Review

Noah Webster, On the absurdity of a Bill of Rights (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Noah Webster

By James Herring (1794 – 1867) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve read my last post you may have guessed from the title why I’ve chosen Noah Webster’s “On the absurdity of a Bill of Rights” as my next Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week to discuss. For those of you who haven’t read that post, or who, like me, have a memory like a sieve, I discussed the play adaptation of Frank Moorehouse’s Cold light, and protagonist Edith Campbell Berry’s desire for government (or, those governing) to act according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Now, before I briefly share Webster’s arguments, a little background to this clearly very tricksy man! I’ll start by admitting that my main knowledge of Noah Webster was as the creator of America’s best known dictionary, Webster’s of course. It wasn’t initially, or even in his lifetime, called that, though. He published his first dictionary in 1806 under the title, A compendious dictionary of the English language, but his first big, comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, wasn’t published until 1828.

All this, though, came after the writing I’m talking about here, but it is related because it was through his writing and publishing work that he became interested in federation, and thus the Bill of Rights issue. You see, as LOA’s notes tell us, in 1783, when he was a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher, Webster “began publishing his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first part of which became The American Spelling Book”. A spelling book leading to the Bill of Rights? How, you might wonder? Well, here’s LOA again:

Less familiar to many readers is the pivotal role Webster played in the founding of the American republic and the adoption of its new constitution—and his advocacy was very much related to the success of his publications. The difficulty of securing copyrights from thirteen separate state governments for each subsequent edition of his spelling book convinced him of the need for an effective national government, and he became an advocate for the Federalist cause.

He started campaigning for the federalist cause in 1785, and here comes the particularly “tricksy” bit because when the new constitution was proposed in 1787, he wrote articles supporting its ratification under various pseudonyms! One of these was Giles Hickory under which he wrote the article I’m discussing here. As LOA writes,

One of the main objections to the new constitution was that it did not include a bill of rights, an argument Webster dismisses in his first Hickory letter by responding that such documents are only needed as protection against tyrants and would become unnecessary in a government elected by the people.

This is one of the main arguments he puts in “On the absurdity of a Bill of Rights”. He argues that a Bill of Rights [like the “Magna Charta”] against “the encroachment of Kings and Barons, or against any power independent of the people, is perfectly intelligible” but that a Bill of Rights in a democracy would essentially be the people guarding against the people. In other words, in an elected legislature “the rulers have the same interest in the laws, as the subjects have” so, he argues, “the rights of the people will be perfectly secure without any declaration in their favour”. Hmm, that sounds perfectly good in theory, but in practice, well, it doesn’t always seem to quite work out that way does it?

Anyhow, as it turned out, those in favour of a Bill of Rights won the argument, as Massachusetts, for example, only agreed to ratify the Constitution with the addition of “ten amendments”. These became known as the “Bill of Rights“, and were adopted in 1791.

Webster’s second argument, which he calls his “principal point”,  is also, given how the Bill of Rights has played out in the US, very interesting:

I undertake to prove that a standing Bill of Rights is absurd, because no constitutions, in a free government, can be unalterable. The present generation have indeed a right to declare what they deem a privilege; but they have no right to say what the next generation shall deem a privilege.

He argues, in other words, that times change, and what one generation might see as a right may not be appropriate to another generation, and that it is therefore inappropriate to set such rights in stone. He uses, as an example, “trial by jury”:

The right of Jury-trial, which we deem invaluable, may in future cease to be a privilege; or other modes of trial more satisfactory to the people, may be devised. Such an event is neither impossible nor improbable. Have we then a right to say that our posterity shall not be judges of their own circumstances? The very attempt to make perpetual constitutions, is the assumption of a right to control the opinions of future generations; and to legislate for those over whom we have as little authority as we have over a nation in Asia.

Would the US be different now, if, for example, they did not have the “perpetual”, enshrined right to “bear arms”?

Webster suggests that:

There are perhaps many laws and regulations, which from their consonance to the eternal rules of justice, will always be good and conformable to the sense of a nation. But most institutions in society, by reason of an unceasing change of circumstances, either become altogether improper or require amendment …

He makes some excellent points, but I’d like to believe there are some rights which stem from “the eternal rules of justice”. However, I can also see how temporal and cultural it all is. Australia, rare for a western democracy, does not have a federal bill of rights – the issue arises occasionally – but my state (well, territory) did pass one in 2004, and was followed by Victoria in 2006.

What do you think?

Noah Webster (as Giles Hickory)
“On the absurdity of a Bill of Rights”
First published: American Magazine, December 1787
Available: Online at the Library of America

Northanger Abbey musings (2)

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

A month ago I posted some musings arising from the first part of my current slow read of  Northanger Abbey with my Jane Austen group. In this post I’ll share some reflections on the rest of the novel, Chapters 20 to 31, which is the part that encompasses our “heroine” Catherine’s arrival in and departure from the Abbey.

On the art of fiction

In my previous post, I discussed how Northanger Abbey spoofs or parodies Gothic novels. Northanger Abbey also contains Austen’s famous defence of the novel. These contribute to one of the pleasures of this novel, which is the joy Austen seems to be having in being an author. She intrudes regularly with her own voice, not only commenting on the characters but on fiction itself. It’s the new novelist having fun, flexing her muscles, and making an argument for more “realistic” fiction over the Gothic novel that was popular in her time.

Northerner Abbey illus br Brock

So, for example, here is Catherine, at the Abbey, deciding that the General had been up to no good regarding his late wife:

His cruelty to such a charming woman made him odious to her. She had often read of such characters, characters which Mr. Allen had been used to call unnatural and overdrawn; but here was proof positive of the contrary.

Mr Allen is the sensible neighbour who, with his wife, had taken Catherine to Bath. One of the things Austen does in this novel, and particularly in the second half, is satirise readers of Gothic novels, readers who let their imaginations run away with them. Catherine, our narrator tells us, is too “well-read” to let the General’s “grandeur of air” and “dignified step” dissuade her from her belief about his dastardliness. And so, when at last she is proved wrong (though the General does prove villainous in other ways), Henry admonishes her:

What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

There is so much to tease out here besides Austen’s satirising the Gothic sensibility … but let’s save them for another re-read, and move on.

