That’s Life: Richard Flanagan, Question 7

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

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

19.

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

That’s life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s question 7.

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

Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
— Emily Brontë

I expect Karen Powell’s Fifteen Wild Decembers is more interesting the less you already know about the Brontës when you read it, whereas I am pretty sure Colm Toibin’s The Master is a richer experience for devoted Jamesians than it was for me—which is really saying something, because I thought it was extraordinary. Emily Brontë’s life is obviously interesting enough for a novel, but if you’re going to fictionalize a story that is already well served by biography, and if you’re going to presume to speak in a voice best known to us from Wuthering Heights, you need to reach a depth of insight and also heights of emotion that I just didn’t find in Powell’s novel. It does have some nice passages of description, but overall it felt flat, and fell flat; even the descriptive sections felt a bit paint-by-numbers to me, detailed without being vivid.

“It fell flat” is a hard complaint to back up with evidence: I can’t point to passages that are obviously badly written. I can at least try to illustrate the plodding quality of the ‘dramatic’ scenes: the dialogue always seemed stilted to my ear, manufactured, with nothing of the vivacity or intensity of the dialogue in any of the Brontë novels I know well. Here, chosen more or less at random, is a bit of the sisters’ debate about whether to try to publish their poems:

‘You live in your own little world, Emily. Always have done. You never listen to a word anyone tells you!’

‘Because I have a mind of my own, am not some puppet for you to play with.’

‘This has nothing to do with our poems,’ said Anne quietly. ‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t send them out to see if people think we have something worth saying. As Charlotte says, Aunt’s money will only last so long. And we can still advertise for your school, either here or elsewhere.’

‘It’s a ridiculous idea, Anne. You must know that. I don’t see how—look, Branwell has a poem in the paper every five minutes and has never once been paid for them.’

‘But a proper publisher,’ said Charlotte, blinking rapidly. Any moment now she would start crying and blame the onions. ‘I still think Branwell will do something remarkable one day.’

‘We won’t make a penny.’

‘How will we know unless we try?’

‘We’re perfectly happy as we are.’

Maybe that seems fine to you and if so you might enjoy Fifteen Wild Decembers just fine too.

The novel is clearly building towards Wuthering Heights and includes some elements designed to get it, and Emily, and us, there, especially a boy (later a man) Emily sees on the moors who fascinates her with his elusive wildness. (There are hints of Cathy cutting her ghostly wrists on the windows too, among other allusions.) How the narrator of Fifteen Wild Decembers could plausibly generate the emotional frenzy of Wuthering Heights is not convincingly portrayed or explained, though. When Powell’s Emily eventually declares her aspirations for her fiction, they seemed to me unearned, not prepared for by what had come previously:

‘I want characters who’ve grown out of the land; have been formed from heath and rock and icy water.’

‘A love story, though?’ Anne had already decided that her fictional governess would be rewarded by a happy marriage to a curate.

I nodded. The outline of the story had come to me on the walk home and, in flashes, during the night, but the detail was forming only now, as I paced around the room. ‘But so passionate that it destroys the lovers and everyone close to them. A jealous, selfish, unthinking love, wicked even. But it will endure beyond death, like bedrock beneath the flimsiness of existence . . . I want to show what lies beneath the veneer of civility.’

Is it just me, or is that overwritten? At any rate, this is not how the narrating voice has talked, or how Powell’s Emily has thought, up until this point. I just wasn’t buying it.

I could go on but I won’t. I don’t think I’m being unfair to the novel, and I’m also not sure why I expected better. The ‘homage to a great writer’ genre is a hard one: it inevitably invites comparisons that are almost certain not to flatter the follower. I’ve written plenty over the years about my dislike of pretty much every such book I’ve read about George Eliot (see, for example, here). I didn’t hate Lesley Krueger’s Mad Richard, which features Charlotte Brontë as a character. When these attempts falter, though, I’m reminded of Dorothy Mermin’s comment when someone asked her in my hearing about A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which was (paraphrasing, as it was a long time ago!) “Why would I want to read that, when I can read the real thing?” She was speaking particularly about Byatt’s brave efforts to write original “Victorian” poetry, but I think she also meant something more general about neo-Victorian fiction, which I too generally dislike, preferring “the real thing.” I don’t like Wuthering Heights—a recent reread confirmed that I will retire without ever assigning it—but it is completely gripping and also utterly convincing in its grim view of human nature. Probably Fifteen Wild Decembers suffered from my reading it too soon after rereading Wuthering Heights, and also so soon after my rereading of Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which I worked through with my Victorian Women Writers seminar last term. Nothing in Powell’s novel comes close to the power of Gaskell’s writing about this cast of characters. Powell’s rendition of Emily’s death (I wondered how she would deal with that, with Emily as her first-person narrator) to me was tedious and affected, straining towards effects more than delivering them:

