Year: 2013

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Classics All the Time: In Which I Read Julie Otsuka, Muriel Spark, & Dickens

"Girl Reading," by Coles Phillips

“Girl Reading,” by Coles Phillips:  A cover for Good Housekeeping magazine

It is gray out there.  It will never stop being gray, I’m convinced.

I want to set up my Christmas tree again for the LED lights.

I’ve given up my housewife duties until I see the sun again.

Tonight I flatly refused to parboil potatoes for a roasted vegetable dish.

“You’re on your own.”

There was much concern.  “You never refuse to make dinner.”

That is pretty much true.  I don’t mind cooking. Last night I chopped some vegetables, threw them in canned broth, and called it soup.

Tonight I was simply stumped.  What had I meant to do with that zucchini, tomato, cauliflower, and sweet potato?

Make no mistake, February is the worst month.  You don’t want to leave the house, you’re wind-burned from your walks, and you don’t want to make any more Earth Mother meals.   Every warmish, sunny day is negated by the warning of the meteorologists, “A snowstorm is coming!   A snowstorm is coming!”

And so I made a resolution to battle the desolation of February by reading classics all the time.  (Oh, and I’m also forcing myself to get out of the house:  I WILL go to some meetings)

Some of you made the resolution on New Year’s Eve to read classics. You said, “I will read The Tale of Genji this year.”  I didn’t say this because I happen to know I will never finish Tale of Genji, having already read one-fourth of it twice (it is 1,216 pages long).

I happened to be reading a lot of very high-quality books anyway .   Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, the best novel I read in 2012, is the brilliant, comical story of a dying vinyl record store.  Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the delightful epic poem that is the source of our knowledge of Greek and Roman myths, is boldly funny: gods and goddesses behave badly without compunction, and transformations, good and bad, happen for no good reason, as they do in life, as they did in Ovid’s life (he was banished to an island).

But suddenly I’ve  switched from long classics to short, and I’m feeling a bit in limbo.  Yes, I really need to add a long classic to my TBR pile. But first I will write up a couple of short books I’ve been meaning to talk about.

the-buddha-in-the-attic-091411-SF-3801.  Although The Tale of Genji is a hyper-joy for those of you who like hyper-long books, I prefer the brevity of Julie Otsuka’s superb novel, The Buddha in the Attic, which won the PEN/Faulkner  Award in 2011.  This stunning, lyrical novel, written mostly in the first person plural, tells the story of a group of Japanese “picture brides” who travel to San Francisco in the early 20th century.  Many of the men lied in their letters to their brides about their success or glossed over unimaginable circumstances: instead of a life of leisure in America, the men are poor and the women work as cooks,  sharecroppers, maids.

The women’s collective voice awakens our empathy.

We lived in a dirt-floored shack beneath a willow tree in the middle of a wide, open field and slept on a mattress stuffed with straw.  We relieved ourselves outside, in a hole in the ground.  We drew our water up from a well.  We spent our days planting and picking tomatoes form dawn until dusk and spoke to on one but our husband for weeks at a time.  We had a cat to keep us company, and chase away the rats, and at night if we stood in the doorway and looked out toward the west we could see a faint, flickering light in the distance.  That, our husband told us, was where people were.  And we knew we should have never left home.

Later, their children reject the Japanese languauge and are ashamed of their mothers’ halting English. And then World War II begins, and the Japanese, young and old, American citizens or not, are interned in a camp.

Otsuka’s style is exquisite, and the novel is poignant, a record of the struggles of Japanese immigrants in the face of prejudice and tragedy.

The_Finishing_School_ spark2.  Some of Muriel Spark’s novels are classics, others not.  The Finishing School, her last novel, is the gracefully-written story of Rowland Mahler’s envy of the talent of his 17-year-old creative writing student, Chris Wiley.  Publishers and editors are already courting the insouciant Chris for his offbeat historical novel about Mary Queen of Scots; the struggling Rowland, who occasionally writes a few pages, is furious.  He and his wife, Nina, run an untraditional finishing school for wealthy students, but Nina certainly never anticipated Rowland’s envy of Chris, and increasingly looks for fulfillment outside of the school.  When Rowland begins to snoop in Chris’s room, we know it’s a matter of time before he implodes.

I liked it, but is it a classic?  I think not.

Although the style is polished, there isn’t much to this burlesque of creative writing programs.  Not one of her best, but even her worst is better than most people’s bests, so…

AND NOW FOR SOME DICKENS.

Our Mutual Friend DickensI pulled a copy of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend off the shelf.  The Vintage edition has no notes, but that is fine because my old falling-apart Penguin has notes.  The Vintage has a beautiful but strange cover and an introduction by Nick Hornby.

