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

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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!).

“Sheer misery”: Mankell and Scandinavian Noir

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Henning Mankell’s most recent (and, as I understand, also his final) Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, is being released in its English translation this week. I’m still enjoying a break from my immersion in Scandinavian crime fiction, though I picked up another of the Martin Beck mysteries during my most recent excursion to Doull’s (The Abominable Man)–now that I’ve decided to assign one for my fall mystery course, I have to figure out which one, so I’ll be back reading them again in a bit. I won’t be rushing out to buy The Troubled Man right away, as I still need to catch up on the rest of the series (I’ve read only Faceless Killers and The Fifth Woman so far). Now that I’ve been thinking more about the characteristics of these books myself, though, the coverage of Mankell’s latest is interesting in itself. I must say that I particularly enjoyed the parodic opening of the review in the Guardian:

The flat, affectless sentences went on. Like rape out of season they stretched to the horizon in grey fields. Wallander found he was in another book. There was no reason for this. There could be no reason except money, but it would take 300 pages for him to work this out. It always did. Later, he would think about this often, but he could not reach any conclusions. Perhaps it was drink. Perhaps it was senility. Perhaps it was just the conventions of a Swedish crime novel. He wondered if any of this mattered.

Another page turned. His daughter rang. She disturbed him. This might be because she was the only human character in the entire book. She tells him he is a self-pitying bore but she loves him anyway. After she has gone he will spend some time looking out of the window and feeling regret while he remembers incidents from other books. Later, she has a baby, but to show she belongs in the book she will refuse to name it for three months. This is a joke that worked better in Doonesbury where the author was aware that people might find it funny.

An old girlfriend turns up. She is dying of cancer. Soon, she will kill herself, although it may have been an accident. Wallander is unhappy for some weeks, and then he decides he will always be unhappy. Life continues.

Spot on! And yet as you know, I have been brought round somewhat by the thoughtful arguments some of you made in response to my criticisms of Faceless Killers, to accept that the surface tedium of this style has its own literary antecedents and justification. (Thanks very much to @Liz_Mc2 for sending me this link via Twitter!)

There’s a longer piece in the Financial Times that is prompted by a recent BBC production, a “Danish-made Copenhagen set” drama called The Killers. The article opens with The Troubled Man (“the first page of the first chapter of Henning Mankell’s … The Troubled Man is sheer misery”) and then moves into a more general inquiry into the current popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction:

Crime fiction has long depended on a sense of dark forces lurking below calm surfaces and it is not unusual for it to have a reformist, critical edge. Critics have pointed to US noir novels and films as an allegory for fears of subversion and communism in the 1940s and 50s. English country-house crime of the Mousetrap genre depended on an assumption that, behind the tennis and the gin, bestial passions waited their time.

But in Scandinavian noir this is frequently married to a revolutionary intent. Most of these writers are militantly left-wing. It is a tradition started by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, a couple of Swedish journalists who, between 1965 and 1975 (when Wahlöö died in his late 40s) wrote the 10-novel Martin Beck series. Beck, a Stockholm police inspector who resembles the later Wallander, stoically solves crimes that are often rooted in upper-class chicanery or lower-class desperation.

It’s not obvious why fiction of this kind (novels “from Marxists who write of people beset with misery who either commit or must deal with acts of extreme sadistic violence”) would have any market appeal today. Sex and violence always sell, as some of the interviewees note, and many of the most successful novels (the Stieg Larsson ones especially) are hyper-modern: “the trappings of contemporary technology are much in evidence.” But there’s also the variation these works provide on the consistent preoccupation of crime fiction: the ongoing contest between order and disorder. The Scandinavian countries have long exemplified a certain kind of contemporary social order: “their “model” – one of high taxation funding comprehensive welfare and education, coupled with world-beating corporations – has roused envy and emulation, as have the orderliness of their civic life and the fluency of much of their population in foreign languages.” Such control inevitably (or so the novels persistently suggest) comes at a cost, and has its own dark side:

Rigidity in maintaining surface order, the mark of the Scandinavian social democracies, needs to be breached violently by those who are, ultimately, on the side of order – otherwise it will be breached by the violence of those who would destroy it.

