Weekend Miscellany: Books, Music, and Sunshine

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

There are crocuses up, the Public Gardens are opening Wednesday, and I bought fries and sat outside the public library to eat them this afternoon: it’s official, spring is here. What a relief. It wasn’t a particularly severe winter, by east coast standards, but it was still tough enough for this recovering Vancouverite. Being on sabbatical definitely made it less stressful than usual, though. If it were an option, I’d happily teach two of my five courses in the spring and summer sessions as a regular thing and use winters as my research terms. I could hibernate with my books, and then emerge, refreshed, into the sunshine and share that restored energy with my students! But this year, at any rate, I’ll just be sharing it with … well … you! And with my friends at OLM, when I trek down to Boston for our editorial summit and general festivities in May.

I have been doing some fairly miscellaneous reading in the last few days. After finishing Noah’s Compass, I picked out the first volume in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Wreath. I wasn’t swept up into it in quite the way I expected to be, but as I read on and also read a bit about the series, I realize that my expectations were not quite right (this seems to be happening to me a lot lately!). I thought it would be more sweeping, more melodramatic, maybe, or epic. Instead, it is quietly lyrical in its descriptive passages but otherwise more direct emphatic than poetic or emotional–except in some of the more heated dialogue, when characters are often described as “screaming,” which shocks me every time because that’s just not the register things have been proceeding in. Not that there’s not plenty of action in the novel, but it just happens in very direct, almost blunt, way, so that when something really shocking happens (like attempted rape, or someone being urged, successfully, to stab herself to death!)  it’s particularly shocking because it’s just there, happening. I’m not explaining this very well, am I? There’s something of the same flatness in the prose style that is striking in the Scandinavian crime fiction I’ve read recently, and again I wonder whether it’s the effect of translation, or an effect of a different set of literary traditions and conventions that affects the tone. It’s also winter a lot in this book, as in the Beck mysteries–but at least here spring does come! I was surprised at the sexual directness of the story. I’m going to move on to the second and third ones soon and then write them all up in a bit more detail.

I’ve also been working through Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature. I was considering reviewing it for Open Letters, but the prospect of writing about this book in any detail makes me tired and irritable. I didn’t dislike it as much as William Deresiewicz did, but my marginal notes have a lot in common with the ones he rattles off in the first paragraph of his stinging review at Slate. It’s rambling, occasionally charming, occasionally extremely tedious, and always strangely evasive; its conclusions are vaporously insubstantial and wholly unrevelatory. I’m starting to think it’s a mistake for anyone to generalize about “literature.” The effusive blurbage on the volume also adds substantially to my cynicism about the publishing business (or at least its marketing side). I’m just not sure it’s worth my weighing in on it: I don’t think it really deserves much attention, well-intentioned and sincere as it clearly is, and I’m not sure what I in particular could add to it, or to discussion of it.

I realized that I have read shockingly little Victorian fiction since my sabbatical began, and one of my ambitions for some time has been to fill in some obvious gaps, so I’ve started Our Mutual Friend. (I did read this once before, but long ago–for my own undergraduate Victorian fiction course, in fact–and I barely remember it, despite having written my term paper on it. “Archipelagos of Meaning: Language in Our Mutual Friend.” Thanks for asking.) It’s interesting how strange and experimental Dickens’s language seems after reading a lot of contemporary novels. As book ordering deadlines for the fall term loom, I’m also wondering if I should shake up my reading list for my seminar on the Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ which I’ve done with the same reading list several times. The novel I’m thinking of mixing in is Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower, but I’ve never read it (only about it), so I probably should do that before I go commiting myself! Any other suggestions?

I also need to make decisions about the detective fiction class, so now I’m reading Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, which so far I am really impressed with. If I do add it, I think I’d back off switching to The Big Sleep and stick with The Maltese Falcon, though, as I don’t think I want to be teaching three new books in the second half of the term. If I go through with my plan to assign one of the Martin Beck series, I still have to decide which one; I found the last two in at the library this afternoon, so I’ll read them and then make up my mind. I’ve been struggling to find an anthology for the class that includes all the short fiction I want. I’ve used the Longman anthology for a couple of years but it was not popular with students and included a fair amount of secondary reading which I don’t tend to assign. I thought I’d switch back to the Oxford Book of Detective Fiction, but I notice it does not include any Poe (??)–I guess I can link to online sources, but when you use an anthology, it would be nice if it had all the readings you wanted in it! There’s a cute little Everyman ‘pocket’ anthology that’s not a bad choice but why are the contents in reverse chronological order? Once upon a time I used a nice little Penguin book of classic crime fiction that suited perfectly, but of course it’s not available anymore. I think the Oxford is the winner, partly because it has a good selection of recent and international stories.

Finally, I just got Jill Barber’s new album, Mischievous Moon, on iTunes and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I also thoroughly enjoyed Chances. It’s not a sound for everyone (my husband doesn’t like her voice at all), but I love the retro vibe, the melodies, the husky voice, the whole sensibility. If you like a little something gently jazzy to go with your glass of wine after dinner, I highly recommend either one.

