Novel Readings

“This blurred world”: Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

June 12, 2013Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Elizabeth Taylor is the first repeat author we’ve chosen in my F2F book club: for our last meeting, we read Angel, which was such a surprise hit we agreed we’d like to try more of Taylor’s novels. By “surprise hit” I mean in part that because we had no expectations, we were surprised to find ourselves so engaged with the book (which is not to say everyone loved it, but we all liked discussing it). But I also mean that we were surprised by its particulars: by how many things about it are unlike other books any of us had read. It is strange and dark and sad and comic and grim and satirical, all at once. And talk about an unlikable heroine! And yet we all found her a perversely captivating one.

So we’ve moved on to A Game of Hide and Seek, which is the other of Taylor’s novels recently reissued by New York Review Books. We haven’t met to discuss it yet, and I’m quite curious to find out how the others responded. For me it was surprising all over again, because at first it didn’t seem very much like Angel. And yet the more I think about it, the more I realize that despite the fairly different story and structure, it does resemble Angel, not in its characters or events but in its attitude. Both novels proceed with a relentless lack of sentimentality that is all the more unexpected in A Game of Hide and Seek because it tells what might be called a love story.

A Game of Hide and Seek tracks the awkward, uneven relationship between reticent Harriet and erratic Vesey. Harriet knows she loves Vesey from early on, but for some time she is tormented by uncertainty about how he feels about her — or, indeed, whether he feels anything at all. Believing there is nothing between them, she marries Charles — older, steadier, uneasy because he knows she nurses a secret passion for Vesey, who, after being both emotionally and then physically absent while Harriet yearned for him, turns up again now that Harriet is unavailable. Harriet and Vesey flirt (though that seems too perky a word) first with each other and then with outright adultery.

I found it impossible to root for a consummation of their love: Harriet is a drip, and Vesey is a bit of a jerk. It is love, though, I suppose, that is hiding and being sought, though the novel doesn’t give a very encouraging idea of what, exactly, love is. Harriet’s early infatuation is completely inexplicable: is that perhaps the point, that love is something that trumps or eludes reason? Or perhaps, as Harriet’s friend Kitty cautions her, the problem is loving an idea instead of a person: Harriet longs for love, and she believes Vesey to be her love, while he does just enough — he is just enough — to sustain the fantasy.

It’s the idea of Vesey and Charles’s knowledge of Harriet’s longing for him that undermine Charles and Harriet’s marriage. Taylor is very good at evoking the isolation that comes with unhappy intimacy:

Beyond their familiarity and nakedness, they could now sense their true isolation and were more perfectly strange to one another than people passing in a street.

After Vesey’s re-entrance into Harriet’s life, her daughter Betsy develops her own crush on him. In an odd twist, Betsy comes to believe Vesey is actually her father, which is at once traumatizing and gratifying:

That life was so unlike Greek literature had been the worse for life, to her mind. To-night it came — on the strength of a cryptic note, a faded photograph — magnificently near to it.

Her other crush, her Greek teacher Miss Bell, urges her not to “be such a slave to [her] feelings.” Miss Bell herself eventually has to leave for a new school, and one reason is that she has made too much of a favorite of Betsy: the lesson she carries away is “never [to] grown fond of any of them.” Is it possibly better that love be neither sought nor found?

A further facet of the novel is its suffragette backstory: Harriet’s mother and Vesey’s aunt are close friends who were once “hustled, gripped above the elbows by policemen, up the steps of a police-station.” Their heroism embarrasses more than it inspires Harriet, who shows no particular interest in the bright future they fought to win for her. Her one independent move is going off to work in a dress shop, but this is a prelude only to her marriage, not to any assertion of herself or pursuit of a more rewarding career. It’s Betsy who finds her grandmother’s adventures exciting. I don’t know how to put this piece together with Harriet and Vesey’s strange affair. Maybe I’m not supposed to: maybe it’s just there, rather than there as part of an aesthetic or thematic unity. Some people’s mothers really were suffragettes: does it have to mean anything? Why do I always seek unifying ideas?

Yet there are teasing intertextual moments that make me think it’s not wrong to try to solve the novel’s puzzles, as when Charles sits reading Persuasion while entirely conscious that something is afoot with Harriet and Vesey:

‘What a novel to choose!’ Charles thought. ‘Only the happy in love should ever read it. It is unbearable to have expression given to our painful solitariness, to rake up the dead leaves in our hearts, when we have nothing that can follow (no heaven dawning beautifully in Union Street), except in dreams, as perhaps Jane Austen herself never had but on the page she wrote.

Persuasion is another novel of love lost and regained; A Game of Hide and Seek could certainly be read as the anti-Persuasion, in that its lovers have aged but not grown, while their past love does not seem worth either remembering or reviving — even though they both remember and try to resuscitate it. Anne and Wentworth learn to fight for the love that will enable a new, better life; Harriet and Vesey, in contrast, can barely see what would be right, much less fight for it. Not knowing where they are, or where they’re going, is liberating at first, even though at the last minute they realize they have been stumbling towards a big mistake:

He walked beside her with the rose hanging from his hand. The taste of the fog was at the back of their throats. They could see only the shape of one another and, when they spoke, so private, so safe did they feel that they neither paused nor dissembled. In this blurred world, words were more beautiful and they used them more truthfully than at other times.

Taylor’s writing is a bit like that. Sentences can be meandering and difficult to follow, leaving you disoriented:

This morning, however, she was ruffled herself, felt that a real sequence was so broken that the punctual arrival of the milk-man, the charwoman coming in at the back door at her usual time, were small mockeries, piteous pretences, like the first meal after a beloved one’s death, not even reaffirming that the world goes on as usual, that in the midst of death we are in life.

But then ideas emerge clearly out of the fog, giving you a distinct outline of feeling or intent:

‘Nowadays,’ she thought, ‘perhaps always, happiness has to be isolated. Only when we block out all that surrounds it, can we have it perfect, as we so often have perfect grief.’ She felt that she must not grope backwards over her conscience, or forwards over her desires, but keep her contentment in this different climate while she could.

A lot seems blurry in A Game of Hide and Seek: character, motive, plot, morality, meaning. Taylor creates a climate of yearning and dissatisfaction, though, in which words seem sometimes beautiful and sometimes true.

How human! Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

June 9, 2013September 1, 2020Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s singular classic The Leopard is the latest book for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. Three other readers have already posted their thoughts, and having read their interesting remarks I find myself wondering what I have to add! They’ve all mentioned aspects of the book that I was also interested in. Alex, for instance, stresses the sensuality of the language: “It is by far the most insistently, sensuously, even seductively, oppressive book I’ve ever read. It made me want to applaud, underline and shudder in equal measure and often with just one very clever, deviously evocative phrase.” As both she and litlove point, out, the book’s beauties always coexist with horrors, so the garden scene Alex quotes, for instance, brings on gloomy thoughts for the eponymous protagonist, Don Fabrizio, because walking among his flowers he is reminded of the corpse they found among them not long ago:

They had found him lying face downwards in the thick clover, his face covered in blood and vomit, crawling with ants, his nails dug into the soil; a pile of purplish intestines had formed a puddle under his bandoleer.

