Month: February 2015

by

The TLS, The Last Trojan Hero, & Adventures in Stationery

tls the_times_literary_supplement_16_january_2015_1I have just renewed my subscription to the TLS,.

It is a guilty pleasure: I end up buying many scholarly books on classics reviewed in this publication.

Right now I am finishing up Philip Hardie’s  The Last Trojan Hero:  A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, an entertaining overview of Virgil’s influence on literary works ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to  Michel Butor’s nouveau roman, La Modification (which my husband has promised to translate–we’ll see!).

But even the TLS has its lighter side.  I enjoyed Catharine Morris’s recent review of James Ward’s Adventures in Stationery: A Journey through Your Pencil Case.   Are you as enchanted by stationery as I am?  I  have added this book  to my TBR list.  (By the way, Ward has a blog called I Like Boring Things.)

image-adventures-in-stationery-a-journey-through-your-pencil-case-james-ward-mainMorris’s review is filled with charming quotes.  Ward writes, “It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the history of stationery is the history of human civilization.”

And I also like this.

The physical means something,” writes Ward. “People like it.” You can’t beat a handwritten letter, it’s true; and, as Ward points out, the materials we use have symbolic power: “Visiting a stationery store, you are surrounded by potential; it’s a way of becoming a new person, a better person.”

Few write letters, but I do correspond with a few old-fashioned friends.  Before the stationery store in town closed, I stocked up on stationery, fountain pens,  and Apica notebooks.  I also adore going to office supply stores on New Year’s Day.    My favorite episode of The Gilmore Girls is “Help Wanted,” when Lorelai and her father, Richard, stock up on post-its at an office supply store.  And of course The Office is set in a corporate paper supply business.

Did you know there is a blog called Letters of Note?

If you want to read some Roman classics, try Cicero’s Letters, Pliny’s letters, and Seneca’s letters.

I am fond of  Fanny Burney’s Evelina, the letters in Ausen’s novels (I especially like Lydia’s in Pride and Prejudice), Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross, Cathleen Schine’s The Love Letter, and there’s a lot of e-mail in Gary Shteyngart’s comic masterpiece, Super Sad True Love Story.

And then there is all that correspondence by favorite authors, Keats, Emily Dickenson, Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, etc.

What are your favorite books on/with letters?

by

Why We Don’t Want to Be Characters in Other People’s Books

Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski

Doris Lessing and Jenny Diski

Someone kindly gave me a subscription to the London Review of Books this year.

It is a very male-oriented publication. I read an appallingly misogynistic article about Hillary Clinton. (They might respect her if they did not call her “Hillary.”)   But I have read with great interest Jenny Diski’s column, particularly her memoirs of Doris Lessing.

Diski, a brilliant memoirist and novelist, lived with Doris Lessing for several months in 1963 after she was expelled from boarding school. There were good times and bad times–she met many famous writers–but how did she know Doris would not kick her out?  Everyone else did.

Doris Lessing memoirs-of-a-survivor-my-copy

Eleven years later,  Diski had the disconcerting experience of finding herself a character in Lessing’s  The Memoirs of a Survivor.

Let me say here that Lessing is my favorite writer. The Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest books influenced the course of my life.  These books are oxygen to me.  I also love her dystopian fable, The Memoirs of a Survivor.

In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the narrator describes the disintegration of society by food shortages and power outages. The “memoir” describes a future  of regression and barbarism, but it is also a reminder of techniques of off-the-grid survival. (Gangs, barter, and flea markets are important.) The future may be most difficult for those of us who remember civilization, Lessing hints.

I also read Memoirs as Lessing’s psychological memoir, and the character Emily as a doppelganger of the narrator’s younger self.

Diski says Emily is based on her..

