Literature by period

Margaret Mendelawitz, Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1859

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It was not to be a high-brow intellectual periodical. Above all he wanted to reach and entertain the masses and, at the same time, help shape discussion and debate on the important social questions of the time. (from Introduction, by Margaret Mendelawitz)

Five covers for the Charles Dickens' Australia set

Set book covers (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Charles Dickens‘ Australia is a set of five volumes containing essays, stories and poems relating to Australia from the magazine, Household Words, that Dickens established and edited. The magazine was published from 1850 to 1859 which, as Margaret Mendelawitz says in her introduction, was an “extraordinary decade in Australian and British history”. The discovery of gold in Australia (and California) transformed the world. Social justice was becoming a serious issue for debate and action. And it was when “the age of capital” really began.

So, it is rather fortunate that a writer of Dickens’ calibre produced a magazine in this period – and that he was sufficiently interested in Australia (as I described in a post last year) to actively seek and commission articles about life and social conditions here for his magazine. As you might expect, the magazine is available online (in gorgeous facsimile and for electronic downloading) but the value of these five volumes is that they have been carefully researched by Mendelawitz and contain the articles specifically relating to Australia. According to the Sydney University Press website, of the 3000 articles published in the magazine over its lifetime, only 100 dealt with Australia in some way. Unless you like the fun of the chase, these volumes are an excellent way to get to the Australian content without having to do the searching and sifting yourself.

This isn’t the only reason though for reading the articles via this set. It is a beautifully conceived anthology. Firstly, the articles have been thematically organised into five manageable volumes:

  1. Convict Stories
  2. Immigration
  3. Frontier Stories
  4. Mining and Gold
  5. Maritime Conditions

And there’s more. Each article  starts with a small panel containing a brief description of its content, its publication details (the volume and issue numbers, pagination, and date) and the amount paid for it! The articles are footnoted, with those original to the article clearly identified as such. Curiously, the editorial additions – the introduction, etc – are referenced differently, with the notes placed at the end of each piece rather than in footnotes. The additions are: a foreword by Geoffrey Blainey; an introduction by Mendelawitz; a list of contributors providing a brief, targeted biography and a list of their articles included in the set; and, a short but appropriate bibliography. These are all repeated in each volume, presumably so the volumes can stand alone.

I was initially perturbed that the article authors are not named in the table of contents, but then I read the introduction which tells us that “regardless of their source, all articles appeared anonymously”. Mendelawitz has followed that practice in her table of contents, but has identified the author/s on the articles themselves, providing another reason for reading this set because knowing the authors and their backgrounds adds a further dimension to the reading.

Mendelawitz covers a lot of ground in her introduction. She talks a little about Dickens himself and about the history of Household Words, she describes the era in which it was written, and she discusses the writers, the content and the “house” style. I found these last two particularly interesting. The articles, as I’ve said, were published anonymously. They were also carefully edited to meet what Elizabeth Gaskell called a “Dickensy style”. This meant they had to be bright, regardless of how dry the subject, and would characteristically start with a snappy, provocative paragraph. It also meant that those that did not accord with Dickens’ views were rewritten. I can’t help thinking that, if slavishly enforced, this adherence to a set style could result in the articles feeling formulaic. It’s something I’ll check out as I read the volumes in depth.

The final point I’d like to make in this overview concerns the issue of fact versus fiction. Mendelawitz argues that the articles are “literature, not history”. They are valuable, she says, for the insight they provide into 19th century Australia but this “does not depend on them being the literal truth”. She writes:

As a collection they demonstrate the complementary nature of storytelling between the writing of history and fiction. The stories in Household Words frequently draw a fine line between fact and fiction, giving voice to characters and events that could easily go unrecognised and unrecorded. In many ways they exemplify the fundamental problem  encountered by historians through the ages of how to separate and present fact, fiction, myth and truth.

Regular readers of this blog know that this issue interests me. I expect to come back to it when I review the first volume in the near future … from what I’ve read so far, I think I’m in for a fascinating ride.

Margaret Mendelawitz
Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1858
5 volumes
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2011

(Review copies courtesy Sydney University Press)

MJ Hyland, Carry me down

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MJ Hyland, Carry me down bookcover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

If you like writers who unsettle, then MJ Hyland is a writer for you. Carry me down is my second Hyland. I read, loved and reviewed a later book of hers, This is how, nearly a year ago, and said then that I’d like to read more. I finally have, and am not disappointed.

Carry me down is a pre-coming-of-age story. John Egan is an 11-year-old boy living in Ireland with his parents. He’s an only child and is keen to be special, different. He is clearly pre-adolescent – he’s naive, for example, about some of his 15-year-old cousin’s behaviours. He’s an unreliable narrator: the world he sees and describes is rather skewed but the unsettling thing is that we, the readers, know it is skewed but we are not quite sure in which way. What is going on in this family is the question in our minds from beginning to end.

Like This is how, the novel has a vaguely unsettling beginning. The first paragraph sets up what looks like a cosy family scene. The three are sitting, companionably it seems, around the table on a Sunday evening. The third and fourth paragraphs read:

From time to time we stop reading to talk. It is a good mood, as though we are one person reading one book – not three people apart and alone.

