Bachelor Girl Lit 101 (written during my "pop" period)

There’s no urine test to prove it, but I AM addicted to an outmoded literary genre. In an age when the press reports an alleged man shortage and pop sociologists document post-30-aged women’s diminishing chances of marrying, I’m urging the revival of what I personally call ‘60s Bachelor Girl Lit (a predecessor of Chick Lit).

In these mostly British novels, all of which were published during the ‘60s, the unmarried heroines get a lot of fun out of life. (Remember fun?) Adventurous, sexy, and refreshingly light-hearted, they generally settle in cities, run with arty crowds even when suck in humdrum jobs, and like men without necessarily wanting to get married.

Why the ‘60s, you may ask. Well, quite simply: hard-working women of the latter-day ‘80s crave entertainment. After a long day’s slaving in the harsh, cruel world, light reading in the bathtub is the ultimate luxury. And the buoyant antics of ‘60s bachelor girls are infinitely more amusing than the alienation of housewives and mistresses described in ‘70s fiction, or the terminally cute befuddlement of post-feminist heroines of the ‘80s (can they get any quirkier?)

A recent rereading of Bachelor Girl Lit evoked fond memories: the exhilarating struggle for self-determination; the solitary highs and lows of single life; the single outsider’s keen perceptions of the compromises and drawbacks of married life.

Most important, however, these wry, funny novels buoy the spirits of single and married women alike.

1. THE EDIBLE WOMAN by Margaret Atwood. Nice girl Marian is engaged to an equally nice young lawyer; her mini-skirted roommate, Ainsley, leads a wild life. When unexpected events trigger Marian’s rebellion, all hell breaks loose. An extremely funny book.

2. CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker. Awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary fellowship for her first novel, YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN, Baker wrote CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING in 1962. The narrator, Cassandra, disturbed by her twin sister’s engagement, wreaks havoc before coming to terms with “the things that get in your way; the indignities you have to suffer before you’re free to do one simple, personal, necessary thing--like work.”

3. THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks. Pragmatic Jane Graham is respected at her public relations job. A slip-up--an unplanned pregnancy--forces her to examine her life. In a bug-infested L-shaped room, she befriends some unconventional Londoners and makes peace with her disapproving father. (Two sequels published in the ‘70s, THE BACKWARD SHADOW and TWO IS LONELY, relate Jane’s further adventures.)

4. THE GREAT OCCASION (in THREE NOVELS) by Isabel Colegate. Attractive Angel listlessly attends a succession of wild parties while secretly pining for a charming homosexual friend; Charlotte falls in love with an artist sight-unseen on the basis of his paintings; and Selina, on whom our hopes are pinned after the others grow disillusioned, remarks, “I think it’s better to be in love with someone you don’t know...Then they themselves don’t play any part of it, loving or not loving you.”

5. THE MILLSTONE by Margaret Drabble. Brainy Rosamund theoretically approves of the sexual revolution, but hasn’t yet experienced it personally. When she takes a break from her research to lose her virginity, she has the bad luck to get pregnant.

6. A JEST OF GOD by Margaret Laurence. Time is slipping by for 34-year-old Rachel, whose invalid mother dominates her. During a brief, not always happy, love affair, she discovers the importance of taking risks.

7. THE COUNTRY GIRLS TRILOGY AND EPILOGUE by Edna O’Brien. The first two novels in this recently reissued trilogy constitute a lyrical coming-of-age story. Caithleen and Baba, two bickering, mischievous friends, contrive their own expulsion from a convent school and move to Dublin to pursue fun and love. Obrien occasionally overwrites the wispy, romantic parts, but it’s all undoutedly true to women’s literary heritage.

There should be ten here, but I’m missing a page.

Elizabeth Taylor: Hide and Seek

My social circle used to comprise people who read Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Elizabeth von Armin. We would roam around at political parties, eating ghastly food and trying to think of something to discuss besides politics. When we discovered similar tastes in literature, we argued for our favorite Elizabeths: Elizabeth Taylor seemed to get the most votes, though her characters always seemed a little too ladylike to me. (How do they get so ladylike?) Elizabeth von Armin’s novels also have their fans, particularly for The Enchanted April. Elizabeth Bowen, with her elegant prose and sometimes dark point of view, appeals most to me, though she's the dark horse.

Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek certainly has its merits (such as being a delight). Her deceptively simple style offsets a complicated narrative about young and middle-aged love. Harriet, the central character, believes she is not good at anything. At 18, she fails her exams and disappoints her mother, a former suffragist whose politics Harriet despises. Harriet falls in love with Vesey, the cynical nephew of her mother's best friend, and Vesey upsets the family (for instance, he takes Caroline's children out to eat meat, which they are not allowed), causing Caroline to make an excuse to send him home to his mother. Because he is only able to get attention by pseudo-sophisitcation, he is willing to hang around in his frivolous mother's boudoir and watch her apply beauty treatments while he cracks cynical jokes. He is eventally sent down from Oxford for the turmoil he causes and for his lackadisical attitude toward work.. Harriet's and Vesey's failure is a bond.

When they meet in their 30s, Harriet ismuch more confident: she has married Charles, a successful businessman and is the mother of an intelligent child who loves Greek; Vesey is a bad actor who works in regional theater, and is still cynical, still charming when he wants to be. Vesey's disruption of the household irritates Charles, furious at the reappearnce Harriet's formerr lover (even if the love was not consummated). One can't help but think it's silly for Harriet and Vesey to become involved, but Harriet has a spark that has been smothered by Charles. On the other hand, Charles and Harriet are very well-suited in conservatism: Charles's has rejected his mother, a former actor, whose dramatic ways still irritate him , just as Harriet disliked her mother's politics.

Charles reads Persuasion, his favorite book, and wonders what marriage is about.

The novel isn’t perfect, however: some of the really interesing characters die, or become cardboard walk-ons: Harriet's mother dies; Caroline, Vesey’s vegetarian aunt dies, the two young children, with whom Harriet and Vesey play Hide and Seek, show up at their mother's funeral in dreary military uniform.

Elizabeth Bowen (yes, my Elizabeth!) reviewed it, “Soberly speaking, however, it is not too much to say that A Game of Hide-and-Seek has something of the lucid delicacies of Persuasion, together with, at moments, more than a touch of the fiery-icy strangeness of Wuthering Heights.”

One of Our Conquerors by George Meredith

One of Our Conquerors is a very good, if not great, novel, but I closed it thinking, “This is enough Meredith for now.” Meredith writes witty, epigrammatic, baroque English: some will like it, others not. The main issue of the novel is divorce, and it is reminiscent of Edith Wharton's themes, also dealing with hypocrisy and the double standard for women.

In the first chapter, Victor Radner, the Babbit-like businessman and central character, sullies his white waistcoat. Cleaning up the “absurd blots of smutty knuckles” and buying a new waistcoat is easier than defending the sullied reputation of his mistress of 20 years, Nataly, who, blackballed by bores, never finds her place in society. Their daughter, Nesta, who grows up in their bohemian musical circle (Nataly is a former singer), knows nothing of their unmarried relationship. Money can protect Nesta, if not Nataly. Victor blames his first wife, who still bears his name, Radner, for not giving him a divorce. He says she shouldn’t have married him in the first place: she was too old. Divorce is the issue, but so is Victor's hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of society. Two women’s lives have been ruined. Nataly, increasingly worn and sensitive, has almost ceased to love him.

Victor does has a buoyant sense of humor, which makes him likable. He laughs about his waistcoat. “But I am taking it seriously,’ he said, and jerked a dead laugh, while fixing a button of his coat.”

The dead laugh--this sadly is the tone of the whole novel. Every incident follows on Meredith's beautifully planned interwoven path.

We see some of the chapters through Nataly’s and Nesta’s points of view. Meredith understands them very well. They love Victor, but he is too ostentatious for them. They want to live a quieter life.

This is a very worthwhile, and the more I think about it, unconventional novel.

The Rector's Daughter

Sometimes it seems that spinsters dominated the women’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Viragos particularly published women's classics about the lives of spinsters, while the "gentler" Persephones are often women’s “family” novels. (Not always, though.) Viragos have had a determined spinster slant since their beginning 30 years ago: In 1984 they published an original papterback by Sybil Oldfield, The Spinsters of this Parish, partially about F. M. Mayor.

F. M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter (1925) is a spinster lit masterpiece. The women characters are saddish and in part shaped by their environment: Mayor's vivid writing rather Gothically potrays Dedmayne, the damp and moldering village where Mary, chief spinster, has lived her whole life (one of Mary's favorite writers, Trollope, wouldn't have been caught dead in Dedmayne: he preferred less moldy hamlets, preferably peopled by aristocrats). Mary, rather exhaustingly intimidated by her father, has only occasionally left home.

Mayor writes: “Dedmayne is an insignificant village in the Eastern counties...Dedmayne was on the way to nowhere; it was not troubled by motors or bicycles, except native bicycles. The grimy “Blue Boar” did not induce any one to stop for tea. Artists and weekend Londoners wanted something picturesque....”

The village is not picturesque; neither is Mary. She prefers winter to any other season. She doesn't like the hyperbole of flowers. Rain and black trees suit her best. She has no outlet for her energy. After her mentally iill sister, Ruth, is released from an asylum, Mary cares for her until she dies of a stroke. Her father doesn't grieve. The servants love and coddle Mary.

Mary is not a desperate character: after Ruth's death, she travels with an aunt and stays at a boarding school where the women conspire to help her change her appearance and hope she’ll catch a man. Mary doesn’t mind dowdy clothes and unfortunately the only man in the boarding house doesn’t consider proposing to her (though she doesn’t particularly like him and he has been rejected by all other female society there).

