“I was Mrs. Hawkins”: Muriel Spark, A Far Cry From Kensington

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

farcryMy local book club met last night to discuss Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington. We always try to follow some kind of thread from one book to the next; after reading two novels by Elizabeth Taylor we were thinking about other mid-20th century women novelists and while Muriel Spark seemed like an obvious choice, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie seemed a little too obvious, plus some of the group had read it before. (I hadn’t, but was finally prompted to by this discussion.) We chose A Far Cry From Kensington a bit randomly from among her other novels — I think the Amazon description of it as including “shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide” may have been decisive, because, after all, how tempting does that make it sound?!

So. Well. Hmm. I guess I could start by noting that I didn’t do terribly well with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — it’s not that I didn’t like it or find it interesting, but as I reported at the time, I struggled to make sense of it. The comments I got on that post helped me see how I might do better, but they didn’t do much to prepare me for A Far Cry From Kensington, which I found even more baffling — formally baffling, because it seemed to jump around from genre to genre and tone to tone; thematically baffling, because I couldn’t understand why it included the different elements it included; and baffling to me as a reader because in spite of all the things about it that bemused me, I didn’t hate it, and in fact I kind of liked it. Despite my confusion, I didn’t resent the book the way, say, Mrs. Hawkins, in the novel, resents Hector Bartlett’s The Eternal Quest, a study of the Romantic-Humanist Position.” I may not really get Muriel Spark’s fictional method or mission, but she’s so obviously artful about whatever it is she’s doing that I feel confident she is not the novelistic equivalent of a pisseur de copie…which is the epithet Mrs. Hawkins so fatefully hisses at the insufferable Hector.

Mrs. Hawkins — large, observant, acerbic, insomniac — is the best thing about A Far Cry From Kensington. I was actually going to write my whole post about the advice she hands out so confidently (and bafflingly! why does she give us so much advice?), but while googling around for insight into the novel, I came across this piece by Maud Newton, which is not only good about Mrs. Hawkins’s advice but smarter about the whole novel than I can be. So I will quote only this one bit of it:

It is my advice to any woman getting married to start, not as you mean to go on, but worse, tougher, than you mean to go on. Then you can relax and it comes as a pleasant surprise.

Even Mrs. Hawkins doesn’t know why she can’t help calling Hector a pisseur de copie (“a hack writer of journalistic copy,” she helpfully explains) but she can’t stop doing it and won’t retract it, either. She’s really quite virulent on the topic of Hector’s terrible writing:

Pisseur de copie! Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it . . . His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.

Little does she know that drawing this line in the rhetorical sand will cost her not one but two jobs in publishing, which the novel endlessly reminds us are both hotly desired and terribly recompensed.  Spark is acidly funny about the cliquishness of the publishing world, in which a word in the right place from the right celebrity author means more than any amount of dedication to literature. “Ah yes, in fact, books,” says one of Mrs. Hawkins’s employers:

Yes, many of our staff here are in fact fairly interested in books. One of our senior colleagues in fact was saying at a meeting only the other day that he thought he might perhaps have a shot at getting back to his first love — books.

Hector has the backing of a famous novelist, Emma Loy, who exercises her influence against Mrs. Hawkins (only, years later, to end up herself a victim of Hector’s malice, as Mrs. Hawkins placidly relates). Hector’s vengeful plotting against Mrs. Hawkins goes far beyond getting her fired, though, and realizing the extent of his insidious scheming is both amusing and, again, baffling. Spark lays her clues out so ingeniously that it’s easy to miss “that glint of a thin trail, like something a snail leaves in its slow path” even though, unlike Mrs. Hawkins, we know we’re looking for it.

Right up to the ‘reveal,’ in fact, the novel seems more random than plotted itself — which may, of course, be part of Spark’s art. And then I was surprised, rather than satisfied, by the conclusion, which draws together elements as disparate as a hysterical, ultimately suicidal, Polish refugee and the absurd pseudo-science of radionics (“no more a subject for mockery,” Mrs. Hawkins observes, “than the claims of all our religions”). And what about the parts that seemed unrelated to that plot, like Mrs. Hawkins’s brief, violent marriage (“Now, it is my advice to anyone getting married, that they should first see the other partner when drunk”), or the unwed mother in the upstairs attic whose father proposes to Mrs. Hawkins because “it would be good for Isobel to have a mother” (“at the age of twenty-nine, I wasn’t minded to take on a girl of twenty-two as a daughter”), or “the Boys” she goes to work for who “always got up when we came into the room” (“Is that American or is it homosexual?”)? I don’t understand why these are the ingredients of the novel — and yet each, in its own way, in the reading moment, was interesting or funny or temptingly quotable.

This Week In My Classes: The Seventh Season Begins

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I began writing posts about my teaching plans and experiences because I thought it might contribute to demystifying our profession — and perhaps counteract, just a little bit, the way it is sometimes demonized (or ridiculed).  I discovered after that first year that there were real benefits in this for me, and, not incidentally (if less directly) for my students, and so I’ve kept it up ever since (you can browse through the archive of posts here, if you’re interested). At this point, I’ve talked about pretty much all the courses in my regular teaching rotation at least once, but while there’s some repetition, I do vary the reading lists from time to time. And I’ve also strayed occasionally from straight-up reporting to broader reflections  on different aspects of pedagogy or extended reflections on our readings, so for me at least that keeps the exercise interesting.

The-Big-SleepHeading into my seventh season of this series, I have no specific ambitions or plans for it beyond keeping it up and seeing what arises from week to week. One of this term’s classes will already be quite familiar to regular visitors here as I have taught it literally every year I’ve been doing these posts, and that’s Mystery and Detective Fiction. I change it up a bit each time, and this year’s innovation is — finally! — switching to The Big Sleep from The Maltese Falcon. I’ve been thinking about this since at least 2009, when I read it and complained that I found it tiresome: “sexist, homophobic, convoluted.” Rereading this summer, I didn’t love it but I certainly appreciated it more (but yes, it is convoluted, and I’m also still pretty sure it is sexist, though I’ll invite debate about that in class when we get there). The only other tweak is that I’ve cut most of the short fiction: students often remark in their evaluation that there’s a lot of reading in the course, and this allows me to stretch out our time for some of the novels a bit more without losing anything that makes me particularly sad. Today we talked about “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and Friday we begin discussions of The Moonstone. Yes, I always reread it — though at this point I do sometimes skim selectively. I almost never get caught out on a detail I’ve forgotten!

copperfield

My other class this term is The British Novel from Austen to Dickens. I’ve taught this class pretty regularly in recent years but I haven’t assigned Waverley since before I started blogging. I stopped assigning it because the students were so petulant about it in their evaluations — most of them, I should say, as there were always a few who really got it and loved it. We’ll see how it goes this year:  it may well provide fodder for a post or two. The other big change is bringing in David Copperfield as my Dickens option: in previous incarnations of this class I have done Hard Times, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, or A Christmas Carol. It’s our only really loose baggy monster, and it does come right in the middle of term, but I’ve tried to allow enough time for it in the schedule that it won’t kill us all — or kill everyone’s enthusiasm for the class. I’m sure they’ll love it. How could they not? Right? Please? Right now we’re working our way through Persuasion and as far as I can tell they’re keeping up and appreciating it.

