“A Tincture of Grandness in Simplicity”: T. H. White, The Once and Future King

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

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It comes back to the geese, in the end. I hoped it would, because of all the marvellous episodes in Wart’s education (the tyrannical pike, the totalitarian ants, the philosophical badger), his time with the geese is the most sublime. It’s beautifully written, for one thing, detailed and evocative, freely fanciful:

The sun, as it rose, tinged the quick-silver of the creeks and the gleaming slime itself with flame. The curlew, who had been piping their mournful plaints since long before the light, flew now from weed-bank to weed-bank. The widgeon, who had slept on water, came whistling their double notes, like whistles from a Christmas cracker. The mallard toiled from land, against the wind. The redshanks scuttled and prodded like mice. A cloud of tiny dunlin, more compact than starlings, turned in the air with the noise of a train. The black-guard of crows rose from the pine trees on the dune with merry cheers. Shore birds of every sort populated the tide line, filling it with business and beauty.

The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight, were of such intense beauty that the boy was moved to sing. He wanted to cry a chorus to life, and, since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or glee.

Like the lengthy excursus on the Middle Ages much later on in the book, these expeditions into natural history speak above all of the writer’s joy in his subject–and what writing is more delightful, more uplifting, to read than joyful writing?

But the flight of the geese is not just natural history: it’s also, like Merlyn’s other lessons (like the whole novel), an embodied class in political theory. “Are we at war,” asks Wart. The goose Lyo-lyok does not understand the question. “There are no boundaries among the geese,” she eventually explains to him. “How can you have boundaries if you fly? Those ants of yours–and the humans too–would have to stop fighting in the end, if they took to the air.” “I like fighting,” replies Wart. “It is knightly.” “Because you are a baby,” replies Lyo-Lyok.

At the end of The Once and Future King, Wart is no longer a baby. Now he’s an old, exhausted king staring in near despair on the failure of his experiment to reconcile might and right. Why do men fight, he wonders? “Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment for ancestral wrong: all these seemed to be a part of it”:

Yet they were not the solution. He could not see the real solution. He was too old and tired and miserable to think constructively. He was only a man who had meant well, who had been spurred along that course of thinking by an eccentric necromancer with a weakness for humanity. Justice had been his last attempt–to do nothing which was not just. But it had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too difficult. He was done himself.

But he isn’t quite done: there’s a bit of thinking in him yet, not to mention “something invincible in his heart, a tincture of grandness in simplicity,” and he uses his last bit of hope and strength to tell his story to young Tom (“his surcoat, with the Malory bearings, looking absurdly new”), and then “to think again,” and what he thinks of is Lyo-lyok–and there it is, “the problem before him as plain as a map”:

The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing–literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines. There was no visible line between Scotland and England, although Flodden and Bannockburn had been fought about it. It was geography which was the cause, political geography. It was nothing else. . . . The imaginary lines on the earth’s surface only needed to be unimagined. The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyo-lyok, and would to Man if he could learn to fly.

Imagine there’s no countries…it isn’t hard to imagine it. But to realize it? The Once and Future King isn’t that kind of fantasy. Ideas are only as good, as strong, as tenable as principles, as the people who try to live up to them, or to subvert or destroy them. And people, the novel shows over and over, are mixed, complicated, contradictory, creatures.

There’s Arthur himself, for instance. He’s such an ordinary fellow for a legendary hero! As the Orkneys gather to force Arthur’s hand with an open accusation against Lancelot and Guenever, Gareth sees him “as he was … a plain man who had done his best–not a leader of chivalry, but the pupil who had tried to be faithful to his curious master, the magician, by thinking all the time–not Arthur of England, but a lonely old gentleman who had worn his crown for half a lifetime in the teeth of fate.” Because we first meet him as Wart, we carry with us throughout the novel a sense of his childish innocence and his simple desire to do his best. “He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or for torturing his wife,” says the narrator; “He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things.” Such innocence and simplicity should surely be strengths, but for Arthur they are weaknesses. If he were more suspicious, more wily, less scrupulously loyal and just, he would not have been there in that room, “hoist,” as the vengeful Agravaine exults, “with his own petard”–“trapped by his enemies into crushing his friends,” as Steve Donoghue nicely puts it, “using the very structure of law and order he worked so hard to champion.”  But “it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.”

Lancelot and Guenever, too, are painfully ordinary, which is not to say that they are dull or commonplace but that they are flawed and mistaken and loving and loyal and treacherous all at the same time. If they were worse people than they are, they could have simplified the situation, as we would handle it today “when everybody is so free from superstitions and prejudice that it is only necessary for all of us to do as we please.” But they have other values, and they love Arthur as well as each other. Their love (the love of all three of them for the others) is a beautiful, fragile thing, more so as they get older and become “seasoned people, who knew what they were about.” Here they are late in the story, poised on the very threshold of disaster:

The room glowed into colour round the lovers, who had released each other quickly. It began to show the splendour of its hangings as the boy put fire to the wicks. The flower meads and bird-fruitful spinneys of the Arras teemed and rippled over the four walls. The door curtain lifted again, and the King was in the room.

He looked old, older than either of them. But it was the noble oldness of self-respect. Sometimes even nowadays you can meet a man of sixty or more who holds himself as straight as a rush, and whose hair is black. They were in that class. Lancelot, now that you could see him clearly, was an erect refinement of humanity–a fanatic for human responsibility. Guenever, and this might have been surprising to a person who had known her in her days of tempest, looked sweet and pretty. You could almost have protected her. But Arthur was the touching one of the three. He was so plainly dressed, so gentle and patient of his simple things. Often, when the Queen was entertaining distinguished company under the flambeaux of the Great Hall, Lancelot had found him sitting by himself in a small room, mending stockings. Now, in his homely blue gown…he paused on the threshold of the gleaming room, and smiled.

‘Well, Lance. Well, Gwen.’

Such a homely greeting, from this simple man to the two people he loves most in the world. Doesn’t this scene make you yearn for their safety? It’s terrible watching the calamity descend on them that you know all along is coming–for inevitably, the novel is governed by dramatic irony, not just for us, who can’t help but know the story already, but for Arthur too, who is warned at the outset by Merlyn. If only, if only, if only… but there’s no way out for any of us: “before she was quite certain of what had happened, Guenever was laughing or weeping, unfaithful to her husband, as she had always known she would be.” And the rest, after that, is as foreseen and foretold.

