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.

Best of 2008

Seven hours till midnight: Hello, 2009. I sweat and chew my pen as I rustle through my notebook, my glasses on the end of my nose. It's the annual Mad Housewife's awards (I being MH) and so much depends on it. Yes, I have at least two readers, who are waiting to hear my judgment. I’ll mix and match a little of each.

Best contemporary novel: People of the Whale by Linda Hogan. I said: Hogan's elegant, concise, and subtle style is suited to recounting Indian legends about a fishing village's relation to the sacred whale... and to depicting the violence of damaged Vietnam vets, determined to break the poetry of the legend by hunting the whale, an endangered species, and committing crimes against the environment.

Second-best contemporary novel: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. Not reviewed here.


Best fairy tales: Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block. I said: A collection of Block’s “post-punk” Weetzie Bat books are delicate “post-punk” prose poems about a creative, unconventional group of drifting L.A. characters with names like Weetzie Bat, Dirk, Duck, Cherokee, Witch Baby, and Brandy-Lynn.

Best 20th-century women’s novel: Honourable Estate by Vera Brittain. I said: In Honourable Estate, Brittain analyzes the impact of World War I on two generations of men and women. Janet, a pre-war suffragist, loathes housework and motherhood and escapes from her fanatical vicar husband to political meetings. In the next generation, Ruth, the feminist daughter of an indulgent manufacturer, graduates from Oxford, despite her family’s belief that marriage should be her 'estate.'

Best 20th-century men’s novel: The Deep Sleep by Wright Morris. I said about his work in general: "Though Morris won the National Book Award twice, one must look to small presses for his books: Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press) publishes (most of them).

Best classic: A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howell. I said: A Hazard of New Fortunes is brilliantly written... , a luminous example of the “new realism” of the late 19th century....The focus of A Hazard of New Fortunes is the inception of a literary magazine: its many employees s comprise a complete society, who are transplanted to New York to pursue “new fortunes." They come from all classes and economic strata: poor artists and writers, intellectual editors and publishers, shrewd businessmen and backers, nouveau riche, middle class, and genteel poor.

Best Classic Western: The Curlew’s Cry by Mildred Walker. I said: Mildred Walker is a powerful writer. Set in Montana, where Walker lived from 1933 to 1955, The Curlew's Cry is the story of Pam Lacy, a passionate, independent young woman whose coquettish friend woos and steals her boyfriend... Confused and on the rebound, Pam makes a hasty marriage to the son of a wealthy businessman in Buffalo who is a director of the Rocky Mountain Cattle Company. (A fifth-generation Montanan, she returns to the West alone.)

Best memoir: An Orderly Man by Dirk Bogarde. I said: Tired of the hectic life of an actor, Bogarde buys a small run-down house in France (which is the frame and organizing concept of the memoir). The house needs extensive renovation. He hires an architect to redesign the house, which the architect explains has been neglected for 500 years. While Bogarde is away finishing a film (he retires only occasionally), the architect and contractors finish the house. Everything that can go wrong does. Humorous and sensitive.

Best non-fiction: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. Not reviewed here, but Mitford fans will like it.

People of the Whale

People of the Whale, by the award-winning American Indian poet and novelist Linda Hogan, is perhaps the most stunning novel of the year. Certainly it tops my list for contemporary fiction of 2008. Hogan's elegant, concise, and subtle style can be effectively adapted to recounting Indian legends about a fishing village's relation to the sacried whale (who gave birth to humans), and to the violence of damaged Vietnam vets, determined to break the poetry of the legend by hunting the whale, an endangered species, and committing crimes against the environment.


Hogan interweaves the stories of a broken couple, Ruth, a strong-willed fisherwoman, and her drifter husband, Thomas, a Viietnam vet who disappears by choice after the war. These two stories are complete in themselves: they are subtly unbalanced by the tale of Thomas’s daughter in Vietnam, whose long life story seems to belong to a different novel. Hogan’s lovely, poetic prose compensates for the flaws, but it does detract from the novel. Yet Hogan’s world is one of contraditcions and conflicts:: the women lfeft behind in the U.S. and Vietnam, traditional cultures and the loss of belief by men who never recover psycholgically from the war and who turn on themselves.