If you like Hornby’s columns from The Believer, and I do, you will enjoy this.

“Great writing is all about what you cut; everybody knows that,” Hornby wittily begins.

And of course we have to laugh, because Dickens never seems to have cut anything and of course when you take a writing class they tell you to pare your writing down.

Hornby doesn’t like Our Mutual Friend as much as I do.  He is more a David Copperfield and Great Expectations Man.

Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s last finished novel, and very, very dark.

It is one of my favorite books.  Sometimes it is my favorite Dicken.  It just depends on which Dickens book I’m reading at the moment.

I last read Our Mutual Friend in 2010 and wrote at my old blog, Frisbee:  A Book Journal:

“The plot of OMF revolves around money:  the effect of the Boffins’ inheritance of the Golden Dustman’s riches on sundry characters, including themselves, after his son, John Harmon is murdered.  Members of the Boffins’ circle include John Rokeman, the mysterious secretary who dedicates himself passionately to their interests; the beautiful, greedy, witty Bella, whom the Boffins informally adopt; poisonous Wegg, the one-legged con man who hopes to blackmail Mr. Boffin;  and Betty Higden, the independent old woman who refuses to accept money from the Boffins because she wants to stand on her own two feet and, by her own money, keep out of the workhouse.”

I will check in periodically and tell you about my rereading.

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My Secret Obsession with Virgil’s Aeneid

New Virgil paperback reviewed in the TLS!

New Virgil paperback!

I don’t usually read the TLS (Times Literary Supplement).

I skim newspaper reviews to find out what’s being published.

I don’t need anything too intellectual.

I once canceled my subscription to The New York Review of Books because the long political essays bored me to death.  I preferred the shorter, more straightforward reviews in The New York Times Book Review and Washington Post.

I am not a scholar, but, yes, I admit I have a degree in classics and I read Latin poetry.

“Sickening,” a friend said  as we sat on a park bench on our lunch hour when I told her this was something I enjoyed.

I recently turned to the TLS because of its pro-classics bent.  It actually printed a review of a new edition of Virgil’s Aeneid Book XII.

I reread Virgil’s Aeneid (in Latin) every year. I recently taught excerpts, in Latin and in translation, to an adult ed Latin class.   After the director of adult ed decided I was teaching too much grammar (though Latin students prefer ablative absolutes to hearing me drone on about Roman culture), I amused myself by adding bits and pieces of Virgil to the curriculum.  Virgil made easy!  By dint of spending entire days making worksheets, I was able to teach my beginning students to translate some famous lines.

Aeneas and Turnus, by Luca Giordano (17th century)

Aeneas and Turnus, by Luca Giordano (17th century)

Anyway, it was  a matter of duty (very big in ancient Rome) to introduce them to the great epic.   I am shocked when I meet someone who has not read Virgil’s  Aeneid, which, as T. S. Eliot pointed out in his essay, “What Is a Classic?”, is probably the only classic in Western literature, the only perfect meeting of a language and literature at the height of civilization.

The TLS caught my eye this week because of Denis Feeney’s review of new Cambridge editions of Virgil’s Aeneid Book XII and Horace’s Satires Book I.

It is unprecedented for a mainstream publication to review scholarly editions of Roman poets.  Or at least it would be in the U.S.

The reception of new classical commentaries is usually lukewarm.  When Richard Tarrant’s new commentary on Virgil’s Book XII was published last fall,  Harvard’s classics dept. website was about as good as it gets:

Congratulations to Professor Richard Tarrant for the September release of his commentary on Book XII of Virgil’s Aeneid, the first ever single-volume commentary to be published on Book XII alone. It is available in paperback and hardcover through Cambridge University Press.

Inspired by the TLS–oh my God, another commentary!–I have secretly ordered Tarrant’s  edition of Book XII.  Horace’s satires are good, but frankly I need to replace ALL of my Horace, since my book is falling apart…

The Virgil is a secret gift to myself.  I already have, yeah, the scholarly Williams, the accessible Pharr, and far too many other editions.

But it is always fascinating to read new commentaries, which help with interpretation, philology, and history.

I am looking forward to what Tarrant has to say.

I was going to buy some pasta jars, but oh well…

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Reading in Bed & Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me

Reading in bed illustrationI’ve been on a break, and it’s been fabulous.

Why write ever?   That’s what I’ve been asking myself.

It’s much more fun to spend Saturday reading in bed.

