This Winter Term: Some Small Good Things

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

1005017_10152126924015803_2115018870_nI may have been in Nova Scotia almost 20 years, but it’s no secret that I have not adapted well to east coast winters. I complain about them a lot! It’s not even the cold and damp I hate so much as the stress of driving in snow and ice. If I could hibernate, or just opt out of work, school, appointments, and grocery shopping whenever the roads are bad, I might shut up about winter!

However, this particular winter (though the weather so far has been dreadful) I’m feeling grateful for a number of small things that are making my term easier. If I write them up here that will make it harder for me to forget them the next time there’s freezing drizzle on top of a foot of snow and everything starts looking bleak.

1. This is my first full term with a reserved parking spot. What a relief! Not only can I drop my kids at school without either forcing them to be uncomfortably early or fretting that I’ll arrive on campus too late and be stranded, but I can even leave and come back during the day if I want. Or make a morning appointment off campus and still come in to my office after. This flexibility would have been even nicer when the kids were smaller, but even now it sure feels liberating not to be worrying about this logistical issue every day.

2. This is my first term in many years without a 9:30 class. Happily, I have long managed to avoid 8:30 classes (by nature I’m a night owl, not a morning person), but even a 9:30 class means having very little prep time in the morning, which means knowing you have to arrive on campus basically ready to go, which means often doing prep in the evenings. I’m sure I’ll still do some reading or marking or making up handouts after dinner, but not as often, and at the very least I’ll know I have plenty of time to do things like finalize notes or print and copy materials on campus before I have to head into my first class.

3. And speaking of classrooms, for the first time that I can remember my classes are all meeting in the same building that my office is in. This is a huge break during the winter term! Not only will I save all kinds of time putting on winter gear and trekking across campus and back (and, of course, also miss the unpleasantness of going outside repeatedly in cold, wet, blustery weather), but I don’t have to teach in my winter boots in my usually overheated classrooms. Plus if I forget something, it’s literally right upstairs, so I don’t have to check and re-check the contents of my folders and bags quite so obsessively. Win! This is possible because …

4. I have a very modest number of students this term: only 2 classes, with 30 in one and 22 in the other. Classrooms in this building officially hold 36 students; my classes capped at 40 used to get scheduled in here regularly anyway but apparently the fire marshal has gotten serious and as a result (because they are pretty much always full) I’ve been exiled for them – and classes capped at 60 or 90 (like Mystery and Detective Fiction) of course always have to be elsewhere. So: more intimate groups, less marking, more discussion instead of lecturing, and all in one building. Hooray!

5. Finally, and not specifically teaching or work related, I just discovered Sun Butter. It really does taste just like peanut butter! I used to love peanut butter, but since my daughter was diagnosed with a severe peanut (and tree nut) allergy over a decade ago, we haven’t had any nut products in the house. Sun Butter is completely nut free! (It’s made of sesame seeds.) I always doubted the nut-free alternatives but a friend assured me she even preferred this to the real thing so I finally risked it … and it’s good! I’ve never resented going without nuts at home (it’s actually easier, too, than worrying about cross-contamination — we can all just relax and eat), but it’s nice to have an old favorite so nearly restored to me. And if I get more protein in the morning and that gives me extra energy, that may indeed be a plus for my teaching term.

You see? I said these were small good things*, but they add up! I’ve been surprised, actually, what a difference the first three especially are making to my frame of mind during what is usually such a stressful time. Do you have any small (or big!) changes this term that make your days a little better? Or any that you wish you could make?

*A small bad thing is that the fiction anthology I’m using doesn’t include “A Small, Good Thing,” which is one of my favorite short stories. But you can’t have everything!

“What was justice?”: Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

misspymBefore the madness of the new term quite overwhelms me, I wanted to put up a few words about Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, which I finished a couple of days ago.

I ended up enjoying Miss Pym Disposes a lot. Not as much as Brat Farrar (so far, still my favourite Tey that’s not The Daughter of Time), and not as much as The Franchise Affair (which touched on deeper, darker problems)– but I still really liked it. I think that my reaction was affected by the very slow unfolding of the novel, so I might end up liking it even more on a reread. The crime itself doesn’t happen until about 180 pages in (and the novel is only 235 pages altogether): well before then, I was starting to get impatient with the book, wondering how Tey was ever going to fit in any kind of investigation if she ever actually got around to what I supposed would be the main business of the book. By the time I’d finished the novel, though, I had realized that the “crime itself” had actually happened much earlier, but was an act of injustice (at least, arguably so) rather than an overt offense against any rules or laws. That act precipitates the actual crime, and must be understood for the crime to be seen — as Miss Pym struggles to see it — in a way that answers the very difficult question of what to do about it. “What was justice” in this case? wonders Miss Pym. “Do the obvious right thing, Miss Pym,” advises another character blithely, “and let God dispose.” But it’s Miss Pym who disposes– and it’s only by thinking through the whole story, and thinking about all the people involved in it, that we can decide if she makes the right decision.

Like the other Tey novels I’ve read, Miss Pym Disposes made me wonder about the lines I draw when selecting readings for my survey class on detective fiction. All four of the novels of hers that I’ve read are really not “detective fiction” in any conventional way. They are hardly even “crime fiction,” though this more nebulous label works better for them. The same thing is true of The Talented Mr. Ripley: it includes a crime, and it’s about guilt and innocence and justice and a lot of the same themes my course turns on — but it doesn’t really have the structure of the classic detective story, organized around a single crime and then its investigation and, usually, its solution. It’s that unity of the novel’s elements around the central crime and investigation that typically distinguishes novels we identify specifically as detective fiction or mysteries from novels with crimes (or detectives) in them. (Thus Bleak House, for instance, is not itself a detective novel despite including a great detective plot.)

Genre definitions are notoriously imperfect, but they are also extremely useful, and at the 2nd-year level, it generally seems good enough to go with that basic “we know it when we see it” definition. From a pedagogical perspective, focusing on detective fiction rather than crime fiction more broadly understood helps (like all rules) to control the fun —  otherwise, the options for book orders proliferate disconcertingly, for instance. I also think some of the coherence of the course depends on sticking pretty close to the formula, which makes it easier to learn the conventions which the great practitioners of the genre both perfect and subvert. It’s not like there’s no variety, as we still go from Poe and Wilkie Collins through Christie and Hammett to Paretsky to Walter Mosley (and sometimes Paul Auster).

Still, Tey (or Highsmith, or du Maurier) would be fun to include. If only I could make it a year-long course! Because after all, book orders are a zero-sum game, more or less. I already assign what strikes many students as a lot of novels in the survey class, and most of them are clearly in the “classics of the genre” category — touchstone texts that trace out the development of the genre over time. The only one I suppose is tangential to that Greatest Hits approach is P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman — which is one of my favorites, but doesn’t really represent a specific subgenre. Maybe I could switch it out for one of these next time around. I suppose if I did, though, it wouldn’t be Miss Pym Disposes, which I think is too understated to be very popular. I bet The Talented Mr. Ripley would be a hit, though.