*headdesk*

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

As previously mentioned, I have begun a little project of catching up on recent (defined as ‘since I last really paid attention’) work in Victorian studies. In aid of this, I have browsed the TOC from a couple of the major academic journals in the field and downloaded a bunch of essays and book reviews (so far, about 75), which I am reading through to get a feel for what people have been doing, what I should know more about, books I should look up for further reading, and so on. I decided to go back about 5 years: it’s not as if I haven’t looked at any criticism published since 2006, but much of my searching has been quite targetted, whereas now I am just looking, not looking for anything in particular. It’s not a particularly inspiring task. I’ve looked at probably 30 or 40 files so far, and not one of them has given me any sense of urgency–nothing, so far, has made me think that I need to reconsider what I usually do in the classroom, for instance. But I’ve listed a few books already that I’d like to take a look, or another look, at, and I’ve filed some essays away where they will be accessible for more specialized work–research or graduate teaching. I have discovered that my iPad is really a wonderful tool for this kind of work. I’ve got the PDFs all tucked into the GoodReader app, which lets me easily highlight and annotate them, and then as I finish looking at each one I tap it away into the appropriate folder so I can find it again when I want to. Yes, I can do these things on my desktop with Adobe Pro, but how much more comfortable to do this in a more accomodating posture than sitting bolt upright staring straight ahead! And my right wrist is grateful to have a break from mousing around. I’ve still got the files saved into folders on the desktop if I want them, but I’m loving this system. It makes me think I might even get into a habit of reviewing recent criticism! Imagine.

Anyway, the real point of this post is not to rehearse my boring work routines for you but to publicly humiliate myself, in the hope that it will motivate me to do better from now on at actually following up on the notes I take. One of the reviews I read today was really the first one I enjoyed reading just for its own qualities, as well as for its subject, and I happily highlighted several passages in it, including this one:

Negative hermeneutics has never been Hardy’s mode, and her determination to take seriously what Eliot said said, without suspicion and cynicism as a premise of the reading, is one thing that might make this anti-biography suspect to modern critics. But that determination becomes a form of negative capability that is one of the most moving and satisfying aspects of the book. For Hardy, Eliot wrote as if she meant what she said and she said what she meant. In critical circles, this is an astonishingly fresh argument these days. (100)

It’s a review by George Levine of Barbara Hardy’s George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography, a book I have but have not sat down and read attentively, though I have long been an admirer of Hardy, as is probably anyone who has studied George Eliot. As I filed the review away in my ‘George Eliot’ folder, I had a dim flash of recollection: didn’t I write something about Barbara Hardy as my critical model right here on Novel  Readings at some point? Sure enough, I did. Here’s the old post, in its entirety. Please note that I wrote it almost three years ago to the day.

April 8, 2008

Being Barbara Hardy

As a proud new member of NAVSA (better late than never!), I have just received a copy of the latest issue of Victorian Studies. Of the many interesting features in this issue (Volume 50 No. 1), I particularly enjoyed George Levine’s review of Barbara Hardy’s George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography, a book I own but haven’t yet read. One of my clearest recollections of my early days as a graduate student is being asked by one of my new faculty mentors to name a critic whose work on George Eliot I admired. “Barbara Hardy,” I promptly replied. The response was a tolerant smile and nod, and a bit of sage advice: “Of course, you can’t be Barbara Hardy any more.” True enough–unless, naturally, you actually are Barbara Hardy. Her steadiness in being herself is at the heart of Levine’s admiration of this new book:

Negative hermeneutics has never been Hardy’s mode, and her determination to take seriously what Eliot said said, without suspicion and cynicism as a premise of the reading, is one thing that might make this anti-biography suspect to modern critics. But that determination becomes a form of negative capability that is one of the most moving and satisfying aspects of the book. For Hardy, Eliot wrote as if she meant what she said and she said what she meant. In critical circles, this is an astonishingly fresh argument these days. (100)

I’ve put it at the top of my “t0 read” pile.

*headdesk*

Here’s a new resolution. I will not only read the book but I will write about it here when I have done so. And not any three years from now, either.

Anne Tyler, Noah’s Compass

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I trust Anne Tyler’s novels to offer me a quietly bracing, gently satirical, mostly forgiving picture of ordinary people muddling along in their lives. By ‘ordinary’ I don’t mean dull or predictable, as all of us ordinary people have our quirks, eccentricities, and perversities, and these are exactly what Tyler seems to enjoy. Though there are a few of her books that I have reread a few times (Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, A Patchwork Planet, Back When We Were Grownups), my favorite, for whatever combination of sentiment and neurosis, is Ladder of Years. There’s just something satisfying to me about Delia’s decision to walk away, about the little room and the library books and the new job and the new love, but then also about the return home and the readjustment. That return home, which is typical (either literally or in spirit) of the endings Tyler doles out, has a conservative aspect to it, a chastening implication that you probably oughtn’t to have gone so far astray in the first place, or that where you already are is probably better than you think. Or in some cases, the acceptance comes not from staying put, but from letting someone else in, allowing your definition of home to expand or soften.

Noah’s Compass is vintage Tyler, in these respects, except that its ending strikes me as a bit less consoling than usual. It’s interesting, so soon after reading Eat, Pray, Love–which celebrates the quest for self-fulfilment and doesn’t wrestle with possibilities by which it comes at someone else’s expense–to read a book in which the right to happiness is raised but not, ultimately, endorsed as a guiding principle. Tyler raises our hopes (and her characters’ hopes!) about a happy ending, but complicates things by acknowledging another value that may compete with happiness–or that, if denied, may fatally undermine that happiness. “Don’t you think you deserve to spend [your life] with the person you love?” someone demands near the end. The question is deceptively simple but all too often made to seem sufficient to justify all manner of compromises, betrayals, and abandonments. Tyler doesn’t forget that you have to live with yourself after you answer it.

