A Few Shells: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Gift from the Sea is a book that enacts its own prescription … which is my attempt to sum up how this book about the difficulty, but also the inestimable value, of quiet meditation prompts its readers (or this reader, anyway) to just such inward contemplation.

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It’s a little book, and an easy one to read: short chapters, each focused on a simple idea and using a single shell as an organizing metaphor, written in simple, satisfying sentences. It’s not, ultimately, a slight or insubstantial book, though, because its wide open spaces leave plenty of room for our own thoughts about our lives, relationships, and priorities. I think it would be impossible, in fact, to read it and not test its propositions against one’s own experiences — and not be tempted by its invitation to consider finding a new rhythm for one’s life, one that’s slower and more spacious. No doubt because of where I am in my own life, I was most interested in the chapter on the ‘oyster bed.’ An oyster shell, as she points out, “is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations”:

Yes, I believe the oyster shell is a good one to express the middle years of marriage. It suggests the struggle of life itself. The oyster has fought to have that place on the rock to which it has fitted itself perfectly and to which it clings tenaciously. So most couples in the growing years of marriage struggle to achieve a place in the world. It is a physical and material battle first of all, for a home, for children, for a place in their particular society. . . . Here one forms ties, roots, a firm base. . . . Here one makes oneself part of the community of men, of human society.

She doesn’t idealize this phase of marriage, recognizing that like the oyster shell’s, its excrescences are “not primarily beautiful but functional.” Yet “it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness.” The early years of marriage – the “double-sunrise” phase – are, by contrast, “pure, simple, and unencumbered,” with a “self-enclosed perfection [that] wears the freshness of a summer morning.” To me, that does seem idealized (we can’t be the only couple whose marriage had its share of complexities early on) but in those years it’s true that there’s a mutuality and an exclusivity to the relationship that can’t be sustained in the changing circumstances of family life.

More than her specific characterizations of each phase of life, I was struck by her theme of accepting changes from one phase to the next, especially within marriage. “Duration,” as she says, “is not a test of true or false,” and perhaps the sagest advice she has is to not to yearn for things to stay the same, or to return to some earlier way of being. The crusty oyster shell is no more the symbol of eternal verities than the graceful double-sunrise: “the tide of life recedes. The house, with its bulging sleeping porches and sheds, begins little by little to empty.” Most of us, she suggests,

insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity, in freedom . . . The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For relationships too must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits . . .

Easier said then done, no doubt, though not so easily said so succinctly or gracefully. The very gentleness of Gift from the Sea, in fact, makes rather light of what could be quite stringent psychological, not to mention marital, renovations! And I personally am always a bit wary of advice to accept things they way they are now, even as I recognize that taking “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” as one’s motto is likely not the route to contentment for us any more than for Ulysses. Still, finding the good in the present and not measuring it against either the real past or an imagined future does seem wise.

But it’s that same aphoristic wisdom that kept me from being absorbed in Gift from the Sea the way I was absorbed in, say, Plant Dreaming Deep — which touches on many of the same life challenges. In making her book so accessible, so broadly applicable, Lindbergh has made herself too generic, her voice and story too impersonal. Sometimes, Gift from the Sea seemed just a shade too close, for my taste, to a New Age self-help book, its eponymous shells dwindling into poetic talismans. The list of “island precepts” for instance — how little separates these from platitudes:

Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.

I don’t mean to deprecate the loveliness of the book, though, or to dismiss its truths. I’m actually surprised to find myself resisting it even as far as I do! After I finished it I thought of at least four people close to me I wanted to recommend it to, and I know I’ll reread it myself.

For a fuller account of the book and its place in its author’s own life, which was certainly “heavily encrusted with accumulations,” read Victoria Best’s wonderful essay about Lindbergh and Gift from the Sea at Open Letters Monthly.

