Novel Readings

On First Looking Into Wilson’s Homer

June 11, 2019June 12, 2019Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

odyssey-wilson I have finally read Homer’s Odyssey. More precisely, I have read Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, which has been widely praised for its immediacy, accessibility, energy, and contemporaneity. These qualities–particularly the last–made it, I think, at once the best and the worst translation for my first experience with this classic text.

Yes, first. I have never so much as taken an undergraduate course in Classics. Everything I know about the Homeric epics has come to me indirectly, from other sources, mostly because I needed context for something else. For instance, I have often taught Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which has meant poking around to get a sense of how Tennyson is interpreting the story and its characters; I have also taught other epic poems, such as Aurora Leigh, which has meant familiarizing myself with some basic ideas about epic form and conventions and the expectations that go with them. I also know, and feel as if I have somehow always known, bits and pieces about the stories I have now read for myself–about the Cyclops, for example, and Scylla and Charybdis, and the lotus eaters (though that’s also because of Tennyson again), and faithful Penelope weaving and waiting. This vague but wide-ranging familiarity testifies to Homer’s pervasive cultural influence.

an-odyssey-cover Yet actually reading Homer for myself never felt like a powerful imperative. Perhaps it should have. I was part ashamed, part irritated when I saw this comment on Daniel Mendelsohn’s Facebook page, when he had kindly shared a link to my post on his wonderful ‘bibliomemoir’ An Odyssey: “amazing that he [sic] has never read the Odyssey (but teaches Middlemarch) and by all accounts, probably never will. Oy.” The list of things I haven’t read is always going to be longer than the list of things I have and I don’t think the Odyssey would even be a Humiliation contender these days — or would it? It’s not as if the ancient classics are part of the core curriculum any more–not, as far as I know, at any level. Still, I can understand thinking that someone with my job might have filled this gap by now, just as I can see why it might shock some people (oy!) that I have only ever read snippets of the Bible. These are foundational cultural texts: maybe it is not enough just to know about them, although I honestly can’t think of a way my own specific work has been the worse for it.

In any case, the buzz around Wilson’s new translation inspired me to fill this lacuna in my education. I actually bought the handsome paperback some months ago, but it wasn’t until this past weekend that I settled in to read it. I was a bit anxious about whether I would be up to the task (it’s always a bit intimidating, isn’t it, reading one of the Great Books for the first time?), which is one reason I had been putting it off, but I decided to take the same approach I did a few years back with Moby-Dick (it’s about whales) and let myself just read, not trying to “get” everything but rather just to get acquainted with it all. And all things considered it went really well! I could follow and enjoy the stories; the ‘ring’ structure was not, after all, very confusing; I frequently got caught up in the action and the drama; some of the trickery made me chuckle; the horrific violence made me shudder; the long-awaited reunions were worth the journey. moby-dick-penguin

I am pretty sure that I have Wilson’s translation to thank for the ease with which I engaged with the Odyssey at this fairly basic but still essential level. Nothing, in her version, really gets in the way of the story-telling: not diction or syntax, and also not notes–which are sparse (presumably because the introduction is very thorough) and kept at the end, for minimal distraction–or any other scholarly apparatus. The whole presentation is clean and crisp and transparent, like much of the language Wilson chooses. What more could a first-time reader ask for a tale so rich and various and strange than that it be made so rhetorically painless and thus so readily consumed?

But that same simplicity and directness, that commitment to an accessible contemporary idiom, meant that, for me, it was hard to get any sense of the poem’s greatness, or, to put it slightly differently, to recognize the Odyssey‘s greatness as a poem. A bit too often for my liking, the language crossed the line from clear and direct into mundane and banal. Sometimes the result was bathos; other times it was just incongruity. One example of many comes from Book 8, when Odysseus is challenged by the Phaeacians to participate in various sporting competitions:

I am only
concerned that one of you may win the footrace:
I lost my stamina and my legs weakened
during my time at sea, upon the raft;
I could not do my exercise routine.*

waterhouse suitors Another example, less jarring rhetorically but more disorienting emotionally, came after the appalling violence of Book 22, which Wilson’s bluntness made remarkably vivid. Here is a bit of that, to show how powerful the translation can be–this is Telemachus overseeing the deaths of the women who “lay beside the suitors”:

As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly
home to their nests, but someone sets a trap–
they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;
just so the girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony. They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.

This brutal work done (and Melanthius also punished as a collaborator by having his genitals ripped off and fed to the dogs–yikes!), Telemachus turns to his nurse Eurycleia and asks for her help gathering what he needs to “fumigate the house”:

She answered with affection,
‘Yes, dear, all this is good. But let me bring
a cloak and shirt for you. You should not stand here
your strong back covered only with those rags.
That would be wrong!’

It’s a reasonable concern, I guess, but not only is her indifference to the suffering he has just caused chilling (though suggestive, I suppose, as a signal about its possible righteousness) but her lines are so bland they trivialize an otherwise climactic moment. They made me burst out laughing at what is surely not supposed to be a funny moment, and that happened pretty regularly as I read through the poem.

There are certainly passages of great eloquence and high drama, and a few that are melodious and even beautiful, such as this bit of Book 7, from the description of “the house of King Alcinous”:

Outside the courtyard by the doors there grows
an orchard of four acres, hedged around.
The trees are tall, luxuriant with fruit:
bright-colored apples, pears and pomegranate,
sweet figs and fertile olives, and the crop
never runs out or withers in the winter,
nor in the summer. Fruit grows all year round.
The West Wind always blows and makes it swell
and ripen: mellowing pear on mellowing pear,
apple on apple, grapes on grapes, and figs.

“Mellowing pear on mellowing pear”: I like that, maybe because it sounds like something Tennyson would write! I liked a lot of the poem, really–maybe even most of it. Flipping back through it to choose my examples I paused at a lot of passages that drew me quickly back in. But I also ran right back into ones that fell flat: Penelope saying “since a god / has made you speak out about these future labors, / tell me what they involve. I will find out / eventually, and better to know now”; Laertes telling Odysseus that if he’d only had a chance to fight the suitors himself, “I would have brought so many of them down, / you would have been delighted!” There’s nothing wrong with these lines, of course, or anyway not anything definitive, but to me they sound like ordinary conversation, not extraordinary verse.

aurora-leigh-oxford I commented on Twitter that reading this translation made me think of Wilde’s quip “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning.” I also noted that as an admirer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s self-consciously contemporary epic Aurora Leigh I am on shaky ground when it comes to complaining that poetry is too prosaic. “There are cases,” noted an early reviewer of Aurora Leigh with some acerbity, “in which Mrs. Browning has broken loose altogether from the meshes of versification, and run riot in prose cut up into lines of ten syllables.” “Is that poetry?” demanded another; “Assuredly not. Is it prose? If so, it is as poor and faulty a specimen as ever was presented to our notice.” EBB’s mission statement for her own epic comes in Book V of Aurora Leigh. “If there’s room for poets in this world,” she declares (“I think there is”),

Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.

