‘Still, was it right, to take a child from his people?’
Thea shook her head and got up from the rocker. ‘You make me tired, Kay,’ she said. ‘You have a way of simplifying an argument that ignores the complexity of life.’
Marina Endicott’s The Difference was a near miss for me. It has a lot of elements and qualities that I usually enjoy, and that I mostly did enjoy in this case. It is meticulous historical fiction–though ‘meticulous’ is not my highest term of praise because it rightly implies that the novel made me a bit too aware of the care with which it renders its imagined version of a particular time and place. I prefer more exuberance, and The Difference as a whole only occasionally risks more expansive expressiveness.
When it does so, it is around the wonders of the sea and its creatures: it is very much a sea-faring novel, and while (again) this meant it was filled with good things, things I usually like (like vivid descriptions of water and light and dolphins, and plenty of neepery about sailing) often it felt to me as if we were proceeding at a speed a bit too close to real time on the Morning Light‘s voyage from Yarmouth to the South Pacific and around again. For over 250 pages (so, much more than half of the novel) The Difference seemed to be going nowhere in particular except on that literal voyage, which provides a deliberate, well-crafted, but rather protracted set-up for the problem that is supposedly the crux of the story and its themes.
The Difference tells the story of Kay, her half-sister Thea, and Thea’s husband Francis, the ship’s captain, as they travel the ocean on Francis’s trading route. Endicott’s account of both the trip and their many varied stops are full of fine detail and Kay is a well-developed character: young, thoughtful, unconventional (of course – she has to be, I guess, to be a protagonist), excited to be tutored in Greek.
Part of the backstory for both Kay and Thea is their father’s work at an “Indian” school, where conditions were harsh and the treatments punitive for the pupils who were taken away from their own families and cultures. It’s clear that Endicott means this large-scale wrong as a counterpoint to the specific wrong on which the book’s plot eventually pivots: about half way through the book, off the coast of a small island called Pulo Anna, the ship encounters boats full of men eager to trade – including, it turns out, one of their own number, a young boy whom they leave on the Morning Light in exchange for four pounds of tobacco. Thea, who has had multiple miscarriages, essentially adopts the boy, whom they call “Aren”; she delights in being his “mother,” and Kay embraces her role as his big sister. Aren adjusts with seeming ease to his new life but becomes ill with TB, and they end up stopping in New York so he can recover.
We pick up again about a decade later and much has changed. Most importantly, Aren has left his adopted family and is living a bit of a rough life in Halifax. Distressed and frustrated, both on his behalf and her own, Kay comes up with a plan to take him “home” to Pulo Anna. Once more we find ourselves on board ship and traveling across the seas. Although the next part of the book is as carefully and thoughtfully crafted as the first part, as I made my way through it, and even more so at the end of the novel, I found myself preoccupied with what Endicott had left out by not addressing the intervening years: a lot was missing, I thought, that would have illuminated both the action and, more importantly, the meaning, of the novel’s resolution.
The moral heart of the novel is the question of whether, as Kay very belatedly asks, it can have been right for them to take Aren away with them. Near the end of the novel, Thea reveals in a letter to Kay that when Aren was very sick, he yearned for his original family to “come to get me.” This is the first and almost the only explicit evidence we get that Aren did not in fact accept his new situation as placidly as it seemed, and while perhaps it should go without saying that his experience was traumatic, I can’t understand why that truth (assuming it is supposed to be the truth) was so completely suppressed in Endicott’s story-telling. Perhaps the point is to indict both Kay and Thea for taking his contentment for granted – an assumption as reductive to his humanity as the more overtly racist things people say to him or about him after he has joined their family – and thus to indict us by association if we haven’t questioned their points of view. Still, it seems odd to make the alternative perspective – a potential source of significant moral conflict – not just elusive but invisible almost to the very end.