Diski writes,

Memoirs of a Survivor was published in 1974, 11 years after I began to live with Doris. She gave me a copy of the novel, as she did every one she wrote. It was inscribed ‘To Jenny love Doris 25/11/74’. It made familiar and disturbing reading. I could see Emily in me, just as I could see my elderly neighbour’s description of me aged three. It is as accurate a reading of me as Emily’s harsh commentary on others. It is true, but it is, of course, a doubly edited version, a view of me from the narrator’s point of view, which itself has been taken and worked for fiction’s purpose from Doris’s point of view. If there is pity in the narrator’s response to Emily, it is strained for. I discovered after a while that Doris had a habit of describing people in fiction and in life as, for example, ‘heartbreaking’ in her most distant, coolest tone, as if to mitigate her dislike of them. She saw it as being fair, I think.

The truth of the matter is, no one wants to be a character in someone else’s novel. I do feel sympathy for Diski, who was hurt by Lessing’s portrayal.   But perhaps Lessing was also writing about herself as Emily.   And I myself thought the portrait of Emily was compassionate.

Living with Lessing sounds relatively heavenly to me. When I was a  teenager, a lesbian teacher installed me in her house and seduced me.  I was always having to pretend I was 18 so she wouldn’t be arrested.  When I moved out, she stood on the curb outside the house where I had a room and yelled, “I hope it hurts like hell when you screw.”

There are observant writers; there are distorting writers.  There are kind writers; there are sociopathic writers.

Of course I’m fascinated by Diski’s memoirs (I  loved Skating to Antarctica), but Lessing’s are more fascinating.  I look forward to the third volume of Lessing’s autobiography, if she ever wrote it and if it is published.

 

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

by

Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse

Hothouse Aldiss 9780141189550I have been meaning to read Brian Aldiss’s science fiction since I read his introduction to the American paperback edition of Anna Kavan’s surreal apocalyptic novel,  Ice.  It is the best piece on Kavan I’ve ever read.

Ice anna kavan 51NlrxAicRL._SL500_AA300_Aldiss thought Ice was the best science fiction novel of 1967.  When he wrote Kavan a letter praising it, they arranged to meet. She said she was not familiar with SF, nor had she intended write science fiction, but was fascinated by his precis of trends in speculative fiction and liked the idea of being part of an up-and-coming genre.

Aldiss is the author of Hothouse, a modernist SF novel in which the earth has heated up of instead of cooled down. In Hothouse,  first published in 1961 and reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2008, human beings are determined to survive on a future  earth, though they are threatened by lush man-eating vegetation.   Aldiss’s gift for brilliant, gorgeous, rhythmic language makes this novel a classic.

In the distant future, the sun is burning out.  The cities are long gone, and the few humans left live in small tribes in trees.   In the first chapter, the child Clat is killed by a trappersnapper, which senses its prey through a layer of foliage and is in essence a pair of a pair of square jaws with teeth.

Hothouse(Aldiss)There are many characters,  but Aldiss focuses on Gren, an intelligent young man treasured as one of the very few males of the species.   Nevertheless, he is  banished by the tribe leader for disobeying orders and exploring on his own;  luckily, he is joined by Yattmur, a woman from another tribe.

Vegetation ironically is more intelligent than humans.   A morel plops on Gren’s head and invades his brain, mining his race memories to learn the history of earth.  Gren and Yattmur are enslaved by the morel’s need to know and his dependence on Gren.  They escape a hostile jungle in a boat with people called the tummy-belly men, who were attached to the intelligent Tummy trees by tails until Gren cuts their tails.  The boats take them to an islet, where they live happily until the morel presses them to travel by huge plants called Stalkers that take them to the dark side of the world.

Aldiss’s descriptions of the vegetation are almost visionary and psychedelic.  Here is a description of three threatening trees.

Standing apart from all other vegetation, the trees bore a resemblance to giant pineapples.  A collar of spiny leaves projected outwards directed from the ground, protecting the central fleshy trunk, which in each of the three cases was swollen into a massive knobbly ovoid.  From the knobs of the ovoid sprouted long trailers; from the top of the ovoid sprouted more leaves, spiny and sharp, extending some two hundred feet into the air, or hanging stiffly out over Long Water.