Her solution, that is, to bringing the epic up to date is to claim it for herself: not to translate it but to transform it. Wilson is up to something different and perhaps more difficult: to bring an epic from another age into our own in language that (as her Translator’s Note thoughtfully and convincingly explains) reflects at once her modernity and Homer’s strangeness, to bring the Odyssey as close to us as possible while also reminding us of its difference and distance from our world:

My use of contemporary language–is meant to remind readers that texts can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient.

My wish for language with more of the qualities she deliberately rejected (“grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated”) reflects on me, on my expectations and desires and, no doubt, my limitations more than anything else. I hoped for a transcendent experience, a thrilling one; I got an interesting and engaging and surprising one, and also, occasionally, a disappointing one. Maybe one day I’ll read the Odyssey again in another translation and see if I like that experience better or worse. As George Eliot says in Middlemarch, every limit is a beginning as well as an ending: at least now I’ve started on this voyage.

*June 12 update: Coincidentally (or possibly not, as someone tagged her in a related tweet to me yesterday, something that, just by the way, I personally avoid doing with authors, for my sake and theirs), the same day I posted this Emily Wilson wrote a thread on Twitter about her translation of this line. It is, as you’d expect, interesting and convincing about her reasons, though it does nothing to change my skeptical response to the line’s poetic affect (or lack thereof).

The Years: Woolf’s Interesting Failure

June 4, 2019February 6, 2020Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

oup-the-years I’m about three quarters of the way through my second reading of Woolf’s The Years. It is still pretty slow going for me, slower than before even, because instead of wondering what the heck is happening (or, as more often seems to be the case in the novel, not happening) I am trying to figure it out with the help of the various sources I’ve been reading around in and also the amply introduced and copiously annotated Cambridge edition–of its 870 pages, only 388 are actually The Years. That’s not really a sufficient excuse for my not having read once more to the end, though: the truth is that The Years engages me much more in theory than in practice. I quite like reading about it, but I (still) don’t much like reading it.

I don’t think The Years is a failure because I don’t enjoy it, however. I am pretty careful about not assuming my own taste is a reliable measure of literary quality! (Just what is a reliable measure of literary quality I’m not sure anyone knows, but that’s another matter. Or maybe not, as the rest of this post may show.) I think it’s a failure partly because Woolf herself thought so: “Its going to be pretty bad, I’m certain,” she wrote in her diary about the book’s impending publication; ” … but at the same time I myself know why its a failure, & that its failure is deliberate.” But I don’t think we know exactly what she meant by calling it a “deliberate” failure. In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee offers a plausible explanation:

Because of her horror of propaganda, her feeling that art should subsume politics, and her fear of being laughed at, a good deal of the book’s explicit argument is buried. And so The Years is a kind of crippled text, which disables itself while writing about a disabled society.

Notice, though, that Lee doesn’t quite allow the novel to be a straight-up failure: instead, she ends up proposing a neat fit between form and theme that actually makes it sound like The Years is kind of a success–a successfully imperfect artistic representation of a broken society.

Penguin Years I would explain the novel’s failure on similar terms as Lee but with less subtlety: The Years is a failure because (deliberately or not) Woolf’s theory of the novel (including “her feeling that art should subsume politics”) was genuinely incompatible with her aims for this particular novel. She wanted (and this is pretty clear from what I’ve read of her diaries around this period) to write a “novel of purpose” (defined by Amanda Claybaugh in The Novel of Purpose as a novel “that sought to intervene in the contemporary world”). It seems plausible, and some scholars make this connection explicitly, that she was motivated to breach the wall between art and politics because of Winifred Holtby’s analysis of her fiction, as well as because of her own ongoing anger about social and political circumstances. She wanted to make a decisive move into the world of facts: “what has happened of course,” she writes in her diary in 1932, “is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years … I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now and then the tug to vision, but resist it.” Unable, quite, to abandon her conviction that fact and fiction are not truly compatible, she began her new novel as a hybrid form, a “novel-essay” called The Pargiters, but over the course of the next few years she excised (or, as she put it, “submerged”) the explanatory portions: “What I want to do is reduce it all so that each sentence, though perfectly natural dialogue, has a great pressure of meaning behind it.” The essay impulse was redirected into Three Guineas, and the novel portion became The Years.

claybaugh I’m not saying anything original about that process, which is well known. I’m just trying to clarify why I think (and why I think Woolf thinks) the result is a failure. “How to do that will be one of the problems,” she comments in her diary early in the writing process; “I mean the intellectual argument in the form of art: I mean how give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art? These are rich hard problems for my four months ahead.” My take is simply that she did not solve these problems, or she refused to solve them, because she could not reconcile her means with her end. To put it bluntly, she could not bring herself to write the kind of fiction that would get the job done. Fiction can’t intervene effectively in contemporary life if nobody knows what you mean by it. Burying the meaning, as she did (“the rest under water”), however artistically consistent, is polemically (politically) stifling, or at least muffling. Obscurity is incompatible with activism.

I’m not saying The Years is not an intervention in contemporary life; I’m saying it is a failed intervention. There’s plenty of critical commentary now explaining (or purporting to) the political implications of the ellipses and gaps and silences and lies in The Years; there are critical editions that fill in the explanations Woolf did not (would not) provide for her many brief and often oblique references to historical and current events and controversies. The novel itself, however, utterly fails to convey the relevance (and sometimes barely even registers the presence) of this material. Though The Years actually sold reasonably well (apparently because people mistook it for a “family saga,” which it kind of is and really isn’t), there’s no evidence that it was hailed on publication as a radical critique of patriarchal norms, militarism, or anything else. “No one,” Woolf wrote, as the (generally positive) reviews began to appear, “has yet seen the point–my point.”

Though Holtby may be the pivot on which Woolf’s failure turns, it’s Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate, not Holtby’s South Riding, that provides the most illuminating comparison to The Years, because it illustrates the perils of doing just what Woolf wouldn’t do: explaining everything. Where The Years (as many critics have noted) takes but subverts the form of the family saga, Honourable Estate embraces it. It covers nearly the same span of time as The Years and many of the same issues (the suffrage movement, the war, challenges to patriarchal dominance in the family, the hazards of sexuality, especially for young women, etc.). I wrote about Honourable Estate here before (here and here). If anything, my estimation of it as a work of art has gone down since that initial assessment, which is saying something considering I described it then as “effortful and long-winded.” Everything Woolf wanted to lurk below the surface of the action is in plain sight in Honourable Estate. It is the fictional equivalent of an earnest and well-researched but badly acted docudrama with mediocre production values. It is fairly interesting as a dramatization of social movements, with characters designed to exemplify its conflicts; there is some effective scene setting and some good description. But its purpose is so clear and its movement so plodding that it has almost no life as a novel.