Soon after, Catherine considers Henry’s admonition, and thinks:

the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged. Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.

So, it is human nature that most interests Austen – not the one-dimensional “angel” and “fiend” characters of the Gothic novelists.

Late in the novel, as our hero and heroine are coming together, Austen writes:

Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.

Here, I’d say, there are two main things going on. One is the cheeky novelist teasing us with her “new circumstance in romance” undermining the conventional idea of romantic love between heroes and heroines in novels. The other is the more serious Austen making a rather subversive observation about the realities of love and human relationships, because she was a pragmatist at heart. She believed in love, but she also understood the implications of the marriage market.

If all this sounds a little confused, that’s probably because it is. Austen plays around in this novel with ideas about fiction versus reality, Gothic (European) sensibility versus more ordered (English) values, and reading versus readers. To do so, she slips in and out of different modes of narrative, daring us to keep up with her. No wonder it’s the book that has proven the hardest to adapt to film.

More word teasing from Henry

In my last post, I shared Henry’s little tirade about the word “nice”. I can’t resist sharing another little tirade from later in the novel:

“No, and I am very much surprised. Isabella promised so faithfully to write directly.”

“Promised so faithfully! A faithful promise! That puzzles me. I have heard of a faithful performance. But a faithful promise—the fidelity of promising! It is a power little worth knowing, however, since it can deceive and pain you…

Love it …

And here endeth my reflections on my most recent re-read of Northanger Abbey. What a delight it has been, yet again. It may not have the romance of Pride and prejudice or the complexity of Emma, but it has the lively, fresh mind of an author who wants to engage with her readers about the very thing she is doing, writing a novel. I find that irresistible.

Picture credit: From Chapter 9, illus. by CE Brock (Presumed Public Domain, from solitaryelegance.com)

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 25 Comments

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouseMena Calthorpe’s novel The dyehouse was, as I wrote in a post last year, Text Publishing’s choice for its 100th Text Classic, which surely says something about its quality or worth, wouldn’t you think? And yet, as Lisa (ANZLitLovers) pointed out in her post, it is not mentioned in recent books discussing the history of Australian literature, such as Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library and Jane Gleeson-White’s Australian Classics.

However, it is listed in bibliographic and encyclopaedic works like Debra Adelaide’s Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide, Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine’s Annals of Australian literature, and William Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews’ The Oxford companion to Australian literature. It has also captured the attention of others, including Introduction-writer Fiona McFarlane (whose The night guest I’ve reviewed here). She writes of coming across a secondhand copy in a Sydney bookshop and says that she’d never heard of Mena Calthorpe, but as soon as she’d read the opening sentences, she decided to buy it. I can understand that. I would have too.

Now, before I get to the book, I’m going to bore you a little more with what people have or haven’t said about the book. In my above-linked 100th Text Classics post, I noted that while most reviewers were favourable, one from my city’s paper was less so. S/he, RR, called it “badly written and pretentious”, though conceded that if Calthorpe focused on “telling a story simply, economically, and honestly” she could be “a force … on the Australian literary scene”. Marian Eldridge, reviewing a reprint in the same paper, two decades later, had quite the opposite opinion. She praised Calthorpe’s “spare, clear prose and jaunty dialogue”, and called the book …

“a fine example of the social realist genre”

Well, I’m with McFarlane and Eldridge. The book got me in from its first paragraph, and I enjoyed it immensely. It is, what Lisa would call, a book that matters because its subject is, to put it broadly (and baldly!), the impact of capitalism-at-all-costs on workers. That could make for a dry, didactic book, but Calthorpe’s writing and characterisation bring the story to life. Her political message is unavoidable but it’s tempered by a cast of believable people (ranging from the cold chairman-of-the-board to the lowliest labourers), a well-controlled story that contains tragedy and romance without turning into melodrama, and writing that’s fresh and lively.

I’ll start with the writing first. The novel starts in 1956 and takes place over about a year. It’s told third person, in short chapters which move between the many, but not hard to keep track of, characters. It starts with Miss Merton arriving at the Dyehouse and meeting the on-site boss, Mr Renshaw. In chapter 2, we meet the Chairman of the Directors Harvison, the General Manager Larcombe, and Company Secretary Cuthbert. They’re discussing problems in the Dyehouse: it’s not keeping up with production. We quickly get a sense of the characters of these three men. Harrison’s lips tighten as he wonders “Where’s the firing squad?” Larcombe is ineffective – wary, unexciting, and full of excuses – while Cuthbert is “sharp-featured, pleasantly mannered”. We soon learn that he has some humanity, some empathy, but too easily lets his accounting distract him from troubling people issues. Then, in the same chapter, we shift to the General Office, and this (which McFarlane loved too):

Clack! Clack! Up came the carrier and ejected papers onto Mr Dennet’s table. There they lay: the Fanfolds! the Ledger Copies!
The Debits!
Mr Dennet took up his pen and began entering into the Control Book. The Comptometers sprang to life. Two young women with painted nails fell upon the papers.
Tic-tac, tic-tac. Now over to the files.
OK, Miss Brennan, you sort them out. City, Country, Government. Now break them up. A to K, L to Z, and then into the files with them.

There are other short interludes like this – a paragraph on worker Barney running for the morning train, for example – which break up the rhythm and convey the life better than any straight descriptive text could do. I have no idea what RR was thinking. Pretentious? No! Instead, I’d agree with McFarlane’s description of it as “formally experimental … with its episodic structure and its restrained lyricism …  its playful attention to sound.” It all makes for delicious reading.

“The trap’s set for us all” (Miss Merton)

Next, the well-controlled story. Told over a year, Calthorpe explores how the Dyehouse manages with its production crisis. We see Renshaw scapegoating the skilled, experienced but not certificated Hughie, moving him from his beloved dye-room to working on the vats. We also see Renshaw sexually preying on pretty young women in his employ, including the initially gullible Patty. We see the workers, their lack of security – those on “Staff” versus those brought in as needed – and their struggle to sustain their lives. We see the bosses turning a blind eye to the struggles of their people, or, not even noticing these struggles. We see nascent attempts to “organise” for better conditions. Along the way there’s an unplanned mid-life pregnancy, a tragic death, physical assaults and sexual abuse. The novel is nicely structured, beginning and ending with the calm, mature Miss Merton.