“The Rough Rocky Depths”: May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

journalsolitude“Plant Dreaming Deep has brought me many friends,” says May Sarton early in Journal of a Solitude, “…but I have begun to realize that, without my intention, that book gives a false view.” She worried that she had given an overly idealistic picture of her life alone in her restored New Hampshire farmhouse, which she describes in Plant Dreaming Deep with such joyous lyricism: “the anguish of my life here — its rages — is hardly mentioned.” She wrote Journal of a Solitude as a counterweight:

Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. . . . I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines.

She kept this journal for a year and recorded both those heights and those depths.

I’m definitely among those who were won over by Plant Dreaming Deep. As I said in the comments on my post on it, though, I didn’t find it idealizing: in the post itself I wrote, “Sarton’s story here is not of uninhibited bliss: there’s guilt and anxiety, as already mentioned, but also fear, hard work, and constant demands on her self-reliance.” Still, Journal of a Solitude did seem darker and more fretful. Days may begin well but often end in tears; friends are welcome but their departure is a relief; traveling is less invigorating than exhausting: “I armed myself in patience and before I finally got back here, I needed it.” Her solitary home is a refuge from the pressures of the external world, but often provides insufficient distractions or buffers against inner turmoil:

I woke in tears this morning. I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically. Can I learn to control resentment and hostility, the ambivalence, born somewhere far below the conscious level? If I cannot, I shall lose the person I love. There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour — put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I canot achieve it inside me.

But while there are tears and rages and fits of intense, frustrated depression, her emotional life is not one deep trough. Her garden especially brings her pleasure, and here, as in Plant Dreaming Deep, she writes about it, and the flowers it yields, with pungent vividness:

 A gray day . . . but, strangely enough, a gray day makes the bunches of daffodils in the house have a particular radiance, a kind of white light. From my bed this morning I could look through at a bunch in the big room, in that old Dutch blue-and-white drug jar, and they glowed. I went out before seven in my pajamas, because it looked like rain, and picked a sampler of twenty-five different varieties. It was worth getting up early, because the first thing I saw was a scarlet tanager a few feet away on a lilac bush–stupendous sight! There is no scarlet so vivid, no black so black.

 You almost want to finish her paragraph with “ah–bright wings!”

While I didn’t really find Journal of a Solitude that different or that much darker than Plant Dreaming Deep, I did find it more episodic and fragmented, perhaps because the earlier journal tells the story of her finding, fixing, and learning to live in her New Hampshire home, while this one does not have as clear a narrative arc. It does turn out to be about a particular turning point in her life — or at least it covers what turns out to be a turning point, namely her decision to move away from the farmhouse and into a house on the Maine coast. This is a development that occurs fairly far along, however, an opportunity that seems to arise more or less out of the blue, so it’s not as if it is written as a farewell to Nelson.

Life rarely has the coherence of fiction, however, and journals especially — written, as they are, in the moment — can hardly be expected to anticipate or be structured around patterns that will emerge only in the future. That’s a luxury for memoir or biography. Simply as a record of Sarton’s experiences and responses to them, Journal of a Solitude had plenty to interest me. For instance, it’s during this year that she first meets Carolyn Heilbrun, whose essay on Sarton I refer to in my post on Plant Dreaming Deep. I enjoyed seeing the relationship from the other side. With her letter of introduction, Heilbrun sends Sarton some reprints of her articles. “I dived into one on Bloomsbury at once,” says Sarton, who “knew Virginia Woolf slightly.” I can’t resist quoting extensively from her remarks on Woolf, not least because they end up at what is still a familiar place:

What a relief to find an essay that neither sneers at nor disparages Virginia Woolf! The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless — not only the novels (every one a break-through in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out! And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaity and fun of it all, the huge sense of life!  . . .

It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter whether she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine — why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? . . . Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented towards the masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true?

 These comments resonate in the journal itself partly because Sarton struggles very hard during this period with her own status as a writer. The entry immediately following records her devastated response to “an annihilating review in the Sunday Times,” which continues to pain her in her low moments:

What a lonely business it is . . . from the long hours of uncertainty, anxiety, and terrible effort while writing such a long book, to the wild hopes (for it looked like a possible best seller, and the Digest has it for their condensed books) and the inevitable disaster at the end. I have had many good reviews and cannot really complain about that. What I have not had is the respect due what is now a considerable opus. I am way outside somewhere in the wilderness. And it has been a long time of being in the wilderness. But I would be crazy if I didn’t believe that I deserved better, and that eventually it will come out right. The alternative is suicide and I’m not about to indulge in that fantasy of revenge.

But she can be turned aside even from these dark thoughts by a glimpse of the sky: “Somehow the great clouds made the day all right, a gift of splendor as they sailed over our heads.”

Summer 2013 Reading Recap

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

My first classes of 2013-14 meet tomorrow morning: between that and the expectation that temperatures will drop into the single digits tonight, it’s clearly time to admit that summer is over — and along with it, Maddie and my annual summer reading project. (She exceeded her goal this year, so good for her!) Because blog traffic, like all things, slows down around here in the warm weather, I thought I’d do another quick review.

Orphan-Masters-Son-with-Pulitzer-BurstIt wasn’t as good a reading summer as last year, though to be fair, it’s hard to beat a season that includes Madame Bovary The Once and Future King, and Bring Up the Bodies along with my personal highlight, The Paper Garden. A late entry turned out to be this year’s winner: I was entirely moved and impressed by Adam Johnson’s grim, funny, poignant novel of North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son. The summer’s other notable highlight was a long overdue rereading of David Copperfield – it’s absurd, really, how much there is to savor, laugh at, and cry at in that one book. Rose Tremain’s Restoration was another notable experience.  Like Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels, it approaches history very personally, and (though quite different in tone and style)  it is also similarly ingenious about making individual character convincingly embody the spirit of an age. Finally, May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep was just wonderful. (I’ve just begun its dark twin, Journal of  a Solitude and am finding it equally engrossing, if less uplifting.)

straightSome of the summer’s other good reading came in clusters. The biggest of these, of course, was the Dick Francis cluster: I reread all 40 of his (solo) thrillers as I worked on my essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. But there was also the Barbara Pym cluster, which included not just The Sweet Dove Died, Jane and Prudence, and Excellent Women, but also Harrison Solow’s smart and lively Felicity and Barbara Pym. There was the Georgette Heyer cluster (I’ve finally figured out how to read her! Everyone was right – she’s delightful!): Arabella, Sprig Muslin, Black Sheep, and Cotillion — the last two of which I particularly enjoyed. And there was the Tana French cluster: In the Woods, The Likeness, and Faithful Place (which for my money is the best of these three – I haven’t read Broken Harbor yet). (I wrote a little about each of these at GoodReads but didn’t review them here in detail.)