The_Years Here’s just one of many potential examples showing how differently these novels approach the same material. Both include sections that take place in 1908, the year of the great “Women’s Sunday” demonstration for women’s suffrage. In its explanatory note for the 1908 chapter of The Years, the Cambridge edition tells us that “the WSPU adopted purple, green and white as its official colours in this year, and in June held a 300,000-strong ‘Women’s Sunday’ rally in Hyde Park.” In the novel itself, Rose Pargiter arrives to visit her sister Eleanor with “a scratch on her chin”; “she had been holding meetings in the North,” we’re told, and a bit later,

They began to discuss politics. She had been speaking at a by-election. A stone had been thrown at her; she put her hand to her chin. But she had enjoyed it.

“I think we gave ’em something to think about,” she said, breaking off another piece of cake.

She ought to have been the soldier, Eleanor thought.

The Cambridge edition offers nearly two full pages of notes explicating this short scene, including information about Ethel Smyth, the model for Rose; details of the WSPU’s political activities; and details about the influence of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene on Woolf’s “thinking on women, militarism and suffrage activism.” (Of course, The Faerie Queene! What, that isn’t what came immediately to mind for you when you read that passage?) There is no mention at all in the novel of the Hyde Park rally.

womens-sunday

Nearly four full pages of Honourable Estate, in contrast, are taken up with Janet Rutherford’s attendance, first at the march (“walking, in her capacity as unrepresented taxpayer, just behind the Fulham Prize Band”) and then at the demonstration:

Standing stiffly to attention with her banner, Janet felt deliriously dizzy as her senses absorbed the compelling animation of that vital stream. Looking at the throng surging back and forth to the boundaries of the Park, she shared the exhilarating consciousness of the individual lost in the mass, the glory of anonymous effort and sacrifice.

“This,” she reflected excitedly, “is the invincible force which is going to count! The contemptuous smiles that greeted us from windows and balconies represented a traditional, unreasoning antagonism which cannot stand for ever against this united determination!”

“We are out to win the vote!” exclaims one of the speakers; “We are effecting a complete revolution in the whole conception and attitude of men to women and of women to their own womanhood!” “The attitude of men to women! Yes,” thinks Janet, eagerly listening, “it will be harder to change that than to get the vote. Will it ever alter widely, and if so, how soon?” The final part of the novel, as I described in my earlier post, gives a moderately positive answer: “‘To-day men and women, but especially women, live in a very different world from that of 1870, or 1900, or 1910.”

pride-and-prejudice-penguin In that earlier post on Honourable Estate I discussed Marion Shaw’s essay “Feminism and Fiction between the Wars: Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf,” saying that it “cautions us (me!) against underestimating the art of a novel like Honourable Estate.” Throwing that caution to the wind, I will say frankly that I think Honourable Estate is not a good novel (see, I knew we’d work our way back to the problem of measuring literary quality). It just seems so painfully obvious from start to finish! On its own terms, though, I’m not sure it is actually a failure. Unlike Woolf, Brittain had an uncompromised mission as a novelist. In her own foreword to Honourable Estate, Brittain explains,

I have tried to leave a truthful impression of certain changes and movements–and especially of the social revolution that has so deeply affected the position of women and their status in marriage and other human relationships … I have not sought to draw conclusions so much as to give imaginative life to the struggles, doubts, fears, misgivings and experiments of men and women passing through a period of rapid and momentous transition in manners and morals.

George Henry Lewes said Jane Austen was “the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.” Given that description of Brittain’s goals–which conspicuously do not include beauty of language, formal innovation, or other qualities we might simply call “aesthetic” ones–it is possible that she too qualifies as a great artist. (The argument pro or con would presumably stand or fall on that phrase “imaginative life.”)

Penguin-Romola What an uncomfortable conclusion, though: even if I’m reluctant to let Woolf (or Austen) set the evaluative terms, I find it hard to concede that literary merit consists solely of doing whatever it is that you set out to do. I have argued (at some length!) about Romola that its failure was a sign of George Eliot’s ambition and thus ought to be cherished: “If consistent “mastery” requires playing it safe, perhaps we should actually consider failure part of, rather than a problem for, our standard of artistic greatness.” I’m not sure I feel the same way about The Years, but I do find its failure more intellectually interesting than Brittain’s (arguable) success.

As for which book I’d rather reread, well, at this point it’s a tie: I still haven’t finished reading either of them for a second time.

Rotten Branches: Sara Collins, The Confessions of Frannie Langton

May 29, 2019May 29, 2019Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

langton2

All those rotten branches, growing from the same black root. – Frannie Langton

There’s a lot going on in The Confessions of Frannie Langton. In it, Frannie Langton tells, in her own voice, the story of her life and how it has ended up where the novel begins: with her imprisoned in the Old Bailey, on trial for the murder of her employers George and Marguerite Benham. Born into slavery in Jamaica, Frannie works on the sugar plantation of John Langton, who is not just her owner but also, we learn without much surprise (though Frannie is shocked and horrified when she is told) her father. Langton’s passion is investigating the “science” of race. Frannie herself was an experiment, educated and trained on a whim of Langton and Benham to test the limits of her “mulatto” intelligence. She becomes Langton’s apprentice, and over the course of the novel we learn just what Langton had her doing in the old coach-house that served as his laboratory. “How guilt has run through me, all this time” says Frannie near the end,

keeping time with my blood. How, even now to think of it, to write of it, makes both leap in my chest. How sorry I am.

Her complicity in his horrors haunts her even though she understands that she was never really free to do otherwise: “That’s what slavery is,” as she later says; “their minds, our hands.” “They might see me as the savage,” she reflects, “but didn’t Benham and Langton pull me into their own dark corners? Wasn’t it them who tried to make an animal of me first?” When she reads Frankenstein, it is impossible not to make the obvious (and obviously intended) connection.

A lot intervenes, however, between her monstrous apprenticeship and her trial. After an upset on the plantation Langton moves to England, taking Frannie with him only to present her to Benham as a gift. Though as Benham’s servant she is in some sense now free, Frannie cannot imagine her way to real freedom: “I kept forgetting,” she explains, “that I was no longer owned.” And as she eventually finds out, a poor black woman on the streets of London in the 1820s is hardly liberated.

langton1 Frannie’s early story has some elements of a slave narrative, though Frannie herself is somewhat disdainful of the form, “all sugared over with misery and despair”: “The anti-slavers are always asking me, what was done to you, Frances? How did you suffer?” She did suffer, and Collins does not spare the details, but the form Frannie wants for her story is the novel. “No one like me has ever written a novel in the history of the world,” she says, and the only hope she has as her end approaches is that her account of herself might “tempt a publisher.” All her life she loved only “all those books I read, and all the people who wrote them”:

Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.