All this might suggest that the characters are stereotypical, designed simply to serve the “idea” but, while they do serve the idea, they come across as real, authentic human beings. Larcombe and Cuthbert, for example, are not simple villains. They are, in Larcombe’s case, for example, a bit lazy, a bit self-protective, a bit uncertain, resulting in his being a bit ineffective! Even the biggest villain of the piece, Renshaw, is shown to to have the odd ounce of humanity. Similarly, the workers. Hughie, Barney, Patty, Miss Merton and Oliver Henery, to name a few, are all rounded out with succinctly presented backstories, which establish their authenticity while also adding depth to the plot.

It is, essentially, an ensemble cast, but the stories of two characters primarily carry the plot – Hughie (whose love of his job “had given purpose and dignity to his labour”) and Patty (a naive young women who believes Renshaw will marry her, until she discovers otherwise).

The ending, which I won’t give away, is inspired, striking the right balance between realism and hope.

I really can’t recommend this book enough. It slots well into other books exploring the struggles of the working poor of the early post-war period, like Ruth Park’s Harp in the South series. And it is a thoroughly engaging read which is relevant today, not only because its humans reflect universals of human behaviour as well as the life of the period, but because we are currently seeing new threats to worker security which ensures that this book’s concerns do not feel dated. A worthwhile read on multiple counts, in other words.

Mena Calthorpe
The dyehouse
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016 (Orig. pub. 1961)
299pp.
ISBN: 9781925355758

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds), The near and the far: New stories from the Asia-Pacific region (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments
David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short, The near and the far

Anthologies, almost by definition, have a unifying theme, something that explains their existence. There are the “best of” type, as in best of a year or of a genre, for example. There are those drawn from a prize, such as The trouble with flying, and other stories (my review) from the Margaret River Short Story competition. And of course there are subject-oriented ones like Rebellious daughters (my review) or Australian love stories (my review). David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short’s anthology, The near and the far, is another type. Its origin is a project called WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange) which, the editors tell us, is “a program of reciprocal residences and cultural events focused on writers and writing from Australia and the Asia-Pacific”. The residencies and events occurred in such places as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia. The aim was to enable Asia-Pacific writers to immerse themselves in the face-to-face exchange of ideas and collaborative experiences, in order to build cultural understanding and find, as one participant says, “sustainable ways of speaking amongst ourselves and relating to one another as cultural practitioners”.

The result is that the stories – and even the forms of the pieces – are varied. The book has been thoughtfully presented. There’s a foreword by Alice Pung and an introduction by the editors at the beginning, and some notes on WrICE and a list of contributors with mini-bios at the back. The stories themselves are organised into three groups – The Near, The Far, and The Near and The Far – though I’d probably have to think hard about why certain stories have been allocated their particular group. There are 21 stories, 15 of which, if I’ve counted correctly, are by women. There’s a lovely extra touch, which is that at the end of each story is an author’s reflection – on the writing process, the goals and/or the experience of WrICE. They were often illuminating.

Before we get to the stories – and of course I’m only going to be able to focus on a few – I’d like to share some comments from the foreword and introduction. In her foreword, Pung calls the book a travel anthology, and I suppose it is, in a sense, though I may not have described it that way if I hadn’t read her foreword! She says

The near and the far is one of those rare travel anthologies, combining fiction with poetry and longform essays, each piece revealing a real insider’s experience of inhabiting a different world without exoticising the foreign. Each story has a centre – whether philosophical, moral, or political – and yet none of them are didactic.

The editors talk of how our different colonial experiences had “left long shadows across our imaginations”. They refer particularly to “settler” Australians who live in what was seen as an “outpost” – further than the “Far East” – and yet who still tend to look to Europe and America for our main cultural input. “The far feels near”, they write, “and the near feels far away”. That makes a lot of sense – to me.

You think you know (Omar Musa)

Now the stories. They come from, as you’d expect, a diverse group of writers, from Australia and Vietnam, from the Philippines and America, and from many places in between. Some I knew – like Melissa Lucashenko, Omar Musa, Cate Kennedy, and of course Francesca Rendle-Short – but most were new to me. Many of the pieces explore in some way the idea of what we know and don’t know. They may be about ignoring what we know because it’s too painful, or because we fear the rejection of others. They may be about the disconnect between what we assume and what we find. Or they may simply be about facing something new or unexpected.

I loved that indigenous Australian writer Melissa Lucashenko’s story, “Dreamers”, was chosen to start the anthology. Set in rural Australia in 1969, two years after the famous referendum, it’s a beautifully structured and told story about the relationship that develops between indigenous woman and her non-indigenous employers. It’s a story about love, loyalty and tolerance, but manages to quietly reference, without being polemical, social change issues such as environmental protest and the stolen generations.

Not surprisingly, the theme of accepting – welcoming, hopefully – diversity runs through the book. In “My two mothers”, Singaporean Suchen Christine Lim shares a story about a young adopted girl’s shame at having two mothers, her unwillingness to appreciate their love and tender care, and her eventual recognition of what they had given her.

If you have ever read or heard Australian-Malaysian performance poet Omar Musa, you won’t be surprised to hear that diversity underpins his contribution, “You think you know”. In this first-person story he explores “the deeply troubling issues” regarding sexual identity in Malaysia through his narrator’s (presumably himself) friendship with a young Malaysian man met on a bus. It’s a quiet, reflective, wrenching story – quite different from the higher octane wordplay of his performance poetry.

A story using a completely different tone and pace is Chinese-Indonesian, now American writer Xu Xi’s “BG: The significant years”. In a time when scientists and historians argue about dating nomenclature – BCE/CE anyone? – Xu Xi has come up with her own, BG or Before Google! Google (created 19 August 2004, if you want to know) provides for her a significant life marker. In short chronological sections, starting with “BG 43 (circa 1961 to ’62)”, she chronicles her life – in a lightly satirical tone – from applying to go to university in America, to becoming a US citizen, and getting a job and then losing it in the 1986 stock market crash. Her commentary on life in the US is enlightening. Joining the unemployment queue meant, she writes, that “for once I wasn’t a minority, because the minority was the majority in that government office”! Telling eh?