There are strict rules for reading in bed.  First, you must pick out five or six books and arrange them near your pillow. Miss Buncle’s Book might be good for the first hour, but what if you suddenly crave Vanity Fair or Casino Royale?  Second, set your tea tray on the bedside table.  You’ll need  tea and snacks:  I had to make do with a stale piece of fudge from Christmas, because I didn’t feel like getting out of bed to bake Our Famous Weekend Oatmeal muffins. (“You bake them.”  “No, you bake them.”)  Third, close the bedroom door:  you don’t want those pesky family members or pets interfering with your reading.

It’s nice to take a day off.

Photo on 2013-02-16 at 22.43 #2

Reading in bed.

Yes, I finished Norman Collins’s charming, funny, sad, albeit very long, novel, London Belongs to Me.  It is not quite a classic, but is a rambunctiously entertaining middlebrow novel.  It is the kind of book  Virago or Persephone readers might enjoy.

In this moving novel, Collins interweaves the stories of the motley lower-middle- and lower-class residents of Number 10 Dulcimer Street in London.  Their stingy landlady, Mrs. Vizier, broods in her basement apartment, wondering if any of her tenants are bringing the tone of her house down.

But her tenants are a plucky lot, and they support one another through innumerable troubles, including a murder trial.

London Belongs to Me Norman CollinsIn the preface, which is a paean to the city,  Collins describes London architecture, from shabby cathedrals, mansions, and crowded markets to “mile upon mile of little houses, most of them as shabby as St. James.  If you start walking westwards in the early morning from somewhere down in Wapping or the Isle of Dogs by evening you will still be on the march, still in the midst of shabby little houses–only somewhere over by Hammersmith by then.”

Then he moves on to people:  “Real Londoners who sleep the night in London as well as work the day there.”

And of course this is a novel about real Londoners.

Collins’s quirky characters are reminiscent of Dickens’ Londoners.  Mr. Josser, a retired clerk, dreams of moving to a rural cottage, but first must battle his sharp-tongued but compassionate wife’s prejudice against the country.  Connie, a former actress who works as a cloakroom attendant at a night club, ignores old age by perkily insinuating herself at parties, crime scenes, and other dramas.   Percy, a mechanic and thief, gives stolen rugs to his mother, Mrs. Boon, who has no idea he is a criminal.  Mr. Squales is a medium who cons Mrs. Vizier, the landlady, a spiritualist, into supporting him; and Mr. Puddy, a night watchman,  is a canned food gourmand whose whole night is ruined when a can opener fails.

The novel begins with Mr. Josser’s retirement from Battlebury and Sons on Christmas Eve in 1938.  They give him a gift of a “handsome clock, a mammoth marble affair with an eight-day movement.”  Mr. Josser comically and precariously lugs it on the tram and to the wine shop and then home.  After he stops at a shop to buy a bottle of wine and Christmas crackers, he can’t seem to balance clock, umbrella, rolled-up coat, and shopping.

“The clock itself was extraordinarily difficult to pick up–difficult that is for a man who is already carrying his office coat, an umbrella and a box of crackers.  He would never have managed it, in fact, if a passer-by hadn’t come along and offered to help him.  With his aid, Mr. Josser finally got the clock up–there were queer jangling noises inside it as he moved it–and then the stranger piled the box of crackers on top of everything else.  Mr. Josser was simply a pair of legs walking along under a large and awkward load.”

Once home, Christmas turns into the  kind of long family party we all recognize.  But this isn’t a cozy family book.  There is lots of action.

Connie is arrested in a raid at the night club, and would have been evicted if the Jossers hadn’t supported her.  Percy has a tremendous crush on Doris Josser, which luckily she doesn’t return:  he ends up killing a blonde during an argument while he speeds through London in a stolen car.  Again, Mr. Josser is the paterfamilias:  he spends hundreds of dollars in savings to hire a lawyer for Percy in the murder trial.

And London is getting ready for war:  the Jossers’ son, Ted, and Doris Josser’s fiance, Bill, a young doctor, enlist:  who will look after Ted’s hapless wife, Cynthia, and Baby?

I cried over Dunkirk:   that tragic scene alone is worth reading the book for.

Londoners go on, even in wartime.

By the end of the book I felt a part of London, too, though I live in a city on the prairie.

A very good read!

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Mirabile Recommends: Books for Both Genders

exhausted-woman“Reading books by men exhausts me,” I told my husband crossly.

I am in the middle of Dave Eggers’ Hologram for the King, a beautifully-crafted novel about a failed Schwinn bicycle salesman/executive turned IT  salesman in Saudi Arabia; he spends his days waiting for a meeting with the king in a city barely under construction.