Next Week In My Classes: Who, Me? Intimidating?

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

Teaching evaluations (or “Student Ratings of Instruction” as we apparently call them these days) are a notoriously … imperfect … guide for future conduct. Probably because we all spent many, many years being graded, professors nonetheless read them obsessively compulsively carefully and fret about freak out pay special attention to the most negative ones, because at the end of the day, or the term, we want everyone to like us want to get an A hope to improve our pedagogy.

I haven’t seen my evaluations from last term yet, though I’m sure they’ll arrive in my inbox any day now (we’ve recently switched to online evaluations, which has added a new layer of complications and made the results even less robust than before). I have seen last year’s, however, and they were the usual blend of enthusiasm and disdain, gratitude and offense. Also as usual the balance tipped in the right direction, assuming that it is preferable to have more happy than discontented students. And, again as usual, what I’ve tried to focus on in them is not the outliers (good or bad) but any pattern of feedback (I so hate to think of these as “ratings,” as if I’m one option in a giant Cineplex) that teaches me something about how I teach — or at least about how I taught last year.

I did find one, and it was something I hadn’t seen before: a number of comments from students in my section of our first-year “Introduction to Literature” class who felt I was “intimidating.” It wasn’t by any means a unanimous perspective, but enough students used that very word to give me food for thought.

Now, I should say that I don’t consider it an altogether bad thing that some of my students found me or my course intimidating. To a certain extent, that was the effect I was going for, at least at the start of term. This is because I have run into enough Intro students who are taking English only to meet a requirement and fully expect it to be their “bird” course, or at any rate who are strongly inclined to make it a lower priority than their “hard” courses or the ones they see as more important (often, their science courses). There are also a lot of students in first year, including some  who consider themselves prospective English majors, who are more used to “expressing themselves” in English classes than learning specialized vocabulary and using it for well-reasoned critical analysis — who are surprised, that is, to find themselves faced with intellectually strenuous tasks and high standards. There are also, of course, students whose previous preparation — or just whose attitude and expectations — make them quite prepared to work and think hard, but they are typically outnumbered.

As a result, I usually start out emphasizing the stringency of the course. The tone I aim for is cheerful but uncompromising, about the logistics of the course (requirements, deadlines, policies, etc.) but also, and more importantly, about the skills and content it aims to teach. The message I seek to convey is quite simple: It is possible to do a better or a worse job of literary analysis. The goal of this class is to help you do a better job, which means both reading better (a matter of both knowledge and skills) and writing better (again, a matter of both knowledge and skills). It’s hard work, but it’s also fun and creative and important work (because the classroom is far from the only place we read, or write). I take it seriously, and so should you. I am passionate and enthusiastic about it, and I hope you will be too, but at the end of the day it’s not about what you like, it’s about what you learn.

In other words, I want them to take the class seriously and understand that they will have to work to get good results. It’s meant to be aspirational: I hope they will be motivated to rise to the challenge. But it’s also meant to be cautionary: don’t think you can phone it in, don’t blow me off. I mix in some inspiration too (some discussion about the value and beauty of literature), but to open the term, it’s the perspiration I usually emphasize, so that they’ll be ready to put in the work that enables us to have good, serious discussions about literature and criticism as we move through the term.

My first question, then, is: since I have always run the class more or less the same way, why was last year the first time I’m aware of that the intimidation factor persisted and became inhibiting? I was aware that the group was not (collectively) very relaxed: I fretted quite a lot last year about the low level of participation, for instance. It wasn’t a disaster — it ebbed and flowed — but compared to other sections of intro that I’ve taught, this was far from the most lively. And my second question is, how much, if anything, should I change?

I have a theory about the first question, which is that last year was the smallest section of intro I’ve ever taught at Dalhousie. Until recently, all of our first-year sections were capped at 55 and taught with one instructor and one TA. Now we have a range of class sizes, including one giant section (360, with multiple TAs), some in the middle, and some “baby” sections at 30 with just the instructor (our Writing Requirement rules mandate a maximum ratio of 30:1). I had a baby section last year that settled down at around 27 students. You’d think that would mean rainbows and lollipops and all good things, and it certainly felt luxurious in some respects, but my standard strategies evolved for bigger rooms and bigger numbers. In a group of nearly 60, the critical mass of both unmotivated and talkative students is bigger, so more students need the chastening “listen up!” approach while more students are present who are willing to join in a class discussion. My professorial presence is also more diffuse (if that makes sense) in a bigger room: in our smaller room, I may have seemed to be more “in your face.” And while in some ways it can be harder to put your hand up with more people around, in other ways you don’t stand out as much, so it can feel like the stakes are lower. I may be way off in these speculations, of course, but my guess is that I need to approach the smaller section (which is what I have again this term) aware that it’s a more intimate group and setting and thus requires a somewhat softer touch. What I don’t want to change is the overall message: that this is not a course to be taken lightly; that it requires attention and studying and commitment, not just showing up; that grades in English are not just a matter of opinion but of expertise and judgment.

So! With all this turning around in my head, as you can imagine I am both excited and anxious about our first meeting on Monday. I have been revising my notes, and I’m making plans for an ice-breaker exercise, nothing too fancy but something to get them talking to each other a bit on the first day, rather than mostly just listening or talking to me. Something I tell all of my classes is that literary criticism is something you get better at by doing — which includes class discussion (at some point I usually explain the concept of “coduction“) as well as both informal and formal writing. I hope that if they all hear their own voices in the classroom on the first day, in a nonthreatening context, it will ease them into the more important conversations to come. And I hope that if I set myself up initially as both professor and facilitator, they will find me less (but not un-) intimidating.

Do you have thoughts or experiences about being either intimidating or intimidated in class? I certainly remember professors I found intimidating, but I didn’t see that as their failing but rather as mine. Often, they were the ones I most admired and hoped to impress. I find it hard to imagine myself as intimidating (I often think of that wonderful line in Middlemarch about our “poor little eyes” behind the “big mask and the speaking-trumpet”) … but I realize we don’t always know how we strike other people, and I have occasionally had other indications that I seem harder, or harsher, than I knew. (I remember one of my own professors saying to me – quite out of the blue, it seemed! – “I always wonder what you’re thinking when you look at me that way.” Perhaps the natural cast of my face is just judgmental?)

Novel Readings 2013

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

2013 has had fewer thrills for me than 2012, which was an especially exhilarating reading year. To be fair, though, it’s hard to follow up a year that included The Once and Future King, Bring Up the Bodies, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary, along with The Paper Garden – which still resonates with me as a particularly special book. 2013 has certainly been a varied year, though, and its reading pleasures sometimes came from unexpected sources. Here’s my traditional look back.

Orphan-Masters-Son-with-Pulitzer-BurstcopperfieldBook of the Year: It’s a tie this time between two very different books: David Copperfield and The Orphan Master’s Son. Of all the books I read in 2013, these are the only ones that proved irresistible, that absorbed me entirely and reminded me how exciting it is to lose track of reality because you are in the world of a great artist — one whose own commitment to the story he’s telling is equaled by the craft with which he tells it.