Taking Stock: Summer Reading, Summer Plans

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It was just about three months ago that I reported having filed the grades for my winter term courses. In addition to the clean-up work that remains at that point, and the unfolding list of administrative business that encroaches especially in May, I mentioned a number of projects that I was going to be working on. It’s gratifying to reflect that I have been working quite steadily through this list:

  1. Review Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life – done!
  2. Review Deirdre David’s Olivia Manning: A Woman at War – done!
  3. Reread all 40+ Dick Francis novels and write essay for Los Angeles Review of Books – full draft done and submitted, now undergoing final revisions!
  4. Complete “beta” version of Middlemarch for Book Clubs – done!

What remains from these original summer plans is what I described then as the “most ambitious but … most amorphous” one: figuring out what kind of larger project could emerge from the essays I’ve been writing on George Eliot. “Do they, could they, add up to something larger, perhaps some kind of cross-over book project?” I wondered. Now that those more immediate deadlines have been met, I’m going to be thinking a lot — and perhaps writing a lot! — about this question. Last week I actually had a very interesting conversation with a publishing professional in which we exchanged some preliminary thoughts about what such a book might look like, and now I’m pondering what she said about what kind of book she can imagine there might be a market for (and thus that might interest a publisher) and whether that’s the kind of book I had in mind. I’m not going to go into details at this point, not to be coy but because, as I said, these were early thoughts and it was our first conversation. But you can expect me to do at least some of my thinking about all this “out loud” here at Novel Readings, not least because here is, after all, where I already have some readers, and ones I respect very much. Trying to imagine, much less write for, some audience conceived of in the abstract seems both scarier and less useful than discussing possibilities with you folks!

While I’m pondering and free-writing and conceptualizing, I will also set some more concrete goals, the first one being an essay on Adam Bede to add to my collection. That will be my next Open Letters contribution, followed by a review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel, The Signature of All Things, for October.

As the fall term approaches, I also have some preparatory work to do, even before I start focusing really intently on preparing syllabi and Blackboard sites. I’m teaching a couple of novels in the fall that I haven’t read in a long time or taught before. I try to introduce some novelty into every rotation of a course, to change up the conversation at least a bit. So in Mystery and Detective fiction this time, I’ve bumped The Maltese Falcon and replaced it with The Big Sleep.  I just reread The Big Sleep and though I don’t really care for Chandler’s rather florid style in it (did the guy ever meet a simile he didn’t like?) I think it will be fun to teach — perhaps a little more fun than The Maltese Falcon, if no less confusing. And in the 19th-C Novel (Austen to Dickens) I’ve chosen David Copperfield this year, which of course I’ve read more than once but which I have never lectured on. I plan to reread that in August. And one other teaching-related summer project is finalizing the reading list for my upcoming winter-term seminar on ‘Women & Detective Fiction.’ I’ve taught it several times before and asked here more than once for recommendations to shake up the reading list. I’m still working on that, particularly with the aim of making the book selection more diverse. I’ve had a lot of good leads but surprisingly often they dead-end because the titles I’m interested in are not in print (Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam, for instance, does not seem to be orderable in Canada). Right now I’m trying out Paula L. Woods’s Inner City Blues.

emeraldstarNow that school is out, Maddie and I have also committed to another round of the summer reading club at our public library. Usually I keep a tally of our books in the side bar here: I’ll set that up soon, to motivate us both! We’ve felt sometimes that the emphasis on quantity becomes a disincentive for Maddie to embark on longer books, so this summer we’ve chosen a modest number for her (10) so that there’s no pressure to fall back on rereading Junie B. Jones or something! She’s read two so far, both by favorite authors: Jacqueline Wilson’s Emerald Star and Meg Tilly’s A Taste of Heaven. Now she’s working on The Diary of Anne Frank, and I think The Fault in Our Stars, which I gave her for her birthday, is next. She has the usual summer challenge of being in camp some of the time (including both of the last two weeks): as she’s pointed out, one thing they never seem to make time for at these things is reading! But she’ll have some quieter weeks soon.