Eggers is a brilliant writer, the founder of McSweeney’s, and the winner of countless awards.  This book was recommended by many readers I respect.

A-hologram-for-the King Dave EggersIt is not that I don’t admire Eggers’s fascinating, multi-layered novel, which required enormous research and is yet a very fast read.  Eggers explores the consciousness of Alan Clay, a divorced 54-year-old American who has lost his dream of manufacturing and selling beautiful bicycles.  He has made and lost a fortune over the years, is in debt and about to lose his house, and cannot pay the college tuition for his daughter if he doesn’t make the deal in Saudi.

The scenes are very vivid:  the desert, the drives, the sea, the drinking in hotel rooms, the lack of a sense of time, the surreal embassy party, and a road trip with his taxi driver.  Eggers seamlessly weaves history and politics into the elegant narrative: a  history of Schwinn, the history of American manufacturing being transferred to China, the politics and culture of Saudi Arabia.

It is a very well-written, architecturally solid book, but the very breadth exhausts me.  And I do feel the male voice is sometimes draining.  It’s not just Alan:  it’s many male characters in many books by men.  Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Delillo, Tom Wolfe, etc.

Let’s just sit down and have a cup of tea with Barbara Pym before I get back to Eggers.   Since Thursday is Valentine’s Day, I am recommending Eggers’ Hologram and four other unromantic novels as gifts for both men and women.

Scenes from Provincial life & Metropolitan lifeWilliam Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Metropolitan Life.  These charming autobiographical novels about a physics-teacher-turned-civil-servant are the first two in a series of five autobiographical novels praised by such “angry young men” as Kingsley Amis and John Braine.

The narrator, Joe Lunn, a novelist, is quietly rebellious.  In Scenes from Provincial Life, published in 1950 and set in the ’30s, he describes the boredom and the politics of teaching at a boys’ school, a job he takes strictly to support his writing.  He is having an affair with Myrtle, an advertising illustrator who wants to marry him, and he loves to go to bed with her, but cannot imagine being married.  Their hours at a weekend cottage sometimes overlap with those of Joe’s pushy gay friend, Tom, an accountant who insists that he needs more time with his lover, Steve.  Tom’s overwrought relationship with Steve is observed with some amusement by Joe, but his own with Myrtle is equally complicated.  There are many scenes between men and women, and men and men.  And the relationships change as time passes.

In Scenes from Metropolitan Life, a post-war novel I really think is a minor classic, Joe is  a civil servant in London, working in a government office with his friend, Robert, a novelist we know slightly from Provincial Life.  The descriptions of the politics of the workplace are superb, and  the mechanizations of Dr. Chubb, an engineer transferred to their department, to usurp Joe’s job, are funny, horrendous, and suspenseful.  (Dr. Chubb reminds me of Widmerpool in Dance to the Music of Time.)

Love affairs are at the heart of the book:  Joe again meets Myrtle, who is married to a soldier still not demobilized, and they embark on an affair; Robert has an affair with the beautiful, neurotic Julia, who claims to be married to a Polish officer.  The men want to marry, and the women sometimes do, sometimes do not.  Very funny, very realistic, and worth reading on its own.

Sweet-Dove-Died- pymBarbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died.  This sophisticated novel is not your typical in-love-with-the-vicar kind of Barbara Pym novel.  When the heroine, Leonora Eyre, faints after buying a book about the language of flowers at an auction,  Humphrey and his nephew, James, both antique dealers, help her outside, take her to lunch, and befriend her.  Leonora, a middle-aged beauty, falls chastely in love with the sexually ambiguous Ned, while Humphrey falls more sexually in love with her.   Leonora’s dislike of sex precludes consummation of either relationship.

And when Leonora learns that James is having an affair with a young woman, she schemes wickedly to get her out of the picture.  Then an American assistant professor, Ned, who has seduced James on vacation, proves to be Leonora’s match.

Funny and so beautifully written.

left hand of darkness3.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.  I recently reread this science fiction classic, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards in 1969;  alas, I had to return it to the library before I wrote about it, so I’m afraid this will be sketchy.  Set on the planet  Winter,  Genly Ai, an envoy, must try to persuade the inhabitants that other solar systems and species exist and that it will be to their advantage to join an inter-planetary coalition.  His main contact, Estraven, the king’s chief advisor, falls out of favor, and after he is banished, Ai, too, must leave.  Both end up across the border in the same surfacely reasonable but actually cruel country,  and Estraven saves Ai from a concentration camp.  The two dangerously escape by sled across glaciers.

Le Guin describes the cold so sharply that I had to put on more blankets.  She obviously knows a lot about winter camping.  The escape scenes are full of practical details about how much weight to carry and how much or little food one must eat.