I enjoyed the book very much. Tyler writes with a clarity that was a relief, frankly, after The Transit of Venus, but while she’s more direct than elliptical (again, a relief!) she lets the significance of little moments linger in her readers’ mind rather than beating out the details. Here’s a little exchange between Liam, the divorced, recently burglarized-and-assaulted protagonist, who has just learned something unsettling about his new girlfriend, and his grandson Jonah, who has taken a dislike to his Bible stories coloring book because he’s mad at Noah for leaving so many animals to drown–“He only took two of things,” after all.

“Where’d he buy gas?” Jonah asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Where’d he buy gas for his boat if he was the only guy in the world?”

“He didn’t need gas,” Liam said. “It wasn’t that kind of boat.”

“Was it a sailboat, then?”

“Why, yes, I guess it was,” Liam said. Although he had never noticed sails in the pictures, come to think of it. “Actually,” he said, “I guess he didn’t need sails either, because he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Not going anywhere?”

“There was nowhere to go. He was just trying to stay afloat. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn’t need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant . . . ”

“What’s a sextant?”

“I believe it’s something that figures out directions by the stars. But Noah didn’t need to figure out directions, because the whole world was underwater and so it made no difference.”

“Huh,” Jonah said. He seemed to have lost interest.

A lot of nice little questions lurk in that moment. Is Liam like Noah? Should Liam / Noah be just trying to say afloat, or ought he to be steering, and if so, where and by what guidance? Does it make a difference? Are thinks in life murky, opaque, underwater, or is it a question of looking below the surface? By the end of the novel, where has Liam gone, and what is his compass? It’s no surprise, in a Tyler novel, that it was right there all the time.

Noah’s Compass wins the prize for the worst included discussion questions I’ve seen in a while. Most of them are of the same painfully literal or solipsistic kind I’ve protested about here before (“Do you like Liam Pennywell as a character? Do you identify with him as a character?”; “Liam is comforted by this thought; do you feel this way, or do you find this viewpoint depressing?”). There is one about the compass bit I’ve just quoted (“How do you think this story relates to Liam’s own life?”), so fair enough, but this one is a doozy: “Did you like the ending of the novel? Did you feel that it satisfactorily answered everything?” Well, maybe not everything . . .

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Litlove was first out of the gate at the Slaves of Golconda site, and her wonderful post about The Transit of Venus, ‘The Art of Being Difficult,’ goes right to the aspect of the novel that seems to me, also, most provoking: its language. Not that the story or characters or setting of The Transit of Venus aren’t interesting–on the contrary, I thought the people had a superb distinctness to them; the story was elegantly constructed, with its crossings and recrossings, its mirrors and inversions and misreadings and accidents; and the settings had a fascinatingly lucid particularity in the details Hazzard used to put them before us. How well this little set piece evokes, for instance, a mildly acerbic colonial bitterness (a tone not altogether unfamiliar to Canadians):

There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never take for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that a poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.

Or, more particular yet, here’s a London morning, damply unwelcoming: “At that hour all London was ashudder, waiting for the bus.” We feel, as well as see, the place. I thought a lot of Hazzard’s descriptions had this tactile quality.

That slightly estranging, too-poetic word “ashudder,” though, is a tiny example of just how stylized Hazzard’s prose is. It is, as litlove says, difficult, elliptical, opaque. There’s a lot of utilitarian prose, or worse, in mainstream and especially genre fiction. Writers whose work I like nonetheless bore me with their assumption that the writer’s job is to get the story told without the language getting in the way; they seem to aspire to prose that is as transparent or functional as possible. That is a safer option, no doubt, than venturing into the dangerous territory of overt artistry. It is not easy to tell a story directly and clearly, but it is far riskier to tease and play and experiment with language–riskier, because, for one thing, the measure of success becomes immediately more elusive. Hazzard is a risk-taker.

On the whole, for me, Hazzard’s style was successful. One measure that I use is whether the style of the book suits what I discern as the organizing ideas or interests of the book: do the author’s verbal tricks seem like sheer display, or does the aesthetic whole have integrity? The Transit of Venus is intensely interested in the degree to which people are opaque to each other, with the uncertainties of their external appearance as indicators of their thoughts and intentions. It sometimes seems that the more literally naked her characters are, the less that is revealed about them; their physical proximity exacerbates rather than overcomes their mental distances, their tendencies to misinterpret or to fill in blanks. So, a prose with gaps and omissions, precise about surfaces but constantly fraught with meaning that seems too weighty to be contained in the sentences that carry it–that seemed right. It’s not a realistic mode exactly (I agree with litlove that the dialogue often strains credulity): the novel proffers a heightened reality. Does it make sense to the rest of you if I say there seemed to be something cinematic about it, not because there’s a grand panoramic sweep, or a plot of secrets and revelations (though in a way, I suppose both of these things are true), but because there are a lot of effects in each scene and as they play out, you can so easily imagine the ebbing and receding of an emotional score? Music, in films, often brings out emotions that can’t be easily displayed through words or actions. I felt like Hazzard’s language sought to do the same, without making every thought or emotion explicit. “Everything had the threat and promise of meaing,” Hazzard says early on. That threat and promise permeate both the story and the language.

