t. My sense of The Land In Winter is that if it has a unifying idea, it is that we all get through winter (and life) as best we can, and that what exactly that looks like depends on who we are and where we are. By the end of the novel there was something very satisfying about the richness with which Miller showed me who his people were and how they were getting from day to day. There are plot developments, not twists so much as consequences or revelations, some of them wrenching but none of them surprising because they all come so organically from the world Miller has created.

In particular, it is a wintry world, and Miller writes about it meticulously and often beautifully:

In the afternoon, the blizzard blew away towards the north. For an hour the air was perfectly still. The ash tree was a frozen fountain. Several times they said to each other how beautiful it was. The dusk came swiftly. In the garden, the snow lay in subtle undulations, each with its deepening blue shadow. The cold descended and the land tightened.

Fight For It: Claire Cameron, How to Survive a Bear Attack

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Will I survive a bear attack? I’d been asking the wrong question. Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death, but the bridge between those two things is love.

After this investigation, my recommendation is to spend your time falling in love with the people and the world around you. Don’t let a fear of death eclipse your life. Run towards love, fight for it, and die for it.

When I was a child, my family went camping most summers, often at Saltery Bay, a significant drive (and two ferry rides) up B. C.’s optimistically named ‘Sunshine Coast.’ I wasn’t – and still am not – particularly outdoorsy, and I am irrationally afraid of starfish, and, less irrationally, of barnacles, so I am not sure I ever swam in the water off the rocks where we hung out day after day. I loved the tidal pools, though, full of mussels and crabs and tiny fish, and I loved staking out our favorite picnic table, the only one with any shade, early in the morning with my dad (the other families must have hated us!). We played Scrabble there, and painted rocks, and colored in our coloring books. Back at the campsite after dark, we played card games and colored some more and designed outfits for my beloved paper doll Hitty (named for and patterned after the wooden doll in this book) and sang songs by the fire when my dad played his guitar.

Every so often on these trips my dad would make a joke to my mother about bears. I am morally certain, now, that she never found them funny. I don’t remember ever taking bears seriously myself. I also don’t remember any particular precautions that we took to keep them at bay. But the elegant and informative B. C. Parks website (no such thing existed during my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, of course) does say that “bears, cougars, wolves, and other potentially dangerous animals may be present,” and gives advice about how to keep yourself safe.

We were more wary about bears when we camped at Manning Park, I guess because it’s in the mountains and bears were known to roam there. In fact, I think I remember us all getting into the car once because we spotted a bear in our vicinity, though I am not 100% sure about this.* If we did, it can’t have helped my mother’s anxiety about these burly threats to her family. As Claire Cameron is at pains to emphasize in her new memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack, bear attacks are vanishingly rare. The couple whose grim deaths on a camping trip in 1991 are the anecdotal center of her story were, statistically speaking, in much greater danger on the drive to Algonquin Park; as she also points out, the woman of the pair was – again, statistically speaking – more likely to be killed by her male companion than by a bear. Still, if you are the rare target of a charging bear, those statistics are not going to feel reassuring, and if a bear does actually attack you, you are in extreme danger.

Claire Cameron was not attacked by a bear. The title of her book is not exactly misdirection: in fact, How to Survive a Bear Attack is full of information about bear attacks and how to survive them. The sections have titles like “When to Play Dead,” “When to Fight,” and “A Time to Surrender.” Cameron had turned to the wilderness after her father’s death from cancer,  and had found courage and strength in the beauty of the Canadian landscape and her own active engagement with it, hiking, climbing, paddling, and camping. Anyone with these interests has to think about bears, and Cameron often had. A turning point in what became a “full-blown bear obsession” was a close encounter with one when she was planting trees in Northern Ontario. She knew the story about the couple who had died in Algonquin Park, but the cinnamon bear she saw on that expedition was  an “apple-eating bear” smart enough to pry the lid off the Tupperware container he’d taken out of her backpack (which the bear had lifted from a van when someone foolishly left the window down a bit) and eat the peanut butter sandwiches inside.