And yet for all of its grim accents, The Leopard is also, as Stefanie and litlove observe, very funny — even, glancingly, in this lush but haunted garden, mostly because of my favorite character, the dog Bendicò:

every now and again the dog would turn innocent eyes towards him as if asking for praise at labour done: fourteen carnations broken off, half a hedge torn apart, an irrigation channel blocked. How human! “Good, Bendicò, come here.” And the animal hurried up and put its earthy nostrils into his hand, anxious to show it had forgiven this silly interruption of a fine job of work.

How human, indeed! I think for me that was one of the keynotes of this odd novel, which takes such a sideways approach to history. Don Fabrizio, born and bred to power, is moving sometimes deftly, sometimes awkwardly, but always inevitably through a period of transition to a future he neither understands nor endorses. “I belong to an unlucky generation,” he explains in one of the novel’s (bizarrely long) monologues, “swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.” The novel is about the human experience of that unease — the sense of change beyond one’s control. The Prince is mostly a man of good faith and good intentions, and so although he does not like the new world order emerging, he does not fight it either. Not only does he not resist Garibaldi’s move on Sicily, to incorporate it in the newly unified Italy — and what, after all, could one man, however formerly powerful, really do to resist this sweeping movement? — but in his own family he also makes concessions, approving the match between his beloved nephew Tancredi and the daughter of his upstart neighbor. An old name, a lot of new wealth: this is how families adapt and survive.

Earthly things ebb and flow; one of Don Fabrizio’s virtues is that he recognizes this and feels melancholic, rather than vengeful, as his own influence wanes. A dedicated amateur astronomer, he takes comfort from the serene continuity of the stars:

At the cross-roads he glimpsed the sky to the west, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always waiting for Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings, at Donnafugata before a shoot, now after a ball.

Don Fabrizio sighed. When would she decide to give him an appointment less ephemeral, far from stumps and blood, in her own region of perennial certitude?

When that time does come, he reflects on his heirs and realizes that they will not, cannot, carry on the family in any more but name:

the last of the Salina was really himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families. . . .

He had thought that perhaps, by changing, he could keep things the same, but of course that hope is as paradoxical as its logic.

Don Fabrizio is not literally the last of his family, and the book carries on after his death with his daughters in their old age. They are at once pathetic and comical in their attempts to maintain their family’s dignity. Now the family traditions are reduced to “mummified memories” — among them, with delightfully morbid literalness, is Bendicò,”dead for forty-five years, embalmed for forty-five years, nest now of spiders’ webs and moth, detested by the servants who had been imploring Concetta for dozens of years to have it thrown on the rubbish heap.” At the novel’s end Concetta has lost altogether her sense of place and certainty in the world: “she seemed to be living in a world known to her yet strange, which had already ceded all the impulses it could give her and now consisted only of pure forms.” I wondered at first why the novel hadn’t ended with the death of the Prince, but on reflection it seems appropriate to show us the incompleteness of any change, the endless pressure of time’s forward movement and the incremental but relentless concessions people have to make to history. Eventually Bendicò, symbol of the eager spirit of the Leopard’s vigorous past, makes his own symbolic exit:

As the carcass ws dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, got rid of. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.

How human!

Blogging: Accept No Substitutes!

June 5, 2013September 19, 2020Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

Lady (Waterhouse) Some time ago (two years, to be precise — where does the time go?!), I wrote a testy post about some things Leonard Cassuto said about blogging in an online discussion about academic publishing. One of my chief complaints was that he threw “a veil of pragmatism” over “an argument for accepting (even reinforcing) the status quo”:

Yes, it’s true: there is a “prestige deficit.” But I would have expected a discussion about ways the digital age is changing academic publishing to at least evaluate, if not actually challenge, that normative thinking. . . . We might also consider whether there are other goals in academic publishing (particularly related to work in progress or collaboration) or other values (such as open access) that are better served by non-traditional forms including blogging.

“Nobody that I know of,” I went on to say, “is trying to argue that blogging in general, or even particular highly scholarly blogs, should replace traditional publications.” As far as I’m concerned, the question should always be what forms of publication best serve the multiple goals and interests that motivate us to write and publish in the first place. These are diverse, and so too, I think should be our styles and outlets.

Plus ça change… The debate about what place, if any, blogging has in academic publishing not only continues but continues to stress the is over the ought. A post this weekend at ‘dagblog’ explained the way things are:

You can’t blog your way to a tenure-track professorship. You simply can’t. Even a gig at IHE orThe Chronicle for Higher Education is not enough. That doesn’t mean blogging is not professionally useful to you. It means you need to be clear about what it’s useful for.

Blogging and other social media serve academics by bringing you to other people’s attention and building your professional network. It works largely as publicity for your other work, and it widens your potential audience while strengthening your connections. . . .

What blogging never does is substitute for other academic writing. It doesn’t get counted as scholarship. It does not serve as an employment credential. (If you wish to argue that it should, I can’t help you. I’m interested in describing what is, not what ought to be…)

I don’t altogether disagree with this as a statement of how things are. In fact, I made similar points in my own post “Should Graduate Students Blog?“:

it would be naive to ignore that blogging (for some good and some bad reasons) is not yet widely recognized as a legitimate form of academic publishing and that the case for it as productive academic work at all remains a difficult one to make. Graduate students aspiring to tenure-track positions hardly need to be told that for most hiring committees, the crucial measure of their competitiveness as candidates will be the number of conventional peer-reviewed scholarly publications on their c.v.–and the more prestigious the venue, the better.

I also said, however, that

blogging is increasingly acknowledged as having a place in the overall ecology of academic scholarship. Graduate students who choose to blog should by now be able to make a thoughtful and well-supported case for the value of that effort as part of their overall scholarly portfolio.

Notice that I do not say that it “substitutes” for other academic writing but that it has a place alongside what we have for some time (but not for-absolutely-ever) seen as the only legitimate (that is, countable for hiring / tenure / promotion) forms of academic writing.

I strongly believe this, and I have some local evidence that such a view is taking hold: the recently developed Tenure & Promotion guidelines in my own Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences include, under the heading “Indicators of Academic Research and Scholarship” (and right after “peer-reviewed publications or performances)”, “Other forms of publication or public performance, peer-reviewed or otherwise, in venues such as blogs, policy publications, public concerts, etc.” I don’t know if acknowledging that this is a pretty significant change sounds like the kind of “blog triumphalism” dismissed as passé in the dagblog comments thread — but it certainly seems significant to me.

But this is still focusing on the is, rather than the ought. Is acknowledging blogging as a valuable supplement to other kinds of academic writing and publishing as far as we ought to go? As Ted Underwood notes in his comment at dagblog, “blog is a baggy category.” So too, I’d add, is “academic writing,” which comes in many flavors even within any given discipline. Of most interest to me is, of course, my own discipline, in which the bulk of academic writing falls into the extremely baggy category “literary criticism.”

After reading the dagblog article on the weekend, I tweeted, “If your job is criticism and you write criticism on your blog, why doesn’t that “substitute” for academic writing?” In response, Miriam Burstein asked, “Is it really equivalent, though? I think of much blogged crit as being, at best, like a highly-polished 1st draft…Something that may take 3-5 days is a “long” composition time for a blog, as opposed to 2-3 mos. for an article.” I agree that these two kinds of publication are not the same thing. As far as that goes, if by “substitution” we mean “replacing with something that’s exactly the same,” then OK, we’re done. But I would also say, as I replied to Miriam on Twitter, that a blog post is not the same as a blog, which over time is more than the sum of its individual parts. It’s blogging, not (usually) writing one blog post, that I would argue could be defended as an academic contribution. I would certainly support Miriam’s blog on these grounds! (Notice my careful qualifiers here: I’m sure we can all imagine and may even have seen a blog post that is every bit as substantial and lasting as a conventionally published article, as well as a blog that for whatever reasons is simply not a convincing part of an academic’s portfolio.)