Another measure I use is the balance of pleasure and annoyance. I was sometimes annoyed, reading along. I found the missing word trick (more accurately, the omitted word trick) especially annoying, even though I have offered sort of an explanation for its thematic fitness. One example: “Caro might have asked, How old. But was silent . . .” It’s like a writing exercise, or an excercise in close reading: What difference does it make, to the sentence, to the rhythm, to the meaning, to our reading experience, to put “she” back in? “Caro might have asked, How old. But she was silent . . .” What is lost in that smoothing out of the syntax, that restoration to normalcy? Or, what is Hazzard doing to us by refusing us that smoother process? The immediate result for me, each time, was to force me to reread: had I just missed something? Had I not grasped the actual grammar of the sentence? These moments always made me stumble and have to gather myself up again. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. And annoying as it could be, the prickly sense of irritation at what seemed, sometimes, just a mannerism was outweighed by the number of times I sighed with appreciation over a sentence that seemed pure and satisfying in its precision. Every word seemed chosen and placed (or omitted!) with such care, which is not to say that the language becomes precious, just that it has a deliberate cerebral quality that is just what you don’t find in so much other fiction. And this is not to say that the book is ponderous: wit can be cerebral as well. I particularly liked this little bit, for example, on the changing fortunes of the perversely pastoral poet Rex Ivory, who keeps on writing poetry about the natural “glories of his native Derbyshire” even during and after his time as a POW:

[H]is story was soon one of the items of victory, for the newspapers took it up and he became “the poet Rex Ivory” in publications where an indefinite article had formerly done for him well, and rarely, enough. A Selected Poems went into print on coarse, flecked wartime paper, and there were no more witticisms about ivory towers. He read that he had been correct in spurning the First World War, and prescient in endorsing the Second; and he pondered the new idea that he had shown acumen. The BBC brought electrical equipment into the Dukeries in a van and a camera followed the well-known and prescient poet Rex Ivory as he walked between flowering borders with a pair of Sealyhams borrowed from a neighbour. Despite his unrehearsed analogy between the British mental asylum and the Japanese camp, the interview was a success; because, when people have made up their minds to admire, wild horses will not get them to admit boredom.

The otherwise quite dark conclusion of the novel is lit up with some fine satire on his posthumous academic prestige, marked by the publication of a “brilliant critical biography” with the spot-on title Abnegation as Statement: Symbol aand Sacrament in the Achievement of Rex Ivory: “Dr Wadding had suspended his groundbreaking work on the Lake Poets so that Rex Ivory might benfit from critical elucidation. . . . ‘My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy.'” Perhaps, with that darting stab at an entirely different order of difficulty, Hazzard seeks to justify her own degree of elusivenss, which is, at least, in the service of human feeling.

A few of us exchanged some thoughts on Twitter as we worked our way to the end, and I think we were all equal parts startled and puzzled by the revelations about Paul Ivory’s past. I wonder if we were surprised on purpose, to make a point about the layers of deceit or performance that come between us and certain knowledge of each other. It works as a plot device, giving Caro a new perspective on her own choices and relationships, but still, why that particular backstory? It seemed discordant, somehow.

This Month in My Sabbatical: Marching On!

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I feel as if March was a reasonably productive month, sabbatical-wise. Let’s see:

Graduate Supervision and Advising: This is one part of my ‘regular’ workload that doesn’t go on hold during a sabbatical (or during maternity leaves, just by the way). This month I received thesis installments from all three of my continuing PhD students. I also met with two of them, one in person, one by Skype, to discuss the progress of their thesis writing and do some long-term planning. I alsomet with a former PhD student who withdrew from the program about 18 months ago but has been wondering about returning. I find this part of my job a disconcerting mix of pleasure and pain. These are all wonderful young women–smart, accomplished, hard-w0rking, and just plain nice. So the pleasure comes from spending time with them, learning from them, and doing my best to support and improve their research projects. The pain, of course, comes from worrying about their professional situations. I have been, I think, very clear and direct with them, encouraging them to prepare to be competitive for academic jobs but also to consider other options–I’ve sent them links to a range of online discussions about graduate school in the humanities (including Thomas Benton’s infamous Chronicle columns as well as this one from Hook & Eye) and to some of the many sites addressing PhDs about non-academic options. In one case I think there is actually no intent to pursue a tenure-track academic position anyway; in another, options will be limited by geography, which makes the likelihood of a tenure-track option just that much smaller. But in that case, presumably if there was a local opening you’d still need to be competitive to have a shot, and in the case of the other continuing student, Lennard Davis’s advice is probably good to share–except what he doesn’t say but should is that it is perfectly possible to work insanely hard to do all the things he says, and you still might not win the job lottery. He also seems a bit sanguine about the pace of academic publishing: it’s all very well to submit things, but from submission to acceptance can take months or years. The hardest conversation, from my point of view, was the one with the student considering coming back. “You escaped!” was most of what I really wanted to say to her, along with what I more or less said, which is that a PhD in English is no kind of safety or default option. It seems attractive (if, and that’s a BIG if) you can get steady funding, because it’s a known world with clear expectations, work you’ve already trained for, and genuine intellectual rewards. But you could well end up, four or five years from now, right back in the difficult situation of trying to figure out what else to do–only by then you’ve invested heavily in your specialized training, including comprehensive exams and the huge chore of writing a thesis–not to mention trying to publish and otherwise pump up your c.v. (These are the features of the PhD program that make it difficult for me to accept the whole “it doesn’t have to be seen just as preparation for academic positions” argument. Sure, it doesn’t have to be, but if it’s not, what is the point of this intensive training in narrowly specialized fields and the hard, hard work of thesis-writing following stringently academic models? Unless we introduce streamed PhD programs, these will remain key components, and streaming is impossible as long as luck remains such a big factor in who actually gets a shot at the tenure-track when it’s all done.) In the end, as I told her, it’s her choice, and I understand it’s a difficult one. All of this (plus reading La Vendee, which is the subject of one of the thesis chapters now in progress) took up a fair amount of time but also, almost more significantly, a lot of mental energy this month. And the next pieces of chapters are already landing in my in-box, so on it goes! I’d be even more busy with graduate students if I hadn’t refused to take on any new MA supervisions: this is thesis proposal / first chapter season, and then the writing heats up heading into May and June. Usually I have at least one, and some years I have had as many as three. When my sabbatical ends, I’ll come in as second reader on a couple of theses, I expect, but it is a relief not to be juggling these meetings and drafts at this point.

