Summer Reading Recap

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Once again, summer is yielding to fall and Maddie and I have reached the end of our summer reading project. This year, we both reached or exceeded our target of 20 books by the library’s September 8th deadline, and we both read quite a few that we thoroughly enjoyed and admired. Because blog readers are typically fewer over the summer (what, you have better things to do than hang out on the internet?), I thought I would once again review the highlights. The library’s reading program didn’t officially begin until the very end of June, but I’m going to start a bit earlier, as some of the best reading I did was in May and June.

May’s most important reading was certainly Madame Bovary (post 1; post 2). This was a memorable experience, not because I enjoyed the novel, exactly, but because I enjoyed thinking about and debating the novel–which is, obviously, one of the very great novels and also an object lesson for those readers who (much to Howard Jacobson‘s annoyance) think that it’s important to be able to identify with a novel’s characters. The debate in the comments between litlove and Amateur Reader (two of the readers and bloggers I most admire) is as well worth reading (maybe more) than anything I said myself. Sometimes it’s just gratifying to have provided the occasion.

In June I travelled to Boston for some F2F time with my Open Letters colleagues and some quality time with my mother, with whom I spent many happy hours in bookstores in Boston, Cambridge, and Northampton. I came back from my trip feeling full of bookish energy and confidence (where, oh where, has that gone?!). I also brought back a lot of books, of course, and the first one I wrote up was Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72. I described this book as ” idiosyncratic, fascinating, beautiful, and occasionally annoying’; writing about it provoked reflections on my own efforts to redefine my life’s work, my experience of aging, and the hope it gave me to read about someone succeeding “by being completely herself”–and doing so when by so many measures she could be seen to have passed her moment. “Some things,” Peacock observes, “take living long enough to do.”

June’s other great reading experience was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which (like The Paper Garden) I had no idea would enthrall and move me the way it did. Part fantasy, part adventure story, part romance, part myth, this extraordinarily effervescent novel is also very much a tragedy about our own inability to live up to our own ideals.

In July I read Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, which was every bit as gripping, artful, and profound as Wolf Hall led us to expect. I admit I was just a tiny bit less impressed with it than with its predecessor, only because it is exactly the same kind of book, and the delightful shock of it all (from the oblique point of view to the vivid immediacy of the historical details) simply could not be as great the second time. It read like a straight continuation of the first novel, and presumably the final volume, now in composition, will complete the package. Not that there’s anything wrong with that–of course not. But Mantel’s other books show her to be capable of a virtuosic range of styles and voices–imagine the feat of doing each of these parts of Cromwell’s life in a technically different way! But of course when someone writes a brilliant novel it’s petty to wish, even a little bit, that they’d written a different brilliant novel.

Probably the most fun I had reading anything this summer was Thomas Raddall’s Halifax: Warden of the North. Once again, some of the fun was in the surprise–as I explain in the post, I had always snarkily assumed Canadian history had little drama or glamour– but Raddall’s break-neck pace and lively story-telling carried me right along.

In a sentimental mood, I read the three novels in K. M. Peyton‘s Flambards series: Flambards, The Edge of the Clouds, and Flambards in Summer. I’m still partial to her Pennington series (brooding adolescence! Liszt!) but these books are real treats, not least for their evocative portrayal of a historical moment marked by profound social transformations.

Like Madame Bovary, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels were more fun to think and write about than to read: they are difficult, nasty even, claustrophobic, misanthropic–yet at the same time, highly stylized. I would have liked to get some responses to my analysis from the folks on Twitter and elsewhere who praised this series to the skies when I mentioned reading it. I expect the discussion would cover many of the same issues that came up in the comment threads on Madame Bovary, actually. Much as I struggled with the first four, I found myself interested and impressed enough to read the final volume.

David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green was a highlight of my August reading–the young narrator won me over, and I found the novel’s more consistent form and focus more appealing than the elaborate Russian doll structure of Cloud Atlas. Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown was slow, difficult, and utterly engrossing.

Throughout the summer also I read a lot in preparation for my seminar on the ‘Somerville Novelists‘ (now, after much anticipation, getting underway). A lot of the contextual reading was recorded only in my research notes, but Brittain’s Honourable Estate, Woolf’s Three Guineas, and Holtby’s Virginia Woolf were all revelatory in their own ways.

It was a bit of a difficult summer for me in some ways. As I’ve written about before, I don’t flourish without structure in my days, and even when I was able to keep up some kind of regular routine with time in my office, I was usually the only person around, as my friends and colleagues were either out of town for research or conferences, or at their cottages, or working at home. I often feel somewhat marooned out here in Halifax, and summer exacerbates the sense of isolation.  This summer I felt particularly mopish! Not, of course, that it isn’t nice to have a more relaxed schedule, and to be able to spend more time enjoying the company of my family. And the virtual company of my online blog and twitter connections is always a good thing–a social lifeline and a great source of intellectual stimulation. Still, I’m thinking I should try to take steps to avoid falling into the same summer slump again. I’ve inquired about spreading my regular teaching load out into the spring or summer: if this is possible, it would help balance things out better, as fall and winter can be overwhelmingly busy. Also, I clearly need to cultivate more friendships outside of work, so that the evacuation of campus doesn’t affect me so much! Precisely because the academic term is so busy, it’s always hard for me to figure out how and where to do this. Also, I’m not much of a joiner. And soon it will be winter and I won’t want to leave the house unless I have to!  Well, when my resolution flags, I can watch this video and renew my motivation:

 

Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is another Book About Books for my ongoing reading project–the longest-running one on this blog. As I’ve noted before, I began reading this kind of book as a deliberate exploration of the genre (what do people say?) and now I am also always curious about voice (how do they say it?).