These kinds of days are the perfect ones.

That “alone” is a little jarring, though not dramatically so. But then comes this on page 2:

“John,” she [his mother] says, “please come with me. “She is taking me out to the hallway, away from my father. She is taking me out of his sight, as though I am rubbish.

“Rubbish”? Now, that’s a strong word. What she tells him in the hallway is to stop staring at her:

“You were staring at me, John. You shouldn’t stare like that.”

“Why can’t I look at you?”

“Because you’re eleven now. You’re not a baby anymore.”

There seems to be something slightly strange going on here, or is there? Is this just a pre-adolescent bumping up against the adult world he is about to join, or is something far more complicated going on? As the book progresses, John’s relationship with his mother verges on “too close”. He seems a little too emotionally and physically needy, and she seems unsure of how to manage it. Is his need normal, is the question we ask. Meanwhile, his relationship with his father seems more typically adolescent. He wants his father’s approval and love, but he wants to be independent too. And, he wants to be special. He is an avid reader of the Guinness Book of Records, and decides early in the novel that he has a gift for lie detection for which he’d like to be included in the Guinness. He reads up on lie detection, and starts his own Gol of Seil (Log of Lies).

The situation is complicated by a number of facts which come out in the first chapters of the novel. John is unusually tall for his age and is under medical care for this. He regularly scratches a spot on his head until it bleeds. And he is bullied at school, because he is clearly a little different. His father is out of a job and studying for exams to be admitted to Trinity College. The book his father is reading at the start of the novel is Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. Is this a hint to us – or a red herring? His mother works with a puppet show. This is interesting, too, as the idea of puppets subtly undercuts the desire for control and independence that John, like any pre-adolescent, is starting to strive for. The family lives with the paternal grandmother, with whom John’s father has a prickly relationship, mainly around money. And, underlying all this is John’s growing obsession with truth and lies.  This obsession is the framing motif in the book. John catches adults lying and takes them to task for it, all the while telling lies himself. He does not, by the end, come to a real understanding of how lying functions, of the difference between white lies and more serious ones. For this reason I don’t see it as a true coming-of-age story.

And now I come to my problem. How do I write about this book without giving it away? There are events – powerful, troubling ones – that occur in the book and that can be “read” in different ways. I’d rather like to analyse or explore the possible meanings, but that would require giving away some significant plot points. I don’t want to do that because this is a book that you need to discover for yourself, sentence by sentence.

What I’ll say though is that this is one of those books that has an open ending. (Indeed, giving nothing away, the last word of the book is “open”). How we read it depends on our own world view, on the weight we give to the various events in the novel, on how we read the specific words and images used by Hyland to describe the events and characters, and our personal understanding of adolescent and family psychology. The way I see it, the book’s ending hints at a number of possibilities but we do not know, at the point in their lives that we leave these characters, which of these possibilities will eventuate. And that, as they say, is life!

MJ Hyland
Carry me down
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2007 (orig. 2006)
313pp.
ISBN: 9781921145780

Kate Chopin, A morning walk

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Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

It’s been some time since I read (and therefore reviewed) a Library of America offering, but when I saw another Kate Chopin offering pop up a few weeks ago, I couldn’t resist it. And so, I printed it off, but have only just managed to read it. Well, what a surprise…

I thought about starting this post with “And now for something completely different” because this story, “A Morning Walk” (1897), is significantly different from my previous three Chopins – her novel The awakening, and the two short stories I’ve previously reviewed here. All is explained though in the brief but useful introductory notes from LOA:

Chopin gained fame (and notoriety) during the 1890s startling readers with her handling of topics considered bold for the era, but she also continued to publish light or pleasant fiction for local magazines. Among these latter stories are several holiday tales – a genre whose prevalence, along with its promise of good pay, proved attractive to writers during the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, from Charles Dickens and Washington Irving to Robert Louis Stevenson and Willa Cather (who published under a pseudonym).

And so to “A Morning Walk”. It is a short short story about Archibald’s morning walk. It was originally published under the title “An Easter Day Conversion” which gives a clue to its meaning. Archibald is around forty, not concerned about looking older than he is, and inclined to focus on the practical rather than emotional or sentimental things in life. In the fifth paragraph we are told that:

Archibald has started out for a walk, not because the day was beautiful and alluring but for the healthful exercise, and for the purpose of gathering into his lungs the amount of pure oxygen needed to keep his body in good working condition.

However, the language in the third paragraph hints at something else going on around him, even if he’s not consciously aware of it: the irregular streets “cuddle up” to the houses, “riotous colours” are abroad, and there is “a velvety gust” which “softly” beats his face. And in the fourth paragraph we are told that these sensations of spring “for some unaccountable reason … were reaching him to-day through unfamiliar channels”. Instead of his usual interest in flowers being “to dismember their delicate, sweet bodies for the purpose of practical and profitable investigation”, on this morning “he saw only the color of the blossoms, and noted their perfumes. The butterflies floated unmolested within his reach …”.