I would say too that the differences between blog posts and academic articles are not all to the disadvantage of the former. And I would say that for literary critics, at least in some ways or some cases, the difference in kind is not as great as all that — not as great as it might be in other fields. It depends, for one thing, on what kind of literary criticism we’re talking about. In the dagblog post, the author suggests that

the distinction [between blogging and scholarship] doesn’t pose a problem to science bloggers, or to most social scientists or historians, where the difference between a journal article and a blog essay is usually self-evident. But it can be tricky for people who work in literature or cultural studies, who can be tempted to blur the distinction between writing scholarship about new media and doing other writing on new media platforms.

That makes us literary types sound kind of clueless! (I admit, however, there’s some justice in that comment, as I have more than once explained to my own colleagues that no, writing literary criticism online does not mean I’m doing “digital humanities.”) I’d actually like to suggest, though, that, setting aside that kind of confusion between content and form, “the difference between a journal article and a blog essay” is not entirely self-evident when we’re talking about literary criticism, and that’s precisely because literary criticism is not a science or a social science. Our preoccupation with publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals reflects some anxiety on our part about that: it’s a kind of scientism that has been beneficial in making some aspects of literary scholarship more rigorous and accountable, more historically attentive, and more theoretically sophisticated, but that has also shaped our profession and our professional lives in occasionally disheartening ways. To be taken seriously, we know we have to look serious, which means avoiding at all costs what was scathingly described (by a peer reviewer of my one and only — and of course unsuccessful — SSHRC application) as “the whiff of belles-lettres.” Bonnard The Letter

There are kinds of literary research and scholarship that have a lot in common with history and the social sciences, or that are so well insulated with theoretical implications that no such unsavory whiff could possibly be detected. But a lot of what literary academics do is not so much produce new knowledge as pursue new understandings of, or ways of understanding, literary texts. Careful close readings lie at the heart of many more elaborate scholarly projects. It is certainly possible to do this kind (or this part) of criticism in an open, accessible way, without the specialized language and complex apparatus of argumentation and citation that differentiate academic from non-academic versions of it. Academic training can be hugely beneficial for this enterprise, but such training need not be conspicuous to be effective. We are experts at reading literature in interesting ways and articulating those readings — that’s what we do. What difference does it really make where we do it? Why should we value it, or consider it “professional writing,” only if we do it in a style and form that severely limits the audience for it and the conversation we can have about it?

Where is the self-evident line, then, between the interpretations of novels we find in academic essays and the interpretations of novels we can find on blogs — besides (again) some specialized vocabulary and a lot more footnotes? In both cases we can and should look closely at the quality (the intelligence, the care, the subtlety, the persuasiveness) of the interpretation, but I would argue that there is a fundamental similarity in the activity represented that — while (to reiterate) it does not mean the final products are exactly the same — is at least as important as any differences. It really is the same kind of thing, just done under different circumstances, for different audiences.

The author of the dagblog post adds in the comments a statement that seems to shift from description to prescription: “blogs are really not good vehicles for academic or professional writing.” Well, again there’s the bagginess problem that makes any such big generalizations about blogs imperfect. But besides that, what I object to is the implication that academic writing really can’t be done in other forms or venues, or that it’s the form or venue, not the content or purpose, that defines “academic or professional writing.” That may be true pragmatically, and in some disciplines it may be necessarily true (I’ll let scholars in those fields hash this out), but at least for literary folks, I think a case can be made that, as literary criticism is our profession, any time we engage in it we are doing professional writing. The desire to draw a firm line between what we do in academic journals and what we do elsewhere seems to me more reflective of our desire to defend ‘professing English’ as a profession than with any really principled or inevitable difference between the two. And, again, the results of that effort have not been altogether salutary, for criticism or for our profession.

jameswood Here’s another way to think about the academic / non-academic divide. James Wood has done (as far as I’m aware) no conventional academic publishing (including How Fiction Works, which, however interesting and thought-provoking, is not really scholarly). However, he holds an academic appointment: he is the Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism in Harvard’s English Department. Sure, it’s Harvard and he’s James Wood — but can’t we take away from this high-profile blurring of the boundaries between the academic and the non-academic critical worlds some support for other critics, at least as qualified as Wood, to practise criticism in other ways and other places than scholarly journals? And if we can make that concession, why not accept blogs as one perfectly good place for some of that work? Aren’t there even advantages to making the academy more porous, to engaging more personally and, yes, casually, with the rest of the world? It’s not as if academics are the only ones interested in literature, after all. In Canada we have been hearing a lot about ‘knowledge mobilization‘: if some of the value of conventional peer-reviewed publications is precisely their stability, the value of blogs could be said to be their mobility, their flexibility, and, in their own way, their accountability — because after all, there they are, open for anyone to read and argue with. Their basic model is coduction – again, not a scientific model, but one supremely well suited to the ongoing process that is criticism.

I understand the pragmatic issues, but if we think there is both intellectual and professional value in changing the norms of our profession, we have to keep making the argument, not shrugging our shoulders and reiterating the status quo. As I said in a further back-and-forth with Cassuto, this is a job for “senior, ‘established,’ faculty” above all:

we are the ones in a position to encourage alternative models of productivity and scholarship, and if blogging is valuable to me in the ways I described, there would be real hypocrisy in my case if I didn’t consider it valuable work for people at earlier stages of their careers and work to recognize it as such when they do it.

I don’t know how much my own advocacy affected my faculty’s new T&P guidelines: I wasn’t on the committee and made no direct submission to it. But I have given three presentations at Dalhousie on blogging and academic publishing, including at a faculty research retreat, and I’ve been including my blog on my c.v. and a statement on blogging in my annual report for six years now. So I’m doing my best to walk the walk.

What matters to me most, though, is that I continue to practice literary criticism, including on my blog. That’s what I trained for, after all. I’ve made conventional academic contributions to my field, and that specialized work informs all the other writing I do. Blogging, though, is where I have the most fun with that expertise, and make it the most freely available. My scholarly articles and books are, I hope, good of their kind — but they are no substitute for Novel Readings!

Update: a shortened version of this post ran on the LSE Impact blog.

Open Letters Monthly: the June 2013 issue!

June 2, 2013Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s a new month, and once again, a new issue of Open Letters Monthly is live and ready for your reading pleasure!

As usual, the pieces range widely and probe deeply. I have a proprietary interest in a handful of them. Alyssa Mackenzie, a former honors student at Dal (now doing graduate work on Virginia Woolf in NYC) contributed a great review of Sandra Djwa’s new biography of P. K. Page — by the time I’d finished working through it with Alyssa I was convinced I have not read nearly enough of Page’s poetry. Nicole Perrin, better known to some of you as bibliographing, takes a sharp look at Jane Gardam’s latest and (to her disappointment and mine) finds it not as good as her earlier books. My Dal colleague Jerry White has a stem-winder on Fintan O’Toole’s attempts to generate a new vision of republicanism in Ireland. It is genuinely exciting to work with people on books and ideas that they are excited about themselves, and gratifying to see our efforts (well, OK, the effort is mostly theirs, but I helped!) pay off with strong, interesting critical writing.