Fadiman has lots of charming and interesting and erudite things to say about books, and about readers, but I actually found her voice a but off-putting. I think my reaction is related to one I’ve had before about writing that is really more about the writer than the subject–there seemed something faintly self-aggrandizing in her attention to just how very bookish her family is, how very particular they are about grammar, how very much she loves books … I know, I know. It’s her life, and I don’t doubt that she’s entirely sincere, and these are all things I appreciate or share myself. There was just something in the tone that I didn’t warm to.

As a result, I ended up liking best the essays that were more about other people. My unexpected favorite was “The P.M.’s Empire of Books”–unexpected because who knew that Gladstone could provide such delights? Fadiman herself certainly had no idea, until she discovered his tiny volume On Books and the Housing of Them. It’s not a book that brings unmitigated pleasure (“he may be the only man in history to have written a long-winded twenty-nine-page book”). But it turns out he had an endearingly insane passion for organizing his vast and ever-expanding book collection, and this led him to produce this intense instruction manual reflecting, as Fadiman says, the “quintessentially Victorian traits” of “Energy. Priggishness. Disciplined nature and control. Conceit. Probity. Neatness and passion for order. Authoritarianism. Singlemindedness.” (This list, by the way, comes from the index entry for “Gladstone, William Ewart,” in Roy Jenkins’s biography.) Gladstone’s mission was to solve the familiar problem of “too many books, too little space.” He did not shy away from particulars:

Mr. G. calculated that a library twenty by forty feet, with projecting bookcases three feet long, twelve inches deep, and nine feet high (“so that the upper shelf can be reached by the aid of a wooden stool of two steps not more than twenty inches high”), would accommodate between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand volumes. I trust his arithmetic. He had, after all, been Chancellor of the Exchequer. This shelving plan would suffice for the home of an ordinary gentleman, but for cases of extreme book-crowding, he proposed a more radical scheme in which “nearly two-thirds, or say three-fifths, of the whole cubic contents of a properly constructed apartment may be made a nearly solid mass of books.” It was detailed in a footnote so extraordinary it bears quoting nearly in full…

And it does, but to read it yourself, you’ll have to get the book–either one, as it turns out AbeBooks actually has a number of copies of Gladstone’s listed for sale. I’ll just give you the spoiler here: Fadiman reports that Gladstone’s proposed “system of rolling shelves … is used in the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera and at the New York Times Book Review, among many other places.” Now that’s a contribution to civilization!

Another essay I particularly appreciated because it seemed so very timely was “Nothing New Under the Sun,” which deals in a sly and charming way with the complicated question of literary borrowing–or stealing. The 9-page essay has 38 footnotes, all of which help to mess with our heads about “the sea-change[8] through which an aggregation of words, common property when scattered throughout a dictionary, is transformed into a stealable asset.” You all know what fn 8 says, right? This essay ends with an anecdote about a writer who, in 1988, was found to have “incorporated entire paragraphs” from someone else’s book into a New Yorker essay. The writer was, it turned out, a “compulsive plagiarist” who “borrowed repeatedly” yet “what a gifted writer he was!–he didn’t need to do it.” Sound familiar?

From the Archives: My Teachers — An Appreciation

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

My daughter starts Grade 6 tomorrow, which for her is the beginning of the end of elementary school. Talking to her about that tonight reminded me of my own Grade 6 year, which was a turning point for me both personally and academically. This thought, in turn, reminded me of this earlier post. As I head into another teaching term myself, it’s both humbling and inspiring to reflect on the lasting impact a teacher can have. I’d love to hear in the comments about teachers who have made a difference to you!

From the Novel Readings Archives:

This post is my 200th at Novel Readings, and I’d like to turn it into something of a special occasion.

A month or so ago, finding myself in “a bit of a posting slump” after wrapping up my series on “This Week in My Classes,” I asked for suggestions about things to write about. I recently received this nice suggestion by email from Tom Wood: “How about a post on a teacher/scholar whose work has had a significant influence on you?” I really liked this idea, because I still think with admiration and gratitude of several teachers whose influence, support, and guidance shaped my life in ways exceeded only by the love and direction provided by my parents. So, for this 200th post, I thought I’d take up Tom’s suggestion and celebrate them.* Now that I’m a teacher myself, I reflect often on the potential we have, in this profession, for making a difference in someone’s development. If you had a particularly memorable or influential teacher, I hope you’ll post a comment telling me about them!

It is impossible to overestimate the importance the right teacher at the right time can have on a student, though it may be impossible to foresee what will turn to be “right” ahead of time. In my own case, I think of my sixth grade teacher, Mr. James. I hadn’t wanted to be assigned to his class, as he had a reputation for being brilliant but eccentric and sort of scary–all of which he was, and indeed still is! But he was the right teacher for me after all: he saw something in my moody, bookish 12-year-old self that caught his interest enough for him to lend me extra books and encourage me to be less fearful about the differences between my own strengths and the qualities that earned other students ease and popularity with their peers. I think, too, of the indomitable Joni MacDougall, who browbeat me into being a better writer and let me, as a nerdy tenth grader, visit her History 12 class to give a presentation on Richard III (when I say “nerdy,” I mean that I was the youngest member–at least to my knowledge–of the Richard III Society of Canada). Later, when she had moved to a different school, she invited me to speak to her social studies class on the Industrial Revolution. Both teachers intimidated, bullied, and pressured me; both also, in equal measure, inspired and motivated me. Somehow, they had an idea of what I was capable of that exceeded my own, and by urging me to cultivate my own interest in reading and history, they started me along my career path well before I could have articulated anything like academic ambition for myself.

