Fields of Prairie Grass

This afternoon I bicycled past a burning field. As the yellow-brown smoke thickened into a ghastly smog, I accelerated past the burning prairie grass, and though I’m not a smoke reader (there are people who calculate emissions for a living), I didn't want to breathe the obviously polluted air. Men in yellow coats and hard hats stood nonchalantly at the edges, not wearing safety masks, ready to put out the fire if it got out of hand.The parks department probably yawns over coffee: “Gotta do three fields today.” It’s the cycle of work for them. The prairie grass will be thick and wavy again in another couple of months. A renaissance.

Well away from the fire, I sat down with my thermos and book. A taped-together Penguin of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s An Avenue of Stone is not geographically correct after the burning of prairie grass. More appropriate farm books: Willa Cather’s O Pioneers; Bess Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand; Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres; Martha Bergland’s A Farm under a Lake; Larry Woiwode's What I Think I Did; and, for light relief, Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I.

But one cannot live always in reality, and Pamela Hansford Johnson, a genius at depicting class differences in England, sweeps me far away. An Avenue of Stone promisingly begins:

“As a class,” Helena said, “we are doomed” - indicating consciousness of her absurdity only by a bright flash in my direction from her Tiberian eye.

More about this later.

By the way, nobody was surprised about the fire. "Oh yeah, I saw it." That laconic prairie matter-of-factness is even part of the cities here.

More Dodie Smith

I spent the lovely day basking in the warm sun in an old Road Runner t-shirt and holey sweats, sipping iced tea and reading Dodie Smith’s The New Moon with the Old. This 1963 pop masterpiece has somehow fallen below the critical radar, but this witty, elegant novel is even more engaging than the classic, I Capture the Castle. It begins with Jane Minton, a glamorous secretary-housekeeper, arriving at the beautiful Dome House to take a job. And though she is intimidated by the size of Dome House and ironically quizzes herself as to why she has taken a job she does not need, the portents are good.

She did not believe in omens but instantly knew that this was a good one: the afternoon sun, coming from behind the clouds, had turned the gray of the glass dome to a shimmer of gold. Seen from this hilltop where she had got out of her car to reconnoiter - and there could be no doubt that was Dome House- the effect was quite dazzling, and extremely cheering.

Only a moment before, her spirits had been low. The slate roof surrounding the dome was so large, the chimneys sprouting from the roof so numerous - and she had undertaken to do the housekeeping. That might prove to be a polite name for housework. One didn’t mind a reasonable amount; as a resident secretary one was usually roped in for it. But with a house that size...!

Now, in this sudden sunlight...

And she promptly falls in love with the Carrington family: Clare, the beautiful, unconventional, but rather harried older daughter who has been the housekeeper since her teens (she hilariously wants to be a king's mistress); Drew, a brilliant 19-year-old writing a historical novel set in Edwardian times; Merry, a 14-year-old aspiring actress who is prone to whimsical statements and can rattle off Chekhov, Sheridan, and Shakespeare: and Richard, a reticent composer who soon accepts her. The family watches TV every night with the two maids, who are treated charmingly as members of the family. But shortly thereafter Jane's absentee employer, Rupert Carrington, a London businessman, visits Dome House and confides that he must flee the country because he is about to be arrested for fraud. And all of them must suddenly get jobs...


Their jobs are fascinating: they reveal much about their psychology. In a way the Carringtons are like the Mortmains of I Capture the Castle: earning power nil (if you remember that scene). But they do embark on a variety of adventures and prove very creative.

I was so fascinated that when I absently spilled tea on it I frantically swabbed the cellophane cover, only to discover that thank God the book was pristine while only my t-shirt was ruined: the book smells of 1963 old library book, a vintage paper aroma that somebody should immediately bottle.

Interlibrary loan can be a godsend...

The Death of the Heart & Friends and Relations

Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart is one of the best “diary” novels of the 20th century: this brilliant portrait of a girl's coming of age is drawn partly through a diary and letters, and partly through her guardian brother and his wife's witty, despairing conversations about her awkwardness.  The orphan Portia moves to London to live with her chilly half-brother, Thomas, and his arrogant, sophisticated wife, Anna. She is self-conscious in their glittering, too-perfectly decorated house. She records their drawing-room conversations and foibles in her journal. And Anna furtively reads it and complains even more about Portia's invasive watchfulness to two male writer friends than to Thomas.

Bowen's books were not read much during my student days. Viragos were just starting: we were more likely to know Antonia White or Elizabeth Taylor. A professor with a soft spot for me recommended The Death of the Heart during my miserable final year of grad school, when I became notorious for reading novels in my library study carrel between stints of long nail-biting study - I was a nervous wreck.

“Did you read Knox?”

“I can’t do anymore today.” (Swallowing a gummy worm.)

“Oh, then don’t. So you’re reading X? Have you read Elizabeth Bowen?”

In critical reassessments in the future, he thought that Bowen might be considered a better stylist than Virginia Woolf. I'm never sure what people mean when they say such things. The two are so different: Woolf and Bowen are at opposite ends of the spectrum - except that they record feminine experience. But Bowen has her own peculiar lyrical style. Her characters in her early novels sometimes seem wooden in comparison to her oddly shaped sentences - just a poetic word too many -, but it doesn't matter because the writing is so good. That is, if you’re a Bowen person.

Here's an example of her prose from the beginning of her 1932 novel, Friends and Relations:

The morning of the Tilney-Studdart wedding rain fell steadily from before daylight, veiling trees and garden and darkening the canvas of the marquee that should have caught the earliest sun in happy augury. The bride's relations frowned in sleep and were roused with a sense of doom by rain's inauspicious mutter on roofs and windowsills Clouds with their reinforcements came rolling over the Malvern hills. Till quite late, the rooms at Corunna Lodge were dusky as though the morning had been delayed.

It’s the phrases like “in happy augury,” "with a sense of doom," and "clouds with their reinforcements" that mark Bowen as a poet, but some of her beautiful adverbial phrases are excessive in the eyes of her detractors. She underlines and illustrates the augury for the marriage, which turns out to be mixed - the bride, Laurel, doesn't care about the weather, and only wants the wedding to Edward be over - but the sun comes out before the wedding. There are complications: Edward's mother, an eccentric divorcee, prefers Laurel’s sister, the more practical Janet, and is disappointed about her son's choice: she treats Janet as the daughter-in-law. And though Laurel marries Rodney, a wealthy man, the meetings between the sisters and their husbands are awkward, because Edward can't get over the fact that Rodney's uncle had a notorious affair with his mother, which ruined his childhood.

One of the main reasons to read early Elizabeth Bowen is to see how it develops into later-period brilliant Bowen. Friends and Relations is good, but one should start with The Death of the Heart.

The Babbling Book

In 1998 I was lounging in a bookstore, fervently praising John Thorndike's memoir, Another Way Home, when an eavesdropper swooped upon a copy, whisked it off to the cashier, and thanked me for the recommendation.

Smilng, he told the owner, “Hire that woman.”

1998 was a pretty good year for unpaid bookselling.  I'd been an accidental bookseller at The Owl for at least 10 years, since the buyer and I mutually sold each other on the strange novels of Rachel Ingalls and Robert Irwin.    I enjoyed hanging out at The Owl, reading bits and pieces of books I'd never heard of, and conducting ridiculous “first sentence tests” and “sincere or suck-up reviewer blurb tests.” I would daringly buy a book on the basis of a good first sentence, but not on a famous author’s blurb after discovering their frequent sell-outs. Customers overheard my ravings, as I overheard theirs . And sometimes we decided to buy each other's favorite books.

The owner of The Owl, a very cute little bookstore, offered me a job.

I thought the offer was ridiculous, because my already tiny salary as a greeting card writer would shrink to Lilliputian proportions if I accepted. “If you’d change your name to The Could I Make Any Less Money? Bookstore,” I said.

"What? Oh. Well, we'd give you a Christmas bonus."