We also follow the aging tribe leader, Lily-Yo, who realizes she has lost her youth and must Go Up.  And so she and the older members of the tribe attach themselves in pods to a plant called the traverser, which takes them to the moon.  (They had no idea what their destination was.)

I loved this book and look forward to reading more Aldiss:  in his introduction to Kavan he compares Ice to his novel, Report on Probability A.  I’ll have to look for that.

And here’s a wacky picture of a cover of a pulp paperback edition:

Hothouse sphere classic 7824329196_b8747deb6e

by

Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower

harrower the watch tower text 9781921922428Last fall I added the Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower to my TBR list after reading James Wood’s fascinating essay in The New Yorker, “No Time for Lies:  Rediscovering Elizabeth Harrower.”  Her critically-acclaimed books, published in the 1950s and the ’60s, have been reissued by Text, an Australian publishing house, along with her never-published novel, In Certain Circles, which she withdrew before publication in 1971.  I recently read In Certain Circles (the e-book is on sale for $2.99), and found it beautifully-written, if a little stagey.  But the novel I want to write about is The Watch Tower (1966), deemed her best book by Wood.

The Watch Tower is riveting and suspenseful.  Harrower’s crystalline prose is sharp and precise. It begins like one of those Rumer Godden novels in which children observe dark adult intrigues and only gradually put together the pieces of the puzzle.  Stella Vaizey, the mother of Laura and Clare, is yanking them out of boarding school.  In the headmistress’s office, she announces, “Now that your father’s dead, the three of us are going to live together in Sydney.”  Miss Lambert, the headmistress, hopes to keep Laura on a scholarship, but  Mrs. Vaizey is firm.  She does not value education.  What she does value is her leisure.

In their small flat in a suburb of Sydney, she does absolutely nothing.  She lies in bed while the children attend school and do housework, the shopping, and the cooking.  Laura is sent to secretarial school so she can support their mother:  she gets a job at a box factory.  When the fees are too high for Clare’s not-very-good school, Mrs. Vaizey suggests that Clare should go to an even worse school nearby.

The girls are completely isolated and know no one. They know from devouring books that other people have friends.   One day Clare wants to know why they can’t speak to strangers.  The sad thing is that it is not strangers they need to fear:  it is the ones they know and love. Responsibility has killed Laura’s liveliness and curiosity.  Clare is the one who questions their way of life.

It was true.  If you knew no one, Laura thought, and were not allowed to speak to someone till you knew him or her, how would you ever get to know anyone?  Because you were unknown yourself, and could not be approached either.

the watch tower old copy harrowerThen at the beginning of World War II, the worst thing that can happen happens.  Their  mother announces she is moving to England without them.  Laura must now support Clare.

If you are deserted by a parent (my father, who had custody of me, moved to another town to live with his girlfriend when I was 16) , you find yourself announcing at random that you need someplace to live.  There are good people (Doris Lessing took in the writer Jenny Diski when she was a teenager, though this wasn’t bliss) and bad people (the ones who expect you to have sex with them).  One of the things you learn is that you never talk about this period of your life to anyone.  “I think I’ve got my virginity back,” a friend who also was on her own in high school anxiously told me.  Like me, she was secretive about her past, and like me, she was studying classics at the university. Ovid was banished to an island for carmen et error.  We feared that we, too, would be banished if anyone knew about our teenage years.

In The Watch Tower, Laura’s very odd, middle-aged boss, Felix, offers to marry Laura and pay Clare’s school fees when he hears about their mother’s departure.  Like children in a fairy tale, Laura and Clare are enchanted by his beautiful big bungalow with the garden.  It will be their house.

But living with Felix is an even a worse trap than living with their mother.  Felix is abusive, misogynistic, sadistic, and often drunk.  Every time he gets rich, he sells his business at a loss to whatever man he has a crush on, and takes it out on Laura  because the man deserts him after the sale.  Clare iescapes into Russian novels; she eventually gets a job in a government office, and has more freedom than Laura.  But Laura is forced to spend all her time with Felix, at the office by day, going over the accounts at night.  He calls her names and viciously crushes her self-respect.  Sometimes he is violent.    She does not believe she could leave Felix and find a job.