Soueif Project: I did some relevant reading, reviewed my research notes, and drafted some new pages for the academic paper I’m trying to produce on Ahdaf Soueif. Then, prompted by reflections about how dissatisfying this work felt when Soueif’s current speaking and writing is all directed towards the Egyptian Revolution, I took the advice of some of my commenters and let myself address that new context in a separate piece, “A Novelist in Tahrir Square,” which appears in this month’s Open Letters. I wanted to use the time and thought I’ve given to her fiction, connecting its ideas to the sense of broader changes in perception and understanding that accompanied the Revolution. It was very challenging distilling the overflowing details of the novels and of my own notes and ideas, but I felt pretty good about it when I finally sent in the revised version (I appreciate very much the input I got from the other editors at Open Letters–though of course any lingering stupidities or infelicities are all my fault). I hope this will have settled me down so that I can appreciate the academic project for what it is: as some of you said, no one piece needs to do or be everything.

Filing and Stuff: I did quite a bit more of my electronic file sorting. I do think it will be helpful when I begin to put my course materials together for 2011-12 that I have eliminated a lot of redundancy and put lecture notes, handouts, quiz questions, exams, and assignments into a system that doesn’t require me to remember in which year, or in which course, I did that group exercise on Felix Holt or whatever. The problem turns out to be courses that aren’t themselves really focused on a particular genre, period, or author. My materials for Close Reading, for instance, will stay all together for now: the lectures and worksheets and assignments I devised on Middlemarch for that course are so different from the ones I use in my Victorian novel courses that I think it’s easiest just to leave that as its own category.

Reading: I have blogged about most of my reading for this month–except The Transit of Venus, which I will write up later today, as the discussion gets underway at Slaves of Golconda. The highlight has definitely been Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Most of my reading was not strictly work-related (though, as I’ve often noted here, you never can tell–wouldn’t an honours seminar on the ‘Somerville Novelists’ be cool, for instance?). The coming month will be different, though, as I’m moving on to another of my sabbatical plans, which is catching up on criticism in my field. In January I took some recent monographs out of the library, but I think this is not actually the best way to proceed: many scholarly books now are just so specialized that the rest of us don’t really need to know that much about their subject. The case has been made a few times recently, I think, that many books in the humanities are artificially inflated essays–the introduction is crucial for making the argument, but then the chapters offer variations on the theme rather than essential development or elaboration. I really do think this is true, and I wouldn’t exempt my own book–though I suppose it hardly counts as recent (© 1998). There’s nothing wrong with the chapters, but there’s really no necessity to my choice of novels to discuss in the context I’d established–they were the ones I wanted to discuss, as much as anything. In any case, I’ve decided to try a different strategy and last night I downloaded a whole bunch of book reviews (and a few articles, but mostly reviews) from the past several years of Victorian Studies–71 PDFs, in total. Going through the reviews will alert me to books I may wish to read, or at least leaf through, in full, but it will also give me a sense of what people are up to, what is trending, and so forth. (I’m sure there are people who do this kind of upkeep on an ongoing basis. Obviously, I’m not one of them! But maybe I’ll find a good routine for it in future–this is something that my iPad will be very helpful for, for instance, as I can load the PDFs into GoodReader and page through them at my leisure.)

Paperwork: Finally, this month I confirmed my intent (or, I should probably say, my hope!) to participate in a panel at the British Association of Victorian Studies in Birmingham the very first weekend in September. I can’t be absolutely sure I can pull this off until I find out what level of funding I can get, especially at the rate air fares are going up. I do think it would be a really good professional opportunity for me, though, not just through my own participation but for what I expect will be the quality of the rest of the conference, so I’m going to give it a good try. I have had some pretty bad conference experiences in recent years, so I’d love to go to one that might help me feel excited about “my” field again.  In aid of that, I’ve begun assembling the necessary paperwork to apply for a travel grant.

And so, onward, with all of these tasks and also with some pedagogical planning, as book orders for the fall are due soon, which means I have to commit myself to my detective fiction list as well as my first round of 19th-century novels, for the Austen to Dickens course. . . .

Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

After the fun I had reading Eat, Pray, Love,* I was a bit disappointed in Committed, which is not nearly as funny and also not nearly as personal. I was curious to find out about Gilbert’s own experience of marriage, but instead Committed is mostly a meditation on marriage in general. As such, it is still interesting and sometimes surprising, but it struck me as sitting uneasily between genres: for a really thorough analysis of the historical, political, economic, and social aspects of marriage, you’d need to go to the scholarly sources Gilbert consulted and often refers to in her own commentary, but she brings nothing in particular of her own to their work, while in the context of the broader investigation Committed purports to be, her anecdotes about friends and family feel, well, anecdotal. I gave her a pass on the weaknesses of Eat, Pray, Love (at my book club meeting recently, a couple of my friends  expressed vague surprise that I went so “easy” on it–not that either of them showed up in the comments on the post to specify any particular disagreements! lurkers!) but even though I read Committed with genuine interest, in the end I thought Gilbert had set herself a harder task, one with less personal prequisites, and her bottom line–which in both books is something like “this is just who I am and what I think, so don’t take it too seriously”–didn’t suit as well. OK, so she eventually finds a theory of marriage that reassures her, that enables the choice she wants to make anyway. That’s not a particularly compelling general result. It probably didn’t help Gilbert that I came to her book right after finishing Testament of Youth, either. There are actually some strong similarities in the reservations Brittain and Gilbert both have about entering into an institution they see as fraught with hazards for women in general and for themselves in particular, accustomed as they both are to independence. But Brittain comes across as someone who persistently wrestles with and articulates principles for her life: she has a moral and intellectual seriousness that I don’t find in Gilbert, who continues to seem a little flighty and solipsistic to me.