Two other books I particularly enjoyed were Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which is, so far, my favorite Elizabeth Taylor novel: it’s an odd but very effective blend of poignancy and acidity (but I read it while on vacation, so again, no post here!) and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea — which I know I will reread in turbulent times, despite my faint unease at its self-helpishness.

mrspalfreyI shouldn’t forget the books I reviewed in Open Letters. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life was both good and bad, smart and limited — in my review I tried to do justice to its strengths while being as clear as I could about what I felt were its shortcomings. I’m particularly proud of that review, actually; I think it’s one of the best I’ve done. Deirdre David’s biography of Olivia Manning, in its turn, was consistently both smart and interesting — like its subject! (But not in any way as ornery!) And that reminds me that I read another excellent literary biography, Susan Kress’s Feminist in a Tenured Position: I’ll be reviewing this as I prepare for next term’s seminar on ‘Women and Detective Fiction’ (even though I won’t be able to assign Death in a Tenured Position this time around).

The only real disappointments were The Woman Upstairs (which, to be fair, I didn’t exactly think was a poor novel – I just disliked it) and The Sixteen Pleasures.

Going through this list, it seems like a decent summer’s reading after all, even if last year’s was better. When the reading’s not as good, neither is the writing, though: I felt a comparative lack of critical exhilaration as well as energy, as indicated by the number of books here I didn’t blog about at all. I was pretty energetic about some other summer projects, though, notably my Middlemarch for Book Clubs website, which went live in June. Now if I could only figure out the most effective way to publicize it … but that’s for another post, along with more thoughts about projects for the fall and beyond.

middlemarchsite

“Better than the truth”: The Orphan Master’s Son

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Orphan-Masters-Son-with-Pulitzer-Burst

It is a true story of love and sorrow, of faith and endurance . . . Sadly, there is tragedy. Yet there is redemption, too! And taekwondo!

What would it be like to live in a world where it is better not to know what happened to someone you love — where lies becomes the truth and truth lies, where props and costumes are interchangeable with the elements of real life? How do you find a way to make your life worth living when you don’t even know for sure who you are? What story do you tell about that life, or about yourself, when what you need is not a story “anyone could really believe” but “a story they can use”?

This is the grim, terrifying, funny, surreal world of Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is the best book I’ve read all summer. (It may be the best book I’ve read all year.) That the world Johnson conjures up so memorably is not a fictional dystopia but, as far as his research and his imagination can determine, the actual world of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea makes his novel only more painful and affecting. In the author interview included with the novel, Johnson notes that “most of the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the real world,” but, he adds

I felt I actually had to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea, as in the kwan li so gulags, the reports of which were so harrowing — forced abortions, amputations, communal executions — that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in.

Yet many of these details are in The Orphan Master’s Son, if only in passing, and it’s hard to contemplate what a darker version might read like, never mind be like:

When I first arrived at Division 42, the preferred method of reforming corrupted citizens was the lobotomy. . . All you needed was a twenty-centimeter nail. You’d lay the subject out on a table and sit on his chest. . . . Careful not to puncture anything, you’d run the nail in along the top of the eyeball, maneuvering it until you felt the bone at the back of the socket. Then with your palm, you gave the head of the nail a good thump. After punching through the orbital, the nail moved freely through the brain. Then it was simple: insert fully, shimmy to the left, shimmy to the right, repeat with other eye. . .

We were told there were whole lobotomy collectives where former subversives now knew nothing but good-natured labor for the benefit of all. But the truth proved far different. I went with Sarge once . . . to interrogate a guard at one of these collectives, and we discovered no model labor farm. The actions of all were blunted and stammering. The laborers would rake the same patch of ground countless times and witlessly fill in holes they’d just dug. They cared not whether they were clothed or naked and relieved themselves at will.

Part of the brilliance of the novel, I think, is that Johnson neither lays out these horrors in prosaic exposition — more explanation would not make more sense of them, after all, and might only smother their human impact — nor overwhelms us  with the scale of the national trauma that is his underlying subject. The novel is full of individual trauma, both directly represented and indirectly indicated, and the layers of meaning Johnson builds up prompt us to scale up their ruinous experience without losing ourselves in abstractions. Eventually it’s clear that the protagonist, the orphan Jun Do, is (as his name suggests) a kind of John Doe, an everyman, who stands in for all the lost individuality of his countrymen; his dreams, his love, his desperation, and his courage are the distilled essence of the humanity of a population forced into lives of near-total artifice and repression. But Johnson makes him too much himself to be reduced to an allegorical figure or for his story to be read only in such formulaic terms.

The first part of the novel proceeds chronologically, taking us along on Jun Do’s journey from the orphanage to Prison 33 and, less literally, from an unquestioning servant of the state to a man who “hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities.”  The second part begins with the arrival at Division 42 for interrogation of a man known as Commander Ga; we gradually reconstruct the events that brought him there.

What is the truth of this man’s identity? Earlier in the novel, Jun Do told a story about his life that caused him to be mistaken for Commander Ga. Like all stories in this unsettling world, this one is as true as its effects make it, as authoritative as those who believe in and act on it. When people can disappear and then simply be replaced, no identity is authentic or lasting — you become who you are said to be. “Where we are from,” explains an older comrade to Jun Do,

stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

“If they say you’re an orphan, then you’re an orphan,” Jun Do explains in his turn, to a puzzled American handler during an unlikely visit to Texas that is among the sadder and more surreal sequences in the novel:

If they tell you to go down a hole, well, you’re suddenly a guy who goes down holes. If they tell you to hurt people, then it begins. . . if they tell him to go to Texas to tell a story, suddenly he’s nobody but that.

In this world, once “the Dear Leader has declared you the real Commander Ga,” you are Commander Ga . . . until someone declares it otherwise. After all, what matters is not that the story be either true or believable, but that it be useful. The result is not always destructive:

“People find your movies inspiring,” he said.