For such a tragic story, the telling is surprisingly lighthearted–or light, at least. I was equal parts enchanted and puzzled by the novel’s tone. How can something so sad also be so funny? How can something so elevated also be so colloquial? If it’s not that serious, why am I crying? In the end, though, what I came to see was that the sadness lay precisely in the lightness of it all, in the way the joyousness I already remarked–the bursting excitement about nature and creativity, about “the age of fullness, the age of wading into everything up to the neck”–is undermined so steadily by the awareness of its eventual destruction. The story would not be so sad, also, if it were kept at more of a distance from us. The novel’s most ridiculous, delicious flights of fancy (the thwarted romance of the Questing Beast, for instance) are narrated in the same down-to-earth way as the most extreme moments of betrayal or grief or psychic torment (“Do you think it would be fine to be the best knight in the world? Think, then, also, how you would have to defend the title. Think of the tests, such repeated, remorseless, scandal-breathing tests, which day after day would be applied to you–until the last and certain day, when you would fail.”) and so we experience them both as part of the same world of people who may transform into animals, trap unicorns, and perform miracles, but are somehow, bizarrely, wonderfully, just like us. White’s casual references to Malory and Tennyson, rather than making his version seem coolly metafictional or presciently postmodern, make it seem natural, real, sincere: “Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites would have found it difficult to recognize this rather sullen and unsatisfactory child, with the ugly face,” he says of Lancelot; “An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime.”

It’s sad because even though it’s a myth, it’s also a true story, one that ought to be told in as direct and simple a way as possible so that we’ll understand it. It’s a sad story because it’s the story of our failure, of our inability to solve King Arthur’s dilemma: to build a just world in which such joy can flourish. Merlyn’s lessons were based on the premise “that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly.” At the end of his reign, Arthur finds this “central tenet of his heart” undone, “ravaged.” If anything, man is worse than beastly–Mordred’s scheming, the blood feuds, the fatal seductions are all calculated and so beyond the capacity of animals. “What creature could be so low,” wonders Lyo-lyok, “as to go about in bands, to murder others of its own blood?” Taught by Merlyn, Arthur had dreamed of a world in which these evils could come to an end. To read The Once and Future King is both to participate in his dream (just as he hopes young Tom will “tell everybody who would listen about this ancient idea, which both of them had once thought good”) and to experience its failure. Can we, perhaps, create the future he dreams of, a day ready for his return? “The hope of making it would lie in culture,” he thinks:

If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they might come to reason.

That must have seemed like a pretty slim chance when the novel was first published in 1939. It still seems like something only a dreamer would imagine.

In his fine review of this handsome Penguin re-issue, Steve Donoghue writes, “The novel ends in a crescendo of loss and disillusion, and yet it’s all so brilliantly cathartic that no reader will be anything but happy they encountered this book.” I couldn’t agree more–and I can’t thank him enough for sending me his copy.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

In the early days of Novel Readings, one of the things I was trying to figure out was how non-academics wrote about books, or (a slight variation) how academics wrote about books for non-academic audiences. So I read a lot of what I very ingeniously (OK, very literally) called “Books About Books“: Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time, John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, James Wood’s How Fiction Works. One that was always on my radar but that I somehow didn’t get hold of before I started focusing more on writing myself, instead of worrying about how other people wrote, was Ruined by Reading, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. I was particularly interested in this one, because Schwartz is the author of one of my favorite novels of all time, Disturbances in the Field–and now I would add that I am a huge admirer of her earlier novel Leaving Brooklyn, which I read for the first time only a couple of years ago. I was happily surprised to see  a copy of Ruined by Reading on the book rack at the school’s Spring Fair flea market this year: though it’s too bad Fred (whoever he is) didn’t want to keep such a nice gift from “Nanny and Poppy,” I think they would be glad to know it ended up with someone who appreciates it properly. And I did appreciate it. It’s part memoir, part meditation on the motives for, effects of, and–above all–the experience of reading. It’s loosely organized, associative rather than strictly logical, but Schwartz is too interesting and thoughtful a writer (and reader) for it to feel rambling, even though it ranges somewhat unpredictably across its array of topics.

There were lots of bits I particularly enjoyed or that made me feel a readerly kinship with Schwartz–her comments about “the fear of being interrupted” while reading, for instance:

Sometimes at the peak of intoxicating pleasures, I am visited by a panic: the phone or doorbell will ring, someone will need me or demand that I do something. Of course I needn’t answer or oblige, but that is bside the point. The spell will have been broken. In fact the spell has already been broken. The panic is the interruption. I have interrupted myself.

Like her (maybe like you) I too “came to prefer reading late at night, when the intrusive world has gone to bed.” I understand, too, her love for Little Women–but unlike her, I never tried “copying it into a notebook” out of a fierce desire to possess it. “Only later did I understand,” she says, “that I wanted to have written Little Women, conceived and gestated it and felt its words delivered from my own pen.” I loved her closing peroration, about reading as an activity that matters because it is so completely, thoroughly “of the moment”: “the dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all of life’s lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present.” How amazing, “what a feat of transmission,” what is done by these marks on the the page. Because I had just been thinking quite a bit about choice in reading, though–about what to buy, what to read, why we make the choices we do, the section I appreciated the most was her discussion of “the convoluted agonies of choice.” Is it better to read contemporary books or “dead” books, to read by design or at random, to keep lists or to forget, to be a spider or a bee, a fox or a hedgehog? Ultimately, she concludes, “reading at random–letting desire lead–feels like the most faithful kind”:

In a bookstore, I leaf through the book next to the one I came to buy, and a sentence sets me quivering. I buy that one instead, or as well. A book comes in the mail and I begin it out of mild curiosity, to finish spellbound. A remark overheard on a bus reminds me of a book I meant to read last month. I hunt it up in the library and glance in passing at the old paperbacks on sale for twenty-five cents. There is the book so talked about in college–it was to have prepared me for life and here I have blundered through decades without it. Snatch it up quickly before it’s too late. And so what we read is as wayward and serendipitous as any taste or desire. Or perhaps randomness is not so random after all. Perhaps at every stage what we read is what we are, or what we are becoming, or desire.

My Somerville Summer: Update

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Six weeks into my ‘Summer of Somerville,’ it seems like time to take stock. In my previous post, I identified two main areas I need to focus on: pedagogical strategies (concrete course-planning things like readings, schedules, and assignments) and research in a whole range of topics (my own expertise will be needed partly to inform the class but also, more important, to guide and direct the students in their own work). I’ve been doing both at once, reading source materials related to some of the topics on the list I had brainstormed, and jotting down ideas for possible exercises and assignments.