I haven’t done too badly myself since the end of June, when she registered: I think I get to count The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and then there’s Felicity & Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died, Jane and Prudence, The Woman Upstairs, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Arabella, In the Woods, and The Big Sleep. One of my next reads will be chosen by the vote at the Slaves of Golconda blog (it seems likely to be Pym’s Excellent Women, though Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian is running a close second). Next from my own immediate pile, though, will be Gift from the Sea, which I picked up at Hager Books in Vancouver under the influence of Victoria Best’s wonderful essay on Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Open Letters a little while back.

Vancouver: By the Books!

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I’m back from my trip to Vancouver. Including travel days, I was on vacation for 11 days, making this the longest trip I’ve taken in ages. It was wonderful to spend so much time with my family and to meet up with so many of my friends — among them the wonderful Liz of Something More, who is every bit as smart and witty and energetic in person as she is online. A special treat was getting to know my newest nephew, who made it to almost three  before coming face to face with his Aunt Rohan. There was lots of good food and drink and general conviviality; the weather was spectacular, and so, as always, was the scenery. A small sample will make you wonder why anyone bothers vacationing (or, for that matter, living) anywhere else:

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Sunset at Kits Beach

 

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Along the Seawall

 

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The Beach at Spanish Banks

 

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Along Kits Point

 

Plaza at Granville Island
My happy place:
the deck at Granville Island Market

 

But enough about all that! This is a book blog, so of course what you want to know about is whether I had any bookish adventures along with all that socializing and sightseeing. Well, of course I did. Here’s the stack of books I either read, bought, or borrowed on my trip:

Vancouver Books I

The Woman Upstairs and Jane and Prudence were the books I brought along to read on the plane. Barbara Pym was excellent company from Halifax to Toronto: I appreciated her much more after reading Harrison Solow’s Felicity & Barbara Pym, so I was happy to find when I arrived in Vancouver that my mother had helpfully picked Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings from her collection and put them out for me. As you can see from the picture, I have “borrowed” them to read at my leisure! (I promise, I will give them back to her … next time she visits me here. See how cleverly I’m adding in incentives for her to come all this way?) The Magnificent Spinster is hers as well: one of the fun things about visiting my parents is exploring their incredibly well-stocked and various shelves, from the rows of vintage Penguin Classics in the living room to the mysteries shelved two deep in the study to my mother’s Bloomsbury nook:

Bloomsbury Corner

From Toronto to Vancouver I made good progress on The Woman Upstairs, which I had suggested for my F2F book club for August; I finished it up a day or two after I got there. I was pretty disappointed in it: it seemed heavy-handed and straining towards significance. Nora’s anger was particularly uninteresting to me, largely because it was so insistent. Though the overt allusion is to Jane Eyre, I found myself thinking more about Villette as I read it. Lucy Snowe is a much more layered and complex character — or perhaps I should say characterization: Brontë gives us mysteries, deception, and self-deception where I felt that Messud gives us mostly clichés and plot twists. And speaking of twists, the one at the end is painfully predictable, isn’t it? I ended up feeling that I had once again made the mistake of following the hype. But perhaps as I think it over more, and after we’ve discussed it in our group, I’ll realize how this preliminary reaction is inadequate.

Also in the pile is Arabella, which I bought myself as a treat at the big Chapters downtown. I ended up reading most of it on the flights home: it was sweet and cheerful and not too demanding, which is just about right for a stressful flying day. (Overall I was pleased with how well I handled the flying on this trip — there was a minimum of armrest clutching, for one thing, and my “self-talk” strategies were more effective than usual, even during turbulence. Still, even at its best it’s a crowded, uncomfortable, and disconcerting experience, isn’t it?)

My other purchases were from Hager Books, one of the very few independent stores left in Vancouver. From their carefully curated selection, I chose Gift from the Sea, which I was inspired to buy because of Litlove’s wonderful essay on Anne Morrow Lindbergh in the April issue of Open Letters Monthly. I had planned to read it on the plane home but didn’t feel well enough to concentrate on it, so now I have it to look forward too. And I chose Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures for the contrasting reason that I’d never heard of it (or him) before and was intrigued that Hager had several of his titles in stock, as if he’s a readerly favorite. Besides that, of course, I also thought it looked interesting! Has anyone read any of Hellenga’s novels? If you hated them, probably best not to tell me that I may have wasted my Hager’s opportunity on the wrong thing!