Other books I’m particularly glad I read and wrote about this year:

Georgette Heyer: The Grand Sophy Now that I’ve read more of Heyer’s novels, I wouldn’t actually point to The Grand Sophy as my favorite (right now I would probably name Devil’s Cub, Venetia, or Black Sheep – or would it be Cotillion?) but The Grand Sophy was a breakthrough for me: I had had trouble appreciating Heyer, but for some reason, with this one everything clicked into place and now I’m having all kinds of fun catching up on the others. I still find the openings of Heyer’s novels stilted, but now I trust that if I keep reading, I will enjoy wit, elegant plotting, and happy endings (even if they are more romantic than sexy).

Elizabeth Taylor, Angel. This is another one that I’m glad to have read not just for its own merits (though what a strange, compelling book it is) but for the introduction it gave me to its author. I’ve now read three more of Taylor’s novels: A Game of Hide and Seek, Palladian and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (which, as I read it on vacation, I never wrote up “properly” even though it is my favorite Taylor so far).

L. M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle.  What a treat it was to return to this long-ago favorite, which may, as it turns out, have been the first romance I ever read.

May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep and Journal of a Solitude. I loved Sarton’s memoirs of her life alone — the first one especially, with its more tranquil spirit and embrace of introspection, but its gloomier counterpart as well.

Susan Kress, Feminist in a Tenured Position. For the first time, my Women & Detective Fiction seminar (starting next week!) won’t include Death in a Tenured Position; I’m especially sorry because this excellent biography of Carolyn Heilbrun added so much to my understanding of her life and work.

All of Dick Francis! That was fun, and not as repetitive as you might predict. My top 10.

Harrison Solow, Felicity and Barbara Pym. I had a much greater appreciation of Pym’s novels after reading this witty commentary on them, and on how and why we read today.

Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows  and This Real Night. West’s novels are as intellectually demanding and epigrammatic as her non-fiction, but she also proved able to move me to tears.

pleasuresBooks I wasn’t especially enthusiastic about:

Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures. I didn’t even change my mind when the author quoted The New Yorker at me: imagine that.

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.

Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things.

Other notable literary / bookish posts:

Is Cormac McCarthy A Terrible Writer? It was a perfectly sincere question, and one that I believe is genuinely challenging to answer. The discussion that followed in the comments helped me keep thinking through how to ask and answer this kind of evaluative question, both generally and about McCarthy in particular. I went on to read No Country for Old Men; despite its getting high praise from readers I much admire, however, I haven’t yet had the courage to tackle Blood Meridian. Maybe I’ll do that as I prepare to teach The Road again this term.

Writing About George Eliot: An Inventory and Why Do I Like George Eliot So Very Much? These posts were both helpful ways for me to take stock of my work to date as I continue trying to conceptualize The Book that I swear is going to start taking a more concrete form in 2014. I did launch my Middlemarch for Book Clubs site, so that’s one definite thing accomplished!

HaulBooks I’m especially looking forward to reading in 2014:

Wilkie Collins, No Name and Armadale. I haven’t been reading much Victorian literature outside of work lately, but I’d like to get back into it, and I can’t believe that either of these will feel much like work! I’d also like to reread Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, and it’s about time I took another look at Scenes of Clerical Life too.

Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun. This is one of the books in my very enticing Christmas pile — which I’ve made a good start on already (I’ve finished both The Franchise Affair and Miss Pym Disposes).

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I know, I know – but I actually am reading it now … again, or still.

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga. I’ve had this on my shelf for some time; Jenny’s posts about it at Shelf Love have moved it up in my mental TBR pile.

The rest of the Raj Quartet. Like Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, this was on my list last year too, as is Time of Gifts. They got displaced by other books I wanted to read more, at least in the moment, but I haven’t forgotten them.

Next up, though, will be Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, which by a remarkable coincidence is the January selection for both of my book clubs.

Thank you as always to everyone who has read and commented on Novel Readings over the past year, and thanks also to the many excellent bloggers and tweeters who do so much to keep my life with books interesting and fresh. Happy New Year!

Stepping into the Bog: Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

franchiseaffairTey’s Detective-Inspector Alan Grant has only a bit part in The Franchise Affair, but his response to the case gets at the heart of what’s at stake in this intriguing novel. It’s not a ‘whodunit’ so much as a study in character and community, and the most threatening aspect of the specific crime is its challenge to readability. What lies behind the faces we see, whether of people or of buildings or communities? Grant, as his subordinate points out, is “famous at the Yard for his good judgment of people” — The Daughter of Time turns entirely on his upset at having “mistaken one of the most notorious murderers of all time for a judge.” When things look bad for the Sharpes, the mother and daughter accused of having kidnapped and abused innocent-looking young Betty Kane, he’s annoyed to have his initial liking for them (and dislike for their accuser) seem misplaced: “Now he thinks the wool was pulled over his eyes, and he’s not taking it lightly.” That things, and people, are not as they seem is essential to the form of the crime novel, yet here that formulaic certainty is worse than the offense itself. “How is she to judge,” reflects Marion Sharpe about Betty’s mother when the whole story has come out, “if appearances can be so deceptive?”

It’s unexpected that Marion would have so much sympathy to spare, considering what she has suffered because of Betty’s accusations. After all, the hostile responses she’s dealt with have themselves been the results of people assuming the worst about her and her mother because they appear guilty — and like guilty types, living as they do in isolation, and being unconventional to the point of eccentric. That surfaces can be misleading should be the Sharpes’ first line of defense; getting to know them is precisely what wins over their handful of supporters, most notably solicitor Robert Blair, whose initial response to their appeal for his help is suspicion that they might well be up to no good:

The old woman had a fanatic’s face, if ever he saw one; and Marion Sharpe herself looked as if the stake would be her natural prop if stakes were not out of fashion.

Blair isn’t the only one to associate the Sharpes with witches: “Give these midland morons a good excuse,” cautions his fellow lawyer Ben Carley, “and they’ll witch-hunt with the best.” Suspicion does quickly turn to hostility and violence: as long as they are unable to prove their innocence, the Sharpes become victims of this predatory mentality.

To an extent, Tey is just continuing the paradoxical strategy of any Golden Age “cozy”: a seemingly peaceful English village like Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, or King’s Abbott in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, turns out to be a festering pocket of greed, jealousy, spite, and malevolence. The pastoral tranquility of the setting is a façade; the story’s central crime is not an aberration but an eruption, and the restored calm can only ever feel precarious, so certain are we that we’ll be back again for the next installment. Tey cares so little for the puzzle aspects of the story, though, that this formulaic oddity of the setting moves from background to foreground. The charm of the classic English town is compromised by its revealed dark side. “Don’t worry, sir,” a police officer says to Robert, who’s worried about the Sharpes’ safety; “Nothing’s going to happen to them. This is England, after all.” It turns out that he’s right about that last point, just not about what it means. The overall effect is not at all the nostalgic one often associated with “cozies”: just as Robert feels a mixture of pleasure and despair at the tranquil continuities of his own life before the Franchise affair, we’re prompted, surely, to wonder if this is a world that should be preserved or destroyed, policed or subverted.