In terms of course design, at this point I have in mind a basic structure along the lines of what I’ve done in my seminar on Victorian sensation fiction a couple of times: front-loading the assigned reading in the first half or two-thirds of the term, using that early phase to establish a core of common ideas and questions, and then doing hands-on workshops and break-out groups to work on a more diverse set of projects that are then brought back for presentation to the whole class at the end of term. In this case, I’ve ordered four texts that will be our core reference points: Testament of Youth, South Riding, Gaudy Night, and The Constant Nymph. It’s a disparate group of books, and making sense of (or questioning) them as a coherent group will be a running theme and one that will, I hope, help us build up a set of broader questions about periodization, canonicity, genre, and women’s writing as a category, as well as generating good discussion about thematic and contextual issues particular to each book. Right now I like the idea of building a collaborative wiki for our major course project, one that we would conceptualize together and then build with groups working on each specific section. Workshops would focus on the how-to aspects of wiki creation and then on the specific components we want to include.

Because I can’t assume anything in particular about the background preparation of students in the class, I think I have to start the term with some kind of orientation session. In the sensation fiction seminar, I usually talk about the history of the 19th-century novel and then about the appearance, definition, and reception of sensation novels as a subcategory (this includes some discussion of whether they really are a distinct subcategory, though that discussion is sometimes best held at the end of term when we’ve gone through our examples). In this case I think I’ll start with a skeletal history of women’s higher education, some generalizations about women’s social and political position around the time “our” writers went to Oxford (with special reference to the suffrage movement, and to the impact of World War I), and some comments on the literary history of “our” period (which I’ll probably define, for simplicity, as 1914-1939), with reference in particular to the ‘rise of Modernism’ narrative that still, I think, dominates. This would serve to introduce, in a preliminary way, the issues that were most immediately important to the writers we’ll be studying and that frame most of the scholarly work on them. The reading I’ve been doing is helping me build up my own understanding of these contexts. So far I’ve mostly focused on education, with books like Judy Batson’s very thorough Her Oxford, but I’m moving into literary-historical material and also commentaries on the ‘Great War’ and its effects on women and on literature (yesterday I read Sandra Gilbert’s essay “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” for instance).

I’ve been thinking of ways to bring in some of the multitude of other related authors and works I’ve been reading, or reading about. One of my assignment ideas is an individual project on a book not assigned for everyone to read, including preparing a wiki entry and giving a short class presentation, so each student would have the experience of becoming expert and producing knowledge to add to the cumulative learning project of the class. It’s not hard to come up with a list of 20 or so options, and I can imagine students enjoying making their individual selections and taking ownership of them, but I’m worried that overall the results might be too diffuse for us to discuss productively as a group. An alternative would be small group projects on a narrower set of alternative texts, but then I might need to rethink the overall idea for the class wiki. My experience is that students vary in their enthusiasm for group work, so I want to be sure there’s a good balance of individual components too. I also expect to require a critical essay, probably involving one of our four common texts, but the relationship of the essay to our other work is something I’m still thinking about.

As I brood about possible assignments, what I’m most concerned about is finding a good balance between curiosity-driven exploration and well-defined expectations. I really do want the students to share my sense of discovery, and I’d love a high degree of “buy-in,” self-motivation, and self-direction from them, but at the same time, I know that most students appreciate plenty of structure and clear ground-rules: they flourish when they feel confident working within the framework established by the syllabus. I also have to consider some realities of my own: I’ll be teaching three courses with a total of around 150 students in the fall term, with no TA support, and I need to manage my own time and workload, which means among other things being able to stagger deadlines across my courses and having made things clear and specific enough for students at the start of term that they don’t need constant consultation with me to move forward with their work outside of class. For my own peace of mind, that probably means not doing things like letting students set their own deadlines or devise individual assignment contracts or portfolios with unpredictable or widely varying components.

Now I’m starting to feel anxious rather than enthusiastic, not least because writing that last paragraph reminded me that I haven’t yet done any concrete preparations for my other fall classes. I’d better get back to work! Right now I’m reading the rest of Brittain’s Honourable Estate, which continues to surprise me with its raw, angry edginess.

Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

peacockI described The Paper Garden as an impulse buy—but there’s always something behind an impulse, some need or desire or curiosity or affinity. As I read through this idiosyncratic, fascinating, beautiful, and occasionally annoying book, I kept wondering what it was that had drawn me to it at this particular moment, especially because it’s not, superficially, “my” kind of book. I don’t read a lot of biography or autobiography, and this book is partly the story of Mary Delany (1700-1788) and partly the story of contemporary poet Molly Peacock. I have never been as interested in the eighteenth century as in other times—never found the art or literature or music of that period as compelling as that of the Victorian period, for instance. This is a generalization that suppresses all kinds of exceptions, of course, but nonetheless, in the choices I made about my professional specialization as well as in the daily choices I make about reading and looking and listening, I don’t tend in an 18th-century direction. And yet not only did I pick up The Paper Garden to take a closer look (a first move that’s understandable when you see how lovely all the various editions are) but almost right away, I wanted it. It seemed to have something to do with me, something to offer me.

Peacock suggests that her own interest in Mary Delany is continuous with her life-long quest for role models (“my blurry radar scanned on, as if I were always looking for something at the back drawers of experience”).  Her strong sense of identification with her subject permeates the story she tells of her and also shapes the way she tells her own story, as she integrates her autobiographical material so as to invite or explicitly draw parallels between the stages of their lives. The similarities are more abstract than specific, unsurprisingly, given the historical distance—and the economic difference (though not, herself, exactly wealthy, Mrs. Delany moved in very aristocratic circles: she was best friends with the Duchess of Portland and eventually intimate with George III and Queen Charlotte). What can two women separated by centuries, living lives unlike in almost every imaginable concrete detail, have in common? What Peacock’s mingled narratives evoke is a sense of the rhythm of lives: growth, survival, flourishing, and then fading. This larger pattern seems more important, ultimately, than the fact that, for instance, both women married twice. This larger pattern is common to all living things, too, and so it unifies not just the two women the book is overtly about but all of us, and then links all of us to the flowers that are the focus of Mrs. Delany’s own art. Peacock chooses one of Mrs. Delany’s flower “mosaicks” (as Mrs. Delany called them) as a motif for each chapter, reading its details as illustrative of each phase. The common Hound’s Tongue, humble, unprepossessing, yet strong, introduces young Mary Granville, nobody of particular notice and yet altogether herself, her strength and possibility nascent rather than displayed; the startlingly aggressive Nodding Thistle evokes the prickly misery of Mary’s first marriage, to the much older, drunken, creepily possessive Alexander Pendarves; much later, the Portlandia Grandiflora (named for her dearest friend) expands luxuriously, as Mrs. Delany did when she emerged from mourning for her second husband to become an artist. “Seventy-two years old,” remarks Peacock. “It gives a person hope.”

