Literature by period

John M. Duncan, A Virginia barbecue

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Now for something different from the Library of America – a little 3-page excerpt, titled “A Virginia Barbecue”, from Scotsman John M. Duncan’s Travels through part of the United States and Canada in 1818 and 1819, which was published in 1823. In it, Duncan describes a barbecue to which he was invited by Bushrod (what a name, eh?) Washington, who was apparently a favourite nephew of (the) George.

Ground oven cooking, Kakadu

The original barbecue: Ground oven cooking in Kakadu National Park (Photographer: Me)

I wanted to read this for a number of reasons: I like to read about food; I like travel writing; I lived in Virgnia for two years; and I wanted to see what he meant by “barbecue”. The thing about “barbecue” is that in my experience Americans mean something different by it than we downunder do. In the brief introductory notes to Duncan’s piece, Library of America informs us that by the middle of the 19th century regional differences were appearing and that “debates about the best meat (pork for the South, beef for Texans), the proper smoke (cool or hot), the best sauce (thick and tomatoey in the Mexican manner or vinegar-steeped with hot peppers in the manner of the Atlantic seaboard), and the appropriate accompaniments were already beginning to rage”. Duncan, however, was a bit early for this debate so he simply describes what he sees:

The meat to be barbecued is split open and pierced with two long slender rods, upon which it is suspended across the mouth of the pits, and turned from side to side till it is thoroughly broiled. The hickory tree gives, it is said, a much stronger heat than coals, and when it is kindled is almost without smoke.

And, anyhow, he is not specifically interested in describing the cooking itself but in conveying the whole experience. From our 21st century point of view, he seems completely unconscious of the disparity between the black workers slaving over the barbecues and the guests (presumably all white) dancing, eating and drinking. This is not totally surprising, given the period, although William Wilberforce, back in England, would have been full throttle on his abolitionist campaign. Here are some of the ways Duncan describes the black workers:

…a whole colony of black servants …

Servants? Or, slaves?

… black men, women and children, were busied with various processes of sylvan cookery…

“Sylvan” is, to me anyhow, a rather poetic word for forest connoting a sense of romantic idyll that is somewhat belied by the reality of the situation.

Leaving the busy negroes at their tasks – a scene by the way which suggested a tolerable idea of an encampment of Indians preparing for a feast after the spoils of the chase.

A more socially or politically aware writer would probably, even at that time, have seen the irony in this comparison, but I don’t think Duncan did. I’m not trying to play politically correct revisionist games here, but rather reflect on how writing like this can convey meaning that was not necessarily intended at the time. Such writing – in the way it documents practices and attitudes – can be a real mine for researchers!

Duncan then describes the dancing – mainly cotillion – and the dining arrangements. I found it a little confusing when he wrote that “few except those who wish to dance choose the first course; watchfulness to anticipate the wants of the ladies, prevent those who sit down with them from accomplishing much themselves”. That is, they don’t get to eat much. Being “too little acquainted with the tactics of a barbecue, and somewhat too well inclined to eat”, he joins this first course. I had to read this a couple of times before I realised (at least I think I’m right) that “first course” actually means “first sitting”. It appears that when the ladies arise, all are expected to “vacate their seats”. The “new levy succeeds” (that is, as I read it, the next sitting) and many of these diners contrive to sit through the next “signal” to rise, thereby managing to get a good feed!

He also describes the drinking but makes it clear that while there was “jollity”, he saw no “intemperance”. He specifically states that this is so for the members of the judiciary, such as Judge Washington, who were present. Duncan makes such a point of this that I wondered whether he “protesteth too much”. I’m guessing though that it’s more a case of having his eye on his market: there was a strong temperance movement in early 19th century Virginia.

This piece is included in an anthology titled American food writing: An anthology with classic recipes. It would be fascinating to read more…

Eva Hornung, Dog boy

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Eva Hornung, Dogboy

Dog boy cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I first read Eva Hornung when she was writing as Eva Sallis. It was her second novel The city of sealions, which is a pretty passionate and evocatively written exploration of cultural alienation and dislocation brought about primarily by migration.