I couldn’t honestly see that I’d be any good at running the cash register. This indie bookstore didn't have a computerized cash register, and I had serious money issues: like how much to tip in restaurants and at the hairdresser’s? Making change wasn’t something I’d done since sixth grade. But of course I was also supposed to chat to people.

“And that will be your strength.”

“Could you call yourself The Babbling Book?  The Accidental Bookseller?”

Bookstores don’t demand great social skills.

I didn’t take the job. I often wish I had. Not then, of course. The bookstore closed six months later, as so many independent bookstores have . But I would have liked to have been one of those arty bookstore saleswomen with jangly jewelry and glasses on a chain, and elegant dresses over tights and Mary Janes. It would have been fun except for the money. It would have been fun if the bookstore hadn't closed.

There are so few indie bookstores now. The Owl was a particularly good one.

But - and I could have told them this - owls were bad luck to the Romans.

N.B.  John Thorndike's Anna Delaney's Child is one of my favorite novels.  Save this novel!

To Serve Them All My Days

I can't fall into old-fashioned historical novels the way I used to. I keep coming up for air. Yet I've entertained myself the last couple of nights with To Serve Them All My Days, which is great fun, a sheer escape into a gentle post-World War I landscape that probably didn't exist. (By the way, To Serve Them All My Days is still in print and also readily available at used bookstores.)

This is the only book by R. F. Delderfield I've read. I despised his blockbuster novels on the basis of the titles until I saw To Serve Them All My Days on "Masterpiece Theater," the classics-adaptation showcase to which I was addicted as a young anglophile (though I’ve lost touch since then). As I was a "militant" anglophile, not an imperialist, I scorned books with chauvinistic titles - and titles don't get much worse than Delderfield's - like God Is an Englishman and Theirs Was the Kingdom. But perhaps the titles were code to alert a certain niche of readers who were half-nostalgic for the interwar period. At any rate, they were very popular. And perhaps the frame of “Masterpiece Theater” allowed the rest of us to enjoy them.

To Serve Them All My Days is a behind-the-scenes school novel, and if you've taught at a private school it will ring true. It is realistic in its descriptions of staff squabbles, politics, and changing alliances, though its depiction of the boys' quirky mischief, loyalty, and occasional gallantry may seem simplistic . The hero, David Powlett-Jones, a Welsh coal miner's son and a veteran of World War I, metamorphoses into a genius teacher at a private school. We first meet David on the brink of his interview for the teaching job for which he has applied at the urging of a doctor, who believes the healthy setting and fresh air will restore David's shattered nerves. And Bamfylde, located on the beautiful moors, does heal him. The challenge of teaching history to boys of all ages stimulates his intelligence and sparks his inherent creativity: he links WWI history with the distant past in a way that engages the boys. There's also romance, tragedy, and second chances. Delderfield is an intelligent writer whose solid novel is scaffolded on fascinating characters, an understated style, and old-fashioned, chronological storytelling.

Pamela Hansford Johnson's The Honours Board is a much, much more interesting school novel; but I've enjoyed my Delderfield.

The Dodie Smith Canon

The lively writer Dodie Smith can be read again and again without pall, but only her classic novel, I Capture the Castle, and her children's book, The Hundred and One Dalmations, are in print. Therefore, I was thrilled to find The Town in Bloom, a 1965 novel, at a sale. it’s amazing when a rare book like this turns up . Some public libraries have a severe weeding policy - a banner at our library practically says, NO ‘60s POP FICTION AVAILABLE -and this book is, indeed, an ex-library book.

I’ve read I Capture the Castle eight or nine times, and once carried it as a talisman when I taught at a school that didn’t hire substitutes and had to proctor my classes during a bout of laryngitis. When students approached, I looked so glazed and threateningly germy that they took turns scrawling my notes on the board, fetched me cups of lukewarm tea, and allowed me to read my Smith comfort book. (Later I disinfected it and passed it around. I’m afraid I Capture the Castle may have been more popular than anything I assigned.) I have never met anyone who was less than charmed by Smith’s characters and blithe voice. The young, dreamy narrator, Cassandra, an aspiring writer, writes droll sketches in her diary of her family life in a dilapidated castle. “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink,” she begins.

The Town in Bloom is very stagy, so if you’re interested in the theater, you’ll enjoy it. It begins with a luncheon. LIke the author, the narrator, Mouse, is an amusing dilettante writer and a former aspiring actress; one minute she aches to finish writing a book, the next she decides she'd prefer to paint. Her wry viewpoint charms us from the beginning. When her eccentric friend Lilian, a former actress, invites three old theater friends to lunch by dramatically placing a personals ad in The Times, Lilian, Mouse, and Molly are the three who show up. But when Mouse glimpses an old woman on a park bench who might be the missing Zelle, she embarks on a taxi chase across London.

The novel is quite charming, though Mouse is not as interesting as Cassandra. The luncheon forms a frame for the book: Mouse's narration of an unforgettable period of their youth makes up the main story. At 18, the stagestruck Mouse moves to London. Although she cannot find a job as an actress - she is told again and again that she is a bad actress - she lives in a club for actresses and artists where she meets Lilian and Molly, who act in musical comedies. When Mouse lands a job at a prestigious theater as a secretary, she learns the business of the theater. Unfortunately, when she understudies for an understudy, she turns a drama into a comedy and infuriates the actors. She also falls for the famous actor/manager Rex Crossway.

Some scenes are extremely entertaining. The three meet Zelle on a rainy afternoon when they park their suitcases and handbags at a NO-VACANCY boarding house while they search for a cheap place to stay. Then they forget where the boarding house is (they can't even find the street). In desperation they finally dash out of the pouring rain into an unlocked empty house to use the telephone. While nervously drying off, they tour the house, and when Zelle finds them she is instantly amused, helps them find their boarding house in a taxi, and then treats them to dinner. (She pretends at first that she has a gun, but isn't afraid because she has eavesdropped on them and finds them hilarious.)

Some scenes are flat, but others show her dramatic flair (Smith was also a playwright). I Capture the Castle is the better novel, but I’m also enjoying this mildly. The cover flap, to which one should never pay attention, informed me: “The unusual little heroine’s freshness of outlook recalls that of Cassandra in ICTC, but Mouse is a more fully developed character with a deeper knowledge of life.” When I finish I’ll let you know. Smith fans might be disappointed; theater fans might like it.

The Survival of the Fittest

I took time out from Drood (which has become increasingly terrifiying) to peruse another Pamela Hansford Johnson.

The Survival of the Fittest is a long, ambitious, sprawling novel which chronicles the relationships of a leftist group of friends from their youth in the 1930s through middle age in the 1960s. This is a remarkably earnest novel for Johnson, who doesn’t usually go in for epics. The Survival of the Fittest unknots the intertwined threads of leftist politics, history, love, and literature which link the group. The friends consists of a mixture of intelligent upwardly-mobile lower-middle-class workers and leftist aristocrats who, in the early days, denigrate or denounce their origins. Their coming of age in the wilds of the shadow of World War II marks them and sets them apart from subsequent generations. But in the time of crisis, literature unites the group: the unassuming, kind, stable Alison and the hard-drinking, mercurial Kit rise from anonymity to become successful, well-reviewed novelists; Clem is a well-known political journalist who analyzes the war; Bobby writes communist novels heavily edited by his publisher; and Jo publishes only one short story. All, both writers and non-writers, attempt to help the aspiring writer Jo, who cannot escape his childhood home because he and his sister Mildred, a teacher, must care for their domineering, crippled mother. And friendship means the most to him, since he does not form new familial bonds. This makes him the central figure of the group, as his home situation is static over the decades.

Musings on Warm Weather

I ran across the lawn to intercept my B&N packages. “Can I save you a trip?”

The UPS lady looked at me askance and wordlessly handed over my boxes. Then she rolled slowly down the street, idled in front of a nearby house, and spied on me until I shambled back into the house. She really did wait (maybe she was on a break). Perhaps she didn’t recognize me with my new short hair ( I barely recognize myself) and was determined to make sure I wasn't some light-fingered Jehovah's Witness camping on my porch. Her mission done, she roared off in the truck. (In the pic below, don't the trees look ready to wash their hair? It's the reflection!)