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Hope is what The Paper Garden is ultimately about; it’s what Mrs. Delany modeled for Peacock, along with perseverance and resilience. It takes a lot of hope, doesn’t it, to make something new, to believe in yourself enough to do it, to expose it and thus yourself? Can it be too late for that? Learning Mrs. Delany’s story, Peacock is reassured that it does not. “Some things,” she concludes, “take living long enough to do.” The paper collages are the fruition of a lifetime of observing, crafting, and caring very deeply about every detail: as Mrs. Delany says in the book’s first epigraph, “How can people say we grow indifferent as we grow old? It is just the reverse.” Peacock loves the moment in which Mrs. Delany sees how to use her attention, “the spectacular mental leap” from a fallen petal to her long expertise with paper and scissors, “the vital imaginative connection between paper and petal,” a “lifelong habit of simile” galvanized into new form by the “dropped petal of a geranium.” Twice widowed, childless, aging, temporarily immobilized by an injured foot, Mary Delany was finally ready for the work that would immortalize her. ‘I have invented,” she wrote laconically, “a new way of imitating flowers.” In the next 11 years, she completed 985 “mosaicks.”

winter-cherryThe prints of them in The Paper Garden are lovely, but it’s hard to believe they are what you’re told they are, that is, incredibly fine cut and layered pieces of paper glued into place: the reproductions do not convey their three-dimensionality. Nothing can compromise the astonishment, though, of learning that on some of them she integrated leaves or other parts from actual flowers, the most magical of which is surely the “desiccated netting” of the decaying Winter Cherry or Chinese Lantern. Nobody knows, Peacock reports, how Mrs. Delany “managed to glue something so brittle and make it stay.” Peacock reads the Winter Cherry as a metaphor for Mary Delany’s creative life: “Some of us flash into floral peak like prom queens, but others of us have to dry like the Winter Cherry in order to unfold into productivity.” That’s the source of her hope: that we can see time as our friend rather than our enemy. “The flowers are portraits of the possibilities of age.” For women in particular, inundated as we are with signals that aging is to be fought, resisted, feared—that youthful blushing ripeness is all—that’s a powerful, subversive, liberating idea.

Peacock’s very personal ‘readings’ of the flower collages were fascinating and also provoking to me: I turned back again and again trying to look with her eyes at their images. These readings of hers were also what prompted intermittent resistance and annoyance from me. For one thing, to her the flowers are insistently sexual. The further I got in the book the more I found myself prepared to concede her that point, which she justifies early on by the straightforward reminder that “flowers are plants’ sexual organs, after all.” Still, there were moments when I thought “really?” and moments when the connections she wanted felt forced or speculative. For all she knows about Mary Delany, from the more than three thousand pages of her correspondence, there’s still plenty she can’t know, after all. “Did Robert Twyford steal a kiss?” she wonders. “No kiss? No touch?” she queries as Mary’s relationship with Lord Baltimore founders; “No disordered dress or wrenching away from an embrace?” Not in her sources, anyway, and so who can be sure what feelings pulsed through the lived experience. “It seems impossible,” Peacock writes about Mary’s second marriage, to Dean Patrick Delaney,

that the woman who ate with the gusto, who wrote with the vigor, who danced with the elan, who walked with the heartiness, who consoled a friend with the vitality, who drew with the energy, who gardened with the spirit, who chattered with the vim that Mary displayed moment to moment in all her eighty-eight years did not have a little sexy affection for the man who called her his bliss.

Fair enough: the life force she sums up here is amply conveyed in the excerpts from Mrs Delany’s letters, and why not assume the rest? But (and perhaps this is just an imaginative or aesthetic failure of my own) I had a harder time accepting moments like this one, comparing Mrs Delany’s magnolia to two contemporary renderings of that flower by male artists:

 Mrs. D’s magnolia lolls at the bottom of the page. It almost looks up from the bed linen-like disarray of its petals. The two men style the magnolia at the top of the missionary position, but hers waits below for a partner to lower onto it.

magnolia“It’s just a flower!” I mentally protested as I read that the first time. And yet the more times I look at the picture—now, inevitably, with that description in my mind—the more I see at least the possibility of its eroticism. As Peacock points out, “Anyone who has ever read a seventeenth-century metaphysical poet knows that the sacred and the sexual are never very far apart. Nor are the botanical and the anatomical.” Mrs. Delany’s flowers look, superficially, very pretty: simple, safe, and feminine. When Peacock herself first saw them, she was disappointed in her own reaction: “I felt nearly ashamed about how deeply I swooned over her work, because the botanicals seemed almost fuddy-duddy.” They belong to “the tiny, boundaried world that has its sources in handiwork,” the kinds of crafts her grandmother did. That’s not the artistic heritage she seeks for herself (“Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso probably would have hated them”) but she is “hooked,” “sunk.” At first, though, she didn’t see the collages quite as she would later come to, and as she would like us to: “They all come out of the darkness, intense and vaginal, bright on their black backgrounds as if, had she possessed one, she had shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eight-five flowers’ cunts.”  Is seeing (showing) the flowers this way a means of exorcising the fuddy-duddy from them, or from herself?

Perhaps one reason I was drawn to The Paper Garden is that as my birthday came around this year, for the first time I began to feel haunted by my own aging. I turned 45—which is not, I know, really old, though it was startling to read Peacock’s remarks on Mary’s second marriage, at age 43, at “what she thought was her old age, but what turned out to be her middle period.” I too am in, I suppose, my “middle period.” I didn’t approach my 40s with the trepidation that seems to be the clichéd expectation for women. (To a large extent, I thank my grandmother for this, as she always told me the good years began at 40, and she launched her own career as a writer and editor in her 40s. Like Mary Delany, she worked into her 80s, too, full of vitality and loving life, never indifferent. ) So it was unexpected that 45 felt like a tipping point. Was it the subtitle that caught my eye, then? It promises what The Paper Garden in fact delivers, a subversive, celebratory view of growing older as a woman. The book is also, crucially, about becoming an artist—I would say, “belatedly,” but the whole impulse of The Paper Garden goes against that word, insisting instead on the necessity of long preparation (“Her whole life flowed to the place where she plucked that moment”). I’m not (as Peacock is) a creative artist, so there’s an even fainter resemblance between my own story and Mrs. Delany’s in these specifics. But in the last couple of years I have been doing some different work that I’m really just starting to believe might be my real work, if I can see how to do it right, the way Mrs. Delany figured out how to replicate the fallen petal. Five years ago, though I had done a lot of writing, I would never have called myself a writer. Now, that identity lives for me as a possibility.