Frankenstein isn’t the only literary touchstone in Collins’ narrative: pages of Candide are sewn into the skirts of the dress Frannie is wearing when she’s arrested; she cherishes Moll Flanders; she and her mistress, Marguerite Benham, both love Paradise Lost.

Frannie’s relationsip with Marguerite is at once the heart of her Confessions and, to me, the least interesting and convincing part of the novel. During her trial, Frannie insists over and over that what they had–that what she felt–was love: “I loved my mistress. I couldn’t have done what you say I’ve done because I loved her.” I think this part didn’t work well for me because Marguerite herself remains something of a cipher–defiantly unconventional but not clearly principled, elusive, slightly fey, and frequently manipulative, especially of Frannie. She treats her unhappy combination of boredom and oppression with laudanum, an addiction she eventually shares with Frannie. Haunting her, and her marriage, is her past relationship with Olaudah “Laddie” Cambridge, once a house servant, now a celebrity; one of the twists of the plot makes this connection a key point in Frannie’s final confession. Another plot twist puts Frannie out on the streets only to end up working in a “spanking parlour”:

Men like him were the ones who wanted scarring, always happier to let themselves loose under the whip hand of a black. That put the white girls’ noses out of joint. But we’d already been in the bondage business, no matter that it had been at the other end.

A lot going on, as I said–too much, I finally thought, and neither the “love” story putatively at the center or the framing murder plot is quite enough to hold it all together. Many of the novel’s individual components are very powerful, and the hideous moral contamination of slavery runs through all of the novel’s violence. Frannie’s love of fiction makes it seem as if she (and thus perhaps Collins as well) believes in the power of an individual narrative to counter the dehumanization so grotesquely literalized in Langton’s “research.” But this premise doesn’t really help me make sense of Marguerite’s role or some of the other particulars of this novel. To me The Confessions of Frannie Langton ultimately seemed miscellaneous, albeit in an ambitious way: it tries to include too much, to be too many things at once–slave narrative, Newgate novel, romance, murder mystery–and the result is not quite formally or aesthetically or thematically unified. There’s that famous line, though, about reach exceeding grasp: by and large, I’d rather read an ambitious but imperfect book than a perfectly but narrowly limned one.

“What a Thing!” George Saunders, Tenth of December

May 25, 2019May 25, 2019Rohan Maitzen19 Comments

What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn’t died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn’t dead. He’d killed no one. Ha! Somehow he’d got it all back. Everything was good now, everything was —

Although I found several of the stories in it interesting and memorable, I didn’t much like Tenth of December until I read “Tenth of December,” the final story in the collection. Perhaps this is a lesson in the importance of reading to the end; it is certainly a reminder that abandoning books part way through brings the risk of missing what is best about them.

I was doing OK, if not great, with Tenth of December until I got to “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Up to that point the story I’d appreciated the most was “Sticks”; I was gripped by both “Victory Lap” and “Puppy,” and “Escape from Spiderhead” moved quickly enough that I didn’t quite tire of the conceit before it ended. Then, unfortunately, I really bogged down in “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: it was obviously doing a lot, but the story’s concept was so aggressive, its execution so heavy-handed, that for me the whole exercise just drowned out any underlying humanity in the story itself. (I’m not saying it isn’t there: just that the style and conceit were very distancing for me.) This slowed my momentum in the collection to the point that I nearly didn’t pick it up again.

Nevertheless, I persisted with Tenth of December, both because of Lincoln in the Bardo and because of Saunders’ reputation, including with readers whose sensibilities I trust. “Home” was a better experience for me; “My Chivalric Fiasco” was worse. Then I read “Tenth of December.” This story put a lot less gimmickry in my way; it was the only story in the book that seemed to me clearly written by the author of Lincoln in the Bardo. I loved it. One in ten: not a great ratio, if you weigh every reading experience equally, but I don’t think art really works that way. Reading “Tenth of December” made reading Tenth of December more than worthwhile to me. That’s part of the trick of short fiction, isn’t it? The brevity of the form means writers can try a lot of things, take a lot of chances, be a lot of different things–if they want to (as Saunders clearly does). And one really solid connection is, really, everything that matters.

tenth-2

My edition of Tenth of December includes a conversation between Saunders and David Sedaris. I enjoyed their discussion very much. I read it before I got to “Tenth of December” and I thought at that point that my blog post about the collection might end up noting that I liked what Saunders had to say about short stories more than I liked his short stories themselves! (As it turned out, that was only partly true.) Saunders comments that people often say his work is cruel or angry; he acknowledges the truth of this and suggests it is “a bit of a technical flaw” but one that reflects who he is and how he sees the world. I actually wouldn’t have thought to call the stories cruel, but I did think that they were mostly kind of cold: that they were driven primarily by whatever concept animated them and so they came off as technical, even virtuosic, but lacking in the quality I would call heart. This is not to say that they aren’t in their own way sympathetic and often poignant: it’s just that what tenderness they have towards the characters, or towards the human condition, seemed to me to be hard to feel under the performance of self-conscious cleverness.

tenth-3 Naturally, my mixed and sometimes vexed response to Tenth of December got me thinking about what contemporary short fiction I have responded to more readily and positively. Because I don’t read a lot of short stories, I really don’t have a lot of other examples to draw on. I was very impressed with Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, but my favorite fairly recent short story is probably Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies.” I have but have not read all of the collection it comes from. I think I will go back to it now and see what else is there. For those of you who read a lot more short stories than I do: is there a writer in the genre you’d recommend to me, knowing that I’m a realist by instinct and training, that my favorite classic short story is (predictable but true) “The Dead,” and that I get irritable with stories that are more cleverly self-referential than they are committed to storytelling?

“That Was Her Tragedy”: Anita Brookner, Dolly

May 19, 2019May 19, 2019Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Nobody loved Dolly; that was her tragedy. Nobody even liked her very much, and she knew that too. She was accepted as a friend by women inferior to herself because she was vigorous and clever, because she entertained and fed them, because she sorted out their affairs, and listened with every appearance of interest to their feeble gossip. Unnerved and enervated by years of this company she had succumbed to the first man to make a show of virility in her presence, and thus, like any victim, had cast herself under his spell. And he had partly compensated her for many humiliations by allowing her to reassert her right to be a normal woman, with a normal woman’s expectations, love, certainly, even marriage.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Anita Brookner’s Dolly. I didn’t like it that much as I was reading it, but it kept me interested and has left me puzzling over it, which is perhaps a sign that there is something to it. Well, it’s by Anita Brookner, so of course there’s something to it, and part of that is her trademark fineness of attention–to character, to social nuance, and to the potential for pathos, especially in women’s lives.