My own contribution is a review of Deirdre David’s Olivia Manning: A Woman at War, which I found fascinating for its account of Manning’s life and work and thought-provoking for the questions it raises about being (or refusing to be) a “woman writer.”

The issue also includes John Cotter’s take on Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature, Steve Donoghue keeping up with the Tudors with a new alt-history account of Anne Boleyn, Spencer Lenfield with an impressively detailed and nuanced reading of Richard Ford, and much more. I hope you’ll come on over and read around in it — and if you read something you like, help us get the word out. Sometimes (perhaps unfoundedly) it feels like we are putting out the best online literary magazine nobody has ever heard of! And also, in case this doesn’t go without saying, if you ever have an idea for an essay or review that you’d like to contribute, let me know (rmaitzen at gmail).

Teaching Art: “Let me describe it to you”

May 31, 2013Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that we’ve been watching one of The Learning Company’s ‘Great Courses,’ The History of European Art. In the comments thread, I noted that the lecturer’s favorite move is to “describe” an artwork to us. At first glance (so to speak!) that seems an odd strategy: we’re looking right at the art, after all. There are many things we can’t do (interrupt him with questions chief among them) but we can see what’s right in front of our own eyes.

Or can we? That, of course, is the trick, the gimmick, the magic, even, of the process. We see it, but, as Sherlock Holmes so often says to poor Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” The untrained eye does not really know what it’s looking at. Professor Kloss may begin by stating what seems self-evident (“there’s a woman in the center of the painting,” “the man on the left side is wearing a wonderful blue robe”) but this is only a preliminary stock-taking, prior to pointing out what requires more expertise to really see: who the woman is, perhaps, and how this version of her differs from other ones; how the blue robe makes other blue bits stand out and maybe form a design across the canvas; why that particular shade of blue is rare in frescoes; how the artist’s brush strokes create a light effect on the woman’s body; what the striking whiteness of her skin suggests about not just the design but the larger meaning of the painting. Even the stock-taking is sometimes a good prompt: perhaps I wasn’t looking at the man on the left at first, because my eye was more immediately drawn to something else.

It’s not a perfect process, especially pedagogically. Not only does Professor Kloss often not describe something we’re curious about, but he never invites us to look first and see what we notice. Realizing this is salutary, as I’ve been thinking that his method is close to one kind of thing I do all the time in my classes: focus on a scene or a passage and try to bring out what’s interesting about it. There too we typically start with a description: “what’s going on here?” Then we move to the more open-ended process of noticing: “what’s interesting about it?” Early in a course, I am likely to do sample analyses, to model what we’re trying to do. Throughout, I also provide relevant contexts, including historical, biographical, literary, or theoretical. But as we go along, the burden of noticing shifts more and more to my students: knowing what they’re looking at — being able to “describe” it with expertise — could be considered our ultimate “course objective.” When I lecture, but also when we discuss and analyze and debate in class, what we’re doing is accumulating the knowledge and skills to make their descriptions more than just statements of the obvious — in my classes, which are fiction-intensive, the crucial distinction is to make them more than just plot summary.

Watching Professor Kloss describe sculptures, lithographs, wood cuts, paintings, frescoes and everything else makes me very aware of how little I have in my own head that helps me with his task: he knows all kinds of things that I don’t, and as a result he sees all kinds of things that I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d swear he sees things that aren’t there — and now I wonder how often my own students feel the same way. I’m also very aware of how passive it makes me knowing he’s going to do all of his own noticing, and how little room the video lecture format leaves for me to have any ideas of my own. Well, I could have speculative ideas: heck, I can pause the video and say anything I want! But what I really want is to test my tentative observations against his expertise. I feel confident in my own taste (many times I have thought, as he rhapsodized about whatever’s on his current slide, “I hate that!” or “That’s beautiful!”), but I know that visceral reaction is irrelevant to the important process of really seeing and understanding what I’m seeing. That lack of interaction with an informed point of view is the biggest obstacle to my becoming anything of an expert myself.

Of course, I’m never going to become an expert art historian, but my job is all about developing expertise in my students. Stocking their heads full of information is one thing, but it’s not the only thing, and it’s not the most important thing. In some ways, it’s also something they can do on their own, if they’re motivated, though as I’ve written about before, it’s easy to overestimate the ease and efficiency of finding good information, much less knowing how to make it useful. Watching Professor Kloss describe great works of art is very interesting, but it’s also very passive. It reinforces for me the pedagogical necessity of going back and forth. Sure, let me describe it to you — but now, tell me what you see. Then we’ll talk about it.

One question I would definitely ask Professor Kloss, if only I could: we’ve reached Monet and so far pretty much the only women in the series have been Madonnas, Magdalenes, saints, or nudes. In the history of European art to 1860, there’s not one woman artist worth including?

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: Preview #1 – Choosing an Edition

May 27, 2013Rohan Maitzen16 Comments

I’ve been working industriously on my Middlemarch for Book Clubs website. I hope to have a “beta” version of the whole site ready to make public by the end of June, but I thought it would be helpful for me to get some feedback on a couple of pages sooner rather than later. One reason is that I’m especially concerned about finding the right tone (not too didactic, but clear and practical; enthusiastic but not gushing), as well as the right balance between too much and not enough information. But also — and this is particularly important for a page like this one on choosing an edition — I can’t be sure if I’m providing the right information. I’d be glad to know if you think I’m on the right track, or, if not, what changes or corrections or additions you’d suggest.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: Choosing an Edition

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The first thing to consider is whether you want everyone in your group to use the same edition of Middlemarch. Even if you think that this would be a good thing, it may prove impractical, as people may already own copies, or may prefer one version over another for their own reasons. My classroom experience (as well as experience in my own book club) has taught me that it can be frustrating trying to talk about a long book when people quite literally can’t get on the same page. This is one reason to encourage people to use some system of navigational aids, like post-it notes! However, because Middlemarch is divided into Books and then into chapters, it’s not that hard to find common reference points.

The next question is whether you want to use a ‘popular’ or a scholarly edition. With a novel like Middlemarch, I think it’s a good idea to have a reliable, well-edited text with thorough annotations–not because you must consult them, but because you may want to. Scholarly editions not only include thoughtful introductions and explanatory footnotes (helpful for everything from literary allusions to historical contexts) but also point out changes made to the novel over its publishing history. One of the most interesting of these in Middlemarch is a tweak to its Finale that might spark some debate among the members of your book club, especially if you’ve talked along the way about how far Dorothea is responsible for her own bad choices.

RECOMMENDED EDITIONS OF MIDDLEMARCH

Oxford World’s Classics: This is the edition I usually assign in my classes. It’s readily available, Felicia Bonaparte’s introduction is illuminating, the notes are good but not overwhelming, and the layout is readable and leaves enough room for annotations. In the current printing, there are two paragraphs out of order: bonus points for the person in your group who spots them! (I’ve notified the press and subsequent printings may be corrected.)

Penguin Classics: This is another fine, reliable edition, with a good introduction by Rosemary Ashton; it has the benefit of also being available as an e-book, which may be an advantage if some of your members use e-readers.

Norton Critical Edition: This edition is the most scholarly of the options, in that it conveniently packages a scrupulous edition of the novel with a selection of critical essays about it. If that’s the kind of thing your book club likes, this is the edition for you. If you doubt you’ll want to read the criticism, however, I recommend an edition with larger type!