Who could break out?  Who could do more than marvel dully at survival?  Who had energy and initiative now to spare for what was merely reasonable?  What promise had the world held out ever that there was anything to escape to?  What was there to desire in this nightmare but the cessation of strain?

Is there a way out?  Clare thinks there is.  And when they take in a young man, Bernard, who collapses at the factory, Felix calms down for a while.  But Laura, the abused and battered woman, behaves much as abused and battered women do.  She is now a quiet, mousy wreck, dependent on Felix, though she is also a brilliant businesswoman.    Her home is the only thing she believes she has.  She does not want to leave her home.

This is a great, brilliant classic, and I look forward to reading Harrower’s other books.

by

Angela Huth’s Invitation to the Married Life

Invitation to the Married Life huth 516137F8QKLThere are some books I read again and again:  Monica Dickens’ The Winds of Heaven, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin,  Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year, and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Sometimes a small perfect book can give as much pleasure as a classic.

Angela Huth’s Invitation to the Married Life is another of my favorite rereads.  In this charming novel, which has the feel of a Shakespearean comedy, Huth explores the changing face of love in middle age.  She tells the story of four married couples, two of whom are contented, two wretched.  As they receive invitations to a ball in Oxford to be given by the wealthy Fotheringoes (perhaps the novel’s least happy couple)  in four months, their reactions tell us about their relationships.

Rachel Arkwright, my favorite character, a neglected wife and mother of two grown children, opens the invitation at breakfast while she is waiting for her irritable husband, Thomas, to go to work. She must open letters quietly and turn pages slowly so as not to disturb him, but is so excited about the invitation she forgets.

There he was, a caricature of a husband, almost completely hidden–guarded against her–by the Daily Telegraph (he had presently switched from The Times).  Two pinkish blobs of fuzzy-backed hands held the pages wide open.

When she opens the invitation and asks Thomas if she should accept, she is suffused with joy when he ungraciously says,

I suppose so.  You obviously want to go.  Though what the middle-aged want to give balls for I can’t imagine.  A more ridiculous way of spending money–“

Invitation to the Married Life huth Rachel has a secret life:  she sleeps every afternoon in her beautifully-refurbished bedroom with its soft bed and expensive linens.  She has a degree in law, but here is a woman who has her priorities right. The nap rejuvenates her, and makes her happy.

Thomas thinks parties for the middle-aged are absurd because he does not find middle-aged women attractive:  he is fixated on younger women, and has no idea that he has grown fat and less attractive to the young.  Planning to break up with his current girlfriend, he wanders into an art gallery and falls for an etiolated young woman who rejects his advances.  But  she is the daughter of the artist, R. Cotterman, whose paintings he buys, and she sends him to her mother’s house.  He is determined to fall in love with Rosie Cotterman before he even meets her.

Mary and her husband Bill, a retired naval man obsessed with time tables, are busy with the upkeep of their country house and the woods.  They are happy with their quiet life, and Mary is not excited about the party.   But Bill insists that she must go to London for a new dress, and reminds her that they can stay at their  daughter Ursula’s in Oxford. When Bill dies and Mary attends the party with her neighbor, Rosie, everyone supposes she must be devastated. But Mary is still happy and peaceful, and is relieved to know that she can continue living happily on her own.

Angela Huth

Angela Huth

The gorgeous Ursula needs the party less than anyone.  She has a perfect life:  she is madly in love with her husband, Martin, an Oxford don,  is the mother of two charming children, and has a friend, Ralph, who believes he is in love with her. Ursula likes her work as a garden planner, though she must compromise with clients who know nothing about nature.   There is just one flaw in her happiness: she hates living in Oxford, and her husband, who works there, sees no reason to move. And then she is often annoyed by Ralph’s lovesick puppy-dog manner.  She teases Ralph,

You know why I think Frances has these parties?  Apart from something to do?  Her real reason is so that she has a chance to dance with you.”