There are many more stories I’d like to share: Laurel Fantauzzo’s second-person-told story, Some Hints About Travelling to the Country Your Family Departed, about going back to the place (in her case the Philippines) a parent came from; Francesca Rendle-Short’s “1:25,000” on the geologies of time, on memories, regrets and saying “no”; and Maxine Beneba Clark’s short, painful, 9/11-inspired “Aviation” in which accepting “other” is put to the test.

And then there’s David Carlin’s gender-bending, mind-bending “Unmade in Bangkok”. Inspired by Thailand’s ladyboys, he explores ideas about identity and gender. The story is told in ten sections, mostly in third person but slipping between male and female personas. In section four, “she” considers:

Women make themselves up, men do not. This is curious when she thinks about it. To be a woman, in this culture, is to be a creature dipped in fiction, whereas to be a man is to be altogether real or at least natural, unconstructed.

So she dresses up and considers: “What is she becoming? Ever more fictional? A character in drag?” I enjoyed how Carlin explored gender identity, using broader ideas about “fiction”. “Some fictions trap us”, he writes, “but other fictions free us”. For ladyboys the implications are serious. It’s a complex story which covers a lot of ground. I need to read it again.

I titled this section “you think you know” because in all the stories, the writers are seeking to know, not so life can be assured, or complete, but in the spirit of understanding, of growing. Alvin Pang, in the note to his story “The Illoi of Kantimeral”, discusses the invented language he used:

Their precise meanings may or may not be immediately discernible from context, but neither is the experience of engagement, negotiation, resistance, and mystery within the Asia-Pacific itself as straightforward as we might wish the world to be. There is humility and pleasure in earnest encounter, and in listening out for the inherent humanity of what we do not fully recognise.

Perfect! This is a book which confronts us with many ways of seeing and experiencing. Different stories will appeal to different readers, depending on experiences, but I hope I’ve given you a taste. Books like this deserve a bigger audience than they often get.

aww2017-badge

David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds),
The near and the far: New stories from the Asia-Pacific region
Melbourne: Scribe, 2016
288pp.
ISBN: 9781925321562

(Review copy courtesy Scribe)

Graham Greene, Travels with my aunt (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Graham Greene, Travels with my auntEvery year, my reading group aims to do at least one classic – usually something from the nineteenth century – but this year someone suggested Graham Greene. Yes, we all responded, why not? But which one? For reasons I don’t recollect, Travels with my aunt was suggested and given none of us had a burning desire to do another, it was scheduled. This suited me as I hadn’t read it before.

It surprised me a little. I was expecting something lighter because I’d understood that it was  a comedy, a bit of a romp, and it is – but I found layers too. Wikipedia says of Greene’s work, overall, that “he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective”. Travels with my aunt might be a fun book but this description is relevant to it too – though I’m not an expert on “the Catholic perspective” bit.

Anyhow, let’s start with the plot. It concerns middle-aged retired banker Henry Pulling’s travels in Europe and South America with his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta whom he only gets to properly know after his mother’s funeral. Henry is a bachelor whose hobby is growing dahlias. It’s a quiet, English sort of life. His aunt, though, is a completely different kettle of fish. She appears at her sister’s funeral, whisks Henry off to her flat where she lives with her valet-cum-lover, the black Wordsworth. She tells him that his mother was not his mother, but had married his father and faked pregnancy in order to take on his care when he was born to… Well, of course, we can guess who the birth mother is can’t we? From this point on, she engages Henry in her various travels which, it has to be said, become increasingly morally suspect. When she says that “sometimes I have the awful feeling that I am the only one left anywhere who finds any fun in life”, she’s not joking, but her fun can have a more than questionable edge.

The story is told first person by Henry. I’d call him a naive, rather than an unreliable, narrator – I think there is a subtle difference. This is one of the jokes of the book. We know or suspect things that Henry, in his inexperienced not to mention conservative British way, doesn’t immediately cotton on to. Part of the story’s enjoyment is the tension Greene creates between Henry and his free-wheeling Aunt. This tension provides one of the layers I referred to.

Another layer I’ll tentatively suggest was inspired by discovering that Greene’s full name was Henry Graham Greene. This made me wonder whether there is a little of the autobiographical in the book. There’s certainly not in the literal sense, because Greene, who left his wife and the associated traditional, domestic, settled life, led a peripatetic and adventurous life, one closer to Aunt Augusta’s. But the ending, which I won’t give away, poses some interesting questions when looked at from this perspective.

Other layers relate to various issues Greene refers to or hints at along the way, such as American imperialism, particularly in South America; World War 2 and the actions of collaborators; the impact of the pill (resulting in pregnancy now being the girl’s fault); Catholicism and its role (or not) in personal value systems; and, I think, some critique of “Englishness”.

However, I don’t want to make it sound too serious. The book is a romp. There’s no doubt about that, as we follow Henry and his aunt to Brighton, France, Istanbul via the Orient Express and, eventually, to Paraguay. The activities his aunt engages in, not to mention the stories she tells Henry about her past shenanigans, are funny, outrageous, sometimes farcical, and not always legal. You do have to keep up with a rather large cast of colourful characters, including the young Tooley and her is-he-a-CIA-operative father O’Toole, the Nazi war criminal and love of Augusta’s life Mr Visconti, various policemen and military personnel, and the put-upon Wordsworth who calls Augusta his “bebi gel”.

Greene’s writing is frequently funny. Here is a description of an American tourist having a cuppa in Europe:

One of them was raising a little bag, like a drowned animal, from his cup at the end of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England, and it was with a pang that I realized how much I was likely to miss Southwood and dahlias in the company of Aunt Augusta.