All cold. Icy angels edged towards me, lips of blue. Branwell came, hair so red against the whiteness. Ice and fire. I felt a cold hand reaching for me. I could not catch my breath. My lips were moving now. Forgive me, Papa, but I cannot—

Lead us not into temptation

Breath won’t come. Lead on my chest. They must not shut me in a coffin, Anne. Who will bake the bread? Lay me in the peaty earth. A terrible light coming now, a tidal drag pulling me under, quicksand; thunder of wings; reaching hands, pulling, pushing, I do not—eyelids burned to the rim, scourged to the bone. Turn away, resist with every last strength in my—

And so on for another page and a half. For contrast, this is Gaskell’s account:

In fact, Emily never went out of doors after the Sunday succeeding Branwell’s death. She made no complaint; she would not endure questioning; she rejected sympathy and help. Many a time did Charlotte and Anne drop their sewing, or cease from their writing, to listen with wrung hearts to the failing step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses, with which their sister climbed the short staircase; yet they dared not notice what they observed, with pangs of suffering even deeper than hers. They dared not notice it in words, far less by the caressing assistance of a helping arm or hand. They sat, still and silent . . .

Emily was growing rapidly worse. I remember Miss Brontë’s shiver at recalling the pang she felt when, after having searched in the little hollows and sheltered crevices of the moors for a lingering spray of heather—just one spray, however withered—to take in to Emily, she saw that the flower was not recognised by the dim and indifferent eyes. Yet, to the last, Emily adhered tenaciously to her habits of independence. She would suffer no one to assist her. Any effort to do so roused the old stern spirit. One Tuesday morning, in December, she arose and dressed herself as usual, making many a pause, but doing everything for herself, and even endeavouring to take up her employment of sewing: the servants looked on, and knew what the catching, rattling breath, and the glazing of the eye too surely foretold; but she kept at her work; and Charlotte and Anne, though full of unspeakable dread, had still the faintest spark of hope.

On that morning Charlotte wrote thus—probably in the very presence of her dying sister:—

“Tuesday. “I should have written to you before, if I had had one word of hope to say; but I have not. She grows daily weaker. The physician’s opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use. He sent some medicine, which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known. I pray for God’s support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it.”

The morning drew on to noon. Emily was worse: she could only whisper in gasps. Now, when it was too late, she said to Charlotte, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.” About two o’clock she died.

Which would you rather read?

July Reading: Quantity vs Quality!

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

I thought I had done very little reading in July, and I was prepared to defend myself: “Fred! Very distracting! Too hot! Can’t concentrate!” Both of these things are true: having Fred in my life has been a significant adjustment, more than I expected, and we did have a pretty warm July. Both factors contributed to a pretty poor month for sleeping, so I was going to point to that too as a reason I read so little.

And yet it turns out I read 11.5 books in July, which is more than many other months. So why did it seem like such a slump? I think it’s because most of them were not very deep, or not very good—plus two of them were re-reads, which I feel is sort of cheating.

The unexpected highlight was a very last minute choice: an interesting conversation with my lovely mom about A. S. Byatt convinced me I should reread the ‘Frederica quartet,’ but I felt too lackadaisical that night to jump right in so I plucked Byatt’s The Matisse Stories off the shelf on July 30 and finished it July 31. I’ve owned it for ages (I think it was a book sale find) but hadn’t gotten around to it. It turns out to be a really fascinating trio of stories all related (surprise! 🙂 ) in some way to paintings by Matisse, though in  unpredictable ways. In the first one, a middle-aged woman reaches a breaking point at the salon and ends up absolutely trashing the place: I would never do such a thing to my nice stylist or the pleasant salon she co-owns, but there was something profoundly understandable about this woman’s rage. In the second, a self-absorbed, pretentious artist endlessly catered to (if silently criticized) by his deferential wife gets an unexpected come-uppance when it turns out their cleaning lady is the one whose wild artistic creations get noticed. The third turns on an accusation against a professor by a student who is clearly unwell; there’s a lot of thought-provoking discussion in it about art and standards, but what will stay with me is a stark moment of acknowledgment between two people who, it becomes clear, have both considered ending their lives:

‘Of course, when one is at that point, imagining others becomes unimaginable. Everything seems clear, and simple, and single; there is only one possible thing to be done—’

Perry Diss says,

‘That is true. You look around you and everything is bleached, and clear, as you say. You are in a white box, a white room, with no doors or windows. You are looking through clear water with no movement—perhaps it is more like being inside ice, inside the white room. There is only one thing possible. It is all perfectly clear and simple and plain. As you say.’