But probably the most influential moment, and the one I never saw coming, was my enrollment in D. G. Stephens’s first-year English class at UBC. I nearly missed it: I had registered for another section, but after the first class meeting I was told that I had to switch to what they called a “Z” section (I had done well on a placement test, I think). So I showed up in Dr. Stephens’s class for the next meeting (and, I distinctly remember, had to write an in-class essay on the seven deadly sins, about which everyone else had been forewarned). Prior to taking his class I had fully intended to major in history. I was a lifelong avid reader, but a complete skeptic about literary interpretation: when I thought about literary criticism at all, which was almost never, it seemed to me an exercise in second-guessing, or just plain guessing–in seeing what wasn’t there. In retrospect, I think this dismissive attitude was partly the result of growing up in a house full of devoted readers: I took reading for granted and didn’t see why or how it could be complicated.

So what happened to me in Dr. Stephens’s class? Obviously, whatever it was, it changed my mind about a lot of things. But it wasn’t because he was messianic. His teaching style is probably best described as “understated,” in fact.** I particularly remember the way he would make a comment and then scan the room, looking for responses, which were slow and hesitant in coming (his demeanor was, or I remember it as being, a bit intimidating–wryly ironic, a bit cynical). Many of his remarks were actually very funny, and I came to believe he was looking around to see if anyone got the joke. (I do that too, now: it’s a good way to see who’s paying attention.) But I don’t remember that he ever cracked a real smile himself. When he asked the class a question, I often wondered what mysterious answer he had in mind. Whatever I was thinking seemed too obvious to be right, and clearly hardly anybody else would hazard a guess. But it was frustrating not to have more discussion, and one day we had read a poem I really liked (it was Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web“) and I finally put my hand up and ventured some replies to his questions about Graves’s language and how particular words fit the central ideas of the poem. He seemed pleased! My answers were good! I knew what he was talking about! Things started to fall into place. He wasn’t making things up, because I could see them there too, in the poem, and thinking about how the details of form and language built up the whole piece made the poem better, more pleasurable, more exciting to read. It was like something coming into focus, something I (as someone who had always loved to read both fiction and poetry) had always seen, but had never really looked at.

I actually have all of my old undergraduate essays (it’s a good exercise in humility to look them over, especially during marking season). I certainly didn’t get all As in his class. What I did get was a sense of the rewards of interpretation, of lingering over details, of making a specific connection with a text. It probably helped me that Dr. Stephens was not a showy teacher, and it certainly helped me that he was a rigorous one as well as a witty one. I didn’t give up the idea of majoring in history. Instead, I became the first UBC student to do a combined Honours degree in English and History (back in the olden days, interdisciplinarity was not the norm). I had many excellent teachers in both departments, and superb mentors for my Honours thesis in James Winter and Jonathan Wisenthal. But I dedicated my thesis to Dr. Stephens, with gratitude.

*I realize that Tom’s question may have been meant to elicit more about scholarly and critical, rather than personal, influences. I’m still thinking about that dimension of influence. No question, I have learned a lot from many teachers and scholars. But is that the same as having been “influenced” by them? And have any of them actually inspired, moved, or motivated me? (If not, is that a problem or a loss?) [Update: I did eventually write a post about Writing and Life – Influential Critics.]

**My search of the UBC website for pictures or other details about Dr. Stephens to link to revealed that he won a “Master Teacher” award in 1974 and 1977 (fully a decade before I took his class), so clearly I wasn’t the only student he impressed. This raises the further question for me of whether UBC had, at that time, a deliberate policy of putting senior and well-regarded faculty in their first-year classrooms.

Originally posted June 5, 2008

“I believe we are lost”: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

All Quiet on the Western Front is as bleak and compelling a version of the “lost generation” narrative of World War I as I’ve read so far. In fact, Paul Bäumer, the novel’s narrator, comments explicitly, repeatedly, and bitterly on the chasm between the generation fighting in the trenches and the older generation far away from the front lines. “We agree that it’s the same for everyone,” Paul and his comrades conclude;

not only for us here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our generation.

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

Though the novel is replete with vivid vignettes, from the tedium of training to the camaraderie of trench life and the horrific chaos of bombardments, the most poignant moments arise when the young men (and they are so very young, most of them, just the age of so many of the first-year students I’m about to meet) reflect on the war’s catastrophic effect on normalcy:

To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled–we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial–I believe we are lost.

They can’t even imagine what they will do when it ends: even if they are lucky enough to survive at all, much less intact, what’s the value of a life from which all meaning has been stripped? The physical violence ultimately comes across as peripheral–collateral, even–to the other damage they endure:

The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer. We believe in the war.

Battle is terrible, but it allows no time for reflection; Paul (and the reader) hurtles along, transformed from a thinking being to a “wild beast”:

We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down–now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged. . . . [C]rouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance. If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him.

 It’s when you stop to think that the true madness of war overwhelms you, because of course it is against men that you fling your bombs, and only the decisions of other men far removed from the consequences have turned ordinary people into enemies. “Just you consider,” observes Paul’s mate Katczinsky,

“almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are just labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchman as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

“Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

“Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.

“Not you, nor anybody else here.”

But it is dangerous to think this way, or to think at all, as Paul discovers during a turn guarding a group of Russian prisoners. In the trenches, the enemy is abstract until he is upon you, and then your common humanity becomes irrelevant in the desperate struggle to survive. But face to face, what you perceive is “the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men”:

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles’ beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

Paul pulls himself up short here: “I am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss.” Yet he realizes, too, that he needs these thoughts: “I will not lose these thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended.” Though it is these thoughts that make the war unbearable, it is also these thoughts–these moments of recognition–that he hopes give him “the possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling.”