“Do they?”

“I find them inspiring. And your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That’s better than the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That there’s no point to it. It’s just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone.”

Though the first part of the novel is gripping reading, with flawless control over tone and pacing, I found Johnson’s technical accomplishment most impressive in the second part. As we shuttle between the narrative of the otherwise unnamed Interrogator, the continuing story of Commander Ga, and the official version of events (told as if installments of the ‘Best North Korean Story’) the novel never loses its coherence or its momentum. Indeed, during the final sections, as the pieces fall into place and the Casablanca allusions take on their full relevance, I found the suspense entirely nerve-wracking. Johnson is as masterful at different voices — and as fluent in multiple genres — as David Mitchell, but reading Cloud Atlas the display of writerly ingenuity distanced me from the novel, whereas reading The Orphan Master’s Son I just felt pulled deeper and deeper in. He’s especially artful with the sanitized banality of the official communiqués: while these initially seem like comic interludes, they become increasingly sinister because we realize they will overpower the other stories (the true stories, the human stories) they subsume. The ebullient doublespeak is particularly revolting because we know what it denies — for instance, that there are no “retired” people at the “resort” of Wonsan:

“Please,” she said. “Give me the joy of seeing my mother at the premiere.”

Citizens, citizens. Ours is a culture that respects the elderly, that grants them their need of rest and solitude in the final years. After a life of labor, haven’t they earned some remote quietude? Can’t the greatest nation on earth spare a little silence for the aged? . . . But we throw up our hands. Who can deny Sun Moon? Ever the exception, so pure of emotion is she.

“She’ll be sitting in the front row,” the Dear Leader told her. “I guarantee.”

Citizens, if the Dear Leader says it, that settles it. Nothing could prevent Sun Moon’s mother from attending that movie premiere now. Only an utterly unforeseeable occurrence — a train mishap, possibly, or regional flooding — could stand in the way of this joyous reunion. Nothing short of a diphtheria quarantine or a military sneak attack could keep Sun Moon’s dreams from coming true!

It’s not just that we know the train mishap or military sneak attack need not actually happen to be the excuse for  Sun Moon’s mother never reappearing: it’s that everyone knows it, and there’s no recourse against the abusively cheerful tissue of lies. Johnson tells us that “much of the propaganda, especially the funnier lines, I pulled straight from the pages of Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun Workers’ Party newspaper.” When the line between satire and realism disappears, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How can intolerable suffering be made so absurd?

It isn’t really absurd, of course. The juxtaposition of stories and voices allows us to realize the many dimensions of pain and grief, and how people’s suffering is exacerbated by its denial and by the state’s relentless revisionism. Our laughter is initially at the transparent and self-serving dishonesty of the state communiqués: their buffoonery defies belief. By the end, though, those jaunty narratives filled me with unsettling rage: that they have the last word seems the ultimate violation of the people whose lives they have made a mockery of. That it’s true, though fictional, is the most appalling thing of all.

The Interrogator’s library of confessions is one form of resistance within the novel to these offenses against human dignity. In creating his “citizen biographies” he believes he is preserving something otherwise lost, and certainly not present in the Central Records office, as he realizes when he looks at his parents’ files:

the files were filled with dates and stamps and grainy images and informant quotes and reports from housing blocks, factory committees, district panels, volunteer details, and Party boards. Yet there was no real information in them, no sense of who these two old people were, what brought them from Manpo to be line workers for life at the Testament to the Greatness of Machines factory.

 But even his meticulously bound confessions, which contain “an entire life, with all its subtleties and motivations,” are worth less than intimacy, a concept that is initially hard for him to understand:

“Intimacy? What is that?”

“It’s when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.”

I had to laugh. “No secrets?” I asked him. “It’s not possible. We spend weeks extracting entire biographies from subjects, and always when we hook them up to the autopilot, they blurt out some crucial detail we’d missed. So getting every secret out of someone, sorry, it’s just not possible.”

“No,” Ga said. “She gives you her secrets. And you give her yours.”

At the end, the Interrogator has “finally been intimate,” and in that voluntary sharing of what he knows to be true he finds the most precious freedom of all: the freedom to be himself. That in his world this epiphany is no prelude to a happy ending is the ultimate and grimly predictable catastrophe of The Orphan Master’s Son. The only hint of grace is that in his final suffering, though he does not know the real identity of the man he’s with, at least he is not alone. That’s not much, but perhaps it’s better than the truth.

Rose Tremain, Restoration

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restoration

I really enjoyed Rose Tremain’s Restoration, which an excellent friend promptly posted to me when I needed a bit of cheering up. (Everyone should have a friend like that!) Not that Restoration is very cheerful, but a good novel is always a tonic, isn’t it? And Restoration is awfully good. Like Wolf Hall, it’s a historical novel that is less about history than about character — which is not to say that these aren’t books steeped in research and full of marvelously tactile historical details, but that the detail never seems decorative (or pedantic) because it is so integral to the lives into which we enter. In both novels, also, those lives are not just individual characters but embody the character of their age.

Restoration‘s structuring idea is right there in its title, which is both the familiar name of the era during which the novel is set (the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II) and the encapsulated story of its protagonist, Robert Merivel. Merivel’s personal flourishing, fall, and reinvention represent (on Tremain’s telling) the larger struggles of an age marked by both gaudy materialism and earnest moral striving (embodied in Restoration by Merivel’s Quaker friend Pearce). The vacuousness of a life with no aim but luxury, and with no occupation but idle amateurism, brings Merivel little substantial happiness — and no reconciliation between his literal heart and his true heart, a dichotomy literalized for us early on when, as a student, Merivel has the opportunity to hold a living heart in his hand:

My hand entered the cavity. I opened my fingers and, with the same care I had applied, as a boy, to the stealing of eggs from birds’ nests, took hold of the heart, Still, the man showed no sign of pain. Fractionally, I tightened my grip. The beat remained strong and regular. I was about to withdraw my hand when the stranger said: ‘Are you touching the organ, Sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘don’t you feel the pressure of my fingers?’

‘No. I feel nothing at all.’ . . .

Ergo, the organ we call the human heart and which is defined, in our human consciousness, as the seat – or even deified as the throne – of all powerful emotion, from unbearable sorrow to ecstatic love, is in itself utterly without feeling.

A selfish lout — a buffoon, even — for most of the early action of the novel, Merivel is brought low only to be restored — not to riches but to human dignity.

It’s not a euphoric redemption story, however, but something more difficult and uneasy: Merivel’s progress is halting, his character imperfect, his actions often despicable. Merivel says it best himself: “I am erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad.”

Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_Self-Portrait_-_Google_Art_Project

His account of his own life hides none of these unattractive characteristics: aptly for the period, it’s a ‘warts and all‘ portrait. Tremain neatly incorporates this theme into the novel itself through the painter Finn, who begins by training Merivel in artistic idealization and ends a successful painter of “merchants, barristers, schoolmasters, drapers, cabinet-makers, clerks.” Finn’s new method is actually Merivel’s idea: “do not paint me as a rich man, dressed up in satin or with a sea battle going on behind my head; paint me as I am, in my old wig and in my shirtsleeves and in this simple room.” This idea, which “had only that second entered [his] mind,” is a sign of how far Merivel has come from his earlier ostentatious luxury and preening self-indulgence.

Merivel’s medical training is his one truly useful skill. He tries to dissociate himself from it because it interferes with his pleasures – on his wedding night, for instance (a vexed occasion anyway, as his new wife is the king’s mistress and the marriage designed to be a sham) he is overcome with horror during a musical performance:

I stare at Sir Joshua’s face, looking down towards his viola, and, layer by layer, in my anatomist’s sadness, I peel back skin and muscle and nerve and tendons, until I can see only the white bone of his skull, the empty sockets of the eyes . . .

All my anatomical studies seem to have brought me to a great sadness. When a man plays a viola da gamba, I want to share in his joy, not see his skull. For where will such visions end? . . . Such a perpetual and visible awareness of mortality would, I am certain, bring me to despair in a very short time. . . .

I must avoid, then, coming to despair and madness. I must try to forget anatomy. Forget it utterly.

But though he doesn’t understand this for some time, it’s precisely this attempt to forget what is real that sends Merivel close to madness and despair: close in both senses, as he ends up, at his lowest ebb, assisting Pearce and a group of other Friends at a hospital for the insane, and also ends up himself on the verge of what might be madness — seeing things and hearing sounds that aren’t really there, lost in “a colossal epidemic of dreaming.”

Tremain is too wise to make medicine a simple cure for Merivel: he does not, for instance, discover a miraculous cure for the plague and rise up heroically sure in his vocation — instead he ends up peddling what he himself considers a quack remedy for it. He doesn’t save anybody with a brilliant surgery — instead, he sits by largely helpless while two people very close to him die. There’s no inspirational turning point or epiphany. But his experiences strip away the pretense in his life as surely as they strip away his excess body fat:

I had grown most peculiarly thin. The waist of the breeches was too large for me by more than two inches, so that the wretched things would not stay up, and, when I put the coat on my back, it hung out from my body like a cape. . . .

For the whole of my life I had never been thin. . . . Now, all the flesh was falling away and every bone in me being slowly unsheathed and made visible.

“I began,” he concludes, “to consider the possibility that I was dying.” This moment seems to me to bring us back to his horror at the viola player’s skull: in acknowledging his own mortality, Merivel is finally ready to begin living a life in which his body and his spirit work together. And so he returns to the home he once prized (and over-decorated) so greedily and is given a chance to start again.

Barbara Messud: The Excellent Women Upstairs

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

She’s an ordinary woman leading a quiet life – no thrills, no romance, few expectations, just her work, her friends, and the comforting knowledge that everyone relies on her common sense. In a crisis, she can be counted on to make tea. All this changes when the new couple comes on the scene. The wife is an energetic professional in a whirl of commitments and contacts; the husband is a suave charmer. As she is drawn into their circle, our heroine finds herself both energized and resentful. What, exactly, is her role? What does she mean to these new people? What has happened to her life since they came — and what will happen when they leave?

messudAs my mash-up title suggests, this is the basic plot outline of two very different novels: Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952). I read The Woman Upstairs a month or so ago and though I found it a page-turner, I ended up not liking it very much. It’s not that I minded the “unlikable” narrator: as I said in my piece on Olivia Manning (apparently quite an unlikable woman herself), “the chief obligation of a writer, . . . as of a character, is not that she be nice but that she be interesting.” The problem I ultimately had with Messud’s Nora was that I did not find her very interesting: she was too much up in my face all the time about how angry she was, and so the novel gave me no sense of discovery about her. The novel was a page-turner because I wondered what would happen and why exactly she was in such a rage. But the answers to both questions were rather disappointing. Nora’s anger especially seemed confused — which is fine for her as a character (she has no obligation to be crystal clear about her own emotional state, and anger does tend to mess things up) but not for the novel, which to me seemed to be trying to make a broader political and feminist case for anger out of one woman’s very personal neuroses and bad judgment.

But it was the artlessness of Nora’s narration that I found particularly tedious after a while: there’s no revelation to it, no subtlety compared to, for instance, Villette, which was the Brontë novel I kept thinking of as I read The Woman Upstairs. The explicit inter-text for Messud’s novel is Jane Eyre, which is a pretty angry novel, to be sure. But Jane’s retrospective narration adds a controlling layer of meaning, and Jane is more admirably assertive than Nora in pursuit of her own selfulfilment. That’s the Victorianist in me coming out, perhaps, but I got quite irritated at Nora’s complaining: stop moping (or ranting, which is just a louder version of the same thing) and get on with your life! Villette, in turn, is a much darker, twistier novel about the differences between calm surfaces and tormented desires, about repression and resentment and bitterness. And Lucy Snowe (cold, like her name, and coy, and judgmental, and yes, angry) makes us figure her out — and she doesn’t make it easy! There’s a readerly excitement in working out just who Lucy is and what she’s feeling that for me has no equivalent in The Woman Upstairs. For all its cleverness (and there are lots of smart things about it), Messud’s novel ultimately seemed kind of obvious (the big surprise at the end – who didn’t see that coming the minute they knew about Sirena’s cameras?).

pymI think this is why I liked Excellent Women so much better. It’s so understated that a lot of it nearly slips past unnoticed, but as a result, while it lacks the driving forward momentum of The Woman Upstairs, its rewards are both more subtle and more surprising. We almost don’t know that Mildred is ever angry at the way those around her treat her as an accessory to their lives or assume they know what she needs or (most annoying of all) whom she loves. “Perhaps,” she observes dryly at one point, “I really enjoyed other people’s lives more than my own,” but over the course of the novel we can’t help but realize how tired she is of being one of the “excellent women” — the women who are always depended on but are somehow never part of the action on their own behalf – “excellent women whom one respects and esteems” but never truly sees. “I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible,” says her friend William, “such an excellent woman.” “It was not the excellent women who got married,” Mildred reflects a bit later, “but people like Allegra Gray, who was not good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up.”