Broadview Press Edition: This handsome edition of Middlemarch is supplemented by contemporary reviews and documents (rather than the mostly 20th-century critical materials included in the Norton). It is annotated in great detail, with special attention paid to the role of the visual arts in the novel; it is the only one of these editions that includes illustrations. The footnotes do occasionally almost overwhelm the novel itself. This edition is also available as an e-book.

There are [will be] links to some free electronic full-text editions of Middlemarch on the ‘Links’ page. I don’t particularly recommend these for reading the whole novel, though of course you may find them fine for your purposes. The searchable e-texts are great, however, for finding lines you remember but forgot to mark with post-its!

Writing Carolyn Heilbrun’s Life: Susan Kress, Feminist in a Tenured Position

May 26, 2013Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s appropriate for a biography of Carolyn Heilbrun to be self-conscious about the challenges of writing about a woman’s life: Heilbrun literally wrote the book on this, in her slim but influential Writing a Woman’s Life. I’ve written here before about the influence of that little book on my own thinking and writing — and I’ve written about Heilbrun often, including as recently as my post on May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep. Heilbrun always seems to be a step ahead of wherever my interests take me, or perhaps, without my really being conscious of it, she’s been leading me along — to a richer appreciation of Dorothy L. Sayers, to an active interest in Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, and to engagement with Sarton. I should add that she also helped me see my way to my current project on Dick Francis (she’s a fan and her comments about him helped shape my pitch).

But of course Heilbrun’s real significance is not in her influence on me, however much that matters personally: as a critic, a feminist, a theorist, an academic (including President of the MLA), and a novelist, she played a substantial role in the intellectual history of the last 50 years. Susan Kress’s biography (the title of which plays on Heilbrun’s Death in a Tenured Position) explores that role, contextualizing Heilbrun’s individual efforts in an account of the history of feminism, especially academic feminism, in the second half of the 20th century. It’s a smart, thought-provoking read: not just a biography, not quite a critical biography, but rather a reading of Heilbrun’s life and works both as manifestations of the political and theoretical problems with which Heilbrun herself was most concerned: split selves, androgyny, inclusion and exclusion, sexism and feminism, and especially stories — stories about women and how to tell them, where to look for (or how to create) models, what shape to give them, how to take strength from them.

Kress shows that Writing a Woman’s Life is the culmination of Heilbrun’s work on all of these questions. It’s also, she notes, a book that embraces the risk of writing not just across disciplines but across audiences: “If this is Heilbrun’s most popular critical book, it is also her most theoretically sophisticated, although she always presents the theory in clear, accessible terms.” The rhetorical simplicity of the book is deceptive, as its influence (including on me!) shows, but that simplicity is also part of an idea of feminist discourse that isn’t satisfied with separating theory from practice. Kress quotes Cynthia Ozick on “the good citizen and the wild writer,” the separation between her essays and her fiction. Heilbrun, in contrast, expresses her feminist ideas through every form of her writing.

It strikes me as interesting and also as deliberate that Kress spends a lot more time on Heilbrun’s intellectual life than on the events of her personal life: her marriage and children are mentioned but primarily as reflections of or influences on her thinking (for instance, how “the experience of motherhood [shaped] her literary point of view”). Lionel Trilling has a much greater presence in the book than Heilbrun’s husband: he’s her unwitting mentor, the vexed inspirational antagonist who “taught [her] how to approach literature” but, to her lasting bitterness, barely acknowledged her at all. A telling early incident: Heilbrun’s first published essay was “The Character of Hamlet’s Mother,” a reassessment of critical views of Gertrude. “Delighted with her first publication,” Kress reports, “Heilbrun sent a copy to Lionel Trilling; he did respond, on a postcard, saying that he did not realize that Gertrude’s character had been in dispute.” Ouch. Kress reads much of Heilbrun’s critical work (and some of her Amanda Cross novels too) as responses to Trilling: “Toward a Recognition of Androgyny … was conceived as an argument against Trilling’s view of women and … Reinventing Womanhood reconceives and reinvents the Trillingesque self for women.”

Kress also (rightly) pays a lot of attention to Heilbrun’s overall — and equally vexed — relationship with Columbia University, where she got her Ph.D. and then taught until her resignation in 1992. It’s easy to dismiss her complaints against this prestigious institution where, after all, she held a tenured position, one of significant privilege (Kress cites several critical or outright hostile responses including that of Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism?). “In 1992,” Kress notes, “to any casual observer, Heilbrun seemed anything but marginal.” Much of Kress’s book, though, has helped set the terms for an alternative understanding of Heilbrun’s position as someone who “valued acceptance and inclusion, not disruption and revolution.” Yet, as she also points out, “the seeds of struggle are there from the beginning”: Heilbrun was always an outsider as much as an insider (this is one aspect of her “split selves”). And there’es plenty of evidence of a “historical pattern of Columbia’s neglect of women.” Kress suggests that by 1992, Heilbrun “had written herself into a position where she had to act, to take risks,” and departing so publicly was a way of “[taking] charge of her story” and make sure that “she would not simply disappear without a trace.”

I appreciated the time Kress took talking about Heilbrun’s teaching career. “The pedagogical impulse is strong in her,” she says, and Heilbrun’s idea that “the classroom walls are permeable” is congruent with the kinds of books she wrote and the style she wrote them in. Her interest in team-teaching is especially interesting: she seems to have been genuinely eager to learn herself, to expose herself to new challenges and approaches. She taught a course called “The Heroine’s Text” with Nancy K. Miller, for instance: “If Miller was impressed by Heilbrun’s inside-out knowledge of literature and literary figures, Heilbrun was introduced to the arcane maneuvers of high theory and to a more intense focus on women’s literary traditions.” “Teaching was a primary aspect of her professional identity,” but she also experienced “a certain discouragement”: “Teaching as a feminist is not easy.” That hasn’t really changed.

Kress’s book ends with a section called “A Rhetoric of Risk” that is, itself, riskily unstructured — or, maybe better, structured unconventionally around different talking points. Kress is wary, I think, about coming to “a conclusion,” not just because Heilbrun’s life was not over at the time of writing but because Heilbrun had taught her that self-consciousness. In her final paragraph, she quotes Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life: “We women have lived too much with closure; this is the delusion of a passive life.” It’s impossible to read the biography overall and this paragraph in particular without thinking about another major step Heilbrun took in refusing “a passive life.” How different is ending your own life on your own terms from ending your career — or your books — the same way? I expect Kress saw this last decisive act as continuous, as part of Heilbrun’s ongoing and indomitable effort to be the one who would tell her own story.

“There solitude became my task”: May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

May 22, 2013February 5, 2020Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I’ve owned Plant Dreaming Deep for a couple of years at least. It’s always funny, isn’t it, when a book that has just been sitting on the shelf suddenly catches your attention, as if its moment to be read has finally arrived? I sometimes think of it as a ripening process — though whether it’s me or the book that needs to mature, I’m not always sure. I picked Plant Dreaming Deep from the shelf almost at random on Monday morning, to look at as I enjoyed a leisurely cup of tea in honor of Victoria Day — and then I stayed at the kitchen table for two hours straight until I’d read the whole thing. I fell right into it, which isn’t an experience I’ve had with a book for a while.