On this walk, and in this frame of mind, he meets a young woman, carrying lilies. His thoughts take a sensual turn as she reminds him of “peaches that he had bitten; of grapes that he has tasted; of a cup’s rim from which he has sometimes sipped wine”. The references to the lilies – which tend to symbolise innocence and purity – are even more pointed: their “big wax-like petals” risk being “bruised and jostled”.

And so he accompanies her to church, surprising the congregation with his presence, and hears the beginning of the traditional Easter sermon, “I am the Resurrection and the Life…”. Life seems about to change for Archibald, for the better, as he senses and accepts “the poet’s vision, of the life that is within and the life that is without, pulsing in unison, breathing the harmony of an undivided existence”. The aforementioned “lilies” – and their bruising – add a little edge which I’d expect of Chopin, but the reading is, I believe, intended to be a positive one.

Note: My other Kate Chopin reviews are A respectable woman and Désirée’s baby.

Helen Garner, Postcards from Surfers

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Helen Garner is a fiercely honest writer – and a prolific one too. She has written novels, short stories, essays and non-fiction books. All are generally well-acclaimed, though not always without controversy (as I mentioned in my recent Monday musings). Certainly, I haven’t always agreed with her … but I do admire her honesty and the quality of her writing. The book I’m reviewing here, Postcards from surfers, is a collection of short stories and provides an excellent introduction to her writing and her (fictional, anyhow) concerns.

Helen Garner, Postcards from Surfers

The collection was first published in 1985, but it has been recently rereleased (2010) by Penguin in their Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price series. Penguin also did an edition in 2008. That says something, I think, about the standing of this collection.

Unlike the last short story collection I reviewed, Leah Swann’s Bearings, this one takes its name from one of the stories in the book, the first to be precise. There is nothing in my copy to indicate whether the stories were written for this collection or whether some or all had been published before. The Resident Judge in her review said that several of the stories had appeared elsewhere before being collected here. I’d like to know when and where: I’m one of those people who always reads that part of the front or end matter for short story collections.

Anyhow, on with the stories. There are 11 of them and while there is an overall theme – the theme that we expect of Garner, that is love and relationships, particularly from the point of view of failure and loss – they are surprisingly (and wonderfully) varied. They vary in length from the little 4-page “The dark, the light” to more hefty first one (the title story) that runs for over 20 pages. The point of view varies: six are told in first person, and five in third person. So does the voice, from a girl child to a male drunk in a bar, from a female friend to a rejected lover. And the style varies. This was its most surprising aspect for me. There is, for example, the seamless flow across place, time and ideas of the first story (which is the more typical Garner), the disjointed vignettes of “The life of art” chronicling a long standing friendship, and the nicely sustained drunken first person rave of “All those bloody young Catholics”.

The subject matter varies too. The title story is about an adult woman coming to visit her retired parents and aunt at Surfers Paradise, leaving a broken relationship and a not fully successful life behind her. I was ready for something more discontented in this story, but the sense we’re given is that she’s matured and has learnt to be content with (tolerant of, perhaps) her imperfect family:

If I speak they pretend to listen, just as I feign attention to their endless looping discourses: these are our courtesies: this is love. Everything is spoken, nothing is said.

(Doesn’t that have a lovely flow to it? Garner’s writing is delicious.) This being Garner, several stories are about broken or past relationships, but there are also stories dealing more generally with families and parenting (“Little Helen’s Sunday afternoon” and “A happy story”) and friendship (“The life of art”).

I once heard Garner in an interview express admiration for the way Elizabeth Jolley reused and retold stories. I felt (though my memory may be failing me here) that she admired Jolley’s risk-taking in doing this (would it irritate or bore readers?) as well as her ability to spin more out of a character or situation. It seems Garner decided that if Jolley could do it, so could she. There is a character, a previous lover, Philip, who appears twice in this collection. He sounds very much like the Philip in Cosmo cosmolino. He represents the lost true love and often appears in her work (under that name or others). Where he is, some pain is usually there too. Here are two excerpts from “Civilisation and its discontents”:

He [Philip] woke with a bright face. ‘I feel unblemished’, he said, ‘when I’ve been with you’. This is why I loved him, of course: because he talked like that, using words and phrases that most people wouldn’t think of saying.

and

I wanted to say to him, to someone, ‘Listen, listen, I am hopelessly in love’. But I hung on. I knew I had bought it on myself, and hung on until the spasm passed.

Helen Garner wears her emotions openly. She’s never afraid to hang out the dirty laundry, to show the darker, more unpleasant sides of human relationships – the selfishness, the jealousy, the unkindness, and of course the pain – but it is always underpinned by a willingness to understand and accept our humanity rather than condemn it. Garner’s world is very much the real world. It’s not hard, I think, to find something in it you recognise (whether you like it or not!)

Helen Garner
Postcards from Surfers
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2010 (orig. 1985)
ISBN: 9780143204909
154pp.

POSTSCRIPT: I wrote and scheduled this a couple of weeks before my Monday musings post. When I came back to check it I was rather relieved to find that I had not contradicted myself.

Jay Griffiths, A love letter from a stray moon

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Jay Griffiths, A love letter from a stray moon cover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I have always wanted wings. To fly where I belong, to become who I am, to speak my truths winged and moon-swayed.