The novel is complicated by the concept of kemmer:  people on Winter do not have one sex.  They go into kemmer, taking on the characteristics of either a man or a woman, and can be biologically both mothers and fathers.  Genly Ai’s close relationship with Estraven raises sexual questions.

LeGuin writes beautifully, and the book is written as an anthropological report containing  Ai’s observations, Estraven’s journal entries, tales, etc.

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Time: A Decade of Walks

"Woman in the Garden," Jószef Rippl-Rónai

“Woman in the Garden,” Jószef Rippl-Rónai

I know my urban neighborhood by heart.  I walk it, I bicycle it.

I am outdoors.  I feel the cold air.  I trudge, I skim the pavement, I am bored or happy according to the weather.  It was brown and windy today and I sat on the steps of the Greek Orthodox church to adjust my hood.  I took off my gloves to pull my hood up over my hat, but it fell down too far over my face and made me claustrophobic, so I took it off again.

Tree-lined streets, Arts-and-Crafts bungalows, the meridians with flowers in the spring time (brown dirt or snow this time of year), the neighborhood grocery store, the good indie coffee houses, the hardware store, the health food store, and the library.

There have been a lot of changes in the neighborhood in the last 10 years.

The clock speeds up and the years pass rapidly some time after the age of 40.  Businesses come and go.  The bagel store has closed (weren’t you eating cinnamon bagel bites just yesterday?), a gym has closed, a used bookstore, a record store, an Italian restaurant, and an entire strip mall is empty except for the odd tattoo parlor and DUI counseling office.

Another gym has opened, a small indie bookstore, a cheese store, a candy store, a consignment shop, and a bar.

The neighborhood public library has been renovated. It is now a spacious building with a tower, fireplace, and comfortable chairs.  The old overcrowded library had buzzing fluourescent lights, few chairs, and not enough books.  Now there is room for books and people, too.  Old books have been brought out of storage and reshelved.  I am delighted to find such great browsing.

Then there’s nature.  Nature is the biggest consideration on walks, don’t you think?  There are some beautiful gardens in our neighborhood.  You can’t tell much this time of year, but that scraggy-looking brown wispy twiggy area is a wild flower garden in summer.  See those sycamore trees?   They’ve grown tall in just a few years.  They’re not my favorite, but a very smart buy for a family in need of shade in a treeless yard. See over there? In a few months the crab apple trees will be blooming.  You will walk down the street and the branches of flowers will brush you.

But nature has suffered in the last decade.  Many trees have fallen in devastating storms.  A neighbor’s tree split and crashed on to our roof, the bulk of it falling across the driveway.  A huge branch from our tree fell  across another neighbor’s driveway, extending from the garage in the back yard to the street. You see the wounded trees, the trees cut down, branches dragged to a truck, then the stumps, then the wood chips, then the holes where the trees were.

Future generations, beware of the weather.

The weather has changed in the Midwest. My hometown is a good gauge of climate change.  The Catholic church where my mother went her whole life, St. Patrick’s, was destroyed by a tornado in 2006.   Jackson Pollock’s  painting, “Mural,” had to be moved when the University of Iowa Art Museum was evacuated during the flood of 2008.  It went first to the Figge in Davenport, then to the Des Moines Art Center, and is now being restored at the Getty Museum in L.A.

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

The Neal Smith trail on the Des Moines River was closed for a few years due to flooding in 2010.  It had to be repaved and the levees rebuilt.  Bridges on the Chichaqua Valley Trail were wiped out and were not rebuilt until last summer.

If I think about all the changes in my lifetime, it is too much to take in.  When too many businesses close, we worry that people will pack up and move to the suburbs.  When bookstores move to the internet, we are not able to browse and miss items we might have seen in physical stores.  When cities lose population and stores, we lose part of our culture.

We are also seeing a civilization in flux as the climate changes and storms and floods wreck our environment.  There will be rock concert benefits in New York, but not for the rest of us.

And so we cope by walking around the neighborhood.  Know your neighborhood, know the changes.

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Barbara Pym & Unsuitable Fashions: I Go to the Joslyn Art Museum

some-tame-gazelle pymI read Barbara Pym on the way to Omaha.  It’s not a very long trip.  Bounce into the car at 9 a.m., open your copy of Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle,  and a few hours later you look up and find yourself in the city.

You probably know nothing about Omaha.  It is actually a very nice city, as we discovered when we moved to this area.  Right now there is a wonderful exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, “Ten Masterworks from the Whitney Museum,” and if you don’t live in New York, as we don’t, it is a great opportunity to see modernist paintings  by Robert Henri, Georgia O’Keefe, John Sloan, Thomas Hart Benton, Max Weber, Reginald Marsh, Gerald Murphy, William J. Glackens, John Steuart Curry, and Maurice Prendergast.