Plant Dreaming Deep is one of May Sarton’s memoirs. When she was 46, Sarton bought an 18th-century farmhouse in Nelson, New Hampshire. Her parents had recently died, and part of their legacy to her was furniture – big solid pieces that traveled with them from Belgium (where they had survived the First World War), and then moved with them from place to place until they settled in their own house. Sarton, who to that point had never owned her own home, had to store the furniture in the cellar (“my mother’s desk with its many pigeonholes and secret drawers, the bahut, the long refectory table that matched it, and two eighteenth-century chests of drawers”), and she found she could not bear having these “great pieces of our lives” stashed away:

After a year they began to haunt me as if they were animals kept underground and dying of neglect. How long would they stay alive? And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?

And so she went on a quest — one which took the form of finding, renovating, and then living in her farmhouse, but which is really about integrating all the parts of her life and history and finally being, not just settled in her house, but at home in her self. Plant Dreaming Deep is the story of that adventure, including both its literal, external parts and its internal adjustments and revelations.

A central conceit of the book is that the house she moves into doesn’t just have character, as we often say of buildings, but is a character. It has needs and pleasures, and makes demands:

I found out very soon that the house demanded certain things of me. Because the very shape of the windows has such good proportions, because the builder cared about form, because of all I brought with me, the house demands that everywhere the eye falls it fall on order and beauty. So, for instance, I discovered in the first days that it would be necessary to keep the kitchen counter free of dirty dishes, and that means washing up after each meal; that the big room is so glorious, and anyone in the house is so apt to go to the kitchen windows to look out at the garden or into the sunset, that it would be a shame to leave it cluttered up.

She has moved there to write, which is difficult work: “the writer, at his desk alone, must create his own momentum, draw the enthusiasm up out of his own substance . . . the writer faces a daily battle with self-questioning, self-doubt, and conflict about his own work.” Music helps Sarton “through the barrier,” but also, she finds, “the house itself helps”:

From where I sit at my desk I look through the front hall, with just a glimpse of staircase and white newel post, and through the warm colors of an Oriental rug on the floor of the cosy room, to the long window at the end that frames distant trees and sky from under the porch roof where I have hung a feeder for woodpeckers and nut-hatches. This sequence pleases my eye and draws it out in a kind of geometric progression to open space.

Thus she finds reflected in it, supported by it, the “clarity and structure” she seeks for her poetry and prose.

The book is full of things to savor, from lyrical descriptions of her garden, to her fond but unsentimental stories of her neighbors, to her meditative (but not always tranquil) reflections on community, family, aging, and writing. “I am happy when I am writing,” she tells us, but “the demons come as soon as I stop and consider what I have done, as the critic takes over from the creator”:

These demons, which might be called the demons of reputation, have two masks, and I do not know which is more distressing. There is the demon who wears the mask of rage: Why have I not been recognized? A young writer may be able to turn that demon away by taking refuge in the delusion of his genius, by thinking as a child does, “They’ll be sorry when I am dead!” For the middle-aged professional writer there is no such consolation. He has, willy-nilly, become a realist. He has to face the other demon, who wears the mask of self-doubt: Why have I failed? Where have I been self-indulgent, lazy, not honest enough? Or is my failure written into my very bones?

Though she finds some reassurance in her success with readers, still “the only real way to keep [the demons] out is to shut the world out,” which she finds easier to do in Nelson than anywhere else. But even Nelson cannot shelter her completely from the demon of guilt that demands she weigh her solitary creative life against “teaching underprivileged children” or some other more socially sanctioned set of responsibilities: “For a single woman the question is acute.” The house contains but cannot overrule her anxiety.

Soldiers'_Monument_&_Church,_Nelson,_NH

Her comments on aging are less fraught but no less thought-provoking:

It is only past the meridian of fifty that one can believe that the universal sentence of death applies to oneself. At twenty we are immortal; at fifty we are too caught up in life to think much about the end, but from about fifty-five on the inmost quality of life changes because of this knowledge. Time is suddenly telescoped. Life in and for itself becomes more precious than it ever could have been earlier . . . it is imperative to taste it, to savor it, every day and every hour, and that means to cut out waste, to be acutely aware of the relevant and the irrelevant. There are late joys just as there are early joys. Young, who has time to look at the light shine through a shirley poppy? The outer world is only an immense resonance for one’s own feelings. But in middle age, afternoon light marbling a white wall may take on the quality of revelation.

Middle age is “time to lay ambition and the world aside,” she tells us, and again the house has a role to play: “Nelson has been my way of learning to do just that.”

Probably the most important thing about the house is that Sarton lives there alone. This is what Carolyn Heilbrun focuses on in her essay on Sarton’s memoirs: “what makes Plant Dreaming Deep unique and uniquely important is that Sarton has written a memoir of the possibilities of the solitary female life.” The chapter in which Sarton settles into the house — once the rebuilding is done, the furniture moved in, the mementos placed — is called “With Solitude for My Domain”: “I was, as I wished to be, alone.” But only after her first house guests depart does it seem that she realizes fully the experience she has sought and found:

It was my first experience of the transition back to solitude, the moment of loneliness, the shadowy moment before I can resume my real life here. The metaphor that comes to mind is that of a sea anemone that has been wide open to the tide, and then slowly closes up again as the tide ebbs. For alone here, I must first give up the world and all its dear, tantalizing human questions, first close myself away, and then, and only then, open to that other tide, the inner life, the life of solitude, which rises very slowly until, like the anemone, I am open to receive whatever it may bring.

I think it was when I realized that the book was less about a house than about being alone in a house that I lost myself to it. I am fascinated by solitude. Often I enjoy it; sometimes I crave it — but I’m also well aware that, as Sarton says, “at any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.” I’ve only lived alone (that is, truly in my own quarters, without roommates or family) for two of my 46 years, in the basement suite I rented as an undergraduate. I am chatty and enjoy being in company both intimate and lively, but I also feel a certain exhilaration when I’m alone. It’s not just being freed for a while of the endless negotiations that life with other people inevitably entails, though that’s certainly part of it; it’s also as if some kind of psychological space opens up — if that makes sense. I hardly know how to put it, but I’m sure I’m not the only bookish person with a preference for quiet and difficulty separating herself emotionally from whatever other lives are going on around her (in fact, I’m related to at least one other person just like that!). People sometimes interpret a desire to have some “alone time” as rejection of them, but I find it can be crucially restorative and can send you back to them with renewed pleasure.

Really living alone, though, rather than just spending some time alone, takes courage, as well as inner resources. 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. Heilbrun notes that a few years after Plant Dreaming Deep was published, Sarton moved again. Heilbrun sees the move to Nelson, the “first, hard assertion of selfhood,” as a necessary step for Sarton in generating a narrative of her own life: “What Sarton did was to write a new plot for women, a new script.” Just knowing such a life is possible, knowing what it might feel like or mean, she suggests, is something other women needed. I’ll never live alone in a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire — I wouldn’t want to! But maybe at this point in my own life it was important for me to imagine the life that Sarton lived in hers. You can be alone even without solitude, after all. We all need to find the resources we need to be at home with ourselves wherever we are. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop reading until I’d seen how it turned out.