I’m not sure I can do justice to this poetic, passionate novella by Jay Griffiths. Titled A love letter from a stray moon, it’s a first person outpouring in the voice of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. I don’t use the term “outpouring” pejoratively, but rather to describe the full-on passion with which it is told. This is a book with confronts the senses with its power – the imagery is strong but beautiful, the story raw and honest (or so it seems to me.) It’s a book you want to describe as a “tour-de-force” but that would be too clichéd.

The opening lines of the novel quoted above introduce us to its two main metaphors – wings/flight and the moon. For Frida, flight equates with hope and with magic. The moon, though, is a far more complex image, and I’ll try to tease it out a bit as I go on. First though the story. This is biographical fiction (historical fiction?) in the form of a prose poem, told in the first person voice of Frida. The facts of Kahlo’s life are conveyed – such as the terrible accident when she was 18 which left her unable to bear children; her falling in love with, marriage to and divorce from Diego Rivera; her relationship with Trotsky; and even her death and cremation which requires some suspension of disbelief but that’s not hard to do given the novel’s style and tone. If you didn’t know much about Frida you could, I think, read this piece of fiction and feel you’ve got the basic facts, as well as a good understanding of the woman who “lived” those facts.

Woven through all this is the Mexican Revolution which started in 1910 (three years after she was born), discussions of the rise of Fascism, and her ideas on love, art and life (and particularly on how they interrelate). There are also, though this seems a bit anachronistic, some strong references to climate change. In fact, at the end of the novel, Griffiths dedicates her book to two groups of people, climate change activists and Zapatistas. Frida died in 1954. Was climate change an issue then? In the book Griffiths has Kahlo expressing concern about the Amazon and Tuvalu:

But the  Amazon will die of thirst, she will seize up with drought … One island nation, five atolls and four islands, pacific and named by doves, Tuvalu, is silently submerged as the quiet waters lap its shores, past the fishing boats, up its beaches, up, to the houses at the coastline, on, on, the gentle sea, the sea murmuring in quiet amazement at itself, on, until the centre where it can see itself coming, reflecting its rise, it meets itself in a full circle of embrace and Tuvalu will only be a story of mythic islands beneath the waves.

Let’s though get back to the moon. The motif is sustained throughout the novel. It’s appropriate of course for a woman, with its implications for women’s reproductive cycle, but Kahlo draws so much more from it than this single meaning. She layers meaning upon meaning for the moon, some of them superficially paradoxical but together they form a whole. Throughout the novel, for example, she opposes the ideas of gold, earth, sun and matter to silver, moon, and myth. The moon represents for her the mythical, the immaterial and creativity but it also connotes coldness and barrenness. I did say it was a complex symbol – but it’s fittingly s0 for a complex woman. In the first chapter, “Exiled from Casa Azul” she talks of wanting to fly to the moon, describing it as “pure idea” versus the sun which, more pragmatically, “lights the earth”. In the next (very short) chapter, “The moon’s instructions for loss”, she expands on her idea of the moon a little further:

And the moon? In the revolution of the earth’s turning – and I was a revolutionary – a shard of earth was flung off, coalescing, reforming further and later, far off as the moon. But shard is the wrong word, too hard and substantial; so immaterial was this moment, so unearthly the earth, so unanchored the moon, what word could be better? The moon was more like Idea, more like Metaphor, or Time, Flight, or Potential or Longing. A highly strung intensity of latency.

In the rest of the book, these ideas about the moon are explored, teased, stretched as far as they will go to convey the wild, free essence of her life. In her mind the moon is closely related to the idea of flight. She refers to Icarus (whose downfall of course was the sun), arguing that the important thing was not the fall but that he dared to fly.

In one of many references to flight she says:

… flight’s true reality was never in its being made material. What is real need not be material at all.

Given the challenges of her physical life (polio as a child and a leg amputation late in life in addition to her accident), it’s not surprising that Frida found significance in the life of the mind, the spirit and the soul.  “The mind needs myths, good ones”, she says.

And then there’s art. She was known for her self-portraits, in which she painted her passion and her pain. Her art was an extension of her “self”:

…so I make this as a votive painting, a prayer, a vow, a plea, painting to win him back to me…

Frida was a rebellious soul … whose passions were personal and political. Somehow Griffiths has managed to capture all this in a novel which could so easily have been over-the-top. It isn’t, because her Frida’s voice sounds authentic. Frida says, towards the end, ‘I would re-enchant myself with mankind, nothing less … I will promise to find the god of new beginnings.”

I have not done justice to this wonderful, complicated little book – but I hope I have conveyed something of its magic. After that, it’s up to you.

Jay Griffiths
A love letter from a stray moon
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011
117pp.

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Alan Gould, The lakewoman: A romance

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Alan Gould, The lakewoman

Book cover (Courtesy: Australian Scholarly Publishing P/L)

I’m a little embarrassed to say that until The lakewoman was shortlisted in the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, I only knew of Alan Gould as a poet. Turns out, though, that he has written several novels, of which this one is his most recent. It is, ostensibly, a war novel, in that much of it is set in or around World War 2, but it is not in fact about the war.