Human feeling surfaces again when, hiding in a shell hole during an enemy attack (and how odd and salutary it is, just by the way, to be on the German side for once in my reading), Paul stabs a Frenchman who tumbles in on top of him. He had expected this moment, prepared for it (“If anyone jumps in here I will go for him … at once, stab him clean through the throat so that he cannot call out; that’s the only way”), but he is not, in fact, prepared (how could he be?) for this moment when killing becomes intimate. He strikes without thinking and feels “how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses.” The man does not die, however–at least, not at once, and Paul is trapped in the shell hole with a man who now seems, not his enemy, but his victim. This way, indeed, lies the abyss:

These hours. . . . The gurgling starts again–but how slowly a man dies! For this I know–he cannot be saved, I have, indeed, tried to tell myself that he will be, but at noon this pretence breaks down and melts before his groans. . . . By noon I am groping on the outer limits of reason. . . . every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.

 At last he dies: what a relief! “I breathe freely again. But only for a short time.” At least his dying was a distraction: “My state is getting worse, I can no longer control my thoughts.” Insanely, pathetically, beautifully, he tells his dead companion what he is thinking:

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they not tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up–take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.”

After he finally brings himself to leave the shell hole, Paul is restored to reason (or what passes for it during war) by Kat showing him the snipers gleefully picking off enemies. “What else could you have done?” ask his friends. “That is what you are here for.” “It was only because I had to lie there with him so long,” Paul says; “After all, war is war.”

That simple tautology says everything that is to be said, and at the same time it says nothing, offers no meaning, no consolation. There is nothing to be said, Paul thinks, as, recovering from a wound, he looks at the wreckage of young lives passing in a ceaseless stream through the hospital:

And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

 Paul’s testimony–Remarque’s novel–shows that too, with harrowing simplicity. For Paul (for Remarque) war is definitive. It is everything. Beyond it, for those who have experienced it, there is nothing:

And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;–it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

I have been interested in reading All Quiet on the Western Front for many years, but I’m reading it at this particular moment as part of my preparation for my Somerville Novelists seminar. It is an example of what Testament of Youth is not: a soldier’s story, a first-hand (if fictionalized) account of fighting and survival and tactics and rations and brothers in arms. It is the masculine story of the war, and as many of the critics I’ve been reading point out, that’s the valorized story, the “authentic” one. Brittain knew these aspects of the war only second-hand, through the letters she received from the front and through her experience as a nurse. There are many points of convergence, though. Above all, both tell a story of lost innocence. And both focus almost exclusively on the personal, on individual disillusionment, devastation, and loss–but both lead us towards political conclusions by making it impossible to understand what cause could possibly be worth such a price. Outside their books, we might well feel there’s an argument to be had about that. Reading them, though, it’s hard to do anything but mourn.

Letters to a Friend

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

A dear friend has been de-cluttering–a foreign concept to those of us with pack-rat archivist tendencies. She wrote to find out if I’d like back the letters I’ve written her over the years. I didn’t figure they contained much of interest, just everyday meanderings and updates, but they go back a pretty long way and I’m already sorry that I haven’t done well keeping track of letters people have sent me (my grandmother, for instance, was a great letter writer, but I have very few letters of hers, though I don’t remember ever deciding not to keep them)–so I said sure, send them along.

I received them last week and have been poking through them with a mixture of disbelief, amusement, and nostalgia. Was I ever that young? Did I really think those were topics of interest, or books or movies worth commenting on? Wow, I was earnest about school for a while–and I was sure excited when my first article was published–but I had forgotten how early in my time at Cornell I started muttering about whether academia was really right for me. I used a purple pen sometimes? That’s embarrassing! On the other hand, my handwriting was much better back then. I wrote a whole letter while sitting in a seminar? I thought that in the olden days, before smart phones and the internet, students always gave professors their full, undivided, respectful attention!

Then there’s the odd experience of reviewing my own life. The earliest letters are from the summer of 1989, before my final year at UBC. That summer I started work on my Honours essay, wrote my GRE, and started seriously planning my grad school applications (“I’m almost as nervous about getting accepted to grad school as I am about not getting accepted!”). Say Anything was just out (“I don’t like watching perfect romances too much these days ….”). For some reason I had resolved to read more American literature and was finding The Scarlet Letter dull, but I was thrilled by Carlyle’s “Characteristics.” There’s a whole long paragraph about my soon-to-be advisor’s book Shaw’s Sense of History and how excited I was that “it is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind for my own paper.” To my dismay, it had a major printing error in it (“pages 53-84 are MISSING and pages 21-52 are reprinted in their place!”)–but I took heart: “if Oxford UP can make mistakes, why should we be so paranoid about doing things right?” (That’s still a good question!) In general, that was a buoyant time for me. Looking back on it in 1993, I wrote “In my last two years at UBC I felt sure of my direction and I was clearly on the right path.” That’s not a feeling that had lasted: “now … I’m worried both about my performance and about my stamina, not to mention my future prospects.”

The letters tell the story of that shift from certainty to confusion and, sort of, back again, as they carry on with reasonable steadiness through my Ph.D. years and my first couple of years in Halifax. What a lot of changes she and I went through in that period! Her story would be hers to tell, of course. As for me, I endured my emotionally and intellectually traumatic first year at Cornell, struggling not just with the academic work but with being myself, or even figuring out who I was, so far from everyone who knew me. I was lonely and homesick and perpetually intimidated.