In the Woods is there because I ordered a book for a gift to be sent to Vancouver ahead of my arrival, and I wanted something to add it so I’d get free shipping! I chose it because Tana French is a name that keeps coming up when I ask for mystery recommendations. I’d been avoiding it because it begins with bad things happening to young children, but I need to refresh my mystery reading. (Pretty soon, in fact, I have to order books for another round of the ‘Women & Detective Fiction’ seminar, so you’ll be seeing more questions about that here later.)

palfreyThe book I liked best of the ones I read on my trip is actually not shown here because I finished it and decided I really shouldn’t kidnap yet another of my mother’s books. It was Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, and it is by far my favorite of the novels by Taylor that I’ve read. It’s got the same clear-eyed, almost ruthless perspective on people’s foibles and self-deceptions but is also both funny and poignant. It was on the shelf next to Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day, which I did make off with. Really, if I lived in Vancouver, I would hardly need bookstores or libraries at all!

And now, back to my regular life. . I’m pleased with how much I got done on different projects before I left, including the Middlemarch for Book Clubs site, the reviews for Open Letters, and the draft of the Dick Francis essay (now in the editor’s hands); it’s time to think about how I want to use the rest of the time I have before teaching once again becomes the #1 priority. First, though, I have to get over my jet lag …

 

“The value of appreciation” — Harrison Solow, Felicity & Barbara Pym

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I missed Barbara Pym Reading Week by just a bit. I have been keen to read more Pym and serendipitously picked up a couple of Pym’s novels at a book sale just in time for it (The Sweet Dove Died and A Few Green Leaves). And I ordered Harrison Solow’s Felicity & Barbara Pym, which arrived on schedule. Then other things got in the way and I missed it.

sweet doveI did read The Sweet Dove Died a week or so later, though. It’s a slight little book, yet it wasn’t an easy read for me: I kept picking it up and putting it down and letting myself be diverted to other books. It’s true I’d been on a steady diet of Dick Francis novels and so perhaps my reading senses (they’re like spidey senses only less tingly) were not attuned to Pym’s dry tone and small scale. I was eventually drawn into the pathos (or is it bathos?) of Leonora’s lost loves, and of course I abhorred the loathsome Ned … but I felt as if the larger significance of the subtle nuances were escaping me.

I was afraid that my relative inexperience and lack of success with Pym (I didn’t love Jane and Prudence either, when I read it last year) set me up badly for Felicity & Barbara Pym. It turns out, though, that the opposite was true, as Solow’s charming and slyly provocative book is (in part) a tutorial for someone not altogether unlike me. Not quite or even very much like me, I hope, as the recipient of the letters that compose the novel is a self-absorbed undergraduate who gets a little snippy at blows to her self-esteem. Actually, that last bit sounds kind of familiar … Anyway (as Felicity might say), she’s registered for a seminar on Barbara Pym and Mallory Cooper (whose side of the correspondence is all we see) is called in to provide some advance tutoring.

Felicity initially isn’t much better at appreciating Pym than I was, and Mallory is quick to call her (alright, us) on it:

Your notes aren’t bad. You have touched on a few themes that Pym’s biographers, editors, and critics analyse repeatedly: Silly men. Mousy women. Tea. Religion. Quotations. These are worthy of mention. The fact that you still think nothing happens is not. It merely shows that you do not respond to what does happen in the novel, for whatever reason — innocence, feminism, scepticism, youth, cynicism, thoughtlessness, expectation, or too rapid and therefore too shallow reading of the novel — too light, perhaps, a perception of the economy of expression Miss Pym employs.

OK, OK: I am appropriately shamed and humbled.

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Over the rest of the correspondence Mallory — cranky, erudite, witty, persistent — does her best to improve Felicity’s perception, working with her on nuances of dress and class, on historical contexts, on literary relationships (the riff on Religio Medici is particularly memorable), on silly men and, crucially, on the real significance of mousy women:

At best, the cultivation of mousiness is to participate in a distinctive moral past. At worst, it may indeed be a camouflage, brought about by war, under the protective covering of which the wish to inhabit one’s own cosmos peacably can be fulfilled.

