Month: June 2018

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Mud and the Magnum Opus: In Which a Blandings Novel Gets Wet

This summer I am immersed in the eternal ’20s and ’30s of P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings series.  Some prefer his Jeeves books, but I am enchanted by the characters at Blandings Castle. There is the dotty Lord Emsworth, who owns a prize pig, the Empress of Blandings; his bossy sister Lady Constance, who often thwarts young love; their brother Galahad, who spent his youth cavorting at the Pelicans Club; and we cannot forget the many star-crossed lovers and the many, many imposters lurking at Blandings Castle.  In one of the novels, Summer Lightning, their love-struck nephew Ronnie steals the Empress so he can then “find” the pig  and ingratiate himself with Lord Emsworth, his trustee.  But then the pig is stolen again.  And can the butler Beach fix everything?

And so, in the midst of comedy, you can imagine my chagrin when I almost lost a Blandings omnibus!

The sun was shining after days of rain, and I was riding my bike to a bench where I planned to read Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, one of the three novels in the Blandings omnibus, Life at Blandings.  But I jolted over a bumpy section of asphalt trail, and alas! I had a flat tire.

There is only one way to fix a flat, and that is to have someone else do it.  I tried once to follow the directions in Anybody’s Bike Book.  Disaster!  (Even Carrie in Homeland takes her flat tire off the bike and puts it in the trunk of her car, I assume to take it to the bike shop.) Now my husband fixes flat tires. But first I had to wheel my bike back to civilization, chain the bike to something, and then find a pay phone and call him to rescue and retrieve.

Finally I made it to a park, chained the bike to a picket fence, and then cut across the mud back to the trail.  There was a big puddle, but who cared?  Alas, it was mostly mud, and I went flying and so did my Skoob bag with the Wodehouse book!

Well, the  bag was pretty much totaled, but the book was only a bit damp.  And as I waited for my husband, I was grateful for Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, because there is nothing duller than sitting in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.  Lady Connie and the Duke of Dunstable were plotting to steal Galahad’s memoirs, because they wanted to repress certain episodes…

I can’t recommend Wodehouse too highly.

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Light Reading: Tara Isabella Burton’s “Social Creature” and Elizabeth von Arnim’s “Christine”

This summer I have done LOTS of light reading.  Since the middle of May, when we first saw the sun after a tenebrous winter, I have been soaking up rays (for Vitamin D!) and lounging and reading, if not beach books, very fast books.

There is a puritanical strain in the family that says it is a sin to read a book not reviewed in The New Yorker, but I have broken some rules.  While my husband was out of town, I read Tara Isabella Burton’s creepy thriller, Social Creature, recommended by Janet Maslin  in The New York Times.  Compared by reviewers to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, this racy novel comprises a sticky web of socialites, social media, and lack of social boundaries.  Louise, a mousy wannabe writer, is down-and-out in New York, and though she’s about to turn 30, she is determined not to return to New Hampshire.  She works three jobs, as a barista, an SAT tutor, and a writer for an online catalogue–and she never has money to go out.  Then she meets Lavinia, a rich, wild socialite who takes her under her wing.  They go to posh party after posh party, and are always drunk or stoned.   Louise makes contacts and begins to write for acclaimed publications.   But it can’t last:  Lavinia has a history of adopting best friends, and then dumping them.  The novel takes a horrific turn …  and I had to leave the lights on all night for a week.

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) may be more to your taste if you’re looking for something light and literary.   (I posted here about Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther.)  I recently discovered her out-of-print anti-war epistolary novel Christine, originally published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Cholmondeley (available under both names as a free e-book).

Twenty-two-year-old Christine, a violinist, moves to Berlin in 1914. She is there to study music with a famous violinist so she can make a living, not as a teacher, but as a musician.  In long letters to her mother every Sunday, she records the details of her life.  But she greatly misses her mother.

The worst of it is that we’re so poor, or you could have come with me and we’d have taken a house and set up housekeeping together for my year of study. Well, we won’t be poor for ever, little mother. I’m going to be your son, and husband, and everything else that loves and is devoted, and I’m going to earn both our livings for us, and take care of you forever.