Then there’s Aunt Augusta on her plans to fund their trip to Istanbul:

“I hope you don’t plan anything illegal” [says retired banker Henry!]
“I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta said. “How could  I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”

And there’s this on the is-he-CIA O’Toole:

“Are you in the CIA like Tooley told me?”
“Well … kind of … not exactly,” he said, clinging to his torn rag of deception like a blown-out umbrella in a high wind.

There are also many delightful set-pieces, such as the description of a Christmas lunch for the lonely, and some ridiculous confrontations with various policemen.

This book is too well-known for me to write something more comprehensive, so I’m going to leave it here, and let you tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, I’ll conclude on a quote from early in the book. It’s Henry reflecting on his mother’s life:

Imprisoned by ambitions which she had never realised, my mother had never known freedom. Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

Without going into what he meant by “successful”, I think this notion of freedom – particularly “of conduct”, which is an interesting take – is what’s at the bottom of this book, the freedom to choose how you will live your life. In the end, Henry realises he is free to choose. Whether he makes the “right” or “best” choice is up for discussion, but it’s the freedom that’s the point.

Graham Greene
Travels with my aunt
London: Vintage Books, 1999 (Orig. pub. 1969)
261pp.
ISBN: 9780099282587

Carson McCullers, The great eaters of Georgia (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Carson McCullers, 1959

Carson McCullers, 1959 (photographed by Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Regular readers of my Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week posts will probably guess why I’ve chosen to write about this story: it’s by an appealing American writer and it’s about food. However, it’s quite different from the other food stories. Firstly, while it’s called “the great eaters” it’s more of a little memoir essay albeit structured around food, and secondly, it was published posthumously in 2005. McCullers was born in 1917 (on Feb 19 in fact, so this month in the centenary of her birth) and died in 1967. “The great eaters of Georgia” was written, LOA’s notes say, in 1954 but was not published, because …

It’s a complex situation, which the Wikipedia article section on her personal life fills in, but the significant thing for us is that she had returned (fled) to the US from Paris in 1953, because her husband had tried to encourage her to commit suicide with him. Soon after her return, he succeeded in taking his life. Now, this is relevant because LOA tells us that McCullers had been offered money by Holiday magazine for a piece on Georgia, but, according to McCullers’ biographer Josyane Savigneau, the magazine rejected the article because they were “looking for a lighter, more descriptive, less personal piece.”

I guess that’s fair enough for a holiday-oriented magazine, but for readers more interested in McCullers than in Georgia – sorry, Georgia – it’s great that the piece didn’t disappear. Like many people, I’ve read and/or seen The heart is a lonely hunter and The member of the wedding – but in my case so long ago that my main memory is not of the plots but of melancholy and loneliness, the sorts of emotions that appealed to my teenage self!

But now, “The great eaters of Georgia”. It’s an intriguing piece that doesn’t perhaps quite cohere – certainly as a piece for a holiday magazine. For example, she mentions visiting various people. First is the controversial writer Lillian Smith, who openly confronted such issues as race and gender equality. McCullers writes:

Lill, like other Southerners, feels passionately about the problems of the Negro. Most Georgians do not agree with her, and often when her name is mentioned there is that strange area of silence.

This may not have been what Holiday was looking for, particularly when she adds that during her visit they “discussed Georgia politics”. Then she visits psychiatrist Dr Hervey Cleckley. She doesn’t share her discussions with him about her husband’s suicide – this I learnt from LOA – but they did talk

of the improvement in the understanding of racial problems and the migration from the rural cotton areas to the cities and towns.

Again perhaps not Holiday content? She says they also talked about Dr Crawford Long, a Georgian who was the first to use ether in an operation. You may wonder why this came up, but it resulted from their discussion of “ether parties”:

These odd-sounding affairs must have been like marijuana parties to the modern teenager but there was no social stigma attached, and my grandmother told me that, as a young lady, she often held ether parties for her young friends after they had ridden home from church and gathered for Sunday dinner.

Fascinating eh? Dr Long apparently noticed the numbing effect of ether (!) and thought it might work in surgery! I found this interesting because I have reviewed Sawako Ariyoshi’s The doctor’s wife, which fictionalises the story of Hanaoka Seishū who is believed to have been the first to use general anaesthesia in surgery – in 1804. Long carried out his first surgery in 1842.

Anyhow, I guess McCullers included this story of Long as an example of Georgian ingenuity? Again it may not have been what Holiday was looking for.

She was probably on firmer ground in her description of eating practices and food, because yes, she does talk about those too as the title suggests! I enjoyed little tidbits such as that in her mother’s day:

a child wore an asafetida bag around his neck to ward off colds and contagious diseases. Asafetida is the foulest-smelling substance. I suppose it makes good medical sense because one was not apt to go very near a person wearing an asafetida bag.

Hmmm, that’s not a food story though asafetida is used in cooking – and, anyhow, it’s adds a touch of humour.

She also talks about what great eaters (hence the title) Georgians are – at every meal:

Georgians eat big meals three times a day. I have never gotten over this orange-juice-and-coffee breakfast they have up North. A respectable Georgia breakfast means fish roe and grits or at least eggs or maybe country sausage.

She remembers chewing sugarcane as a child, and the historic cultivation of chinaberry trees “to counteract miasma”. She mentions the razing of the home she was born in, and sneaks in a comment about the reduction in (though not removal of) poverty in her home-town, before returning to the subject of breakfasts. She talks of the Yankee vulgarity of referring to children as “kids”. And she tells us that fried chicken is probably Georgia’s best-known dish, closely followed by “field peas”. She surprised me by mentioning a dish I have in my recipe folders from my early recipe-gathering days, Country Captain. It’s a sort of curried chicken dish, and I didn’t realise it came from the American south.

She also tells us that “any discussion of Georgian food is incomplete without the mention of watermelon” and provides a loving description of the “special operation and procedure” it demands. Fruitcake, tupelo honey, and the smells of Savannah are also shared with us, before she comes to a little anecdote about a “town character”, a bachelor who prefers to eat alone. This is very “un-Georgian”, and she concludes her piece by saying that

Although we have our share of eccentrics, I know very few Georgians who do not love fellowship, good hunting, food, and laughter—who do not enjoy life.