Still, accepting Committed as something less substantial than a genuinely original treatise on modern marriage, more a popularization of the body of scholarship and the record of experience that’s available, it did manage to be engaging and thought-provoking. It covers a lot of ground, not all of it familiar, and Gilbert is a pleasantly fluent writer. As I said about Eat, Pray, Love, it’s the kind of book that inevitably acts as a mirror, and I found myself reflecting plenty, as I read along, on my own expectations of marriage and family life, on the models I had around me growing up and have around me now. These are not, however, the kinds of reflections I feel comfortable making explicit here. The people in my own life have not made the knowing sacrifice of their privacy that Felipe made when he married Liz, after all.

*I watched the film version of Eat, Pray, Love last night, just by the way, and found it quite dull compared to the book. It’s not the events, after all, that are particularly interesting–it’s Gilbert’s telling of them, and reflections on them. Without her voice, it all seemed flat. Nice scenery, though. Did anyone else find the whole “too tight jeans” sequence absurd? Both actresses look to be about size 4.

A New Month, A New Open Letters Monthly

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The April issue of Open Letters Monthly went live yesterday, but it seemed, um, foolish to compete for attention with all the April Fool’s fun on the internet, so I saved the announcement for today! It’s another wide-ranging collection representing the different voices and interests we rally to our standard. Some highlights include:

  • a think-piece about the current state of poetry by Joseph Wood: “we have become unwitting slaves to the taxonomic tendencies of literary criticism and the institutional emphasis on publication and theoretical self-labeling. In the face of what we perceive as our “professional future”, many writers struggle to remember that poetry’s greatest gift is located in making intimate human connections, no matter how disfigured or disembodied.”
  • Steve Donoghue’s favorable review of a new addition to the seemingly inexhaustible genre of Tudor fiction, Suzannah Dunn’s The Confession of Katherine Howard: “Subtle vortices strengthen throughout Dunn’s beguiling book (this is her best novel yet, and the previous ones were no flimsy competition)”
  • the next instalment of Steve’s ‘Year with the Windsors’ with Prince Eddy–Queen Victoria’s grandson, a harmless fellow who somehow became the focus of conspiracy theories identifying him as none other than Jack the Ripper: “The Prince was laid to rest at Windsor Castle, and his younger brother George came reluctantly to the throne. The world moved on into the calamitous 20th century, and history seemed to forget Eddy for about half a century. Then all hell broke loose.”
  • Jeffrey Eaton’s incisive review of the third volume of Edmund Morris’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt: “covering Roosevelt’s final decade ensures that Colonel Roosevelt will never be quite as lovable as Morris’ first two volumes. Roosevelt has come a long ways from his days herding cattle in the Dakotas or charging up San Juan Hill, and many of the stories contained herein are tinged with Teddy’s inevitable physical decline.”
  • Daniel Green’s review of a new biography of Stanley Elkin, which “does its subject a disservice by being such a terrible book that it is hard to imagine it could either enhance appreciation of Elkin’s fiction for those already acquainted with it or persuade those unfamiliar with it that he is a writer worth their attention”
  • my own essay on Ahdaf Soueif, “A Novelist in Tahrir Square” (the result of my desire to turn my work on her fiction to some new purpose in light of the Egyptian revolution): “Both novels also not only invoke but create their own version of the Mezzaterra: a literary common ground, an optimistic, if endangered, space well served by the novelist’s tools. Ales Debeljak calls this space the “Republic of Letters,” “a place where the only condition required to obtain citizenship is a human capacity for empathy—that is, the capacity to put oneself in someone else’s shoes.” By creating such a space for her readers, Soueif held out an alternative to the limited and limiting narratives about her country that she saw around her. Sitting in the middle of Tahrir Square in January and February of this year, she was surrounded by millions of allies in this project.”

There’s more, too, of course, including more of our regular features–Irma Heldman’s regular “It’s a Mystery” column and Elisa Gabbert’s series on perfume, focusing this time on synthetic vs. natural ingredients–John Cotter on an intriguing new contemporary writer Alta Ifland, and poetry by J. R. Pearson. It’s perfect weekend reading: I hope you’ll come on over, and that you find something you like.

An Examined Life: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

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Now that I’ve finished reading Testament of Youth, I am most impressed by it as a testament to Brittain’s determination to understand and give meaning to the war. Though the book is often very poignant (as in the excerpt I posted last time), it’s not, ultimately, an emotional book so much as it is an intellectual book. I like the book better for that commitment to thought over feeling, or to thought about feeling, and I admired Brittain, too, for facing up to what she felt was her responsibility to those who had died by doing something more than grieving for them. “How like we were,” she thinks at one point, “to the fighters of those old wars, trusting to the irresponsible caprices of an importuned God to deliver us from blunders and barbarisms for which we only were responsible, and from which we alone could deliver ourselves and our rocking  civilization.” Her lack of religious belief turns her away from such a passive response toward attention to the human and historical causes of the devastation she witnesses. Returning to Oxford after the Armistice, she turns from her study of literature to history, economics, and politics:

Henceforward . . . people will count only in so far as they recognize their background and help to create and change it. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence; our lives, and our children’s lives, will be rational, balanced, well-proportioned, to exactly the extent that we recognize this fundamental truth. . . . I don’t know yet what I can do, I concluded, to help all this to happen, but at least I can begin by trying to understand where humanity failed and civilisation went wrong. If only I and a few other people succeed in this, it may be worth while that our lives have been lived; it may even be worth that the lives of the others have been laid down.