I don’t know if they are right, but when I read this what I thought to myself was “How did Byatt know this?” It feels as if it must be true. Byatt is such a consistently smart writer; I do absolutely look forward to starting in on The Virgin in the Garden.

Nothing else I read made me think or feel as much as this little volume. I quite liked Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue; it has been especially fun watching Rankin push Rebus along through the years rather than preserving him in eternal crime-fighting youth. I also liked Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook. I read Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow for my book club (I’m not considering this a re-read as it had been more than 30 years since my first go at it!). It starts out so strong! It goes so awry! It ends . . . with a parasitic worm? Really? Katerina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling was mildly entertaining. Martha Wells’s All Systems Red—which I listened to as an audio book—was very entertaining and very short. Felix Francis’s The Syndicate was not very good: he took over his dad’s franchise and some of the results have been fine, but this one read like someone ticking off boxes.

I reread David Nicholls’s You are Here and enjoyed it about as much as the first time. That’s probably enough times, though: I can’t see it becoming one of my go-to comfort reads. Katherine Center’s How to Walk Away and Abby Jimenez’s Life’s Too Short were pretty trauma-riddled for romances (maybe that’s not the right category for them?); Center’s The Rom-Commers was another re-read and I think I actually liked it better the second time.

The 0.5 is Ali Smith’s Gliff. I lost traction on it about half way through. Smith is a hit-or-miss author for me: I think she’s brilliant and absolutely love listening to her talk about her fiction, but the Seasonal Quartet are the only novels of hers that I have gotten along with well at all.

I am not, by training or inclination, a reading snob but it is interesting to recognize that my sense that I wasn’t “really” reading much is due in part to so many of these books being non-literary (in the genre sense). If they’d been better examples of their kind, though, I don’t think I would have felt the same.

“The Shadow of Some Kind of Form”: Woolf on her Diary

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

In my previous post I wondered whether we knew what Woolf’s wishes were for her diary: whether she imagined it as something others would someday read, or thought of it as—and hoped it would remain—a private space. How might these different ideas about what she was writing, or who she was writing for, have affected what she wrote? With these questions still lingering as I read on yesterday, I reached an entry that explicitly addresses what keeping a diary meant to her and what her aspirations were for it, particularly for herself as a writer. It’s a longish passage but I’m going to copy the whole of it here, because I find every bit of it so interesting. It’s part of her entry for Sunday 20 April, 1919.

In the idleness which succeeds any long article, & Defoe is the 2nd leader this month, I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; & take no time over this; & forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct & instant shots at my object, & thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, & shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould transparent enough to reflect the light of our live, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think on re-reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, & found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. But looseness quickly becomes slovenly. A little effort is needed to face a character or an incident which needs to be recorded. Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack & untidy like Vernon Lee. Her ligaments are too loose for my taste.

“But to return to live,” she then says, “albeit with something of an effort,” and back she goes to writing the diary instead of reflecting on it.

What a lot of “significance” there is in these ruminations! Of course I noticed the comments about writing just for her own eye, nobody else’s, which seem crucially linked to the insight that for the process to work, she must not censor herself. Probably all writers know she is right that writing often, however seemingly loosely, does lead to an “increase in ease” for the writing we have to do: I have not personally gotten into ‘morning pages,’ but they seem a good example of this theory put into practice—for me, this blog loosens my ligaments, without, I hope, seeming “slovenly”! Her desire to express the “loose, drifting material of life,” to find a kind of transparency in prose that allows form and meaning to emerge unexpectedly, anticipates the ways her fiction would develop over the next twenty years; “steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art” is a beautiful description of the somewhat abstract aesthetic of To the Lighthouse, say. It’s clear that she sees the diary form as permissive in a way that even then she would not accept for her fiction, but that the freedom she wanted in writing less “consciously & scrupulously” feels to her like essential preparation for the work to come. As we ourselves read her diaries, invading the privacy she did seem to want, perhaps we can also think of ourselves as opening that “capacious hold-all” and proving through our own fascination that, as she had hoped, the “mass of odds & ends” she threw into it have coalesced and refined into something new and wonderful.

As I keep reading, I will be thinking especially about the challenge she set for herself of being loose and elastic without becoming “slack & untidy,” and also watching for more such self-conscious reflections on the process of keeping the diary. Does the “shadow of some kind of form” become more fixed in her mind or her practice? Or does the looseness she values depend on that form always being somehow elusive, so that the result never becomes routine or formulaic?

“I cant fill up the lost days”: 1918

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Woolf misses just five days in her diaries, skipping from 4 July 1918 to 9 July, and feels bad enough about it to mention them apologetically as “lost”: here I am catching up after weeks of not reporting on my reading of her diaries, and not only have a couple of months gone by in my world but I’ve read right through a whole year’s worth of entries and more, into March 1919.