Her friends begin to reappear in her life,. This is not a drab, hopeless book. Mayor is not too serious--she writes with humor of a woman whose life “went round in its accustomed round; Advent Sunday, Carols, the Christmas treat, Ash Wednesday, and a hope that people will come to Church this Lent (never realized);...summer treats; garden- and tennis-parties....”

The novel is not without a love interest. But when Mary is invited to mix with the upper class, a small tragedy happens. Her relationships are unbalanced. Horse-and-hunt women with nicknames like "Jim-Jam" turn her world upside down. Kathy, a beautiful woman who doesn't notice Mary, particularly hurts her.

There is much more to this than plot, of course. Mayor's direct narrative does not get lost in sentiment. This is a startling book, never softening Mary's difficulties, and the character, unlike Barbara Pym's single women, is penniless. That of course makes all the difference. Without money, how can these women live? Pym's women can work.

Elizabeth Gaskell

I read a little today: 100 pages or so of Wives and Daughters, which I’m reading for a book group (and as usual I’m behind.) This is one of those forgotten novels--forgotten by me anyway--which have been revived by feminist critics in recent years. (I myself first read it as a graduate student, after reading Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte.) Wives and Daughters is a rich example of her work, almost contemporary in its understated style, and is generally regarded as her masterpiece, Gaskell's style is quiet but intense, not unlike her friend Bronte's style in Villette (another masterpiece). Each character and episode is delineated skillfully, especially the character of Molly Gibson, whose life is sketched childhood to womanhood. Molly, a doctor’s daughter, is quiet, yet emotional and spirited, strongly bound to her father, and imbued with a sense of rightt.. She makes friends mainly among older people, because ther are no young ones in the neighborhood. Her father's marriage to a (slutty) former governess breaks up Molly's home: old servants are dismissed; she prevents Molly from visiting an old friend merely for the sake of stopping her; and she cares only about fashion and a posh social life (she wants to make Molly drop her old friends). Gaskell contrasts Molly with her new stepsister, the beautiful Cynthia, who doesn't stick strictly to the truth herself, doesn't care about people admiring her beauty (they've always done that),and informs Molly repeatedly that she'll never "be good." Yet the two amuse each other greatly: Molly has never known anyone like this.

By the way, we're reading Gaskell in this book group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/trollope-l/

In his 1866 review of Wives and Daughters , Henry James wrote: "The book is very long and of an interest so quiet that not a few readers will be sure to vote it dull....The reader will be tempted to lay down the book and ask himself of what possible concern to him are the clean frocks and the French lessons of little Molly Gibson. But if he will have patience awhile he will see.”

Henry, I loved the details.

Hiatus

It’s very difficult to keep a daily reading journal, the kind of thing I used to ask my students to do in a “Writing about Literature” class. My students didn’t know what a reading journal was. Neither did I. But they'd scribble about Heart of Darkness or P. G. Wodehouse or whatever they were reading and I’d write about what I was reading and occasionally we’d read bits aloud. They’d groan when I read mine: “Not E.M.. Forster again.” But I was reading about E. M. Forster and, believe me, they learned about him

I've been drinking a lot of iced tea lately. I mean a lot. It is very hot here and there's a constant struggle about whether to keep the air conditioner on. So I've been reading Angela Thirkell.

She was the granddaughter of Burne-Jones, and made her living as a writer from the age of 30 on. Her novels are witty in a somewhat subdued goofy way (though this might offend class-conscious people: her people are snobs, but the humor makes them occupy their own little world: nothing like any world I know). Angela Thirkell's What Did It Mean? made me laugh so hard I forget about the humidity. No one reads her anymore except for members of the Angela Thirkell Society. Go to their web site and learn all about her books.

George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors is temporarily on hiatus: the yellow pages in the 1914 edition crumble in my hands. One of Our Conquerors is, however, available in some new paperbacks( published by (Kessinger or BiblioBazaar) and I have ordered a new copy. (This also might be available online, but I haven't looked.)

In the meantime I’m beginning Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge. The Persephone web site say it’s being reprinted so I feel incredibly lucky to have a copy. The Saturday Review i in 1933 said it was not "a beach companion" but “a book to be read and relished in an armchair at home.” So those of us who don't go to the beach much won't feel intimidated.

One of Our Conquerors, Pomfrey Towers, and Time after Time

What do you read in the heat? (A) mysteries, (B) classics, (C) non-fiction, (D) Other?

Where do your read it? (A) on a chaise longue wearing earplugs to keep out the lawnmower noises, (B) sprawling in a comfortable chair with a fan overhead, (C) at the office between checking e-mail, (D) ) Other?

As for myself:

1. As promised, I have read a mystery, Time and Time Again, by B. M. Gill. Narrated by an upper-class accountant who has spent 18 months in prison for throwing a rock at a policeman during an anti-nuke demonstration, she cannot fit into conventional society (people keep telling her she had a cushy time in prison) and secretly hangs out with a shoplifter she met in prison.

2. Angela Thirkell’s Pomfret Towers (Thirkell writes humor books, somewhere between A Provincial Lady and P. G. Wodehouse).

3. George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors, much superior to Beauchamp’s Career. The “revised” edition, published in 1914 by Constable & Company, is, unfortunately, a little crumbly with some uncut pages. (Those rip easily, regrettably). I highly recommend this book, if you can get a copy. It’s rather Edith Whartonish, reminding me very much of The Custom of the Country.


The contingency of the novel lies in the relationship of Victor Radner to Nataly, a woman he has lived with for 20 years. His first wife, a much older woman, introduced him to Nataly when she was her companion. The first Mrs. Radner has never gotten over her grief over the elopement and has maliciously refused a divorce, Victor, a cheerful Babbilt who is satisifed with money l, is relatively unharmed by the gossip, but society is harder on women, as Nataly knows. And so they have moved from place to place, shunned as soon as society finds out their position.

The Radners and their daughter, Nesta, attract friends through their music. There is a huge cast of diverse characters who attend the concerts at the Radners’ house: Meredith wittily contrasts teetotalers with oinophiles, etc. His has suitors: Radner hopes to marry her to a lord or some bigwig because he tells them she will have $10,000 a year settled on her.

Victor builds an enormous house of which his wife and daughter are ashamed, and we learn as much about him through their dialogue and thouhts as we do through Victor's escapades (Meredith also does this in Beauchamp's Career).

Political Novel

George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career is an odd, confused jumble of a book. Some believe this is the best political novel of its kind, but I can’t pretend I like it as much as Phineas Finn. Beauchamp's Career is about not only politics but love, and how one affects the other--love and politics, money and marriage. Meredith's Beauchamp, inspired by the historical character, Frederick Maxse, a radical who ran for election in Southampton in 1868, becomes a radical candidate and canvasses from door to door among the poor, hoping to trigger a revolution. The first 80 pages, however, are devoted to the theme of love. Beauchamp is not a mercenary: he has a platonic affair with a young French girl, who is engaged to an older man. At one point Beauchamp obstinately tries to carry her away against her will on a yacht. This extremism is characteristic of Beauchamps in politics as well, and soon he is defined to us not just as a radical but as appallingly domineering in his relationships with women.

Beauchamps decides to become a candidate because, after studying the radical pamphlets and speeches of his friend Dr. Shrapnel, he believes that he can equalize the fortunes of English society. Maxse, Meredith's model for Beachamps, wrote. ' ..I found that a number of Britons were slaves, slaves for artificial oppressive circumstances, for the maintenance of which the governing classes stood, in my eyes, responsible," and this pretty much sums up Beauchamp's campaign. Beauchamp's political career hinders his financial prospects with his aristocratic uncle, who not only cuts off money, but furiously sends a catty nephew to oppose Beachchamp in the election. Beauchamp's candidacy, in fact, threatens all society.

Politics are important, but love and money are more so. “I must have money. I must have money,” he says, forever worrying about starting a radical journal. When Beauchamp’s uncle turns against him, he decides he must marry an heiress. Cecilia Halkett, brilliant and impressionable, would marry him, but her father, the Colonel, understands that Beauchamps wants her inheritance to start a radical journal. Cecelia, too, notices this, but it doesn’t seem offensive to her. She’s not a rebel: she, like Renee, is a “good girl,” who will do nothing without her father's approval. Jenny, the pragmatic niece of Shrapnel, is fatherless and skeptical about radicalism: she has no money, so she is not a candidate for wifedom. But all three women play as important parts: we see Beauchamp more clearly through their eyes.

Margaret Harris writes in the intro to the 1988 Oxford World Classics: “Women are denied writes, and even needs. Cecilia suffers, grievously; but her position socially and economically is a privileged one, and she has the means partly to salve her hurt by putting to sea. By contrast, for Jenny Denham...male dominance is compounded by her material dependence. However, she has a resilience and self-sufficiency..."

The book is fairly enjoyable, in a kind of messy way, but If you want to read Meredith, you’re far better off reading The Egoist or Diana of the Crossways.

Haggard Summer

I'm reading King Solomon’s Mines (1886), an adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard.

Haggard, who lived in Africa for six years, wrote 34 adventure novels. His fans included Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling and Orwell. The influence of Treasure Island on King Solomon’s Mines is unmistakable and Haggard genially admitted it: both novels center on a treasure map and describe adventurers who attempt to decode it. The characters in King Solomon’s Mines, however, are nobler and more idealistic. Allan Quatermain, KSM's 50-year-old ex-elephand-hunter narrator, Charles Good, and Sir Henry travel n search of ir Henry’s brother, who was last seen traveling in search of the legendary diamonds of King Solomon's Mines. Wwith the help of a map from a dying treasure hunter, the three travel across Afica. The geography--crossing the desert without water and climbing freezing mountains, in which the streams run south to north--is their primary enemy until they reach a Zulu city.