The piece ends with some comments from mystery novelist Joan Smith; I was interested that she describes the Wallander novels as “very old-fashioned,” and points to “Larsson, Arnaldur Indridason in Iceland, Jo Nesbø in Norway” as  doing something much more interesting.”

Book Club: Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is the third book chosen by the book club I recently joined: we began with Morley Callaghan’s Such is My Beloved, and in January we discussed Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Our idea (a good one, I think) is to choose books with at least some connection to each other. So we began with an idealistic but ultimately disillusioned priest and moved on to another priest who is neither idealistic nor any kind of ideal–except, perhaps, in his inability to abandon his vocation in the face of every imaginable discouragement. We looked to Brian Moore next on the understanding that he was one of Greene’s favourite novelists, and when we saw that Judith Hearne is a drunk who endures a crisis of faith, well, it seemed the perfect choice, providing continuity but, with its female protagonist, a nice dose of difference as well.

Of these three books, I think The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is my favourite so far, just as a reading experience. I wonder if that’s because Judith herself is quite familiar: she’s a close cousin to Alice and Virginia Madden in Gissing’s The Odd Women, for instance, an unmarried woman in a world where women’s worth (and, sadder, their self-worth) is defined exclusively by their success in attracting a husband. Further, like the Madden sisters, she clings to a veneer of gentility despite her poverty: keeping up appearances is everything. Her situation is profoundly pathetic, her suppressed desperation poignant and sometimes even chilling. Moore writes wonderfully about her growing reliance on a little whiskey, “medicinally, of course, to help [her] feel better”:

For as the years wore on, there was not much to be cheerful about, old friends dying off, young men a thing of the past. . . . And all the things Miss Hearne used to dream about in those lonely years with her poor dear aunt: Mr Right, a Paris honeymoon, things better not thought of now, all these things were slipping farther away each year a girl was single. So she cheered herself up as best she could and if she overdid it, it was a private matter between herself and her confessor, old Father Farrelly, and he was understanding, he liked a drink himself, right up to the end . . .

The rooming house where Miss Hearne (temporarily sober) takes up residence at the novel’s beginning is vividly recreated, from its dreary clutter (“little lace doilies on the tables and lamps with pretty pastel shades . . . a big enamel china dog on the mantelpiece and a set of crossed flags on the wall”) to its odd and somewhat creepy inhabitants, including the landlady’s truly creepy son Bernard (“all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size”) and the landlady’s brother, James Madden, recently returned from America. Madden is a man on the make, eager to promote himself with inflated stories of New York and his own success “in the hotel business” there (in fact, he was a doorman who got a little money in a settlement after being by a bus).

Madden and Miss Hearne begin an awkward relationship–not exactly a courtship, but something like it, as she hopes against all hope that here, finally, is that Mr Right she’d given up on, and he believes that her appearance as a “lady” means she has enough money to make her worth pursuing despite her age and ugliness. All ends badly, largely thanks to Bernie’s machinations. We puzzled over Bernie’s role here. He fancies himself a great artist and is working on an epic poem; he meddles with Miss Hearne and Madden because he wants them out of the house, where his mother’s doting fondness frees him from responsibility, so that he can write as well as help himself furtively to the pretty young maid. One of the oddest scenes in the novel involves Mrs Rice washing Bernie’s hair in the middle of her living room:

Night gave a special flavour to Mrs Henry Rice’s nest. The coloured lampshades glowed orange, blue and green and flames yawned noisily up the chimney. already a state of nightly undress was evident. A pillow had been laid on a sofa and a blanket was folded beside it. In the centre of the room, kneeling on a rug, was Bernard, stripped to his bulging middle, his head immersed in a towel. A big enamel basin of soapy water stood beside him on the floor.

Poor Miss Hearne hardly knows where to look–and neither did we. His hulking, dripping, bulging presence seems ominously significant, but we couldn’t settle on the nature of that significance: why should he be the one who brings on the novel’s crisis? Given the novel’s emphasis on women’s economic and sexual powerlessness, it seemed plausible that he embodies men’s advantages, in which case it is interesting that his cruel and selfish behaviour is enabled by his mother.

