Take one and call me in the morning!

I was flat-on-my-back tired today.  I read and stared at the ceiling.  I’m not hallucinating, or at least I don’t think I am, but the living room ceiling looks high–higher than the kitchen ceiling. So I took a nap. I got up in time for a doctor’s appointment, where I apologized for seeming slow and tired.  The doctor says I don’t seem slow and tired.  Whew!  What a relief. When I came home, I drank coffee.  The ceiling looked normal.   I’m getting a cold.  I thought I was seriously tired, but it’s just a cold.

While I was sleepy,  I began to think about sleep disorders in literature, because colds are so unromantic.

Here is a Short List of Sleep Disorders in Lit

1 In Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You, set in a post-9/11 near future shaped by paranoia about terrorism, teams of doctors are trained to deal with chemical or biological attacks. Edith’s son is one of the doctors, but she doesn’t care about this aspect of life right now.  She  is grieving over her husband’s death, and takes an Ambien every time she wakes up, so she can sleep round the clock.

Edith says,

I woke up on the couch, where I’d been sleeping for the last two months. I was alone.  I looked at the ceiling for quite a long time. and then I said, “Let me just keep my eyes open.”

The insomnia, pills, and grief are a small part of a very complicated novel. See’s strange, lively, brilliant novels are always surprising and beautiful.

2 Gail Godwin is excellent on insomnia in her 1974 novel, The Odd Woman.  The heroine, Jane, an English professor at a Midwestern university, has insomnia, and, no wonder! Her life is a mess! She is having an affair with a married man, she realizes she cannot give failing grades to the scatty papers turned in by a hippie draft dodger and a black student from the ghetto, and then her grandmother dies.  Jane’s mother has serious insomnia.

Her mother, Kitty, a veteran insomniac of many years, read spiritual guides.  She had a large collection of them in different languages, spanning the centuries from Boethius to Thomas Merton, and she kept them stacked, according to a private rotating section, on the tray table next to her side of the bed which she shared–after almost 25 years–with Jane’s stepfather, Ray. … When the malady grew more challenging,… she resurrected her Latin or went into the tongue of her father’s forebears.  And recnetly–as if she anticipated further demands on her nights–she had been teaching herself Italian with a dual-language edition of La Vita Nuva.

3 Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.  Le Guin, an  award-winning science fiction writer, is always compelling, but I have never returned to this terrifying novel.  The hero, George Orr, has dreams that alter reality, and takes drugs to try to control it, then consults a manipulative psychotherapist who does not have his best interests at heart.

4 Gabriel García Márquez’s The Hundred Years of Solitude.” If you like magic realism, you’ll love this mythic novel. At one point, a mythical Latin American town, Macondo, is struck by a plague of insomnia.  The insomniacs no longer remember the names of objects, plants and animals, and have to label them.

5 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. There is more than one dream in Wuthering Heights, a story of doomed love.  Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan, are reaised together and are soulmates.   After Catherine’s father dies, her brother, Hindley, turns  Heathcliff into a farmhand, and Catherine ditches him for the refined Edgar Linton, Before she marries Edgar, she has  dream in which she goes to heaven and gets thrown out because she weeps  to “come back to earth.” She knows that she should not marry Linton, because Heathcliff is her other half.

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s so handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

6. Last but not least, here is a beautiful “Ode to Sleep” by Statius, translated by Kathleen Coleman.  POETRY WILL CURE YOUR INSOMNIA!

What is the charge, young god, what have I done
Alone to be denied, in desperate straits,
Epitome of Calm, your treasure, Sleep?
Hush holds enmeshed each herd, fowl, prowling beast;
The trees, capitulating, nod to aching sleep:
The raging floods relinquish their frim roar;
The heavy sea has ceased and oceans curl
Upon the lap of land to sink in rest.
The moon has now in seven visits seen
My wild eyes staring; seven stars of dawn
And twilight have returned to me
And sunrise, transient witness of distress,
Has in compassion sprayed dew from her whip.
Where is the strength I need? It would defeat
The consecrated Argus, thousand-eyed,
Despite the watch which one part of him keeps,
Nerves taut, on guard relentlessly.
On Sleep, some couple, bodies interlocked,
Must shut you from their night-long ecstasy;
So come to me. I issue no demand
that you enfold my eyes’ gaze with your wings —
Let all the world, more fortunate, beg that.
Your wand-tip’s mere caress, your hovering form
Poised lightly on tiptoe; that is enough.