At first she is unhappy.  Rude pedestrians actually knock her off the narrow sidewalks into the road when she takes a walk.   Her stout landlady and eccentric fellow roomers shun her  because of a strong anti-English feeling. Eventually they soften, because she is charming, but is music worth the price of loneliness in Berlin?  Yes, because Kloster, her music teacher, a short, chubby middle-aged violinist, becomes angelic when he plays the violin.  He tells her she is his most talented student, and she improves by long, joyful practice in her room. Kloster and his wife take her under their wing, and sen her to the country when it gets too hot and she looks pale.  He also introduces her to  handsome, musical Bernd, an aristocrat who, unfortunately, because of his class and tradition , is an officer in the army.  They fall in love and get engaged, though his family does not approve.

She knows something political is brewing:  the roomers boast about the strong German army.  And then Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated.  Everyone insists  that there will be war, though she can’t understand why.

Here day and night, day and night, since Wednesday, soldiers in new grey uniforms pass through the Brandenburger Thor down the broad road to Charlottenburg. Their tramp never stops. I can see them from my window tramping, tramping away down the great straight road; and crowds that don’t seem to change or dwindle watch them and shout. Where do the soldiers all come from? I never dreamed there could be so many in the world, let alone in Berlin; and Germany isn’t even at war! But it’s no use asking questions, or trying to talk about it. I’ve found the word “Why?” in this house is not only useless but improper. Nobody will talk about anything; I suppose they don’t need to, for they all seem perfectly to know. They’re in the inner circle in this house. They’re not the public. The public is that shouting, The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don’t know; an immense multitude of slaves,—abject, greedy, pitiful. I don’t think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing with joy because they think the great moment they’ve been taught to wait for has come, and they’re going to get suddenly rich, scoop in wealth from Russia and France, get up to the top of the world and be able to kick it.

And frankly we are terrified for Christine.  The anti-English feeling is very strong.

Von Arnim writes brilliantly at times, at other times her prose is pedestrian, but overall this is an extremely moving anti-war novel.  Surely some press should reissue it!

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A Charming Epistolary Novel: “Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther” by Elizabeth von Arnim

I confess I am not a fan of teaching English (too many papers to grade), but if I returned to teaching would enjoy planning a class on H. G. Wells’s mistresses.  Not only am I a fan of the progressive Wells’s feminist, socialist novels, Ann Veronica and The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman,  but I am fascinated by his affairs with the Edwardian novelists Elizabeth von Arnim, E. Nesbit, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, and Amber Reeves.

I have been whiling away afternoons in an Adirondack chair with Elizabeth von Arnim, who was best known as the author of The Enchanted April.  Vintage Classics has  reissued four of her books in bright, attractive, summery-looking editions: Vera, The Enchanted April, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther.  My favorite is Vera, a dark comedy that is a  kind of predecessor of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.  The 22-year-old heroine, Lucy, marries a middle-aged stockbroker, who becomes more and more controlling after their marriage.    He isolates her from her friends, installs her in his first wife Vera’s creepy sitting room, and prevents her from reading (he actually locks up the books).  Soon she begins to  wonder about  his first wife, Vera, who “fell out a window.”   Was it suicide, or was she pushed? (I posted about this book here.)

The only one of the four Vintage Von Arnims I had  not  read was Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther, a charming epistolary novel.   It is light and  entertaining, a bit rambling, with many fine passages, but far from her best work.  But fans of von Arnim  will relish the  lively accounts of small-town life in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, the heroine’s beautiful observations of nature, her enthusiasm for poetry, and  meditations on the  pros and cons of marriage and the single life.

Written in the form of lively letters from Rose-Marie Schmidt in Germany to Roger Anstruther, her English fiance, it opens on a bright note.   In her witty letters, Rose-Marie teases him about his fondness for marmalade, thanks him for comparing her to Nausicaa , a princess in The Odyssey, muses on her scholarly father’s eccentricities, and recounts the malicious gossip at a women’s kaffee klatch which her very proper stepmother forces her to attend.  Rose-Marie can be funny but she also reports on the suffocating restrictiveness of the women’s social circle.

They were talking about sin. We don’t sin much in Jena, so generally they talk about sick people, or their neighbor’s income and what he does with it. But yesterday they talked sin. You know because we are poor and Papa has no official position and I have come to be twenty-five without having found a husband, I am a quantité négligeable in our set, a being in whose presence everything can be said, and who is expected to sit in a draught if there is one. Too old to join the young girls in the corner set apart for them, where they whisper and giggle and eat amazing quantities of whipped cream, I hover uneasily on the outskirts of the group of the married, and try to ingratiate myself by keeping on handing them cakes. It generally ends in my being sent out every few minutes by the hostess to the kitchen to fetch more food and things. ‘Rose-Marie is so useful,’ she will explain to the others when I have been extra quick and cheerful; but I don’t suppose Nausicaa’s female acquaintances said more.