By the middle of my second year, I was somewhat more confident academically (though unhappily dependent on external validation), and much more settled personally: I met my husband-to-be in the summer of 1991, and we got engaged in December. In my third year, I was married. I also taught my first independent class, a writing seminar of 17 students: it’s “very writing intensive,” I reported, “and that means a lot of grading … e.g. 16 or 17 [papers] a week.” Ha–those were the days. I enjoyed the teaching right from the start: “I like it better than going to graduate seminars: so much less pretentious!” Perhaps I was thinking of the student who interjected into every discussion, “Oh, but that’s so Godwinian!”

Actually, it’s the continuities that surprise me the most as I leaf through these pages from my past. There I am in 1990 complaining that Blue Velvet immerses us too much in the dark side of life, and here I am today making the same objection to Madame Bovary and the Patrick Melrose novels. There I am, again and again, waiting for someone else to tell me whether my writing is any good. There I am, year after year, wondering if I’m cut out for the academic life but loving enough about it to persist. “If someone offered me a job in publishing right now, I’d probably take it,” I say, but of course nobody did (because nobody does!) and so I stayed on the path I could see most clearly, and through a combination of inertia and luck (and, of course, some pretty hard work) I ended up, well, here.

When I first looked at these letters last week, I kept thinking, “Oh, if only I could somehow have told myself what I know now. The things I would do differently!” But it doesn’t take much hard thought to realize that wishing to apply one’s hindsight in this way is not only futile but also illogical. It’s not as if I could make a different decision at one point and yet keep everything else the same, after all, and life is such a complicated tangle of interconnected things. The possible world in which I leave Cornell to pursue a job in publishing, for instance, is also one in which, among other things, I don’t have my children–not that I wouldn’t have had any children, but I wouldn’t have had the ones I actually do have. And how can I wish them unmade?

I’m not one to believe that everything happens for a reason. I think we just do the best we can, and make the best sense of things we can, as we go along, and time passes, and things change one way or another. Though by and large their details are mundane, my letters are a part of this process, a sorting and filtering of experience. “I have been reading ‘The Prelude,'” I wrote to my friend,

and it seems only fair that if every detail of Wordsworth’s life is considered interesting enough to suffer through in hundreds of lines of understated iambic pentameter, my own humdrum existence deserves at least a few lines of commonplace prose!

Self-reflection doesn’t necessarily lead to self-knowledge, or to anything of wider import, but I’m glad to have had this chance to look back and rediscover what I had to say about my life. And, more than anything, I’m glad to have had such a true and loyal friend to say it all to. Knowing that someone is out there who cares enough to read all the “gory details”–well, that’s about the best thing there is.

Ahdaf Soueif: “We all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction”

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Ahdaf Soueif had a thought-provoking essay in the Guardian recently about fiction and activism in general, and the effect of the Egyptian revolution on Egyptian novelists in particular:

 In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction.

Fiction will come again, I hope …

Attempts at fiction right now would be too simple. The immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take form. For reality has to take time to be processed, to transform into fiction. So it’s no use a story presenting itself, tempting, asking to be written, because another story will – in the next minute – come roaring over it, making the same demand. And you, the novelist, can’t grab one of them and run away and lock yourself up with it and surrender to it and wait and work for the transformation to happen – because you, the citizen, need to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, articulating. Your talent – at the time of crisis – is to tell the stories as they are, to help them to achieve power as reality not as fiction.

 It’s not that she thinks writing fiction is itself apolitical, or that it can’t be a form of activism: “A work of fiction lives by empathy – the extending of my self into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes. This itself is a political act: empathy is at the heart of much revolutionary action.”  But Soueif doesn’t think great art can come from a sense of deliberate activism: “it may be a good cause and a just cause, but what you get will not be a novel – it will be a political tract with a veneer of fiction.” “Ah yes, Mary Barton,” says the sage Victorianist, nodding … and yet that doesn’t seem quite fair to Mary Barton, actually, which has more than a veneer of artistry even as it is an overt act of advocacy. Its art, we might say, is its advocacy.

Maybe the moment for such “novels with a purpose” has simply passed: today we want our fiction to intervene obliquely or ironically, rather than to confront us (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, anyone?) with demands, to raise questions rather than blandish prescriptions. Our tolerance for didacticism in art is very low. And yet maybe we underestimate the effects of that veneer of fiction, or overestimate the importance of aesthetic ineffables over social deliverables. Would anyone make a case for the artistry of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I didn’t think so–but would we wish it unwritten? It played its part in the revolutions of its time. But then, if we had to choose between Mary Barton and another novel pretty much contemporary with it that had no immediate interest in “the problems of its day,” Wuthering Heights, which would be the greater loss?* We don’t blame Emily Brontë, surely, for not rushing off to Manchester to see what she could do about relations between master and men; we don’t suggest that she chose to “absent [herself] from the great narrative of the world.” But what difference did her book make, compared to Gaskell’s or Stowe’s? Do we care? Should we care? ‘Tis a muddle.

And so, like Soueif in her essay, we don’t take a stand one way or the other on whether the artist can or should, in general, “do one or the other.” But “at the time of crisis,” “if you cannot or will not remove yourself from the situation,” Soueif suggests, you lose the luxury of distance, the luxury of choice. At such a time, your responsibility “as a citizen of the world” is to turn your efforts and talents to things that are not made up. Thus, for the time being, she at least is no longer a novelist.