“And now,” she continues, “– on to Tea” — and the excursus on tea is a wondrous thing indeed.

The Pym neophyte will benefit enormously from all of this: I have been moved not only to a greater appreciation of The Sweet Dove Died (“There is even an entire Pym novel devoted to the downfall of elegance, beauty, and taste, personified in the character of the colossally self-preoccupied Leonora”) but to a wish to reread Jane and Prudence and to acquire as soon as possible Excellent Women and Less Than Angels (at a minimum).

But the sneaky thing about Felicity & Barbara Pym is that Pym herself (as Solow acknowledges in her Preface) is not exactly the real subject of the book: instead, she’s a device for allowing Mallory — or  Solow — to critique academic approaches to literature she thinks are limited and limiting. Pym’s lack of academic currency (and really, how likely is it that anyone would offer or take an entire seminar on her novels?) makes her useful for this project: “she is such an antithesis to the prevailing attitude.”

It’s a project that could, like Pym, seem “outmoded.” Mallory speaks with nostalgia of a time when universities “were sacred to the pursuit of education, whereas now, for the most part, they are desultorily engaged in the dispensing of narrow expertise.” Her position is not exactly anti-theory: there’s even a theory primer of sorts near the end, which, though brisk and tendentious, is not inaccurate and includes the full URL of a real website at Brock University for “some rather more practical assistance,” perhaps even enlightenment. I might sum it up as a “pre-theory” position: Mallory feels that the literary conversation, particularly but not exclusively in the academy, needs to start with what Solow calls “the context of the civilisation of literature itself” — not just the big picture but the really big picture. “We do not read, after all, as a species,” Solow says in her Preface,

in order that we may deconstruct and dissect. People buy books and borrow books from libraries because they like them. They read, re-read, recommend, learn from, incorporate values from, live by, study, and take to bed at night, books they like; books they appreciate; books they find meaningful.  Appreciation is not perhaps what the university requests of its students today. But it is what writers … deserve.

As Felicity’s tutor, Mallory keeps broadening, rather than narrowing, the field of inquiry, the scope of questions. The ultimate goal, though, is not to ignore the range of theory, interpretation, and scholarship available but to arrive at it equipped with as rich an “appreciation” as possible, so that you can figure out its worth for your reading (and writing) with some independence. “I hope you will not ignore all of these critics,” exhorts Mallory, “for, among the labyrinths of nonsense, there is great, great worth. But that is for you to discover . . . ”

Excellent Women

To some extent I sympathize  with Mallory’s skepticism and impatience with the “labyrinths of nonsense,” and I certainly embrace the idea of appreciation, which is something I often pitch to my own classes as our goal (as opposed to, say, “liking”). The kind of appreciation Mallory endorses is also, crucially, not an anti-intellectual kind. There’s even a paragraph in the book that is eerily like a speech I have given more than once:

I want you to feel — and feel deeply about literature. But I also want you to know why and how these emotions are engendered by the writer, the text (apart from the writer), the words (apart from the text) as well as the relationship between the reader and all of the above. I also want you to be able to take that emotion out of any equation when it is necessary to do so. Otherwise, we could all take courses in “My Favourite Books” and spend endless and idle time in groups resembling your friend’s therapy session “sharing” our feelings about why we just love Gone with the Wind and how cool Harry Potter is. Not that there is anything wrong with that, intrinsically. But it’s not what we do in academic literary studies. If that’s what you want to do, join a book club.