The senseless, cruel killing of the whale and the women’s protests become a metaphor for the destruction of the old way of life and the fight of the conservationists. Hogan writes:

"On the day of the whale hunt, the gray day, only three women had the courage to stand at the shore facing the ocean fog as it lifted. Far out was the roar of the water, tlhe sound of a storm beginning in the lead-colored sky. Their eyes closed, the women sent their hearts across the ocean, willing the whales not to come near land....

"The three women told the whales not to come. But the whales no longer heard their voices or thoughts. Perthaps because the hunt had become a spectacle and not a holy thing. Their voices were drowned out by the sound of speedboats and a helicopter...This was not the way it had ever been done in the past. This was the first whale hunt since the 1920s."

Journey into Christmas

Dickens' A Christmas Carol doesn't blunt the edginess of the season. Is your family having a fit of major sulks while you entertain a ragtag group of friends who have appeared out of nowhere because their own families have rejected them? Is your perfectionist sister on the edge of nervous collapse because she burned the turkey? ("And, no, you can't start over again with a new turkey," you all have to insist). Is it possible that your husband and cousin are really going to spend all day playing foosball in the basement? ("IWe're not hungry," they say casually.)

Dickens particularly depresses me. I have two copies of his Christmas books, purchased at sales, in case I am suddenly infused with the Dickensian Christmas spirit, but I honestly believe these slapdash novels are sub-standard and setimental. The longer the better for Dickens: lest you think I am a philistine, I am very fond of Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, and Dombey and Son)

This year, I have, however been delighted to find excellent Christmas stories in Bess Streeter Aldrich's collection, A Journey into Christmas and Other Stories. The title story is especially good and can be read at:

A Journey into Christmas

Solstice

It's the winter solstice.

Is this a festival, I wonder? It’s -2 degrees. Lord, what could be gloomier? And in just four days...four days...it will be Christmas.

David Lodge's Deaf Sentence has some hilarious Christmas scenes, told in the form of a diary. It will cheer you up as much as a hot toddy (especially if you take meds, and are by necessity a teetotaller.)

So, anyway, I'm drinking herbal tea and trying to think cheerfully about Xmas. Here are some innocuous Christmas memories over the decades, showing that Christmas isn't ALL bad. (Though really, don't you hate those Dickens books?)

1964: there is a photograph of me, twinkling through my cat-shaped glasses, wearing an olive-green dress with fishnet stockings, so I obviously didn't mind getting dressed up on Christmas Eve. If I got the dress from Sears I'd begged for, I wore It. I also wore the impractical fishnet stockings, even in winter (think -2 degrees): Care about the cold? No, be cool. we wanted to look like Twiggy, or the Revlon girl, or someone.


The unwrapped gifts were kept in my mother’s closet, so it was impossible not to know what we were getting. Was this the year of the Barbie dream house? Or the Tammy house? This was the year of Tammy, a kind of alternative to Barbie (here is a photo of Tammy and her sister Pepper: I also had the Tammy house, cardboard with folding cardboard furniture, and Pepper's treehouse made of plastic.) Relieved, our mothers practically embraced Tammy, who, unlike Barbie, seemed like a nice, NORMAL girl.

There were also books: A Wrinkle in Time, E. Nesbit's books, etc.

1975: rabbit stew and no gifts. Friends and guests indulged in a drunken debauchery, so I got stuck cooking. Only immense irritation could have gotten me through that Julia Child recipe. I had to channel Julia Child, which is not easy when one is a non-cook. After dinner a Russian sang and accompanied himself on a guitar-like thing, which I should have appreciated. Instead, I wandered off into another room., leaving the drunks to drink and sing. The sober ones followed me. My excuse: exhaustion.