In some ways Dog boy explores similar concerns, but its alienation is played out in a different way – through that fascinating archetype of the feral or wild child. In the novel, Hornung refers to a few modern examples of feral children, such as Oksana from the Ukraine; in an interview on the Literary Minded blog she says that the novel was inspired by a news story about a child living with dogs in Moscow. Guess where this book is set? You got it – Moscow! This intrigued me somewhat. Why would an Australian novelist read about a feral child in Moscow, go there to research and then write a novel? But Eva Hornung seems to be no ordinary novelist. She did her PhD in the Yemen and her settings – even if not her overriding theme – range rather widely.

And so to Dog boy. At the beginning of the novel Romochka, 4 years old, is alone in an apartment. He hasn’t seen his mother for a week or more and suddenly his uncle does not return. He senses the apartment building is being emptied and so after a couple of days being alone he heads out, and manages to get himself adopted by a dog, Mamochka, who lives with her four young puppies and two older offspring. How and why he is left alone is not the concern of this novel (which reminded me a little of Cormac McCarthy’s The road in which the cause of the devastation is also not the point). The novel tells the story of his life with the dogs and of what happens when he, four years later, comes to the attention of humans, specifically two scientists/doctors working in a children’s rehabilitation centre.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS]

The story is told chronologically, and is divided into 5 parts. The first two parts cover Romochka’s first two years in the lair and how he gradually learns “to be a dog”. In the third part, Mamochka introduces a baby to the pack – to provide human company for Romochka. The baby is, ironically, called Puppy (by Romochka). Without giving any important plot points away, the final two parts deal with the boys’ renewed contact with the human world. It’s told in 3rd person but the perspective does shift, particularly in the last two parts where we see what’s happening through different eyes – the two scientists, Dmitry and Natalya, and Romochka himself. But even before this, we occasionally move between Romochka’s and the author’s perspective. It’s a technique that encourages us to understand, if not empathise with, the various experiences as they play out.

As I read this book, I felt I was in the hands of someone who knew what she was doing – even though at times I wondered exactly why she was telling this story. Not only does she viscerally describe Romochka’s gradual acceptance into the dog clan, his learning to hunt and his slow rise to dominance, but she starts to introduce humans at a time when our interest in an ongoing dog story would start to pall. This shift starts with Romochka’s increasing interest in people and builds up to the more or less inevitable conclusion – but that conclusion is not simple and is open-ended.

The language is evocative – sometimes beautiful but more often earthy and confronting to our senses. Hornung evokes Romochka’s life with the dogs with such attention to detail that it is entirely believable. She describes his animality, without being heavy-handed – he moves in “a wide lope”, uses his “paws”, and carries with him a horrible “stench” – but also shows his ability to use human logic and reasoning. At the time of his first capture, Romochka’s inner dog-human conflict is obvious:

Romochka wished bitterly … for true doghood. Were he really a dog, he would understand only their bodies, and not their words. Were he really a dog, he wouldn’t know their names, and their kids’ names. He wouldn’t … be paralysed by these lives that stretched before and after the station: he would know only their smell, only their aggression and torments; and what they ate.

The fight went out of him altogether. He stared dumbly, balefully without growling or snapping, unresistant even when he was pushed around. He was no longer sure that hiding his human side would get him released, but he remained a dog …

The big question to ask is, Why did Hornung choose to tell such a story? There is the obvious reason, that of our ongoing fascination with the wild child phenomenon and what it might tell us about what it means to be human. But there is also Hornung’s ongoing interest in alienation and, related to that, the abuse of humans by other humans (particularly where there is social disintegration). For all our horror at the way Romochka lives, we also see that he is not only safe but well nurtured in his life with the dogs. Was this boy, Natalya and Dmitry ponder, “better off living with dogs than with humans”. This question, that comes towards the end, represents a big shift from Dmitry’s earlier “proper awareness of the philosophic and scientific divide between man and animal”. The second part of the novel, in fact, explores this question at some depth. How big is the divide really? And to what extent is man a beast? All this is explored with more than just a little skepticism about scientific research and the tension between nice neat theory (and the chance it offers for professional glory) and messy reality. There is a lot in this book for keen readers to consider. It’s one that I will remember for some time.