delaney

Mrs. Delany’s possibilities come to fruition not just through her own creativity and ability but, Peacock emphasizes, through the encouragement of her friends, especially Margaret, the Duchess of Portland: “the idea of the solitary artist is undercut at every turn by Mrs. D.” When Mary makes her first “mosaick,” her “friend of more than forty years supplied exactly what was necessary: applause.” Her applause continued “non-stop for ten years,” spurring Mary to continue and also drawing the attention of “the botanical, artistic, and aristocratic worlds.” Peacock’s many returns to this issue made me wonder why today we are so furtive about wanting applause. I often make self-deprecating remarks about my own anxiety about how my writing will be judged: “I’m a recovering A student,” I say, “still worrying about getting my teacher’s approval.” But is this anxiety really nothing more than refracted vanity, no better than the chafing of needy egotism? Isn’t it instead (or also) a kind of hope? And is it so shameful to bask in the occasional praise that comes our way? “Compliments,” Peacock points out, “aren’t superficial … They are the foundation of recognition of who we are in life.” Compliments about my writing help me believe in myself as a writer. They encourage me to write more, as “the recognition and praise of the Duchess for Mrs. Delany’s imaginative act triggered more acts.” Peacock tells us also of Mary’s young classmate Lady Jane Douglas, at Mlle Puelle’s school for girls, who cherished Mary’s paper cut-outs of flowers and birds, “preserving them,” Mrs. Delany recalled, “many years after.” “It was as if Mrs. Delany had pinned her friend Lady Jane’s admiration to some emotional equivalent of a ‘gown or apron,'” Peacock reflects, “and in private moments, decade after decade, dressed herself in its esteem.”

It seems apt that Mrs. Delany’s creations should, in their turn, have given other women confidence. The very idiosyncrasy of her project is its most inspirational aspect. She succeeded by being completely herself. “What is your own form among the endless varieties of life on earth?” Peacock asks meditatively, near the end of the book. We’re all, in our own way, just trying to figure that out. It’s an effort that “requires creativity till the day a person dies.” That’s the effort, the quality, that Mrs. Delany exemplifies. It does, indeed, give a person hope.

Back from Boston Bearing Books!

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

I got back yesterday from my second annual (?) spring expedition to Boston. Once again I loved exploring the city and meeting up with some of my Open Letters Monthly colleagues. And this time I had the special treat of also meeting up with my mother. Though we had a delightful time sightseeing, visiting museums, and eating all kinds of good food, there’s no question but what our favorite activity was browsing in the excellent bookstores (and trading comments and suggestions back and forth): we spent hours in Brattle Books in Boston, in both the Harvard Book Store and the Harvard Coop in  Cambridge, and in the Broadside Book Shop and Booklink in Northampton. Here’s most of my haul (a few others will be wending their way to me by post):

Book buying is such a funny thing–when you are surrounded by thousands of titles, many different, sometimes conflicting, even irrational influences and impulses go into the final decisions. I had a little list of books I particularly hoped to find, ones that I hadn’t found in stock in Halifax but wanted to look at personally, rather than just online, before ordering, or ones that I could order but would have to wait for. Other titles or authors I had in mind in a general way and looked for to see what the options were–with such great stock all around, I found more of these than I expected! So what did I get, and why? Let’s go through the pile starting at the top.

A Handbook to the Art and Architecture of the Boston Public Library. I can’t get over how beautiful and inspiring the BPL is. Here are two of the exterior inscriptions: “The Public Library of the City of Boston Built By the People and Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning”; “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.” Yes, yes, yes, it does! And public libraries are such a wonderful commitment to and investment in that conviction. The BPL is a great public building not just because it serves this great cause, though, which many modern libraries do in a very utilitarian spirit, but because it is itself filled with art and grace, from the grand entrance hall to the elegant Bates Hall reading room to the astonishing murals by John Singer Sargent. This little book was just $2 at the gift shop. It has no color plates but gives lots of detail about the history, design, and art of the building.

Next in the pile is Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. I’ve heard a lot about this novel and it sounded really interesting, but so do lots of recent books, so it hadn’t made it onto my TBR list until my mother reported having been won over by it. When I saw a nice copy at the Brattle, I grabbed it up.

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is one I went looking for. I was moved and impressed by Crossing to Safety when I read it a few years ago, and my interest in Stegner was rekindled recently by a documentary I watched about him–though the documentary itself was not very well done. This one I found at the Harvard Coop in the handsome Penguin edition with an introduction by Stegner biographer Jackson J. Benson.

I’ve been wanting to break up my nearly-all-fiction reading diet with more poetry, and Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath are two of the poets I wanted to read more of than is found in my heaps of anthologies (most of which include the same small selection of poems). (We’ve run pieces on both Larkin and Plath recently at Open Letters that further stimulated my interest.) I found The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin at the Coop and Ariel downstairs at the Harvard Book Store. I’ve never written anything on poetry for Open Letters. Maybe someday–but what? In the meantime, I may venture some comments on these volumes here on my own turf.

Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul was recommended to me some time ago by a friend, who thought it was both a really fine read and a book I’d respond to because it’s about a pianist, and my son is a very gifted composer and performer. It too I found at the Coop (which would have been even more dangerous to my budget if it hadn’t been one of the last bookstores we went to, as every time I thought of something to look for, it was there!).

I’ve found New York Review Classics scarce here in Halifax and often with limited availability from Canadian online retailers as well, so I was especially glad to find so many of these around. Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado sounded delightful when I read about it on different blogs and reviews, so I pounced on it when I saw it at the Coop. I’ve been looking for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts all over town here and hadn’t found it yet; I picked it up at the Broadside Book Shop in Northampton. And I found Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner (also the subject of a good piece in Open Letters) downstairs at the Harvard Book Store, where they have all kinds of NYRB Classics on their remainders tables!

I’ve read two novels by Jane Gardam–Old Filth and Queen of the Tambourines. The Man in the Wooden Hat, which I got at the Broadside Book Shop, tells the story of Old Filth’s marriage over again, from the point of view of his wife Betty. The blurb calls it “as fine a portrait of a marriage as any written in English.” We’ll see about that!

Flaubert’s Parrot is the next book chosen by my local book club–the one that just finished Madame Bovary. We have tried since the beginning to follow some kind of thread from one book to the next. The thread here is pretty obvious! I think the only other Julian Barnes I’ve read is Arthur and George, which I didn’t love. I got The Sense of an Ending from the library as an e-book just before I left last week, and I started it on the plane, but it turned out to be too cerebral for me to read under those conditions. (What did I read on the plane? Mostly Jennifer Crusie, actually, several of whose books I had also borrowed electronically with precisely my fear of flying in mind. And they were just right: cheerful, diverting, and easy to keep track of even if you are pausing every few minutes to clutch your armrest and take deep breaths.) I don’t have high hopes for Flaubert’s Parrot (and so I was glad to find it remaindered at the Harvard Book Store for just a few dollars), but at the same time I like that my book groups get me reading things I wouldn’t otherwise, and who knows, I might love it.

Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden was my one real unforeseen impulse buy of the trip. I started leafing through it quite at random in the MFA gift shop (I picked it up just because it looked very beautiful) and got quickly intrigued by the concept of the book–“An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.” The first epigram to the book is from its main subject, Mary Delany, who invented (discovered? developed? conceived of?) an intricate form of collage. “How can people say we grow indifferent as we grow old?” she writes to her younger sister in 1750; “It is just the reverse.” Her spectacular paper renditions of flowers are a testimony to her own utter lack of indifference (sample). I ended up buying it at Booklink in Northampton, as I kept thinking about it after I put it back at the MFA, and I started reading it right away. It’s an odd book in terms of genre, as it interweaves a biographical account of Delany’s life with meditations and speculations on the psychological and sexual meanings of her her flower collages (some quite speculative, though I’m trying to go along with that for now), and with autobiographical material from Peacock herself. I often resist books that offer epigrammatic snippets of wisdom about life in general (you really have to earn the right to them, I figure) but so far I’m liking the delicacy with which Peacock moves from Delany to herself to thoughts about creativity, aging, and other topics.

Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf was not a purchase but was hand-delivered to me by my mother, who has a vast collection of Bloomsbury materials. I’ve read quite a bit about it, and some excerpts from it, and I’m very keen to read the whole thing. (I’ll give it back, though–I promise!)

I found Sandra Gilbert’s Rereading Women at the Brattle. It’s the only academic literary criticism I really even looked at in all these bookstores. Gilbert is a good stylist and always an interesting thinker and reader, and this looks both accessible (it’s an essay collection, not a monograph) and provocative.

The little book Samplers from A to Z, from the Museum of Fine Arts, was a consolation prize to me for just barely missing their exhibit on Embroideries of Colonial Boston. I love looking at samplers and needlework: there’s something so intensely personal about them. It hadn’t occurred to me to time my visit around special museum exhibits, but next time I’m booking a ticket with some flexibility in my dates, I will have to pay attention to that kind of thing, as I was so disappointed to see the poster with the “closed” sign on it.

The last book in the pile is also from a museum, but this time for an exhibit we did manage (though just barely!) to see: the marvelous multi-media display on “Debussy’s Paris” at the Smith College Museum of Art. The displays were fascinating and very thoughtfully done, with listening and viewing stations bringing the music and street life of Paris into the room along with the drawings, paintings, and posters. I don’t often buy companion books for exhibits, but this book is much more than a catalogue: it includes a series of essays on topics like “Dance in Debussy’s Paris.” And I was really absorbed by the attention to dance, visual art, and music–such a rich display, in just one small room, too. They had a listening station with excerpts from some of Debussy’s pieces (with introductory commentary), some of which I hadn’t heard or even heard of before and a couple of which I made a note of because I thought they’d appeal to my son (whose favorite composer is Ravel but who has been experimenting more and more with different styles and modulations).  Here’s a link to Dawn Upshaw singing the “Chansons de Bilitis.”

It’s not as if I don’t already have books to read (and I haven’t forgotten about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon–I have another post on it lurking in my ‘drafts’ folder already!). But it’s really exciting to be surrounded by books and readers the way you are in these shops, and to get a hands-on sense of what the books are really like before you decide what to get, something that just isn’t quite replicated by the ‘look inside’ feature at Amazon. There’s only one book I was sorely tempted by but resisted, and the temptation arose purely from what a lovely tactile object it was: the Penguin ‘Threads’ edition of Little Women. We already own the book (of course!)–in fact, I think we may have two copies of it–but I kept picking this one up just to fondle it. I wonder if Penguin (and the artists responsible for the covers in this wonderful series) would consider releasing them as needlework or cross-stitch patterns.

So! I think I’m ready for the annual ‘summer reading challenge’: Maddie signs up for it at our own local public library, and I always promise to match her book for book. The first one I’m likely to write up here is The Paper Garden, so stay tuned.

Bits and Pieces, and a Break

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I’m heading to Boston tomorrow–again! I had a great time there last year (touristy post, bookish post) and expect to have just as much fun this time. Once again a primary reason for going  is to meet up with some of my Open Letters Monthly colleagues: we work well together in our various virtual spaces, but it’s definitely a good thing to cultivate face-to-face relationships too, not least because in email and other online correspondence there’s always that pesky issue of tone, which is much less difficult to interpret the better you know somebody. (As an aside, I think tone is also easier to interpret if an online relationship goes back a ways, even if you haven’t met in person: you get a sense of someone across a range of moods and modes that makes a difference, as I realized when my book club discussed the discussion between Amateur Reader and Litlove on my Madame Bovary posts. They found the exchange more ornery than I did, and I think that’s because they had no previous experience of either voice. This is not by any means a criticism, direct or indirect, of the tone of any of those comments, which I found  fascinating, respectful, and also very mentally stimulating. It was just interesting to reflect on the kind of familiarity you can feel with someone even if you know them only ethereally.)

Another happy feature of this trip to Boston is that I’m meeting up with my mother there. She’s a born and bred New Englander, though long transplanted to Canada’s west coast (by way of Berkeley), so she has many associations with Boston and the surrounding area; she’s also a Smith College alum, so we’re including a nostalgic stay in Northampton along with our bookstores-and-museums-and-libraries tour of Boston. Doesn’t that sound like a lovely time?

I had hoped to write up a proper post about my book club session on Madame Bovary but got caught up in the miscellaneous errands and obligations involved in traveling.( What an unpleasant chore it has become, from the early check-ins and security hassles to the cramped quarters of the planes themselves–and I hate flying, too. When I went to London last summer, the London Review Bookshop was my ‘happy place’: en route to Boston it will be the Public Garden, I think, and the placid swans–and the statue of Mrs Mallard and her ducklings.) The discussion at the book club was energetic: the book clearly provoked most of us, though reactions varied. Probably the most controversial subject was whether we felt (or Flaubert encouraged) any sympathy for Emma. One proposal was that, in seeking to be unlike the rest of the dreary people around her, she is like Dorothea Brooke. This is not one of the parallels I made in my post comparing Madame Bovary and Middlemarch, and ultimately I didn’t find it a persuasive suggestion, beyond a kind of structural similarity. Dorothea’s aspirations are certainly misguided, but her aim is to have a spiritually significant life. She begins imagining how to do this in fairly egotistical terms, but she learns from her experience–and from the start, she has an instinctive generosity, even in error. We didn’t get a chance to pursue this topic at the time, and in fact one thing I find difficult about these sessions is precisely that we move on (and around) so fast. I find it mentally exhausting! I enjoy the occasion, and it’s good to hear a range of ideas and views from so many smart opinionated people, but it also sometimes feels frustratingly chaotic. Well, it’s not meant to be a seminar, and heaven forbid one of us should assert herself as group leader! At the same time, it does give me renewed appreciation for the challenge of seminar discussions, which need to combine direction and focus with organic development and spontaneity. And it helps me see why I enjoyed the comment thread so much: writing things out forces a certain slowing down, and then reading and replying allows also for some reflection and cogitation.