It’s an intriguing book that slides literally and metaphorically between the solidity of the earth and the fluidity of water, between pragmatism and magic (or enchantment). It tells the story of Alec Dearborn, an Australian grazier’s son who was born in 1918. He goes to Cambridge in England and, when the war starts, decides to join up with the British Army rather than return home. The novel starts with his having landed in a lake, after parachuting from a plane for the D-Day Invasion. He is drowning, dragged down by his weapons bag and parachute, but is rescued by – yes – a lady in a lake. Ha! Now you see why it is called a “romance” because, while it contains “a” romance, it also hearkens back to the “romances” of yore, like the Arthurian legend. Here is the set up, pp. 2-3:

As he vomited he also wondered why this sudden young Mamzelle happened to be present at the exact, unlikely spot in France where his foolish body had come to earth. It was a question that would usefully occupy his mind later, when he was behind the wire with the austere leisure to brood on the magic that settled into his life following this, his fluky rescue. Magic? He was not a fellow given to outlandish notions, and would interrogate the dubious word, looking for its sense, not in mumbo jumbo, but as some friable quantity existing within the very crevices of everyday occasions.

In this passage, we see how carefully Gould has laid out his novel. He introduces us to the ideas of coincidence (fluke) and magic versus the everyday business of living, and he uses foreshadowing to distract us from plot issues (what will happen next) towards more interior ones (what is the meaning of what happens). As the novel progresses, this fellow who is not given “to outlandish notions” finds himself drawn, almost telepathically (it seems), to his rescuer. She , Viva, rather like the Arthurian lady-in-the-lake, frames the rest of his life, one way or another.

What happens on the surface of the novel is fairly matter-of-fact. Alec’s life runs its course in a mostly unremarkable way. One of the central questions of the book is that which Alec poses to his sister, Bell, a little while after he returns to Australia:

What I can’t work out is […] Well, how a person knows whether the existence he’s been given has been of value to anyone else.

This is Alec’s conundrum. He does not fulfil the traditional expectations of a grazier’s son (“Dearborn”, after all), despite his “prospects” : he’s intelligent, sensitive, and physically capable (“the dynamism in balance with the dreaminess”). Much of this failure stems from his being “disarmed” on June 6, 1944, by Viva. There are some lovely, appropriate wordplays in the novel, and one of these centres on the idea of disarming/arming, which works beautifully against the novel’s military background:

‘If you think about me, then, when you are gone, I will be arming you still,’ she assured him, mysteriously.

Soon after he leaves her, he ponders what has occurred:

‘I feel distress at having relinquished you,’ he supplied on consideration. For it was distress, he recognised, to be walking away from this sudden new claim on his life. ‘It is this that has disarmed me, I reckon,’ he explained for her.

I will be arming you, she reminded.

It is difficult with this WordPress theme to get the formatting right: this last statement by her is in italics in the novel and suggests either his memory of her words or an actual telepathic communication. Which one it is, is one of the lasting ambiguities of the novel. Italics are used throughout the novel for “communications” like this and for interior monologues/reflections, usually Alec’s, since this is a third person narrative, told mostly from Alec’s point of view.

By now you may be thinking that this novel is a fantasy, even a romantic fantasy, but not so. Neither is it magical realist. It’s simply that there is a sense that slightly mystical things may be happening, things that make sense psychologically but that also convey another plane of human thought and behaviour. It reminded me, at times, of Patrick White‘s Voss, but to suggest more than that would be to do it a disservice because it is not at all derivative. Rather, it is simply that the story focuses on a dimension of experience that can’t always be logically explained but that is nonetheless very real. Gould has, I think, pulled this dichotomy off, by careful manipulation of tone: through language that is poetic but not overdone; a pacing that is meditatively slow at the beginning and pragmatically faster at the end; evocative chapter titles (such as “To Fling the Lovely Foolish Body”, “Had You Down Dead”); the occasional light touch (“‘You are the invasion?’, she asked”); and timing that foreshadows just enough to make sure we stay focused on the ideas and not the facts.

And for me, the main idea (the one that provides an “undercurrent” to all the others) is that of completing the self, which is something Alec struggles  to do. In the end though:

…the joy, the completion was her presence, and the talk was strangely superfluous. Yet by convention they did talk from some region of the mind where the words did not especially matter but the proximity of the person created an entirety of being.

This is a rather melancholic, but by no means sentimental, book – and it moved me deeply.

Alan Gould
The lakewoman
North Melbourne: Arcadia, 2009
296pp.
ISBN: 9781921509346

Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts

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Joyce Carol Oates @ The Belmont Library

Creative Commons licensed image by San Mateo County Library via Flickr

If we wanted to be writers we must examine the world with fresh, sceptical eyes.

Beasts is, I’m ashamed to say, my first Joyce Carol Oates. She’s one of those writers who has kept crossing my path but whom I’ve never quite got to read. I bought Beasts a couple of years ago when I saw it on the remainder table of my favourite independent bookshop – and still it took me some time to get to read it, but I’m glad I finally did. I didn’t really know what to expect – and I’m not quite sure what I got – but I nonetheless found it a compelling read that is staying with me.