Dog boy is Sallis aka Hornung’s 6th novel. She has won or been nominated for awards for many of her novels and yet she is not particularly well-known. Her change of name may have contributed to this but, whatever the reason, I think it’s a shame. Her writing is clear, accessible and evocative – and yet has a depth and passion that is worthy of the prizes she wins. May we see more of her.

Eva Hornung
Dogboy
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
293pp.
ISBN: 9781921656378

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Jeffrey Eugenides, Extreme solitude

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I’ve only read one work by Jeffrey Eugenides, and that was his grand saga of an immigrant family in America, Middlesex. I enjoyed its sweep and the insight it provided into the social history of twentieth century America from an immigrant point of view, and I liked the way he mixed light and dark in his story-telling. “Extreme solitude” is, though, a short story, and was published this month in The New Yorker. It is a rather tongue-in-cheek take on young love viewed through the changing literary theory scene in early 1990s (I think) academia.

The story opens with Madeleine and her realisation that she loves Leonard, whom she’d met in an “upper-level semiotics seminar”. This class is taught by a lecturer who had changed from his long-standing allegiance to New Criticism (and its focus on text) to Semiotics and the ideas of theoreticians like Roland Barthes. Semiotics was only just reaching academia – at least in my neck of the woods – in the very early 1970s and so the tensions between these two approaches to literary criticism somewhat passed me by.

Madeleine, as I’m sure I would have in her place, initially found Semiotics mystifying and unhelpful. After a few seminars she goes to the library to find a nice nineteenth century novel:

to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

But then, “for reasons that were entirely extracurricular, semiotics began making sense” and it all, of course, has to do with love! She’s reading Roland Barthes’ A lover’s discourse and comes across his description of “a lover’s discourse” as being “extreme solitude”. She connects – because it describes her feelings for the somewhat self-sufficient Leonard. From then on, the story plays in a lovely tongue-in-cheek way with love and particularly with the “signs” or “signifiers” of love (as Semiotics would have it), with the language one uses (as in the loaded “I’d love to” come out with you), and with all those early relationship behaviours that you try to “deconstruct” to find out whether he does or doesn’t.

It’s a pretty straight-forwardly structured short story, and the ending is a little pat. But made its point clearly. I read “Extreme solitude” as a clever and playful take on the limits of theory … and I thought it was fun.

Peter Temple’s Miles Franklin win, Ruckus

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Peter Temple’s winning this year’s Miles Franklin award* with his crime novel Truth has caused a bit of a ruckus – and, consequently, there’s been some interesting discussion about it on various blogs. The discussion mainly concerns the implications of a so-called genre novel winning this traditionally “literary fiction” award, but there is also some discussion of the literary “worthiness” of Temple’s work. If you are interested in this discussion, you may like to check out:

As I wrote in my own post and have commented elsewhere:

  • I have not read this novel yet – though I did read and was impressed by his previous novel The broken shore;
  • I am not a reader, in general, of crime fiction.

As is my wont, I don’t have strong feelings about this. I was surprised by the win (not so much because of its “genre” nature but because I’d read more mixed reviews of it than of some of the other shortlisted books), but I’m also interested in the strength of feeling its win has engendered. I would be sorry if we tried to categorise eligibility for the prize based on some notion of “genre”, and yet I recognise that “genre” implies adherence to conventions that can make it hard for writers to achieve the level of creativity and “difference” (or innovation) that we tend to expect in our literary prize winners. For me, then, the issue is whether the novels longlisted, shortlisted and then awarded literary prizes like this have achieved that level of  “literary” interest that we readers look for. Time will tell whether I think Temple has achieved this in Truth.

* The Miles Franklin Award conditions are that the work express “Australian life in all its phases”. I’m not sure what “in all its phases” means as I can’t imagine any one book exploring all aspects of Australian life. I have to assume that Peter Temple’s novel being set in Melbourne does meet this criterion.