Over the years, Cameron had been plenty close to bears – and also “stood close enough to mountain lions, and jumped over rattlesnakes.” It was only practical to know something about what to do in the event that a bear saw her as a threat, or as prey. But it had never come to that, and then at 45, she got a diagnosis that changed everything. “It was only now,” she says, “that I realized how foolish I was. I’d been preparing to fight a bear when the thing that would most likely kill me – my own DNA – had been lurking in a place much closer.” What she is fighting is cancer, specifically the rare and threatening form of melanoma that led to her father’s death at only 42. At the time of her own diagnosis, Cameron was 45.

Some of the strongest writing in the book comes in the passages where Cameron reflects on how it feels and also what it means to understand that “nature” is not a setting for our lives but that our lives are themselves natural. In the wake of this frightening news, she and her husband hold each other, wonder what to tell their kids, and contemplate a future without the “false sense of security” that comes from the walls we build around ourselves. “Every now and then,” she says,

something happens. A reminder. The mask of control slips to the side and there is a glimpse of what lies behind. We are subject to natural forces. We are delicate, vulnerable creatures, no matter how much time we spend telling ourselves otherwise. Our teeth are blunt, our skin is thin, and our hearts flutter close to the surface. We are subject to the pull of the moon; we can be shifted by the tides and pushed by the wind.

Later, in the context of the deadly bear attack in Algonquin Park, she will note specifically the vulnerability of the backs of our necks: “a person approached from behind with force stands little chance.” This, she thinks, is how Carola died – instantly, at least, unlike her partner Ray, who seems to have fought with everything he had. (Fair warning: parts of this book are quite graphic about the damage bears can do.)

What does a bear attack have to do with cancer? Is it just a metaphor? Yes, partly: the book is about Cameron’s illness and her desire to survive it, and so the section headings (especially 12, “How to Live”) take on dual meaning. But Cameron is also, still, obsessed with literal bears, and just as her turn to the outdoors helped her come back to life after her father’s death, so her strong and initially inexplicable fixation on finding out what exactly happened at that campsite in 1991 helps her find purpose, motivation, and eventually meaning after the surgery that, provisionally anyway, removes her cancer but leaves her weakened and unmotivated. The quest starts with an anomaly, perhaps a mistake, in a note she’d written about the case for her earlier novel The Bear. Suddenly “every hour became urgent”:

By that time, I had lived three years longer than my dad. This felt like borrowed time. I made a list of questions. I was sore and tired. I suspected I might be dying, but finding answers became more pressing than fear.

The next big shift comes as she pursues those answers and comes across a photograph of the killer bear. She had always focused on the people, the victims, the search party, the mourners, herself. Only at that moment does she realize there’s another point of view: the bear’s. Bears “are individuals. They do individual things.” To complete her story of that fatal meeting, she “needed to understand this bear on his terms, not mine.”

The bear’s story becomes the third strand in the narrative Cameron weaves, which combines her personal story, the story she puts together (including various testimonies and evidence) about Carola and Ray’s horrific final day, and sections from the point of view of the bear that attempt to portray him as a character in his own right – personality, curiosity, hunger, all as far as possible conveyed as aspects of what we might call bearishness. I admit I found these parts not completely convincing, not so much because they are inevitably speculative but because, well, it’s a bear. Cameron knows, and tells us, a lot about bears, including how smart they are, but this bear thinks, remembers, and plans to a degree that seems improbable. I think the idea probably was to make explicit what in reality is more implicit or instinctual; the risk is anthropomorphizing him, and while I think Cameron makes a valiant effort not to do that, still, well, it’s a bear. I still found it very interesting to learn so much about a bear’s life, though! And I liked the connections Cameron makes to Beowulf, one of the stories her father had loved to share with her. Toni Morrison, in an essay on Beowulf, “makes the point that nowhere in the story do people ask questions about why Grendel was hell-bent on eating them.” “When I followed Morrison’s thought,” Cameron explains, “I understood that the bear wasn’t beyond comprehension . . . It felt like trying to reach out and touch Grendel.”