It’s not that she writes up nothing of interest in her 1918 entries. There are the moments that remind you that there’s a whole history unfolding, making dents over and over in the surface of her life: “Rain for the first time for weeks today, & a funeral next door; dead of influenza,” she writes on July 10.  There are the offhand comments that remind us (as if we needed it!) that she was a book lover as well as a book writer: “I spent 7/ on books this afternoon,” she notes on March  11, and follows it with an account of her finds along Charing Cross Road. “I was amused to find that the lust after books revives with the least encouragement,” she wryly observes, but “after all, nothing gives back more for one’s money than a beautiful book.”

In August she is losing track of her days, as who doesn’t, in the languor of high summer in the countryside: “I had to look carefully before I wrote Saturday.” Her idleness does not affect her ability to capture what she sees with a few deft phrase, even as she denies her ability to “get it right”:

 If I weren’t too lazy I think I should try to describe the country; but then I shouldn’t get it right. I shouldn’t bring back to my own eyes the look of all those old beautiful worn carpets which are spread over the lower slopes of the hills; nor should I convey the look of clouded emerald which the downs wear, the semi-transparent look, as the sun & shadows change, & the green becomes now vivid now opaque.

I love that.

Even more, I love her comments on her reading, which during this period includes Christina Rossetti:

Christina has the great distinction of being a born poet, as she seems to have known very well herself. But if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call. It is melancholy reading. First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.

Rossetti’s Christianity, Woolf suggests, led her to “starve into austere emaciation, a very fine original gift . . . She has the natural singing power. She thinks too. She has fancy.” Like her more polished criticism, these glancing remarks provoke rather than pronounce. She’s also reading and loving Byron, in spite of the “extreme badness” of his his poetry. In September she is reading Paradise Lost, with great admiration and excitement (“how smooth, strong & elaborate it all is! What poetry!”) but not without reservations (“Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon ones own joys & sorrows?”). She has some harsh things to say about Katherine Mansfield: after reading “Bliss,” she comments,

I dont see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to affect the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; & the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind.

And then the coup de grâce: “She writes badly too.”

I always find it fascinating when one great writer faces off against another—Charlotte Brontë on how dull she found Austen’s too-confined world, for example, or George Eliot critiquing Dickens’s idealization of the poor, or Henry James declaring Middlemarch “a treasure-house of details, but an indifferent whole.” Obviously they are all wrong, as is Woolf, and yet they are right too, in ways that matter, and one of those ways is that they are themselves striving for something different in their own fiction. It has always seemed to me to take both courage and arrogance to do pretty much anything creative, and to be truly original, or just truly yourself as an artist, surely there’s a way in which you have to reject other options, to find them inadequate to what you believe art is for or can do or should be.

Yet Woolf is also a really receptive and perceptive reader of a lot of writers who are not like her at all (as in her centenary essay on George Eliot), so maybe it really was personal with Mansfield—but she wrote this in her diary, for her own eyes only, which is something I’ve been thinking a bit uncomfortably about, not just in this context but in general. I don’t know whether Woolf herself left any wishes or instructions about her diaries: did she expect them to be read, at all or this widely? Does that matter? (The first published version was, I think, the highly selective ‘Writer’s Diary’ that Leonard oversaw.) Is this whole project—not specifically my reading of them but their whole presence as complete texts—an invasion of her privacy? Obviously I recognize the intrinsic interest of getting so close to such a remarkable mind, and of course we take for granted a lot of access to ‘public figures.’ If anyone knows of any discussion of the ethics of publishing diaries in general, or of Woolf’s own expectations or wishes for her diaries in particular, I’d be glad for a suggestion for further reading! Anne Olivier Bell’s introduction does not, as far as I noticed, explicitly address whether Woolf wanted the diaries published.

In the meantime, thinking about this has led me to think about my own (much less erudite, witty, and interesting!) journals. There would never be any reason to publish them, but it is a bit discomfiting to think of anyone else, even close family, reading them. I value them too much as records and references to preemptively destroy them . . . yet. Perhaps I can at least check them for “Mansfield moments” and expurgate them. 😉 

“Doubtful Against the Gulf”: Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The flimsy walls did not shut out the world but made a sounding box for it; through every crack the smell of the world crept in, the smell of rain and sun and earth and the deodar trees and a wind strangely scented with tea. Here the bell did not command, it sounded doubtful against the gulf; the wind took the notes away and yet it brought the sound of the bells at Goontu very strongly; pagan temple bells. And everywhere in front of them was that far horizon and the eagles in the gulf below the snow.