I found her reflections interesting not just because of the questions they raise about a novelist’s obligations, but because they reminded me of her comments last year about whether the revolution had rendered her (then) in-progress novel obsolete–and of my own dissatisfaction with doing literary criticism about her novels when world events made such a project seem pretty trivial. In the intervening time she has published one book of non-fiction, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. This was clearly, as I said in my review, “a book Soueif felt compelled to write”: this recent piece suggests that we will see more writing of this kind before we see another novel. A part of me is sorry, because I want to see what kind of fiction she writes next, but I accept that what she’s doing right now is much more important. I’m glad that she’s still invoking George Eliot, anyway.

*There’s the complicating factor that perhaps Mary Barton, which to be sure is a bit creaky around the plot points and shamelessly sentimental to boot, was important preparatory work for Gaskell’s later, better novels, but that just muddies up my attempt at a provocative comparison, so never mind that for now.

The Moral Continuum: Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

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Like The Once and Future King, The Jewel in the Crown is something I have gotten around to very belatedly. I have known about it for ages and always meant to read it, but hadn’t, until now. I haven’t even seen the old BBC adaptation–at least, not all of it. (I think I saw some episodes when it first aired back in the 80s, at friends’ houses, as my family had no TV when I was growing up.)

Also like The Once and Future King, The Jewel in the Crown is a book I thought I knew enough about not to be surprised on actually reading it. And in this case too, I was, after all, surprised. I knew the historical setting and, more or less, the plot, but  I wasn’t prepared for the form of the novel, which turns out to be where much of its interest lies and how many of its ideas are expressed. Though the obvious predecessor to compare it to is A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown reminded me insistently of both The Moonstone and The Ring and the Book, both multi-voiced crime narratives that show through telling and tell through showing — people expose themselves through speaking as themselves, and the accumulation of their voices gives us a  complexly layered whole that is far more, and far more interesting, than any single part. All of them are also about crime and guilt and innocence, and how tangled and twisted lives and motives and judgments can be. They all focus on what, in The Jewel in the Crown, are called “areas of dangerous fallibility.”

Nobody emerges truly innocent in The Moonstone, and no one character (except, arguably, the implied author) emerges as authoritative, but in both The Ring and the Book and The Jewel in the Crown there’s a certain status attached to the victimized woman whose story is at the center. As the telling and retelling by other characters roils around–as the possibility of ever seeing clearly, or acting on that clarity, eludes us–eventually it becomes clear that we must hear her speak. It’s interesting how they end up carrying so much moral weight. How do they earn it? In Daphne’s case, partly by being a woman and thus in a complicated relationship to British imperial power. This slight dislocation is not enough, though: not all English women in the novel see, much less act, as Daphne does. Once everything else is explained as fully as possible, there still always remains the mystery of human personality, after all. This, ultimately, is what the novel’s form emphasizes.

One question that inevitably arises reading The Jewel and the Crown is how far the trauma of the Bibighar Gardens can or should be read as a metaphor for other kinds of trauma, violence, and violation in the novel. It turns out that Daphne eventually addresses this question quite directly as she reflects on “the danger to [Hari] as a black man carrying [her] through a gateway that opened on to the world of white people”:

I look for similes, for something that explains it more clearly, but find nothing, because there is nothing. It is itself, an Indian carrying an English girl he has made love to and been forced to watch being assaulted — carrying her back to where she would be safe. It is its own simile. It says all that needs to be said, doesn’t it?

That’s true, but only because by the time we see the event as it happened–as it happened, that is, to her and to Hari–we have seen and heard so much that every word and movement of theirs is hopelessly fraught with everything else.

There’s no question but what The Jewel in the Crown is a novel about a very particular time and place, and that its central incidents mean what they do because of that specific context. At the same time, the diversity of voices in the novel means that, though specific, their experience is not narrow, not altogether foreign. “There are the action, the people, and the place,” as Scott says on the novel’s first page, “all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.”

This Week in My Class Prep: Sorting, Drafting, and Pondering

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The beginning of classes is getting close enough that working on class prep no longer seems like just a way of avoiding more amorphous (and thus more stressful) tasks like research and writing. All summer, of course, I’ve been doing reading and thinking with my seminar on the Somerville novelists in mind, but now I’ve got a draft syllabus including a tentative assignment sequence. I’ve also been working on a prezi to accompany my opening remarks on the first day. At this point my plan is to sketch out the contexts that I think will be most relevant to our discussions of our four main texts: the history of women at Oxford, the suffrage movement, World War I, and modernism. As I work out details for the course requirements (still only provisionally decided) I am trying to balance a more open-ended attitude than is typical of even my upper-level courses with enough structure that everyone feels confident about expectations and standards.

Right now I’m feeling a bit panicky about this course, to be honest: I am personally very interested in the material, and I’m hopeful that the students will also find it interesting and have enough genuine curiosity and drive to make it work. But at the same time I worry that my expertise won’t be deep enough to support them if their interests take them too far afield, and that what seems enticingly open-ended to me will feel aimless or vague to them. Still, I’m glad not to be doing yet another round of one of my more familiar seminars: even though I could set up and run ‘The Victorian Woman Question’ or ‘Sensation Fiction’ or even ‘Women and Detective Fiction’ quite easily, as I’ve taught each of these seminars multiple times now, it is more exciting and intellectually challenging to be trying something new, and my being fresh has got to be beneficial to the students at some level. As I finalize the organizational details, I’ll keep reading background and critical sources to build up my confidence in the course content. This week I solicited advice on Twitter and got a great list of recommendations for books on World War I, most of which I was able to round up from the library. This week I’ll be adding to my collection of sources on women and modernism, and doing some reviewing of our four primary texts to help me decide on the reading installments for the schedule. And tidying up instructions for the wiki assignment. And … so many other things.