The women gossiped about an illicit relationship between two people Rose-Marie very much likes, especially the woman, “the nicest woman in Jena.”   And when this woman arrives late, they greet her warmly and behave as though they haven’t been assassinating her character.   Rose-Marie hates their hypocrisy, and loves this woman whether the gossip is true or false.  But this episode explains why she does not have a place in the small town.

She and Roger met when he took lodgings in their house  and studied German with her father, but the engagement remains secret because he feels it is not the right time yet to tell his well-to-do father.  Soon it becomes clear that there will be no right time.  Roger falls in love with a woman he meets at a country house.  He and Rose-Marie break off their engagement.

But a few months later he writes to her again, and they embark on a second correspondence, though Rose-Marie now considers him only a friend, as she constantly assures him.  And Yet the letters constitute an intimate diary as she writes about her stepmother’s sad death, the financial necessity of  moving outside Jena to a tiny, inexpensive house on a mountain, and her friendship with a young woman who is stigmatized because she was jilted almost at the altar.

So will Rose-Marie and Roger marry or won’t they?  That is the question. Or is it?  Actually, we consider it less seriously as Rose-Marie becomes stronger and happier. An odd book, but very enjoyable–some of the letters are really polished essays on various topics.

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Naïveté or Willful Misreading? Lara Feigel’s “Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing”

Doris Lessing

The Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing (1919-2013) had a powerful effect on my thinking when I read her at age fifteen, and nowadays, as a Woman of a Certain Age, I  continue to read and reread her work.  I began with  The Golden Notebook,  her famous experimental novel about “free women” (as she ironically says) and the breakdown of personality.  In her novels in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, Lessing illuminated aspects of women’s sexuality, radical politics, marriage, madness, and the break-up of the nuclear family.  Later, she  wrote experimental novels and science fiction about the consequences of war, nuclear power, pollution, and the disintegration of society.  If you’re a Lessing novice, don’t start with The Golden Notebook: The Children of Violence series, a  group of semi-autobiographical novels about the character Martha Quest, is her best work, and has stood up better over time.

As a Lessing fan, I recently picked up a copy of Lara Feigel’s new bibliomemoir, Free Woman:  Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing. I expected to love it.  But, alas, as with many bibliomemoirs, there is a crashing contrast between the stylistic powers of the memoirist and the Great Author.  Lessing is bold and outspoken, while Feigel is mousy and slyly querulous.  Again and again, Feigel professes admiration for Lessing only to turn around and conclude that her own choices are better.  And the structure of the book is very strange:  Feigel has pasted an ostensible study of Lessing on a the framework of her own memoir about miscarriage, motherhood, and trying to get pregnant.   The real paradox is that motherhood was not one of Lessing’s subjects.

Here is the premise of Feigel’s book.  When she rereads The Golden Notebook in her mid-thirties, she is envious of Lessing’s adventurous spirit.  She would like to be a “free woman,” like Anna Wulf, the heroine of The Golden Notebook.   It angers her that her friends keep getting married, instead of staying free.  Of course she, too,  is married, but she projects her anger on them.   She is  a disappointed wife and the ambivalent mother of a son, whom she claims she has trouble leaving at day care.  But she often retires to  a cabin by the sea to write her book while her husband cares for their son at home.  (Doesn’t that sound idyllic?)  She wishes she could have affairs like Lessing, but she waffles about the problems of open marriage.

Then she has a miscarriage and mourns because she can’t  conceive again.  Trying to have a second child becomes the focus of her life.  And so, driven by the imperative of her own emotions,  Feigel turns her attention to Lessing’s abilities as a parent.   Although Feigel repeatedly claims she is not one of those women who criticize Lessing’s performance as a mother,  she spends at least one-fourth (and probably more) of the book doing that very thing.  How could Lessing walk out on her husband and “abandon” her two children in Africa when she left their father?   If you read the second and third of the Children of Violence novels, A Proper Marriage and A Ripple from the Storm,  Lessing herself will provide the answers.  She married at 19, before she felt ready, and felt trapped by the traditional role of a suburban motherhood.  Both Lessing and the heroine Martha Quest leave the children with their prosperous, middle-class  father, a civil servant.