One of the most unnerving aspects of the novel for me was that Betty Kane’s mean-spirited deception made all our “good guys” so angry that they started sounding an awful lot like bad guys. “An attractive face, on the whole,” Robert says to his cousin as they contemplate Betty’s photo. “What do you make of it?” “What I should like to make of it,” is the reply, “with slow venom, ‘would be a very nasty mess.'” As Robert prepares to face her in court, he declares his intention to “undress her in public . . . to strip her of every rag of pretence, in open court, so that everyone will see her for what she is.” He’s outraged that she might get away with her scheme and “go on being the centre of an adoring family”: “the once easy-going Robert grew homicidal at the thought.” When the truth comes out, and it’s revealed that whatever her other lies, her bruises are real, the general attitude seems to be that a beating was no worse than she deserved, and nobody seems shocked at the remark that “it was a pity her mother hadn’t done the same thing ten years ago.” Nobody, for that matter, censures the grown — and married — man who makes this statement for having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl.

Is she really so appalling? At what point does she, like the Sharpes, slip from accused to victim? What threat does she really represent that the jury can reach a unanimous verdict without even hearing the remainder of the case (or retiring to discuss the evidence) and it’s greeted as justice? She’s shunned so completely that we never even find out what happens to her. Guilty though she certainly is, is she also a scapegoat, a focal point for disruptive forces that the community abhors and wishes to banish? Is it she who is really the witch, or some kind of shape-shifter, someone who has the terrifying capacity to make guilt look like innocence? Is it her real crime to embody and thus expose the deceptive safety of the world they all live in, making explicit a truth they all prefer to deny? “She can never again take a step onto green grass,” Marion says sympathetically of Betty’s mother, “without wondering if it is a bog.” But it wasn’t Betty who set The Franchise on fire and watched, face “alive with gloating,” as it burned to the ground.

2013: My Year in Writing

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I still expect to get some reading done before the end of the calendar year (especially Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which I have resolutely started over), but except for another blog post or two I have no great writing ambitions for the remainder of 2013, so I thought I’d start my annual year-end wrap-up with a look back at the essays and reviews I published in 2013.

Once again I did most of my writing for Open Letters Monthly, and once again I can only be grateful for the encouragement, support, and astute criticism I get from my co-editors. After only three years “on board,” I know I would be bereft without the freedom but also the challenges this platform offers me as a writer and thinker.

OxfordIn 2013 I wrote two more essays on George Eliot for Open Letters. I consider all of these essays part of a larger work in progress, the exact form and character of which I am still trying to figure out. In February I wrote about the ending of The Mill on the Floss, which I framed with some ideas about the concept of ‘spoilers’ but intended primarily as an investigation into how Eliot uses the trap and shock of the novel’s conclusion to provoke us into demanding alternatives. In March, I worked through some ideas about the beautiful but ruthless morality of Middlemarch; the thoughtful comments I received helped me see ways in which my argument is, not wrong, but incomplete. One thing’s clear to me when I think about a more sustained project on Eliot: these are the issues I want most to keep writing about. I wrote one more Victorian essay for Open Letters this year, a fun ‘Second Glance’ feature on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

I reviewed four books for Open Letters this year (that’s a long way from Steve’s nearly 200, but for me it’s not a bad total). In some ways the time spent on these reviews — or on three of the four — was time I ended up regretting a bit, as I’m not sure the books themselves were worth the effort. That said, generally you can’t be sure what a book is worth until after you read it carefully and think about it for a while — and write about it, too, which is always a learning experience. And if I’m going to review a book, I want to bring my best attention to bear on it, even if there’s a risk it will not hold up. This was true only of the most recent one, I think, which was Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which I reviewed for our December issue. It really isn’t a very good book even of its kind. But writing about it did give me another opportunity to air my grievance against the tediously persistent idea that incompetence is charming while brains are, well, not. (How pleased I was to find Rebecca West making the same complaint: “can anybody who cannot grasp that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal have charm?”) The other two novels I reviewed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, were at least intelligent and ambitious books, and thus it was more interesting to grapple with just why I nonetheless found them unsatisfactory. I’m particularly proud of my review of Life After Life, which I think is both intellectually scrupulous and rhetorically ingenious. The other book I reviewed for Open Letters this year was Deirdre David’s biography of Olivia Manning. I have no regrets about the time spent on this book, which is smart, interesting, and thought-provoking — like Manning herself.

straightOutside of Open Letters, I successfully pitched another piece to the Los Angeles Review of Books, this time on the racing thrillers of Dick Francis (in previous years I have written for them on Sjowall and Wahloo’s ‘Story of Crime’ and on Silas Marner). I had a great time rereading the novels and thinking about how to place them in the context of debates about and revisions of gender roles in crime fiction. What should I pitch to them next summer, do you think? How about a similar Big Gulp piece on Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series?

Of course, the bulk of my writing has been here at Novel Readings. I have been feeling as if I was in a blogging slump this year, but looking back through my archives I don’t see much evidence for that, which is reassuring. Since I’m going to write another post on my year in reading, I’ll pick out here a few pieces that aren’t book reviews.

I wrote several more posts on blogging. My post on blogging and ‘intellectual curiosity’ led to some confessions about the limits of my own curiosity. l also considered how I would answer the question “should graduate students blog?” and I wrote yet another polemic on the place of blogging in criticism and scholarship (“Blogging: Accept No Substitute!“), which was rerun in a slightly abbreviated form at the LSE’s Impact blog. Also in a polemical spirit I responded to William Giraldi’s gratuitous grumblings about internet criticism: “Forget that blog is just one letter away from bog, or that the passel of burgeoning “literary” websites is largely a harvest of inanity with only the most tenuous hold on actual literature.”

As usual, I also did a lot of thinking out loud about my teaching: this year’s highlights include posts on teaching feminism, on ‘coercive pedagogy,’ on the difference between information and education, and on the challenge of emphasizing processes over products.

Finally, I wrote a lot on Twitter this year. 140 characters isn’t much at one time, but they add up. It’s a very different kind of writing than a blog, an essay, or a review, but the conversations Twitter enables and the communities it supports have become essential parts of my intellectual and social life.

“The sword in the hand of humanity”: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917

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youngrebecca“Boldness is Rebecca West’s strength,” Jane Marcus says in  her edited collection The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917; “She polished the weapons of invective and denunciation into the tools of a fine art.” That combination of boldness and artfulness makes West irresistibly quotable: people who hang out with me on Twitter may have noticed that I, at least, couldn’t resist sharing some of her erudite zingers. As most of the essays and reviews in this volume are fairly short, it’s West herself that makes the biggest impression, though cumulatively her political and aesthetic commitments are clear: as Marcus outlines them, “the young Rebecca West stood for revolution, free love, equal pay, the working class, votes for women, and the most advanced ideas in literature.” Some samples — and keep in mind that between 1911 and 1917 West (b. 1892) was between 19 and 25:

On The Considine Luck by H. A. Hinkson, The Spinster by H. Wales, and The Trespasser by D. H. Lawrence.