Before Coursera, There Were the ‘Great Courses’

May 19, 2013November 25, 2021Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

arenachapel Have any of you watched any of the videos produced for The Great Courses series? We’re pretty big fans of these in our house as sources of enrichment and edutainment. My mathematically-inclined son has watched a number of them (along with his dad), including The Joy of Mathematics, Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers, An Introduction to Number Theory, and Discrete Mathematics — as well as some music ones, including (aptly, for him) How Music and Mathematics Relate. My husband and I are currently watching A History of European Art, which I chose as a birthday gift because I’ve strolled through too many museums feeling I don’t really know enough about what I’m looking at.

I’m enjoying the course a lot. The lecturer, William Kloss, is not only erudite but endearingly enamored of his subject: he seems to stay pretty much on script, but every so often he gets this little extra glimmer in his eye or urgency in his voice and you know he just can’t help himself — he has to share how he feels about something. He has a lot of ground to cover in just 48 lectures and as a result has to skip along quite briskly (we got to peer closely at only three works by Michelangelo, for instance) — but that said, I think both members of this Teeny-tiny Open Offline Course would have been happy with a little less attention to medieval altarpieces, however revealing the distinctions between their various reworkings of the identical scriptural scenes.

It’s been impossible to sit through these lectures without thinking about their much larger cousins, the MOOCs. MOOCs, after all, are built around recorded lectures by eminent specialists. I discovered that the booklets accompanying our DVD set include some review questions, so if we were so inclined, we could take that extra step or two to help with comprehension and retention. Of course, we can’t ask Professor Kloss to check our answers (but then, that can’t happen in MOOCs either) — but we’d have each other, and I feel confident our ‘peer evaluation’ would be pretty rigorous. We’re not doing the fairly dull provided questions, though: we’re just watching the videos.

Piero-della-Francesca-The-Nativity

And yet we do have a lot of questions about what we’re seeing. They aren’t usually of the “reiterate the main distinction between Romanesque and Gothic architecture” kind but are, more typically, challenges to Professor Kloss’s conclusions or effusions. For one thing, we find the vocabulary of art criticism — or, perhaps more justly, his vocabulary — kind of impressionistic, if you’ll forgive the pun, and sometimes his rhapsodies about the wondrous unforgettable quality of one piece or another strike us as special pleading more than reasoned analysis. It would be nice to be able to press him on just what he means, now and then. We often wonder about details of the paintings that he doesn’t choose to comment on, but of course he carries on quite impervious to our curiosity. Sometimes there are technical issues we’d like to understand better, or additional materials we’d love to see. In a MOOC, we’d have forums where I suppose we could crowd-source these questions, and even now if we really cared we could do some research of our own to see if they’re addressed anywhere. But there are at least two advantages to having a real live instructor: one would be our trust in the answers we got, and the other would be the efficiency of talking to someone who can filter the noise for us, rather than trying to create our own expertise on the fly. Here’s a third, actually: that real live instructor can help us reframe our questions too, which itself, in an unfamiliar field, is not easy (as anyone who has ever had students create discussion questions for class can attest), and in that back-and-forth too there is learning.

I do feel I am learning from my Great Course. I would be learning even more if I were doing more than watching it fairly passively, and I would be learning more still if I were actually taking the course in person, face to face. I don’t think there’s anyone who is claiming that MOOCs are as pedagogically effective (never mind as socially engaging) as actual classroom instruction. What’s odd is how much hype there is around them as if we haven’t already, for decades, had similar options. Our TOOC* lacks the online infrastructure, but otherwise, in its essentials, it’s about the same: you watch and listen, and then you decide how involved you want to be. That’s OK for us, because our only stake in this experience is personal, our only goal some extra enlightenment. It’s not OK if you imagine this activity as part of a deliberate process of intellectual and academic development.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with Hieronymous Bosch: tonight it’s Lecture 25: Netherlandish Art in the 16th Century.

Hieronymus_Bosch,_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_tryptich,_centre_panel_-_detail_6

*Technically it’s not entirely “open” since the DVDs aren’t free (but if you keep an eye out for sales, as we do, they aren’t expensive either) — but they could be borrowed from libraries, I expect.

Communities of the Wounded: Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War

May 16, 2013Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I’m reviewing Deirdre David’s Olivia Manning: A Woman At War for the June issue of Open Letters Monthly; inevitably, that has me thinking again about Manning’s best-known novels, which I read and wrote about a few years ago. Here, from the Novel Readings archives, is that original post. David’s excellent critical biography has prompted me to look up some of Manning’s other fiction, so stay tuned not only for the review but for posts on more novels by Manning as I get around to them!

Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War

This two-volume set is actually a sextet of shorter novels, the first three comprising The Balkan Trilogy, the second The Levant Trilogy. According to my Penguin editions, Anthony Burgess described this series as “the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.” The war in question is, of course, the second World War, but if Burgess’s remark leads you to expect a sweeping war-time saga full of action, heroism, drama and suspense, you’ll be surprised–as I was. In the first volume, set first in Romania and then in Greece, our protagonists are at the periphery of the conflict, which is spreading through Europe and gradually encroaches on their lives without ever directly reaching it, as they leave both Bucharest and then Athens on the eve of German occupation. All of the motley array of characters are versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bit players with no important part to play in the real story, except that theirs is the story, and it’s not comic–or tragic, either. (Some textual evidence that Manning herself conceived of her characters in this way comes in the Coda to The Levant Trilogy, in which she compares them to “the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy”). The novels unfold in a strangely muted register that matches the characters’ global insignificance even as the interest, and pathos of their circumstances and their endearing and irritating individual characteristics eventually win us over to believing in and caring about them.

I was fascinated with the picture Manning offers of the British abroad in this particular historical moment; the novels are highly autobiographical, or at any rate follow closely the historical and geographical situations she and her husband experienced, and Manning was clearly an astute observer of the both the local and the expatriat cultures she participated in. She is particularly understated and yet pointed (if that’s not too paradoxical a description) about the anti-Semitism in Romania, illustrating its character and effects while keeping its worst realities just off-stage. The horrible truths are shown most explicitly through the story of the banker Drucker, whose son Sasha the Pringles eventually shelter in their flat. Imprisoned by the Romanians ostensibly for trading in currency on the black market but really, it is clear, for the crime of being a rich Jew, he is eventually released for trial, and Harriet Pringle goes on Sasha’s behalf to get a look at how he has fared:

Harriet, who had seen Drucker only once, ten months before, remembered him as a man in fresh middle age, tall, weighty, elegant, handsome, who had welcomed her with a warm gaze of admiration.

What appeared was an elderly stooping skeleton, a cripple who descended the steps by dropping the same foot each time and dragging the other after. The murmurs of ‘Drucker’ told her that, whether she could believe it or not, this was he. Then she recognised the suit of English tweed he had been wearing when he had entertained the Pringles to luncheon. The suit was scarcely a suit at all now….

From the bottom step he half-smiled, as if in apology, at his audience, then, seeing Harriet, the only woman present, he looked puzzled. He paused and one of the warders gave him a kick that sent him sprawling over the narrow pavement. As he picked himself up, there came from him a stench like the stench of a carrion bird. The warder kicked at him again and he fell forward, clutching at the van steps and murmuring “Da, da,” in zealous obedience.