1982: we traveled; no gift exchange; doughnuts for breakfast and dinner at a steak house, the only restaurant open in town. I did receive a copy of Keats.

1990s and 2000s: we did the whole Christmas thing, complete with expensive presents. I suppose this shows we are finally adults.

Anti-War Classics

During a lull at a peace rally you might want to rejuvenate yourself with:

Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Aristophanes' Lysistrata

Virgil's Aeneid

Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth

Sophocles's Antigone

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Cicely Hamilton's William - An Englishman

Vera Brittain's Honourable Estate

Noel Stretatfeild's Saplings

Elsa Morante's History: A Novel

Miss Bishop

Miss Bishop was so popular when it was published in 1933 that it was made into a movie, Cheers for Miss Bishop. it was Bess Streeter Aldrich's homage to teaching, which was her own itinerant profession for 11 years (six in her hometown of Cedar Falls, one in Boone, IA, another in Salt Lake City, and three years in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she met her husband in a boarding house). The heroine, Ella, whom we first meet as an extroverted college freshman, cannot find a job teaching country school, but is then recruited to teach grammar at her college. A dedicated teacher, she cannot do "half-measures," and she manages to be vigorous and inspiring even about participles and subordinate clauses (her students love her) . She supports her frail mother, who worries that her schoolma'arm career may end in spinster-dom. But Ella says,, "Don’t you worry. I won’t be an old maid.... I have too many dreams for that, Mother. I think sometimes it is as though I am weaving at a loom with a spindle of hopes and dreams. And no matter, Mother, how lovely the pattern--no matter how many gorgeous colors I use,--always the center of it is...you know..., just a little house in the country in a garden and red firelight and...the man I love...and children...and happiness. For me, Mother, that’s the end of all dreaming.”

Although this novel was a best-seller in 1933, it has not stood the test of time: Aldrich’s language is dated, the style too blunt, and the change of point-of-view sometimes disconcerting. Yet her portrait of Ella, the workaholic teacher, is entirely convincing. Have we not all known someone like this? The novel is lighter and less affecting than A Lantern in Her Hand, Miss Bishop, the novel, not the character, is almost cloying at times. The imaginative reader must transport herself to another place and time to appreciate this, imagining herself in her “own little house in the country in a garden.” Ella, of course, does not realize all her dreams. To state one’s dream is to jinx it. Ella wants to marry: she is jilted in a scene that reminds me very much of the jilting in The Curlew’s Cry.

Read A Lantern in Her Hand instead.

A Lantern in Her Hand

Bess Streeter Aldrich knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote A Lantern in Her Hand (first published in 1928). Before she wrote the novel, she interviewed early settlers in Nebraska and studied historical documents and letters. Her heroine, Abbie Mackenzie Deal, follows her husband, Will, a Civil War veteran, to Nebraska, where he struggles to farm on the unforgiving prairie. Droughts and onslaughts of grasshoppers raze the fields year after year. One year the prices fall so low that the farmers burn corncobs rather than trade for coal at a loss. We often grieve for Abbie, who suffers the agony of the displaced yet struggles to emphasize small dertermined joys for the sake of her husband and five children. The landscape is barren and desolate, the endless wave of grasses get on her nerves, and she must constantly work in the sod house, saving every string and button and piece of brown paper (she eventually writes on the brown paper). She educates her children, giving them opportunities she didn't have. She cannot pursue the talents she once had (particularly singing), and is both proud and envious of her successful children.

Aldrich's understated prose in this engrossing novel matches the numbness necessary for dignity in Abbie's often dramatic life: She cannot show her feelings;

"The grasshoppers swarmed over the young waist-high corn and the pasture and the garden. By evening the long rows of sweet corn had been eaten to the plowed ground. The tender vines of the tomatoes were stripped down to the stalk. The buds of the fruit trees were gone. Part of the garden was a memory. The chickens had feasted themselves to bursting point. Gus Reinmueller, driving up to the door, could hardly control his raring houses, so irritated were they by the bouncing, thumping pests. The farm was a squirming, greenish-gray mass of them."