It was a stunning, high-blue-skied, warm day of dripping sunshine - too lovely to stay indoors and read Bleak House. After a lazy morning with Esther and the the Jellybys, I mounted my bicycle and headed downtown to the Coffee Garden, skirting the smashed glass on the bridge - why do alienated drunks break bottles on pedestrian bridges in the spring? And where do they get the glass since everything is made of plastic nowadays? Though glass is biodegradable, so there should be a concerted effort to shut down plastic factories and go back to glass and WAXED CARTONS.

After grabbing my coffee and cookie, I sat outside on a bench squinting (forgot my sunglasses) and counting the number of people in black. Fifteen in black inside, five in the garden. People in pastels and raggedy smokers in smoke-bleached garments tended to dominate the garden. Black-clad business prima donnas clung to their artificial air-conditioned comfort zone. The air was good today, according to an air quality emissions expert. Perhaps we should have spread the word and liberated the primas? But who would have been their eco-leader? Not I, because sadly I committed a fashion faux pas wearing jeans with muddy hems (from the road) and a mail-order blouse I didn't have the patience to return. A wardrobe of black can make infinite fashion statements. If you don't know who you are, black is also handy. That stretchy black dress can be tarted up with green jewelry and a scarf around the waist. That black jacket looks rather well with your black silk t-shirt, slacks, and dominatrix boots.


Then I went into the library, which is shaped like a giant airplane made apparently out of copper screen. I grabbed a book, The Tea-Olive Birdwatching Society, and plopped down at a table. The birdwatcher characters were all Baptists who inherited some land and were apparently prepared to murder to keep it intact. Since I'm not as religious and deluded as Beulah-Land and Love-Divine and the other birdwatchers named after hymn phrases, I certainly wasn't keen on their murder plan. So much for cozies.... I discreetly moved away from the nearest homeless person after a bug appeared on my table. SQUASH. I GOT IT. Traumatized, I curled up in a ghastly meta-armchair upstairs. The back of the chair is several feet back even from tall people's backs, so that if I wanted to sit back comfortably and didn't want my long legs dangling above the floor, my one hope was to find a footstool and spread out as though on a chaise longue. Footstool, footstool! There are no footstools. Someone has taken them home, or something. So I had to sit cross-legged, muddy soles up: and if that didn't make me look like a homeless person....well! I was expecting to be herded out any minute. I was reading a library book that made very little sense. I abandoned The Tea-Olive Birdwatching Society conspicuously beside a computer. I was afraid to put it back: bugs.

I saw a boat roaring - BRRRRRrRR- on the river and didn't even mind. Several rangers were hauling and chopping trees downed by last year's brutal storms. Alas, the reading tree is gone. For many summers I saw the same man reading next to the river under a particular tree I always called the reading tree.

Mrs. Tim News

In August, Bloomsbury will reissue D. E. Stevenson's charming Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, the first novel in the out-of-print Mrs. Tim quartet. It is one of the launch titles of Bloomsbury's new reprint library, the Bloomsbury Group. I raved about Mrs. Tim last fall when I found it at the library - it is one of those books you can't help but laugh aloud over, even if you wake up your spouse while reading in bed - and if you're apprehensive about the prospect of militaristic overtones, the breezy Mrs. Tim of the Regiment has none. The intelligent, witty Hester records her daily life in a gossipy diary, which is loosely based on D. E. Stevenon's own diaries. Published at approximately the same time as The Provincial Lady, the narrative is to my mind much more fleshed-out and amusing. But it's safe to say that if you like The Provincial Lady - and even if you don't like The Provincial Lady - you'll like Mrs. Tim, because she is frankly less dry and snobbish. I can't wait to acquire it: when I looked last fall, the prices were too high, though they might have come down since. Remember last summer when the Virago edition of Rachel Ferguson's The Brontes Went to Woolworths was selling at the scandalous price of $50? So was Mrs. Tim. (And, by the way, The Brontes Went to Woolworths is another of the Bloomsbury Group titles, so we can also buy that in an affordable edition).

Here is the link to Bloomsbury's Mrs. Tim page:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/Books/details.aspx?isbn=9781408803462

And here is the link to my review:
http://frisbeewind.blogspot.com/2008/10/d.html

The Honours Board

We went to Carpe Diem today, our favorite coffee house, which was teeming with college students studying for midterms and writing furiously on their computers. Of course they could have been writing e-mail. Some were definitely surfing the internet. No cell phones, though. Minimal conversation. At any rate there we were, all of us quiet, sipping coffee, and reading. The atmosphere of a library annex.

I continue to swoop upon out-of-print middlebrow novels at university libraries. My taste for the underrated is galvanized by my infatuation with Pamela Hansford Johnson, my favorite writer of the moment. I just finished The Honours Board, which is one of her better books, a fascinating portrayal of the lives of the disparate, volatile, questing, and sometimes anguished staff of a liberal boys’ prep school. Johnson's books are really novels of character rather than style: her plain style is serviceable and energetic and her intelligence shines through, but it is her energetic characters who keep you reading. Even when her plots falter (which is seldom), her characters are unusually well-drawn - though often like no one you would want to meet in real life.



In this novel, however, the characters are equally divided between the genial and the horrific. The headmaster, Annick, and his super-competent wife, Grace, strive to provide a “family” atmosphere for the faculty, genuinely wanting harmony in the school, smoothing the conflicts between good teachers and demonized, conservative and liberal, popular and unpopular. But Annick is increasingly nervous about the school’s financial problems and the failure of his students, despite good teaching, to move on to top public schools. So the novel begins at a double crisis: Annick is resisting the offer of a conservative - and sadistic - math and gym teacher, Rupert Massinger, who, with his gym teacher wife, Blossom, want to buy the school; and he is also welcoming a brilliant student, Quillan, who he hopes will win a scholarship and raise the reputation of the school. There is pressure on all sides.

But the book really focuses on the secrets of the faculty. Johnson’s teachers are not stereotypical, and it is their very individuality that makes their "case histories" and neuroses believable. The terrible Rupert, who is an unsuccessful math teacher , has a secret drawer of kinky literature (the less said the better) and insists on borderline-rape-style sex with the secretary who discovers it . Mrs. Murray, the French teacher, another uncharismatic teacher, is hysterical and lonely, older than most of the teachers at 56, and socially inept: “She had never been able to accept the kindly attempts of the Annicks to draw her into the family life of the staff; asked for sherry or a chat, she would almost invariably find some excuse for not going.” Yet she desperately needs support. “As usual the boys were stealthily out of hand. Richard Searle had dipped a snail in an ink-pot and was setting it to trail across his book. David Maitland was making spit-balls and piling them up like miniature cannon balls in a heap. Morgan was humming under his breath, just quietly enough to escape rebuke...”

(Oh dear! Johnson must have taught at a private school.)

Then there is the brilliant Canning, a scientist from the lower-middle class, who lives a sort of alternate childhood through creating wonderful lessons and labs at this school for the upper classes. The star teacher of Downs Park, Canning is constantly being offered huge salaries to go work in industry . But his affair with Annick’s daughter, a beautiful widow with a complex sex life, is one of the draws of the schools. One strait-laced teacher's wife is a frivolous, witty alcoholic, who unfortunately falls down all over campus and during the art classes she attempts to teach. And then there is Betty Cope, the ultra-feminine assistant matron, a lesbian who inspires unrequited love. And on and on.

Anyone who has taught at a private school will appreciate this book, though it is not just a school novel.

Oh, the picture is of Eton, by the way. I couldn't find anything better.

Bleak House at the Home Cafe

My reading of the epic Drood has inspired me to return to Dickens. I was afraid this would happen. I decided halfway through to jump over to Bleak House, though it would have made more sense to try The Mystery of Edwin Drood, since I could at least have pretended a scholarly motive.

So I’m reading Bleak House and Drood both at once, more or less, if that’s possible.