The bear is a bear; the bear is Grendel, embodiment of our oldest and deepest fears; the bear is cancer; the bear is nature. They are all, in their own way, wild – and the wilderness is not somewhere else, separate, held back or “conserved” within inside the arbitrary boundaries of a park:

The wilderness has never been empty. It doesn’t have borders. It’s a word that defines a relationship between the people, the wildlife, and the land. It’s ancient and will be here long after I’m gone. I can’t control where or how it goes. It’s under the carpet, in the alley behind my house, in the lake, inside a glacier, and on an island in Algonquin Park. It’s inside the mind of a black bear.

It’s also much closer. It lives in my cells. To some, those cells might have a mutation. To me, they are cells inherited from my dad. I have cancer. It’s wild inside me.

Cameron completes her investigation and writes her account of what happened, to Carola and Ray, to the bear, to her father, and to herself. There is ultimately no comforting answer to the question that once preoccupied her: “If I’m attacked by a bear, will I survive?” None of us survive, so the question, the preoccupation, is itself misguided, she concludes. “Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death”; instead of running away from bears (which, just by the way, is not a good move in the case of a literal bear attack) we should “run towards love, fight for it, and die for it.” The lesson might seem a little pat, even trite, but the urgency and the poignancy of it are real for Cameron, which gives it power, and besides, things are often trite precisely because they are true. There’s a reason a story as old as Beowulf can still speak to us, can still give Cameron the words she needs to face the end: “I’ll let go then, of all my holdings, my throne, my carefully guarded bones.”

*I checked with my parents and my mother confirms: “The night before, a bear prowled around our tent. At lunch the next day when many were enjoying themselves by a stream at a picnic site, a bear wandered in and I was the only one who made my family get in the car.” That seems a very sensible precaution to me!

Recent Reading

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

My recent reading has not been particularly exhilarating, but most of it has been just fine: no duds, just no thrills.

Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience was enjoyable but also seemed quaint, in a sad sort of way: what is the point, really, of academic satire given the existential threats to research, education, faculty, and students currently devastating the higher ed landscape in the United States? It’s true that things have been grim for a long time, including in the UK, where every day seems to bring more dire news about program closures, and in Canada, where “do more with less” has been the rule for decades thanks to chronic underfunding for our ostensibly ‘public’ universities. But Schumacher’s Professor Fitger and his students are very much American, and while there is both comedy and pathos in the story of their misadventures, and while the gentle optimism of the ending is a nice reminder that both travel and education can and should give people a chance to become someone a bit different and a bit better, the The English Experience, charming as it was, seemed more nostalgic than pointed.

Liz Moore’s Long Bright River is one of the best crime novels I’ve read in a while—though since I don’t actually read much crime fiction these days, I’m not sure that’s really saying much. I’d heard that it was character-driven, and it is; it is a good novel about families, especially sisters, as well as about the far-reaching personal and social harms of the opioid epidemic. It has a good number of twists and turns and kept me engaged without making me feel overly manipulated, which I appreciated. I’m always scouting for recent options to include in Mystery & Detective Fiction: I don’t think I would assign this, but mostly because it is pretty long and I’m not sure it’s good enough qua novel to spend the amount of time on it that I’d need to coax the students through its 450+ pages (more than two weeks, most likely). This is the conundrum of the “teachable” (vs. readable) text; this is why so far I have not assigned one of Tana French’s books either.

I loved both Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Summer Before the War so I eagerly picked up The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club when I saw the paperback had finally come out. Unfortunately, it disappointed. There is plenty of good material in it. I enjoyed the details about women’s wartime experiences and then their struggles as they were displaced from their jobs as the men came back from the war; I liked the ‘neepery’ about both motorcycles and airplanes. The characters are all promising types, in this context, but as the novel dragged on (and the pacing did seem too slow to me, too much talking without much purpose, too many scenes not contributing all that much) they felt more like cut-outs representing those types than fully realized people. I felt the same about the novel’s plotlines around racism and discrimination: these are good things to represent, of course, but they seemed, if not exactly perfunctory, at least predictable. Reading it I thought again of the conversation I had with Trevor and Paul about historical fiction: this is not a bad novel, but I think it may represent the qualities or aspirations or limits that make some readers think historical fiction is not a really serious or ‘literary’ genre.