Obviously there is more to follow.

By the way, Haggard's masterpiece, SHE , has three sequels. If you want to read any of Haggard's books online,, they're free at various web sites.. But you can also buy the books in paper and print style....

Kind of a Summer Thing

You really need to get out of the house in this heat and spend at least part of the day in air conditioning. Mad Housewife does this. First, she loads her almost-messenger bag with easy reading for coffeehouses. Then she takes off on her city bike. It squeaks. The tires rub. She can’t fix it. But she continues bravely.

In the fabulous coffeehouse she orders a cold drink (mocha fabucchino or something) and chooses what to read, taking books out of her bookbag.

Possibilities:


1. The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger. She's been meaning to read this forever.


2. Georgette Heyer’s Venetia. The witty repartee flies back and forth in these humorous romances between libertines and witty George Meredith heroines. Who hasn’t laughed over these?


3. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Mad Housewife is a fan of She, one of the best adventure/romances of all time. Haggard, who lived in Africa for many years, said, “The thing must have heart; mere adventures are not enough. I can turn these out by the peck.” It’s a Dover. You can read it in public. Mine is a triple-pack, She, Allan Quatermain, and King Solomon’s Mines.

4. Any mystery. It doesn't matter. Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Arthur Conan Doyle...

Meanwhile, you notice that everybody at the coffeehouse is on laptops doing mysterious things. Perhaps they’re writers; perhaps they’re students; perhaps they’re mad housewives reading King Solomon’s Mines online. It’s kind of a summer thing.

Luck

As you may have noticed, I read mainly older novels. I spent many years happily reading Philip Roth, Ann Beattie, Antonya Nelson, and the late Ray Carver. But lately I have had bad luck with contemporary fiction, such bad luck that I've considered turning to biogaphies, and have one biography on my coffee table as I write this, about Evelyn Nesbit, though I have no idea who she was .

My cross-off list: I didn’t care for Peter Carey’s latest; Jim Crace’s futuristic trashed world was too horrifying and real (he can create a world); and Ethan Canin’s book simply floored me. How could I hate so innocuous a novel? See my post: http://frisbeewind.blogspot.com/2008/07/just-in-time-for-4th-of-july.html


Fae Mayenne Ng’s STEER TOWARD ROCK is pretty good, though. Ng, a Chinese American born in San Francisco and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award in 1994, does not write much but what she writes is perfect.. STEER TOWARD ROCK,, her second novel, delicately integrates voice, identity, and place, making that integration almost the subject, and certainly the foundation of the novel. Her characters, like beautiful Origami figures, are shaped by her poetic prose and confident swirl of voices.

The main character is Jack Sveto, a butcher who “was sold to a (Chinese-American) woman who couldn’t have babies. The village was so small, its name was a number.”

And that is part of the sadness of this narrative: the numbers instead of names, the use of false names for illegal aliens. The characters are Chinese illegal aliens (like Jack), immigrants, and Chinese-Americans raised in San Francisco's Chinatown. Stories become confused. Stories and lies become truth. There is also a complicated Chinese belief about holding back part to the story. Even the younger generation is confused about identity.

Jack falls in love with a woman who won’t love him back. He gets her pregnant; she runs away. She is a Chinese-American with her real nane, She cannot imagine Jack's life.

“I first saw Joice Qwan at King Duck’s Noodle House. Mankok and I were running a hand truck of butchered pigs to the Four Seas and as we passed, there she was, sitting at my favorite windows, so I couldn’t see her face well. I was drawn to the way she held her bowl, a thumb on the top rim and four fingers underneath, so that the heavy restaurant bowl seemed cradled in her hand. “

Jocie is wild: a woman of the ‘60s. Jack is forced by Gold Sveto, his “fake father” (who extracts payment from Jack periodically) to bring over a pseudo-wife from China in Jack's name, so Gold can replace his infertile wife. IIronically, Ilin is infertile, too. But she has her own life, and learns to be a butcher.

Fertility and infertility are recurring themes in this novel. Jack’s daughter also struggles with story and backstory and family and choices.

There are a few problems with changing narrators. Ilin suddenly takes over a chapter. Who the hell?...one thinks. But voice is only one issue here, and we're soon swept away by the writing.

Poor Caroline

While brooding on the question of what to read next, I turned to Winifred Holtby, my favorite inter-war novelist, whose name lives on here mainly because of Vera Brittain’s sutobiography TESTAMENT OF FRIENDSHIIP. Holtby is one of the greatest satirists of the '20s and '30s--a brilliant feminist who lectured on pacifism, worked for the League of Nations, and still found time to write novels.

POOR CAROLINE is Holtby’s best book. It was also her first best-selling novel. In Geoge Davidson’s introduction to the Virago edition he mentions that in 1931 POOR CAROLINE was “hailed as the wittiest novel of the season.”

This is spinster lit at its best. (If you read enough Virago and Persephone classics, you’ll recognize the elements.) Caroline, an evangelical, imaginative spinster, has ,at 72, been abandoned by her relatives. She lives in poverty, but refuses to acknowledge the sadness of her plain rented room, nor does she let poverty impede her activites. She has founded the Christian Cinema Company, an institution devoted to the making of Christian, anti-Hollywood film. At her insistence she has assembled (maybe captured is a better word) an incongruous board of directors: a penniless, indolent aristicrat, a Jewish antique enthusiast who needs a connection to get his son into Eton, an inventor who works with "talkie" films, and a con-man who pretends to write screenplays. Caroline ignores the politics. She expects not only to clean up the cinema for Christians, but to make millions. One has to laugh at her big dreams and imagination, but at the same time it is sad, and sometimes very irritating. She goes off the deep end when making plans, gets starry-eyed over a curate, chats to journalists in such a hysterical manner that they ignore her. And, worst, she doesn’t properly appreciate Eleanor, the feminist, scientifc, loyal niece from South Africa who, by contributing money to the bankrupt film company, helps Caroline retain her fantasies.

Caroline's relatives in the chorus at the beginning laugh after the funeral at Caroline . “But, my dears, the Will. Do you know, she left 500 pounds each to Betty and me, and eight thousand to her dear friend and kinswoman, Eleanor de la Roux, and twenty thousand--yes, twoenty-thousand, to the Rev. Roger Mortimer...Just think of it--she must have been a little bit potty, wasn’t she, Mums, dying in an imfirmary at seventy-two and making a will like that leaving thousands of pounds, that she hadn’t got, to people she hardly knew?"

Well, that's Caroline. And, although she is absurd, one can't help disliking her relatives for not helping her. And one can see that Holtby compares Caroline and Eleanor--two generations with different opportunities for women.

David Copperfield

On bicycle breaks, I’m still fishing out DAVID COPPERFIELD from my panniers, slowly making progress, loving the characters and comedic genius, wondering why I'm so slow (300 pages to go). Only Dickens in the nineteenth century could write Shakespearean comedy. The language of the first-person narration is outrageously good (David's sketches of the bizarre characters he meets are hyperbolic, but also affectionate).

The cast of characters include: Peggotty, the devoted servant who throws her apron over her head when she laughs; Mr. Peggotty , Ham Peggotty, Little Em'ly, and the gloomy Mrs. Gummidge, who live in a boat on the beach in Yarmouth; Mr. Murdstone, David’s cruel stepfather, who, in Peggotty's view, drives David's mother to her death; wily Uriah Heep, who schemes to take over his patron's law office; Aunt Betsey Trotwood, David’s guardian, who hates donkeys and rushes several times a day to drive them off her property; and Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, a genteel if ridiculous couple who are always in debt.

Here's an example of Dickens' Micawber's witty advice to David when he boards with them: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

One can read Dickens all year round, and perhaps that's why I'm savoring it. BLEAK HOUSE is almost everyone's favorite: Harold Bloom wrote about it in GREAT BOOKS, and Nabokov wrote about it in NABOKOV'S ENGLISH LECTURES. There's something shivery about the description of the fog and Chancery Court; something humorous and touching all at once about Esther Summerson's 1st perseon narrative (her background is Jane Eyre plus feminine David Copperfield).

The character Desmond on LOST, the T.V. show, has read all of Dickens except one, which he carries in a plastic bag (I'm not sure what he's saving, though someone told me it was OUR MUTUAL FRIEND).

I haven't read PICKWICK PAPERS.

Here's an excerpt from Nick Hornby on DAVID COPPERFIELD (from THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE, a great book):

"For the first time since I've been writing this column, the completion of a book has left me feeling bereft: I miss them all. Let's face it: You're usually just happy as hell to have chalked another one up on the board, but this last month I've been living in this hyperreal world, full of memorable, brilliantly eccentric people, and laughs (I hope you know how funny Dickens is), and proper bendy stories you want to follow."

Just in Time for the 4th of July

Ethan Canin’s AMERICA AMERICA is, well, a beach book. Why not be honest about it? Ron Charles in the Wash Post compared it to ALL THE KING’S MEN so I rushed out and bought it. Was that neccessary? No. I’d give you mine if you wanted it, but I've given it away to charity.