Take the opening quote, for example. On the surface it makes perfect sense, and yet when we know who says it we see a whole different layer of meaning to it, a layer that doesn’t necessarily remove the fundamental truth but that certainly shows how such a truth can be twisted or, at least, complicated.

The plot concerns a young college student and her obsession with her poetry writing class teacher, Andre Harrow. The novel (novella, in fact) starts some 25 years after the main events of the novel, when our narrator is at the Louvre in Paris and sees a piece of sculpture that reminds her of the work of Harrow’s wife, Dorcas. The sculpture is an earthy totemic piece that is “primitively human” or, in fact, rather beast-like. In this short three page chapter we are introduced to the notion that something not quite right has happened. “It wasn’t burned after all”, the narrator says, and then soon after mentions the horrible deaths some quarter of a century earlier, of “two people I’d loved”. The final sentence of the chapter is:

This is not a confession. You will see, I have nothing to hide.

As soon as you see a statement like that you can be pretty sure you are in the hands of an unreliable narrator, and this is so here – though she’s cleverly disguised and could be taken to be reliable. It’s all a matter of perspective really! The novel is told first person, in flashback, so we do need to be aware that what she is saying may very well be coloured by her knowledge and experience, that what she says she was feeling at the time, may not be quite right. This adds to the complexity of the book. The structure, though, is pretty straightforward. There’s the first chapter in Paris in 2001, followed by a chapter, set in 1976, describing the night of the house fire (in which the two people died). The third chapter takes place four months before that. From this, the novel works chronologically forward again to the fire.

The novel has a smallish cast of characters – there’s the narrator (Gillian), Andre Harrow and Dorcas, and the girls of the poetry class. Gradually a complex picture is built up of surface friendships with secrecy and jealousy lying just beneath. The reason for this is that pretty well all the girls are obsessed with Andre and each it seems, in turn, have their way with him (or, should I say, vice versa). But here the plot thickens … though perhaps I’ll leave it there for you to discover for yourselves.

Let’s just say that this book is an unsettling exploration of the (sexual) games people play, games in which people can and do get badly hurt. It’s easy to see the young women as the victims – and I must say that to a large degree I think they are. Whenever there is a power imbalance (and this is why I disagree with Helen Garner‘s take in her non-fiction book, The first stone), I see the major wrong as being with those in power. However, that does not mean that the less powerful are not complicit in some way, because often they are, and this seems to be the case with Gillian. She says “I was not predator seeking prey, I was myself the prey. I was the innocent party”. But she has choices, and she makes them, knowing ….

I was in love now. I took strength from my love for Mr Harrow. Though knowing, for I was no fool, that it could never be reciprocated.

And yet, she of course, like the girls before her, lets herself be drawn into a situation that is both thrilling and destructive. Harrow is an aficionado of DH Lawrence – Lawrence was big on campuses in the 1970s as I recollect – and tells his students (with terrible irony) that:

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a noose around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to do, for their own selfish unstated purposes.

Hmm … this sounds a bit like the Nietzschean conundrum explored in The immoralist doesn’t it, but Oates plays it out in a very different way by exploring its implications across gender, age/experience and power differences to see what falls out.

The novel starts with an epigraph from a DH Lawrence poem:

I love you, rotten
Delicious rottenness

… wonderful are the hellish experiences

Wonderful for whom one may well ask? The ending – or is it the beginning – provides no definite answer but it sure teases out the complexity of “love” running rather amok amongst people who think little about the ramifications of their actions. Damage, as it usually does in such situations, ensues. What price morality, eh?

Joyce Carol Oates
Beasts
London: Orion, 2002
138pp.
ISBN: 0752855921

Jane Austen’s letters, 1807-1809

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Portrait of Henry IV. Ink and watercolor on pa...

Watercolour by Cassandra, for Austens (juvenile) "History of England" (Presumed public domain, courtesy Wikipedia)

The letters Jane Austen wrote between 1807 and 1809 seem somewhat different to those she wrote later. There are probably a number of reasons for this but one could be that this was an unsettled period for her. Her father died in early 1805 which changed her (and her mother’s and sister’s) life circumstances dramatically. From then until July 1809 they did not have a home of their own. It is interesting that while she had written earlier versions of some of her six completed novels in the late 1700s and early 1800s, none was published until after she, her mother and sister moved to Chawton. This must tell us something, surely, about her state of mind.

The letters, mostly written to her sister Cassandra, are not necessarily easy to read. They are full of pretty straightforward gossip and chat about family and friends. There are myriad names to wade through. (Fortunately Deirdre Le Faye’s edition has an excellent Biographical Index.) If you don’t get bogged down though, you will find some gems, and gain an understanding of life in Georgian and Regency England.

So, what do these letters tell us about her? To make it easy to read, I’ll use headings.

She was a keen, clear-eyed and somewhat acerbic observer of humanity

These letters often make you laugh (though perhaps not so much if you were the subject of some of her comments). Here she is on her oldest brother, James:

I am sorry & angry that his Visits should not give us more pleasure; the company of so good & so clever a Man ought to be gratifying in itself; – but his Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied  from his Wife’s, & his time here is spent  I think in walking about the House & banging the doors, or ringing the Bell for a glass of Water.