My interest was piqued in Rumer Godden’s fiction by Margaret Drabble’s discussion in the TLS a few months back. Until then I really only knew her for her children’s Christmas story “The Story of Holly and Ivy,” which we had in this edition with its bright, beautiful illustrations by Barbara Cooney. Drabble’s discussion of China Court is not itself very encouraging, and yet she still made it, and Godden, sound interesting: “the novel is irredeemably quaint, an unlikely romance in a Cornish setting of china clay pits and wild moorland and dismal graveyards.” Yes, please! In her piece, Drabble mentioned Black Narcissus, which I then looked up, and in doing so I discovered that Virago was reissuing a number of Godden’s novels, and then there some of them were in Bookmark, and we all know how that kind of thing turns out. 😉

In her introduction to the new edition of Black Narcissus, Amanda Coe describes it as a “perfect novel” that “has the atmosphere and self-sufficiency of a dream.” It belongs to the genre of the “nun novel,” if there is such a thing (there’s The Corner That Held Them, of course, and Matrix, and Stoneyard Devotional, just for starters), but it also belongs to the broader category of novels about struggles between faith and feeling, or desire and duty, and it is a novel about empire, and about Englishwomen abroad.

The nuns in this case have traveled to India to set up shop in what was previously St Saviour’s School, run by “the Brotherhood,” but which earlier had been known as “the House of Women,” meaning women with very different roles and habits (!) than those under the leadership of the staunch and upright Sister Clodagh. As they make their way to their new establishment, one of them, Sister Ruth, comments that she would like to know “why the Brothers went away so soon.” Sister Clodagh cannot give a direct answer, and she keeps her own doubts to herself: “she had lain awake thinking that they should not have come.”

They begin their mission full of confidence and “a kind of ecstasy” at the beauty of the setting:

They woke in the late October mornings before the sun had reached the hills, and saw its light travel down from snow and cloud over the hills, until it reached the other clouds that lay like curds in the bottom of the valley. The mountain stood out, glittering into the air.

About China Court, which I have not read, Drabble says “the tone is too floral, not to say florid”; I did not think that at all about Black Narcissus, which has a lot of vividly descriptive language that is typically, as in this example, held in check by a note of unease or discomfort (“curds” is a jarring simile here!). Also, it seems essential to the underlying conflicts in Black Narcissus that the landscape be sensual as well as strange—that we feel something of the same push and pull it creates in the nuns, who find the sheer drama of the views from their new home distracting:

At recreation they walked on the terrace and sat on the block to watch the views, but that was not enough. Sister Honey would stop with a needle in one hand and the cotton in the other, gaping out of the window, and sometimes Sister Philippa would find that it had taken her an hour to pick the cosmos for the altar vases. She was standing in the flowers, red and clove pink and ivory as high as her breast, and her hands were empty.

‘Even in my thoughts I’m discourteous and ungrateful,’ she sighed. ‘We came here to work for God and here I am already neglecting the smallest things I have to do for him.’

‘I think you can see too far,’ Sister Philippa says;

‘I look across there, and then I can’t see the potato I’m planting and it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant it or not.’

There are also human distractions. Chief among them is Mr. Dean, the agent of the General whose property their new home is. Mr. Dean, with his “charming dissipated face” and too much skin showing through the tatters of his shirt, embodies the slide into dissolute sensuality that threatens the nuns’ holy intentions. He helps the nuns, but also warns them: “It’s no place to put a nunnery.” His presence stirs up memories in Sister Clodagh of a lost love, and more immediate feelings in some of the other sisters that become the main engine of the novel’s plot, along with the disruptive presence of a beautiful young girl and the General’s handsome nephew Dilip Rai, who (in spite of their misgivings) joins the nuns as a pupil. “Won’t you be letting a cuckoo into your nest,” asks Mr. Dean, which is both stating the obvious and a sign that he knows better than the nuns do that they may not be strong enough to resist the instincts they have chosen to deny. Once all these plot pieces are in place, the story plays out with a kind of inevitability that still manages to be surprising in its details—which I won’t give away, except to say that the novel’s structure is elegant, bringing us back to where we began with a powerful awareness of what has changed, and perhaps been learned, in the meantime.

There are lots of interesting aspects to Black Narcissus. It trades in some familiar tropes around the “exotic east,” but I basically agree with Coe that Godden seems very in control of these, aware and critical of rather than acquiescent in them:

Godden, who grew up in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, is unflinchingly contemptuous of the knee-jerk assertions of colonial superiority espoused by Clodagh and her nuns. Her sympathies clearly lie with the would-be colonised, who have no desire to be taught or interfered with.

In this respect the novel reminded me of A Passage to India, which I think takes a similar risk in appearing to indulge while really undermining its English characters’ world views.