             A light snow.

It’s snowing.  Just a light snowfall.

But our house is very cold.  And so I am sitting under one blanket and four comforters.  I am drinking Mellow Moments herbal tea.  A cat is sitting on my feet.  Another cat is sitting under the top comforter. We are keeping warm as best we can.

Since I (very slightly) neatened the bedroom, we are down to 10 books on the bookstand.  Classics, literary fiction, best-sellers, genre books–you name it.

In winter you can read something heavy, or something light.  Any literary distraction is welcome.  Here’s what I’ve been reading, some still in progress, followed by a list of books on my nightstand.

1. Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War.  At the age of 100, Herman Wouk, who won the Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny, is in the news:  he has written a memoir.  I have long meant to read his critically-acclaimed novels about World War II,  The Winds of War and its sequel, War and Remembrance.  And so I downloaded The Winds of War on the e-reader

Let me just say The Winds of War is gripping.  I tore through 270 of 886 pages, and can’t wait to tear through another 270 pages.  Wouk writes very smoothly and intelligently, and he tells a good, no, a great, well-plotted story.  This well-crafted historical novel revolves around the Henry family:  in 1939,  just before the German invasion of Poland, Victor “Pug” Henry, a naval officer, has been offered the position of US Naval attaché in Berlin and reluctantly accepted it.  (He prefers to be on a ship.)  His beautiful wife, Rhoda, who is used to moving around with her husband, prefers a city to a naval base.   Their oldest son, Warren, is a naval officer, their daughter Madeleine is a student who makes herself indispensible at a rradio station, and their other son, Byron, rebelliously refuses to go into the Navy and, works as a secretary for a Jewish writer in Italy, where he falls in love with Jastrow’s niece, Natalie Jastrow.  Then, despite all the rumors about Hitler,  he and Natalie go off on a wild jaunt to Poland, to visit her ambassador boyfriend in Warsaw and iattend  a family wedding in a Polish village.  Then the Germans attack, and  on a dangerous car trip back to Warsaw with the wedding party, Byron is wounded, his passport is taken away, but they continue on, because he knows it’s a very bad idea to stick around the Germans.  In Warsaw they meet more danger and deprivation, but to Byron it is an adventure and to Natalie an opportunity to volunteer as a nurse at the hospital.

Here is an example of Wouk’s crystalline prose.

It took them two days to go the ninety-five kilometers.  While it was happening it seemed to Byron a saga that he would be telling his grandchildren, if he lived through it.  But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day trip from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled memory.  The breakdown of the water pump that halted them for half a day, on a deserted back road in a forest, until Byron, tinkering with it in a daze of illness, to his astonishment got it to work; the leak in the gas tank that compelled them to take great risks to buy more; the disappearance of the hysterical bride from the hayfield where they spent one night and the long search for her; the two blood-caked boys they found asleep by the roadside, who had a confused story of falling out of a truck and who rode the last thirty kilometers to Warsaw sitting on wooden slats on the sizzling hood of the Fiat–all this dimmed.  But he always remembered how ungodly sick to the stomach he was, and the horrible embarrassment of his frequent excursions into the bushes…

If you’re not up to War and Peace, which is my favorite book, try Wouk’s best-seller, which he considered his War and Peace. 

2. I admired and enjoyed Sarah Vincent’s The Testament of Vida Tremayne,  a 2014 novel I discovered by accident–I had mixed it up with another book.   It is utterly fascinating, the convoluted story, told partly in a journal, partly in a traditional narrative, of the thorny relationship between Vida, a writer, and her successful, materialistic, non-literary realtor daughter, Dory.  The two women also must examine their sudden intense  friendship with a mad, mysterious fan, who writes to Vida and then insinuates herself into the house.  The book turns on a dime from a cozy realistic literary novel into  literary horror.