It’s Helena and her smoothly flirtatious husband Rocky who play the Shahids’ role in Excellent Women. “Things were much simpler before they came,” Mildred thinks. They stir things up, but in doing so they bring things to the surface that might have been better off left undisturbed. When they go, she’ll still have her old occupations, but the Napiers are more blunt than the Shahids ever are to Nora about how her options look to them:

‘What will you do after we’ve gone?’ Helena asked.

‘Well, she had a life before we came,’ Rocky reminded her. ‘Very much so – what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.’

‘I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn’t have a full life in the accepted sense,’ said Helena.

‘Oh, she’ll marry,’ said Rocky confidently. They were talking about me as if I wasn’t there.

‘Everard might take her to hear a paper at the Learned Society,’ suggested Helena. ‘That would widen her outlook.’

‘Yes, it might,’ I said humbly from my narrowness.

Right there we see the genius of Excellent Women in microcosm: if you weren’t already enraged on Mildred’s behalf at the complacent condescension of her supposed friends, that moment of self-deprecating bitterness ought to do the trick.  She doesn’t have to yell at us about how angry she is, but we don’t have to be in her company long to understand that there’s a lot going on in her head that isn’t “excellent” at all.

Unlike Helena, Mildred spends a lot of time washing up – often, Helena’s dishes. After one particularly dramatic incident at the Napiers’, she finds herself in their flat, “with the idea of making some order out of the confusion there” — but also, really, to get some time to herself. The scene beautifully literalizes her discomfort and frustration at the life she’s living:

 No sink has ever been built high enough for a reasonably tall person and my back was soon aching with the effort of washing up, especially as yesterday’s greasy dishes needed a lot of scrubbing to get them clean. My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

She feels “resentful and bitter towards Helena and Rocky” but she also admits “nobody had compelled me to wash these dishes or tidy this kitchen. It was the fussy spinster in me.” They aren’t altogether wrong, that is, in their assumptions about her, and yet (as her struggles through the novel with her hair, make-up, and clothing tell us) there’s nothing inevitable about the woman she is or is becoming. At the end of the novel she finds herself trapped once again in a part she doesn’t want to play but can’t seem to escape.

Messud’s novel suggests that anger is a necessary stage on the way to freedom, and in some ways its ending is triumphant: Nora has broken free of the Shahids’ spell and perhaps (though her narrative doesn’t convince me of this) gained some self-knowledge in the process. She is certainly fired up to do … something. There’s something infinitely sadder (if also, perversely, funnier) about Mildred’s conclusion, but I ended up a lot with a lot more invested in her fate, and feeling a lot more admiring of the art with which she was drawn.

Excellent Women is this month’s selection for the Slaves of Golconda reading group – look for more posts about it there in a few days.

The Reader as Writer: Giraldi and His Gratuitous Grumblings

Rohan Maitzen16 Comments

giraldiI don’t teach creative writing classes or attend MFA workshops or writers’ conferences, so I have no first-hand experience of the lamentable species William Giraldi is so annoyed about in his recent essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books: wannabe writers with “no usable knowledge of literary tradition [who] are mostly mere weekend readers of in-vogue books.” For all I know, his generalizations are entirely accurate, and speaking as someone who will almost certainly never write any novels but certainly does love reading them, it does seem wrong to assume (if anyone does assume this) that “writing doesn’t demand special skills” and right to urge (or even demand, if you’re in a position to) that aspiring authors read both widely and deeply.

I’m not quite so sure that I would second Giraldi’s specific prescription, however: “decades [of] training … in canonical literature” and “an unflagging religious immersion in the great books.” As Giraldi’s own examples show, there has always been disagreement about which books are “great” or what literature is or should be “canonical.” He is confident that Henry James underestimated Middlemarch (and I, obviously, concur entirely), and it’s obvious to him that the key to writing “the next great social novel” is to study “Stendhal, James, and Austen’s half-dozen” and that Keats represents “the perfection of craft.”  But these are evaluative claims to be debated, not absolutes to be declared. Moreover, the ideal of the “important writer” as one who “kneels at the altar of literature” has its conservative as well as its elevating aspect. That the many names he drops are so predictable seems to me a symptom of the limits of his own approach: he’s so much a product of his own canonical literary education (as, of course, we all are) that it doesn’t occur to him to mention Scott, Pope, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or to mention Elizabeth Gaskell or Winifred Holtby as great social novelists. Which is fine in a way, as of course he can’t mention everybody, but he also should not imply that we all know just what books really deserve our attention.  And this is all before we even get into the discussion about whether someone aspiring to write about contemporary society might not learn something from the novels of Jodi Picoult. Giraldi apparently reads Jeffrey Eugenides without regret (at any rate, he quotes from The Marriage Plot): who is he to turn his nose up at other people’s choices? (And if people want to write like Dan Brown, well, neither Giraldi nor I will buy their books, but not all bestsellers are “lobotomized,” and before we conflate “popular” and “worthless” let’s pause to think about Dickens for a moment.)

Still, I think that discussions about which books we value and why are important ones to have. I feel fortunate to have had some very stimulating conversations about this kind of thing here at Novel Readings, usually to my own edification. Giraldi’s tone strongly suggests he isn’t interested in having a conversation – his piece is a polemic. However, it does quite rightly, if only implicitly, challenge us to think about how far we agree with him, who we might rather, or also, cite, and what we think books are for anyway. That’s all good, then. The bone I really want to pick with him is about something else – something tangential, it seems to me, to his main purpose, and gratuitously insulting to a lot of people who actually share his evident passion for reading and writing about literature.

You see, among his litany of complaints about “troubled twenty-somethings who have been bamboozled by second-raters such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and have arrived to molest you with spontaneous prose which ought to remain incarcerated inside their diaries” (see, I told you it was a polemic!) he includes swipes at things I do have first-hand experience of and indeed invest a good deal of my own time and energy on: blogs and “‘literary’ websites” (his ‘scare quotes’). “The abracadabra of the internet,” he explains,

 has transformed us into a society of berserk scribblers; now anyone can have a public voice and spew his middling stories and thoughts at will. 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. Our capacity for untamed, ceaseless communication has convinced us that we have something priceless to say.