Aldrich, a conscientious graduate of Iowa Teachers College who had the "writing bug" (according to her son in an intro to an older versison of this book), won a writing prize from Ladies' Home Journal in 1911 and became popular in 1918 after American Magazine bought "Mother's Dash for Liberty." .Adrich moved to Nebraska with her doctor-husband in 1909 and raised her family there.

This is not a classic, perhaps, but it is a book to be cherished (it was recently reissued by University of Nebraska press). She seems a little uncertain at the beginning, but after three chapters you race through the book--and I did cry over one page.)

Bookworm Alert

"No more books." That's the Grinch speaking. But our shelves swell pregnant lywith books, so I have not succumbed to Borders 30%-off coupons for TWO WEEKS.

It's like a twelve-step program.

One Christmas Eve I hysterically bought most of Nabokov for an intellectual friend because I didn't have the faintest idea what to give.

"Going to have a dark Christmas?" the bookseller inquired.

Probably, though that wasn't my goal. I plunge into shopping on Christmas Eve out of a pathetic anti-Christmasy gloom to gossip with people who have even worse Christmases than I do (I hope this doesn't get on their nerves). Few clerks have families like Bob Cratchitt's They sit around; they read Advance Reader Copies; they have mood disorders and they lounge under those special lights to fight SAD.

I'm reading bookworm lit this year to prepare for giving gifts to bookworms. Here's a list:

George Orwell's Keep the Aphrodistia Flying (about a gloomy intellectual who works in a used bookshop)

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop

Nick Hornby's The Polysyallbic Spree (essays)

Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop

Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels

Christopher Morley's Pipefuls (essays and newspaper columns)

Christopher Morley's Shandygaff (essays and newspaper columns)

D. E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book (published by Persephone)

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (I can't vouch for this one: it's a history of the Great Books program)

Nabokov's Lectures on Literature

Coetzee's Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005

Lynne Tillman's Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.

Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross

Helene Hanff's Q's Legacy

On Reading by Andre Kertesz (photographs)

Hallie Ephron's 1001 Books for Every Mood

(And I'm sure there are many more, so let me know, and I'll add them)

The Curlew's Cry

I wouldn't have read Mildred Walker's The Curlew's Cry if I hadn't gone to Omaha. (Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, we're always chanting, "If only we could get to Omaha.") It was a curiosity I spotted in a bookstore, and because I'm a sucker for university presses (Bison Press: www.nebraskapress.uni.edu) I decided to take a chance.


I have such a passion for this book that I don't know if I can convey it.

Mildred Walker is a powerful writer. Set in Montana, where she lived from 1933 to 1955, The Curlew's Cry is the story of Pam Lacy, a passionate, independent young woman whose coquettish friend woos her boyfriend away and almost spoils her life. Confused and on the rebound, Pam makes a hasty marriage to the son of a wealthy businessman in Buffalo who is a director of the Rocky Mountain Cattle Company. (The company ruined her father, a rancher, when it refused to back up his loan from a bank which changed hands). And in a sense the company also ruined Pam through her marriage to the unimaginative Alan. The marriage is mechanical and disastrous from the start. All Pam's loyalties are to her father and the landscape of the West, but when she speaks of her beloved Montana, the Easterners disparage it. She returns to Montana and divorces her husband (who cannot understand it) and builds an astonishing, unconventional career.

But the book is more than its characterization of Pamela. Walker writes this with such unobtrusive and consistence brilliance that we see and feel the beauty of the West.

I suppose she's considered a craftsman, not an artist. How boring that gets. But for readers of Susan Glaspell 's Fidelity,which I have also posted about, this novel is as remarkable or more so.