The final section of the book chronicles her attempts to achieve this understanding and then act on what she has learned through her lectures, journalism, and political activism. How much more impressive this is than falling back on wishful platitudes about the inscrutability of God’s plan or the better place where the dead now reside. It’s appropriate that she returns a few times to her reading of George Eliot, who had very much the same insight about our relationship to what we call “Providence,” and the same sense that from it comes a duty to ourselves and others every bit as challenging and more morally elevating than obedience (under the promise of reward and the threat of punishment) to religious authority.

Brittain is similarly rational and deliberative in her approach to marriage, which seems to her not at all a desirable end in itself and, potentially, a threat to everything she works for as a feminist:

In spite of the feminine family tradition and the relentless social pressure which had placed an artificial emphasis on marriage for all women born, like myself, in the eighteen-nineties, I had always held and still believed it to be irrelevant to the main purpose of life. For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.

When marriage becomes a specific possibility rather than a theoretical issue (the courtship is, aptly, conducted largely by correspondence, through shared reading and writing and argumentation), she continues to worry, not just about whether it might compromise her political and professional commitments but also about whether she can marry and yet keep faith with those who died in the war. Marriage represents an emotional severance of the past from the present: “so long, I knew, as I remained unmarried I was merely a survivor from the past. . . . To marry would be to dissociate myself from that past, for marriage inevitably brought with it a future.”  Waking from a troubling dream in which her dead fiancé returns, facing her with an anguished choice between him and her new love, she remembers

with a startling sense of relief, that there was no resurrection to complicate the changing relationships forced on men and women by the sheer passage of earthly time. There was only a brief interval between darkness and darkness in which to fulfil obligations, both to individuals and society, which could not be postponed to the comfortable futurity of a compensating heaven.

Repeatedly through these years of her life Brittain faces what George Eliot calls “the burden of choice.” The courage she has to find is not the same as that shown by the young men (including so many she knew and loved) who faced death in the trenches, but it has its own dignity and significance. Even her decision to marry is part of the war she is fighting. Against the expectations that marriage ends women’s participation in a wider social and political life, she hopes to demonstrate that the experience of marriage and children “rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world’s pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation.”

The demonstration would not, I was well aware, be easy; for me and my contemporaries our old enemies–the Victorian tradition of womanhood, a carefully trained conscience, a sheltered youth, an imperfect education, lost time, blasted years–were still there and always would be; we seemed to be for ever slaying them, and they to be for ever rising again. Yet even these handicaps I no longer resented, for I was ceasing at last to feel bitterness against the obstacles that had impeded for half a lifetime my fight for freedom to work and to create. Dimly I perceived that it was these very handicaps and my struggle against them which had lifted life out of mediocrity, given it glamour, made it worth while; that the individuals from whom destiny demands too much are infinitely more vital than those of whom it asks too little. In one sense I was my war; my war was I; without it I should do nothing and be nothing. if marriage made the whole fight harder, so much the better; it would become part of my war and as this I would face it, and show that, however stubborn any domestic problem, a lasting solution could be found if only men and women would seek it together.

This may seem an elaborate rationalization of a decision she longs to make for other highly personal reasons. To me, though, it’s precisely the conversation a thoughtful woman had to have (possibly, still, has to have) about entering into an institution that for so long turned that personal relationship into one with so many complicated and disadvantageous legal, political, economic, and social consequences for women–at the time she writes about, for instance, a Matrimonial Causes Bill was debated and finally passed, “and for the first time in England the rights of men and women were equal with regard to divorce.”

I expected to be moved to tears by Testament of Youth. I was, but it matters more to me, and seems more fitted to Brittain’s own aims and accomplishments, that I was moved to great respect for her. I’m looking forward to starting Testament of Friendship soon.

The Pity of War: More from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth

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Testament of Youth is long; I have about 200 pages still to go. We’re well into the war now, and her account is a compelling mix of immediacy–especially through the long excerpts from letters and diaries written ‘to the moment’–and reflection. I’m fascinated by the almost portentous sentimentality of much of her youthful writing and her self-conscious reflections on just that quality in it, in her retrospective commentary: “It all sounded, like most of my youthful diary,” she observes wryly at one point, “very earnest and sentimental; only an experienced writer can put aspirations and prayers and resolutions into words without appearing a sententious prig.” Still, the stories of life and death she has to tell deserve a certain sentimentality. Here’s her moving account of receiving a posthumous letter from a dear friend. As the scale of loss in the war is no secret, I think there’s no point in changing names to prevent ‘spoilers.’ I’m reading along, really, in the full expectation that everyone she knows who’s at the front will die. At least this way I can only be happily surprised (not so far, just by the way).

By one of those curious chances which occurred during the War with such poignant frequency, a mail came in that evening with a letter from Geoffrey. It had been written in pencil three days before the attack; reading it with the knowledge that he had been so soon to die, I found its simple nobility even less bearable than the shock of the cablegram [bringing the news].