I sat outdoors this afternoon and couldn’t believe how gorgeous it was. Sun on steaming thawing mud: the mud is cold but the light was beautiful and warm and it was a preview of spring. I balanced my book, tea and sandwich on the soiled plastic table, which needs a shot or two of Windex: I pretend the table and chairs under the tree are our "Home Cafe." Coffee, tea, water: we have it all al fresco. Squirrels and dogs were running about the yard, birds were singing gently, and there was a fair amount of city traffic noise. The dog next door alertly watched me and occasionally barked to make sure I didn’t jump the fence into his back yard. That is his nightmare.

So...I'm loving reading about Lady Dedlock. Usually it’s Esther Summerson whom I find cleverest; she is sweet and witty...and I don’t understand people who consider her cloying, as does the character Wilkie Collins in Drood. But this time I’m fascinated by Lady Dedlock’s frozen bitterness and ennui, and it occurs to me that she’s more than the stick figure I dismissed her as before. That’s what is so great about Dickens. Every time you read him you find more.

I had expected a break from laudanum and opium scenes in Bleak House. But no. I was startled by the minor character Nemo’s death from an opium overdose, havingI completely forgotten this detail: Nemo, a figure from Lady Dedlock’s past, has fallen in the world, been reduced to earning his living a law writer (a copyist of legal papers), and dies an opium addict.

Why did I turn to Bleak House instead of the brilliant Our Mutual Friend? Bleak House is more likable. My busy mind told me the reading was overdue, because it’s as necessary to Dickensians to reread Bleak House constantly as it is to Austenites to read Pride and Prejudice. By the way, it strikes me as strange that there are so many sequels to Jane Austen books but so few to Dickens's.

Cheap Date in the Wild West

Although there have been beautiful days this February, we’re all longing for the end of winter. There’s no snow, but there’s a bone-chilling, tree-shaking wind which stupefies, induces headache, and creates the creaky impression of a haunted house. Duvets, shawls, scarves, and afghans drape every piece of furniture. Time to bring out the cocoa...

But the important thing is to KEEP WALKING. Gotta conquer the outdoors! We boldly walked the trail yesterday clutching our independent coffeehouse paper cups, huddled in puffy coats with hoods, battling the wind (“It’s at our backs on the way home.”).. Only the intrepid walked the trail: a few gloomy dog-walkers, a rosy-faced bicyclist in a face mask riding 100 miles an hour to keep warm, and one crazy runner in shorts and a t-shirt.


Fortunately the frosty walk ended at a used bookstore. We hadn’t been here in quite a while and were happy to see the stock had changed. There was lots of Updike on the sales rack, as well as Daphne du Maurier. I longed for a Pocket Book copy of The Glassblowers , but it was falling apart. "Why do you want that?" my other half asked. I found a copy of Wyndham Lewis’s The Vulgar Streak (completely unknown to me, but in one of those beautiful Black Sparrow Press editions) and Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, a long novel about a World War One vet who has to adjust to teaching in a remote English boys' school - lots of class issues. Inspired by a Masterpiece Theater production, I read this years ago. And even if I don’t read either of these books, it was fun to browse and was basically a cheap date.

If only there were more used bookstores in town...but we have to drive 200 miles to the next one...

Drood

I had to buy Drood.

Friends and acquaintances won’t be surprised. I was the goofy young woman who used to read Dickens on the roof of the office building . My co-workers and I would sit up there during breaks, illicitly soaking up the sun, even in the dead of winter, sometimes chatting, other times reading (most of us reading because we were bored to death with each other), and some of us smoking - something (not opium like Drood; mostly cigarettes and cigars). We wore old air force parkas with the fur flapping in fringes around the hoods: you get the picture. The Roofs on the Plains Are Freezing-Windswept. Occasionally someone would read something witty aloud from the Village Voice or even, very occasionally, from Dickens.

People started naming their cats Nat Hentoff and Drood.

I was browsing at Borders the other day with a 40%-off coupon. It turned out to be inapplicable towards buying Dan Simmons’s new 30%-off bestseller Drood, which I snapped up. I've heard about Simmons for years because everyone insisted that I needed to read his science fiction account of the Iliad, Ilium - though Achilles seemed a sufficiently sci-fi-ish hero already in the epic. But a historical novel narrated by Wilkie Collins and centered on Dickens and his research for The Mystery of Edwin Drood was necessary to my life immediately.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood isn’t my favorite, but that’s all right - because Drood is as much about Wilkie Collins as it is about Dickens’ unfinished last novel. Cleverly presented as Wilkie Collins’s account of the last five years of Dickens’s life, it focuses on his bitter jealousy of Dickens (particularly of his most perfect book Our Mutual Friend), Collins’ growing addiction to laudanum, and his night walks with Dickens through London’s ghostly underworld in search of Drood, an opium addict/angel of death, whom Dickens claimed to have met during a traumatic train crash he survived in 1865 (along with his girlfriend, the actress Ellen Tiernan and her mother).

It’s an eerie novel. Well-written, well-researched, and historically accurate except for the Drood fantasy, it also cleverly takes the form of a sort of gigantic Wilkie Collins melodrama. There is the borderline hysteria of the novel of sensation: Dickens is a nervous wreck after the train wreck, and his motivation for pursuing Drood, who may or may not exist, baffles Collins as he is dragged by Dickens through crypts and tunnels, occasionally guided by Detective Hatchery, and later persecuted by Hatchery’s boss Inspector Field, a blackmailer who, though this doesn’t make much sense, needs Wilkie to tell him everything Dickens says about Drood (since his employee is guiding Dickens to Drood, this plot device seems thin, but it’s best not to think. It combines the character of Bucket in Bleak House with the detective in The Moonstone).

Anyway I’m enjoying this enormously (771 pages: I’d better). Collins's voice is easier to imitate than Dickens's, and though Simmons doesn't exactly claim he is doing that, it seems to work.

Night and Silence Who Is Here?

This winter I have read Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Dorothy Merlin trilogy twice, and it would be fibbing to say I’m not going to read it again. Her three riotous satires on the writing life, The Unspeakable Skipton (still in print and considered a classic), Night and Silence Who Is Here?, and Cork Street, Next to the Hatter’s, have saved me from the February doldrums. These suberb comedies are loosely connected by the character of Dorothy Merlin, an obnoxious poet/playwright who extols maternity in her deliciously terrible, pretentious verses (cleverly and merrily ghosted by Johnson). In The Unspeakable Skipton, she is only a minor character, a tourist in Belgium despised and exploited by the impoverished expatriate novelist Skipton, who ekes out a living brokering fake antiques, arranging seedy sexual shows and other shady deals.


The second book, Night and Silence Who Is Here?, though not quite as perfect as the first and third, is very, very funny, a kind of Lucky Jim-ish comedy about Dorothy’s friend, Matthew, an aristocratic playboy who is lionized by an American college after Dorothy bullies him into writing articles about her. “Since he mildly liked her work, he saw no reason why not to; and as her total oeuvre consisted of twenty shortish poems and four slim verse-dramas, the labor was not demanding. He had all the luck of those who find themselves, by accident, first in the field. He was immediately accepted as the world authority on Dorothy Merlin, because he was literally the only one.”

Matthew looks forward to his term as a Visiting Fellow. But college life in a freezing New Hampshire village without shops or pubs comes as a shock since he can neither cook nor drive and must cadge meals or drink them when the union restaurant is closed (as it constantly is). He spends most of his time foraging for food and huddling in misery with the other fellows (two of whom are also English non-drivers) and thus writes little about Dorothy except for the book's title: ‘Dorothy Merlin: Tentative Steps Towards a Synthesis of Imagery” (which he steals from Cobb College's Emily Dickinson Fellow), The Fellows are both absurd and likable. Ruddick is writing about Emily Dickinson's drinking and forever cornering Matthew to listen to the latest "drinking" quotes from her poems. "Partake as doth the Bee/Abstemiously." Etc. Ruddick is really hysterical and somehow sympathetic: he's crazy but is, well, sweet.

But in Matthew's subversive protests against the inadequate arrangements for the Fellows, he begins to politick for the job as Director...