“Bad mother” accusations are hardly new, but they represent the height of sexism and hypocrisy.   Lessing  left her children with her husband, a middle-class civil servant, surely not abandonment. Can’t men raise children? Must every woman be a mother? Can’t some women be great writers:  surely it is accepted that it is tough to write when you’re doing child care.   Peter Stanford wrote an excellent article on this subject for the Telegraph, “Doris Lessing:  A Mother Much Misunderstood.” And in Lessing’s A Ripple from the Storm, Martha Quest (Lessing’s alter ego) describes her ambivalence about leaving her daughter Caroline.

Most of the time she was very careful not to allow herself to think of Caroline.  Once, missing Caroline, she had borrowed Jasmine’s car and driven several times up and down past the house, to watch the little girl playing in the garden with the nurse-girl.  The sight had confused her, for she had not felt as unhappy as she had expected.  She had continued to drive up and down past the house until she saw a female figure through a window and believed she recognized Elaine Talbot.

But damned if you do and damned if you don’t:  Feigel also fails to understand why Lessing had a third child at age 30.  Feigel wonders why bad mother Lessing didn’t “abandon” her son Peter in Africa.  (Lessing and Peter moved to London.). And then Feigel accuses Lessing of being a smother mother, because Peter lived with her till his death a few months before Lessing’s.  Peter had multiple health problems, diabetes, heart problems, and perhaps a mental illness.  So if Lessing hadn’t cared for him, she would have been the other kind of bad mother.  (Are you rolling your eyes?)

The alienation never stops.  Feigel even criticizes Lessing’s menopause.  At the smug age of 35, Feigel is convinced that menstruation is a sign of true womanhood. She  doesn’t believe Lessing didn’t grieve or suffer or feel any change when she stopped bleeding, though that is what Lessing said.  Let me assure you, menopause is painless for many of us!  My mother and I both “went through” early menopause at 42, i.e., we stopped having periods, never had a hot flash, and gleefully were free from tampons!  The thirties are tough:  hormones are out of wack, marriages are out of wack….  Menopause is a serene state.

The only flicker of life in this sad little book is when she flies to L.A. to interview Clancy Sigal, who was Lessing’s lover in the ’60s, the model for Saul in The Golden Notebook. Sigal doesn’t give interviews, buy said he’d  have coffee with her if she ever came to L.A.  The interview was very short, but he is by far the liveliest character in the book:  he mocks Feigel’s ideas of freedom and says he never read anything Lessing wrote.  Refreshing!

All right, I can’t spend any more time on this disappointing book.  But–spoiler alert–Feigel and her husband are divorced at the end and she has a daughter conceived (if that’s the right word) via IVF.  Freedom?

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A Giveaway of Graham Greene, Mary Wesley, Lawrence Durrell, & Robert Graves

It’s the summer giveaway!  Here are four free books for anyone energetic enough to request them.  Leave a comment if you would like one or more, and do ask for as many as interest you.  I’ll do a drawing Wednesday.  (N.B.  The images show the editions I’m giving away.)

1 Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. (You can read my post  here). In this tense, fast-paced novel, the narrator, Fowler, a cynical English war correspondent in Saigon in the 1950s,  has witnessed battles, bombings, and atrocities in the war between the French  and the Vietminh guerrillas.  The European papers are interested in very few of the incidents, so he regards himself as an observer, not an activist, until an American fanatic threatens the Vietnamese way of life and that of expatriates like Fowler.

2  Mary Wesley’s Part of the Furniture.  Mary Wesley published her first novel in 1983 when she was 71.    Here is the description of Part of the Furniture at Goodreads:  “Early in 1941, seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street. Planes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up. She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger who offers her the protection of his house. Given this respite from the bleakness of an existence where she has no home and family, June encounters a series of events that take her to a house in the West Country, where war only occasionally intrudes, where she may find peace, and no longer just be part of the furniture.”

3  Lawrence Durrell’s Livia.  This is the second book in the Avignon Quintet, which I wrote about a few days ago here.  Poetic metafiction!

4.  Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius.  Graves’s most famous book is the brilliant novel,  I, Claudius, but I also enjoyed Count Belisarius, the story of the sixth-century general who repeatedly saved the Byzantine empire, including Rome, until the jealous emperor Justinian and other less gifted generals interfered .  I wrote in more detail about it here.