Vida is a  blocked writer whose literary novels no longer sell; her publisher wants her to start writing vampire novels. She loved her country house, named “The Gingerbread House,” after her cricially-acclaimed novel of the same title, but after her husband leaves her, she finds the house too quiet.  Her daughter Dory, who hates leaving London to visit her mother in the country, finds Vida collapsed in her kitchen .  Vida falls into a catatonic state in a mental hospital and is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. When Dory goes back to the house, she finds that a woman, Rhiannon, who claims to be living there, is back from London.   Dory is amazed by how quickly Rhiannon, her mother’s fan, becomes her friend, too:  there is lots of looking into eyes and sympathetic responses.  But Dory reads Vida’s journal, and learns about Rhiannon’s scatty program for removing blocks to creativity.  Don’t sign up unless you like starvation, incense, scrubbing floors, no reading or writing, meditation, and pumas.

BOOKS ON MY NIGHTSTAND!

1. Homer’s Iliad (in Greek)

2. Caroline Alexander’s new translation of Homer’s Iliad, the first by a woman.

3. Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries

4. The Julian Symons Omnibus

5. Ovid’s Fasti

6. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (magnificent!)

7. Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris

8.  The Diary of Anais Nin

9. Emily Kimbrough’s So Near and Yet So Far

10. Chekhov’s short stories (Folio Society four-volume set)

SO MANY GREAT BOOKS!  What to read next?

I have always read compusively in the English canon.  As a girl I indiscriminately read Rumer Godden, E. Nesbit, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and Dickens, and unconciously read them as fantasies, so different were they from my life.   Later, I considered moving to England.  And then I discovered the novels of Margaret Drabble, whose characters, especially Rose in The Needle’s Eye, an heiress who chooses to live in a rundown house in a crumbling London neighborhood, convinced me I was  living an English life in the U.S. anyway (except the heiress part).

A few years ago, I discovered the writer Tessa Hadley.  Although she is not as polished as Drabble, she is continuing  the tradition of Drabble’s intelligent novels about the vicissitudes of  middle-class women’s lives.  Hadley’s writing is lyrical yet slightly flat, and, like Drabble, she seamlessly interweaves English life, history, literature, and the changing culture.  Reading her new novel, The Past, is a transcendent experience: every sentence is exquisitely crafted, and every character brilliantly alive. The book has a tripartite structure:  “The Present,” “The Past,” and “The Present.”

Tessa Hadley

In the first and last sections, called “The Present,” four adult siblings spend a three-week vacation together in the dilapidated, moldering rectory where their mother grew up and their grandparents lived for decades.  They must decide whether to keep or sell this summer cottage.  The characters are irritating as they obsess and bicker.

Fortunately this is interrupted by the powerful middle section, “The Past,” which elucidates our understanding of their entwined yet separate views of the past, and makes this a luminous novel.

In “The Present,  two of the siblings are content with their holidays; the others are deeply bored or confront their unhappiness. Harriet, the oldest, a former radical, advises asylum seekers and has an unsatisfying personal life; Roland, a popular philosopher, pays little attention to his sisters because he has a new wife, Pilar, a beautiful lawyer from Argentina; Alice, a former actress, is the most imaginative and connected to their past; and Fran, a math teacher with two unruly children, is furious at her husband, Jeff, who is away with his band. Alice has also invited an old boyfriend’s son, Kasim, who is bored in college, and he falls for Molly, Roland’s teenage daughter by an earlier wife.

Alice, the middle sister, is the central character, a kind of actressy Antigone who refuses to bury the culture of the past.   It is she who loves the moldering country rectory uncritically, though it needs a new roof and many other repairs.  She is the most nostalgic character, and recaptures the past by rereading their mother’s and their own children’s books–she starts with E. Nesbit’s  The Wouldbegoods–and their grandmother’s letters. But, typically, she arrives without her key, and begins the visit by looking in the windows.

From the beginning, the siblings squabble about what the past means.  Alice holds forth “in one of her diatribes against modern life”  that modern objects are not beautiful and have no meaning.  Roland is “wary of [her] evaluative judgements,” while Harriet dismisses her romanticism.  Fran also gangs up against her.

–It’s a bit late for peasants carving bowls, Alice, Fran said.–I don’t think you’re going to get that particular genie back into its bottle.

–Not just peasants.  It’s the way that people lived more slowly, and kept the same things all their lives, and took care of them.  Our whole relationship to the things we owned was different.  I hate how we throw everything away now.

Alice was more of an actress in her private life, Roland thought, than she ever was in the years when she had tried to be one on the stage.