Harriet’s specific emotional response is not elaborated on, and why should it be? We have, presumably, shared it, and we understand her decision, arriving home, to “deceive Sasha. He was never likely to see his father again.” She reports only “‘Your father looked very well,'” and that kind, protective lie speaks eloquently of the destructive inhumanity of the truth. Key moments of high suspense or emotion are treated in this cool, matter-of-fact way throughout, as when the Pringles arrive home to find that Sasha has been taken in a raid:

The bed-covers were on the floor, and as Harriet piled them back on to the bed, the mouth-organ fell from among them. She handed it to Guy as proof that he had been taken, and forcibly. Under the bed-covers was the forged passport, torn in half – derisively, it seemed.

Remembering her childhood pets whose deaths had broken her heart, she said: “They’ll murder him, of course.”

The next day, “Harriet [is] surprised that she felt nothing.” The risk, in both her consciousness and the narrative, seems to be that, in such circumstances, the only options are feeling nothing or being overwhelmed with feeling. Cumulatively, though, for this reader anyway, the effect of the persistent resistance to melodrama is a story nearly stripped of its human essentials and thus of a sense of what the novels stand for in the face of totalitarianism. Towards the end of their stay in Athens, for example, a major character whose quirks and (mis)fortunes we have followed since the first pages is unexpectedly and unnecessarily shot, more or less accidentally and at random. Is it because destruction and death are always at the margins of their lives, because the war has taken normalcy from them, that his companions feel more inconvenienced than anything else?

The manager agreed to let the body rest for the night in one of the hotel bathrooms. The four friends followed as it was carried away from the terrace and placed on a bathroom floor. As the door was locked upon it, the all clear sounded. The manager, offering his commiserations, shook hands all round and the English party left the hotel. Alan, hourly expecting an evacuation order, had decided to spend the night in his office. Ben Phipps, on his way to Psychico, dropped the Pringles off at the academy.

Pop psychology terms like “coping strategies” come to mind: these non-combatants are struggling for survival themselves, but their enemies are not the Nazis so much as the moral and social rootlessness they experience, with military victory, and thus the survival of their ‘home’ countries and values, uncertain, and with reminders of their own mortality and insignificance nearly constant.

In this context, Guy Pringle is a fascinating figure (though I don’t see why he’s the one Burgess highlights as “one of the major characters in modern fiction,” given the much greater priority given to the experience and perspective of his wife). Guy is a lecturer in English literature notable for his expansive energy, which in The Balkan Trilogy he invests in two major theatrical productions. The one treated in most detail is an amateur production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a project for which he recruits many of the other major characters–but, tellingly, not Harriet, with whom he declares he cannot work, because she will not take him or his effort seriously enough. His goals include raising the morale of the British residents and their friends in Bucharest as well as asserting the importance of British culture and history in the face of the military setbacks that have eroded the nation’s stature abroad–they are, after all, on the losing side at this point. The German Propaganda Bureau keeps a map in its window indicating German advances across France with “broad arrows.” “For Bucharest,” we are told, “the fall of France was the fall of civilization….With France lost, there would be no stay or force against savagery….the victory of Nazi Germany would be the victory of darkness.” In this context, Guy’s preoccupation with his play is suggestive of fiddling while Rome burns, and yet at the same time it seems defiant, an assertion of the value of art and beauty and imagination. Emerging from the theatre, the audience learns that Paris has fallen: “Chastened, they emerged into the summer night and met reality, avoiding each others’ eyes, guilty because they had escaped the last calamitous hours.” They have been experiencing freedom of the mind, the kind of freedom that these novels make you feel is the most to be cherished in wartime. And yet where is the heroism in going to the theatre while around you suffer millions unable to escape in the most literal way?

Ambivalence to Guy’s cultural projects, and indeed to Guy more generally, intensifies in The Levant Trilogy, written more than a decade after The Balkan Trilogy but picking up the story of most of the same characters as they move through another phase of displacement, this time in Egypt. Harriet’s relationship with Guy has always been strained by his inability to put her needs even on the same level as the demands placed on him by everyone else he knows, as well as by his own obsession with his work. Harriet’s discontent takes concrete form occasionally, as in a near-romance that evolves in Athens in the third novel of The Balkan Trilogy. In The Levant Trilogy, we see more of Harriet’s efforts to develop an independent identity in the face of Guy’s physical and emotional absence. In this series, though the war is brought much closer, through the character of Simon Boulderstone (is the redundancy of his surname significant?), with whom we travel to the front at last. Simon comes literally face to face with the horrors of the desert campaign:

Before him was a flat expanse of desert where the light was rolling out like a wave across the sand. Two tanks stood in the middle distance and imagining they had stopped for a morning brew-up, he decided to cross to them and ask if they had seen anything of the patrol or the batman’s truck. It was too far to walk so he went by car, following the track till he was level with the tanks, then walking across the mardam. A man was standing in one of the turrets, motionless, as if unaware of Simon’s approach. Simon stopped at a few yards’ distance to observe the figure, then saw it was not a man. It was a man-shaped cinder that faced him with white and perfect teeth set in a charred black skull. He could make out the eye-sockets and the triangle that had once supported a nose then, returning at a run, he swung the car round and drove back between the batteries, so stunned that for a little while his own private anxiety was forgotten.

We see, too, that the violence of war has the capacity to reach ‘civilians’ with no easing of its horrors. Very early in this volume, for instance, a child is brought in who has been killed by the explosion of a hand grenade he picked up while playing in the desert. In what may be the most surrealistically gruesome and disturbing scene I’ve ever read, his distraught parents refuse to interpret the signs that he has been fatally wounded and attempt to revive him by pouring gruel into a hole blown into his cheek: “The gruel poured out again. This happened three times before Sir Desmond gave up and, gathering the child into his arms, said, ‘He wants to sleep. I’ll take him to his room.'” His death prompts Harriet to think of “all the other boys who were dying in the desert before they had had a chance to live. And yet, though there was so much death at hand, she felt the boy’s death was a death apart.” Suffering was nearby throughout The Balkan Trilogy, but here we live in a community of the physically and spiritually wounded.

Yet even as the action and emotion of this trilogy had an intensity not often displayed in the earlier volume, it also seemed to me more directed at the unfolding of interior dramas for the characters, many of whom are struggling to define themselves against the expectations of others, or in the absence of well-defined or well-understood roles for themselves in the war-time conditions and foreign locations they are negotiating: Simon himself, for example, who has come to Egypt in part to follow in his brother’s footsteps, or Harriet, who eventually hitches a lift into Syria in an attempt to claim some meaning for herself beyond being Guy’s wife. Guy’s obtuseness about Harriet’s independent needs is highlighted more specifically here and his incessant busyness seems more irresponsible than it did in the first volume, perhaps because it’s not seen as serving any greater purpose. The one major cultural event ends…unexpectedly…without any of the triumphant possibilities of Troilus and Cressida, though perhaps it has as much symbolic significance of its own, maybe even marking a rejection of the idealism that Guy represented.

I haven’t really reached many interpretive conclusions about these books, but I have a lot of lingering questions. How far, for instance, do these books seek simply to chronicle how people lived through the exile from home and from normalcy imposed by the war, and how far do they prompt us to think about the global conflict as a reflection, an externalization, of abstract forces and values playing out on a personal scale as well? Is Manning’s understated style itself some kind of statement about the limitations of aesthetic responses to catastrophe, or about the necessity we are under of living life on our own small scale, however grand the larger narrative? Is Guy offered up as the embodiment of some essentially British quality, and if so, how far is it critiqued and how far accepted or encouraged?

Originally posted May 10, 2008