No man and woman can be less compatible than Toby and Frances Fotheringoe. Toby is a computer genius and a nature lover who watches badgers at night in the woods. Frances is a very lonely woman who plans parties to have something to do and to be noticed.  She pays almost no attention to her daughter.  She wants very badly to find some kind of work, perhaps as a designer in the theater.  But at the party itself, she will hook-up with the band leader, who thinks he can find her work as a party planner.  And as for Toby…well, we don’t see that coming.

Who belongs with whom?  Some of the answers are quite surprising.  A ball in middle age shakes people up just as much as it does in youth.

Well, I don’t actually know.  I’ve never gone to a ball, have you?  But I do like Rachel’s reaction.  She finds a bed in a spare room and curls up and goes to sleep.

Rachel has a chance of happiness…

by

Your True Self Fries Away

Facebook is crack.”–Henry Higgins (John Cho) on Selfie, a cancelled TV show

 

Karen Gillan and John Cho in "Selfie" (a canceled sitcom)

Karen Gillan and John Cho in “Selfie” (a canceled sitcom about social media addiction)

In a recent review in The Washington Post of the scientist Susan Greenfield’s new book, How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains,  I was fascinated by her thesis that the internet ruins lives.  She cites a Korean couple whose baby starved while they pursued video gaming.

Although the reviewer Matthew Wisnioski is not a fan of Greenfield, I felt a pang of recognition as I read his recap of some of her evidence. He begins the review:

This is your brain on digital technology. A flick of the thumb sparks a pale glow. You wait for the dopamine rush of an incoming message. Like a pathological gambler, you check again. And again. You feed your narcissistic impulses with tweets. Lacking face-to-face cues, you knock a “friend” down a peg on Facebook. Keeping loneliness at bay, you “like” a few others. Hours of catapulted birds later, you finger the off button. Repeat the cycle. You hardly notice as the synapses of your true self fry away.

How well I know this feeling.   I do not tweet and I do not do Facebook, but  I have certainly been an internet addict. When I first went online the ’90s, I found a site that was rather like Goodreads, except people wrote much longer posts and  IMed constantly.

That addiction, however, was nothing compared to my blogging addiction. When I began Mirabile Dictu a few years ago, I resolved to post every day. Why? I still don’t know. I enjoyed the project for the first year. I enjoyed it less last year. And then I found I was reading less because I posted so much. And that’s frightening, because posting is not, in my opinion, the same thing as writing.

Has blogging ruined my writing? It certainly ruined my reading.  When I discovered that I was reading less, I decided to cut back on blogging.

And so I am carefully measuring out my time online.  Thank God, I have managed to read one book a day this year.  Because that’s who I am, you know?  A reader.

The internet can be a good thing or a bad thing.  Blogging is a wonderful opportunity to express our love of books, and I have become acquainted with several bloggers and generous writers who agreed to be interviewed here.  .And yet lurking at the back of our minds is the knowledge that many critics and writers mock bloggers.

Didn’t I tell you about the time Lynne Sharon Schwartz plagiarized a passage from my blog?

Her last novel, Two Part Invention, was a story of plagiarism. Based on the story of Joyce Hatto and her husband William Barrington-Coupe, a recording engineer who snitched musical phrases from other artists and synced them into his wife’s recordings, the novel is a sympathetic take on the couple’s strange enterprise, with names and details changed. The characters don’t quite come to life, the writing is flat, I was ready to put the book down, and then I came to the part where she “borrowed” an incident from my blog.

I had posted about trying to get ice for my mother at the nursing home, and noted that I could push but not too hard because I  didn’t want anyone to hold it against her as a patient. I added a few lines about my mother’s former pushiness when I was in fourth grade.  I wrote,

It’s like the time in fourth grade when she complained to my teacher when I got a B instead of an A in geography. For the rest of the year, the teacher humiliated me by asking, “Are your grades good enough for your mother?”