As things fall apart for Miss Hearne, she starts drinking again, first turning her picture of the Sacred Heart to the wall. It’s a compelling scene of need, degradation, and escape:

Then she scrambled off the bed, shaking, took a glass from the trunk and scrabbled with her long fingers at the seal, breaking a fingernail, pulling nervously until the seal crumbled on the floor and the cork lay upended on top of the bedside table. She took off her clothes quickly, wise in the habits of it, because sometimes you forgot, later. She pulled on her nightdress and dressing-gown, sat quietly by the fire, shaking a little still, but with the rage, the desire of it. Then, while the bottle of cheap whiskey beat a clattering dribbling tattoo on the edge of the tumbler, she poured two long fingers and leaned back. The yellow liquid rolled in the glass, opulent, oily, the key to contentment. She swallowed it, feeling it warm the pit of her stomach, slowly spreading through her body, steadying her hands, filling her with its secret power. Warmed, relaxed, her own and only mistress, she reached for and poured a tumbler full of drink.

Moore handles her binge brilliantly: we don’t realize until she drags herself downstairs much later that she has been, as Mrs Rice slyly remarks, “singing and talking away to [herself[ as happy as a lark. . . . louder than the wireless.” It’s just a tiny bit funny to realize how she has given herself away, but it’s painful to watch her cling to her dignity when we know it is too late.

As things deteriorate, she seeks comfort in church, but Moore allows her no consolation there: the church in this novel is an institution stripped of its authenticity, a space for hollow rituals. Miss Hearne is terrified when she sees the sacristan closing up shop in a business-like manner:

It was as though the old sacristan, keeper of secrets, knew he had no need to genuflect again. The lights were out, the people had gone home, the church was closing. In the tabernacle there was no God. Only round wafers of unleavened bread. She had prayed to bread. The great ceremonial of the Mass, the singing, the incsense, the benedictions, what it if was show, all useless show? What if it meant nothing?

Miss Hearne is horrified at her doubt, but it worsens as the novel goes on, as she demands answers for her suffering and abandonment and meets only indifference from Father Quigley at her despairing confession:

She had seen his face. A weary face, his cheek resting in the palm of his hand, his eyes shut. He’s not listening, her mind cried. Not listening! . . . (O, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t.)

Like the sacristan, Father Quigley leaves the church without reverence (he has a golf game to get to), adding to her fear that “they both knew there was no need to bow, as though the tabernacle was empty”: “Was it? Was there nothing to pray to?” And so Miss Hearne, in a moment of defiance, approaches the altar and issues a challenge: “Show me a sign.” The rest of the novel follows her as she tests God–withdrawing her savings, moving into a ritzy hotel, and drinking herself into some rare moments of honesty. Eventually, deposited back at the church, she not only approaches the altar but attacks it in a drunken rage, tearing at the door until her fingers bleed.

We debated whether there’s something heroic, or at least courageous, about Miss Hearne. It’s not an easy question. Her challenge is not a principled one: she rebels, not against the social rules and taboos that have reduced her to her pitiable state, but against her own unhappiness (she remains just as class-conscious as ever, for instance). And yet there’s something astonishing about the spectacle of her confrontation with a God she can neither believe in nor abandon; her tearing at the tabernacle door might be seen as her scrabbling also at all the shams and pretenses of her society and her life, trying to see what substance they really have.

In the end, though, she finds only the courage to persist in a life in which now, fairly explicitly, there is no substance, only surface. At the end of the novel she is, once again, setting up home, this time in a private hospital where charitable friends have arranged “convalescent care” for her after her breakdown. Once more she puts up her picture of the Sacred Heart, but this is more a gesture of resignation than a restoration of faith: she can’t give it up because without at least the overt sign of belief, she has nothing left to give any order or meaning to her life:

If you do not believe, you are alone. But I was of Ireland, among my people, a member of my faith. Now I have no — and if no faith, then no people. No, no, I have not given up. I cannot. For if I give up this, then I must give up all the rest.

That missing word (“Now I have no –“) is crucial, I think: even to herself, she cannot claim her own loss of faith. Instead, she choose, not belief itself, but the appearance of belief and the limited comfort of belonging, rather than the martyrdom of honesty, in which there might have been some moral heroism to offset the otherwise unrelenting bleakness of her story.