PS (a few hours later): Silly me did not check the conditions. It is not “in all its phases” as I read elsewhere but “in any of its phases”. That makes more sense and is what I assumed was meant anyhow. Temple clearly meets this.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

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Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

This is the second time I have read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Much as I enjoyed it the first time around, I probably wouldn’t have read it again if it hadn’t been scheduled for one of my online bookgroups. However, given that scheduling and the fact that I had recently listened to Simon Armitage’s dramatisation of The odyssey, I didn’t mind reading it again – and it is short! My rereading though ended up being a little disjointed as I was trying to finish off a number of competing contracts at the time as well as prepare for a ten-day trip to our warm Top End. This review may be similarly disjointed!

The book is part of Canongate’s Myths series in which recognised writers were asked to retell well-known myths. At the time of publication, Atwood said that she tried a number of myths and had nearly given up when she suddenly recollected the story of Penelope and her hanged maids – and her childhood reaction to it. The result is a rather fresh – and cheeky – look at the story told through Penelope’s and the hanged maids’ eyes, from, not surprisingly, a feminist (or at least female) perspective.

The story is told through a large number of short chapters in Penelope’s voice, and these are interspersed with commentary from the hanged maids, emulating, appropriately enough, the idea of a Greek chorus. The way Atwood uses it, the chorus provides a satiric perspective on Penelope’s view of the story. The story is told in flashback, with the narrators all speaking from Hades, where they now reside. It is not a standard revisionist feminist treatise that simplifies the world to one of gender power discrepancies (even though that is what underlies it all). We get to “feel” what it might have been like to have lived then. Atwood’s characters are “real” and operate in a complex world where game-playing and manipulation are de rigueur if you are going to survive.

In Homer, Penelope is presented as “the quintessential faithful wife” (Atwood’s introduction) who brings up their son and cleverly fends off suitors while waiting patiently for Odysseus’ return. When he returns, he kills the suitors and twelve of Penelope’s maids. Atwood, again in her introduction, says that in choosing to tell the story through Penelope and the maids she wanted to focus on “what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really doing?”. Her Penelope is something rather more than the constant wife of The odyssey. She, the part daughter of a watery Naiad, is a slippery character to pin down. She is highly jealous of her beautiful cousin Helen (she of Troy fame) and she is capable of making her own power plays. She is of high birth, contrasting her with the twelve maids who, by their own admission “were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents…”.

What I enjoyed most about this book – besides the story Atwood tells – is its sly humour. It is genuinely funny, albeit in a dark or sometimes gruesome way. Much of the humour arises out of Penelope’s playing with the truth. In fact the book plays continually with the idea of “stories”. In the first chapter, Penelope says:

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve had to work myself up to it; it’s a low art, tale-telling … So, I’ll spin a little thread of my own.

A little further on in the book, she says, when reporting one of the prevailing stories about her, that “there’s some [my emphasis] truth to this story”. And so, as we read we need to remember that she too is telling us a story, and that there’s no guarantee that her story is any more “true” than another’s. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the maids comment on what Penelope tells us. Their and Penelope’s perspectives are not always the same. That is, their truths are different. This notion of stories versus stories is made even more clear in the chapter titled “Waiting” in which Penelope recites all the opposing stories and rumours about what Odysseus was doing/what was happening to him during the 10 years of his return. Reader beware, I say. In fact, at one point in the book where Penelope questions whether the “maids were making some of this up”, I wrote in the margin “Where is the truth”? I love the way Atwood plays with myth-making in a book about a myth – and, in doing so, also calls into question her own storytelling. Very postmodern!

I won’t go on. It’s a little uneven, with the maids’ story in particular being not quite as well integrated as it perhaps could. And yet, I’d recommend it, if you haven’t already read it. It’s clever, funny and compassionate – but its compassion is not a naive one. Rather, it has wide open eyes and knows that nothing is ever as simple as it looks – particularly when you find yourself in a situation where there is imbalance of power. Games will be played – and the powerless, such as women and particularly poor maids, will usually lose. And this, in the end, is Atwood’s (somewhat heavy-handed) point. As Penelope says in her last chapter:

Even with my limited access I can see that the world is just as dangerous as it was in my day, except that the misery and suffering are on a much wider scale. As for human nature, it’s as tawdry as ever.