I  was particularly struck by Mr. Dean’s criticisms of the nuns’ version of religion, which he explicitly finds (pun intended!) cloistered and stifling. When he sees the plans for their new chapel, to be built on the exact model of the Order’s English chapel, including imported stalls and carpets and tiles and reproductions of the stained glass windows, he is disdainful and makes them an alternative design, open to the air and sky, “made so that the path comes right through it, and the people are going and coming through it all day long.” “A chapel shouldn’t be sacred,” he yells, when they dismiss his plan as inappropriate, “but as free and as useful as the path I put it on.” It’s not just that their English chapel is an imposition but that it fundamentally misrepresents what he thinks religion should be. His chapel, in contrast, will be “‘for all life. All life,’ he repeated, reverently, ‘which is God.'”

I really liked Black Narcissus, enough that now I want to read  another of Godden’s nun novels, In This House of Brede: “Bruised by tragedy,” says the Virago blurb,

Philippa Talbot leaves behind a successful career with the civil service for a new calling: to join an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns. In this small community of fewer than one hundred women, she soon discovers all the human frailties: jealousy, love, despair. But each crisis of heart and conscience is guided by the compassion and intelligence of the Abbess and by the Sisters’ shared bond of faith and ritual. Away from the world, and yet at one with it, Philippa must learn to forgive and forget her past . . .

How great does that sound? Unfortunately (or not), Bookmark is closed today, but they’ll be open again tomorrow!

Meet Fred!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

I had barely recovered from my jet lag after my recent trip to Vancouver when I got caught up in another big distraction: I have adopted a cat! Her name is Fred, short for Winifred (she happily acknowledges either Winifred Holtby or Winifred Burkle as her namesake—or both), she’s approximately two years old, she’s tiny, she’s sweet, and she’s a bit of a pest in the wee hours of the morning.

I had thought for a long time about getting a cat. I had one growing up, an elegant Siamese named Bothwell—I was in a big Mary, Queen of Scots phase when he joined the household. (Maybe Fred should consider herself lucky?) He was a great companion: loyal, eccentric, and independent, so basically a lot like me. During my marriage having a cat wasn’t an option, as my ex-husband is allergic; so too is my daughter, but only to some cats, and she encouraged me to take a chance. (So far, so good: she has visited Fred a few times and even held her, without any noticeable reaction.) I am extremely good at overthinking things, and I also don’t much like making decisions when I can’t clearly foresee the outcome, which is obviously the case when taking on a pet that is going to have her own personality and needs. I just could not get the pro / con list to be decisive either way! Then while I was away I missed out on an opportunity to adopt what sounded like the perfect cat for me, a ragdoll in sudden need of re-homing. My disappointment at not getting her clarified that I did want a cat in my life, and after an unsuccessful visit to a local shelter where the cat I went to meet first threw up at my feet then hid so I really could not get to know him, I got lucky with some help from Cat Rescue Maritimes . . . and here I am, and here we are.

I admit I do feel somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, both at the change to my routines and by my new responsibilities. Also, pet stores have a bewildering array of options now, and the online cat-care debates are already making me crazy. The sleep deprivation definitely adds to this! (Don’t worry: I have set up an appointment with a vet and will try to follow only evidence-based advice rather than random Redditors’.) But Fred is a sweet and incredibly affectionate and trusting little cat. I was cautioned that she would probably just hide somewhere for the first few days, but she immediately explored all the available space, spent a lot of time watching out the windows, then settled on her favorite places to nap. She loves to be held and stroked and purrs like mad when you scritch her head and around her ears—just what Bothwell liked best too. I’m hopeful that we will get better at our nighttime routines. I mean, if she can sleep in this position, surely she can also figure out how to sleep more or less when I do, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

Frogs in a Saucepan: John Ironmonger, ‘The Wager and the Bear’

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments
We are frogs in a saucepan. All of us. We never noticed the water getting warmer and warmer. And now it’s almost too late to jump out. We tolerate the slow erosion of our climate the way a frog in a pan tolerates the rising heat. This year, we lose one percent of our coral reefs. Never mind. We can live with that. Next year, we lose another one percent. Hey. Never mind. And then another. And another. And in a hundred years they’re gone and we never noticed it happening.
“Frogs are smarter than we imagine,” John Ironmonger reveals in the notes at the end of his novel The Wager and the Bear, “and will escape from the saucepan if they can.” Frogs, that is, are smarter than we are. After all, not only can they not be blamed for starting the fire or putting the pot on to boil in the first place, but given a chance, they overcome their inertia. We, in contrast, just keep denying either that there’s a problem or that we can do anything about it. By “we” I don’t mean each of us individually, of course. I mean society, nations, governments, humanity collectively. Lots of people keep trying to make better choices, but our individual efforts (recycling! giving up plastic straws! taking shorter showers!) feel increasingly pointless in the absence of the kind of massive reforms that can happen only with total commitment from the people in power across the globe. How hot will our pot have to get before enough people agree that it’s intolerable? I’m writing this with Halifax under a heat warning; it’s worse elsewhere and it’s only June. And, as Ironmonger’s protagonist Tom Horsmith explains angrily to a political operative accusing him of pessimism, it’s not as if we only just learned about the looming climate crisis:

We’ve known about global warming for decades. The first COP conference was in 1995, for God’s sake. Way before I was born. Al Gore made a big deal about it in 2006. Remember him? . . . We’re on a rowing boat heading towards a massive waterfall, and the people in the front of the boat are yelling for us to stop, but the people rowing the boat are all facing backwards, and they can’t see the falls.