Next up for our group: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. We decided to stay in that mid-century period, and Bowen is “Anglo-Irish,” so that’s another continuity. I think we all hope there’s no religious despair in this one.

Happy OLM-iversary to Me!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I was working so hard on the draft of an essay for next month’s Open Letters Monthly that I forgot to observe the 1-year anniversary of the migration of my blog to Open Letters Monthly: my first post at this address went up on March 21, 2010. Little did I know that this was only the first OLM tentacle that would wind around me–within another couple of months I was helping out a little with editing, and next thing I knew, I was editing all the time! And writing a lot, too! I was happy to be here then, and I’m still happy about it. Thanks to the readers who came along from the old site, and to the new readers who joined up with me here. I feel very fortunate in the community I’ve found online.

I never did start that “ask an academic” feature I had in mind. Do you suppose there’d be any takers? Maybe I should try it…

Carlyle on the Death of Louis XVI

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I had a phrase from Carlyle’s French Revolution circling in my head today: I thought I wanted to use the phrase in the piece I’m writing for Open Letters Monthly (though now I think I won’t), but I couldn’t quite remember how it went (not even enough to try a search for it), so I was browsing through the book trying to bring it into focus, and oh! what an amazing, weird, spectacular, inimitable book it is. So, for no other reason than that we should all read a little Carlyle every so often (and yes, it will inspire us but also make us want to punch him in the head, as William Morris said), here’s some of my favourite chapter, “Place de la Révolution”:

A King dying by such violence appeals impressively to the imagination; as the like must do, and ought to do. And yet at bottom it is not the King dying, but the man! Kingship is a coat: the grand loss is of the skin. the man from whom you take his Life, to him can the whole combined world do more? Lally went on his hurdle; his mouth filled with a gag. Miserablest mortals, doomed for picking pockets, have a whole five-act Tragedy in them, in that dumb pain, as they go to the gallows unregarded; they consume the cup of trembling down to the lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard thing to die. Pity them all: they utmost pity, with all aids and appliances and throne-and-scaffold contrasts, how far short it is of the thing pitied. . . .

They arrive at the place of execution:

What temper is [Louis] in? Ten different witnesses will give ten different accounts of it. He is in the collision of all tempers; arrived now at the black Mahlstrom and descent of Death: in sorrow, in indignation, in resignation struggling to be resigned. . . .

The drums are beating: ‘Taisez-vous, Silence!’ he cries, ‘in a terrible voice, d’une voix terrible.’ He mounts the scaffold, not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of grey, white stockings. He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel. The Executioners approach to bind him: he spurns, resists; Abbé Edgeworth has to remind him how the Saviour, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound. His hands are tied, his head bare; the fatal moment is come. He advances to the edge of the Scaffold, ‘his face very red,’ and says: ‘Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from the Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my enemies. I desire that France —–‘ A General on horseback, Santerre or another, prances out, with uplifted hand: ‘Tambours!‘ The drums drown the voice. ‘Executioners, do your duty!’ The Executioners, desperate lest themselves be murdered (for Santerre and his Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the hapless Louis: six of them desperate, him singly desperate, struggling there; and bind him to their plank. Abbé Edgeworth, stooping, bespeaks him: ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.’ The Axe clanks down; a King’s Life is shorn away. It is Monday the 21st of January 1793. He was aged Thirty-Eight years four months and twenty-eight days.

I would not be the first one to propose that The French Revolution is best understood as one of the (maybe, the) greatest novels of the 19th century. Certainly it defies conventional expectations for historical writing, then as much as now. It is itself, as Carlyle said, “itself a kind of French Revolution,” or in Mill’s words, “not so much a history as an epic poem.” The memories this all brings back! My undergraduate thesis was ‘Definition More or Less Arbitrary’: Ideas of History and Fiction in The French Revolution and Middlemarch, and my first publication was an essay on Carlyle’s “carnivalesque” historiography. After I read The French Revolution for the first time I couldn’t imagine not writing about it–I had simply never read anything like it before, certainly not in the assigned reading for my history courses! And I’ve never read anything like it again, though when I wrote about Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety I did find some affinities there. Though A Tale of Two Cities has its own kind of genius (a more sentimental kind than Carlyle’s, that’s for sure), there’s nothing of the epic poem about La Vendée, I’m sorry to say.