Yet there are aspects of Mallory’s approach, and even more of her tone, that seemed a bit 1990s-culture-wars-ish to me, and I wondered how important it was that Felicity & Barbara Pym is epistolary fiction, rather than a straightforward first-person treatise or polemic: is Mallory herself being ironized even as she’s the vehicle for Felicity’s (re)education? Is her rather prim tone and affected manner a way of placing her at a safe distance? Are we meant to embrace her nostalgia, or to see her as embodying another among the list of theoretical approaches, one that purports to speak for the universal value of literature but that, in doing so, reveals its own limitations? (The book is actually, Solow says, “both fiction and non-fiction”; there are clear biographical parallels, but it’s also clear that we aren’t meant to assume a direct identification of author with speaker.)

Felicity & Barbara Pym, then, provokes as well as amuses. It had lots of connections, sometimes unexpected, to my own adventures in re-thinking literary criticism (speaking of “why we just love Gone with the Wind“!). I would recommend Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel over Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, and I didn’t much care for Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, but these are hardly irreconcilable differences to have with a book  so lively and ingenious.

Full disclosure: Harrison Solow and I follow each other on Twitter and have had more than one friendly exchange. I first learned about Felicity & Barbara Pym as a result of this contact — and I’m glad I did.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The Crème de la Crème?

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

I’ve finally read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: that’s one more potential “Humiliation” winner gone!

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I very much enjoyed reading this novel. And yet I felt as if I understood better what it was about than why it was written as it was. Miss Jean Brodie is a fabulous character, as charismatic as a creation as she is as a teacher. I can’t disagree with Hal Hager’s effusive remarks in my sleek Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition: “Irrepressible, imperious, and irresistible, she has joined the ranks of those fictional characters who, through the sheer power of their lives on the printed page, endure in memory and in the culture from which they spring.” Long before this meeting with Miss Brodie on the page, I felt I knew her, partly from having seen (though years ago) the film with Maggie Smith, and partly also from the general circulation of lines from the novel: “For those who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like”; “You are the crème de la crème”; “I am a woman in my prime.”

The novel’s a fascinating study in the problematic allure of charismatic leadership: Miss Brodie’s fascination with fascism (“She had returned from Germany and Austria which were now magnificently organized”; “the German brown-shirts, she said, were exactly the same as the Italian black, only more reliable”) has a comic aspect but is also frighteningly apt, and reflective of her own power over her “set” — though that power proves more wishful or elusive than the forms of authoritarianism she so admires. Miss Brodie is perhaps the agent of her own undoing as a leader, as she fiercely individualizes her girls and preaches the evils of “team spirit” (“phrases like ‘the team spirit’ are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal loyalties”). It’s no wonder that this tension between leading and following eventually causes the set to implode.

The novel is equally preoccupied with the complications of sexual feelings: repression, desire, speculation, displacement. The girls’ prurient fascination with sex, and especially with Miss Brodie’s sex life (real and imagined), shows how entwined these feelings are with charismatic leadership, I thought: teaching, for instance, is always a kind of seduction, an attempt to win over hearts and minds, and Miss Brodie’s allure holds as long as she (knowingly or not) effectively channels her students’ erotic longings. Once they outgrow her — once they have sexual experience and power of their own, for instance — her grip on them begins to weaken.

There’s lot to think about in Spark’s strange, acerbic novel, lots to be amused and appalled at. But I was disoriented by some aspects of its style: I can’t see yet how they help me appreciate the tangle of emotions and politics and personalities the novel brings together. For instance, why does Spark insist so repetitively on characterization by tagline — there’s Rose (“famous for sex”), Mary (dies in the fire), Monica (mental math and fits of anger),  Eunice (does the splits), Sandy (“small, almost nonexistent eyes”). I appreciate that we need to get them all sorted, and that these are shorthand ways of indicating some fundamental things about them, but why reiterate their tags so incessantly? And why does Spark love prolepsis so? The chronology of the novel as a whole is quite an intricate braid of events from 1933 to 1939, but there’s a constant flitting still further ahead to the girls’ futures, as well as to Miss Brodie’s eventual end. Perhaps it is a way to signal that, intense as the school experience is, it is only a short interlude — or, the other way around, to bring out the lasting effects of early influences? I’d be interested in anyone’s ideas about  unities of form and content! My expectations were very high for this novel, and I’m a bit disappointed that at this point it seems more glittery than brilliant.