AMERICA AMERICA is about Democratic presidential politics and patronage, primaries and caucuses in 1972, as recalled by Corey Sifter, a pretty sentimental newspaper editor who as a teenager worked for "Bonwiller," a Teddy Kennedyish senator and presidential candidate. Corey's employer, Metarey, an industrialist/old money/ inluential Bonwiller Democrat, hires him as a driver and then impulsively decides to tuition for him to attend his old boarding school.,

This causes no conflict in his family. Oh my God, I thought. Not a boarding school. Am I in JANE EYRE or DAVID COPPERFIELD? Then there’s an Ivy League college. Yes, the tuition is paid here, too. What’s going on? For Christ’s sake, couldn’t the plumber’s son work for the senator without compromising his values? Did he have to be bribed? Why not go to public schools and state colleges?

Could anything be less hip than this book? It’s safe; that’s the best thing I can say about it. Nothing to offend; nothing unless you’re bored with the upper-class thing. A typical (if I may say so) book by a Writers Workshop professor. It’s polished, it’s traditional. John Updike reviewed it in The New Yorker. you can carry it around without feeling ashamed. Snobs will say it's all right.

Now on a good note: Canin is an M.D. and a writer. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it, that he’s gone from medicine to a professorial job at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop?

Anyway...look at the library before you invest...

Indecision

I'm betwixt and between books and suddenly, pathetically, have too many books going at once. Have you seen those blogs where about 100 books at once are pictured in the sidebar? And you're wondering naively how the bloggers have time? Well, here are some recommendations for ditherers, some gleaned from boards, but most from my own library:

1. Something contemporary? I've begun AMERICA AMERICA by Ethan Canin, whose smooth, elegant writing makes contemporary fiction almost worthwhile. But (bad portent) I have begun a few contemporary novels lately and abandoned them. Essentially the world I know has nothing to do with any situation described in the 21st century novel. Here are some problems: (a) I am not rich, b) I do not live nor ever have lived in Manhattan, c) I am not a cocaine addict, d) did not graduate from a prep school ( we lived in small towns and crappy cities; at our schools we drank wine in borrowed science class beakersr; we only made about $10,000 a year at our refined liberal arts graduate jobs and slightly more at low-caste paralegal jobs, etc.). So...it’s not that I’m seeking MY world particularly, but I’m irritated by the dominance of the upper-class Ivy (Icy?)-league writers..

2. Try something Victorian, something vaguely reformist. Maybe George Eliot.

3. Daniel Defoe. JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEARS looks like post-apocalyptic science fiction.

4. CLAUDIUS THE GOD, a pretty good sequel to I, CLAUDIUS.

5. Nothing about curates, rectors, priests, etc. for a little while. There's been a little too much Mrs. Oliphant around lately.

If anyone has any suggestions, please comment.

Top Five

Those of you who read this blog, and that seems to be about one person, will have noticed that Persephone has dominated my reading lately. Persephones are suddenly very hip and trendy: gossip about Persephone books has become a blogging phenomenon. Most devotees apparently pass on their enthusiasm through word-of-mouth, blogs, and Library Thing. Nicola Beauman, the founder and publisher of Persephone, and author of THE GREAT PROFESSION: THE WOMAN'S NOVEL 1914-39, has brilliantly discovered a new women's fiction niche: inter-war middle-class women’s novels, published mainly during the years quoted above.

I didn’t get it at first.

I’d yawn. “It must be a peri-menopausal thing. I don’t care if a book is by a man or a woman anymore.” I vaguely believed, except for a handful of Viragos, most of these rediscovered women’s books were merely grist for doctoral students.

Anyway, I’d become a canonical zombie, reading classics and contemporary literature according to “lists” and reviews.

And then I read a couple of staggeringly good Viragos and changed my mind.

What happened? The revival occurred when articles about Viragos and Persephones began to appear in newspapers during the past six months. And others apparently thought that, too, because suddenly we were all blogging.

I admire Viragos (especially the novels by Molly Keane and her earlier pseudonym, M. J. Ferrell: read these if you get a chance) and am also a fan of several Persephones. But this is my Persephone day, so here are my top-five Persephones (with blurbs).

1. Rachel Ferguson’s ALAS, POOR LADY. A classic. If you have one book to read on a desert island.... Ferguson’s witty, staccato style is addictive, a bit Virginia Woolfish, a bit Dorothy Whippleish. Plot: what happens to upper-class poor spinsters when their relatives don’t want them? Entirely unsentimental. Get out your Odd Women by Gissing. A good pair.

2. HOUSE-BOUND by Winifred Peck. A hilarious novel about a woman’s determination to do her own housework when servants have deserted to do war work. Recommended by her niece, Penelope Fitzgerald.

3. MARIANA by Monica Dickens. Autobiographical, comical, and a gem. The heroine lives in an odd menage consisting of her mother, who is a tailor, and her uncle, an actor. She gets kicked out of drama school, goes to Paris, and has a couple of love affairs before the war interrupts. Will everything turn out well in the end? That's the fingernail biter.

4. FIDELITY by Susan Glaspell. Not perfect, but who cares? It’s an important novel about middle-class values in a staid city in the midwest. Comparable in some ways to Willa Cather’s books.

5. THE CROWDED STREET by Winifred Holtby. Another spinster book. Tedious at times for a reason: the spinster has a tedious life. Recently reviewed in The Spectator.

On to something else. This has been a real binge. Too much of a good thing...

Alas, Poor Lady

At our house the gray-covered Persephone books are beginning to take over a bookshelf. Not everyone in the house approves. "Are these Pod books?" The cat pensively chewed the cover the other day, perhaps mistaking it for a rectangular mouse. But these books are not for mice, In light of reading Rachel Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady (Persepone), with its question of what happens to unmarried gentlewomen, I’m briefly signing in to praise this "found" classic. This later novel may seem more conventional than Ferguson's The Brontes Went to Woolworths, but I'm convinced there's more to it. It is beautfully written, with compassion and great cynicism, and more blatantly feminist andsophisticated than Ferguson's her earlier novell. Ferguson's writing style falls somehwere between Virginia Woolf's and Dorothy Whipple's. In Alas, Poor Lady, the passive mother of eight children vaguely reminds me of the mother in To the Lighthouse.

It’s a generational narrative, chiasmically arranged in four segments: 1936, 1870-1888, 1888 to 1936, and 1936 and After. The family's daughters are so far apart in age that they essentially make up two generations: the three older daughters marry conventionally, four others, not pretty enough, remain desperately single as they slowly realize they have nothing to do, caught in the passivity of Victorian mores.

Well, I haven't finished the book. But the emphasis on the sisters reminds me very much of Dorothy Whipple's THEY WERE SISTERS. The two weren't published very far apart, so one gathers these ideas were "just around."

Book Club

We showed up with DAVID COPPERFIELDS in book bags and purses. The leader’s library book was so thick it kept falling off her lap and emitted a smell of mildew. She balanced it on her head, laughing.

“Here. Use mine,” another friend said, swapping books efficiently.

We had library books, Penguins, Modern Library, and B&N classics. The Penguin owners tended to be the most discursive. Two of us were silent during the discussion. Like me, the other mute hadn’t finished the book. Both of us had B&N classics. Both of us had run out to buy it at the last minute.

What do you say when you haven’t finished DAVID COPPERFIELD? Reading the book is a requisite for book groups. You whisper in secret to the other silent member. She shrugs. She doesn’t care much. But you’ve never come unprepared. You drink your tea or energy drink or whatever the hell your health nut friend is serving and help yourself to a large serving of non-fat, non-dairy, (non) cake. You even ask a question. Everybody is supposed to ask a question. You base yours on a quote from the introduction of your Riverside.

“ George Orwell said that when he first began reading DAVID COPPERFIELD at age 9 he thought it was written 'by a child.”' What narrative trick (trick?) makes this novel believable to all of us?”

I got this quote from the intro to my old Riverside copy. And the B&N y even had questions at the back, so I nudged my friend and she was able to ask one wildly at random.

Since this book is well-beloved to me, read and reread by me many times, even though i didn’t finish it for Book Club Monday, you should read it as a requisite for life. David doesn’t see people as they are; he sees them as they present themselves. This is the genius of it. Dickens’s wit is never cruel, and his rhetorical devices and periodic sentences elegant: but it his characterization you always remember, even whe's he's thin on plot: he describes clownish, adorable characters like Peggoty and the Micawbers so as to make them credible and shows how the efforts of good, innocent people work hard to screen the innocent David and themselves from bad influences.

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton's classic Catholic autobiography, THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, is one I’ve always meant to read, You do not have to be a Catholic to enjoy THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN: you just have to start it. The years go on--the paperback somehow becomes scuffed and yellow on the shelves--and finally jumps onto your coffee table, apparently of its own volition. You paid 25 cents for it at a library sale, a VERY cheap price for religion.

Even if you’re not religious, it’s a good idea to read a spiritual classic now and then. It helps you understand how the millions of religious people think (even if you think it's the opium of the masses, as an atheist). An hour a day will get you through most of it in the summer. Merton’s riveting narrative is an adventure, weaving the events of his life with his thoughts, and relating his spiritual journey as an artists’ son through his reckless and disillusioned youth to his Catholic baptism and his entry into a Trappist Monastery.

Born in 1915 in Europe during World War I, he writes: “The world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him, born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopelessly self-contradictory hungers.

“Not many hundreds of miles away from the home where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a Forrest of trees without branches along the Rlver Marne.”

Yet he quickly makes a transition from hell to descriptions of his parents’ innocence and art, his childhood and travels. This is a rewarding autobiography. If you're not religious, you will admire Merton's writing. . It is easy to see how this brilliant man moved from hell to to Catholicism to the Trappist monastery. It's my choice for spiritual autobiography of the summer.

The Whipple Report

Every Persephone book looks exactly alike. The beautiful pearl-gray covered books differ only in the gorgeous fabric design endpapers. The fabulous thing is, if you’re a Mad Housewife, that you can always say it’s the same book.