Because I won’t be changing much at all in this year’s version of the Mystery and Detective Fiction class (I shook up the reading list last year), my other main worry right now is my section of English 1000, Introduction to Literature. It hasn’t been that long since I taught an intro class, but most recently I’ve been doing one of our half-year versions, whereas in 2012-13 I’m doing a full-year section for the first time since 2000-2001! The half-year course I did was just “prose and fiction” (there’s a second course on poetry and drama that completes the intro requirement for students). The full-year version is supposed to address all of the major genres, so that’s one difference. The other difference, of course, is just having a lot more time with the same group, which is a great opportunity to develop both relationships and skills. Because book orders were due in the spring, that part of the course planning was already done (and there too I got very helpful input from people on Twitter, especially about choosing a contemporary novel to round out the syllabus). Now I’m sorting the readings into some kind of order and mapping out writing assignments, keeping in mind the various rules for the university’s Writing Requirements and our departmental policies on first-year courses.

The objectives for Introduction to Literature are quite broad and include both literary and composition skills. Aside from having to work on all the major genres, practice writing about literature, and give explicit attention to grammar, punctuation, and citations, what we do in Intro is pretty much up to us–which is nice, of course, but it also leaves every decision pretty wide open. So far I’ve decided to use the fall term for units on essays, short fiction, and poetry, drawing on the anthologies I’ve ordered, and to bundle the longer readings in the winter term. I’m pairing Night and The Road, and doing a poetry interval on grief, despair, and death to go along with them; and then I’m pairing Unless and A Room of One’s Own, with a women’s poetry cluster including Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Margaret Atwood to set that up. We won’t be spending a lot of time on drama, but we’ll be reading one short play in the fall term. There’s time for me to add another one for the winter, but I’ve already discovered that once I set aside time for writing workshops, peer editing, and so forth, there’s not enough time to read all the poetry I’d like to cover, so I’m reluctant to crowd the schedule even more. I know some of my colleagues don’t assign any essays in their intro sections, so I figure I’m following the rules at least as well as they are! I really look forward to teaching poetry, which I don’t typically get much chance to do (last year, with English 3000, was another welcome opportunity). Students often mutter things about not “getting” poetry, or simply declare that they don’t like it–to which I typically reply that they should not, then, be English majors! Though novels are my first love as a reader, I do consider poetry the highest form of literary art.

At 30 students, my intro section this year will be the smallest first-year class I’ve ever taught at Dal: as part of a curriculum restructuring a couple of years ago, we introduced one extremely large section (largely with the aim of guaranteeing our TA allotment and thus funding for our graduate students) and (the silver lining) turned some of the remaining sections into these little baby ones. 30 isn’t really tiny, of course: at Cornell, I got to teach a writing seminar capped at 17, and that’s a size that makes serious one-on-one attention possible. Our sections of 30 will have no TA support, so it will be just me and them–all year long! Though with no TA I’ll have the same marking load as in the formerly-standard sections of 60, I will certainly be able to give them more personalized attention overall, especially during class discussion and workshops.

Demand for these small sections has been very strong: I think they all have waiting lists of at least 20. I hope that the students who get spaces in them appreciate that it is increasingly rare to be face to face with a (relatively senior!) professor like this for a full year. Inevitably I’ve been reflecting on all the hype around MOOCs as I plan my classes this year and trying to understand why it is so easy for some pundits to talk as if a teacher’s personal interaction with her students is an expendable part of the learning process. I know that many kinds of interaction are possible online (given my own range of online activities, I hardly need to be told that!), and for years I have supplemented my classroom time with a variety of technological options, from holding office hours in chat rooms to curating discussion boards or hosting class blogs and Twitter feeds. So much of the inspiration and motivation for students’ learning, though, comes from what happens between us when we look each other in the eye! And I don’t mean just for them: for me, too, it is often critical to be focused completely on the student, which often includes interpreting what they are trying to say, rather than what words are actually coming out. Moving towards understanding is a very fluid, dynamic, interactive process. And I do so much more with their writing than mark things right or wrong–and it takes so much time! With adequate resources, I suppose much of this could be done in some virtual way, but at some point, without that live classroom experience, this would cease to be a job I’d want to do. I guess I feel that way particularly at this point in the summer, when my own energy and motivation is flagging from sheer lack of human contact. When colleagues ask me how my summer’s going, they typically look shocked when I reply that it’s going slowly and I miss the energy of the teaching term (even though I do  rather dread the hectic pace of it!).  I had just this conversation again just yesterday, in fact. But it’s true!

At Last, and Maybe Least: The Final Patrick Melrose Novel

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I find I have little to say about At Last. I think this is because I said quite a lot about the first four of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, most of which applies equally well to the mixed experience I had reading this one. More awful people mostly being self-centered, self-deceiving, and self-indulgent. More self-consciously metaphorical writing  (occasionally so irritating that I wondered whether the praise lavished on the previous novels had inflated St. Aubyn’s sense of his own stylishness or just discouraged his editors’ interest in, well, editing). More barbed humor. More suspect precocity from young children, this time including one little fellow who can spontaneously pun on ‘Bin Laden’. A lot more popping in and out of different people’s points of views, which is appropriate in a series so interested in what defines identity and consciousness, and in memory and how it shapes or governs our characters.

If anything really struck me as interestingly different about At Last, it would lie in that question of memory. Most of the novel takes place at the memorial service for Patrick’s mother, so not only is this a good device for assembling everyone who remains from the dramatis personae of all the other books, but it also makes plausible a lot of flashbacks as they think back over their (mostly quite sordid and/or unhappy) lives. Ultimately for Patrick the question is how far the memory of his own appalling traumatic childhood defines him. His final meditation on this problem is by far the best part of the novel, but it didn’t seem really earned by what had come before it. At least, not by what had come before it in At Last: I can’t imagine how this novel would read on its own, but to the extent that the conclusion brings Patrick to something of an epiphany, it was the whole accumulation of what he’s been through (what he and the reader have been through!) that justifies it. I read the 250 or so pages before it with curiosity but no urgency, and that was disappointing given the intensity (sometimes quite unpleasant) of the other books.