The baldness and badness of popular novels is as touching as the ugliness of a cherished rag doll. What overflowing tenderness must be in the heart of the child who loves this monstrosity, we think. And so with the people who read these novels — what tireless imaginations they must have, to perceive joy in these bare chronicles! We superior persons are too feeble to go searching for beauty on our own like that. We wait idly until Thomas Hardy comes back from witnessing fierce wars between the flesh and the spirit, and Conrad sails home from the strangest and most distant tropic. But the common man picks up some artless work such as The Considine Luck by H. A. Hinkson and creates his own beauty. He takes the puppet heroine, Grace Smith, and paints her wooden cheeks with the flush of his sensuous dreams; he lights her eyes with the radiance he has seen in unattainable women in pictures or at theatres, till Grace Smith is more fair than his first love. In a sense he writes his own book. . . .

It is not unkind to say that the above two books need never have been written. Of course, one is glad that they have been written, just as one is glad that there are dog shows at the Horticultural Show, even though one never goes near the place oneself. One likes to think of all those jolly little puppies; and similarly one is glad that Mr. Wales feels up to his work, and quite certain that a lot of people will get ingenuous pleasure out of Mr. Hinkson’s book.

 On J. M. Kennedy’s English Literature, 1880-1905.

He misses the really high purpose which the Yellow Book school fulfilled. These young men of artistic ambition came into the world to find that style was held in contempt. Dickens had dragged the English language through the mud, Browning had thrown bricks at it, Trollope was sit on its chest and reading the lessons to it. The house of art was full of men who had magnificent messages, but nevertheless ate peas with their knives. This revolted Wilde, possibly because, coming from Ireland, he was accustomed to hear good, clean, English; but in any case he and his followers set about imposing style on English literature. That was the purpose of their existence, and they fulfilled it. There was no new philosophy in the air, so they had no new gospel to preach. But they improved our manners. It is thanks to them that we are as fastidious about words as we are about personal cleanliness.

 On The Carnival of Florence by Marjorie Bowen.

There are two kinds of historical novel: the dietetic and the dressy. In the first one cries ‘Tush!’ and calls for nut-brown ale and a pasty. In the second one sighs ‘Ah God, my lord!’ and wimples, when one does not stomacher. In both cases local colour is not the complexion of the story but an impediment in its speech, but the latter has attracted a higher type of intellect by the delicious opportunity it affords of spending the afternoon in museums, looking at pretty things in glass cases and pretending that one is doing a good day’s work. For the literary mind enjoys almost everything except its work. Chief among the students of upholstery of the past is Miss Marjorie Bowen, who brings to the research enormous romping vitality and a love for beauty of language in which one would believe more thoroughly if she did not so frequently split her infinitives neatly down the middle.

On The World of H. G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks.

 Mr Van Wyck Brooks is one of those young American writers who would have made excellent wives and mothers. He fails from sheer excess of the housewifely qualities. He is saving: just as in happier circumstances he would have put every scrap into the stockpot, so now he refuses to throw away the very driest bone of thought, and insists on boiling it up in his mental soup He is hospitable; the deadest idea does not get turned away from his doorstep. He is cleanly: his bleached, scentless style suggests that he hung out the English language on the line in the dry, pure breezes of Boston before he used it.

On Hatchways by E. Sidgwick.

With the possible exeption of Angela Carranza (condemned by the Inquisition of Lima in 1684), who claimed to have written her revelations with a quill from the wings of the Holy Ghost, Miss E. Sidgwick is the most pretentious woman writer who ever lived.

One more, on The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford (to show that she could praise as well as condemn).

 It is as impossible to miss the light of its extreme beauty and wisdom as it would be to miss the full moon on a clear night. Its first claim on the attention is the obvious loveliness of the colour and cadence of its language, and it is also clever as the novels of Mr Henry James are clever, with all sorts of acute discoveries about human nature; and at times it is radiantly witty. And behind these things there is the delight of a noble and ambitious design, and behind that again, there is the thing we call inspiration — a force of passion which so sustains the story in its flight that never once does it appear as the work of a man’s invention. It is because of that unison of inspiration and the finest technique that this story, this close and relentless recital of how the good soldier struggled from the mere clean innocence which was the most his class could expect of him to the knowledge of love, could bear up under the vastness of its subject. For the subject is, one realises when one has come to the end of this saddest story, much vaster than one had imagined that any story about well-bred people, who live in sunny houses with deer in the park, and play polo, and go to Nauheim for the cure, could possibly contain. . . . Indeed, this is a much, much better book than any of us deserve.

 Oh, OK, just one more, on The Lion’s Share, by Arnold Bennett (because it’s impossible not to think about Woolf’s much more famous essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” while reading this — though Woolf’s appears eight years later).

It is now the fashion in many intellectual circles to despise Mr Bennett, as it is the fashion to despise all authors who have performed the crude act of publishing anything. But it is interesting to notice that because has has worked so hard at the craft of writing, at the art of inventing the dreams of a not wild imagination with beauty, he cannot help but achieve good writing and beauty even in a book written without much devotion and with a light intention.

 Oh, and this one too, on Love and Lucy by Maurice Hewlett (because it takes up a pet theme of mine).

But Mr. Hewlett would probably object, the girl had charm. Yet can anybody who cannot grasp that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal have charm? Can anybody who cannot – to take a simple and revealing test of intelligence — fold up a deck-chair, have charm? Lucy, one feels, could not have passed either of these tests. Isn’t it a sign of commonness, like buying a watch with a handsome exterior and cheap works, to be able to regard such a person as charming? Isn’t intelligence not a separate inserted quality but a necessary condition of beauty, at once a manifestation of a subtle and healthy nervous system and a power which organizes mere physical perfection into beauty that stirs the soul?

 rwestAll of these reviews are, in their own ways, epigrammatically delightful. But they also have a quality of self-display that is in fact slightly wearing after a while: it is perhaps a symptom of West’s precocity, indicative of the youthful zest for being right, or of a critical sensibility compromised (as is so often the case today as well) by the journalistic need to be both pithy and memorable. To be quotable, that is, is not the same as to be impressive, and I find her reviews here more impressive when she tones things down and speaks less from her head and more from her heart. I quoted before from her essay on the death of Emily Davison, for instance; along with the suffering of the suffragettes, it’s the war about which she is most eloquent. Here are some excerpts from her review of May Sinclair’s  A Journal of Impressions in Belgium:

The contrast between the manner of Miss Sinclair’s genius and its achievements is difficult to define. It is as though the usual literary process had been reversed and a mouse had produced a mountain. She writes about life as though she were a little girl sitting on a tin trunk at a railway station and watching the people go by; she writes as though at the  most hopeful estimate she might be another Miss Mitford; and out of this piteousness and diffidence and round-eyed observation there amazingly comes a fierce, large vision of reality. It is entirely characteristic of Miss Sinclair that this record of seventeen days spent in Belgium, which is largely a record of humiliations, and is told with the extremest timidity and a trembling meticulosity about the lightest facts, should be one of the few books of permanent value produced by the war.