Rereading Dick Francis: the Top Ten!

Rohan Maitzen91 Comments

0430 SOCIAL Racing[The essay for which this reading was preparation was Spinster, Victim, Soldier, Spy: Dick Francis and the Evolution of Female Characters in Crime Fiction, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2013.]

I have been binge-reading Dick Francis in service of an essay project that is steadily, if a bit stumblingly, heading towards completion. One question I’ve been asked pretty often when I mention that I’m doing this is “Which Dick Francis novels are your favorites?” A variation on this is “If I haven’t read any Dick Francis before, which one(s) should I start with?” You might think that, with so many books with so much in common, the worst time to answer these questions is right now, before the dust has really settled. On the other hand, the differences have never been — and probably never will be again — as clear in my mind as they are now. Interestingly, too, there are definitely standouts for me — and I think there are a couple of duds, too. And so, without further ado, here’s my Top Ten list.

10. Nerve (1964): Rob Finn, the lone jockey in a family of musicians, faces off against a malevolent villain driven by obsessive hatred of jockeys. The motive and thus the plot is a bit strained, but the book is brisk and suspenseful, and Rob Finn is a good early prototype of what becomes the classic Dick Francis hero.

8. and 9. Break In (1985) and Bolt (1986): Both feature jockey Kit Fielding, one of only two repeaters in Francis’s cast of characters. Kit is a good character, worth revisiting, and over the two books we get an interesting narrative arc involving his relationship with Danielle, niece of Kit’s patron, the excellent Princess Casilia. Racing is central to these books, as it is to Nerve, and Francis writes with great energy and great sympathy about horses and their riders.

7. Banker (1982): Here our hero is investment banker Tim Ekaterin, who gets a different return than he expects when he puts money into a race horse. Banker features one of Francis’s many strong women characters, here a pharmacist whose expertise proves essential to solving the case.

6. To the Hilt (1996): This time our hero is painter Alexander Kinloch, who prefers the solitude of the Highland mountains to life in society but is drawn into a thicket of family and corporate villainy. I’m particularly fond of this one, partly because the details about painting are fascinating, partly because of Alexander himself, and partly because of, again, the strong women characters. The most interesting one this time is Zoë Lang, a fierce 80-year-old expert on all things antique and Scottish. I can’t at all picture the portrait of her that Alexander eventually paints, and I don’t know if the technique described is even possible, but she believes he has made her “immortal.”

proof5. Proof (1984): In this one, Tony Beach, wine merchant, is on the site of a terrible accident and ends up drawn into its causes and facing off against some of Francis’s most cold-blooded villains (I’ll just say plaster of Paris and leave it at that). The investigation includes a lot of drinking — mostly scotch, and we get a lot of expert information about how it’s made and how to tell one kind from another. Tony is one of Francis’s best characters: a widower, he is broken with grief for his lost wife, while as the son of a military man, he is painfully conscious that he isn’t living up to his father’s standard of courage and masculinity.

4. Reflex (1980): Reflex features Philip Nore, jockey and amateur photographer, who gets caught up in a complicated tangle of blackmail and murder. A lot of the plot turns on his ability to solve photographic puzzles — so, again, the expert information is intrinsically interesting. But so, too, are the characters, including Philip himself, with his unusual family history, and his eventual love-interest, ambitious publisher Clare.

whiphand2. and 3. Whip Hand (1979) and Come to Grief (1995): There’s a good case to be made for ranking at least one of these as Number 1. The protagonist in both is former-jockey-turned-private-eye Sid Halley, who actually appears in four books altogether. The first, Odds Against, is also quite good, but the last one, Under Orders (2006) is one of only two Dick Francis novels that I consider real duds (the other is Blood Sport). Sid is Francis’s best-developed and most complex and interesting character, the array of secondary characters is robust and, again, interesting, and the plots are among Francis’s best. The title Whip Hand alludes to Sid’s greatest weakness: before Odds Against begins, his left hand was badly damaged in a racing accident, forcing his retirement; I won’t give away exactly what happens, but in the next two books he has a prosthetic left hand and greatly fears damaging or losing his right one. His blend of persistent, almost obstinate courage with soul-crushing weakness takes the typical qualities of the Dick Francis hero — always very human, never a superhero — to an extreme.