And on one Miss Curling:

I wish her no worse than a long & happy abode there [Portsmouth]. Here she wd probably be dull, & I’m sure she wd be troublesome.

And on Lady Sondes (and her second marriage):

…but I consider everybody as having the right to marry once in their Lives for Love, if they can – & provided she will now leave off having bad headaches & being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her to be happy.

Austen, it is believed, had a somewhat tricky relationship with her mother. She mentions her mother often in the letters, mostly with cool description rather than warmth, and sometimes rather more pointedly:

My mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate – a whole Tablespoon & a whole dessertspoon, & six whole Teaspoons, which make our sideboard border on the Magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old or useless silver …

She understood the import of money

This period of her life – post her father’s death, and pre-Chawton and the publication of her books – was her most insecure financially. Consequently, money seems to feature more prominently in this section’s letters. On one acquaintance, she says:

She looks remarkably well (legacies are a very wholesome diet) …

And on some particularly rich people:

They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich,  and we gave her to understand that we were far from  being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.

On the impact of her own impecunious state which meant, for example, that she had to rely on the favours (and therefore schedules) of others when travelling, she writes:

I shall be sorry to pass the door at Seale without calling, but it must be so … till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things …

She thought about writing constantly

We know that Jane Austen had a longstanding interest in writing and this is obvious in these earlier letters – from her (sometimes self-deprecating) comments on her letter writing to her brief but pointed comments on the books she was reading. Through her letters we get a sense of what she thinks a good novel should be. For example, she says of  Sarah Harriet Burney‘s Clarentine that

It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind.

We also see that she is ever conscious of the act of writing. Often she feels she has no news and mentions how this challenges her letter writing ability:

I really have very little to say this week, & do not feel as if I should spread that little into the shew of much. I am inclined for short sentences …

I enjoyed her praise of another letter writer, Mr Deedes, who

certainly has a very pleasing way of winding up a whole, & and speeding Truth into the World.

There are also descriptions and stories which clue us to her writing and story-telling bent. She describes a fire at Southampton, vividly and with a touch of humour. Always there is humour. In another letter, having discovered that her aspiring-writer niece is also reading her letters, she discusses (with humour again) her increasing awareness of her writing:

I begin already to weigh my words & and sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset, it would be charming. We have been in two or three dreadful states within the last week, from the melting of the snow &c. – & the contest between us & the Closet has now ended in our defeat; I have been obliged to move almost everything out of it, & leave it to splash itself as it likes.

By mid 1809, the family had moved to the “remarkably pretty village” of Chawton, and Austen at last settled down to her writing (but she had only eight more years to live). One of the last letters in this section is to a publisher asking about the non-publication of Susan (later, Northanger Abbey) which she’d sold to them in 1803. She never did see it published. It was bought back by her brother Henry in 1817, and published posthumously… How sad is that?

Note: This is my third post on Austen’s letters. The first looked at her letters from 1814 to 1816, and the second from 1811 to 1813. With this post covering 1807 to 1809, you might be wondering about 1810. Well, there are no letters from 1810. This is probably because they were among those destroyed by family members after her death. Why, we do not really know.

Nine, just 9, books by female authors at the top of a 20th century list?

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Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 1902

Woolf, 1902, by George Charles Beresford (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

The Reading Ape, in his February Literary Fact of the Day compilation, included the following tidbit:

There are only 6 female authors on The Modern Library‘s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century.

In fact, in the Modern Library’s Board’s list (over 10 years old now), a woman doesn’t appear until slot 15, and it’s Virginia Woolf‘s To the lighthouse. By contrast, a woman – Ayn Rand no less – occupies the first two slots of the Modern Library’s Readers’ List. Granted, this list is old news now as it was published at the end of the 20th century and was well raked over at the time. But, the Reading Ape reminded me of it and it seemed to me to be worth another look, 10 or so years down the track.  Here are the women:

  • 15. Virginia Woolf’s To the lighthouse
  • 17. Carson McCullers’ The heart is a lonely hunter
  • 58. Edith Wharton’s The age of innocence
  • 61. Willa Cather’s Death comes for the archbishop
  • 69. Edith Wharton’s The house of mirth
  • 76. Muriel Spark’s The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  • 84. Elizabeth Bowen’s The death of the heart
  • 94. Jean Rhys’ The wide Sargasso Sea
  • 95. Iris Murdoch’s Under the net

Oh, that’s actually 9. The Reading Ape can’t count! Still 9% is pretty poor isn’t it? There are only 2 in the first 50, and did you notice that only one of these authors is represented by more than one book? That’s not the case with the male authors. I’m not going to be thorough about this but Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford, EM Forster, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh are just some of the male authors represented by two or more novels.