For both principled and personal reasons, Tom is determined to fight as hard as he can for change, but even he can’t help but wonder if it’s worth it:

And if all the people who give a shit about the planet manage to change anything, maybe they’ll get us all to slow the climate collapse down by ten years or so. But what’s the point of that? If humanity hangs on, it will be a miserable shitty existence for the next hundred thousand generations. What does ten years matter either way?

The Wager and the Bear is not, thankfully, just speeches or rants of this kind strung together, and Tom is more than a device to deliver this kind of bad news. The instigation for the novel’s plot is an encounter in a pub between Tom and another (better off, less popular) resident of his Cornish town, Monty Causley, who has become an MP. They get into an argument about climate change in which Tom shows up Monty’s ignorance. “You shouldn’t try to argue if you don’t understand the science,” Tom concludes—or should have concluded, except that he has been drinking and is enjoying the appreciative audience. So he bets Monty that in 50 years he won’t be able to sit in his front room without drowning. Riled up, Monty counters with a “real wager”: in 50 years, either he will sit for an hour in his front room at high tide and drown . . . or Tom must “walk into the sea and drown.” It’s a ridiculous wager, but as happens these days, it is captured on video and goes viral. As a result, Tom and Monty’s lives are linked in various ways over the years until (and this is not a spoiler, as it’s on the back cover!) they end up on “an iceberg with a ravenous polar bear”—and even this is not quite the end of their adventures! Ironmonger’s challenge is to sustain the drama and humanize his characters while keeping the novel’s underlying polemic vivid and urgent. This is really what interested me the most about the novel, and one of the reasons I was curious to read it: I think Ironmonger was trying to create what I might call a “condition of the planet” novel, akin to the 19thC “condition of England” novels I have read and taught so often. He even uses some of the same tools as Dickens and Gaskell: melodrama, coincidence, suspense, symbolism (yes, it’s an actual polar bear, but what ensues when it joins our antagonists on their floating ice carries more than literal resonance, I thought). Where Gaskell’s task was to help her middle-class readers really grasp the nature of urban poverty, Ironmonger’s is to make us frogs feel the heat and think about the costs, especially to the not-us. He lavishes his attention (and his best writing) on the ice-world of the Arctic:

It was a seascape of unimaginable, ethereal beauty. The flat ocean was a patchwork of swirling blues, some areas dark, and some pale, and some almost green, or turquoise, as if an artist had splashed every blue from a watercolour paintbox onto a pure white canvas, and crusted the surface with pack ice. The backdrop was the great precipice of the glacier, and behind it, a horizon of white mountains fading into a clear blue sky. Only the cracks and pops of the glacier disturbed the majestic solitude of it.

When I commented on Bluesky that The Wager and the Bear had left me feeling bleak, Ironmonger himself showed up in my mentions and said he was sorry about that. I don’t think he should be. I have talked so often with my students about the value of dissatisfaction. What is there left for us to do at the end of Pride and Prejudice? But the end of Middlemarch leaves us asking precisely Dorothea’s question: what can we do, what should we do? It is dispiriting to know that we aren’t making and probably won’t make the kinds of decisions that could cool things down. We seem condemned to boil in a pot and on a stove of our own making. Ironmonger does leave us with a better vision, though, or a mission statement:

We owe this to our children. To our grandchildren. To protect the meadows, the woodlands, the jungles, the savannahs, the oceans, and the ice caps. We owe our children the pristine world we were given. It is our duty. It should be right at the top of every action list we write. It should also be our joy.

“Dear reader!” exclaims Dickens at the end of his most overtly didactic novel, Hard Times; “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!” The Wager and the Bear is a good read—suspenseful, emotional, neatly structured in episodes that carry us across generations—but the Victorianist in me especially appreciated its unabashed sense of purpose.

Moving Away: Carys Davies, Clear

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way through the country. She saw them moving away with quiet resignation, leading animals and small children, carrying tools and furniture and differently sized bundles, and when at last they disappeared she saw the low houses they’d left behind, roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing.