Partly it is because her meticulosity makes her describe what writers more accustomed to the battlefield leave one to take for granted. . . . And partly it is because she writes of such a company of heroes as never lived before: of girls of nineteen who trudge over turnip-fields among the bullets to look for the wounded, not in any sudden flame of courage, but as a daily occupation; of women who stayed in Antwerp at their posts till the red skies fell in on them. . . .

And against this background, which is a miracle of of dreadfulness, there moves the Ambulance Corps, which is a miracle of human splendour. It is merciful that, just as one discovers that the world is capable of being infinitely more noble. One perceives quite clearly that some members of this Ambulance Corps must have been intolerable as individuals: ‘practical’ women who use their common sense to rasp their neighbours’ shins and regard suavity as a part of incompetence. And yet, united by their collective purpose of courage, they become an organisation so magnificent in its fearlessness that one accepts as a real tragedy the personal grief which makes this book muted like words spoken by one who holds back the tears. No triumph of good work that may come to Miss Sinclair will ever make up to her for the discovery that the artist is unfit for the life of action. And yet every page of this gallant, humiliated book makes it plain that while it is glorious that England should have women who walk quietly under the rain of bullets it is glorious too that England should have women who grieve inconsolably because the face of danger has not been turned to them.

 Faced with that ‘miracle of dreadfulness,’ West is angrily impatient with wishful “emotional” solutions or simplistic pacifism, such as the proposal by Ellen Key’s Women, Peace and the Future that “mere femaleness is going to end the war”:

 Mere platitudinous assertions as to the niceness of peace and the nastiness of war are useless in such crises, and the ‘motherly’ advice of Miss Key that the belligerent nations should refrain from denouncing the sins of others and should turn their attention to their own defects, is actively mischievous.

If we refrain from regarding the invasion of Belgium as a crime, we foment a state of public opinion which would tolerate England’s commission of a similar crime if the occasion arose. It is alert and vigorous thinking about specific points, it is the very quality of intelligence which Miss Key belittles, which brings an end to war. The intellect is the sword in the hand of humanity, without which its tears and laughter are as impotent as the tears and laughter of children. That is why Miss Key’s feminism, this woman-worship that would have women cultivate laxness of mental tissue so that they shall dissolve into a hot emotional vapour that shall act as a Turkish bath to the Superman, is an offence not only against women but against the race.

Reading through this collection I was frequently reminded of Testament of a Generation: what years these were of passionate, uncompromising, yet humane writing in the service of both political and literary ideals! How well did West know Holtby and Brittain? Marcus’s introduction notes that to Brittain West was “the embodiment of the feminist cause, the twentieth-century successor to Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Berry / Bostridge biography mentions West’s friendly treatment of Brittain at a party in 1933 and there are scattered further references to letters and meetings. How stimulating it would have been to share in their conversations — and yet I’ve also been thinking, as I read West’s ruthless pronouncements, that this is not the kind of person I might like best in real life (West sounds difficult, if not quite as challenging a personality as Olivia Manning). Also, much as I appreciate West’s rhetorical flair, this is not the kind of writing I seek out in contemporary contexts, when I tend to find it tiresome. Though I certainly identify as a feminist, I let my Ms. subscription lapse in the mid 90s. I wonder why I enjoy polemics so much more at some historical distance. Or is it that these particular polemicists bring something to their work that isn’t there in the contemporary equivalents? Who would be the equivalents today of this “Fleet Street feminism” anyway? Jezebel? Feministing? What critics would you point to who combine strong political critique with a strong literary sensibility?

Holiday Traditions

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

Tree 2013

On Sunday, while the snow and sleet and freezing rain made a mess of things outside, we stayed cheerful inside as we carried on one of our favorite holiday traditions: decorating our Christmas tree while listening to Michael Bawtree’s recording of A Christmas Carol. There aren’t a lot of activities, holiday-related or otherwise, that all four of us are equally enthusiastic about, so one reason this is such a special time is that we really feel together during it — even though we all  participate in different ways (Maddie and I do the actual decorating, while the other two get cozy and just listen).

Rituals of one kind or another are of course fundamental to a sense of belonging, whether to a family or to a community, and one feature of academic life that I’ve written about here before is that because you rarely get to choose where you settle, you’re likely to be transplanted, and thus to be disconnected from the traditions that helped shape your identity. That’s not always a bad thing, I realize: when you are separated from your family it’s perfectly possible to idealize proximity! But rituals are something my own family was (is!) always very good at. Things weren’t absolutely the same every year (we used to joke about coming up with “brand new traditions”) but when I think back on my childhood I remember fondly (to give just one example) how we would “always” play charades until midnight on New Year’s Eve and then wait on the front porch until we heard the ships in the harbor before banging wildly on pots and pans to welcome in the new year. (We weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood who did this, so it didn’t make us pariahs…I don’t think!)

When my husband and I were first married, we usually traveled to stay with one or the other of our families at Christmas, but winter is not a good time for trips, especially if you’re teaching on both sides of the break. Then after we had children, the increasing costs and complications made our decision to stay home overdetermined. We’ve had the occasional visitor out here, if not for Christmas itself, at least for the lead-up to it (and one memorable year, because my brother was also living in Halifax, all the rest of my family came out!), but now by and large the four of us are on our own through the holidays, and we’ve gradually figured out what traditions work for us. The tree decorating is one. Another is an adaptation from my past: one of our traditions was “Advent Brunch,” a festive occasion usually on the first Sunday in December which marked (for our wholly secular family) the launch of the Christmas season. We broke out the holly-patterned china and the Santa decorations and the Christmas mugs and all the other paraphernalia that of course can’t have been, but seemed, eternal. We unpacked the Christmas records, too, and the books, and we got tiny presents (I especially remember, because I still have most of them, the new holiday pin tradition!).

Advent Treats

Something like this (though with a more modest menu and not quite so many trappings) has also become part of the Maitzen Family Christmas. We try to stick to the rule that there’s no (or very little) Christmas activity before then: though local stores had their Christmas stuff up before the Halloween decorations had quite come down, there were no carols or decorations in our house before December 1!  (I’m with Monica: “Rules help control the fun!”) The kids mock me about this rigidity sometimes, but I think they actually appreciate that special occasions stay special because they aren’t every day.