It’s Kay who has the most chance to be a figure of resistance and an ally for Aren, as she is set up as a bit of a maverick or nonconformist from the start, but she doesn’t express any concerns until that late and quite muted confrontation with Thea, and her relationship with Aren is genuinely affectionate, and (as far as we are ever shown) mutually so. Only her tutor, Mr. Brimner, shows any shock at the crude transaction these kindly people have engaged in. “We’ll leave Thea to tell the tale of her purchase of this little fellow,” Francis says lightly, at which
Mr. Brimner’s eyes snapped up to Francis’s face, as if he checked for a jape or jollity, but he schooled his expression quickly to one of objective interest.
His reaction does cast a skeptical shadow over the family’s own account, which casts them as benevolent saviors (“One could not credit how desperate the people were,” Thea explains to Mr. Brimner), and perhaps that is supposed to be enough to drive a wedge between us and them, even though the novel proceeds to depict both them and Aren as carrying on quite happily together.
I wonder if Endicott decided not to show the actual years Aren spends with his adopted family (skipping ahead as she does to his eventual alienation and departure) because that actually avoids treating Kay’s question as one that presents a genuine moral problem. Is the idea that we should not even try to weigh the life he had against the life that, in some sense, he should have had, or that at any rate he would have had, if his brother (as it turns out) had not so cavalierly traded him for tobacco? If the question of whether he might not, by some measures, have benefited from the trade is simply inadmissible, than I can see that it would be wasted time, argumentatively at least, to lay out the results as if there is any value or meaning in doing so: as if the specifics of his experience of being raised as part of Thea and Francis’s family could possibly make any difference to the absolute moral wrong of his having been take away in that way from his own home. (Does he consent? What would count as consent, for a child and in those circumstances? Would it matter if he did?)
Taking that initial trade as a kind of original sin, from which no good can come, there is a certain simplicity, rather than complexity, to the novel’s moral framework: no matter how kind you are or how good your intentions, you have no right (to answer Kay’s question) to take a child from “his people.” If that is the novel’s point, it approaches it quite circuitously and by omission, rather than inquiry or dramatic enactment. Why not more directly expose the inadequacy of Thea’s version of the story, for one thing? (“A benevolent God,” she thinks, “had given her the chance to save this one soul at least from poverty and starvation,” and she considers this repayment for, not duplication of, “the deaths of all those poor Blade Lake children.”) Why not show us, too, what exactly Aren gave up, what the loss is to him, which remains not just abstract but actually a bit hard to take for granted, because something else we learn on that final voyage is that “his people” have not survived: war and then famine have wiped them out. If he had never left, he would presumably have died with them; his body might well have been one of those found “littering” the beach. I guess what I missed as I finished the novel was clearer evidence of how (or, I guess, whether) the novel thought we should wrestle with these alternatives. Is the news of the island’s catastrophe actually evidence of complexity after all, because it is hard to say for sure whether Aren was, ultimately, better off for being spared this fate? Or, again, do the terms of his “adoption” make any further moral considerations moot as there’s nothing that can possibly compensate for or mitigate that harm?
Endicott’s acknowledgments suggest she intends the latter. The Difference was inspired by real events, and she says that she “heard Miss Ladd’s story of the boy bought for four pounds of tobacco with an instantaneous feeling of revulsion.” She also makes explicit the connection I alluded to between Aren’s story and “the terrible legacy of residential schools in Canada.” Kay and Thea both carry profound guilt with them for how their father’s pupils suffered; it is surprising that they do not more readily make this connection themselves, though Kay moves closer to it by the end. One of the reviews quoted on my edition of The Difference says that the novel shows “how many mistakes can lead to kindness.” To me, the thrust of the novel seems rather to be “how many intended kindnesses can lead to mistakes.” I just wish the novel had been more direct about both dramatizing and philosophizing about – making the arguments for – that theme.
It has been two weeks since my last post. That sounds almost confessional: forgive me, gentle readers; it has been fourteen days since 
I think my overwhelming impression at this point (and it may get better as we all get more and more used to doing things this way) is that I am spending a lot more time managing logistics and a lot less time engaging robustly with my classes about our readings. I can understand how online structures of the sort we were encouraged to develop would work pretty well for more mechanical subjects, and I think, too, that there is some good cross-talk going on between the students that does accomplish some of the goals of classroom time. That I feel a bit left out does not mean it isn’t valuable: this is what the experts mean, I guess, when they tell us online teaching “decenters” the teacher. But I don’t think I have so far found the strategy that makes an asynchronous course feel like what a face to face class (at its best) feels like. I don’t see where the energy comes from this way: even if I admit that the best classroom discussion doesn’t actually generate that energy for everyone, it still does it for some of us, and I just really miss that.