I really liked Clear. It’s a slight book in a way, not very long, not very dense. The small personal story it tells, though, is like the visible tip of an iceberg, three people whose options and choices are very much functions of much larger social contexts. Davies’s author’s note explains that the novel takes place in 1843, during the “Great Disruption” that led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland and also during the ongoing “Clearances,” during which landlords removed tenant farmers, driving them off the land to clear it for more profitable uses—profitable, that is, to the landlords, but with devastating consequences for those displaced from their homes and their ways of life.

The plot of Clear is very simple: John Ferguson, part of the new Free Church, is having trouble making ends meet so his brother-in-law pulls some strings and John is assigned to do a bit of work for a local landowner, traveling to a remote island to “clear” it of its one remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivar. We move between John’s point of view and Ivar’s, getting to know John and learning about Ivar’s solitary but full life. We see the two men’s stories converge: John falls off a cliff soon after landing, and Ivar discovers him and nurses him back to health. Ivar does not suspect the real reason for John’s visit; John does not have the words to tell him even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

Davies gives a lot of attention to the importance of language, first as a barrier and then, as John laboriously gains some ability to speak Ivar’s language (a version, Davies’s note explains, of “Norn,” which died out in most areas after the Shetlands passed from Danish to Scottish control), a means of halting but profound understanding. “Before the arrival of John Ferguson,” Ivar reflects,

he’d never really thought of the things he saw or heard or touched or felt as words . . . He wondered . . . if there was a word in John Ferguson’s language for the excitement he felt when he ran his finger down the line between the two columns of words, which seemed to him to connect their lives in the strongest possible way—words for ‘milk’ and ‘stream’ and the flightless blue-winged beetle that lived in the hill pasture; words for ‘halibut’ and ‘byre’ and the overhand knot he used in the cow’s tether; words for ‘house’ and ‘butter,’ for ‘heather’ and ‘whey,’ for ‘sea wrack’ and ‘chicken.’

It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now—as if, with the arrival of John Ferguson, he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sister, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife.

Those last words have a bit more significance than they might initially seem to when they land just as part of that long list of vocabulary. By the end of Clear John and Ivar, and then John and Ivar and John’s wife Mary (who has bravely come to find him, worried that he has been sent unknowingly into a more dangerous situation than he suspected) have to rethink their relationships, their commitments—but I will leave the details to be discovered.

There was a moment in the novel when I thought Davies had given in to melodrama—a gunshot rings out, and I thought . . . well, I won’t say what I thought, again so that you can discover the moment for yourself if you want to. If things had gone the way it seemed at first, it would have cheapened the novel, which I think finds its beauty in its simplicity, which is not to say it ignores complexity, just that it takes us through its chosen scenario with a kind of quiet well suited to its people and its setting. Overall Clear reminded me of Emma Donoghue’s Haven, which is also about remoteness, isolation, essentials. Haven is a plottier novel, but both books trade in the imaginative appeal of clearing away the noise and demands and expectations of an uncongenial modernity. At the same time, neither novel romanticizes its setting. In both, it’s togetherness that leads to grace, if any such as possible.

No Good Way: Yiyun Li, Things In Nature Merely Grow

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough . . .

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. My husband and I had two children and lost them both . . .

I wrote a little bit about Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, first in 2019, when I could only imagine, and again in 2022, when I no longer had to. I didn’t actually say much myself either time. “Some books,” I said in 2019, “are hard to write about. Imagine how hard this one was to write.”

When I reread it, it was because I was still looking for and sometimes finding comfort in what seemed like the right words. I didn’t bring my critical self to the book, and I can’t bring it to Things In Nature Merely Grow either. Well, I probably could, but I don’t want to: sometimes, what I want from words is to let them do to the work. I appreciate the work Li has done with her words here, again. Her experience is not exactly my own: she is herself; her sons are themselves; she has lost them both. Loss may be universal but every loss is intensely specific. There are also ways in which I don’t actually find Li that congenial a writer, or a thinker. We are not the same person, the same kind of person, at all, I don’t think.

Still, she says things in this hard, painful, honest book that I completely understood and was glad to have articulated. Some of them are things that, for various reasons, I have not been able to say, or not wanted to say, myself. It turns out that there are good ways to say them: unadorned, unapologetic.

As before, then, excerpts.

1.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, not at life either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”

2.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.

The only passage in which grief appears in its truest meaning is from King John, when Constance speaks eloquently of a grief that is called madness by others in the play.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then, I have I reason to be fond of grief?

3.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

4.

We like to set our hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle and pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed.

Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.

How often we return to the problem of time, as we go on living, eventually learning—at whatever cost—to seem “normal” again. (“Children die,” Li repeats throughout the book, “and parents go on living—this too is a fact that defies all adjectives.”) “Until the end of time” is also what A. S. Byatt said about her son: “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.”