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Lawrence Durrell’s Lush Metafiction: The Avignon Quintet

I do not much enjoy literary events, but I am such a fan of Lawrence Durrell’s lush prose that I would ecstatically travel back in time to attend his readings (though It seems unlikely that he would give readings).  His gorgeous masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is one of my favorite novel sequences (and, by the way, you can read my post on it here.) But this summer I’ve moved on to Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, a luminous metafictional series.

In Monsieur: The Prince of Darkness, the first novel in the Avignon Quintet (which I wrote about here),  Durrell experiments with point-of-view.  The narrative shifts are radical and there are many twists–madness, incest, suicide, and bisexuality–along the way. At the end we learn that Monsieur is a novel within a novel, and the character Rob Sutcliffe, a novelist, is the fictional alter ego of the character Aubrey Blanford, the real writer of Monsieur–or the alter ego of Durrell, who won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Monsieur in 1974.

I struggled through some of the more overblown episodes in Monsieur, but I very much enjoyed the more straightforward second novel, Livia, or Buried Alive.  Blanford is grieving over the death of his best friend Constance,  the sister of Livia, his dead wife.   A phone call from Rob Sutcliffe comforts him, though at first Blanford skewers the relationship between the writer and his creation.

All process causes pain, and we are part of process. How chimerical the consolations of art against the central horror of death; being sucked down the great sink like an insect, into the cloaca maxima of death, the anus mundi! Sutcliffe, in writing about him, or rather, he writing about himself in the character of Sutcliffe, under the satirical name of Bloshford in the novel Monsieur had said somewhere: “Women to him were simply a commodity. He was not a fool about them; O no! He knew them inside out, or so he thought. That is to say he was worse than a fool.”

Only a writer as lyrical as Durrell could get away with this flamboyant overwriting, but he is not without humor.  Blanford and Sutcliffe have much in common:  their wives were both, absurdly, lesbian sirens who led them a merry chase through Europe (Livia had sex with the female private detective Blanford hired to track her).

But Blanford tries to remind Sutcliffe he is not real.

“You are dead, Robin,” said Blanford. “Remember the end of Monsieur?”
“Bring me back then,” said Sutcliffe on a heroic note, “and we shall see.”

Much of Livia is devoted to Blanford’s  first trip to Avignon on a long vacation from Oxford with friends.  He and  Sam are invited to camp out in Avignon with Hilary, whose sister Constance has inherited a chateau from a mad aunt:  the aunt had let it crumble Miss Havisham-style around her.  (There is a high level of mental illness in The Avignon Quintet.)   Blanford falls in love with beautiful Constance, but  then her seductive sister Livia arrives.  Poor Constance!  Not only does Livia steal Blanford’s affections, but she also fascinates their friend Felix, the consul of Avignon.  One night Blanford and Felix, jealously searching for Livia, visit a brothel where Livia is said to work as a prostitute.  The rumor is not true, or at least she is not there.  Instead, she often dresses in men’s clothes and takes long walks at night, and sometimes has sex with a random gypsy girl. Yes, the decadence gets a little tiring. Why, why, why are these men so fascinated by Livia? The best parts of the novel are Durrell’s long descriptions of Avignon, its ruins, its river, its gypsy quarter, and the history of Templar heresies.

Read The Alexandria Quartet first.  The Avignon Quintet is less interesting, not for everybody.  But if you like metafiction, it’s for you.

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A Neglected Classic: The Rain Forest by Olivia Manning

There’s nothing like discovering a great out-of-print book, especially when one has no expectations.

I have a collection of old tatty Penguins, which fall apart as I read them. Of those that remain bound, I have a favorite.  I was immediately caught in the tightly-plotted web of Olivia Manning’s The Rain Forest, published in 1974, set on an island in the Indian Ocean. If you are a fan of Graham Greene or W. Somerset Maugham, you will not be able to put it down.  This hypnotic story of an expatriate couple living on a jasmine-scented island ruled by the British is a trenchant examination of colonialism and culture clash.

Manning is no longer a neglected writer; she has been rediscovered in recent years.  In 2010 NYRB  reissued her partly autobiographical masterpiece,  Fortunes of War, in two volumes as the Balkan trilogy and the Levant trilogy.  In this compelling series, Manning follows the fortunes of a British couple, Guy Pringle, a university lecturer, and his wife, Harriet, during World War II. Adapted by the BBC as a TV series  starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, the DVD  brought me to Manning’s books.   A biography of Olivia Manning was published in 2013.