In Schwartz’s novel:

Her quarterly report card gave him nothing to reproach her with. Until, in the fourth grade, she presented a report card to him as usual for his signature… He gave the report card a cursory glance, a small folded four-sided document on stiff paper that attempted to look official. He was searching for his fountain pen, when he noticed the B+ in geography.

Christ, she didn’t even bother to change fourth grade to another grade .

All right!  I’m over it.

Except for a few little things.

Such as that it’s immoral.

Merriam-Webster tells us that plagiarism is:

  • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
  • to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
  • to commit literary theft
  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

In other words, it is unethical.

I like to get credit for my own work.

It must be quite a blog if sleazeballs think they ought to plagiarize it.

Are they high-fiving each other?

And what on earth must their creative writing students endure if their teachers feel free to plagiarize?

by

Angela Huth’s Virginia Fly Is Drowning

Virginia Fly Is Drowning angela huth 51Hj6TSxrvL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_One  of the perks of having an e-reader is access to e-books from Bloomsbury Reader, which publishes middlebrow classics by Monica Dickens, Lettice Cooper, and Norman Collins.

And so I have been bingeing on Angela Huth’s charming novels.

Huth is best-known for Land Girls, a delightful novel about three young women who work as land girls on an English farm as part of a program to replace male farm laborers who are away fighting in World War II.

Some of Huth’s novels are even more entertaining.  I especially enjoyed Virginia Fly Is Drowning, a brilliant comedy about a 31-year-old virgin.

Angela Huth

Angela Huth

Virginia Fly, a teacher at a girls’ school, lives with her parents and is still a virgin at age 31.  Although she is reasonably attractive, she has little social life and few prospects of meeting men. Occasionally she goes to concerts with an elderly music professor.  She also has an American pen friend named Charles, who has promised to visit England.

Meanwhile, she has wild fantasies about meeting a beautiful young herdsman in a field of buttercups.  He tears off her clothes and they have to hurry, because the cows are about to go into the road.

And when a researcher for a TV show wants Virginia to represent virgins on an interview show about modern love, she agrees.

The whole interview is very funny.  Virginia is practical and in control.

…Virginia sensed that she disappointed Mr. Wysdom.  Was she happy in her virginity?  Yes, she was.  He looked a trifle downcast.  Was there no private, promiscuous being within her trying to get out?  No, there wasn’t.  Then how was it, in this day and age–he was a master of the softly spoken cliche–that she maintained her unusual state?  Simply, that, believe it or not, Mr. Wysdom (she refused to call him Geoffrey, though he kept calling her Virginia) the occasion for ending that state had never arisen.  No one had ever asked her.

Although we’re thinking, Poor Virginia!  we’re also laughing.  She isn’t doing too badly for herself.

Virginia Fly hardcover 510E6JE79KL._UY250_But the TV interview does help her in a way.   Rita Thompson, a 50-year-old widow and a former courtesan, whom we first meet dressed as a  fairy godmother as she comes home  from a volunteer performance of Cinderella at the old folks’ club, sees Virginia on TV and  writes her a letter.  When Virginia comes to visit, Mrs. Thompson takes her to a bar and introduces her to a handsome salesman.

Virginia’s  life is at times comical, at other times very painful.  After her brief encounter with the salesman, she looks forward to  meeting  her pen friend from Utah.  Then there is the professor, who pities her after seeing the TV interview.

The ending is darkly comic–life isn’t a fairy tale for former virgins.    And what Cinderella might have settled for isn’t quite what Virginia hoped for.

by

Stop in the Name of Love

At a gay dance in the ’70s, I first heard the Supremes’ plaintive, witty song, “Stop in the Name of Love.”

supremes stop in the name of love tumblr_mcvq2czhrm1ridow9o1_1280The dance was fun, as these things go.  A  group of women were doing a line dance, waving their arms in a traffic sign to “Stop in the Name of Love.”  Some were wearing men’s suits and hats, which baffled me and seemed vaguely anti-feminist:  perhaps it was a radical lesbian’s parody of the butch/femme culture.

And now all these years later gay life is legal and accepted and I hope they all found happiness.