So was my hope for a hopeful ending fulfilled? Ultimately, yes, though just barely. As the novel and the series ends, Patrick has found hope–just enough, anyway, to pick up the phone and have another try at living a life with “a margin of freedom.” Since it seems the freedom he longs for is from himself, though, it’s a thin thread. But it’s strengthened for him by compassion:

As the compassion expanded he saw himself on equal terms with his supposed persecutors, saw his parents, who appeared to be the cause of his suffering, as unhappy children with parents who appeared to be the cause of their suffering: there was no one to blame and everyone to help, and those who appeared to deserve the most blame needed the most help.

Perhaps, at last, this is the mercy he dreamed of, “a course that is neither bitter nor false, something that lies beyond argument.”

From the Archives: Who Cares Who Killed … Whoever It Was?

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I’m reading Elizabeth George’s Believing the Lie, and I find I still feel pretty much as I did when I wrote this post in 2009: I’m more interested in the continuing characters than in the mystery plot they’re caught up in. Given the particular characters, I suppose it’s inevitable that a novel about them would involve some kind of crime story, and I appreciate what George is able to do with character development while still working in the procedural form. But I’m tempted to skim everything that’s not directly about Lynley and his immediate circle…

 

(Originally posted May 1, 2009)

I’ve just finished reading the latest releases by two of my favourite mystery novelists, P. D. James‘s The Private Patient and Elizabeth George‘s Careless in Red. (I know they’ve been out for a while; I was waiting for the paperback editions.) Both books are better than fine as examples of their type–though George is in fact American, both authors write what we could call highbrow British police procedurals, leisurely in pace, attentive to setting, driven by character more than plot. Both write well; James’s prose is more economical, while George’s would (IMHO) benefit from more stringent editing, but both offer their readers intelligent complexity of language and thought. The depth of character and theme both achieve justifies James’s repeated assertion that crime fiction provides a useful structure for the novelist without necessarily limiting the literary potential of her work.

Yet for all their virtues, I found myself unexpectedly dissatisfied with both of these novels, for reasons that are based in their form. Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of ‘puzzle mysteries,’ such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly “whodunnit.” (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character’s outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives–which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.

That, I think, is very much what has happened with both James’s Adam Dalgliesh and George’s Thomas Lynley. Every one of their books is populated by a new array of people, but they are the ones with whom we have longstanding relationships–remarkably longstanding, indeed, as James has been publishing Dalgliesh mysteries since Cover Her Face in 1962, and the first Lynley novel, A Great Deliverance, was published in 1988. And though Dalgliesh and Lynley have always been complex and interesting protagonists, in recent books so much of significance has happened in their lives that I turned to these latest instalments motivated far less by curiosity about the latest corpse than by the desire to know how things are going with them. While actually reading the books, I took a fairly perfunctory interest in the investigations but I was keenly interested in what came to seem the regrettably few sections focusing on, for instance, Dalgliesh’s relationship with Emma Lavenham (and not just because it’s a little victory for English professors everywhere). The real novelistic potential of The Private Patient emerges, I think, in the scene in which Emma confronts Dalgliesh in his professional capacity and we see, fleetingly, the difficulty that even these two extremely intelligent and independent people might have reconciling law and love, justice and humanity. But this material is not developed, and in fact the novel in which it does become the focus would have to leave the genre of detection quite far behind. (Gaudy Night is a rare example of a novel that I believe successfully balances human and literary interests with mystery elements, partly by integrating the case so thoroughly with the personal aspects of the story and making both the detection and the romance converge on the same themes.) Careless in Red spends more time on Lynley’s personal situation, but again his struggle to move forward after the tragedy of two novels ago (see how I’m avoiding spoilers, in case anyone hasn’t already read this excellent series?) is subordinated to the case at hand–though George does set the case up with thematic echoes of his tragedy.

I can hardly fault either author for the relative weight they give to the professional, rather than personal, business of their characters. That’s the kind of book they have undertaken to write. Also, as their protagonists are professional detectives, policing is integral not just to their work, but to their identities. But I do wonder if even James, the acknowledged Grande Dame of the genre, hasn’t finally shown us the end point (dare I say the dead end?) of a commitment to this genre. Just introducing the kind of story arcs they have given their protagonists recently suggests that James and George might be chafing at the constraints of detective fiction, wanting to write a straight novel of psychological and moral development, a novel in which incident is second to character, a novel squarely in the tradition James has always claimed as hers–that of Austen and George Eliot and Trollope. At any rate, that’s the kind of novel I find I wish they would write. Over the years they have succeeded in getting me quite emotionally involved in the lives of their main characters (and not just Dalgliesh and Lynley, either, but Kate Miskin, Barbara Havers, Simon and Deborah St. James…). The corpse and suspects, however, are never more than passing acquaintances.

On a somewhat tangential note, I was struck reading The Private Patient by the elegaic note on which it ends, in a passage which also echoes the wonderful ‘squirrel’s heartbeat’ passage from Chapter XX of Middlemarch:

She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defense against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all we have.

Though of course I would not rush to assume that a character’s views are those of the author, it is hard not to read this final paragraph from a novelist who has spent nearly five decades telling us about “deeds of horror” as a reminder, even a consolation, that even in a murder mystery, death need not define life.