All in all, it’s a fascinating article – for what it tells us about Georgian life and food but more, for the little insights we glean of her interests and her emotional state. A good read for anyone interested in McCullers.

Pam (Travellin’ Penguin) has also written a response to this story.

Note: My other LOA food stories are by John Duncan (“A Virginia barbecue“), Ana Menéndez (“Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban offerings“), George G. Foster (“The eating-houses“) and George Augustus Sala (“The tyranny of pie“).

Carson McCullers
“The great eaters of Georgia”
First published: Oxford American, Spring 2005
Available: Online at the Library of America

Northanger Abbey musings (1)

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments

Northerner Abbey illus br Brock

Ch 9, illus. by CE Brock (Presumed Public Domain, solitaryelegance.com)

My Jane Austen group is reading Northanger Abbey – again – because this year is the 200th anniversary of its publication. However, I did write about the novel when we did it in 2015, so what to do? Well, the thing is that every time I read Austen something else pops into my mind to think about – and I’d love to share a couple of them.

Now, my group often does slow reads of the novels, and we are doing Northanger Abbey in two parts: up to Chapter 19, which is just before Catherine leaves Bath; and from Chapter 20 to the end which encompasses her arrival in and departure from Northanger Abbey. My comments in this post relate to the first part.

On heroes and heroines

Northanger Abbey, as you may know, spoofs or parodies Gothic novels, which were popular at the time. One of the clues to the parody is the frequency with which Austen refers to her heroine Catherine’s likeness (or not) to “heroines”. The novel commences:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine…

And Austen goes on the describe why Catherine is not heroine material. She’s a simple country girl living in an ordinary family in which nothing dramatic happens. Her father is a “very respectable man” who is “not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters”. There are no lords or baronets in the vicinity to create hero intrigues … and so it goes.

However, it’s not this Gothic spoof that I want to discuss, but the whole concept of hero/heroine. It occurred to me as I was thinking about the heroine thread during this read that when I was a student writing essays I always referred to the protagonists of novels as the “hero” or “heroine”. I don’t do this so much now, preferring something like “main character”. I’m guessing this is part of our post-modern world.

But, this is not what I want to talk about either! My question to myself was where did this concept of “hero” and “heroine” come from, so I did a little digging. And here’s my disclaimer, because it was just a little digging that I did. I discovered a couple of things. One is that the poet-playwright-critic Dryden was the first to use the word “hero” in this way in 1697. The site on which I found this went on to say that “it is still commonly accepted as a synonym for protagonist, even when the protagonist does nothing particularly heroic”. Yes!

Britannica.com told me that:

The appearance of heroes in literature marks a revolution in thought that occurred when poets and their audiences turned their attention away from immortal gods to mortal men, who suffer pain and death, but in defiance of this live gallantly and fully, and create, through their own efforts, a moment’s glory that survives in the memory of their descendants. They are the first human beings in literature …

This must be what Dryden was picking up on – a move from a focus on gods to people and their agency in their own lives. Another site (whose link I didn’t capture) said that:

The Novel was a new genre. Contrary to the epic or the drama, the Novel places the hero at the heart of its reflections. For the first time, we have access to the thoughts and feelings of the hero.

I’d argue that Austen, in presenting Catherine to us as she does, is drawing our attention to a transition from the notion of “hero” (or “heroine”) as someone who “live[s] gallantly and fully, and create[s], through their own efforts, a moment’s glory that survives in the memory of their descendants”, like a Gothic novel hero, to more realistic stories about ordinary human beings that she wrote. This is not to say that ordinary human beings can’t be heroic, but it’s a different sort of heroism, nest-ce pas? This is simplistic, I realise, in terms of analysing the “hero” in literature, but it’s given me something to hang my thinking on to.

On “nice”

In a conversation with hero (!) Henry and his sister Eleanor, Catherine asks Henry “do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

Now, if you went to school when I did, you were probably told not to use the word “nice” because it’s over-used and meaningless. Well, this is what Henry teases Catherine about. He replies (teasingly, cheekily, condescendingly, depending on your attitude to our hero), “The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

At this point sister Eleanor steps in and tells Catherine that

“He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”

“While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise…”

I loved reading that this injunction we all heard in the mid-late twentieth century was “a thing” back in the very early nineteenth. “Nice” has such a fascinating semantic history that I’m not going to explore here – but I can’t resist telling Henry that he’s wrong because my Shorter Oxford Dictionary says that, back around 1500, it originally meant “silly” or “stupid”. Did Austen know that too, and is having a joke on Henry?

What fun Austen is to read …

Kate Chopin, Fedora (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

Time methinks for another Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week, particularly since one of their recent offerings was one of my favourite American authors, Kate Chopin. “Fedora” is the sixth story by Chopin I’ve discussed here, and is probably the shortest, more of a “sketch”. In fact its original title was apparently ““The Falling in Love of Fedora. A Sketch”

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, or her novel The awakening which I read a couple of times before blogging, you’ll know that Chopin was not afraid to tackle confronting subjects, like suicide, adultery, and miscegenation. LOA’s notes briefly discuss the controversy surrounding The awakening. Words such as  “morbid,” “sex fiction,” “poison,” were applied to it, and the clearly more conservative, younger, Willa Cather, whom I’ve also reviewed here, said that “I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme.”

Well, of course, many of us do know why she explored the themes she did in puritanical late-nineteenth century America, and we admire her for doing so. LOA explains that while her stories were usually sought after, some were a little too hot to handle. “Fedora” was one such, being “turned down by the national magazines that often competed for her work”, only appearing “in an upstart literary journal in her hometown of St. Louis”.

So, what is it that was so shocking about “Fedora”? Well, there’s the rub, because it’s one of those short stories that leaves you wondering. Fedora is 30 years old – and is described pretty much as the quintessential spinster:

The young people—her brothers’ and sisters’ guests, who were constantly coming and going that summer—occupied her to a great extent, but failed to interest her. She concerned herself with their comforts—in the absence of her mother—looked after their health and well-being; contrived for their amusements, in which she never joined. And, as Fedora was tall and slim, and carried her head loftily, and wore eye-glasses and a severe expression, some of them—the silliest—felt as if she were a hundred years old. Young Malthers thought she was about forty.