On Valentine’s Day, as I do laundry, vacuum, and clean pee off the toilet, I wonder if lesbian romance would have been simpler.  You could wear each other’s clothes, there might have been less fuss about red satin teddies, and you could watch “The Lake House” together (the most romantic movie ever).

I was thinking of the Supremes’ lyrics today when my husband gave me my third Valentine’s Day gift in three days.  I was puzzled, because I wasn’t wearing a red teddy..  But there are roses on the kitchen counter, a heart-shaped box of candy, and I am looking forward to reading my new copy of Persuasion.

“Why all the gifts?”

“Awwww!”  you’re saying.

But it’s not really an “awww” thing.

It seemed he wanted to go to a ski race today, and he thought he had to bribe me.

Heavens, of course he could go to a ski race.  I’m not into the greeting card holiday scene.  But my attention was so focused on Valentine’s Day because of all the gifts that my solitary day was depressing.

And I had to give him a fall-back gift:  the Amazon gift card!  It’s always sexy and romantic, don’t you think?

But before you overwhelm your lover with Valentine’s Day gifts,

Stop in the name of love
Before you break my heart.

by

Would You Like a Cup of Tea, Luv? or How to Send a Package to England

In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”–Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

My cousin drove me to the post office.  I had to mail a package to England.  It contained a Lanz flannel nightgown, a ouija board, turquoise flatties, a box of Valentine candy, and my old Little Women doll (Jo).

“It will definitely cheer her up,” says my cousin, who had egged me on to buy the ouija board.

VARIOUS - 2006 ouijaIn the middle of the night had come the phone call :  not a death, thank goodness, but our American friend wailing that she does not fit in in the UK.  When someone she works with says that her father died, she says, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then someone else says, “Can I make you a cup of tea, luv?” And the two go off to a corner of the lounge and ignore her.

“At least someone at the British Museum didn’t say you were immense,” I remind her.

“Nobody says anything to me.”

Try the British Museum.

Anyway, back to the package:  the line at the post office was long, and my cousin had a hypomanic moment:. “Let’s go to the UPS. store. Our time is valuable.”

“Isn’t that expensive time?”

A phone number is required on the customs form.  I write 666 and some random numbers and dashes.

It cost, err, a staggering amount.

“Good God!”  My cousin said when she handed over her credit card.

But what did we care? We’re Americans!  We get paid!  If you spend money,  you should spend a lot of money. We went to the mall and bought our own flannel nightgowns on sale.  I kind of wanted a Ouija board, too.

And now I know why the narrator in Eudora Welty’s  “Why I Live at the P.O.” lives at the P.O.

by

Nothing in Common: Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest & Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

This is a catch-up post about two classics with nothing in common.

1.  Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953)

Richter pretty cover LIGHT_IN_FORESTSo many of us read The Light in the Forest in school.  Does it hold up?

Yes, it is an American classic.  Richter, who won the Pulitzer for The Town and the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos, is famous for his novels about life on the frontier in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

In The Light in the Forest, set in the eighteenth century, Richter relates the story of a white boy captured in an Indian raid in Pennsylvania.  Cuyloga, a warrior of the Lenni Lenape tribe, adopts John and renames him True Son.  He lives blissfully with his new family.  Ten years later, a treaty is signed, saying all the captives must be returned to their white families.  True Son is cruelly torn from his Indian family.

Richter movingly depicts True Son’s attachment to the beauty of the forest and the Lenni Lenape way of life.

He could see the great oaks and shiver-bark hickories standing over the village in the autumn dusk, the smoke rising from the double row of cabins with the street between, and the shining, white reflection of the sky in the Tuscarawas beyond.  Fallen red, brown and golden leaves lay over roofs and bushes, street and forest floor.  Tramping through them could be made out the friendly forms fo those he knew, warriors and hunter, squaws, and the boys, dogs and girls he played with.