Anyhow, back to the women. I’ve read all those authors, and 7 of the books. I would agree with the inclusion of most of them, but let’s think about who’s missing. Well, for a start, there are quite a few Nobel Prize winners, including the following who write in English (which seems to be what this list is – Top 100 English language novels):

  • Pearl S. Buck
  • Nadine Gordimer
  • Toni Morrison
  • Doris Lessing (Nobel granted in 21st century, but her main body of work was written in the 20th century)

Surely each of these has at least one novel worthy of inclusion and could, say, replace one of DH Lawrence’s 3 (THREE!) inclusions? And what about Christina Stead, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt to name a few other significant female authors of the 20th century? What about Keri Hulme’s The bone people? Or a novel by Thea Astley? (Because, another feature of the list is that it’s very America-England centric)

Given that we are now over a decade into the 21st century, it might be interesting to reflect on a list compiled at the end of the 20th century. What do you think of the balance, and do you think there are novels by female writers which should have been included in the top 100 of the 20th century? (Let’s not get too bogged down in what we’d eliminate – that’s much less fun!)

Leah Swann, Bearings

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Bearings bookcover, by Leah Swan

Bookcover (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

When I read a collection of short stories, I look to see whether there is an overriding theme. It’s not essential that there be one, of course, but it can add to the satisfaction, if only because looking for a theme forces me to think a little more about what I’ve been reading. Well, I didn’t have to look too far with this most recent collection, as the title pretty well gives it away. Bearings, by Leah Swann, is a collection of seven short stories and a novella and, as the back cover blurb says, is about “challenging the course of our lives and keeping a foothold during unpredictable times”. That’s a pretty good description and, I must say, it’s appealing, for a change, to have a short story collection whose title is not that of one of the stories within.

Bearings is the fifth book in Affirm Press’s series, Long Story Shorts. (I reviewed the fourth one, Having cried wolf, a few months ago.) It’s a gorgeously produced series. The books are a little more squat than the usual paperback, and each has a cover designed by Dean Gorissen. They are books you want to hold (fondle even) and look at.

Anyhow, on with the show. This is a varied bunch of stories. Some are told in first person, some third, and the first story is told in the less common second person. The subject matter includes broken families, suicide, grief, foster children, and motherhood. That is, all those things that happen in people’s lives to challenge them. However, as the title suggests, the stories are not totally depressing. Sad at times, yes, but not hopeless. They are more about finding ways to survive the challenges.

The stories grew on me. It’s not that I didn’t like them from the start because I did, but I think the writing got surer and more interesting, less predictable, by the end. Whether, of course, they are presented in the order written I have no idea. Probably not, but that’s how it feels. Of the first few stories, I especially liked “All the mothers”, a first person story about a foster child. He starts off as a naive narrator, not quite understanding what is happening as he moves from “mother” to “mother”. Take, for example, Mr Gordon who sometimes gives him an Eskimo Pie “especially if I have a cuddle”. When Mrs Gordon catches him on Mr Gordon’s knee one day, she pulls him off but he’s mystified: “I keep saying I’m okay, but she doesn’t believe me. Or maybe she’s not listening”. Gradually, of course, he becomes less naive and, more angry. It’s a well realised, psychologically real, slice-of-life story.

The central novella, “Silver hands”, is a little predictable. You can see most of it coming before you get there, but it’s nonetheless a good read because the characters are engaging and the language is fresh. I enjoyed descriptions like this:

His laugh goes up and down the scale like a hammer on chimes.

And this one on a woman starting to see signs of aging:

My skin is drying like the pages of a manuscript lettered with childbirth, lovemaking, nicotine and alcohol, and under it all the bones are losing density. But the letters of my true being are not written here. I am not only my body. I’ve never believed that yet here I am mourning it, sucked into that great big lie, measuring myself by flesh more than ever.

This is (obviously) a first person story. The set up is a marriage in the process of breaking down, but it’s more about how experiences in our past can come back to bite us if we don’t properly address them at the time. There are some “mysteries” for the reader to uncover and Swann plots them nicely. An enjoyable read.

My very favourite stories though are the last two, “The Easter Hare” and “The Ringwood Madonna”. Many of Swann’s protagonists are artists – potters, musicians, painters, writers – and this is so in these two stories. “The Ringwood Madonna” is about an artist who is struggling with motherhood, about how she meets a homeless tagger and engages in her own little act of rebellion. She creates a Madonna poster which she pastes like graffiti on a railway cutting wall. It attracts a lot of attention but an art expert says that holy images should not be sprayed around town. However,

Her graffiti Mary was  – to her – a beautiful lamp in suburban ugliness. A gift. Subconsciously she’d hoped that by creating Mary she would create beauty inside herself, she could see that now. And she had felt warmth when she was creating. Yes. Even joy.

The story’s conclusion nicely resolves some of the conflicts in her life while also making a comment on art as being not only about expression but communication too.

“The Easter Hare” takes place over Easter (of course) and beautifully reflects on the Easter story of death and redemption through a loose parallel describing a suicide and the response of strangers to it. It’s a finely told tale, and its conclusion brought tears to my eyes.

Swann describes the mother in “The Easter Hare” as wanting to write an Easter story for her children that is not “bloody and harsh” like the Crucifixion story, as wanting, rather, to “create something gentler for them”. This seems also to be what Swann wanted to create for us. She chronicles the challenges, sufferings and miseries of life but, as her title suggests, her worldview is a positive one, one that believes we can all find our “bearings” if we just take the time to look for them. This collection would be a good place to start.

Leah Swann
Bearings
(Series: Long Story Shorts, 5)
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2011
198pp.
ISBN: 9780980790429

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)