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells is one of those American writers of whom I’ve only been peripherally aware. His paperbacks have been floating around our house forever, though they have remained largely unread, because I understood that he was “second-rate.” Second-class novels are resigned to abysmal fates: they lie inert and dusty forever unless someone takes them idly off the shelf. Our grandmothers may have read them, but we have considered ourselves too modish and posh for such unfashionable literature. After bingeing on Sinclair Lewis’s satires, however, Howells, famous for his realistic “domestic” novels and skewering of capitalism, seemed the next logical step..

“Where’s Howells?” I asked. I looked over my glasses.

“Which?”

“Which do you recommend?”

Vaguely: “I’ll bring you a pile.”

“Just one.”

The pile grew. I considered his science fiction novel, A Traveler from Arturia, but decided to start with a more conventional, characteristic work. I chose A Hazard of New Fortunes (a classic reminiscent of Henry James, and why it took me so long to get around to it I’ll never know).

A Hazard of New Fortunes is brilliantly written and structurally convoluted , a luminous example of the “new realism” of the late 19th century. Howells controls the threads of his New York unobtrusively and the detailed, reflective, almost businesslike story unfolds in a subtly organized manner. The focus of A Hazard of New Fortunes is the inception of a literary magazine: its many employees s comprise a complete society, who are transplanted to New York to pursue “new fortunes." They come from all classes and economic strata: poor artists and writers, intellectual editors and publishers, shrewd businessmen and backers, nouveau riche, middle class, and genteel poor. All are connected to the new literary magazine. There are many, many protagonists: in Part One the March family reluctantly leave Boston for New York after March loses his insurance job. Fulkerson, the founder of the new magazine, has recruited him through sheer bluster to take a chance on being the editor. In Part Two we meet Beaton, a moody artist, and Alma Leighton, an illustrator, whom he has dropped after luring her and her mother to New York. The publisher, the son of a nouveau riche farmer who has made a fortune in real estate after being forced off the family farm, has no interest in the literary business, particularly as regards making money, and his sisters miserably live alone in a great house, unable to make friends in New York, having hoped to break into "society." (Their religious mother and their shrewd monied father care nothing about it.)

Howell, the son of an itinerant newspaperman and printer,worked as a journalist in his youth and eventually became editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote 13 novels and three works of criticism. Among his friends were Henry James and Mark Twain.

He is one of the best writers I’ve discovered this year.

Babbitt

Oh, Sinclair Lewis! As I read Babbitt, I'm beginning to mix Sinclair Lewis up with Upton Sinclair. Such good ideas, such insightful sociology, such clumsy sentences. What is (was) America of the '20s and '30s? These two documented it unflinchingly.

Sinclair Lewis's Main Street is a beautifully written classic--Carol Kennicott gives us the middle-class, liberal arts-educated perspective on the horrifyingly closed-minded materialism of prairie towns . Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd novels operate on a broader canvas--Lanny Budd, over a period of 20 years, analyzes international politics, often living in Europe and dealing with politicians (as did Sinclair in his lifetime).

But Lewis's Babbitt has almost defeated me. This satire is so broad, and the style much more florid than in Main Street. The style itself condemns George Babbitt. Yet I feel so sorry for the babbling, boosterish Babbitt. Babbitt's Zenith is a super-sized Gopher Prairie, a city of 300,000 people characterized by dog-eat-dog businessmen, state-university-educated vs. Yale-educated clubs, desperate housewives in modern housing developments, aimless daughters (graduates of Bryn Mawr with nothing to do), and punk sons who want to drop out and take correpsondence classes. It's a sad society, but of course they don't feel sad. Babbitt, a realtor who lives to shop and chomp cigars, is immensely proud of his self-made man status but also empty and bewildered as he wishes inarticulately for something better.

Babbitt and his overly-sensitive friend Paul (of whom he is proud) go to Maine for a week without their wives. Babbitt finds himself gradually descending into enuui, breaking down, wanting silence, relieved to escape the "chumminess" of his everyday life.. He becomes more lethargic when his wife arrives. He doesn't feel well until the last day of vacation.