Typical conversation:

“Don’t you have a book that looks like that?”

Evasion. Then the earnest explanation about the gray covers.

“Hoomph.” Back to the newspaper.

In fact you are living in a Dorthy Whipple novel.

Persephone specializes in middle-class domestic novels. And Dorothy Whipple is one of its most popular writers: four titles are published, The Priory, They Knew Mr. Knight, Someone at a Distance, and They Were Sisters. Whipple, a sensible and sensitive writer, draws you into her world. Her style is polished and reserved, compelling yet unobtrusive. THE THREE SISTERS, published in 1942, is small, sensible masterpiece, yet it. has no chance except with Persephone.
.
THE THREE SISTERS is the story of three sisters. They will put you in mind of the Brontes. Lucy, the oldest (Villette), must struggle to bring up her siblings after her mother dies; Charlotte, the second daughter, marries an abusive husband and must escape through drink and drugs , while Vera, the gorgeous sister, rarely tells the truth. There are three essentially unhappy marriages, though Lucy, whose husband at least is quiet, is does not face the truth about her marriage. Charlotte’s husband terrifies her and her children; Vera’s husband, much in love with her, bores her.

This is highly recommended by moi.

Nothing Much

I did nothing much in the reading arena today. I tried two contemporary novels:

1. HIS ILLEGAL SELF by Peter Carey

2. THE PESTHOUSE by Jim Crace

Peter Carey is a great writer (and in fact I voted for him at the Best of the Bookers), a two-time Booker winner, whose prose is good-humored, laid-back, not showy, with an invisible structure that holds up the whole book. Jim Crace is also a graceful writer, wilder, but with rather bizarre, dismal ideas, which simply fascinate or depress, according to one's mood. But neither of these novels impressed me, and indeed I became so listless that I felt like a prisoner of the Sabbath: "Every day is like Sunday/every day is quiet and gray," as a song I heard on the indie station says.

Carey's book is smoothly written and goes at a fast effortless pace. It is partly told from the point of view of Che (called Jay), a seven-year-old. He has learned from a teenage babysitter that his mother is an SDS militant who disappeared (Che's grandmother doesn't have a TV, so he doesn't see the news). Then there is Dial, a young woman who has just landed a job at Vassar, where oddly she is given the phone number of Susan, her girlhood friend-turned-terrorist, Che's mother. Not quite sure what to do with this number, feeling invincible, Dial calls. Susan is not there; some other SDS members give her specific directions about meeting Che at his grandmother's and taking the child to see his mother. But the mother doesn't show up, the directions get odder and odder, the confusion and fear grow, and suddenly Dial is on the lam with a seven-year-old. The novel is elegant, but the problem is I like one of his other on-the-lam novels more. And his last novel, THEFT, about an art theft, full of allusions to THE HORSE'S MOUTH, is completely elegant, a masterpiece.

THE PESTHOUSE: not for me. Crace writes about a post-apocalypse America with grace and occasionally humor, but I simply wasn't in the mood to read about toxins, plague, floods, avalanches, and the end of the machine age. THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and I AM LEGEND were enough for me. This one is, I think, probably a classic of its kind, though.

So two good, well-written contemporary novels that simply aren't right for me. They'll be right for somebody.

25 Minutes of Reading

If you had only 25 minutes to read, what would you read? Novels, poetry, biographies? I had exactly 25 minutes, and I was able to read FIDELITY at a picnic table, which I think is a good thing after the post-flood mosquito swarms. The mosquito trucks roar down the road late at night, and now the front yards are chemically equipped to demolish bug squads. Well, the mosquitos are still flying around my back yard...There probably weren't any in the front yard anyway.


FIDELITY is perfect for the 25-minute read. You can meander around the kitchen, breeze out to the garden, or plop down on the bed for a "nap." You don't lose track of the simple story: the heroine, Ruth Holland, who was cast out of her hometown's society 11 years ago after leaving with her married lover, comes back for her father's funeral. A usual kind of plot, but unusual in Glaspell's telling.

Laura Godwin, who writes the introduction, says: "FIDELITY is as important a novel as any by Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton or Willa Cather; the reason it has been neglected is twofold. Its author may have rejected the conventions of the nineteenth-century 'three-decker', with its melodramatic plots and sentimentality, the conventions that had helped to make her first novel such a success, but FIDELITY is still a novel that tells a story..Alas, it was her rejection of the conventions of women's fiction on the one hand and of modernism on the other that helped to ensure the mixed reception of FIDELITY in America, and indeedd the eventual demise of Susan Glaspell's reptuation in America."

I promise to read something that isn't a novel soon. But I'm absorbed in these "demise/revived" women's novels. There is something very different about Glaspell's portrait of the midwest: the geography of Freeport, her industrial city on the Mississippi (modeled after her hometown, Davenport, Iowa), is somehow different from Gopher Prairie in Sinclair Lewis's MAIN STREET (published five years later in 1920). The middle-class women are not unlike Wharton's conventional New York ladies, though their lively conversation and rigid mores somehow define them as simpler. Glaspell has a real feeling for the Iowa she lived in for 36 years, before she ran off with the socialist writer "Jig" Cook.

The Brontes Went to Woolworths

Sometimes almost too many ideas are floating around at blogs. Have you ever read so much at Library Thing that you can't decide what to read next? After Virago’s 30th anniversary, I came across at least five blogs excitedly recalling the pleasure of first reading Rachel Ferguson’s novel, THE BRONTES WENT TO WOOLWORTHS.

Well, my copy finally came today. After ripping off the wrapping, I threw down DAVID COPPERFIELD (due Monday) and FIDELITY, then ran outside and sat on the lawn chair, slathering my arms with Off (which has DEET, which can’t be a good thing, and probably turns my body into a horrid chemical experiment), and soon became absorbed in this likable little novel.

It is very gently amusing, a comic novel of a kind I've never read. Like the Brontes, the three sisters, Deirdre (a freelance writer and failed novelist), Katrine (a drama student), and, Sheil (who has a governess), have imaginative lives which supersede reality. Deirdre burlesques celebrities about which she has read or written about for newspapers. Among these whimical characters are Toddy, a judge; Dion Saffron, a Pierrot; and a doll called Ironface. Deirdre, her mother, and sisters have stagy dialogues about these people, speaking in different voices and creating imaginary situations for them.

Here’s a description of Shiel's trip with her governess to Judge Toddington’s law court:

“”She sat, it seems, drinking him in, and horrified Miss Chisholm, the predecessor ot Miss Martin, by unwrapping one of my photographs of his lordship in Court and frankly comparing it with the aloof, seated figure. Going home she said, ‘He is VERY pretty, and yawns like tiny jam tarts.’ And Miss Chisholm, who had seen an old, frail man in pince-nez, austerely putting people in therir place, told her not to talk nonsence.”

It reminds me very slightly of Dodie Smith's I CAPTURE THE CASTLE.

:

Small Towns

Between ridiculous household things, I am reading Susan Glaspell, a grey-covered Persephone of an American novel, FIDELITY, published originally in 1915. At first I honestly didn’t admire it--the writing seemed too plain and adjectives might be repeated three times in a paragraph--but now I am a fan of Glaspell's discreet story.

Glaspell understands small towns:

“Things are pretty mixed up in this world....Oh, yes, in these small towns everybody’s somehow mixed up with everybody else,” (Cora) laughed. “And of course,” she went on more gravely, “it is hard to answer the people who seem so hard on Ruth. It isn’t just one’s self, or even just one’s family--though it broke them pretty completely, you know, but a thing like that reaches out into so many places--hurts so many lives.....Society as a whole is greater than the individual, isn’t it?”

Cora understands Ruth and pities her flaunted sexuality (condemned by all the matrons, the more so because they didn't notice at the time). But Amy, the newcomer and the bride of a doctor (one of the few townspeople who still cares for Ruth), wants desperately to sever her husband’s ties with Ruth, and is thrilled to think "society as a whole demanded that hardness.”

Glaspell was writing more or less about her birthplace, Davenport--the town of "Freeport" is said to have 40.000 people and lies on the Mississippi--but it is just small enough for the “society people", to know each other. There is no privacy, and in a way this is a book about a town stripped of privacy.This novel is a woman’s view of MAIN STREET.

I have noticed something very odd: Both FIDELITY and Willa Cather’s A LOST LADY send their fallen women to Denver. Is Denver popular for midwesterners? I also wondered if Ruth was a reference to Mrs. Gaskell’s RUTH (Glaspell/Gaskell). It does seem likely Glaspell would have known Gaskell’s work.

Susan Glaspell

I rushed out to a bookstore, difficult because of having to skirt roads which are being repaved after the flood, and bought a copy of David Copperfield for my book club. My Riverside is falling apart (heavy underlining on p. 199 of words like 'umble and whole sentences that God-knows-why: did I intend to write a paper or was I idly and hopefully underlining?). Our book club, the usual group of nice, bored women, was founded by the hairdresser we all go to. So when is Karen Joy Fowler going to write "The Hairdresser's Book Group"?



Anyway, there were no Penguins or Oxford classics. (There seems to be a ban at Barnes & Noble.) So I bought a B&N classic because, let's face it, I don't have time to wait around for Amazon. It's $7.15 with a discount and has an intro and footnotes and endnotes so it seems perfectly all right. I HAVE TO FINISH BY MONDAY.