The story concerns her going to the station – driving the horse and cart – to pick up young Malthers’ sister who is returning from college. Young Malthers is, we are told, 23 – and Fedora has become fascinated by him, suddenly realising he is a man – “in voice, in attitude, in bearing, in every sense — a man”. Now, early in the story, we’d been told that:

Fedora had too early in life formed an ideal and treasured it. By this ideal she had measured such male beings as had hitherto challenged her attention, and needless to say she had found them wanting.

But, suddenly she is aware of him, she watches him:

She sought him out; she selected him when occasion permitted. She wanted him by her, though his nearness troubled her. There was uneasiness, restlessness, expectation when he was not there within sight or sound. There was redoubled uneasiness when he was by—there was inward revolt, astonishment, rapture, self-contumely; a swift, fierce encounter betwixt thought and feeling.

Fedora could hardly explain to her own satisfaction why she wanted to go herself to the station for young Malthers’ sister. She felt a desire to see the girl, to be near her; as unaccountable, when she tried to analyze it, as the impulse which drove her, and to which she often yielded, to touch his hat, hanging with others upon the hall pegs, when she passed it by.

It seems, then, that she is in love with him, as the original title encourages us to think – or that she, at least, feels a desire or passion for him. So, when she picks up Miss Malthers, why does she do what she does? That is the question – and it’s one I’m not going to answer, because that would be a spoiler and because the story is so short that you can read it, and ponder it, yourself. And anyhow, I’m still thinking about it myself, given the way Chopin teases us. Suffice it to say that, however you read it, Chopin was challenging her readers to think about desire – its origins, its expression, and its impact on the person who desires.

This is a beautiful and intriguing little “sketch”, though to call it that doesn’t fully do it justice.

Note: My other Kate Chopin reviews are A pair of silk stockings, After the winter, A respectable woman, Désirée’s baby and Morning walk. My, they are building up aren’t they?

Kate Chopin
“Fedora”
First published: Criterion, February 20, 1897
(Under the pseudonym, La Tour)
Available: Online at the Library of America

William Lane, The salamanders (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

William Lane, The salamandersWilliam Lane’s latest novel, The salamanders, is a book that keeps you thinking from beginning to end. As I started it, I was thinking of it as a cross between Julian Davies’ Crow mellow (my review), a satirical novel about a house party for artists and their patrons, and Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review) about an artist colony, focusing particularly on the founding family. A few comparisons could be drawn, but I soon discovered that this is its own book.

I hadn’t heard of this* William Lane before, but The salamanders is his third novel. In a different version, with a different title, it was apparently shortlisted for the Vogel Prize. The book’s author bio also told me that Lane did his doctorate on Christina Stead. So, he’s been about the place – just not the places I’ve been haunting, clearly!

But now to the book. It starts during a beach holiday on the New South Wales coast. There’s the obsessed artist Peregrine, his ex-wife Naomi, their daughter Julia, his sons, David, Arthur, and George, from his previous relationship – and the adopted Rosie. There are also some visitors, including friend Elizabeth and her husband Johnno. The children range in age down from the 14-year-old David. Arthur, aged around 11, has a crush on the slightly older Rosie, and George and Julia form a happy play unit. Lane sets up the idyll – Naomi says they are “enjoying one another’s company far more than when we were married” – and then gradually pulls it apart, exposing past and present cracks. By the end of the first chapter – the book is told in 5 chapters – the idyll has broken, mostly due to Peregrine’s arrogant and self-involved behaviour, and Naomi departs with the two girls. Chapter 2 jumps 15 years or so. Arthur is around 27 years old, and is back at the beach-house living alone. Rosie comes to visit.

The rest of the book focuses primarily on Arthur and Rosie as they circle each other, coming together, separating, all the while trying to come to terms with their lives, their pasts and their desires for the future. Lane doesn’t over-explain, preferring to show not tell, so we are left to guess exactly what had happened on that holiday and just after, which resulted in changes to the family units. All we know is that the fallout has had long-lasting impact and that Rosie is coming from England, to which she’d run away. She refuses to eat with Arthur. This eating behaviour of hers is one of the motifs running through the novel, and represents an inner discordance, despite the refrain that what happened wasn’t their fault.

Other motifs run through the book. One is the indigenous rock art image, in a cliff near the house, of a falling man. It mesmerises Arthur, and represents his emotional state. The other main motif relates of course to salamanders – and various members of the somewhat-related lizard and snake families. These creatures occur both literally and metaphorically. Rosie, in Chapter 2, says to Arthur:

‘Skinks, salamanders, geckos, frill-necked lizards, water dragons,’ laughed Rosie in her burred and husky way, ‘this is the land of the lizard. When I see a lizard, I think of this country. I never realised that its surface is so lizard-like. That’s what I saw from the plane.

This motif is complex, conveying a range of ideas, many of them unsettling:

… Peregrine glittered, and his eyes grew milky. He might be covered in scales, with discreetly expanding gills. With an absolute, self-preserving, inward rush of energy, Elizabeth removed herself from him.

Lizards also represent the antiquity of the continent – “the young lizard … considered them from some million years ago”. And in this, they also represent resilience. “Lizards are tough”, says Rosie, and toughness, the ability to grow and move beyond their youth, is what Rosie and Arthur are working to achieve.

There’s an underlying Gothic sense to the novel which imbues it with an overall eeriness. Peregrine creates strange paintings in caves. There are mysterious shapes or shadows which appear out of the blue – “Something scurried outside the glass. He looked up, but did not catch its form” or “A liquid slithering passed along the glass of the house …” or “Then that scrabbling again. Something ancient was trying to get in”. There’s Arthur and Rosie’s roadtrip into Australia’s interior, and their uncertain relationship with each other. Not blood-related but brought up as brother and sister, they mystify and concern others.

So, where does all this go? I’m not sure it’s a book you can easily comprehend in one reading. The road trip to the interior and Peregrine’s bizarre painting projects in caves within caves suggest some sort of psyche-seeking but it isn’t completely resolved in my mind. Need it be?