Robert Henri's portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum

Robert Henri’s portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum

I especially admired Robert Henri’s portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum of American art. Her husband thought her pants so outrageous that he refused to hang the painting in their mansion.

You may wonder what Gertrude’s unsuitable pants have to do with the novelist Barbara Pym.  She was nothing like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, as you can see from the photo of Pym below.  While Gertrude, a wealthy sculptor and lover of modern art, lounged in a beautiful blue silk embroidered jacket and teal pajama pants, Barbara wears a down-to-earth print vest and skirt that no cat’s claws will pill.

Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym

But Pym is obsessed with fashion in her books.

In life she was also besotted by fashion, according to many entries in A Very Private Eye:  An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters by Barbara Pym and edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.

In her witty, beautifully-crafted first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, the fiftysomething heroine, Belinda Bede, muses endlessly about clothes.  Belinda wears “suitable” dresses and sensible shoes, while her younger sister Harriet reads Vogue and insists that Miss Prior, the village seamstress, make her fashionable dresses with the latest sleeves.  The Bede sisters live next door to the vicarage, and since their lives revolve around the church, they are always planning what to wear to church functions:  garden parties, concerts, and lectures.

Pym SomeTameGazelle- open roadBut all is not perfect in this seemingly rather asexual world. Belinda is in love with the Archdeacon, her old boyfriend at Oxford, whom she lost to a snobbish medievalist, Agatha, now his suitable wife;  Harriet is obsessed with whoever the curate is of the moment, and entertains the very young Mr. Donne with meals of boiled chicken and pudding. Even Harriet’s quasi-romance is imperiled:  there is a possibility that Mr. Donne is in love with an older woman, a medievalist at Oxford.

Belinda has frequent clashes with Agatha.  When Belinda hangs green festoons around a stall for the vicarage garden party, Agatha takes them down and redoes them.  Agatha is threatened by her rival Belinda’s seemingly endless ability to listen to the Archdeacon quote poetry.

But back to clothes:  before the vicarage garden party, Belinda is sewing.  She knows she will wear a crepe de Chine dress and coatee with sensible shoes that are a little too heavy for the dress.  But what will the others wear?

“Agatha Hoccleve would of course wear a nice suitable dress, but nothing extreme or daring.  As the wife of an archdeacon she always had very good clothes, which seemed somehow to emphasize the fact that her father had been a bishop.  Then there was Edith Liversidge, who would look odd in the familiar old-fashioned grey costume, whose unfashionably narrow shoulders combined with Edith’s broad hips made her look rather like a lighthouse.  Her relation, Miss Aspinall, would wear a fluttering blue or grey dress with a great many scarves and draperies, and she would, as always, carry that mysterious little beaded bag without which she was never seen anywhere.”

Harriet, who wears high heels to the garden party, though Belinda wondered if they were comfortable, buys Vogue patterns a size or two too small so she can just squeeze into her tight-fitting clothes.  Sensible Belinda believes that she and Harriet should be beyond fashion at their age, but Harriet debates whether she should wear her white fur cape or a gold lame jacket to a church concert.  In the end she goes with the cape.  Unlike Belinda, Harriet has suitors:  an Italian count who lives in the village courts her.

Sewing and knitting are constant activities.  The women are always letting out seams, knitting pullovers, and darning sock. When Miss Prior, the seamstress, comes to the Bedes to sew clothes, chair covers, and bathroom curtains, you would expect her to be stylish, but “her dress was drab and dateless.”  Important though she is in village life, her status is surprisingly low.  Belinda wants to give her a good lunch, but Harriet insists on feeding Miss Prior cauliflower cheese and saving the meat for dinner for the curate, Mr. Dunne.  When the caterpillar cheese has a caterpillar in it, Belinda is even more embarrassed, and suggests that Miss Prior must get better meals at the Archdeacon’s.  But Miss Prior, giggling, confides that the food is terrible there.

This brilliant first novel, published in 1950, is utterly charming.   I very much enjoyed Pym’s descriptions of what people wear as well as who they all are, and, yes, this novel actually is Austen-ish, unlike many of the novels described so.

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Barbara Pym Giveaway!

Pym_GlassBlessings-lowresWould anyone like a free e-book copy of Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings?

The publisher Open Road Media has offered to give away one free copy to a Mirabile Dictu reader.