One ritual we came up with ourselves is our unusual strategy for gifts: we dole them out one per day once school gets out, keeping things relaxed and allowing time for appreciation and gratitude. We used to go on a Christmas lights drive around town on a suitably ice-free night; this tradition was cut short by a tragic car-sickness episode a couple of years ago … but we used to really enjoy it, so we are weighing the risks of trying again. Or maybe bundling up for a Christmas lights walk around our quiet neighborhood: that might make an excellent brand new tradition! Then there are the Christmas movies: we all love The Muppet Christmas Carol, so that’s another good time for togetherness, and then different combinations of us can be counted on to watch Scrooged, White Christmas, A Miracle on 34th Street, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and It’s a Wonderful Life at least once over the school break. All through December, we also enjoy our Advent calendar routine: we have one that has an (abridged) installment of A Christmas Carol for each day, so the kids take turns reading it — and, lately, acting it out (as of today we’re up to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come). This year we got another beautiful calendar that has an ornament in every window that then gets hung on the tree you can see as the centerpiece in the picture of our Advent Brunch table.

Holidays 2010 028

Because of our one-a-day present opening, Christmas Day itself is not the hyped-up occasion it is in many households, but we do keep up the tradition of putting out and filling Christmas stockings. I find it’s an excellent way to restock the kids with socks! I have a lot of fun picking out other little goodies for them too, and I keep up another of my family’s traditions by always topping the stockings off with a book. We have a traditional Christmas breakfast (pancakes) and dinner (roast pork with fixings), and dessert (apple crumble). The predictability adds to the pleasure: for one thing, it makes the preparation easier, and we all know we will enjoy the results. (Last year I actually made the radical decision to serve lamb instead. It turned out well, but it also turned out that Maddie doesn’t like lamb and we don’t like it a lot, or not as much as we like the pork — so this year we’re going back to the usual, though I have flirted with doing roast beef, which is what my grandmother “always” served us when we went over to her house for Christmas dinner.)

We’ve arrived at our family traditions through some trial and error. It was important to realize that we needed to find rituals that worked for us, with all our quirks and idiosyncrasies, rather than trying to relive our childhoods (or at least not entirely!) or live up to some imaginary ideal of what families should do on holidays. It turns out that we like things quiet: we’d rather see a few friends than have a big party (or go to one); we have no urge to stand outside in a crowd to cheer in the new year but prefer to watch a movie and turn in when we’re tired;  a holiday for us means time with fewer obligations and stresses, not more. Every so often it seems a bit too quiet to me, especially when I get reports from back home about everyone going to and fro and having all kinds of sociable fun. But we rush around a lot as it is, and so now, really, my favorite tradition of all is just taking my book and my Baileys and sitting to read where I can bask in the calming beauty of the tree.

Do you have holiday traditions you particularly enjoy? I know I’m not the only one who’s far from the people and places, and thus rituals, that I grew up with: what brand new traditions have you developed that work for you where you are now in your life? Do you embrace the quiet or relish the social whirl?

Weekend Miscellany: Bests and Worsts and Turgenev and Middlemarch and More!

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

As usual, the bloggers I follow have been putting up all kinds of good posts recently. Here’s a sampling!

At stevereads, the annual Best and Worst of the year extravaganza is in full flood. Lists already offered including Best History, Best Romance, Best Biography, Best Collected Letters, Best Reprints, Best Debut Fiction … and there’s more, and more to come. The range is extraordinary, the judgments vigorously pronounced, and the curmudgeonly digressions about the state of the (book) world today just add to the fun. Nobody I know or have ever known reads more, or more passionately, than Steve.

At Wuthering Expectations, Tom is reading Turgenev:

Turgenev may not have known what to do with the hero of Fathers and Sons once he created him, fleshed him out, and showed him from all sides.  So he killed him off, by disease.  Discerning critics have found this end unsatisfying in that it is arbitrary, too easy.  In a sense, yes.  But the next to last chapter, Bazarov’s death is so good that I do not care.

Vladimir Nabokov, judging by his notes in Lectures of Russian Literature, apparently taught this chapter simply by reading large parts of it aloud to his class.

The funny thing is that there is hardly a sentence in it that I would pull out as particularly good.  The quality is a question of urgency, of small movement, of the right amount of attention given to a scene before a quick cut to the next.  And of course the stakes are high.

There’s always a slightly sideways quality to Tom’s readings, by which I don’t mean they aren’t illuminating or interesting but rather the opposite. He finds his own way into every book he reads. I have never read Fathers and Sons or indeed most of the non-British literature he reads, so whatever he says about these books is inevitably fresh to me, but I always especially like it when he takes on Victorian novels or novelists that I think I already know well and makes me look and think again about how they do what they do.

At Tales from the Reading Room, litlove has a much more positive reaction to The Signature of All Things than I did:

This was altogether a much more convincing and and enjoyable riposte to the 19th century novel than Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and I think Elizabeth Gilbert has pulled off something quite special here.

I notice Gilbert’s novel made Steve’s 2013 ‘Honor Roll’ for fiction too. Geez, with friends like this … but in fact, this is all evidence that the real method of criticism is not finite declarations but coduction. In reading each other’s views, we test and reevaluate our own, and the goal cannot be some ultimate right reading, but only our most thoughtful, attentive, well-articulated ones.

At Shelf Love, Jenny has completed her posts on Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. “Such enjoyable books,” she concludes; “If you’ve been considering these, do take them down from your shelf and join me in reading them!” I have indeed been considering them, and I have a handsome Oxford edition that I got for Christmas or perhaps a birthday not that long ago. They sound so good I did indeed take it off my shelf … but then I remembered that I’ve been vowing to finish Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, before the winter term begins if I possibly can, and I’m confident that I can’t do both. I think I will hold The Forsyte Saga in reserve for my February break!

At The Little Professor, Miriam writes on Charles Palliser’s Rustication. I’ve never read The Quincunx, but Danielle at A Work in Progress has just finished it and is ambivalent. I think Rustication might be more my style: Miriam describes it as in the tradition of the sensation novel. I stopped reading before she gave away the big plot twist, in case I do get around to it!

Ana at Things Mean A Lot has been doing year-end posts as well, and this one on Favourite Picture Books made me feel all happy and nostalgic. I really must get a copy of Frederick. One consequence of moving away from my family home is that my family doesn’t have any of our old children’s books!

Among many interesting recent posts at Thinking in Fragments, this one on Laura Wilson’s The Riot stands out because I too am always looking for good new crime writing. Alex writes so convincingly about it that I went immediately to see if I could get my hands on the first in the series … but no luck at the library or any of our local bookstores! I’ll have to order it in — or add it to my wish list.

At Read React Review, Jessica posted her thoughts about Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester, which was also one of the first of Heyer’s novels I read. I didn’t like it at all then, but I reread it after I’d learned to enjoy Heyer and liked it much better.