Though everyone in the novel is drawn with scrupulous detail, most of her attention in this case goes to the eponymous Dolly, who is shown to us through the eyes of her often skeptical, even hostile, niece Jane. To Jane, Dolly is at once repellent and magnetic. Where Jane is pale, reserved, and solitary, Dolly is intense, charismatic, and hungry for company, especially male company. Widowed by the death of Jane’s uncle Hugo, Dolly becomes parasitic on his well-to-do family, living off an allowance that Jane herself ultimately, after her parents’ deaths, takes over. Jane is not exactly resentful of Dolly’s willed dependence: in fact, much of the novel is spent explaining Dolly to us–her personality, her upbringing, her relationships– in such a way that it seems impossible, perhaps even unjust, to expect anything else of her. When Dolly takes up with the handsome but slightly sleazy Harry, Jane hopes he will marry her: dolly-2

for she was in many ways an old-fashioned woman, apt to hang on a man’s words, brought up in any case to flatter, to placate, to cajole, as if this were a profession in itself, as it must have been before women worked and earned their own money … Not only was it of prime importance to a woman like Dolly to have a man of her own, but that same man, if he were willing … would, in marrying her, confer on her a status which she had not enjoyed for many years.

Dolly, in other words, is a woman of a different generation, one defined by the narrow gender norms of an earlier time. I think one of Brookner’s goals in the novel is to trace how these norms have changed and what that means for allegiances between women now divided by conflicting values and expectations. In the last chapters especially, when Jane is a successful children’s author often invited to give talks to academics, she becomes almost defensive on Dolly’s behalf, as if mentally warding off contemporary criticisms of her type.

But this is where things get complicated, and also, for me, problematic. Jane herself has an ambivalent relationship to feminism:

I find them exhausting, these women of goodwill, with their agenda of wrongs to be righted, of injustices to be eliminated. I want to stand still in the dusk and contemplate the lake, seeing only mist, hearing only a brief ripple where the wing of a bird disturbs the surface of the water, but I must respond intelligently, employ a certain kind of feminised argument, feel myself to be the victim of a monstrous wrong which has been passed down to me from generation to generation.

This wish to be free of politics is itself, of course, highly political and also a symptom of Jane’s class privilege: though she has worked, for one thing, she never had to. She notes that her feminist interlocutors seem disappointed that she replies to inquiries about her “experience in the workplace” by saying she was “never happier” and never experienced any discrimination, but to her this is more a symptom of their determination to be aggrieved than of her own statistically anomalous good fortune. She is self-conscious about the advantages of her private wealth but does not seem to see how this might make her individual experience an unreliable measure of systemic problems.

Not least because these discussions appear so late in the novel and are not (that I noticed) convincingly anticipated, they felt to me like Brookner having her say, about feminism and academia, rather than developing something essential to Jane’s character or story. “Who really benefits,” she has Jane wonder,

from studies in re-reading gender in 1950s melodrama, or women’s revolutionary fiction in Depression America? Is there any chance that a feminist theory of the state will ever be taken seriously? Must we campaign for surrogate motherhood? Or review the legal representations of lesbians in cases of discrimination by employers?

These works pour out from university presses, and are produced by the most excellent of women, many of whom have welcomed me with great cordiality. I appreciate them for their fervour and their courage. And yet a doubt creeps in. I do not want to fight. I want, rather, to explore the world without prejudice, and to be allowed a measure of lenity in my dealings with the world. Sometimes I even long to take the coward’s way out and to live my life without benefit of any sort of agenda …

The assumption that ignoring “the legal representations of lesbians in cases of discrimination by employers” is “without prejudice,” that feminist analysis is an “agenda” that can be done without–these are not neutral statements, and neither is the model of female identity Jane claims to have rejected but says “opens doors on to older simpler longings, regrettable, no doubt, even deplorable,” but compelling to her nonetheless.

dolly-3 This is the model of Dolly: “Charm, Jane, charm!” Jane, or the novel, acknowledges that Dolly’s way of life has been discredited by feminism, but the idea sometimes seems to be that those “older simpler longings” are natural, essential, defining, not just of Dolly but of what women need and want. “I now understand,” Jane explains, reflecting on her own reactions to Dolly’s choices,

that what I wanted to be was not independent, but its very opposite: dependent. I now understood–but of course did not at the time–that Dolly and I had something in common, an age-old ache that may have been no more and no less than a longing to be taken in, to be appropriated, to be endowed with someone’s worldly good whosoever they might be, for in that extremity of longing it might hardly matter. But I was young then, and unfeeling, as they all thought, and so, although I was not shocked by Dolly’s behaviour I was sincerely disapproving.

Jane’s own choices do not win her uncompromised happiness. “Self-sufficient as I am,” she says, “I too feel a longing which I am reluctant to ascribe to the feminine condition alone.” When her friend asserts “personhood” as the most important goal, not being identified as “a wife or mother,” Jane finds this answer pat, “it has an obstinate sound, as if in keeping with the agenda.” The trajectory of the novel is not towards understanding Dolly as a product, even to some extent a victim, of a world that gave a woman with her resources and will to power few options or resources. It seemed to me to move towards criticizing the modern rejection of the values Dolly lives by, the kind of power she exercises, and the ends to which she dedicates her life. Instead of Jane historicizing her own modern judgment, that is (something I struggle sometimes to get my students to do when they discuss the heroines of 19th-century novels), Jane seems to see Dolly as embodying “true” femininity, an essentialized version of womanhood characterized by an “age-old” desire to be dependent, even dominated. There is something touching in the evolution of Jane’s feelings for Dolly, but the love she finally feels for her is explicitly in defiance of her “feminist friends,” who she says “would not recognise the woman I become in Dolly’s presence.”

It’s Jane’s unlikely love we are supposed to be inspired by, but for me Jane’s insistence on setting it up in opposition to feminism was both unconvincing and unappealing. I think it also impeded a genuinely sympathetic portrait of Dolly herself: at first unattractive as a predatory type, by the end she is standing in for a theory of “what women want”–normal women, as Jane says in my epigraph–that I just can’t like or accept. As a result, Dolly is my least favorite Brookner novel to date.

This Week in My Sabbatical: Puttering and Sputtering

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The_Years It has not felt like a very productive week, though it is hard for me to be sure right now as I am still in the “muddy middle” of the research I have been puttering away on since April. I am definitely out of practice at working without a narrowly defined goal and a specific deadline! While sometimes it still feels luxurious just to be reading and thinking, and while I am well aware that time to do that is literally a luxury, at other times it feels aimless or, worse, pointless. What will come of this effort? Will anything come of it? It isn’t nothing to learn new things, of course, but the other part of this job is to add to them in some way myself.