Margaret Atwood
The Penelopiad
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005
199pp.
ISBN: 9781920885953
NB: Cover image used above is from the new 2007 edition.

Peter Temple’s Truth wins the 2010 Miles Franklin

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Peter Temple, Truth

Truth bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

So, the waiting is over and Peter Temple has won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award. I’m kicking myself that I haven’t read it yet. I am not much of a crime-fiction reader – in fact I could probably count on one hand the crime novels I’ve read – but I did like his The broken shore (which itself won quite a few awards, though not the Miles Franklin). Truth is a sequel – at least in part – to The broken shore.

I’ll be interested to read the commentary on this announcement over the next few days but the win does suggest that the literary crime novel is becoming fully ensconced into the literary mainstream. According to one report Truth is the first work of “genre fiction” to win this award since it was established in 1957.

The Miles Franklin Trust website describes the novel as follows:

Temple’s winning novel is the much anticipated sequel to The Broken Shore and comprehends murder, corruption, family, friends, honour, honesty, deceit, love, betrayal – and truth. A stunning story about contemporary Australian life, Truth is written with great moral sophistication.

I’m not averse to a bit of moral sophistication, and you all know by now that explorations of truth engage me – so Truth here I come, soon!

ALS Gold Medal (and 2009 award shortlist)

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My recent review of Herz Bergner’s Between sky and sea reminded me of a rather ignored Australian literary award, the ALS Gold Medal, that I’d come across a few years ago but have let slip beneath my radar. It is time, methinks, to bring it to the fore. It was initially awarded by the Australian Literary Society (ALS) – hence its name – but this society was incorporated, in 1982, into the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) and they now make the award. I suspect it does not receive the exposure that other awards do because there is no money attached, just – obviously – a gold medal, and oh, the glory, though perhaps there’s not much glory if no-one knows about it! There is a judging panel convened by an ASAL member from a state different to that of the previous year’s convenor and comprising other ASAL members.

The Gold Medal, just one of several awards they make, is awarded to “an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year”. They identify the award by the year for which the award is made and not in which it is announced and so last year’s winner, Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap, was announced in 2009, as the 2008 winner. This year’s award will be announced in July after ASAL’s annual conference, but the shortlist is out. It is:

While I haven’t read all of these, they are by respected writers who have won and/or been shortlisted for other significant Australian awards. It is therefore an award worth watching, if only because it represents another contribution to our assessment of Australian literature. I will keep you posted…

Herz Bergner, Between sky and sea

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Hans Bergner, Between sea and sky
Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Do you read introductions to novels? And, if you do, do you read them before or after you read the novel itself? I read them, but always afterwards because I like to come to  novels as objectively as I can. And so, this is what I did with Herz Bergner’s  Between sky and sea which won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal for Book of the Year in 1948. I’d never heard of it. (Well, I wasn’t around then, but still …!) However, this year Text Publishing has republished it, which is a pretty savvy decision because, as Arnold Zable suggests in the introduction, it has some resonances for contemporary Australia – but more on that anon. Zable also tells us that while Bergner, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Australia in 1938, wrote the book in Yiddish, it was first published in English, having been translated by another Australian Jewish novelist, Judah Waten.

The novel has a straightforward plot. It tells the story of a group of Jewish refugees from the Nazi invasion of Poland who are passengers on an old Greek freighter bound for Australia where they hope for a new life. (Australians, at least, will see the contemporary resonances now. Think SIEV X, for example). There is, though, an older resonance which Bergner presumably knew – that of the MS St Louis which tried to find a home for Jewish refugees in 1939 after they were turned away from Cuba (and which later inspired the book Voyage of the damned, so titled because, as many of you know I’m sure, they continued to be turned away as they went from port to port). These resonances and more are all referred to in the Introduction. Knowing readers will pick many of them up, but isn’t that the fun of reading? To pick them up yourself? So, read the book, I say, and then the rather fine Introduction.