Finally, 2013 really does start to seem like the Year of Middlemarch. Of course the most spectacular event was the launch of Middlemarch for Book Clubs! OK, maybe not spectacular. But at least I did get it built, and some day they will come! (I’m still working on how to make that happen.) But at The Toast they are leading a Middlemarch read-along in preparation for the launch of Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch in the new year. Too Fond is also doing a read-along. And at The Millions, Adelle Waldmann highlights Middlemarch for their Year in Reading feature. (Weirdly (for me), I did not teach Middlemarch in any course in 2013. This is shocking! I’ve been thinking of assigning it for the Dickens to Hardy course in Fall 2014 … but right now I’m feeling anxious about students’ ability to keep up with the amount of reading I typically assign, and I’d hate to be dragging them through it. I’ll be thinking about this as book orders come due after Christmas.)

 

“He was my shadow, or I was his”: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

The Scapegoat is the third novel I’ve read recently with a plot that turns on stolen identities. It’s really interesting how differently they deal with the dangerous temptation to be someone else. In each case, the usurper is at least somewhat sympathetic because what he wants is so simple and recognizable: belonging, acceptance, communion. But while in Highsmith’s Tom Ripley this longing becomes an amoral readiness to betray or kill to protect his deception, and in Tey’s Brat Farrar it leads to unexpected heroism in defense of the people he intended to defraud, in du Maurier’s John it becomes something deeper still: in taking over the life of Jean de Gué, our protagonist is drawn not only into a history and a family steeped in their own secrets and lies, but into his own soul. What kind of man does he want to be — is he capable of being? How can his presence, as an undetected stranger in their midst, change the lives of the people Jean de Gué has damaged and now abandoned? In taking their pain and suffering into himself, can he free them somehow from the burdens of their past, even as he’d hoped that to be among them would liberate him from his own failures?

When the novel opens, John, a repressed English scholar and lecturer in French history, has been traveling in France. His pleasure in the sights has been haunted by his sense that for all his expertise, he remains an “alien” among the people whose language he speaks like a native:

Years of study, years of training, the fluency with which I spoke their language, taught their history, described their culture, had never brought me closer to the people themselves. . . . My knowledge was library knowledge, and my day-by-day experience no deeper than a tourist’s gleaning. The urge to know was with me, and the ache. The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an everlasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality. Others could force an entrance and break the barrier down: not I. I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them.

He longs to come out from the shadows of his “pale self,” to let loose “the man within” and discover “what urgings and longings he might possess.” Though his new identity is not freely chosen but thrust upon him, it is also the realization of his dream “to unlock the door”; no wonder that as he drives towards the chateau to take up Jean’s life, John finds himself rejoicing:

I drove faster still, overtaking the cars ahead of me, possessed by a reckless feeling I had never known before, the sensation that I myself did not matter any more. I was wearing another man’s clothes, driving another man’s car, and no one could call me to account for any action. For the first time I was free.

At first it’s just a lark to John, who can hardly believe nobody realizes he’s not really Monsieur le Comte. That’s a stretch for the reader’s credulity too, I have to say, but the dog at least growls at him (much to the family’s puzzlement), and we learn eventually that Jean’s mistress, too, was not taken in (“A woman would have to be a great fool not to distinguish between one man and another, making love”) — though she hasn’t turned him away either. Figuring out the puzzle that is Jean de Gué’s life is initially interesting and confusing but not terribly meaningful to John; his own missteps cause no deep feeling or alarm. Before long he realizes, though, that in moving into the chateau he has, however inadvertently, inserted himself into a complex and still unfolding story, and the shift from “library knowledge” to real life is fraught with dangers, the worst of them not physical but moral. To be “one of them” is to be called upon to act, even (as head of the family) to lead. But with what motive, and to what result?

Du Maurier brilliantly evokes the chateau’s brooding atmosphere, which we see, through the eyes of John the historian, as part of a broader national story of threat and struggle, of longing and destructive indifference:

The chateau, which had seemed a jewel in sunlight, was more forbidding at the approach of dusk. The roof and turrets that had blended against blue took on a sharpened tone against the changing sky. I thought how like a bastion it might have been when water filled the moat, before the eighteenth-century facade of the central portion linked the early Renaissance towers. Were they any more lonely, the silken ladies peering through those slits, than the Renée and the Françoise of today, with the clammy water damping the mouldering walls, and the forest, thick and shaggy, shrouding the very door? Did the wild boar, fiery-eyed, come rooting where the cattle wandered now, and the thin horn of the huntsman sound in early morning when the mist still clung about the trees? What drinking, roystering nobles of Anjou must have clattered forth over the drawbridge to hunt and fight and kill; what love-making by night, what long uneasy births, what sudden deaths? And now, in another time, how much of this was repeated, oddly, in a different way, with stifled emotions and hungers more obscure. Cruelty was of a deeper kind today, wounding the spirit, hurting the secret self, but then it was more openly brutal: only the tough survived, and the lonely Françoise or the frustrated Renée of that age went like blown candles into disease and death, lamented or forgotten by their lords, who, prototype of Jean de Gué, feasted and fought, shrugging a velvet shoulder.

It’s more recent events, of the kind that wound the spirit, that have set in motion the particular conflicts of Jean’s generation, and thus John’s new reality: the war-time occupation, and the subsequent brutal accounting between resistance fighters and collaborators, have set family and friends against each other, but also provided useful cover for other, more personal, reckonings. As John untangles the threads of Jean’s past actions and current relationships, he gradually feels himself becoming part of the history that he had previously only read about in books, and this in turn fills him with a powerful longing to do right by not just the people but the place:

I was no longer isolated, watching apart, numb with exhaustion, but one among many, part of St. Gilles. . . . I knew suddenly, with conviction, that it was not a stranger’s curiosity that drew me to them, a sentimental attachment to the picturesque, but something deeper, more intimate, a desire so intense for their wellbeing and their future that although akin to love it resembled pain. This longing, strongly felt, was yet somehow impersonal: it did not spring from a wish to stand well with them, and it embraced, in some curious fashion, not only the village people and those who now seemed part of me, sleeping within the chateau, but inanimate things beyond — the contour of a hill, a sloping sandy road, the vine clinging to the master’s house, the forest trees.

 Even before this point John has, rather bumblingly, been trying to act in the best interests of his strange, unhappy new family. He’s not overtly successful, but his good intentions are perhaps what Jean’s mistress acknowledges when she remarks, “you have something that he doesn’t possess . . . You may call it tendresse.” It may be, though, that his best course is not to live among them but to leave, taking with him everything he has learned, every burden or grief or sin he has shared while in Jean’s place. When the novel begins, John is contemplating a stay at the Abbaye de la Grand-Trappe: perhaps there among the monks, he had hoped, he would “discover what to do with failure.” “They might not give the answer,” he confides in Jean de Gué on the night of their fateful meeting, “but they could tell me where to look for it.” He ends up at the chateau instead: it is in action, not silence and solitude, that he finds his answer, and his belonging.

But is this success?  John believes it is just failure in another form: “[failure] merely became transformed. It turned into love for St. Gilles. So the problem remains the same.” After all, he doesn’t belong — not really — and as the novel ends he is once more on the road to the Abbaye, now with a different question that is somehow also the same one: “What do I do with love?” In seeking freedom, he found new obligations; in being someone else, he became, more than ever, himself.