Though Manning’s other books don’t quite live up to  Fortunes of War, The Rain Forest is a little gem.  In this strange, striking novel, she writes about another British couple, Hugh Foster, an unemployed script writer, and his wife Kristy, a novelist.  They cannot pay their income tax in England, so Hugh takes a government job in Al-Bustan, a British-ruled island populated by Arabs, Africans, and Indians.  Hugh feels like a failure as he tries to break into the class-bound society, and Kristy laughs at everybody.

From the beginning, the class system is rigid.  While the rich live at the Praslin Hotel, the middle-class British rent rooms at the Daisy Pension, where Hugh and Kristy are shunned as bohemians and outsiders.   The clique-y residents won’t even speak to them, and their only friend is the pension owner’s son, Ambrose, a former Cambridge scholar (the best in his year) who ventured into publishing, was bankrupted twice, and now lives with his mother, scheming to find investors for a new quixotic project to find a treasure ship..

Manning brilliantly captures the oppressive atmosphere of the Daisy.  And in the following passage, Manning describes the Fosters’ first meeting with Ambrose.

The government workers in their suits of khaki drill , the wives all much alike in flowered, sleeveless dresses of unfashionable length, seemed to keep dry by a refrigeration of the will.  The newcomer–who had entered late and whose table was close to the Fosters–glistened with sweat and his clothes, too heavy for the climate, were shabby, sweat-stained and, in places, split.  Bent over his food, he was still remembering Kristy and her pleasure. He was so different from the other inmates that Kristy whispered, “A human being!

As the weeks go on, Kristy is befriended by Arabs, Indians, and Africans, all of whom say they hope to take over when the British leave. (The government favors the Africans.) And Hugh also makes a dangerous friend, a doctor who wheedled a pass from him to explore the rain forest on the other side of the island, which is off limits:  he is trying to discover what caused a mysterious disease there.  Things go from bad to worse.

Loved the book.  Extraordinary writing,  great characters.

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Memorably Manic: On Folio Society Books & Reading Robert Graves’s “Count Belisarius”

Do you love shopping?  Have you ever bought a $2,900 handbag after watching The Devil Wears Prada? Or spent $300 on a Folio Society limited edition ? (Yes, the latter.)

Mind you, you don’t have to suffer from manic-depressive illness to have Memorably Manic moments.  We apply the MMM phrase to any $250-plus purchase that is not a computer or a washing machine.

My Memorably Manic moment occurred in 2014 when I ordered the Folio Society edition of the complete text of Trollope’s The Duke’s Children.  In my defense, I am a Trollope fan.  But you may wonder:   How could I afford it?  Did I take to the streets and sell my prescription thyroid drugs?  (No! I went without new clothes.)

I am a fan of paperbacks, which are compact, flexible, and suitable for reading in the horizontal position.  But I was mesmerized by an article in The Guardian about the publication of the complete text of The Duke’s Children.  Steven Annick, an American Trollope scholar, had restored the complete text from the manuscript at Yale.  When Trollope’s sales were waning, his editor, Charles Dickens, Jr., had required Trollope to cut 65,000 words.

Annick put them back.

And so I ordered the limited edition– an enormous leather object.

Oh, dear, it was lovely, but unwieldy.  I usually read in the horizontal position, and that was impossible.  So I gave the oversized  book to a charity sale.

Was the FS limited edition a one-off?  No, because I have bought used editions of FS books at reasonable prices.  I don’t care for the REALLY oversized FS books, but I love my used set of  Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy .

WHAT AM I READING NOW?  I am loving Robert Graves’s historical novel, Count Belisarius, a brilliant retelling of the story of Belisarius, who was a Byzantine general  in the sixth century under the rule of Justinian. If you are a fan of Graves’s dazzling  I, Claudius, you will love Count Belisarius (why isn’t it a BBC series?).  Belisarius, known as the Last Roman because of his courage and integrity (what the Romans would call virtus), was loyal to Justinian, despite his taking credit for Belisarius’s victories.

Not all historians have been Belisarius fans:  Belisarius’s secretary, the historian Procopius, reviled Belisarius in his over-the-top book, The Secret History, along with Justinian, Justinian’s wife, Theodora, and Belisarius’s wife Antonina (the women were former actresses and prostitutes).  But in The Wars of Justinian, Procopius praised the achievements of Justinian and Belisarius. So perhaps Procopius had manic moments, too. (I recently wrote about The Secret History here.)