I also began Susan Glaspell’s FIDELITY--a regional novel, long out of print, now reissued by Peresphone Books. It seems ironic to have to purchase an American novel from a British publisher, but that’s the way it is. if you haven’t read Glaspell, you can read her most famous short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,”which also appeared in THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, at:

http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/story/fulltext.html

Glaspell, like jazz icon Bix Beiderbecke, was born in Davenport, Iowa. She graduated from Drake University and then worked as a reporter for The Des Moines Daily News. After she began to publish short stories, she moved to NY and eventually to Cape Cod, where she founded the Provincetown Players. Best known as a playwright, she won the Pulitzer i;n 1931 for the play “Alison’s House." She also wrote novels, two of which are published by Persephone.

In FIDELITY, insiders (some sympathetic, some hypocritical), newcomers, and exiles converge in the drawing rooms to drink tea and spread calumny about their old friend, a woman who lives in sin. It’s a bit Edith Whartonish, a bit Sinclair Lewisish and the small town of Newport resembles Davenport. The fallen woman is a nice small-town girl who gains a wicked rep as an infamous woman when she runs off with a married man (similar to Glaspell’s life and her escape from Davenport). Glaspell’s style is very simple: very short sentences, few subordinate clauses, and certainly not as powerful as Winifred Holtby's in THE CROWDED STREET, but it reflects American society and the simple Midwestern views and mores of 1915.

Double-Waugh and Bronte-ites

Mosquitos are the enemy and reading outside must stop at 7 p.m. Although it’s daylight savings time and there is delightful sunshine till 9, the mosquitos raid like vampires and unless you have a safari hat with a veil you’re doomed. Most of us just have cotton things with mismatched T-shirts and baseball caps. Try Citronella candles. What a laugh!

I’m still reading Waugh slowly. That’s because it’s DOUBLE-WAUGH: Evelyn Waugh’s SWORD OF HONOUR trilogy and Alex Waugh’s FATHERS AND SONS. Both are highly recommended.


I’m also reading Stevie Davies’s FOUR DREAMERS AND EMILY, a novel I found by googling on the internet. This Brontesque comedy-drama assembles four Bronte aficionados at an Emily Bronte conference: Marianne, a Bronte scholar and conference organizer; Timothy, an old man with heart trouble (brought on by lifting his wife when she was dying); Eileen, an obnoxious enthusiast who romanticizes the Brontes and stands up at each conference and denounces the academics (The deconstructionists ARE wickedly lamooned); and Sharon, an overweight waitress who has read JANE EYRE and is invited by Marianne.

It’s a bit like LUCKY JIM, with women's problems: what to do when your furious husband drops off the three children at the conference (Marianne); what to do when you’re locked in at Haworth with a strange conference-ee (Timothy and Eileen); and what to do when drunken punks call you a “lard-ass” at a bar. “PIss off, you wankers...You’re dormant, you. You’re spack. Scran. Just fuck off or I’ll fist you where it hurts.” (Sharon).

A really excellent contemporary novel, probably known to Brontei-ites, but not to me.

Casual and Imponderable

Alex Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family is almost good enough to read while mosquitoes thrash threateningly about one's head. I'm bundled up in long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck, jeans, velcro sneakers and socks, and the cat is meowing because it wants to join me, and suddenly I can't bear the swoop of several mosquitoes at once.

So I went inside, but not without some irritation at Alex's uncle Alec Waugh, who wrote in MYSELF WHEN YOUNG: "The best-seller is written for women, usually by women. And it is by a masculine intelligence that the masterpieces of prose literature have been produced...Art is the fine raiment in which the civilized man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps, because women have need of such artifice that their contributions to the museum of the world's art have been so casual and so imponderable."

We've all heard that before, though he somehow trailed off weakly with that "casual and so imponderable" bit. Perhaps he didn't dare be too insulting to his first wife, who "was not a fan of Alec's writing at the best of times." Alec and Barbara, by the way, never consummated their marriage. It was attributed to her "impenetrable hymen"......

The Flood of '08

The Flood of ‘08, as they’re calling it, is slowly receding. I am proud to say I was not one of the gawkers. The downtown was briefly evacuated. You watch with horrified fascination on TV as the water gushes up to the roofs. The local channels covered it 24/7 and it has been the lead story on the national news (is that a matter of prurient pride? Yeah, I survived the flood of “08). But it’s not over for many people. The rivers aren’t supposed to crest till later in the week in other midwestern towns. Footage on TV: people crying, women with kerchiefed heads because they couldn't wash their hair, people staying in gyms across the state, saying their dream was gone. The national guard and hundreds of residents have helped with sandbagging. It will cost billions of dollars to repair the damage.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading MISS MOLE, a 1930 novel by E. H. Young, spinster lit. (This, however, is not proving to be a soothing Barbara Pymish novel. ) Hannah Mole may be the most unlikable spinster in history: having worked for 20 years at typical spinster jobs, companion, housekeeper, governess, she is fed up. When she tires of sycophancy as a companion to an old lady, she walks out and decides she will have a new adventure. Through a cousin's conniving, Miss Mole, the least demure spinster in fiction, become a vicar's housekeeper. She enjoys her self-effacing role while plotting Machiavellian strategies to win over his nephew and two daughters and to rebel against his tyranny. Hannah refuses to be bored by her life. She rearranges everything in her mind and tells witty stories to her employers.

But some kind of clash is coming.

The Comedy of Housework

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in “Neglected Fictions” in the TLS in 1985: “If I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose HOUSE-BOUND (now reissued by Persephone).”

Winifred Peck, the aunt of Penelope Fitzgerald, was a popular writer in her day, very gently comical. In HOUSE-BOUND, the warm humorously original musings of the anti-heroine Rose dazzle us and make us laugh and temporize the occasional sentimentalism. This uproarious, charming, canny novel takes place in the first years of World War II, and its ludicrous central problem is Rose’s inability to find a maid or cook at Mrs. Loman’s Registry for Domestic Servants. Things are changing, and work in munitions factories and other war industries have attracted women for better pay and more opportunities. So Rose decides to do hter own housework, inspired by Mrs. Loman’s words to a sour client who says she can’t manage her own house. “I don’t know why...Millions of women do just that!” Rose decides, at age 50, to take over the duties of her cook and maid when they leave to work in a munitions factory.

The class system breaks down with the war. It breaks down on a personal level as Rose humbly learns to clean from her new daily help, the outspoken Mrs. Childs who felt “pitying contempt now for another woman’s ignorance and ineffriciency. If the essence of a lady, in the true sense of the word, lies in the virtues of courage, honesty, and kindliness, Mrs. Childe was a lady already: If the essence of vulgarity is the inability to face life and its vagaries heroically, Rose was at the moment, she considered, as common as she could be.”

The witty novel, told from Rose’s point of view, shows her never quite mastering housework, but in interludes she daydreams or dips into anthologies of poetry. She becomes “house-bound,” the slave of the house, and has little time to read, socialize, or do war work (the last she’d hated anyway). Every object she cleans reminds her to clean another. Her work is never done.

We get acquainted with her family: an unemotional husband who retires after dinne to his library to write a genealogy book; two teasing, loving sons in the military who come home from time to time; and a miserable daughter who has always felt neglected. (The daughter is quite a warped character, one of those people who believe their own hyperbolic stories about their relationships and take no responsiblility). There is so much humor in this novel, and Rose has such good sense. No one escapes the tragedy of the war, however.

The Waugh Thing

The Waugh thing continues. In The Sword of Honour trilogy (Officers and Gentlemen), the brigade has not yet seen action. They're shifted from one place to the next, climb rocks, forage for roots and vegetables and return emaciated, and perform other useless military exercises. Another character has a knee injury (knee injuries are a joke: this is the third). These books are really classics, yet I know no one who reads them. Sword of Honour treats the same war themes and Catholic themes as Brideshead Revisited but more successfully. Brideshead is an uneven book--I reread it five years ago and thought it was good for about the first half, then surprisingly sentimental--and we all love it but The Sword of Honour is BETTER.

I began Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. This was a rush job: I ran out to the library in my pajamas (nobody batted an eye) so I could suddenly read all about Waughs if I needed to. So I’m sitting around in my pajamas reading this at night. it’s one of those things like the Mitford biographies: you can’t go wrong. Though I’m not sure there’s a Waugh industry as there is a Mitford industry. But Alexander Waugh has inherited his grandfather Evelyn's wit. He also gives some useful suggestions about reading his family’s books. He says that Evelyn’s are best read in the order of publication to identify common themes, common characters, and autobiographical elements.

The biography presents me with a "Waugh challenge." (You know how blogs are always giving you a reading "challenge?") Here are my questions:

1. Do I need to read or reread all of Waugh’s books? I’ve already read:



Decline and Fall

Vile Bodies

A Handful of Dust

Put Out More Flags

Brideshead Revisited

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Scoop (several times)

Black Mischief

The Loved One

2. How about if I just read Scoop several more times?

3. Should I read the novels of Evelyn's son Auberon Waugh, who I now learn was considered the better writer of the two by A. N. Wilson and V. S. Naipaul (who usually trashes everyone)? Oh, despair. I’ll never find any of these at the library. My library is like the Boots library described in my last post, The Great Profession.

3. Why SHOULD I read everything about Waugh? Am I a biographer?

No. So I’ll continue with the Sword of Honour trilogy and Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Son. And then I’ll try to find something by Auberon if it’s possible. No rush: one of these days I’ll find a 17-cent-er (my preferred price for online shopping) and then add $3.99 shipping.

A Very Great Profession

I’m halfway through Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, which I found at the Persephone Books web site. Needless to say, this is just my kind of thing, a chatty, informative social history of women’s literature, much of which is out-of-print and has languished forgotten in library vaults. Pointedly yet gently, learnedly yet subtly, Beauman explains exactly why middle-class women loved these interwar women’s novels.