Seriously, William: why did you have to go there? The whole ‘bloggers are ruining everything’ trope is so old, for one thing (see, just for instance, here, here, and here). If the best you have to bring to this particular game is “blog is just one letter away from bog,” it’s actually hard to know how to respond – some old line about “what’s in a name” comes to mind. But of course it’s easier to spew hasty generalizations than to explore the literary blogosphere with an open mind and rejoice that so many people care enough about books to write about them (or to write their own). Sure, some book blogs are middling or worse, but I have always found the same to be true of an awful lot of more formally published writing in forms ranging from peer-reviewed academic journals to the pages of mainstream newspapers. For range, originality, and enthusiasm, blogs can’t be beat: if you want to read about something more than “in-vogue books,” you’re much better off exploring some of the sites on my blogroll, for instance, than reading the New York Times Book Review, and if you enjoy hearing from different voices and getting surprised by what you read, well, you’re better off reading a lot of those “literary” websites than New York Review of Books. Further, as an editor at one of those literary websites (and I’ll abandon those condescending scare quotes now!), I feel pretty good about our “hold on actual literature,” and I feel very proud of what we accomplish every month with no resources but our own deep commitment to just what Giraldi claims to be defending — that is, the art of taking literature seriously.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not countering Giraldi’s sweeping dismissal with a blanket endorsement. The challenge of the internet, as I’ve often said, is filtering. But it’s not an impossible task, and I genuinely believe it is a worthwhile one. I just wish more professional critics would not just follow Daniel Mendelsohn’s lead and acknowledge the presence of “serious longform review-essays by deeply committed lit bloggers” but also curate blogrolls of their own. And since it seems that Giraldi exempts the Los Angeles Review of Books from his indictment of online inanity (else why publish in it?), wouldn’t it do more for the cause of literature to find and encourage and promote other sites (or at least individual pieces) that live up to his standards, instead of ranting about kids these days and their dang computers?

LARBI actually hesitated to write any kind of response to Giraldi. When I mentioned his essay on Twitter, a wise friend counselled me to “skip it, not worth the stress!” And in some ways he was right. Whenever someone goes off on an anti-blogging, anti-internet rant on the internet, you know you’re being trolled, and “don’t feed the trolls” is almost as important an online rule as “don’t read the comments” (though happily that last rule mostly doesn’t apply in my corner of the blogosphere, where the comments make the whole exercise worthwhile!). Giraldi has just enough qualifiers (“largely a harvest of inanity”), too, that he can shield himself from the fall-out (“hey, I didn’t mean you guys! some of my best friends are bloggers / run ‘literary’ websites!”).

But I guess I’m just a slow learner. I don’t see why things have to be this way: I don’t see why slagging off about bloggers has to be part of anybody’s defense of criticism or literature, or why people who should know better insist on conflating form (or platform) with content…except that it’s more work to draw finer distinctions. Giraldi has said this kind of thing before (worse, really):

If you’ve ever attempted to read a review on Amazon or on someone’s personal blog, you know it’s identical to seeking relationship advice on the wall of a public restroom.

The bottom line is that I don’t think he should be able to get away with it. Frankly, I don’t think his editors should let it go by either: though I’m sure they appreciate the link-bait, they might keep in mind that some of their other contributors write “personal blogs” — or, to take it less personally, they might at least insist on some specifics and some qualifying nuances. I happen to agree with Giraldi’s summary of a critic’s ideal credentials: “the assertion of an aesthetic and moral sensibility wedded to a deep erudition.” He just needs to stop belligerently proclaiming that these qualities aren’t to be found “on the Net.” He needn’t become one of the “online coddlers” he so despises, but there’s no special virtue in being sloppily vitriolic either.  He could at least take his own advice and read widely before writing.

Weekend Reading: I laughed, I cried, I’d read it again!

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

And that was just the first book I read this weekend …

Maclise DickensI was right that David Copperfield not only gave me great pleasure while I was reading it but restored my flagging enthusiasm for reading more generally. I finished it over the weekend and loved almost every minute of it.

The big setback for me is always Agnes. Dora is insufferable, but the poor thing is set up as a mistake, not an ideal, which is some compensation — and her final chapter still makes me cry, which is kind of embarrassing, but there we are. Agnes, on the other hand, with that damn finger pointing ever upwards: what kind of an alternative is that? Agnes had me wondering, actually, where the (good) sexy is in Dickens. He’s good at lechery, here exemplified by the horror that is Uriah Heep (and there’s the pedophiliac Bounderby in Hard Times as another example of just how creepy Dickens can make lust). He’s good at treachery, here epitomized by Steerforth’s fatal seduction of Little Emily. And he’s brilliant at childish innocence (Dora) and shining purity (Agnes). But healthy adult sexual desire (you know, the kind both parties are pretty excited about) is harder to spot. It’s pretty broadly hinted at that Agnes is wounded by David’s long insistence on seeing her as a sister, but there’s nothing like Dinah’s blush to make sure we understand the nature of her feelings, while David’s feeling for Agnes never seem other than worshipful admiration. Even though they seem better matched than David and Dora, there’s still something awkward about them as a married couple.

However. Whatever reservations I had about the women in David Copperfield were more or less overwhelmed by the many hilarious and touching and vindictively gratifying parts we are treated to as the novel draws to a close–Mr. Micawber’s denunciation of Uriah Heep, for instance, which (like so much in Dickens) is absolutely best read aloud. And the chapter “Tempest” is just splendid, with no “Dickens being Dickens” apologia required.

Unfortunately, though I was energized by David Copperfield to do a lot more reading this weekend, it was just this book that really excited me. I skimmed through Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which I had picked up at the library because it is supposed to be very funny and at the time I felt I could use a good laugh. Meh. At most I got a couple of chortles out of it. Since I have never liked Saturday Night Live and never been tempted to watch 30 Rock, I guess I should have known better.

faultinstarsThen I read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. It went very quickly and I quite enjoyed it: I was engaged from the beginning by the narrator’s voice and the quick pacing and the blend of humor and pathos. But though I thought it was quite good, it also seemed to me a little too self-consciously smart — not just Hazel and her hyper-articulate friends (after all, such teenagers do exist — around here, most of them end up enrolling in the King’s Foundation Year Program, where they continue to talk pretty much like Hazel and Augustus) but the novel as a whole, including the metatextual interaction with An Imperial Affliction. That layer (along with the wry humor of the characters) kept the book from descending into bathos, but it also kept me at kind of an emotional distance: I was not one of those who wept copiously through the final chapters. In fact, a bit to my surprise it didn’t make me cry at all, and here I’ve just confessed to crying over Dora! After I finished it I reread a lot of the discussion of it in this year’s Tournament of Books. I haven’t read many of the other contestants, but I admit I share the feeling expressed by some commenters there that YA literature, however good of its kind and for its intended audience, shouldn’t really compete in the grown-up leagues. And yet it made it to the finals, so what do I know, right?