I expressed cautious optimism when the term began and I do still feel some of that, even if at times over the past couple of weeks it has been challenged by fatigue and frustration and sadness. The students are there and most of them are really trying; in my turn, I am doing my level best to demonstrate “instructor presence” and make them feel that I care and am paying attention, not just tracking submissions. I’ve already made a few adjustments to the requirements, too, to reflect what we are all learning about how long all of this takes. Also, although preparing recorded segments is not my favorite thing to do, I find devising topics and shaping them into what seem (to me at least) like engaging little packages intellectually stimulating and even fun sometimes. 
The readings, too, are as good as they always are, and when I have time to linger over them, that really boosts my morale. I reread the first half of North and South this week (a bit hastily, but still all through) and got excited about the many ways it provokes comparisons with Hard Times, which we are just wrapping up. And in my intro class we are doing Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth,” which was also a tonic to revisit. It’s so beautiful and so sad and so oddly uplifting, in its contemplation of
It is hard to know how to begin the 2020-21 iteration of 
So how is it going? One of the oddest things about it, to be honest, is that I really have no idea. The whole past week felt like a massive anti-climax: after months of work, trying to re-train myself and take on board an overwhelming amount of information about “best practices” for online course design and student engagement and teacher presence, after taking a 9-week online course myself to learn about how to do this, after countless hours revising my course outlines and schedules and learning new tools and building my actual Brightspace course sites … all with September 8 as the looming deadline for when the students would “arrive” and the whole experiment would really begin … After all of this, there was no one moment when we were back in class, no online equivalent to that exhilarating and terrifying first face to face session. Instead, because this is how asynchronous online teaching works, students just gradually and on their own timeline started checking in and making their first contributions, while I watched and waited and wondered and tried not to pounce too fast whenever a new notification appeared.
I’m also genuinely pleased about the contributions that have come in, especially, in both courses, the introductions students have been posting on our “getting to know each other” discussion boards. As I said to them, our first crucial task is to begin building the class into a community, and it has been lovely to see them embrace that goal by telling us a little bit about themselves and then (best of all) responding with great friendliness to each other. I don’t usually solicit individual introductions in all of my F2F classes, only in the smaller seminars, so actually I know more about these groups than I think I ever have this early in the term. While a lot of what I read and practiced this summer was about how to make myself present to my students as a real, if virtual, person, this exercise has been great for making them present to me, not just “students” in the abstract but two really varied and interesting groups of people who bring different perspectives, interests, and needs to our collective enterprise.
Still, I find the spread of the experience out over all hours of the day and all the days of the week disorienting, destabilizing, uncomfortable. Usually my weekly schedule involves regular build-ups to each class meeting: preparing notes and materials and ideas and plans, doing the reading, summoning the energy. Then there’s the live session, which in the moment absorbs all my concentration. When it’s over, I’m drained, even if (especially if!) there has been a really good, lively discussion: being in the moment for that kind of exchange is unlike anything else I do in terms of how focused but also flexible, how attentive to others but also on-task I need to be. I love it, and I really miss it already. I know we can have engaged and intellectually serious exchanges in our online format, but they won’t have the same rhythm, or perhaps any rhythm at all, who knows. Not having to be up and dressed and out the door early in the morning (or ever!) is some compensation, and I expect I will find more of a routine as we settle into the term, but (and I expect I’m going to be saying things like this a lot this term, so sorry for the repetition) it’s a strange new way of being a professor.