Middle-class women read novels, she tells us. Thank God. I’ve always considered the novel a necessary art form, and finally someone is telling me it’s fine to read them. Much of my youth was spent reading canonical poetry, novels, and history, but in recent years I've branched out to more obscure novels. Not all of them are by women. I also adore Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, a Barbara Pymish novel with a bite, in which the spinster heroine lives in a rooming house to escape the blitz but must survive residents' fracases which disconcertingly mirror the politics of WWII. Nicola Beauman would love this book, if she hasn’t already gotten to it.

Among Beauman's favorites is Cicely Hamilton’s William-an Englishman, which was out-of-print when she wrote her book, but has since been reissued by Persephone. But some of them are simply impossible to find: I'd like Amber Reeves’s A Lady and Her Husband for my teapot collection (the husband runs tea shoppes). Yes, I collect books about tea--Tea at Four-Oclock by Janet O’Neill, Monica Dickens’s My Turn to Make the Tea, a tea shop mystery, etc.--but sadly Reeves’ book doesn’t seem to be around.

In a scene in the movie Brief Encounter, the heroine, Laura Jesson, goes into town to “change her library book.” Beauman wanted to know what the library book was. (I also have this obsession. Which Dickens book does Desmond keep in a plastic bag in LOST?.) When she saw it was a Kate O’Brien, she immediately wanted to write A Great Profession (though she was discouraged by one of her professors at Cambridge).

Beauman describes the British library system of the '20s and '30s. Circulating (rental) libraries were an important part of middle-class life, and Boots was the largest and most accessible of a chain of 400 branches in the 1930s.

"The Boots First Literary Course for librarians divided literature into categories, presumably so that the harassed attendant could at least decide which type of book her customer would find acceptable. One of the most popular (along with the detective and the love story) was Light Romance. The course lecturer said: ‘We often hear [women] say they like a “pretty” book. I am sure that your own taste in reading has developed far above this level, but to a librarian books are but tools and it is our duty to supply them to our subscribers without questioning their taste.’ He lent rather more of his approval to Family Stories, defined as being ‘for those tired of romance’ who are often seeking something with reality in it; the subscriber may define these as a ‘well-written book.’

Beauman categorizes the novels in a manner that is quite un-librarian-like: War, Surplus Women, Feminism, Domesticity, Sex, etc.. And as she documents the history, she speaks of many “middle-class women’s writers,” among them some of my favorites, Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen, Enid Bagnold, an E. M. Forster.

This is a book I’ll treasure. Her appreciation of women's novels is like learning history effortlessly at the same time as getting recommendations from a literary friend.

Men at Arms (Sword of Honours trilogy)

World War II novels fill me with dread, I’ve read so many in recent years: Jane Gardam, Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters. The list goes on and on and on and on.

It was not my intention to read Men at Arms. I had been considering rereading Brideshead Revisited and suddenly recalled that Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy was in the house. Unlike Waugh’s raucous satires, Men at Arms is an often touching, realistic novel, an account of the Roman Catholic, sweetly sardonic, Guy Crouchback’s war. Guy (guy?!) returns to England from italy, intent on fighting the Nazis, only to find that he is already superannuated in his mid-thirties. Finally, he meets a friend of his father's, a jovial major with Dickensian bluffness, who pulls some strings--and Guy becomes a member of a very peculiar brigade. We see the Halberdiers through Guy’s gently satiric eyes. And what a strange bunch they are.

Althorpe, the only other middle-aged officer in training, is a fool, a stickler for rules (and creator of other rules to boost his self-importance), entirely humorless, yet humorous in the extreme. He carries a collapsible chemical toilet, nicknamed the Thuderbox, and hides it in various sheds, where he can take care of “unfinished business.” The thunderbox finally explodes (this is the kind of incident that characterizes the first months of Guy’s war).

Many accidents happen: Guy is lamed for months after playing football with a wastepaper basket. Althorpe is similarly lamed by another absurd escapade. The Helberdiers believe the two are putting them on when they both walk into the dining room leaning on canes.

The wild brigadier, Colonel Ritchie-Hook, most famous for taking risks in battle, returns from a brief sortie in Algeria with a “Negro’s head,” (which he calls a coconut.) The jokes about his fondness for decapitation, which we hae heard at a dinner party. turn out to be real:

“’We mustn’t be late,’ said Mrs. Green. “Ben Ritchie-Hook is coming. He’s a terror if he’s kept waiting for his food.’...

“Is it the man you were telling me about?’ asked Mrs. Leonard, whose way of showing her disapproval of the expedition was to speak only to her husband, ‘the man who cuts off people’s heads?’”

There is also, of course, much sadness. Terrible things are happening all around them. The military world, oddly, from the point of view of the training camp, seems entirely protected. And of course it's not.

This is the most winning war novel I’ve read since Catch-22.

Beards in Literature

A friend, horrifed by Wilkie Collins's beard, said, "What a beard!" and suggested I do a piece on beards of literary men. So I've done a little investigation and posted photos of: (1) Wilkie Collins (top left); (2) Charles Dickens (below Collins); (3) Anthony Trollope (below) and (4) Henry James (below Trollope). Not all Victorian writers had beards as I learned after INTENSIVELY searching the internet (meaning 10 minutes). George Gissing and Edmund Gosse, for example, sported tasteful moustaches (which one hopes may have boosted sales despite their radicalism). There's something rather grotesque about two of the beards (who were their stylists?), though I like Dickens's. Which of these is your favorite beard? A, B, C, or D?

Dames

It's a rainy day, so you rifle through your bookshelves.... Dames by Elizabeth North is randomly chosen, the kind of boarding school novel you might read as a girl (i.e., by Enid Blyton, a writer alluded to by North in the clash between the faculty's snobbery and the girls' tastes), except the characters are sophisticated and it chronologically jumps back and forth over a 25-year-year period. It's a bit like a subdued English version of Mary McCarthy's The Group, except it begins at a boarding school instead of a Seven Sisters college. At Dames School, the teachers dislike the group called the Ambers. These five girls scorn anyone “public-spirited, hearty and conscientious...” They nonchalantly mock their English teacher, pretend they’re menstruating in gym class, and skip chapel.

The rebellious Erica becomes a hip but worried mother of children who follow a guru in California. Mousie, the most overlooked member of the group, is at the center of the novel and becomes the least conventional. A woman in her 30s, Mousie has fallen in love with a married man and travels to Ethiopia to take over a mission connected with Dames.

The headmistress of Dames, Miss Bedford, is also unconventional. Disillusioned, she believes the school is outdated. She is defeated by the Ambers, the new kind of girl admitted by the school. Half of her doesn’t care about their skipping chapel; half of her realizes she must punish them, though the punishment will have no impact. An older Mousie, Miss Bedford is half in love with her late best friend’s widowed husband and meets him in Ethiopia when she spends her holiday at the Dames mission house.

So one single woman is in love with a married man; the other with a widower.

There is a coolness and cleverness to the subtle, witty style, which is so minimalist it stays in the background. There is an odd connection between the privileged Dames school and the patronage of the mission in Ethiopia. Sadly, this seems to be a forgotten book.

Wilkie Collins and Eliot Bliss

Wilkie Collins's Blind Love is a luxurious pleasure after hard work. It doesn’t take itself too seriously--it absorbs one's whole attention--and somehow it is believable while one reads. The intriguing characters include a harum-scarum young lord who romantically becomes a double agent in an assassins' group; Iris, a brilliant, faithful woman who saves him three times (once in men’s clothes); Hugh Mountjoy, a steady friend who fiercely loves Iris and negotiates her safety several times by bribing a confidence man to stay away; a con-man doctor; a former actress; and a half-mad maid.

Serialized in the Illustrated London News in 1889, Blind Love was completed by Walter Besant and posthumously published. , Collins on his deathbed left Besant copious notes on the development of the plot and even lines of dialouge. This neglected novel is worth looking up--but only do so after reading No Name, Armadale, The Moonstone, or some of his more famous works. The Dover paperback gives no background on Besant, just his short preface explaining the circumstances.

Now, back to Viragos. For every essay celebrating Virago’s 30th anniversary (the latest on Sunday June 4 by Justine Picardie), I have read at least five Viragos. Actually I read 8 last month. I can wholeheartedly recommend many: the witty Molly Keane (whose early books are published under the name M. J. Farrell), Nina Bawden’s Circles of Deceit (I’m a sucker for books about artists), Vera Brittain’s earnest Honourable Estate (which concentrates on the suffrage movement and socialism before and after WWI), and anything by Rose Macaulay (best known for Towers of Trepizand, but The World My Wildnerness and Told by an Idiod are also good and published by Virago).

I've most recently read Eliot Bliss's Saraband. What’s wrong with it? Why didn’t I like it? My enjoyment of this novel has been tepid at best. Saraband is the sometimes-poetic story of a dreamy Catholic girl, Louie, whose years at a Catholic boarding school never seem quite real to her (though she has one mischievous friend and mourns the pretty music teacher who leaves the nunnery ). Her idyllic home with her grandmother, Lulu, her mother, and uncles grounds her with an imagination that inspires some of the most vivid imagery and memories.

The first paragraph illustrates Louie's dreaminess: “All along the road from the river the frost made patterns on the ground, and how beautifully the air smelt...The sharp air hung over one’s head like the blade of a knife, she imagined it saying, ‘Behold, you shall be cold, you shall be cold...’ Winter had a most exciting smell, it made one think of people whom one knew and yet had never met, places where at some time or other one felt sure one must have lived and yet could not remember. The frost hung on the trees, it made them look as if they had gone white during the night from fear, it gave them a very queer stark look.”