The children also play a complicated part in the story.  There is danger in the beautiful woods for all four of them, from the youngest to Kasim.   While Kasim sleeps outdoors, Fran’s young children, Ivy and Arthur, wander into a deserted cottage; they  find porn magazines and a dead dog.  Horrified, they recognize the dog as Mitzi, a neighbor’s dog.  They tell no one, and Ivy revisits the scene, then brings back Arthur, where they play a complicated game.  They are both upset by the death of Mitzi, and yet tell no one.

Why all the dead dog scenes?  Dogs in literature so often meet a terrible end, have you noticed?  And the meaning of the dead dog is…  well, I never figure that out. MIt’s a bit Gothic.

But all is forgiven after reading “The Past,” the illuminating story of Jill Fellowes, their mother, who,  in 1968, leaves her adulterous journalist husband  and takes her three children to her parent’s house, hoping to start a new life there.  She is sweaty, earthy, and sexy, and candidly admits that she and the children stink after a long ride on the train and the people who drove them from the station will have to air out their car.  Jill loves being on her own, and looks at houses for rent, including the cottage in the woods (where the dead dog now is).    This section reads like a miniature Margaret Drabble novel.  And Jill happens to be reading a library book by Margaret Drabble.  Tragically, Jill dies of cancer.  It is “The Past” that makes the rest of the book so luminous.

According to Hadley in the acknowledgements, she has borrowed the structure from Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris.  Reviewers have all discussed the influence of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.  No mention of Drabble, but it’s here.  Hadley wrote a fascinating article for The Guardian on Drabble’s The Millstone.

An excellent read!

“Bacchante” by Leighton

I have always been a rumpled, indifferent housewife.  Now I have become the frenzied bacchante of decluttering.

“Hire a maid now so you can ask for help later when you need it,” my cousin suggested.   She has a maid come in once a week.  I always feel comfortable in her very clean house.

I started cleaning so I could hire a maid. Then, in theory. the maid comes in and does “deep cleaning.”

But once I started cleaning, I realized I could BE the maid. Might as well do it yourself.  Once you get started, it’s kind of fun.

Vacuuming, scrubbing the floor, cleaning the toilet:  nothing is harder than throwing out things.  Our basement is full of  junk we’ve kept because of  recyclers’ guilt.  Today I stumbled across a box of ancient vacuum cleaner attachments.  Good God, why?  I guess we were hoping the city would one day include them in their recyling program.

But mostly our mess is paper.

Sort the mail.  Neaten piles of magazines. Stick in recycling bin.   Put books back on shelves.  A big part of tidying here.

We are inundated with newspapers, catalogues, and, now, brochures from Hillary and Bernie (the caucuses are next month).  The worst paper clutter culprits are The New Yorkers.  They sit on a table in the living room for months, because my husband cannot bear to part with them. Some of them wander into the kitchen at breakfast.  I read them at breakfast myself.  He says he will sort them, but I end up holding each issue one by one in front of him until he assents.  Today I picked up the pile and dumped it in the recycling bin.  I left him three issues.   And he didn’t notice the rest were missing. He chatted about an article by Louis Menand on War and Peace. (I’d already read it online.)

But here is my biggest problem.  How do you get rid of your diaries? Open burning is against the law because of of toxic emissions into the air.  I kept a journal for fifteen years.  I wrote when I was unhappy.  And very dreary they are. I can imagine bored recyclers sitting around reading them.

While you solve my problem for me, I will share the one really amusing entry I wrote on a bike trip the summer I was  30.

8-16-??

Pedal and eat, eat and pedal.  I feel like some wacky scifi heroine welded to her  buzzy, zingy, creaky Schwinn machine.  It’s 4:00.  I’m binging on frosted molasses cookies picked up at a sleazy supermarket on a piece of highway called Bristol.

Cookie No. 4.  My husband had to ride back to the ranger’s station to tell him our site number.

Today I was extremely inattentive, a pedaling zombie. The road was boringly familiar from last week’s jaunt but my sleeping bag kept slipping off the back of the bike, DH’s brakes kept rubbing against the tire, and a million other mishaps.

Ate at Wendy’s in M,  A slow Wendy’s.  An Amish couple and a guy with a couple of tattoos who looked  like a regular civilian.

A lot of dead frogs on the road. Yuck. Squishy little varmints.

……………….,,,,,,,,,,…….,,,,,………………

I hadn’t thought of that in years.