As for specifics, well, we’re discussing Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger” in my intro class this coming week, and in 19th-Century Fiction it’s time for Hard Times (which I assigned this term because we ended up cutting it last term when we ‘pivoted’ to online). These are all texts I like a lot, though in my experience Hard Times is often a hard sell, even to students who otherwise like Dickens (which is never all of them, of course). Will I be able to communicate my enthusiasm and generate the kinds of discussions I aspire to in the classroom without being in the classroom? I guess I’ll find out. I’m trying to create recorded lectures that open up into writing prompts, rather than drawing conclusions, much as I would move in the classroom through laying out some ideas, contexts, or questions and then opening things up to their input. I am actually having some fun with this, though yet one more unknown is how effective my first attempts will be. I have the next two weeks of material nearly completed, so that buys me a bit of time: as I see what works and what doesn’t, and which approach to the lectures they prefer, I can adapt the next round accordingly.
Where Mrs. Browning saw, he smelt; where she wrote, he snuffed.
And this brings me to the other thing I really liked about Flush, which is the clever way Woolf conveys the daring and intensity of the romance between EBB and Robert Browning. Flush is keenly sensitive to changes in his mistress’s mood and the progress of her feelings for Browning – from keen but uncertain interest to expanding confidence to love – is beautifully conveyed through Flush’s peripheral and often peevish point of view:
Rooney actually took at least two big risks in taking on this particular subject–or, in taking it on the way she did. The first is the obvious one: a pigeon narrator! But I think this leap of imaginative faith was necessary to mitigate the second risk, which is telling yet another story of bravery and brotherhood in the trenches. To some extent Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is exactly that kind of book, and this literary ground is so well-trodden that even the best new treatments can seem clichéd (and 
This is a structural reflection of Rooney’s commitment to equivalence between her human and her animal protagonists, and by the end that equivalence seemed to be the real point of the novel. It’s making the case against speciesism; it pushes us repeatedly to consider why we (including novelists) typically treat animals as accessories to human stories if we consider them at all, rather than accepting that they have their own whole, intrinsically meaningful lives and perspectives. “I think of these numbers still all the time,” says Cher Ami as she reflects on the devastating human casualties on the front; but also,
That said, her whole approach is a flamboyant adventure in anthropomorphism: if I were inclined to be critical about the book, I might start there, with the idea that the best way to earn our respect for animals is to depict them as essentially human-like. For all the specific references to pigeon behaviors and preferences, Cher Ami doesn’t really seem much more bird-like in her consciousness than Margalo in Stuart Little 2. I also got a bit tired of Rooney’s using her as a device for social commentary and criticism: for a stuffed bird, Cher Ami gets pretty preachy about racism and sexism and militarism. Those were the moments when my own commitment to Rooney’s experiment got the most wobbly. In contrast, my engagement with Charles Whittlesey never wavered. The sad story of his inability to recover from what he saw and did in “the Pocket” during those terrifying days–the very things that, to others, made him a hero–is a more powerful critique of war and the cynicism of its leaders and promoters than any of Cher Ami’s more didactic remarks.
The other World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey most reminded me of was Timothy Findley’s The Wars, because there too it is animals who force a moral reckoning. Findley does not go as far as Rooney in addressing the animals’ own perspectives: in fact, it’s their inability to speak or act for themselves that arouses Robert Ross’s rage and, ultimately, rebellion. The horses are provocations for his crisis of conscience, not meaningful agents in themselves. The affinity between the two novels lies in their aversion to the human arrogance that subordinates other living creatures to our often highly destructive priorities. World War I is often talked about as particularly tragic because its losses served no higher purpose. “The defeat of Hitler and company,” as Cher Ami remarks,
I have fallen out of the habit of regular blogging in the last little while. One of the odder features (to me) of my blog archive is that early on, I actually posted much more frequently, even though my life back then was much more hectic. I think in those days writing blog posts felt intellectually liberating–which it still does, but less urgently so, given the ways in which my life has changed. Time to myself is a less precious commodity now, too, so blogging feels less like an escape and more like another task (which is silly, of course, as it remains entirely voluntary). Then when I find myself in the doldrums, as I have recently, it is hard to muster up both the energy to post and enough faith in myself to believe I have something to say.