Some of the scenes are really hysterically funny--a seance scene at one of Babbitt's dinner parties (the guests are Vergil Gunch, Chum Frink, Eddie Swanson, Orville Jones, Howard Littlefield, and their wives): and the wives want to "talk to Dante."

Vergil Gunch says: "I suppose Dante showed a lot of speed for an old-timer--not that I've actually read him, of course--but to come right down to hard facts, he wouldn't stand one-two-three if he had to buckle down to practical literature and turn out a poem for the newspaper-syndicate every day, like Chum does.:

But Babbitt thinks privately--and this is why we love him--"We're all so flip and think we're so smart. There'd be--A fellow like Dante--I wish I'd read some of his pieces. I don't suppose I ever will, now."

Main Street

Sinclair Lewis, who refused the Pulitzer in 1925 (see below) and accepted the Nobel in 1930 (love that international yet anti-American chauvinist attitude), isn't much talked about anymore.

Main Street, Sinclair Lewis' classic satire of the midwest, is my favorite book--at least occasionally, when I reread it. It has a perennial place in women’s studies and American studies (a kind of thank-God-I-took-that-class novel, with a radical bent). Lewis, who grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, mocks the sanctimony of small town America . His Gopher Prairie (brilliant name!) is a dull, smug town of 3,000 gossips, which dismays and almost defeats Carol Kennicott, the heroine. (If you've read Babbitt, you'll know that Gopher Prairie is the country cousin of Babbitt's Zenith City.)

Poor Carol Kennicott, the heroine and would-be lofty converter to the arts in Gopher Prairie, is horrified by the ugliness of the town. She is baffled by the dull citizens' emphasis on "comfiness" and "jolliness" and resistance to change. She dreams of art, writing, drama, anthropology, archaelogy, plays, parties, and concerts. Born in Mankato, a university town with hills and valleys, she is encouraged to dream and studyt. As a librarian in Saint Paul, she dreams and influences patrons and attends parties where people discuss the latest" ideas." Her marriage to the good-hearted Dr. Will Kennicott almost shatters her dreams. Gopher Prairie, Will's home, almost breaks her. Although she loves Will, Carol fights back.

She guides us through the small town as though she has a Baedker. It takes 31 minutes to walk around the town. She is aghast at fly-specked store windows, a grocery store with a cat sleeping on bananas and lettuce, Billy's Lunch (an odor of onions and hot lard), ugly one-and-a-half-story houses, no town square. This is not a pioneer town--it's a nightmare, she decides.

Lewis’s style is blunt, yet he knows exactly the bluff tone of the dialogue. “Maybe we’re kind of slow, but we are democratic,” “Bridge is half the fun of life,” “There’s a fine class of people,” and “Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I’ve had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. “Real he-town. did you know Percy Bresnahan came from here?”

Carol alienates people by her attempts to inculcate culture. Even Vida Sherwin, the "liberal" schoolteacher, a friend, crushes her by passing on the biting gossip of "The Jolly Seventeen "about Carol. (A whole chapter describes Vida's hatred and envy of Carol).

The most interesting character in the novel after Carol is Miles Bjornstam, a socialist handyman who becomes a successful and farmer and tones down his ideas so his wife, Bea, Carol's former maid, will make friends. No one comes near her. Carol has more in common with these two than with anyone else and visits them often.. But she is afraid to declare it. She doesn't want to lose any more friends.

Carol, though she is also subtly satirized, is a strong character, a nonconformist who tries hard not to be provincial, who doesn’t want to give in to the men’s narrow jokiness and the women’s gossip. Completely realistic.

Excerpt from Lewis's reasons to decline the Pulitzer:

"I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel Arrowsmith for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.

"All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards; they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for Novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

"Those terms are that the prize shall be given "for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." This phrase, if it means anything whatsoever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment. "