Anyhow, back to the book. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help also thinking of that allegorical boat trip, the Ship of Fools. This is not that allegory – they are not fools, and the boat does have a captain, but as I read the novel I felt that awful sense of a world out of control that the allegory represents.

If this book were a film, it would be described as having an ensemble cast, because it has no identifiable heroes or heroines, no real anti-heroes either. Rather, it has a bunch of people who are thrown together by circumstance but who have little in common other than that they are Jewish refugees. Their backgrounds are diverse and they vary in their practice of Judaism (if they practise it at all). They include Nathan and Ida (who lost their respective spouses and children while escaping the invasion), the know-it-all Fabyash and his family, the flirty but mostly kind-hearted Bronya and her stolid overweight husband Marcus, Mrs Hudess and her two daughters (whose only remaining possession is one doll), and several others. As you might expect with such a set up, the novel explores the increasing tensions – the arguments, the pettinesses alongside the kindnesses – that occur as supplies of food and water dwindle and people get sick, while the journey goes on and on without an end in sight:

They were ashamed to lift their heads, to look each other in the face, and for two reasons. Because Fabyash had sunk so low that he had stolen food from a child, and because Mrs Hudess, who was regarded as such a refined person, had burst forth with the language of the coarsest market vendor. To what depths suffering can bring a person.

The strength of the novel is, in fact, its characterisation. Despite its almost non-existent plot (though there is a climax that I won’t give away), the novel maintains our interest because its characters are real in the way they relate to each other and their circumstances. We know these people, we are these people. In this regard it is a little different from those Holocaust novels – many of which also deal with “ordinary” people – that work on a larger-than-life heroism-betrayal scale.

Towards the end of his introduction, Zable quotes Waten regarding the translation. Waten apparently translated it with Bergner by his side, and says that Bergner was “very odd because he wanted every word translated, and if the number of words came out fewer in English he wasn’t very happy. He never really mastered the English language”. This makes a bit of sense because there are times when the novel feels a little – well – wordy. This never becomes a big problem, however, because Bergner’s imagery (mostly simile and analogy) tends to be fresh and is often two-edged:

A soft haze shimmered in the summer air, caressing their faces like spider webs. [on Nathan and Ida’s escape from Warsaw]

and

For a moment the moon shone through, glittering like a lance, and then it was quickly hidden again.

and

… at midday when the sun was ripe and full like a great golden pear that hung heavily from the centre of the sky.

I enjoy writing like this that contains layers of meaning that make you think a little before you move on. The language is not particularly complex, but Bergner has a habit of inserting a word or phrase that undercuts your expectation and keeps you reading.

The themes are both particular and universal – particular because they specifically depict the anti-Semitism that was rife during World War 2 (to the extent that even the crew on the boat treat the passengers as less than human), and universal because they explore the various ways humans behave under stress. The overriding theme – the biggie, in fact – is the way we continue to turn away other. The irony is that even when we are the other – such as the Jews on this boat – we find otherness amongst ourselves to turn away (until a bigger calamity forces us to reconnect). Will we ever change? I fear not. In fact, that’s what makes the universal, universal, isn’t it?

It is encouraging to see publishers like Sydney University Press and Text Publishing – not to mention of course Penguin –  reissuing long out-of-print Australian classics. I hope it pays off, not only because I like to see forgotten Australian classics brought to life again but because, as in this book, the messages conveyed by these classics can be as valid today as they were when they were first written.

Herz Bergner (trans. by Judah Waten)
Between sky and sea
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010 (first ed. 1946)
215pp.
ISBN: 9781921656316

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Shirley Jackson, Charles

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Before I start this review, I have a technical question. Does anyone know why advice to bloggers about maximising your site always say not to use something like “here” for a hyperlink but, rather, to add the link to the actual name of what is being linked to? In other words, to make the link so – Shirley Jackson’s Charles – rather than so – Shirley Jackson’s Charles can can be read here? I have done both but I have tended to prefer the “here” approach when I am making a link to the actual text of the item I am reviewing. Otherwise, the chances are – and this has happened – that the blog’s readers miss it because they will not know that the link under the title is the actual story and not just a link to an article about (or a source to buy) the story. My preference is to go for the unambiguous approach – but is there a really BIG reason why I shouldn’t? Enquiring minds – well mine anyhow – would love to know.