She is one of my favorite writers:  she often wrote about intellectual women who love vicars too much.   And this year is the centenary of her birth.

Just leave a comment and I’ll draw a name out of the hat on Monday.

Here is the Open Road Media synopsis of A Glass of Blessings:

Barbara Pym’s early novel takes us into 1950s England, where life revolved around the village green and the local church—as seen through the funny, engaging, yearning eyes of a restless housewife.  Wilmet Forsyth is bored. Bored with the everyday routine of her provincial village life. Bored with teatimes filled with local gossip. Bored with her husband, Rodney, a military man who dotes on her. But on her thirty-third birthday, Wilmet’s conventional life takes a turn when she runs into the handsome brother of her close friend. Attractive and enigmatic, Piers Longridge is a mystery Wilmet is determined to solve. Rather than settling down, he lived in Portugal, then returned to England for a series of odd jobs. Driven by a fantasy of romance, the sheltered, naïve Englishwoman sets out to seduce Piers—only to discover that he isn’t the man she thinks he is. As cozy as sharing a cup of tea with an old friend, A Glass of Blessings explores timeless themes of sex, marriage, religion, and friendship while exposing our flaws and foibles with wit, compassion, and a generous helping of love.

Well, to one

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Whom Do You Love? Ford Madox Ford or Christopher in Parade’s End?

"Do you write on a typewriter or computer or with a pen?" Silly interview question

“Do you write on a computer, typewriter, or with a pen?”

Did you ever fall in love with a dead writer?

It’s best not to bother with living writers,  even though Michael Chabon is handsome,  Jonathan Lethem is brilliant, and Dave Eggers is a political saint.

I’ve only read their books.

But even if you have a great conversation at a reading about HOW MUCH YOU LOVE A WRITER’S BOOKS, remember: He or she is dazed on a book tour and barely knows what city he or she is in. He or she is desperately hoping for a drink because he or she has given a reading, a Q&A session, and two interviews. And don’t despair:  he or she only wrote that very short thing in your book because the line was awfully long.

Writers are just people, if  more brilliant than we are.  We once had to chauffeur a couple of them around to some readings I had volunteered to organize.  (PR is not my strong suit.)  They often wanted a drink after the reading, just like ordinary folks.  If my husband and I didn’t have a drink with them, I assume they watched TV in their room until their plane left the next morning.

Nice, friendly people.  But, you know, not romantic.

Not like Ford Madox Ford.

Now where did I get the idea that he’s romantic?

Ford Madox Ford: Not cute, but probably sexy.

Ford Madox Ford: plain but probably sexy.

He’s not even handsome, but, yes, it’s that dazzling prose.

He’s dead, but oh, well…

I read in the Guardian about Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy, Parade’s End, for a miniseries in the UK.  And so I decided to reread the book.  I just finished the  first of the tetralogy, Some Do Not…

And I am in love with Ford, or the hero, Christopher Tietjens.

Christopher has complicated mores.  He takes back his beautiful wife, Sylvia, who has been living abroad with a lover, because of his tortuous sense of honor, though he is not even sure if Sylvia’s son is his.  Sylvia won’t divorce him because she is Catholic.  Christopher won’t have sex with her anymore.  The immoral Sylvia, one of those beautiful women who looks like an angel, tries to foil his burgeoning affair with a schoolteacher/suffragette.  Christopher, who comes back shell-shocked on leave, tries to decide what to do.

And then I fell in love with Ford’s slow, erotic description of the evolution of Christopher’s romance with Valentine Wannop, a suffragette.

He meets Valentine when she and a friend demonstrate for suffrage at a golf course where important men play.    Some of the men chase and try to assault her friend, and she runs over to Christopher and asks for help.

“I say,” she said, “Go and see they don’t hurt Gertie. I’ve lost her…”  She pointed back to the sandhills.  “There looked to be some beasts among them….”

Noises existed.  Sandbach, from beyond the low garden wall fifty yards away, was yelping, just like a dog: “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and gesticulating.  His little caddy, entangled with his golf-bag, was trying to scramble over the wall.  On top of the high sandhill stood the policeman:  he waved his hands like a windmill and shouted.  Beside him and behind, slowly rising, were the heads of the General, Macmaster, and their two boys.  Further along, in completion, were appearing the figures of Mr. Waterhouse, his two companions and their three boys.  The Minister was waving his driver and shouting.  They all shouted.”

Parade's EndChristopher drops his golf clubs and throws his kitbag between the policeman’s legs to stop him.  And then he apologizes, though the policeman, who was reluctant to pursue the woman anyway, knows he did it on purpose.

Valentine and Gertie could have gone to prison.  Christopher saved them.