It's a very silly book, but so much fun.

Poppy Shakespeare

Sometimes it may seem that I read no contemporary books. Certainly I rarely write about them. Once upon a time I was a freelance book reviewer (for real journals, not my book journal); but I eventually lost interest and found that I’d rather read classics, or the “ quirky" tomes published by Overlook Press, Virago, Persephone, or Capuchin Classics, than sit down at my computer and write about mediocre new books. Did my snarkiness help the book industry? No.

So what a thrill when I come across a contemporary book like Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare, a madly satiric, poignant, and witty novel about madness which I found so addictive I could barely tear myself away to watch Battlestar Galactica (date night at our house). That says it all.

N, the narrator, has been mad all her life. She is an out-patient at a day program at a mental hospital, where she sits around the common room smoking cigarettes and exchanging jibes with Astrid Arse-Wipe and Middle-Class Michael, occasionally attending “life goals” groups where she learns to make lists of pros and cons (heavily weighted by her desired result, of course). She has spent her life shuttled around from one home or hospital to another. The day program has been as good as it gets. She calculates like a canny stockbroker to earn straight 6es on her yearly mental health assessment, because she needs her “mad money” and it’s hard work to remain an out-patient.

But life changes for N when she is assigned as a guide to Poppy Shakespeare, the new patient.

Poppy doesn’t want to be mad. She has been rounded up and dragged into the day program, a fiasco that resulted from a multiple-choice personality test she takes on the first day of a New Careers program. And she can’t persuade anyone she’s not mad. The “mental health” lawyers won’t work for her unless she’s on the “mad money” register.

It is N's original, vulerable, but pitch-perfect comic voice that makes this novel perfect. ("You know what I'm saying" is included in every insecure but incisive paragraph.)

“‘So you neurotic, psychotic, or what?’ I said, like just making conversation. Ask most dribblers what’s wrong, they’re that fucking grateful, they’ll talk till their throats is raw, but Poppy just stopped where she was, head down, not moving so much as a muscle and she didn’t say nothing for maybe a minute then, I can’t describe it like anything else, she turned to me and gave me this look like I’d pissed on her mother’s grave. ‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ she said. “I Am Not a Nutter. There is Nothing Whatever Wrong with My Head. Alright?’”

To N Poppy's wish to escape the mad community is madness. But the story of N's and Poppy's friendship and Poppy's desperate attempt to escape the day program are touching and absorbing. It is ironic that Poppy is a compulsory patient just as the new Minister of Madness is threatening to privatize the health system and pressuring hospitals to “cure” patients and release them into the community.

A great book.

Green Dolphin Country

Some books hold up; others don’t.

You can still find worn-out, well-read books by Elizabeth Goudge at the library, but her old-fashioned novels appeal to a narrower constituency these days.

Elizabeth Goudge was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up: I segued eagerly from her children’s books - The Little White Horse won the Carnegie Award - to adult novels like The Dean’s Watch and Green Dolphin Country (published as Green Dolphin Street in America). I read her books again and again. And I remember being puzzled: why weren’t these classics?

Who could not adore her beautifully embellished descriptions and eccentric Dickensian characters?

Okay, these are weird, weird books. I’m rereading Green Dolphin Country in a new Capuchin Classics edition, which makes it look respectable because the design looks like a Penguin, so I don’t have to read it secretly. This is so enjoyable: it transports me into Goudge’s magical world, and her whimsical style, her liberal use of adjectives and sweeping descriptive paragraphs, really turn this into a a fantasy; it wouldn’t suit every reader. This romantic novel is set in the Channel Islands and New Zealand in the 19th century; the heroines are two sisters, the demanding, ambitious Marianne and her peaceful, lovely younger sister Marguerite. William, the generous “boy next-door” who often “screws up,” as Obama would say, is loved by both. And in their late twenties they’re still unmarried, both waiting for William, though they haven’t heard from him since he left the island. William, ever impulsive and blundering, has inadvertently deserted from the English navy in China after an encounter with a conwoman prostitute. His ship sails without him; he eventually settles in New Zealan. After ten years in the lumber business, he writes a letter proposing marriage, naming Marianne as the bride instead of Marguerite by a drunken slip of the pen. And the rest of the novel revolves around the slip of the pen and its consequences.

Such a lovely book: so passionate, absorbing, and fun.

Yet I could not recommend this to everybody. It’s not that I don’t love it; I do. I simply couldn’t guarantee that everyone would like this flowery style. It’s for a special kind of reader, someone who doesn’t mind long stylized unwindings of ideas - the first 200 pages are devoted to growing up in the Channel Islands. William doesn’t arrive in New Zealand till page 231. The novel is out of date, written for a different time. In 1944 it won the Literary Guild Award and the MGM Literary Award, but no one writes books like this anymore.

It begins: “Sophie Le Patourel was reading aloud to her two daughters from the Book of Ruth, as they lay prostrate upon their backboards, digesting their dinners and improving their deportment. This spending of the after-dinner hour upon their backboards instead of in the parlour was as a matter of fact a punishment for insubordination during the morning, but their Papa being from home Sophie was softening the punishment by reading aloud. She was an indulgent mother, adoring her children, anxious to keep them with her as long as possible, afraid of what might be done to them by the great world outside the schoolroom window, the great world that in this mid-nineteen-century horrified her with its bustle and vulgarity and noise, George Stephenson’s terrible steam engine hurtling people to destruction at twenty-five miles an hour, its dreadful balloons in which man in his profanity was daring the heavens in which it was never the intention of his Creator that he should disport himself, its restless young people with thoughts for ever straining towards new countries and new ways, and its insubordinate children like her daughter Marianne.”

There are Goudge enthusiasts out there. Check out the Elizabeth Goudge Society at:

www.elizabethgoudge.org

A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep

Last year I became a Virago addict: I read so many Viragos that I began to recognize the types of heroines: curious spinsters who question the status quo, mischievous curate’s wives, ambitious working women, courageous political activists, trapped women, and mothers who learn to "think outside the box." Much as I loved these books, I needed to branch out.   Gradually I began to remember the cherished women’s literature of my own childhood and youth.  So this is the winter of establishing my personal “Virago-Persephone” list, meaning that, though I’m not a publisher, these out-of-print books have merit and should be shared.  


It's been a Rumer Godden marathon around here.  On Monday I stayed up most of the night reading her compelling and beautiful memoir, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, which spans her first 38 years. Godden, raised partly in India, partly in England, had an idyllic childhood before being banished by well-meaning parents to a succession of horrifying English boarding schools.  "I still cannot fathom why, as it had been decided that Fa would go back to India alone and Mam would stay with us four in a rented house, we could not have been day girls which would have been more merciful; perhaps Fa and Mam had decided Jon was out of hand and, of course, where Jon went I went too."

At a convent boarding school, which obviously inspired her best-seller, Black Narcissus, a group of brutal, narrow-minded nuns resolved to crush Rumer and her older sister Jon's obstreperous spirits.  Rumer was branded a "liar" for telling exaggerated stories about India; and when Jon had malaria she was accused of "rubbing the thermometer on her blanket - a school trick we poor innocents had never heard of - and she was told to get up, dress and go back to her class at once."  Eventually they were yanked out of this school:  Mam realizing something was wrong when they ceased to write letters:  Jon refused to write because of the nuns' censorship.

Five years later, when Mam and her four daughters returned to India, Rumer and Jon were debutantes, and Rumer, who had never had a beau, was so flattered that she almost married at 18.  She regained her senses in time, broke the engagement, and returned to England to study dance education. (Fa said it would have been cheaper to keep her at home).  She ran a dancing school in Calcutta for several years and, between classes, wrote her first novel; then, during World War II, as a wife and mother of two children, having written her first "big" book, Black Narcissus, Godden retreated to Kashmir as “an abandoned wife” (her irresponsible, Mr. Micawber-type husband joins the army and takes up with another woman).  She renovated a bungalow, taught the children, gardened so they could live off their own vegetables, and with a sculptor neighbor traded their  children  back and forth:  it was the only way she could have uninterrupted work time.  Eventually a shocking episode with the servants cut short the idyll.  This fascinating memoir uncovers the roots of her more autobiographical novels, and in the cases of The Greengage Summer and Kingfishers Catch Fire, she quotes excerpts. A fascinating life is obviously needed

Godden captures the atmosphere of India with beauty and wit and lightly conveys the advantages of living in such a multicultural society. She also elucidates the joys and problems of a writer’s life. The book ends with her return to England. Her second memoir, A House with Four Rooms, describes her years in England.