Anyhow, on to what will be a brief review of this week’s Library of America story. It’s by – well, if you’ve read the first para you’ll know by now – Shirley Jackson. Another American writer I’ve never heard of! Apparently she is best known for her “tales of psychological horror” (LOA introductory notes) but this one that they’ve presented to us, “Charles”, is an ordinary domestic life story. It was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1948 and, again according to LOA, “is one of the first of her numerous semi-autobiographical stories of life as a 1940s housewife raising children who sometimes seemed one step outside her ability to control them”.

Well, that certainly seems to the the case in “Charles” because it is clear that the young protagonist of the story has it all over his parents. It’s a nice little story but rather predictable. I’d be surprised if any experienced reader didn’t “get” it some long time before the end. This spoils the story a little – although perhaps Jackson is playing a game with the reader, willing us to see what the parents clearly don’t? Whatever her intentions,  it nicely shows the wiliness of children and the gullibility of many parents. I think though, that to properly assess Ms Jackson, I should read one of her psychological tales rather than this little slice-of-life piece.

Edward Field, WWII (Poem)

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Well, Library of America has surprised again. This week it is a poem (6 pages). I wasn’t expecting that, but as I like to delve into poetry every now and then I was rather pleased. The poem, “WWII” by Edward Field, was first published in 1967 in a collection titled Poets of World War II. According to LOA’s notes, the poem “recounts an actual incident” – and that’s certainly how it reads.

B-17 Bomber plan

B-17 Bomber (Royalty free image from Planes of WW2 website*)

It tells the story of an American bombing mission over Europe in which Field’s plane is damaged by flak and ends up having to ditch in the North Sea on its way back to England. It’s a very matter of fact poem that calmly documents the events, until the moment of ditching when, for a moment, the language becomes more expressive. Here is the beginning of the serious troubles with the plane:

Over the North Sea the third engine gave out
and we dropped low over the water.
The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose down
a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward
and kept our single engine going.

Pretty plainly descriptive. It sounds like they’re in a tight situation but they’ve got everything under control. And then, just nine lines on, that engine’s in trouble and we get:

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,
and we went down into the sea with a crash,
just like hitting a brick wall,
jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Suddenly we get adjectives, a simile and a shift in rhythm, and we are right there with him. He then describes the exit from the plane, the rush for the life rafts which aren’t in a condition to accommodate them all, and the resulting loss of life among the crew. This, though, is not one of those heroic “band of brothers” war poems. It is about survival – our poet is not a coward, but neither does he risk his life to save others. He’s a realist. Soon after the plane ditches, he (the navigator) and the radio operator find themselves still on the plane, with the rafts already pushed off. Their colleagues tell him later that the cords holding the raft to the plane broke. He’s not 100% sure of that:

… but I wouldn’t have blamed them
for cutting them loose, for fear
that by waiting for us the plane would go down
and drag them with it.

Back to plain speaking. And it prepares us for when he too opts for survival – not by any sin of commission but by not engaging in heroics:

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,
although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world,
even if, when opportunity knocked,
I instinctively chose survival.

The poem ends – surely this is not a spoiler? can you spoil a poem? – with the idea that “This was a minor accident of war”. Life and death – all in a day’s work!

I liked this poem. It was not what I expected when I started it: it has few of the usual hallmarks of war poetry. There’s no breast-beating patriotism, no histrionics; its tone is neither tragic, nor melancholic, nor heroic. It’s a plainly told story about one man’s experience of one event in war, and its power lies in that and the understated style in which he tells it. Thanks, once again, to the Library of America for presenting me with something a little different.

*B-17 Bombers were flown by Field’s company, the Eighth Airforce. Attribution as requested: “This image comes from Airforce Image Gallery and has been modified and can be found at Planes of World War II page”.