Then for the rest of the book the attraction grows between Christopher and Valentine.

Christopher finally asks Valentine to be his mistress.  She’s been fantasizing forever.

There are actually some quite erotic parts, though not much happens.

The next two books are about his war experiences.

I probably have mixed up Ford Madox Ford with Christopher.  Do I love Ford or Christopher?

And while I am reading, tell me this: Whom do you love?

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

It is an astonishingly various and complex book, simplified in the folk land, which has remembered in its place the dramatic version in which Mrs. Stowe had no hand and which she saw, secretly, only once.”—Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

uncle-toms-cabin-harriet-beecher-stowe-paperback-cover-artHarriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a dicey reputation, though it was beloved in its day.  The anti-slavery blockbuster that helped promulgate Abolitionism and kick off the Civil War was praised by Abraham Lincoln and Dickens. When Stowe visited the White House, Lincoln said, “So this is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.”  Although Dickens praised both the execution of the novel and its anti-slavery message, Stowe was too radical for him:  he told her that she went too far in her veneration of the African race.

Stowe, the daughter of an abolitionist minister, the sister of six ministers, and the wife of an abolitionist professor at a seminary, helped slaves escape to Canada via the underground railroad.  She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reaction to  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1950, which  allowed runaway slaves in free states to be hunted, returned to their owners, or killed.

By the time I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the late 20th century,  Stowe was out of fashion.  In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave feminism, and other political movements, readers had trouble with the interpretation of radical Christianity.  Stowe’s portrait of Uncle Tom, a Christian slave who preaches against violence to his fellow slaves, was considered too simple:  he was too passive and sycophantic. (Readers forget that Tom radically advises the concubine slave Cassie to run away from the plantation with young Emmeline when Cassie says she will kill the sadistic plantation owner, Simon Legree.).  Readers often have trouble digesting ideas from another century,  and  their disapproval of Uncle Tom is very like the deprecation of the humble escaped slave Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The historical context for these characterizations must be analyzed, and so this accessible novel is not accessible to some.

harriet-beecher-stowe-three-novels-uncle-toms-cabin-hardcover-cover-artIf you can get past the discomfort, it is worth it.  On a second reading, I am enthralled by Stowe’s graceful prose, pitch-perfect dialogue, and passionate preaching of Abolitionism.  The perfection and power of this novel escaped me on a first reading:  was I too concerned about the image of black Americans to appreciate her style?  Sometimes the book seems dated–there are many authorial asides –but if you are a fan of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Stowe is Alcott for grown-ups.

Stowe’s fast-paced novel is a vivid and unflinching look at the horrors of slavery. The plot and characterization are equally vivid.  The novel begins with the sale of two slaves.  Although Mr. and Mrs. Shelby are Christians,  and treat their slaves like valued employees, Mr. Shelby  sells Uncle Tom and the house slave Eliza’s son Harry to pay off debts without telling Mrs. Shelby.  When she learns of the sale, she is appalled.

Then Eliza runs away with her son, and Mrs. Shelby makes it clear to two slaves assigned to help the tracker that she doesn’t want them to find Eliza.  They take the slave trader on a wild goose chase, but eventually find her on the border of Kentucky and Ohio.  There is a harrowing scene where Eliza escapes across the icy river, carrying her child, and jumping from ice cake to cake.  There is much drama after that as well, but at least the abolitionists are there to help.

Tom, though a husband and father, has not considered running away.  He believes it is his fate to be sold.  When a trader takes him down the Mississippi on a steamboat to Louisiana, an intelligent, compassionate rich little girl, Little Eva, becomes his companion.  She persuades her father, Saint-Clare, an outwardly languorous, extremely witty, but empathetic aristocrat, to buy Tom, and soon he is Saint-Clare’s trusted household manager.

But Stowe points out that slave ownership corrupts. Even kind slave owners don’t consider what will happen to the slaves after a sale or their death.  And when Saint-Clare dies, Tom is sold to a third owner, Simon Legree.

The torture scenes in this part of the book are so graphic I had to put the book aside from time to time. Tom amazingly helps the slaves cope–many have never heard of the Bible–and when he has a chance to escape, he doesn’t take it, because his work is among them.

He does, however, encourage Cassie, a brilliant quadroon slave who has been Simon’s mistress, and who has sometimes secretly ministered to the slaves when they have been beaten, to run away when she wildly plots his death.  She has been too afraid to run, seeing how they are tortured when they are found.

This is a great popular novel, and beyond that.  Stowe wrote it in serial form, and in book form it  sold 3,000 copies the first day and 300,000 copies the first year.

A classic!