Godden grew up inseparable from her older sister Jon, a talented writer whose bouts of mental illness impeded her stamina and prevented her achieving the same stature as Rumer.

I haven't read her, but I certainly would be interested.

More Rumer Godden

This winter I’ve begun to read Rumer Godden again.

I rejected her many years ago, in my late teens, after I began to concentrate on the classics. Godden wasn’t good enought. Reading in bed after a day of work was too good to waste on pop fiction when I could be reading Dickens or Austen. (I’d Rather Be Reading Dickens: the T-shirt.)

I obviously hadn’t read Godden’s India novels.



Breakfast with the Nikolides and Kingfishers Catch Fire are both minor classics. Kingfishers is a little better than minor.

Kingfishers Catch Fire, an autobiographical novel based on Godden’s experiences as an impoverished mother of two children who moves to Kashmir to “live simply,” is a beautiful, moving, and symmetrically perfect gem, a poetic, sometimes comic narrative in which Godden contrasts the relative meanings of poverty to an English family and Indian villagers. Painted against a gorgeous landscape, described in colorful, piercing detail of sights and sounds, the novel delineates the misunderstandings and resentment catalyzed when the rebellious, hip mother intrudes on village life and transgresses social barriers without understanding the traditions and hierarchy dictated by pride and poverty.

In Breakfast with the Nikolides, the action revolves around the death of a dog.

When Louise Pool and two daughters return to India after eight years in France, Charles, still at odds with Louise, tries to get to know his children. He gives a dog to Emily. The dog comes down with rabies, and as Louise recognizes the symptoms, she hysterically demands that they put down the dog; she screams until she gets her way, though Charles and the young veterinarian, Dr. Das, are more conservative about the diagnosis.

The family is shattered by Louise’s actions. The children have been away at breakfast with the Nikolides. The dog’s death is a trauma, and Emily will not forgive the mother. The dog’s death also has ramifications for a widening circle, including Dr. Das, who has struggled into the middle class, and his friend, Anil, a Brahmin.

Of course it is Godden's elegant style that makes the books. But the elaborate structure underlying the style is worth studying, too.

I can remember how dismayed and dumbfounded I was when a teacher friend told me Rumer Godden was her favorite writer.

Now I respect her for standing up for this undervalued writer.

The Unspeakable Skipton

Pamela Hansford Johnson's The Unspeakable Skipton is an "underclassic," an unknown, under-read, potentially cult-status humor novel - if anyone knew about it. The good news: it's still in print. The bad news: it's not readily available in the U.S. (Just ask your bookseller.) But it is well-worth reading; in fact I intend to start all over and read it again tonight.

The droll Skipton inhabits the same portrait-of-a-writer universe as Anthony Burgess's hilarious Enderby and Updike's Bech: A Book.
Skipton is a horrific character, but Johnson's short, witty book about his horribleness is perfect: she reveals his insecurities as well as his exasperating self-centeredness. Her style mimics the somewhat anemic prissiness of Skipton, who is the most finicky, narcissictic, self-deluded of writers: he lives in a garret in Bruges ("in one of "the last of the patrician houses," as he fussily reminds himself); wears socks with individually knitted toes because he thinks it's faintly obscene to have toes touching; writes 250 often libellous words a day, which preclude his neverending new epic from being published; and also repulsively cons his fond publisher and a relative, whom he refers to as Flabby Anne, out of money, hassling them via insane invectives. Without conscience, he acts as a hustler/procurer of fake antiques and voyeuristic private parties at which mildly obscene skits of Leda and the Swan are performed. The misanthropic Skipton's shady business depradations are completely, fascinatingly detached from his writing.

Skipton always needs money. He is the greatest artist of his time, so he believes, but he must sneak out of his patrician house to evade his landlady. Her daughter thinks he's so hilarious that she smuggles up food he hasn't paid for. But the tricklings of cash are not enough - he occasionally must pay his landlady - and he honestly is incapable of making a living. Yet he is so unprincipled that he believes that everyone is fair prey, and has no morals where conning the rich is concerned. At the center of the book is his chance meeting with a group of literary tourists and his attempts to dub them out of money: Dorothy Merlin, a playwright, her husband, Cosmo, a bookseller, Duncan, a photographer kind of playboy, and Matthew, a mysterious aristocrat. He's equally matched here, however, and underrates his opponents, particularly the prima donna Dorothy Merlin's husband.

Ruth Rendell writes the enthusiastic introduction to the Prion Humour Classics edition.

Anyway, it's a coincidence that I read this and Bech in the same week.

Bech: A Book

I've been attempting to read Bech: A Book, in memoriam of Updike. The buzz is that Henry Bech is "Updike's irreverent alter ego," so naturally I was curious to have a go at this lighter Updike. But these linked stories about the witty, patronizing, and often spiteful Bech utterly dismay me. Bech, on a literary tour of Russia and eastern Europe, teases and ridicules his well-meaning guides. In "Rich in Russian," he enjoys skewering the English of his guide, the translator Kate. After she earnestly shares her feelings about their tour of Tolstoy's house, rambling on about where he wrote his books, he rudely apes her English syntax, "I also like the way Upton Sinclair was in his bookcase." At one point, he reduces her to tears, and then guiltily tries to make it up to her by a surreal shopping trip In Moscow. (Kate doesn't enjoy the understocked Russian shops.)

In the next chapter, "Bech in Rumania," he gently mocks Petrescu, the polite, helpful guide and translator of Melville : Petrescu is "a fool for books." While Petrescu eagerly quizzes him about American literature, Bech, bored and rude, mimics him. Petrescu: "Is it possible to you that Pierre is a yet greater work than The White Whale?" Bech: "No, I think it is yet not so great, possibly." Petrescu: "You are ironical about my English." Yes, this is humorous --but Bech, oblivious, doesn't seem to care that people catch on to his barbs. Of course Updike portrays Bech's insensitivity, as well as his humor. Everyone is fodder for Bech's satire, and for Updike's too. Updike obviously enjoys himself, giving payback for the indignities of writer tours and other demands on his public persona. And it's all a literary joke: it opens with the fictional character Bech's letter to Updike, flippantly giving his blessing to Updike's "indecency of writing about a writer. Thus the metafictional Updike plays Boswell to Bech's Johnson.

"Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silky mechanism whereby America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage....We veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Halloween priests' robes a-rustle with economy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Book-of-the-Month Club, amid a standing corwd of rueful Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degenerating in the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers," etc.

It's brilliant, and yet it palls very quickly. Obviously writers experience these difficulties on writers' tours. But a little of this satire goes a long way..

Rumer Godden

Finally, a beautiful Saturday! We turned off the heat, threw the porch door open, and basked in the sunlight, reading our library books. The sun feels so good! If we’d been braver, we would have sat outside in our Adirondack chairs, though there are still seven or eight crunchy inches of snow to deter us. (If we'd been younger, we would have done it.)

This timidly slanting light reveals memories of past reading in other gasping thaws. I remember with delight long ice-crunching walks to the library at the age of 12, gambling with my first adult library card on Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, and Lloyd C.(?) Douglas's The Robe. It took a haphazard divining to come up with these three choices, but they were not as weird as you might think. I knew Rumer Godden from The Doll’s House, probably the only one of hers children’s books I'd read; I picked out The Magic Toyshop for the cover (and became hooked on Angela Carter almost before anyone else did); and The Robe because I’d been thrilled by the movie. Obviously my taste was all over the map, but I read all three indiscriminately, with equal enjoyment.