I got Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing from the library as soon as I had agreed to review her forthcoming novel The Book of Records, on the theory that it was probably a good idea to know something about the earlier one in case there were connections. It turns out there is one possibly important one, though I’m still figuring out exactly what it means: throughout Do Not Say We Have Nothing the characters are reading and writing and revising a narrative called the Book of Records! I actually owned a copy of Do Not Say We Have Nothing for years and put it in the donate pile eventually because for whatever reason I still hadn’t read it. I assigned a story by Thien in my first-year class this year that I thought was really good, so this had already piqued my interest in looking it up again. I had mixed feelings about it. I found it a bit rough or stilted stylistically and never really fell into it with full absorption, but it is packed with memorable elements and also with ideas. It tells harrowing stories about the Cultural Revolution in China and focuses through its musician characters on how or whether it is possible to hold on to whatever it is exactly that music and art mean in the face of such an onslaught on individuality and creativity. It invites us to think about storytelling as a means of survival, literal but also (in the broadest sense) cultural—this is where its Book of Records comes in, as the notebooks are cherished and preserved, often at great risk. I’m not very far into Thien’s new novel yet but it seems even more a novel of ideas, perhaps (we’ll see) too much so.

My book club meets this weekend to talk about Northanger Abbey, so I also reread this. It has been so long since I read it it didn’t really feel like a reread, actually. It amused me, but that’s about it. After I’d finished it I read Marilyn Butler’s introduction to my Penguin edition and she makes the case that it is much more interesting and sophisticated than it is often given credit for. OK, sure, and I take her point that to really appreciate it we need to be as immersed in the other novels it alludes to as its characters are—but I’m not, and I’m not really interested in them (sorry, Jane!). I think I get the gist of the novel’s playful jousting with gothic conventions as well as other models of ‘women’s fiction’ from the time. I love and greatly admire both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, but for sheer pleasure I prefer almost any Georgette Heyer to this and don’t expect to read it again. Still, I am curious about what the other members of my book club have to say!

And that basically catches me up. I have just started Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, which so far seems as good as everyone said; I still have Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium on my TBR pile; and I’m still stalled out several chapters into Hisham Matar’s My Friends. Stay tuned for the next thrilling updates on my reading! 🙂

This Week In My Classes: The Kids Are Alright

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Look, I don’t want to pretend everything is fine, in general or in my classes. Last week I was grading take-home midterms for Mystery & Detective Fiction and feeling to my core the truth of what is now a commonplace: AI is pervasive, and not “for better or for worse”—just, unequivocally, for worse. The one consolation I had (and it is, truly, not particularly consoling) is that the results, for the students, are not usually good. This means it doesn’t matter whether I can prove AI use or not: I can just mark the answers on their merits and move on. But it really sucks going through this process and wondering what the point of it even is. I felt demoralized, sad, and frustrated, which is unfortunately how I have often felt about this course this term because attendance has been so poor: on a good day, maybe 60% of the students are present, and there are some who have almost never been to class at all since January. What am I even doing, I have wondered, and how much longer can I keep doing it if it just no longer means to them anything like what it means to me?

BUT.

Here’s the other side of how things have been going in Mystery & Detective Fiction. There is a solid core of students who come every single time (or close enough—it’s perfectly reasonable, of course, to miss a class here and there because you are sick or your bus was late or whatever). I don’t know if they are all reading every page of every book, but enough of them are keeping up that we have pretty good discussions: the ones who speak up seem keen and interested, and they seem to be listening to each other, and they laugh when I try to be funny (which is one way to see if they are paying attention!). We have worked our way through a lot of good, complex, thought-provoking fiction, most recently Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s The Terrorists. (It is a book that seems uncannily relevant to our current moment, with its questions about what happens to citizens when their government is actively indifferent to their needs and politics is the playground of people too corrupt and too wealthy to be held accountable.) Sure, a lot of the midterms I marked had the whiff of ChatGPT (or Copilot, I guess, which is now oh-so-helpfully available via the Microsoft suite the university installs on its computers)—but a lot of them did not, and some of these were really excellent. To answer my own plaintive question, then, what I am doing is showing up, as cheerily as I can, to offer these students the class they deserve. As always, I will also keep puzzling about how to reach the ones who aren’t: AI may be new, but students turn to it for reasons that are not new, reasons I have been trying to find solutions for as long as I have been teaching.