1. Straight (1989): It’s possible that Straight is not in fact the best Dick Francis novel, but it is certainly my favorite. The hero, steeplechase jockey Derek Franklin, inherits all of his brother Greville’s problems along with his business. Greville was a gemstone dealer, and so this time the expert information includes lots of tidbits about jewels and their composition and value. Derek is another good character, strong and likable and principled; his regrets over not having known his brother better add a bittersweet tenderness to the story as it unfolds. It’s still a thriller, but it’s also a good novel about people and their complicated mixed motives.

straightSo there they are: my top ten! No doubt this list reflects my taste as much as any objective standard of quality. Also, surprisingly many others stood up very well to rereading, including sentimental favorite The Edge (which takes place on a ‘mystery’ train across Canada), Decider (I especially enjoy the insights into architecture and building), Twice Shy (which has not one but two protagonists for our crime fighting pleasure), Shattered (with lots of fascinating insight into glass-blowing) and Hot Money (which is the closest of them all to a ratiocinative mystery).

If you’re also a fan, what do you think – is my top ten close to yours? Have I skipped over a favorite? And if you’re not (yet) a Dick Francis reader, are you tempted? Be sure to report back if you read one (or more) that I’ve recommended.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: the beta launch

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

OxfordJust over a year ago, I got somewhat exercised over a news story claiming that Middlemarch is the kiss of death for book clubs. My annoyance was exacerbated by the number of links it got from other sources, which added up to quite the anti-Middlemarch buzz for a while.

My first response was a post on this blog that included a list of 10 tips to help book clubs that wanted to read Middlemarch but felt they could use a little support. In that post I also made a bold pronouncement: “I’ve decided, therefore, to put together an online site to encourage and support reading Middlemarch–whether in book clubs or on your own.” I was and am well aware that there’s no shortage of information about George Eliot and Middlemarch already available, but the work of finding and filtering with an eye to what might be useful and illuminating for book clubs (rather than, say, scholars) is not insignificant, and having relevant basics gathered in one place might — or so I thought and hope — simply be convenient.

middlemarchsite

At long last, I have a full (if not necessarily finished) version of that site now up for people to take a look at. As you’ll see if you visit it, it’s not a very fancy thing — it’s just a free WordPress site. I chose what I hope is a clean, easy-to-read theme and set up what seemed to me like simple but useful categories. At this point I feel very aware of what is not there (many more topics could be covered under ‘contexts,’ for instance) and also of how what is there reflects my own interests and idiosyncrasies as a reader and teacher of the novel. Depending on the response to this draft version, I could certainly end up adding more material. But I’m not sure I want to try to neutralize my own perspective: good discussions arise from encounters between different people’s minds, and I wanted the site to convey the sense that there’s a person behind it. That’s why I let myself be kind of chatty, including in the questions.

There are lots more excuses explanations I could offer for what I’ve done so far, but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. I welcome feedback, here or at the site, particularly from people who might some day — or have already — chosen Middlemarch for reading with their own book clubs!

 

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

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How human! Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Pictureleopard8Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s singular classic The Leopard is the latest book for the Slaves of Golconda reading group. Three other readers have already posted their thoughts, and having read their interesting remarks I find myself wondering what I have to add! They’ve all mentioned aspects of the book that I was also interested in. Alex, for instance, stresses the sensuality of the language: “It is by far the most insistently, sensuously, even seductively, oppressive book I’ve ever read. It made me want to applaud, underline and shudder in equal measure and often with just one very clever, deviously evocative phrase.” As both she and litlove point, out, the book’s beauties always coexist with horrors, so the garden scene Alex quotes, for instance, brings on gloomy thoughts for the eponymous protagonist, Don Fabrizio, because walking among his flowers he is reminded of the corpse they found among them not long ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How human!