So...to go back in time, I've been reading some "real" library books, the old ones you find when you browse without preconceptions. I've rediscovered Rumer Godden's China Court, which was proudly displayed in the glass bookcases at my grandmother’s house. China Court was a Book- of-the-Month-Club book, as were most of my grandmother’s books. As a child I thought the novel had too many threads, portrayed too many generations, and was confusingly non-linear with parallel and intersecting back-and-forth-in time lines. Of course now I love it; it's exactly my kind of book. Five generations, the rise and fall of a Cornish house, the fourth generation abandoning the quarry and the obsolete china factory for more lucrative, less demanding careers. The novel begins with the death of Mrs. Quin, the third-generation dowager of the slightly dilapidated, once grand house, China Court.  Mrs. Quin, an unconventional woman who was originally rejected by Lady Patrick as an appropriate friend for her son, has, ironically, not only married into the family, but become the last matriarch and house historian.  Yet, through her wild garden, she has somehow renewed the house and even made the past more accessible.

One thing I love about Godden's style:  characters who are peripheral to the action, or even family members looking back at the past, comment, Greek-chorus-like, on events in the narrative.  We first learn about Mrs. Quin and life at China Court from her maids.

Godden writes:  "Neither Cecily nor Mrs. Abel whispered, nor did they speak of Mrs. Quin as if she were not there, but all the same, things were muted; there was no early firing of explosives from the quarry, which had stopped work when the news was heard and the men had been sent home as a mark of respect.  'But the news will be in the village before the men,' said Cecily.

"Of course, Dr. Taft's car would have been seen, then Mrs. Abel coming down, and Cecily knew the vicar would be here at any moment.  'No one goes in or out of China Court who isn't seen,' complained Cecily often, 'seen and talked about.'  The village was not kind: proudly inbred, it kept for strangers the spirit of its wrecker forebear, though where it respected it was staunch and for Mrs. Quin there would be genuine feeling.  'Mrs. Quin gone!'..."

Godden's best books deserve rereading:  most are out-of-print, at least in the U.S. We should lobby for  Persephone or Virago to "rediscover" them. T

John Updike

John Updike died of cancer today at the age of 76.

I wasn’t a natural fan of John Updike. He was not John Cheever, the reigning chronicler of the suburbs whom I idolized in my university days. Cheever’s stories were easier to read, more direct, less disturbing than Updike's.

It wasn’t until I read the Rabbit books that I understood Updike’s genius.

With humor, pathos, and a complete lack of sentimentality, Updike wrote about Rabbit's hollow confusion and stumbling attempts to break away from his class paradigm. Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest seemed to describe my life, or rather the contiguous lives of lower-middle-class male relatives who played pick-up basketball, yearningly watched sports, and broke their wives’ hearts by picking up women and sometimes leaving their families. The scenes are so familiar: Rabbit running away and his wife Janice drinking; Rabbit returning to Janice, and the two trapped by conventions and tragedy; Rabbit eventually managing his father-in-law's car dealership while Janice blooms; and their son Nelson’s cocaine addiction.

Isn't this the stuff of all our lives? Even as a metaphor?

The Rabbit books meant so much to me that I vigorously chose Rabbit Is Rich for my reluctant book group in 2000. Nobody wanted to read it, but they were stunned by the beautiful writing and the easy flow of the story. It was the third of the Rabbit quartet, and they loved it and immediately changed their minds about Updike’s reputation for inducing boredom.

Old interviews with Updike are all over the internet today. He was brilliant, calm, and patient with reporters who asked the same questions again and again. Was he too old to write well? Did he think he’d written better in his youth? Updike, who had liver spots on his hands and apparently was already suffering from cancer last fall, talked about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the youth culture and America’s restless insistence on young talent.

His books were always there: something new to read in the teacher’s lounge at lunchtime. “Is that actually good?” someone asked, thinking I was posing as an intellectual when I read Memories of the Ford Administration. Oh please, give me a break.

“Of course.”

He won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Circle Award, so he certainly wasn't lacking in the awards department. But he should have won the Nobel for Rabbit if for nothing else

He was imminently readable.

Off to read Updike.

A Favourite of the Gods

Sybille Bedford, a widely-touted novelist who died in 2006, was described in The Guardian as a writer who "did indeed look back to a multi-lingual society of salons and private trains, flawed by arrogance and complacency..." (Is there perhaps a hint of an apology in "indeed?")

She is so highly recommended (there seems to be a kind of mystique) that I did attempt to read A Favourite of the Gods.

Bedford wrote beautifully, with a luminous clarity which validates her reputation for intelligence and wit. The narrative of the novel perfectly orchestrates brilliant style with a loose plot centered on the complications of sexual fidelity. This Jamesian saga about three generations of women is vaguely reminiscent of Portrait of a Lady. James never wrote a saga, of course, but the characters on a superficial level fit into his paradigm of naive women and duplicitous men. Anna, an American ingenue (New England), marries an impoverished Italian prince, who makes her happy for many years. But when she learns of her husband’s long-term affair with a chic Italian woman he has known from childhood, she flees with her teenage daughter, Constanza, to England. And for a long time Constanza does not understand the reason for the separation. Since adultery seems so commonplace to her (she has already had affairs), she believes her father committed some crime, probably involving money.


In this case, unlike any of James’s novels, the prince is sweet, not a monster, but promiscuous. All three of the women, Anna, Constanza, and her daughter, Flavia, have different morals, all shaped by their birthplaces: America, Italy, and England.

The daughter of an IItalian prince and a German noblewoman, Bedford had some experience of growing up as the displaced daughter of a separated couple (she traveled between Rome and England, like her character, Constanza). And whe wrote of imcompatible marriage partners "that they at least shared a belief in the importance of society and the habit of being rich."

The characters seem shallow to me. I believe in Henry James, though how I don't know, yet these capricioush characters never come alive for me.

I know Bedford was a "good" humanist, though, who, as a legal journalist covered 100 complicated trials, among them the Lady Chatterley scandal and Jack Ruby's trial for the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald.

And A Favourite of the Gods is a brilliant book on many levels. It just doesn't work for me.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

Yesterday we drove 40 miles to a university town, passing abandoned smashed cars cordoned off with yellow tape, wondering what had happened, since the ice has melted away (perhaps the tow trucks haven't come yet). We stopped at our favorite coffeehouse, Carpe Diem, rattled the paper, enjoyed the cappuccino-and-cinnamon smell, and then walked to one of the best libraries in the state. One of the perks of living here is that, with the flash of an ID, one is entitled to check out books statewide. I’ve browsed at small-town libraries (population 3,000) where I’ve discovered forgotten treasures by Cozzens and Cronin, and at bigger-city (well, population 100,000) libraries where I’ve perused the complete works of Sigrid Undset.

Tromping through the snow, a little more snow than we have in ____, we clumped and puffed up the staircase of the granite many-windowed building. It was a warmish day, thirtysomething, slushy, birds singing, a harbinger of spring, and people striding with parkas opened. We stopped at the computers to look up our lists: the computer is an IBM thing (I’m used to Macs) and I confess I couldn't turn it on without help. On my list: many of the books I wanted are in storage. I found Pamela Hansford Johnson, but not Pamela Frankau. In the stacks I serendipitously discovered a novel by Vera Brittain  and The Spare Room by Helen Garner (which I've read about online). The stacks are very narrow, so navigation among the bookshelves in a parka is slightly precarious: I pulled out my pile of books and sat cross-legged on the floor to examine them. My last collection included several disappointing books, among them Prozac Highway, which turned out to be a novel about lesbian performance artists with angst. (I had expected one of those fascinating madness books.) This collection looked better.  Then I smugly wandered over to a comfortable chair with a view of black-and-white trees through the church-like windows, as far from the buzzing fluorescent lights as possible.