Things were a bit hectic and stressful around here for some family reasons too, so I have been struggling to concentrate on the more demanding books in my reading pile. I read Amy Jones’s Every Little Piece of Me but didn’t like it nearly as much as 
The other reading I’ve been doing is in the Broadview anthology I ordered for my first-year class, as it contains a lot of stories and poems I don’t know at all. I’m impressed at the range of styles and voices in the reader–and mine is the concise edition, too! I haven’t quite pinned down the specific readings for the course yet, but in this, as in my other fall class prep, I do feel I am making progress. I have spent such a lot of time thinking about online teaching this summer that I was starting to panic about not actually having built my course sites or created content for them. I hope that theoretical time will pay off, but in any case it is definitely time to stop thinking and start doing–and since the TLS piece went in, that’s what I’ve been focused on. It is daunting to feel September is so close, but at the same time I am looking forward to it for the same reasons I usually welcome the return to classes: activity, conversation, intellectual exercise, the stimulation of being busy in more concrete ways. Sure, it won’t be the same kind of activity or conversation, but I’ll take it.
It is impossible not to have Hamlet in mind while reading Hamnet (as it is more simply and, I think, more aptly titled in its UK release), and I imagine that someone who knows the play better than I do (so, a lot of people!) would find many echoes and resonances that deepen O’Farrell’s effects. But she resists, rightly I think, making either Shakespeare or Hamlet the most important thing about Hamnet–she avoids holding out their future fame (unknown and unforeseeable to her characters, after all) as what matters most about the lives her people are living in the moment. Instead, she focuses our attention and ties our emotions to their small family circle, and especially to the story of Hamnet’s mother Agnes (better known to us as Anne). The novel’s themes of love and loss, grief and guilt, parents and children, are (some of) Hamlet‘s themes as well, and by the end O’Farrell has convinced me of their connection, but in her telling Hamnet’s death does not matter because it inspired Hamlet, but rather Hamlet matters because it is an offering to Hamnet:
Shakespeare’s greatness, as Agnes understands it, is as a father, not as a playwright. In fact, Shakespeare (who is never directly named–he is always “the glover’s son” or “the Latin tutor” or just the husband or the father) is just barely a main character in O’Farrell’s novel. Hamnet is really Agnes’s book, and O’Farrell portrays her with wonderful specificity, from her knowledge of medicinal herbs to her uncanny ability to read a person’s character and future from pinching the bit of flesh between thumb and forefinger:
It’s there, of course, that he finds his vocation and begins the work that will lead him to Hamlet and beyond. But that richer life keeps him apart from Agnes and his children: his older daughter Susanna and the twins, Hamnet and Judith. He is away on the day Judith becomes ill, which turns into the day Hamnet dies. Agnes too is away, though not as distant, and O’Farrell writes with devastating clarity about what it means to her when she discovers that her harmless expedition to gather honey meant that her son faced catastrophe alone:
What O’Farrell does best, though–and this is no surprise, given 
But of course Hamnet itself is built, artfully, on just that moment, and art’s ability not just to convey pain but also to console is one of the reasons we value and need it, though artists are often ambivalent or uneasy about that. “I sometimes hold it half a sin,” writes Tennyson in In Memoriam A.H.H.,
They sat for longer at the table, the cigarette Florian had put out to smoke unsmoked, the tea he’d made gone cold. This was what he would take with him, he thought. This was what he would leave behind. These moments now would haunt whole days.
It has this quality in common with 
As for Ellie, her expectations of happiness in her life are low enough to content her with her marriage to a man burdened by guilt and grief for his part in the accidental death of his first wife and their baby. It isn’t until she glimpses Florian Kilderry passing through her small community that she is awakened to the possibility of something more. Theirs is a sweet friendship but not a great mutual passion, and by the end of the summer Florian himself regrets the part he has played in it and the price Ellie pays in dashed dreams:
It’s an intensely small-scale and personal novel, but I thought Trevor was also drawing out a particularly Irish tragedy through Miss Connulty’s suffering for her “craven appetites” and the story of Ellie’s stern convent upbringing:
Novel Readings 