On the long march, guarded by soldiers, True Son is accompanied by his  friend Half Arrow.  Little Crane, who walks with his white squaw (who will also be returned to her white family), reminds them that the Great Spirit made the Indians, with their black hair and dark eyes and skins. On the other hand, the whites, who are light, dark, or in-between, are “a mixed breed.” He says, “The reason they act so queer is because they’re not an original people.  Now we Indians are an original people.”

True Son, aka John, is unable to adjust to life with his white family. When John’s uncle murders White Crane, who has come in peace with Half Arrow to visit True Son, he and Half Arrow run away and take refuge in the forest.  Their time there  is idyllic:  “Abundance supported them.  Completeness was for the taking.  Days unfolded, rich and inexhaustible.”

But nothing is simple:  violence begets violence.   When the boys return to the Lenni Lenape, some insist on revenge for White Crane’s death, and Cuyloga, True Son’s father, reluctantly agrees.  Neither the whites nor Indians are completely innocent, though Richter leans towards the culture of the Indians.

A fascinating, heart-rending little gem of a book.

1.  Virginia Woolf’s Orlando:  A Biography (1928)

Woolf penguin Orlando+coverWoolf’s comic novel, Orlando, was a surprise when it was published in 1928 after To the Lighthouse.

Orlando is one of Woolf’s lightest books, dedicated to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West.  In Alexandra’ Harris’s Virginia Woolf, a wonderful short book about Woolf’s life and work, she says that Woolf’s teasing novel is a a fanciful biography of Vita Sackville-West, with a tip of the hat to her ancestors.  And it had the tone of Woolf’s playful letters to Sackville-West. The hero, Orlando,  is a beautiful androgynous man, a courtier, and an aspiring poet.  He lives for more than three centuries, first as  a man and then as a woman.

Harris quotes Elizabeth Bowen, who In her 1960 preface to Orlando remembered,

This Orlando–we did not care for the sound of it. The book was, we gathered, in the nature of a prank, or a private joke; worse still, it was personal.”

Virginia woolf orlandoSome fans of Woolf’s abstract novels were put off by her whimsical portrait of Orlando, whom we first meet as a 16-year-old in the Elizabethan age .  “He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”  Slicing and beheading is not the usual way to begin a book, and in this first chapter there are many references to slicing and heads: Orlando’s father had struck the head from the shoulders of a pagan. And when Queen Elizabeth visits, the first thing she notices is Orlando’s head.  While his head is bowed, she strokes it.  And she invites him to her court.

As a  young man at Elizabeth’s court, Orlando has a doomed love affair with a beautiful Russian princess, whom he calls Sasha.  After a long winter festival, with Woolf’s fantastical descriptions of festivities and ice palaces on the frozen Thames, Sasha stands him up during a thaw and sails away on her ship with the gritty sailor she really loves.  Orlando, crushed, returns to his estate and works on his poem, “The Oak Tree.”   And when he invites Greene, a poet and comrade of Shakespeare and Marlowe, to visit and talk about poetry, Greene lambastes all the writers of his day.

Just as writers worry that Amazon will influence publishing, so Greene blames the booksellers for bad writing.  The Elizabethans cannot live up to the Greeks, he says.

Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell.  Shakespeare was the chief offender in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty.  Their own age, he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments–neither of which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment.  Much though it hurt him to say it–for he loved literature as he loved his life–he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future.  Here he poured himself a glass of wine.

Greene also satirizes Orlando’s poem and deeply wounds him. Orlando decides to go to Constantinople as an ambassador.  While there, he magically falls into a coma and becomes a woman.   Now she is Lady Orlando, and when she returns to London, there is a lawsuit to see whether she is indeed entitled to her property.  (It goes on for centuries.)  She is a hostess who entertains Pope and Dryden, though their wit seems dry, pursues her own poetry, adjusts to changes of weather in the nineteenth century and finally publishes her  poem, “The Oak Tree.”   In the twentieth century she has become a wife and mother.  And, after all this time, she is only 36.

I enjoyed this literary fantasy, which reminds me of some of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s whimsical novels, particularly The Corner That Held Them, a comic novel about a convent in the 12th century.