I’m trying to have faith that I will figure out what I’ve got to say eventually, and (at least as important) to what audience. I don’t think I want to write a strictly academic paper: I think I want to keep working in that interstitial space between academic criticism and literary journalism. I’m feeling a bit discouraged about doing that right now, though, because that will mean pitching my idea (whatever it turns out to be) and not only am I not very good at that but I am also a bit turned off at the moment about the kind of literary writing that seems marketable–the intensely personal (which, with rare exceptions, is the least interesting kind to me), the immediately relevant (which I have at least tried my hand at, though I felt a tad squeamish about it), or the “rescued from obscurity”. (One good recent essay about the pressure to generate a certain kind of story is this one by Joanna Scutts; another is this one by B. D. McClay.) Since I do not have to literally sell whatever essay I write, I have the luxury (another one!) of writing whatever kind of essay I actually want, but I would like it to be of interest and to be read by other people too, so I have to at least consider where it might fit. holtby-woolf

But I need to know what it’s about first — beyond what I know so far, which is that it will in some way be about Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, especially The Years and Three Guineas, and maybe also Middlemarch and North and South, because what I’ve been thinking and reading about is the “novel of purpose” (one of the books I was recently taking notes on is Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose) and how Woolf does and doesn’t fit in to that 19th-century tradition. One sign that I’m not just spinning my wheels is that I am better able now to narrow the scope of my searches, and also some of the discussions in my sources are getting familiar: I know not just a lot of the basic context around the composition of The Years (starting with The Pargiters and ending with the two books we now have) but at least some of the main lines of critical discussion around both Holtby and Woolf. Not Woolf scholarship as a whole, of course: I have had to fight off discouragement brought on by its vastness, which a crude search on the MLA Bibliography suggests now overwhelms the scholarship on George Eliot–6784 entries vs. 3972. (What was I thinking, fleeing what seemed to me like an overpopulated field for one even more crowded?)

book sale haul My other reading has also felt relatively unproductive, though I suppose productivity is not really an appropriate measure for it (though I have long struggled with how or whether to make distinctions between reading and research). I have not actually finished a book since Iza’s Ballad. I have started a couple, and one of them, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, I nearly finished, but though I liked the concept (it tells a kind of history of the newspaper business across decades through a linked series of character sketches) and I can’t point to anything wrong with the execution (each sketch is briskly vivid), I just felt less and less motivated to go back to it and finally gave it up. Sometimes reluctant persistence just backfires: in this case, because I felt guilty about not reading The Imperfectionists I kept watching TV instead of picking up another book. As a result I have made great progress on rewatching The Wire (I’m nearly finished Season 4, which is as heartbreaking and infuriating as I remembered it). This morning I picked Anita Brookner’s Dolly off the shelf–like The Imperfectionists, it’s a recent acquisition from the ‘Women for Music’ book sale. I like it already, so here’s hoping it breaks the slump.

“Perfectly Alone”: Magda Szabó, Iza’s Ballad

May 10, 2019Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Now she could see the picture that used to hang over her bed, the face of the little girl gathering strawberries, a face whose Old German sweetness vanished, replaced by a wreath of wheat-coloured hair from under which her own wrinkled face looked out, and she saw that, in place of the little basket the running girl had carried, there was now her own black string bag. At that moment she realised what she could do for Iza, the Iza that lived inside her, not the stranger rushing about in taxis or the one who talks in whispers to Teréz and looks up from her books with such a stern gaze. Vince was no longer at her side but this time she didn’t call him. This was a moment when she had to be perfectly alone.

It isn’t until nearly the end of Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad that we learn the significance of the novel’s title. As a child, Iza–now a successful doctor–had stopped her father Vince from singing “a beautiful ballad from his student days” because she could not bear its sad story:

In the middle of the chamber
Raised up high on her bier
a lovely virgin bride
lies dead and cannot hear.

We find this out both belatedly and indirectly from Lidia, who nursed Vince on his deathbed. By the time we hear the story of Iza’s ballad, Lidia is engaged to Iza’s ex-husband Antal; Vince has been dead since the novel began. Lidia has been at most a peripheral presence in the novel up to this point, but it turns out that she is a keen observer, particularly of Iza, whom she once watched with awe and admiration but comes to regard with a mixture of pity and horror–as, I think, do we.

It’s not that Iza does anything horrible–at least not deliberately. Iza’s Ballad is a heartbreaking novel, but it is painful in large part because the central characters in its quiet unfolding tragedy, Iza and her recently widowed mother Ettie, want so much to do right by each other. After Vince’s death, the competent and self-sufficient Iza takes charge of her mother in ways that are paradoxically at once generous and ruthless: determined to do everything for Ettie, Iza fails completely to understand what Ettie actually wants or needs. In her turn, at once adoring of and intimidated by her daughter, Ettie suffers in silence as one after another of her modest attempts to retain her autonomy and preserve some sense of self, some continuity between her old life and her new, is stifled by Iza’s single-minded efficiency.

Immediately after Vince’s funeral, for instance, Iza packs Ettie off to a nearby resort town to “relax, have a lie-in, look at the trees, read, sleep and buy a couple of sessions at the baths because it looks as though your bones need it.” Iza pitches this plan as a kindness, so Ettie won’t have to deal with the difficult work of packing up for her impending move to Iza’s flat in Budapest. Ettie is “happy to think how much Iza loved and looked after her, but she had never been so sad in her life as when she finally went to Dorozos,” where she and Vince had “longed to go.” During her stay there, Ettie cheers herself by dreaming of how she will arrange her furniture in Iza’s flat:

She took great delight in the effort, drawing little semicircles for chairs, a square for the table and oblongs for the beds. She carefully put the plan away in her bag so she could produce it when Iza appeared and they could get straight to work. The furniture would have arrived by now, Iza will have sent it up by truck. There’d be plenty to do once they got to Pest. But it would be good work and it made her happy to think about it. Making a home.

But it turns out Iza has taken care of everything in her own way: “She was happy that once again, everything had been done for her, but she thought of the slip of paper in her handbag and tears came to her eyes.”

iza-nyrb This is how things go for Ettie and Iza once settled in Budapest as well. Iza does what she thinks is best, and Ettie’s attempts to participate are either thwarted or criticized. Ettie’s ways are not Iza’s; she does not belong in the modern world of the flat, the city, the trams, the markets, the technology. Her cooking, her shopping, her cleaning–none of it is right. She tries to make a friend and brings home the wrong sort of person. Eventually she realizes that she is an inconvenience, a burden, on both Iza and her housekeeper Teréz: “Teréz would get on better without her. Iza could never relax when she was around.” One of the strangest and saddest signs of Ettie’s growing isolation is the relationship she develops with Iza’s refrigerator, at once a symbol of the alien modern world and a stand-in for the old life from which she has been so completely cut off:

The old woman, who was frightened of all machines, found a curious way of making the acquaintance of the refrigerator. She discovered that the fridge made a sort of animal noise, a low purr. It startled her at first, but then she imagined having a conversation with it and would sit beside it, feeling she was not alone.