Graves is sympathetic to Belisarius. He intended to write the book from the point-of-view of Antonina, Belisarius’s wife, but at the suggestion of his girlfriend, the poet Laura Riding, changed the perspective to that of Eugenius, Antonina’s eunuch slave. Lindsey Davis, who wrote the introduction to the Folio Society edition, finds this decision disappointing.  But she points out that the trusted domestic servant has been the model for later narrators of historical novels (think Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy, narrated by Cicero’s secretary).   Davis writes,

Use of such a figure has since become standard practice where men of letters write their novels about famous fellows from history.  It can have the advantage that as part of the hero’s household, the narrator supplies private insights, though we get no pillow talk from Eugenius.  Graves fits him out with an appealing background (he is the son of a British king, captured by Saxon pirates) and he is no cipher, because from time to time he assists his mistress Antonina with her schemes, not least helping to dethrone a pope.

Theodora and Antonina, childhood friends and the powers behind the throne, are by far the most interesting characters. But Graves is such a master of plot and characterization that there are no stick figures:  Belisarius, noble and courageous from boyhood, is commanding and believable.  As a boy, during a dinner at his uncle’s, Belisarius speaks eloquently of what it means to be Roman.

“‘Roman’ is a name borne by hundreds of thousands who have never seen the City of Rome and never will; and so it was, I believe,in the greatest days of the Empire.  To be Roman is to belong not to Rome, a city in Italy, but to the world.  The Roman legionaries who perished with Valens were Gauls and Spaniards and Britons and Dalmatians and many other sorts; of true-born Romans among them there cannot have been many hundreds….  Now, suppose that one could combine Hun archer and Gothic lancer and civilize him as a Roman, and put him under camp discipline–that, I think, would be to breed a soldier as near perfection as possible.  I intend to command such troops someday.”

Don’t fear being bored by soldiers: Graves’s war scenes are vivid and suspenseful.   If, as a Latin student, you fell in love with Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (for the gorgeous prose!), and Livy’s history (also gorgeous prose!) and even admired Belisarius’s enemy, the Greek historian Procopius, you will appreciate Graves’s facility in describing battles:  it is part of a long narrative tradition.   Trained in rhetoric,  Belisarius delivers speeches worthy of Cicero, especially when preventing mutiny, or cementing the plan for recapturing Carthage from the Vandals.

There is much to muse about in Grave’s intelligent chronicle of Justinian’s age, which he describes in the preface as  the overlapping of the Classical Age with the Romantic Age of medieval legend.

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Horace vs. Stephen King: Which is the Better Horror Writer?

Horace

Horace is rarely compared to Stephen King.  In fact, he is never compared to Stephen King.  I am the first to make the comparison.  And I don’t read Stephen King, because his books give me nightmares.

Although my “Truth in Wine” series of posts depicted Horace as an adorable oenophile who conversed with a wine jar, there are serious, even stern, facets to his character.  The six poems known as the Roman Odes (the first six odes of  Book III) are very disturbing. His descriptions of the wrath of Juppiter, Juno, and other gods are as blood-curdling as any passage in Stephen King. Yes, we are patriotic, but I am always disturbed by Horace’s famous line,  dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” (Carmina III.2).  It gave me flashbacks to writers’ conferences where the war veterans submitted disturbingly violent short stories in which the teachers had to find positive elements to praise in order to support the men psychologically.  And of course Wilfred Owen, the World War I poet, wrote his own response to Horace in the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Wilfred Owen

  Here’s the dulce et decorum bit of Wilfred Owen’s poem
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

 

Life was one long war in the first century B.C. in Rome.  Horace  had fought (on the wrong side) of the civil war between Octavian (later called Augustus) and Antony.  In his poetry, Horace alludes to the peace established by Augustus, who became a benign emperor, though never called that, in the wake of three civil wars.  Horace praises the cardinal virtues, the morals, and the old Roman religion:  Augustus wanted to reform the decadent society.   Some consider Horace’s Roman odes propaganda, but others point out the ambiguities that sometimes undercut the surface.

In Book III, Ode 6,  the dulce et decorum sentence is the crux of the fourth stanza,  which falls in the middle of Horace’s eight-stanza poem.  And the placement of the stanza emphasizes Horace’s  view of war and death.  Here is the entire stanza (the Latin below the English):

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit imbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.               15

It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.
Death chases even the man who flees
and does not spare the peace-loving youth:
it gets him in the back or the knees.