Beautiful writing. this is great stuff, but why all the run-on sentences? As though she had turned stanzas of a poem into prose. Of course that's the point. Louie writes poetry and says she doesn't know how to write prose.

I also like this passage about leaving the business school where she learns stenography and typing.

“She was leaving the draughty, noisy place, the singing of the machines and the crowds on the stairs. Now they were all new people in the crowds, one hardly ever recognized a face anywhere. it was astonishing how quickly they changed. Very few people took the whole course. Most of them came to learn quickly, and they learnt quickly and went. And yet there were the same kind of people on the stairs. The same kind of conversation went on all around them....”

The pileup of adjectives and the unique phrase “singing” of the machines are brilliant. Then dreary short sentence follows short sentence. This particular Catholic feminist novel Isn’t in the same class as Antonia White’s Catholic novels. But Bliss does seem to be following in the footsteps of May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson.

Dorothy Richardson, a friend of Bliss, may have influenced her style. Richardson, of course, is more innovative, but the more I write about Bliss the more I see this influence may be important.

Naked Lunch and Ice

I once listened to a record of William Burroughs reading from Naked Lunch. “I'm looking for a fix in Pleasantville, Iowa," he rasped. Much laughter all around. My eyes widened. Marijuana: okay. Heroin: no. I never forgot the time a friend on LSD forgot how to read and we took care of her until she was sane enough to return home. Insanity was only postponed: a few years later she ended up in a mental hospital. Did the LSD do it? And unfortunately those were the days when psychiatric treatment consisted of a regimen of drugs that resulted in personality change. She seemed so somehow slow and thickened when she came out. And so I have never read William Burroughs. Get real, I always think. But perhaps this is the year I overcome my prejudices and read these "drug" classics.


Some drug literature, however, fascinates me. Who can be consistent? [LEFT: detail of self-portrait of ANNA KAVAN] Anna Kavan, an English writer whose heroin addiction shaped her fiction, is known as a “cult” novelist (a phrase I recently applied it to Winifred Holtby’s socialist novels, just showing you can apply it to anything). Her most famous novel, ice, is sometimes considered science fiction, other times a surreal allegory. “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me,” says the narrator of Ice. This allegorical world is on the brink of an icy nuclear war and the narrator is searching for a mysterious, fragile girl who has eluded both him and her husband (who thinks she is in need of psychiatric treatmen). It's fairly obvious that Kavan is the fragile girl (who charmed men but rejected them in favor of heroin). A few years ago I considered writing a paper on Kavan, but my notes led me nowhere. I should have concentrated on one book (Julia and the Bazooka, a book of short stories, is my favorite), but I wrote notes on all of them. Too much material for a single paper.

There is a biography of Kavan. And Rhys Davies, a Welsh writer and friend of Kavan, wrote a novel based on her life. He wrote that she once threw a chicken at him during a dinner party, but she also worked as an interior decorator and could be charming.

It would have to be inconvenient to be a friend of an addict. I mean how good a friend could they be? Chickens thrown at us at dinner? But I love Kavan’s writing: she is as good as (or better than) Jean Rhys, only completely unknown in this country.

The Cult of Winifred Holtby

It's middlebrow novel time--beach reading, even if there is no beach--and the dusty novels of the '20s and '30s fit nicely into a totebag. After reading three of Winifred Holtby's absorbing if uneven and unsubtly political novels, I am suddenly a Holtby "cult" fan. SOUTH RIDING, ANDERBY WOLD, & THE CROWDED STREET speak across time and are emotionally and intellectually true. Her naturalistic portraits of women on farms, in villages, and cities are unglamourous but somehow touch one and often strike home: women have more choices now, but these books illustrate a period when not being selected to marry was shameful and spinsterhood was the "S" word. Women's and socialist politics, important to Holtby, have not, surprisingly, changed much.

Muriel, the unsympathetic protagonist of THE CROWDED STREET, was beginning to bore me when it became clear that this is Holtby's plan. Muriel's dullness and indecisiveness are caused by her very conventional, determined mother's indoctrination, which slowly withers Muriel's personality. After a meeting of a church society, "(Muriel) thought: 'What on earth shall I do when I get home? Read? All books are the same--about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. In books things always happen to people. Why doesn't someone write a book about someone to whom nothing ever happens--like me?'"

Like a princess in a fairy tale, Muriel requires salvation, though that's not quite how it turns out. And perhaps the process is somewhat unrealistic. Never mind. Holtby completely carries us away.

This is not quite a classic--but almost. Library books of a lost world. And Persephone Books has just reissued this.

P.S. And talk about coincidence--there is an enthusaiastic REVIEW of this in the Sunday June 1 Spectator. The link is below:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/books/658421/not-the-marrying-type.thtml

Winifred Holtby

Another Virago in the house? All right. It's Winifred Holtby's SOUTH RIDING. I didn’t like this one so much as her best friend Vera Brittain's masterpiece, HONOURABLE ESTATE..

Holtby, the subject of Vera Brittain's memoir, TESTAMENT OF FRIENDSHIP, simply did not write as fluidly and well as Brittain. Holtby’s sprawling, intelligent, political, if somewhat turgid, novel, is compelling, yet awkward, the labored story of a town. SOUTH RIDING fascinatingly spirals out from actions of the city council of South Riding to highlight the characters of all classes from shack dwellers to headmistresses to construction workers on the dole to once wealthy farmers. Perhaps that is its appeal: Holtby cares so much about her characters and contrasts the innocence of socialists and do-gooders to the corruption of sleazy council members who hope to make real estate deals by preying on the poor. The traditional narrative is never preachy, and she gives all the characters their due. Published posthumously in 1936, the Winner of the James Tait Black Award, it doesn’t measure up to the best of ‘30s liberal writers like Storm jameson. Nevertheless, it is a very good traditional novel, logically constructed, if not exquisitely written.

In her preface Holtby wrote to her alderman mother: “What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic and impersonal resolutions passed in a city council were daily revolutionizing the lives of those men and women whom they affected. The complex tangle of motives prompting public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on private lives appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern of the English landscape.”

Anyway...this one is readily available, though I’m not sure about Holtby’s others.

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates (1926-1992), the author of Revolutionary Road, knows the hopeless emptiness of suburban life. He knows the commuters who hate their 9-5 jobs and the claustrophobic housewives whose pregnancies cut them off radically from past achievements and friends. Revolutionary Road, a cult classic, is passed on by word of mouth, or, according to Richard Ford in his introduction to the 2000 Vintage edition, taught by maverick professors who specialize in Kesey, Kerouac, and Paula Fox (the latter’s work is especially pertinent).

The protagonists, a couple named Frank and April Wheeler, never intended to live average lives. They enjoyed their slight rebelliousness in Greenwich Village until April became pregnant, the contingency on which their lives hinge. Frank talks her out of an abortion (which was a perilous and horrifying prospect, since she intended to perform it on herself with a syringe), but the pregnancy in fact ruins both their lives. April has no life outside the suburb; Frank, who prides himself on doing nothing at his job and not even knowing what it is, rebels at work, hilariously shuffling files from his in-box to his desk drawers to the secretary’s files and back to his own in-box, writing brochures and letters as seldom as possible. April, however, stuck at home, has lost confidence. She encourages him to quit his job and move to France, where she can support the family.

it is a, ironically, a madman who understands their philosophy. John, a schizophrenic mathematic, articulates their loathing of suburbia:

“You want to play house, you got to have a nice job. You want to play very NICE house, very SWEET house, then you got to have a job you don’t like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine percent of the people work things out, so believe me buddy you’ve got nothing to apologize for. Anybody comes along and says “Whaddya do it for?’ you can be pretty sure he’s on a four-hour pass from the State funny farm...”

It takes a madman to speak the truth. And possibly a housewife (April has less to lose than Frank). But the reader also sympathizes with Frank’s point of view. He may be unlikable and arrogant, but is believable as a guy in a gray flannel suit who is tempted by success at a job he doesn’t respect.

Honourable Estate

Readers of Virago Modern Classics have been hustling their green-backed paperbacks (and new chick-lit-lookialikes) out of their bookcases lately. You’ll see women in urban landscapes on the buses reading Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbor, and sweaty women swigging water and munching power bars beside a dusty trail, reading Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate (1936; Virago 2000).

The 30th anniversary of the founding of Virago is the occasion of gossipy reminiscences in blogs and the Guardian (including an article by founder Carmen Callil). Bloggers will ask what your favorite Virago is and are there any copies of The Brontes Went to Woolworth's for less than $34 (the answer is no). I've been reading some extraordinary Viragos myself. I LOVED the Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, which I learned about in Carmen Callil's article. And I mention Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate because I was denied it so long by its obscure status, and because Brittain’s novels have been sneered at by critics and more often overlooked.

Carolyn Heilbrun, a literary critic who wrote the introduction to Brittain’s Testament of experience, declared: “Brittain was not a great novelist....She discovered her form to be the documentary.” Because of such dismissive statements, I assumed that Brittain’s autobiographies were her best work and never looked for the novels. I am stunned by this low estimation of her fiction. Honourable Estate is a swift-moving 587-page novel of ideas, from which I could barely tear myself away for work or for sleep.

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." A nurse during World War I, disillusioned by many losses, she believes that the war continues after the armistice as refugees pour into camps in Russia and Poland. All characters are psychologically damaged, but make a difference in society. The novel is not plot-oriented, but Brittain's ideas and the emotional political involvement of her characters are exquisitely expressed and explained in her fluid style.