Even to myself this positive spin, if that’s what it is, does not sound completely convincing. Yes, something is different now. I’m just not sure it’s as bad as this gloomy article says it is. Maybe I’m kidding myself. A few years back, one of my best students let slip that a lot of students in my 19thC fiction class were basing their contributions on what they’d read in SparkNotes, not the assigned novels themselves. I wished she hadn’t said that! Was it true? Is it still true? It doesn’t feel true in these classes! I want to believe! But also, even if it is true about some students, it is definitely not true of all students. I just get too much evidence to the contrary, often from conversations with students outside of class, like the one who came to my office hours recently to talk about her term paper ideas but also to ask for recommendations for more Victorian novels to read after she graduates. Guess which novel she’d studied with me had most won her heart: David Copperfield! (It is truly heartwarming how many students who were in the Austen to Dickens class last year have told me they loved David Copperfield. A lot of them signed up for Dickens to Hardy this year and I have never had a group dig in to Bleak House with so much enthusiasm!) Twice this term, students who had already graduated from Dalhousie asked to sit in on my Victorian Women Writers seminar just to hear some of our discussions of Middlemarch. The current students who are actually taking that seminar seem genuinely caught up in the novel—some of them so much so that they will be writing on it. Those who aren’t will be writing on Villette, or on North and South.

These are long, complex, demanding books! So when the author of that essay declares that “our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” that students “are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done,” I have to wonder: are my students really so exceptional? I mean, I do think they are lovely and wonderful; I genuinely look forward to every class. It’s true they are English students, and mostly Honours English students at that, with some graduate students as well, so definitely, when it comes to reading, both an elite and a self-selecting group. Still, when we tell stories about higher ed today, shouldn’t we talk about them too?

It’s not just about choosing between glass half empty and glass half full perspectives: I think it really matters that we not turn our grimmest anecdata into the dominant narrative. If things are really as bad as all that, after all, what are we all doing, and how much longer should we keep doing it? It is important that alongside our laments about the “stunning level of student disconnection” we acknowledge the students who do care, who choose engagement, who want to read and think and write and don’t want their education to be stripped of its humanity (and the humanities). Here in Nova Scotia our provincial government has proposed a bill that would give them the power to interfere with universities that aren’t doing what they consider a good enough job serving “provincial priorities.” Giving these students the education they want and deserve should be one of those priorities—though I am morally certain that is not the kind of thing our leaders have in mind, even though, as we have explained over and over, studying literature actually is excellent preparation for a whole range of careers, if that’s what you think is the point of an education. (Do you think if I dropped off copies of Hard Times at Province House they would see themselves in Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild and be ashamed?)

Anyway. I am as guilty as the next tired professor of occasionally giving in to cynicism and anger and venting some of it on social media. Many of us believe, or at least hope, that AI will go the way of MOOCs (remember when they were going to revolutionize education?). In the meantime it is definitely making things harder for us, and (despite the edtech industry’s promises) no better for the students, unless “ubiquitous” and “seems easier than doing the work myself” is all that counts. The antidote to despair is not AI detectors or in-class tests, though: it’s the students themselves. Just as I thought we should stand up to the Srigleys of the world when they declared our classrooms “contentless” and said we were leaving our students’ “real intellectual and and moral needs unmet,” so too I think we should counter the “it’s all over” doomsayers with some positivity. I am a Victorianist, after all! Optimism comes with the territory.

As Human: Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I have come here to walk the earth as human. I choose to be disguised and camouflaged. I live in the faces of the most betrayed and ignored of all humans. I live in silence. I am the words trapped on the bitten tongue. I am more than a statistic. I am more than another hashtag. I live in the heart of the poor woman, the black woman, the elderly woman, the sick woman, the healer, the teacher, the priestess, the witch, the wife, the mother and the girl. I am Death and I am quick. I am a rabbit and I can vanish. I can be anything I want to be. I choose the unheard and unspoken. I live in the silent scream and I will be silent no more and I have so much work to do . . . 

Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death begins with a disclaimer. “Spoiler alert,” it says in part; “We will all die in the end.” “This work has a very high dead and death count,” it goes on:

Take with caution. Take your time. Do your lifetime in your own life time. If you are sensitive or allergic to talk of the dead or non-living things use this work in small doses. This is not a self-help brochure. This is not a guide to avoiding dying. if you think you are about to drop dead, please seek medical advice immediately.

If you find the tone of this passage disorienting (as I do), you have a sense of what it is like to read this strange, moving, provocative book. Its basic premise is that a writer, Wolf Willeford, meets Mrs Death (“she who is Death, the woman who is the boss at the end of all of us”), who appears in the form of an elderly black woman (“there is no more human more invisible”) and shares stories, poems, and recollections that Wolf eventually compiles into a memoir, the book we are reading. (Did this “really” happen, though? Towards the end of the novel Wolf a bit frantically wards off the possibility that Mrs Death was “Not a dream. And not a manifestation, not a hallucination, but a real, real, real, real . . . memory.”)

There is a sort of plot involving Wolf, Mrs Death, a desk, and a writer’s retreat in Ireland, as well as backstory about Wolf’s family. These details matter, but Mrs Death Misses Death is not really a novel you’d read for conventional story-and-character reasons. It is more interesting and memorable (for me, anyway) as a meditation on death, and thus, inevitably, on life: “when writing about Death,” as Wolf remarks, “you soon realise it isn’t all about Death and that you write about Life and the living.” Sometimes Mrs Death recalls specific deaths, individual or mass:

The other day—just one example—the other day, there I am sweeping through a town in Syria and I find I am in floods of tears I stop and stand there in the rubble and debris and I wonder why, why? What the fuck am I doing here again, so soon, again? Twice in one week? And that same day I am in America, in a school for another mass shooting, and I am there, roaring my eyes out, clearing through, collecting all these souls of terrified dead teenagers. Then I am out in the channel, off the coast of France, collecting the murdered souls of another sunk dinghy, a make-do refugee raft filled with desperate people escaping war but being left to drown on purpose. My work has been overwhelming. So much death and war and destruction, famine and murder.

Other times, it is death in general, not in the abstract but as a universal, that’s the topic, as when Wolf reminds us that it is all, always, “borrowed time”:

One by one we leave each other. We never know who might go next and when and where and why. I’ve often wondered how very different this living life would be if we were born with our expiry date stamped on our foreheads . . . I mean, if we knew exactly how long and little time we have left to love each other, maybe then we would all be more kind and loving. Imagine if we knew our death date. How differently we would live, maybe, and yes I know, maybe not.

As both of these passages show in their different ways, Mrs Death Misses Death is both a moral and a political calling to account. How can we bear to live in a world with so much cruel, needless death—but also, how can we carry on living as if we don’t know that it inevitably ends? How is it that both of these facets of our reality seem to make so little difference to how we live, to the choices we make, to the people we are, or aspire to be? Imagining your own death, and the deaths of everyone you care for, should, Mrs Death suggests, “be the death of the demanding chubby shit you were and the birth of the kind wise person you will become”:

Do not run away from the inevitable, the beautiful and glorious ending, the proof you lived, the life you lived. To live tasting metal is blood. To live saving tokens is death. To die is to have been alive, that is why you must life: live free, live wild, live true and live love alive. Let the fire burn you and the light blind you. Let your belly get full and fat and embarrass you. Let your words fall out and tumble carelessly and honestly. Let your passions be unlimited.

After all, as she says, “I am Mrs Death and I am coming for you all.”

The form of Mrs Death Misses Death is just barely novelistic: it is almost collage-like, with its poems, dialogues, letters, reminiscences, and monologues. Parts of it repeat or circle back on other parts. I can see finding it frustrating, or excessive, or overly insistent, including the excerpts I’ve quoted here so far. It is all those things at times, and also sometimes grim and bracing and haunting. It kept surprising me. It made me think, and it also made me cry, especially at the end, where six pages are left blank “as a silent memorial for all the names we do not know and cannot say”:

Please add your loved one’s name on one of these blank pages, maybe add a date, a memory or a prayer. In this one act of remembrance we will be united. From now on every single person who reads this book will know their copy contains their own dead . . . And in the future anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud . . . We share these names of our loved ones in the whisper of the last page turning, over the years to come.