* “peace-loving” is often translated “cowardly”

Horace says that no one can escape war or death. They’ll get your back or knees if you turn away.    And does this knowledge of the inevitability of death make it easier for the survivors of war and the parents of the dead?  I am not a member of a military family.  I have never faced this situation. Would the Romans have found comfort in this philosophy?

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Cool Books in Air Conditioning: Patricia Moyes’s Murder a la Mode & Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

Matisse, “Woman Reading with Tea”

One never gets used to the Midwestern heat. My husband dislikes air conditioning, but in these record-high temperatures I couldn’t live without it.  Though I can be sprightly and cheerful  in front of fans blowing at top speed, I need the AC at night.

We struggled over the issue of AC for years.  No, my husband said.  But during a drought one summer, I bought the last air conditioner in town–I called many, many stores before I found one at Sears.  We stuck it in the bedroom window, wedged a copy of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire beneath it, and then fanned out the plastic pleated shutters on either side.  Not the safest installation: the vampire Lestat held it up.

Even with central air and no vampire installations, the heat is exhausting. So I stayed home last week and took a mini-vacation indoors. And I read the perfect cool books. What can be cooler than the fashion world and a Graham Greene quasi-thriller?   I recommend:

1. Murder a la Mode by Patricia Moyes.  Patricia Moyes’s mysteries are delectable, especially Murder a la Mode, a cozy classic–now back in print, published by Felony and Mayhem Press.  Set in the 1960s at the offices of a London fashion magazine, it captures the hectic quibbling and high-pitched tension of the staff’s hurrying to put out the Paris fashion issue.  Having returned late from the spring show in Paris, they are still bickering over layouts at midnight.  The art department is histrionic, and only the level-headed,  soon-to-retire editor Margery French can soothe Patrick, the art editor, who refuses to give a double spread to an ugly hat:  “that…that pudding on stilts.”  Teresa Manners, the posh fashion editor, has a pitch-perfect fashion sense and insists that the hat will be the axis of the season.  Meanwhile,   Helen, the assistant editor, must stay behind to write the copy and photo captions after the others leave. When Helen is found dead the next morning from  cyanide in her tea, Inspector Henry Tibbett investigates, with the help of his niece, Veronica, a model.  (P.S.  Moyes worked as an assistant editor at Vogue, so she gets the details of the fashion magazine just right.)

2.  Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Greene is one of the most intelligent writers of the 20th century, and his intelligent  well-plotted novels are peopled with intelligent men who agonize, Greek tragedian-style, about their emptiness and angst.  I am not Greene’s biggest fan–I prefer his pop predecessor, W. Somerset Maugham–but his characters definitely know how to be cool in the most volatile situations.

That is true of The Quiet American,which I recently read to stay cool.  The narrator, Fowler, an English war correspondent in Saigon in the 1950s,  has witnessed battles, bombings, and atrocities in the war between the French  and the Vietminh guerrillas.  He knows just what his newspaper will or will not publish, and he regards himself as an observer, not an activist.

The British empire has fallen, and Fowler cynically watches the new world politics enacted in Vietnam.  But when an American comes to Saigon and threatens Fowler’s way of life (and the Vietnamese way of life), Fowler eventually must act.  Pyle, an American employed in the Economic Aid Mission, seems at first friendly and naive, irritating and sincere:  he earnestly believes that  “a third force” can save Vietnam.   Pyle wants not only to Americanize Vietnam but to poach on Fowler’s personal territory:  he falls in love with and steals Fowler’s mistress, Phuong, after chivalrously warning Fowler of his intentions.  But when one of Fowler’s contacts tells him the truth about the death-dealing “plastics” industry Pyle is setting up, Fowler must cross a moral line.

Gorgeous writing, even though this book is not for me.   Greene needs only a paragraph or two, or a line of dialogue, to establish character and mood.   In the following passage, he describes his first meeting Pyle at a cafe.  Pyle asks to join him, because there are no free tables.

“Was that a grenade?” he asked with excitement and hope.

“More likely the exhaust of a car,” I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment.  One forgets so quickly one’s own youth:  once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news.  But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper–so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon:  they never made the European press.  Up the street came the lovely flat figures–the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh.  I watched them with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I left the region forever.  “They are lovely, aren’t they?” I said over my beer, and Pyle cast a cursory glance as they went up the rue Catinant.

The Pyles of the world turn out not to be what they seem, and the Fowlers have more to them than you noticed.  Love the writing, but am indifferent to the book.  It’s something about Greene:  not for me.