But then she spills soup on it and Iza, discovering that she cleaned it up without turning off the electricity first, warns her off, and “after that she no longer tried to make friends with the refrigerator.”

Ettie recovers some sense of purpose and will as she undertakes a trip back home to see to installing the headstone she ordered for Vince’s grave. It is there, back in the village where she once belonged, filled once more with memories of the life she once lived, reconnected to old places and friends, and full of love for her husband and daughter–who, alone again in Budapest, is relishing her restored space and privacy–that Ettie realizes there is something she can do to free both herself and Iza of the intractable unhappy tangle their lives have become. That Iza does not realize the deliberate sacrifice her mother has made is just one more sign of why Ettie made the choice she did.

izas-ballad Though it incorporates several people’s perspectives and stories besides Ettie’s, including Iza’s, Iza’s Ballad felt to me like Ettie’s book, which is why the novel’s title puzzled me at first. It’s Lidia, who looks at Iza and sees her clearly “for what she was,” who articulates why it is really Iza who is central, Iza whose “self-discipline” is also “a hardness of heart that dares not indulge itself by grieving over dead virgins.” Iza’s perfection is the result of a lack of imagination and empathy, a resolute clarity of purpose that obscures rather than illuminates. The things that made Ettie’s life vivid and meaningful to her are invisible or irrelevant to Iza. “The poor woman believes,” Lidia reflects,

that old people’s pasts are the enemy. She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.

This personal insight has historical implications too in a novel that is very much about social changes and their consequences. Though they are compellingly individual, the characters–Ettie and Iza and Vince and Antal especially–are also illustrative of these more abstract processes; their particular actions, such as Antal’s renovations to Ettie and Vince’s house after Ettie’s move to Budapest, carry symbolic resonance about change and competing ideas of progress and improvement.

Lidia’s comment about the significance of the past to the present also gave me a useful way to think about the novel’s attention to characters’ back stories, and to its somewhat circuitous organization. I found it slowly going and digressive at times: I was emotionally engaged with Ettie’s struggle and wanted the novel’s focus to stay there, with her. Thinking about the novel in broader terms, as an exploration of changing mores and competing values, not just family dynamics, gave retrospective significance to sections I wasn’t originally that interested in. What will stay with me, though, is the pathos and tenderness of Szabó’s picture of Ettie. “Maybe she was already dead and hadn’t noticed?” she wonders as her life shrinks and her spirits fade under Iza’s well-intentioned but murderous regime of care; “Could a person die without being aware of it?”

Incompatible: Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

rooney I don’t typically post about books I didn’t finish, and I don’t want to make a big contrarian to-do about my having given up on Conversations With Friends, but it is what I’ve been reading lately and I have given up on it, so I might as well at least comment briefly on it here.

I began the novel with some skepticism but also, as always, with the hope that I’d be pleasantly surprised. I told the friend who kindly lent me her copy that I feared it was going to be yet another new novel that is “coolly underwritten,” and it is exactly that. I tried to keep an open mind, though, especially because books that are minimalist in some ways can sometimes be very powerful. For me, books like that would include all the ones I’ve ready by Kent Haruf, for instance, though not Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, which I said ultimately read to me as if Strout had “used this dispersed form to let herself off the hook.”

It wasn’t exactly, or entirely, the spareness of Conversations With Friends that put me off it, however. It was something about the quality of the sentences, which seemed flat to the point of monotonous: not just the flat affect I’ve protested against before in highly polished contemporary fiction (even really smart fiction I admire, like Sarah Moss’s Signs for Lost Children) but wearisomely unvaried in their tone and rhythm. A sample, chosen (honest!) by just letting the book fall open anywhere:

When I arrived at the house all the windows and doors were open. I rang the doorbell anyway. When I got inside he was drying his hands on a tea towel, like he’d just finished washing up. He smiled and told me he’d been feeling nervous about seeing me again. The dog was lying on the sofa. I hadn’t seen her on the sofa before and wondered if maybe Melissa wouldn’t let her sleep there. I asked Nick why he was nervous and he laughed and made a little shrugging gesture, though one that seemed more relaxed than anxious. I leaned my back against the countertop while he folded the towel away.

I was bored stiff by the process of reading Rooney’s prose, and while I am open to arguments about how really this effect is all about the narrator’s own inadequacies in some way, I simply didn’t care enough about Frances–or anyone else in the novel, as they all seemed equal parts dull and insufferable–to press on past page 100. Whatever revelation or maturation or epiphany lies ahead for Frances, she’s going to have to go through it without me as a witness.

Is it me? Is it the book? It’s both, of course, as it always is.

Postscript: Now I’m reading Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad. How much more interesting, in every way, is this little excerpt than that quotation from Conversations with Friends? “‘The yellow globes shone jovially through the mesh of the bag. ‘She’s trying to work magic,’ thought the doctor. ‘She wants to work magic with three miserable lemons. She thinks that if she shows death she is not frightened of it, it will run away. She thinks that if she turns up at the old man’s bedside with lemons she will find him still alive.'”

May Day: Sabbatical Update

May 1, 2019May 1, 2019Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Arcimbolo Librarian The start of a new month seems like a good time to take stock, once again, of how my plans and projects for this sabbatical term are progressing. May is actually the point in a winter term sabbatical when being on leave stops meaning that much, as the regular teaching term is now over for everyone anyway. May is often very busy with meetings, though (including our department’s traditional ‘May Marks Meeting’), so my time is still more my own than it would be otherwise.

Looking back over the past four months, it does seem to me that I have been making pretty good use of that protected time. Since I placed my book orders for September, my early project to refresh my reading lists has been less of a priority, but it has definitely had results. The biggest change so far is to the approach and book list for Women and Detective Fiction, which I wrote about in my March update. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my postscript to that post, I ran into problems with my revised book list for Pulp Fiction (specifically, True Grit turned out not to be available from a Canadian supplier), so I decided to go with Valdez Is Coming again and accept that the onus is on me to teach it differently to make it more accessible. Because I wanted at least something to change for this iteration of the course but had rather run out of enthusiasm for novelty, I switched out The Maltese Falcon for The Big Sleep, which I know reasonably well from teaching it in Mystery and Detective Fiction. My overall enthusiasm for Pulp Fiction is actually flagging right now; I hope that in 2020-21 I can offer a different first-year course, perhaps ‘Literature: How It Works,’ which would let me go back to the broader range of texts and topics I used to cover in our (now retired) courses ‘Introduction to Literature’ and ‘Introduction to Prose and Fiction.’