As I took in its contents with a slow, dull pain, the silent, shadowy verandah outside the door seemed to vanish from my eyes, and I saw the April evening in France which Geoffrey’s words were to paint upon my mind forever–the battened-out line of German trenches winding away into the shell-torn trees, the ant-like contingent of men marching across a derelict plain to billets in the large town outlined against the pale yellow sky, the setting sun beneath purple clouds reflected in the still water at the bottom of many “crump-holes.” How he wished, he said, that Edward could have been with him to see this beauty if it were any other place, but though the future seemed very vague it was none the less certain. He only hoped that he would not fail at the critical moment, as he was indeed a “horrible coward”; for his school’s sake, where so often he had watched the splendours of the sunset from the school field, he would especially like to do well. “But all this will be boring you.”

Characteristically he concluded his letter with the haunting lines that must have nerved many a reluctant young soldier to brave the death from which body and spirit shrank so pitifully:

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going . . .
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

“Rupert Brooke,” he added, “is great and his faith also great. If destiny is willing I will write later.”

Well, I thought, destiny was not willing, and I shall not see that graceful, generous handwriting on any envelope any more.

The whole memoir is full of poetry, much of it composed by Brittain and her friends. When the belongings of another fallen friend are sorted out, among the muddy, bloody remains of his kit she and his mother find “the black manuscript note-book containing his poems.”

Racing Out of the Gate: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I haven’t been doing very well with Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children since I posted a little while back about how unbearably annoying I found Sam Pollitt. In fact, I have put the book back on the shelf, for now at least, a rare decision of mine regarding a book I recognize to be of genuine interest, even significance–not to mention one that has been appreciated by readers including Elizabeth Hardwick (whose high praise led me to the book in the first place). Maybe another time I will find some way to cope with what felt to me on this attempt like a tormenting barrage of words and negative emotions. When someone drowns a cat in a bathtub early on and this episode quickly loses its distinctive repulsiveness, you know you’re not in a nice place.

In contrast,  I have been instantly caught up in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, something that has been on my TBR radar for many years but which I only recently acquired. The very first sentence, for instance, is immediately provoking:

When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

“To explain the reasons for this egotistical view of history’s greatest disaster,” she continues, “it is necessary to go back a little”–and so we do. I’m only a little ways in at this point (the war has not yet broken out) but Brittain tells a briskly evocative story about her early years that is all the while haunted by this promise of impending disaster. She’s particularly interesting, so far, about her education: she was forutunate enough, though at a school primarily considered “as a means of equipping girls to be men’s decorative and contented inferiors,” to have teachers who introduced her to both feminism and literature. Testament of Youth itself is testament, of course, to their lasting influence. A taste of her voice, on which the success of any memoir so entirely depends:

Among the girls Miss Heath Jones’s lessons were not always appreciated, for most of the sheltered young women in that era displayed no particular anxiety to have the capacity for thought developed within them. Even now I recall the struggles of some of my contemporaries to avoid facing some of the less agreeable lessons of 1914. There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think–which is fundamentally a moral problem–must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilized world which still goes to war … and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.

I suppose I like that passage as much as I do partly because I too believe that thought is uncomfortable and that discomfort is, therefore, a necessary and beneficial aspect of education, but we are pressured today to make education as comfortable as possible for our students. But I also like the forthrightness and slight acerbity of the voice. This is, we can tell, an unapologetically opinionated, articulate, political woman who somehow became, and flourished as, such a woman despite the stultifying environment in which, by her account, her intelligence and ambition was seen always as a difficulty rather than an advantage. How she became the woman who wrote this book is inevitably going to be one of the most interesting angles of the book for me, just as in Jane Eyre or Great Expectations the retrospective narration draws our attention to the development of the youthfully misguided protagonist into someone capable of narrating the novels.

There are all kinds of other quotable bits from the first 50 or so pages. She quotes often from her early diaries, which both amuse and appall the later Vera with their naivete.  Naturally, I enjoyed this bit about her reading of George Eliot:

‘The reading of Romola,’ enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, ‘has left me in a state of exultation! It is wonderful to be able to purchase so much rapture for 2s. 6d. ! . . . It makes me wonder when in my life will come the moments of supreme emotion in which all lesser feelings are merged, and which leave one’s spirit different for evermore.’

Soon enough, of course, we realize as we note the date. Her resentment of her brother Edward’s “privileged position as a boy” is reminiscent of Maggie Tulliver’s turmoil  in The Mill on the Floss (I wonder if she read that too). “The idea of refusing Edward a university education never so much as crossed my father’s mind,” she recalls, while “the most flattering of [her] schol reports had never … been regarded more seriously than my inconvenient thirst for knowledge and opportunities.” “The constant and to me enraging evidences of this difference of attitude towards Edward and myself,” she reflects, “violently reinforced the feminist tendencies which I had first acquired at school”:

The passage of time–or so, at least, I fondly believe–has changed my furious Bruxton resentments into mellower and more balanced opinions, but probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions. Perhaps it is just as well; women have still a long way to travel before their achievements are likely to be assessed without irrelevant sex considerations entering in to bias the judgment of the critic, and even their recent political successes are not yet so secure that those who profit by them can afford to dispense with the few acknowledged feminists who are still vigilant, and still walk warily along once forbidden paths.

On these last points, the change from 1933 to 2011 is not as great as one might hope.

I’m excited about reading on: this is someone I want to get to know, and to know about. A ‘proper’ post will follow when I’ve read the whole thing.

I’m also excited about finishing Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, which I have been much appreciating despite the difficulties of its prose, which are of the opposite kind to Stead’s difficulties–Hazzard is elliptical, rather than excessive. The Slaves of Golconda discussion of The Transit of Venus, just by the way, will be beginning April 4 (the slight deferral of this date explains why I’ve picked up something else–I’m afraid if I finish Hazzard too far in advance, its details will not be ideally fresh in my mind!).