The other book club discussion I was involved in last week was of The Yacoubian Building, with the other Slaves of Golconda. The novel didn’t seem to excite a great deal of enthusiasm, though I think most of us found it quite interesting. The forum where discussion usually breaks out has certainly been very quiet! Perhaps the next selection will work better.

I don’t expect to be posting again until I get back, as not only will I be busy frolicking but I’m taking only my iPad, which as far as I’m concerned is no good for producing content. See you then!

June in Open Letters Monthly

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It’s the first of the month, and that means the new issue of Open Letters Monthly has just appeared, all bright and shiny like a new penny! As always, the Table of Contents is as eclectic and inviting as we could make it. Some highlights:

Steve Donoghue marks Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee with a look at three new biographies of the woman who remains, despite all the attention, remarkably opaque to outsiders.

Greg Waldmann reviews Steve Coll’s grimly disturbing look at the reach and power of Exxon Mobil.

John Cotter does a “Peer Review” feature on Toni Morrison’s Home, reviewing first the reviewers then the novel itself.

In our two “Second Glance” features this month, Robert Latona revisits The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, while Joshua Lustig shows that David Halberstam’s Vietnam War classic The Best and the Brightest is as relevant as ever.

Steve Danziger looks at the “Voltaire of science fiction,” Robert Sheckley.

I explore the failure that is George Eliot’s Romola and wonder whether success isn’t sometimes overrated in our measures of literary greatness.

All this plus Alien, Diablo III, Irma Heldman’s ‘It’s a Mystery’ column, and more–including more from me on George  Eliot (this time, Felix Holt) in our selection of pieces from the OLM archives. Come on over and read for a while!

Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building

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yacoubianI didn’t realize until I finished The Yacoubian Building how its characters and stories had caught me up emotionally. The consistently flat narration–I’m not sure if this is a function of the translation or a genuine reflection of Al Aswany’s style–and the dispersal of our attention across multiple plots conspired against any strong feelings except curiosity for much of the novel. But by the end I found that curiosity had turned into concern, even care, about how each person’s story would end, and each ending was, in its own way, deeply moving. Some stories (Souad, Taha, Hatim especially) are heartrending; others (Abaskharon and Malak) wryly comic; others (Busayna and Zaki) are surprisingly beautiful and hopeful.

The Yacoubian Building (and the Yacoubian Building) is a microcosm of a world that comes across as chaotic, risky, bleak, yet shot through with a kind of wistful longing for dignity and love, the two things all of the characters are ultimately in search of. Even as you watch their mistakes, their compromises, their sacrifices, their sins, it’s hard to sit in judgment, because the medium they move in is so relentlessly corrupt. The conviction that there’s no winning against this system may account for the matter-of-fact tone and the absence of authorial commentary about even the novel’s most depressing sequences, such as Taha’s descent into extremism–inaugurated not by religious fanaticism or political commitment but by the injustice and prejudice of a bureaucracy that blocks him from his honorable dream–or the disastrous conclusion of Hatim’s affair with Abd Rabbuh, for whose shame, guilt and resentment Hatim’s sad love proves an unequal match. “I’m sure that Our Lord will forgive us because we don’t do anyone any harm,” Hatim reassures his lover; “We just love one another.” If only that belief were reflected in the world around them.

Al Aswany’s storytelling is so inexorable it feels fatalistic. But against the backdrop of cynicism and despair, Al Aswany sets the unlikely, unforeseeable–the “strange and unexpected”– love story of Busayna and Zaki: “little by little, raising his arms aloft amid the joyful laughter and cries of the others, he joined her in the dance.”

The Yacoubian Building is this month’s reading for The Slaves of Golconda: check out the group’s website for other posts, and feel free to join in the discussion on the Forum.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: Update

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I have started building the ‘Middlemarch for Book Clubs’ site I boldly promised to create in response to the whole ‘Middlemarch kills book clubs’ story that got so much linkage a week or so ago. Here is a list of the pages and subpages I’ve set up so far. Let me know if you think they look sensible, and also if (based on your experience either as a reader or as a member of a book club) you think I should include something else or go in a different direction altogether. As part of my preparation, I’ve been looking around at other online book club guides, and Amateur Reader is right that the Faulkner site for Oprah’s Book Club is pretty nice. (The ‘How to Read Faulkner’ section is actually fairly similar in spirit and even in some specifics to the ‘top 10 tips’ I posted before, some of which, of course, will show up on the new site.) My own instinct is that the tone of such a site will be at least as important as the content, and then after that what matters most is the organization: after all, it’ s not hard to find information on all of these topics on your own if you go looking. So my goal is not to create original content so much as an atmosphere that’s inviting and a structure that’s useful. That’s a project that plays to my strengths, at least based on my recent course evaluations: apparently I am both conspicuously enthusiastic and unusually well organized.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: A Preliminary Outline

Welcome

Getting Started

Tips for Success

Choosing an Edition

George Eliot

Life

Ideas

Contexts

Politics

Religion

The ‘Woman Question’

Discussion Questions

The Big Picture

One Book at a Time

Forum

Links

Electronic Editions of Middlemarch

Other Writing by George Eliot

Writing About George Eliot and Middlemarch

Other Related Resources

 

Madame Bovary II: The Doctors and Their Wives

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s difficult to compare two books that are very, very good at what they do but that do very different things.

Must such a comparison be evaluative, hierarchical? Of course not. Does it often end up that way? Of course. We’re only human! We like different things, for reasons that often say more about us than about the objects of our inquiry. Is it a cheap dodge, though, to hide behind the unassailable (because ultimately indefensible) assertion of taste when you strongly prefer one great novel to another? Yes, probably. Maybe it’s better not to go there, then, but to stick with “these books do two very different things”–with the what, the fact of the matter, the precise depiction, and leave the rest unsaid, implicit.