Finally, I tried a few more chapters of May Sarton’s The Magnificent Spinster. Though I’ve loved everything else I’ve read by Sarton, it just has not been going very well: I’ve been finding it prosy and portentous. The narrator insists a great deal that Jane, the spinster of the title, is magnificent, but I’ve been getting no authentic sense of that myself. I like the formal conceit, with the attention to Cam’s problems writing Jane’s life story as a novel. And I like the idea of taking us through so many important historical moments from the perspective such an unusual and individual experience. But with my time running out for summer reading, and with the new term looming along with deadlines for reviews and essays and book clubs, I’ve decided to put this one back on the shelf for now. It’s just not ripe yet (or I’m not). I’m certainly not giving up on Sarton, though: I long to get my hands on Journal of a Solitude.

Saved by the Inimitable!

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

Judging from a few recent blog posts and twitter updates I’ve seen, a lot of us have fallen into reading slumps lately. I blame my own partly on a phase of duty reading: I was sampling books with an eye to assigning them for a course, which means a lot of them were books I would probably not have picked up otherwise, and while that can lead to some exciting discoveries, it can also just be frustrating, which is what I was finding. As a result I was putting down a lot of books unfinished, which always makes me feel a bit shabby. I have had some fun with a couple of lighter books, including Cotillion, but I’ve been hoping for a book to exhilarate and challenge me the way, say, The Once and Future King, The Paper Garden, or the Patrick Melrose novels did last summer, and this summer seems to have been light on that kind of reading. I thought May Sarton’s The Magnificent Spinster might be the magic bullet, but I’m about half way through and frankly, it’s kind of dull and prosy so far.

copperfieldWhat a fool I’ve been. It turns out that the solution was right there next to my reading chair all this time: the handsome Oxford World’s Classics edition of David Copperfield I’ve ordered for my fall class on the 19th-century novel. This too is duty reading — or, properly, rereading, as of course I haven’t made it this far without having read it before (including out loud to my husband, years ago when this was the kind of thing we did). But I haven’t read it in a long time, and I’ve also never actually assigned it for a course. My go-to teaching Dickens has been Great Expectations (it’s very good, after all, plus it’s short, for Dickens), with Hard Times a frequent alternate and Bleak House a favorite in terms when I’m not also assigning Middlemarch. Oh, and once or twice, A Tale of Two Cities. But I finally felt kind of tired of Great Expectations, and I did Bleak House last term, and it seemed like a good time to mix things up a little, so I put David Copperfield on the book list for next term and on my summer reading list so I could get started on my class prep. It’s been sitting there looking reproachfully at me for weeks (I mean, look at that cover — it practically screams “you’re not doing your duty!”) and I’ve puttered away at it a little, but only yesterday did I put everything else aside and just read it for a few hours — and I feel all my reading mojo coming back.

I’ve never been personally passionate about Dickens the way I am about George Eliot. If for some strange reason I had to choose between them, no question: she gets my vote. But happily, as I’ve said before, literary greatness is not a zero-sum game, and it’s also not something for which there are or need to be common measures or standards. (There are also people who don’t think either of these writers is great — and while I feel kind of sorry for those people, I’m sure they are perfectly happy with their Proust or their Henry James or their Virginia Woolf or their precious Jane Austen, and we’ll just leave them be.) For me personally, Dickens is fabulous precisely for all the things he does that aren’t what Eliot does, and that’s the magic of it all. Dickens is fantastic at being Dickens, and if you get caught up in that Dickensian spirit (which, I know, not everybody does) it’s sheer delight. And sheer horror. And sheer pathos. And … well, you get the point — his is not a particularly subtle world, but gosh, it’s such a lot of fun.Maclise Dickens

That’s what I’m recovering with the help of David Copperfield: the sense that reading is about how fun it all can be. Even if you aren’t a Dickens-lover, I think you have to admit that his books radiate delight in words and stories and imagination. Their excess is not a mistake: it’s the point. As Nick Hornby says, these days we seem to take it as given that “spare is good,” but why?

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where.

What a loss that would be! Not a loss to the tautness of the storyline or the unity of the themes, but if that’s what you’re reading Dickens for, you need a little re-education. (OK, yes, I don’t want to underestimate the unity of his themes, but brilliantly coherent as they can be, both conceptually and aesthetically, still, I think we all get the point long before we’re done with the novels.) Hornby’s example is a great one: “Dickens being Dickens, he finds a bit part for a real rogue of a secondhand clothes merchant, a really scary guy who smells of rum and who shouts things like ‘Oh, my lungs and liver’ and ‘Goroo!’ a lot.”

One thing I’d forgotten is just how laugh-out-loud funny David Copperfield is. I cherish Eliot’s humor, but my marginalia in Middlemarch, though it frequently includes little smiley faces, rarely says “LOL.” There are a few really funny bits in Great Expectations (Joe’s hat on the chimney piece  being one) — none, though, in Hard Times. Aunt Betsy and the donkeys, though? Hilarious! Barkis’s courtship of Peggotty? Spit-take warning: not safe for e-readers! Mr. Dick and Charles the First — irresistible.

CopperfieldPhiz

(illustration by ‘Phiz,’ scanned by Philip Allingham)

And in contrast, while I hadn’t forgotten how pathetic David’s early childhood is, I hadn’t read about it since I had children of my own, and his loneliness and abandonment and desperate yearning for love hit me really hard this time:

I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved; but the wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected. I wonder sometimes, when I think of it, what they would have done if I had been taken with an illness; whether I should have lain down in my lonely room, and languished through it in my usual solitary way, or whether anybody would have helped me out.

And the suspense! Dickens loves his foreshadowing, and it’s pretty heavy-handed, but the mounting sense of dread is still wonderfully effective:

 ‘I’m not afraid in this way,’ said little Em’ly. ‘But I wake when it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham and believe I hear ’em crying out for help. That’s why I should like so much to be a lady. But I’m not afraid in this way. Not a bit. Look here!’

    She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I dare say, accurately as it was that day, and little Em’ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out to sea.

    The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near. But there have been times since, in my manhood, many times there have been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of the child and her wild look so far off, there was any merciful attraction of her into danger, any tempting her towards him permitted on the part of her dead father, that her life might have a chance of ending that day? There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to have held it up to save her. There has been a time since-I do not say it lasted long, but it has been-when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and when I have answered Yes, it would have been.

    This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it stand.

And the betrayal, all the more devastating because we, like David, have been warned:

I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly as I could, looked into his room. He was fast asleep; lying, easily, with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

 The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when I almost wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked at him. But he slept-let me think of him so again-as I had often seen him sleep at school; and thus, in this silent hour, I left him.

 -Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive hand in love and friendship. Never, never more!

Looking at these excerpts, I can readily see why (to paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie) people who don’t like this sort of thing don’t like this sort of thing. It’s too much! It’s sentimental, and manipulative, and he uses exclamation points! But I’m loving it. What a relief! Like David, I am once again “reading as if for life.”