greatexpectations I have until the fall to settle on the book lists for my winter term courses, which are British Literature After 1800 and 19th-century British Fiction (the Austen to Dickens variation). I’ve spent quite a bit of time examining anthologies for the survey course and concluded that the most reasonable way to go is a slim custom text assembled from Broadview’s wide-ranging options. (Who is actually assigning these behemoth volumes? And how do they assign enough in one term to make it worth their students’ expense?) The down side is that for copyright reasons I can’t include much material past Joyce, but I think I can fill in a small number of contemporary poems and a story or two by other means. I have been playing around with a lot of different options for longer texts that I think would work well in combination, because the assignment sequence I am planning to use includes a final essay for which students would compare our last book with either of our previous ones. (One reason for this is that it means one way or another everyone has a stake in our final reading.) Right now the front runners are Great Expectations, Three Guineas, and The Remains of the Day: I can imagine a lot of interesting ways to connect Remains with the other two, including first-person narration, questions of class, dignity, money, and morality, and connections between personal and public politics. The 19th-century fiction book list is still uncertain: one of the big questions for me is whether Wuthering Heights will make it in or whether I’ll lose my nerve and fall back on old favorites. wuthering-oup

Since fall book orders went in, I have been dedicating most of my time to the more open-ended research I discussed in my earlier posts about the value of ‘uproductive’ time and re-learning patience. Although it still makes me intermittently anxious that I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with all this, I am relaxing more into the process of reading and inquiry–and I am also starting to get a sense of how the different things that interest me might eventually coalesce, though I am a long way from being sure about how to frame the central question, much less how to answer it. I am genuinely enjoying the luxury of just being interested: “curiosity-driven research” is supposedly fundamental to our work, but as I discussed in my post on ‘fallow time’ there are lots of professional disincentives to following your interests in new directions.

book Having said that, the more I read about Holtby and Woolf, and especially the harder I try to understand what’s going on with The Years, the more I’ve been identifying continuities between this material and longstanding interests of mine, including genre (my monograph was about history and fiction as means of telling particular kinds of stories about women’s lives) and the relationship between literary form and ethics (something I’ve addressed both explicitly and implicitly in a lot of my essays and academic articles). I had long casually accepted the image of Woolf as (to quote Janis Paul) “a kind of patron saint of inner vision and consciousness”; the books I’ve been reading on Woolf’s politics and cultural criticism have helped me see her differently, and especially as perhaps not so entirely unlike Victorian novelists in her interest in using fiction to make a difference in the “real world” (as Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World has it). This week I’ve also been reading scholarship on Woolf’s connections to her Victorian predecessors, including Janis Paul’s The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf and Emily Blair’s Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, neither of which (though both are very interesting on their own terms) turned out to address quite the things I was looking for–but of course in some ways that’s encouraging, as it shows where there might be room for me in the conversation.

So that’s where I am now, at the two-thirds point in this six-month sabbatical. I have checked off a number of the concrete tasks I set myself, and I have made progress on the more amorphous but no less important task of refreshing my own intellectual engagement. There have been other things going on too, of course (including Maddie’s performance in Jesus Christ Superstar and, exciting in a different way, her acceptance of a place in Dalhousie’s Fountain School of Performing Arts for next year), and as always I’ve been doing other reading, most recently Lissa Evans’s Old Baggage and a reread of The Break for my book club (where it was a big success). My leisure reading right now is Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, which I am not liking at all (my goodness, her sentences are dull!)–but that’s a subject for another post!

“Splendid Non-Conformity”: Lissa Evans, Old Baggage

April 28, 2019Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

‘I have no party affiliation, merely the aim of encouraging the girls to take their rightful places in the modern world. Knowledge, confidence, ready laughter and a strong overarm throw will equip them for many arenas.’

She was watching the teams as she spoke: why on earth Jacko had chosen to clothe the League in garments the colour of a municipal drainpipe was quite beyond her. By contrast, the Amazons, aligning themselves for a photograph, were a frieze of splendid non-conformity.

I enjoyed Old Baggage quite a bit. It is tighter and swifter than Their Finest, its focus and, I would say, its strength much more the depiction of character than the construction of plot. In fact, overall I liked the ‘old baggage’ herself, Mattie Simpkin, better than Old Baggage. She is splendid: unapologetically unconventional, proud of her suffragist past and determined not just to continue living up to her principles but to find some way to pass them on to a new generation already losing the sense of urgency that drove Mattie and her colleagues to violence and personal sacrifice in the fight for equality. Her supporting cast is good too, especially her close companion Florrie, nicknamed ‘The Flea,’ and her protege Ida, a smart working-class girl who joins the girls’ club Mattie establishes to promote mental and physical agility, called with apt grandiosity ‘The Amazons.’

old-baggage Evans does a wonderful job delineating Mattie’s world, from its domestic apparatus to its politics. The novel takes place mostly in 1928 and 1929, and while like Mattie herself this world is full of energy and change, it is also shot through with pathos from the aftereffects and memories of the war, in which Mattie’s brother Angus was terribly injured:

Shrapnel had sheared away a triangle of Angus’s skull and a wedge of brain matter beneath: a mortal wound that had nonetheless taken almost two years to kill him. He had lost his speech and his ability to walk, and most of his sight, but his charm had remained intact …

Like the war, the militant suffrage movement is now part of Mattie’s past, though both are also (as the title hints) baggage she cannot leave behind. The novel’s central question is what Mattie can and should be doing in the present–who she is now that the causes she fought for have (more or less) been won. This personal question merges with political ones as Mattie becomes increasingly aware that a new force is rising that threatens those hard-won victories: fascism. As her Amazons train, so too does the Empire Youth League; the two organizations neatly embody two profoundly opposed sets of value, one ruthlessly regimented, the other vigorous, wayward, and unruly, like freedom itself.

baggage-2 This is all really good material, and the novel is well told start to finish, but my initial enthusiasm was somewhat deflated by the way its story eventually played out. Mattie compromises her own mission for reasons that seemed to me both out of character and insufficiently dramatic to create a genuine crisis of either conscience or story. The potential for significant conflict between the youth organizations, their leaders, and (most importantly) the larger political stakes they represent was not realized–perhaps because it would have been incompatible with the novel’s overall lightness of tone and touch–and the novel’s final twist not only seemed weirdly random but was a disappointing relegation of Mattie’s fighting spirit to a form of caretaking retirement. Perhaps the ending was meant to signal that the torch has finally been passed: that the best thing Mattie can do for the next generation of activists, or for the women (such as Ida) who are making new lives based on their achievements, is to free them from domestic responsibilities–to look after their baggage?–so that they can carry on. Still, I thought Mattie deserved better, though I suppose I should not underestimate the radicalism of the doctorate she earns. And as she says, quoting its subject, “All things are difficult before they are easy”: Mattie’s fighting life, which has certainly been difficult, has maybe earned her a future a bit out of the fray, away from the front lines of what we know too well would be an ongoing war.