I started reading Johnson’s An Impossible Marriage in the car and continued to read it till bedtime. Fascinating Virago-like material, the story of a thoughtful, strong-willed young woman who knows enough to dump a young man with whom she is sexually compatible but not otherwise;  but then makes the same mistake when she falls in love at first sight with a beautiful but arrogant man 14 years older than herself. That whole experience of falling in love at first sight: can that ever turn out well? The horror: it usually involves falling for someone believed to be superior to and more beautiful than oneself (and some groveling ). Johnson describes the affair with compassion and insight. She is a very good writer, whom I haven't read in years.

If not for Janet Malcolm...

When Janet Malcolm praised Gossip Girl in the "Critics at Large" column in The New Yorker (“Advanced Placement: The Wicked Joys of Gossip Girl,”3-10-2008), I made a mental note. I recently found a couple of Gossip Girl books and read like a zombie (at least I read one and a half before throwing them into the “give to charity” box). Although I admire Malcolm’s exuberance, her brisk, mordant style, and her penetrating journalism--The Freud Archives and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughe are certainly American classics--why is she writing about Gossip Girl? A shock thing? This trashy series is about materialistic, shallow teenagers who casually drop brand names into every conversation, wear new designer clothes on each page (though I haven't heard of half the brands), drive Jaguars, fly private planes, check into posh hotels to meet boys, and attend exclusive private schools. In fact they have no real friends. These hollow girls and boys steal each other's lovers and spread rumors about each other on their phones when they're not in the dressing room at Barney's. The "Gossip Girl" column is a computer blog, on which the most scandalous gossip is spread. No one knows who Gossip Girl is (at least not in the first book).

Malcolm writes: "Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult."

Oh dear. What literate adult might that be? Malcolm actually refers to these books as "classics."

Some of the Gossip Girl columns are humorous, but the narrative is appalling. We need that loyal coterie of friends at the center, like the Sex and the City gals.

The Gossip Girl computer board could say: Rumor has it that Janet Malcolm is ghosting the series. That is totally so Gossip Girl! But of course, I made it up, so don't believe it for a minute. Janet Malcolm has nothing to do with these books ! Some of the books are "created by Cecily von Ziegesar," not written, so we can conclude she has some ghosts. (Not Janet Malcolm, though. I SO made that up!)

My snowshoes are lost...(What would Trixie say?)

I planned to photograph the ice-rink lawns and post them here to invoke pity. Poor Mad Housewife! No wonder she's mad having to live in that ig -alow. Wait, isn't that Alaska? From all I hear, Alaska is melting and and it's trickling south so the Great Plains get whalloped with the ice and snow. The environmental drums are rolling. But if this is the New Alaska, where are the pubs, the small planes, the talk radio station? Maybe a couple of cute huskies and a sled? Is that Northern Exposure or Men in Trees?

The ice has melted, though, and we have a blanket of seven inches of snow. As you can imagine, every winter athlete has hit the, well, not the slopes, unless they wander down to Colorado, but the groomed trails. These obsessed x-country fanatics spend their LON-N-N-NNNNG lunches and breaks x-country skiing and sometimes make videos of themselves skiing . I have to pretend that I'm watching the ski film or I'll get hit over the head with a ski (gently). The boss doesn't rebuke them: he'd probably get whopped over the head with a ski, too.

"Do you want to ski or snowshoe?" they ask for the thousandth time. Their idea of teaching me was to stand me up on skis at the top of a trail and give me a little push. I slammed into a tree and was lucky I didn't fall into a deep ravine. Running into a tree sounds humorous, but it is painful. Since then I've glowered at the SHARE THE SKI ENTHUSIASTS. IT IS A WEAPON, NOT A TOBOGGAN. And why doesn't everybody remember that?

But they don't take a hint.

"How about the snowshoes?"

"What snowshoes?"

"I gave you snowshoes a couple of years ago."

"OH, THOSE SNOWSHOES. Well, they don't really fit, you know."

"Oh, come on. Wear the snowshoes. It'll be fun."

"If you want them so much, you wear them." Suck your cigarette in.  Bad, bad loss of temper. They love their sport so much they can't help proselytizing. And I can absolutely see this.line of thought. Snowshoes will be easy: then throw her onto skis...

"Well, get rid of that cigarette."

"Okay."

Have you ever read Trixie Belden and the Mystery at Mead Mountain? I can't find it, but I have read it. While staying in a ski lodge, Trixie and the Bob-Whites (her gang) soon stumble upon some suspicious goings-on. Oh, yeah, and there's skiing in this book. Cross-country AND downhill. I don't remember any snowshoes, though.

The Elliptical and the Bike

Be careful on your walks this winter. Sometimes there's an incline at the intersection and you find yourself frantically grabbing at the traffic light pole so you don't fall into the street. It's melancholy and treacherous. Day after day of freezing rain and ice storms have transformed the world into a gigantic science-fictionl ice rink this winter. The yards are ice. Not icy snow, really ice. The world is stunning but unnavigable. I’ve never seen anything like it.

So everyone is stuck indoors. And mad as hell about it.

So we must go to the health club.

 At the health club treadmills are all taken and eveybody’s huffing and puffing on the elliptical. The elliptical is MY THING. You walk up and down on those pedals while you watch that movie, Elf, which has been playing on all the channels all the time since Thanksgiving. No, really you don’t want to watch Elf. It's only one step above Project Runway, which you also got stuck watching once here.

The solution during this cranky time is to switch to the bicycle. Like other bicyclists, I've discovered that it is possible to read a small paperback, WHICH YOU MUST PROVIDE, during exercise. At the health club, there's a pile of germy sweated-up Newsweeks, abandoned by my peers. (Recently every issue is about Obama. Obama lore! These will be collectibles someday!) So, like all desperately bored health club members, I've discovered some books that make perfect workout reading.


1. James Welch’s lyrical Winter in the Blood, a classic first published in 1974. In the new Penguin edition, it is only 137 pages, easily read in 20-minute increments on the bicycle. The narrator, an American Indian with a drinking problem and a bad knee, often gets stuck walking back from town to the ranch, where he lives with his mother, Theresa, and Lame Bull, whom she marries early on in the novel. His mother goes out with Lame Bull one day after many jokes about marriage, and comes back married, much to the
surprise of the narrator. Anyway...it's witty and sad, a novel about regrets, the past and the present.


2. I tried Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It is brilliant. It cannot, however, be read on a bicycle. The paperback is gorgeous, but I finally realized I'm not making a fashion statement. A fourth done, none of it at the health club. Well, it's a great book and I didn't really take it to the health club...

3. Any mystery will do.

The Wicked Books

Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, the first book in his reimagined Oz series, reinvents the character of the Wicked Witch of the West as a “green” animal rights activists. Her nemesis, Dorothy, is a displaced, manipulative, politically savvy, two-faced bitch (sorry), who will do anything, even murder the witch, to escape the political intrigues of Oz and return to her dour aunt and uncle in Kansas. When Elphaba, the witch, idling in a tree, overhears the Yellow Brick Road quartet slander about her, she is stunned to hear that she is “psychologically warped,” “a despot,” or “born hermaphroditic, maybe entirely male.”

"The last thing she ever cared about was gossip. Yet she had been out of touch for so long that she was astonished at the vigorous opinions of these random nobodies."

We were all crazy about Elphaba when we read the novel for a book group 10 years ago. Yet I didn't keep up with the Wicked books. Perhaps the idea of the musical put me off (even though it confirmed my good taste).

But for Christmas I received A Lion among Men, the third book in the Wicked series, an excellent novel for reading at night. Maguire has cleverly transformed Brr, the Cowardly Lion, into a displaced animal who earns a reputation for heroism when an act of cowardice is misinterpreted d during a political demonstration (dwarfs vs. humans).
Eventually we learn that he was probably concocted in a lab: he fits in nowhere and perhaps is the loneliest animal in the world. Talking animals have been driven out of the cities, and he has lived among humans too long. He is accepted neither by prides of lions nor by human beings during his adventures, and survives by working or, eventually, selling services for different political factions.

I enjoyed this novel, but it isn’t in the same class (a classic) as Wicked.

Son of a Witch, the second Wicked book, which I began today, is closer to Wicked in the complexity of the plot and smoothness of the writing.