It would be ironic for me to do that when comparing Madame Bovary and Middlemarch, though, because when I try to fix on what it is that I didn’t like about reading Madame Bovary, what I come up with is the way that novel is so relentlessly about the ‘what.’ There are a lot of things the novel just doesn’t do, things Flaubert just won’t do. To quote Lydia Davis’s introduction again, “his technique is to present the material without comment.” There’s nothing trivial or superficial about his “painstaking objective description,” which is often devastatingly perceptive, but “without comment,” it felt somehow unmoored to me. The ‘what’ is very meticulously rendered, but Madame Bovary is not a novel that deals very much in the ‘why?’ (broadly conceived), or the ‘what about it, then?’ Things and people in the novel are what they are in themselves: they are intensely specific, and it’s only indirectly, if at all, that the novel attaches them to anything general, from historical context to moral or philosophical ideas.

Middlemarch, by contrast, is fundamentally about connecting the specific to the general, about seeing the particular in as broad and varied a context as possible. Middlemarch “without comment” is all but inconceivable: how depleted, how deflated, it would be! The wisdom of Middlemarch–the excellence of Middlemarch–resides in its comments. The excellence of Madame Bovary lies (perforce) somewhere else: in its perfect realization of its own concept, perhaps? G. H. Lewes famously called Jane Austen “the greatest artist who ever lived” because she displayed, he thought, “the most perfect mastery over the means to her ends”: that seems true of Flaubert as well, at least in this case, and at least as far as I understand his ends and means. Where, though, is the wisdom of Madame Bovary? The novel itself makes this question seem foolish, misguided, naive. Nobody in the novel really learns anything, after all: “Since the events that are about to be recounted here, nothing … has changed in Yonville.” If you don’t think anybody can learn anything, no wonder you refrain from commenting. What would be the point? Middlemarch, in contrast, is profoundly pedagogical, and so its narrator balances wry awareness of her students’ inadequacies and limits with utter commitment to helping them understand and grow. This is not work that can be done by keeping out of the way.

Different means serving different ends: different visions, different aesthetics, different novels. And the reason it is so obvious how different the two novels are is that they have so much in common. There’s the basic premise: both are about ‘provincial life’ (and both, I think, see its limitations and defects in quite similar ways). Both also take a doctor and his discontented wife as main characters, a plot parallel that nicely sets me up to illustrate the authors’ contrasting approaches.

Doctoral Education

Charles Bovary

It would be impossible by now for any of us to recall a thing about him. He was a boy of even temperament, who played at recess, worked in study hall, listening in class, sleeping well in the dormitory, eating well in the dining hall. He had as local guardian a wholesale hardware dealer in the rue Ganterie, who would take him out once a month, on a Sunday, after his shop was closed, send him off to walk along the harbor looking at the boats, then return him to school by seven o’clock, before supper. In the evening, every Thursday, he would write a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three pats of sealing wax; then he would review his history notebooks or read an old volume of Anacharsis that was lying around in the study hall. Out walking, he would talk to the servant, who, like him, was from the country.

By dint of applying himself, he stayed somewhere in the middle of the class; once he even earned a first honorable mention in natural history. But at the end of his third year, his parents withdrew him from the school in order to have him study medicine, convinced that he would be able to go on alone to the baccalaureate. . . .

The curriculum, which he read on the notice board, made his head swim: a course in anatomy, a course in pathology, a course in physiology, a course in pharmacy, a course in chemistry, and one in botany, and one in clinical practice and one in therapeutics, not to mention hygiene and materia medica, names with unfamiliar etymologies that were like so many doors to sanctuaries filled with solemn shadows.

He understood none of it; though he listened, he did not grasp it. He worked, nonetheless, he possessed bound notebooks, he attended all the lectures, he never missed a hospital round. He accomplished his little daily task like a mill horse, which walks in circles with its eyes covered, not knowing what it is grinding. (Part I, Chapter  1)

Tertius Lydgate

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He was one of the rare lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. . . . one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with grey-paper backs and dingy-labels — the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the heading of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdon and her fairnesse”, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance. (Book II, Chapter 15)

Romantic Dreams

Emma Bovary

Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and this lyrical throng of adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. She herself was in some way becoming an actual part of those imaginings and was fulfilling the long daydream of her youth, by seeing herself as this type of amorous woman she had so much envied. Besides, Emma was experiencing the satisfaction of revenge. Hadn’t she suffered enough? But now she was triumphing, and love, so long contained, was springing forth whole, with joyful effervescence. She savored it without remorse, without uneasiness, without distress. (Part II, Chapter 9)

Rosamond Lydgate

[T]his result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance . . . . Now that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for it? (Book I, Chapter 12)

Desperate Housewives*

Emma Bovary

Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she had been before, and Charles seemed neither more loving nor more deeply moved.

When in this way she had made some attempt to strike the tinder against her heart without causing a single spark to fly from it, incapable, in any case, of understanding something she was not experiencing herself, just as she was incapable of believing in anything that did not manifest itself in a conventional form, she easily persuaded herself that Charles’s passion was no longer extraordinary. (Part I, Chapter 7)

So now they were going to continue one after another like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! Other people’s lives, however dull they were, had at least the possibility that something would happen. A chance occurrence would sometimes lead to an infinite number of sudden shifts, and the setting would change. But for her, nothing happened. God had willed it! The future was a dark corridor, with the door at its end firmly closed. (Part I, Chapter 9)

Rosamond Lydgate

Poor Rosamund for months had begun to associate her husband with feelings of disappointment, and the terribly inflexible relation of marriage had lost its charm of encouraging delightful dreams. It had freed her from the disagreeables of her father’s house, but it had not given her everything that she had wished and hoped. The Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by everyday details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid selection of favourable aspects. The habits of Lydgate’s profession, his home preoccupation with scientific subjects, which seemed to her almost like a morbid vampire’s taste, his peculiar views of things which had never entered into the dialogue of courtship — all these continually-alienating influences, even without the fact of his having placed himself at a disadvantage in the town, and without that first shock of revelation about Dover’s debt, would have made his presence dull to her. There was another presence which ever since the early days of her marriage, until four months ago, had been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone: Rosamond would not confess to herself how much the consequent blank had to do with her utter ennui. . . (Book VII, Chapter 64)

 [Will] would have made, she thought, a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate. No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the family at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on. Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love. (Book VIII, Chapter 75)

These examples aren’t offered in a tendentious spirit. They all display, I think, mastery as Lewes defines it. Yet I can’t imagine ever loving one novel as I love the other. Sorry, Gustave: it’s not you, it’s me! But I’m looking forward to the discussion that I hope these juxtapositions provoke.

*Don’t blame me! If the blurb for the Davis translation can call Emma “the original desperate housewife,” how am I supposed to resist?