Overall, then, it’s one of those mesmerising books that can be read in different ways, making it a little disconcerting. The first chapter felt a little over-written at times and I feared a clichéd story about dysfunctional artists’ colonies, but it then shifted into something more mysterious, less-defined, slippery, something incorporating a broad, abstract story about our relationship to art, place and nature, and a more personal story about identity and family.

According to myth, salamanders are born of and resistant to fire. Rosie says during her road-trip with Arthur that “we’re salamanders – we don’t feel the fire”. And that, in a way, is the point of the novel, surviving the fires that confront us.

William Lane
The salamanders
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2016
255pp.
ISBN: 9780994395849

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge)

* I allude to the late nineteenth-early twentieth century Utopian of the same name, whose The workingman’s paradise I’ve reviewed.

Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman (eds), Rebellious daughters (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, Rebellious daughtersTo rebel or not to rebel, that is the question. At least, it’s the question that interested memoirists Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman who, having written their own stories about “conservative upbringings and subsequent rebellions”, wanted to discover what other women could reveal about that “universal life experience”, the rebellion against parents. This book, Rebellious daughters, is, obviously, the end result – and it makes for fascinating reading.

In their Introduction, Katsonis and Kofman quote American author Gordon Lish’s statement that the  best thing writers can do is to get themselves “in trouble”, to “make it hot” for themselves. This is what they wanted from their contributors, they wanted them to take risks – and it’s what they got.

Like most anthologies, Rebellious daughters has been carefully ordered. It starts with one of the grand-dames of Australian literature, Marion Halligan (“The daughters of debate”) who describes herself as “well-behaved”, as the “good girl” that so many of the later contributors rebelled against. But this is not to say that she didn’t engage in her own little subversions, such as reading forbidden books. They didn’t do her any harm, she writes, “the delicate ones were my parents.” I related to Halligan’s story because, like her, I was the eldest, “the one who came before, who paved the way” and didn’t rebel dramatically. But, enough of that, I’m talking order, structure, here.

The book ends with author-journalist Jane Caro (“Where mothers stop and daughters start”) who shares her daughters’ rebellions, the loud in-your-face one and the withdraw-and-don’t-engage one. Her motherly perspective provides a satisfying, logical conclusion to the anthology. And then, right in the middle, the ninth story of seventeen, is author-publisher Rebecca Starford’s “Who owns my story”. Drawing on her own life and memoir, Starford grapples with the form, with the ethics and practice of memoir writing. I was intrigued by the placement of this contribution, but it’s clever. Having read eight already, I was ready to think about the issues Starford posed, and then, as I read the final eight, I had them in mind.

So, what are the issues? Starford starts by quoting author JP Dunleavy, who said that “The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame”. Starford likes this quote because

it reveals, simply and with a degree of sharp comedy, the risky nature of memoir writing.

She touches on several issues. One is the idea of shame, and whether it is “an emotion women memoirists suffer from more acutely than our male counterparts.” She thinks it is, and wonders if this is due to girls being taught that they should never speak out. She also explores “a nagging moral quandary”, that is, “the right” to tell stories that involve others. It is, she admits, “the biggest ethical question a memoirist faces” particularly when the memoir portrays these others “in an unflattering light”. She discusses the option of writing the story as fiction. (But we all know cases where people “see” through that – or think they do – don’t we!) Anyhow, she says that she couldn’t choose the fiction option:

For me, the act of writing a memoir was important to the process. If I’d written my experiences as fiction, I would have been hiding behind the genre, and that would have been self-defeating, less courageous, and less honest.

This makes sense to me – and implies that many memoirs are a form of catharsis or, at least, of resolving one’s past. This seems to be the case for Starford who concludes that her memoir has resulted in improved communications with her father. And, she says, while her memoir might have seemed like rebellion to him, for her it was about “seeking to understand him and my mother” and how her experiences as a child had shaped her.

Starford’s analysis of the personal and ethical implications of writing memoirs provides a wonderful grounding for understanding of the other “stories”. There’s a lot of pain here, but there’s also humour, occasionally laugh-out-loud, more often wry. Lee Kofman’s story (“Me, mother and Sexpo”) about taking her conservative Hassidic mother to the Sexpo exhibition is hilarious, but is also a lesson in the assumptions we make – particularly about our parents. Michelle Law’s (“Joyride”), on the other hand, perfectly captures her pain of rebelling only to discover that she’d misread the feelings of the boy in question.

Not surprisingly many of the stories are about tension over boys and sex. Krissy Kneen (“Wundermärchen: A retelling of my grandmother”), whose Steeplechase I’ve reviewed, comes to realise in the end that instead of being the rebellious granddaughter she thought she was, she had taken on her grandmother’s mantle, she’d become a storyteller who likes to shock the innocent. It’s just that her grandmother used death, where she uses sex.  In “Resisting the nipple”, Rochelle Siemienowicz, whose memoir Fallen I’ve reviewed, tells of her struggle against the “good girl” expectations of her strict Seventh-day Adventist family and then of her complicated feelings, particularly regarding her mother, when becoming a mother herself.

In many of the stories, the youthful rebels are shocked to discover things aren’t as they thought they were or would be. Jamila Rizvi (“The good girl”) is confused when she realises that a girl (like her baby sister for example) could be not-good but liked. Jo Case (“Rebelling to conform”), in her desperation to be popular, starts to do poorly at school only to realise, later, that some of those popular girls she was trying to emulate got good grades. And Amra Pajalic (“Nervous breakdowns”) is frustrated by her out-of-touch migrant mother’s nervous breakdowns until she realises the cause is a mental illness.

Not all the rebellions in the book are against mothers – some are against fathers and grandmothers – and not all are resolved but, in most of the stories, age and experience eventually bring rapprochement. That doesn’t mean of course that the daughters capitulate. Rather, they come to understand their mothers (or whomever) a little more and their mothers likewise learn to accept the daughter they have. As Susan Wyndham (“A man of one’s own”) concludes

life is a long lesson and from this distance I prefer to look back with tenderness on those riotous years … And for both of us I say, no regrets.

And that seems the perfect point on which to end my post on this engaging, sometimes shocking, but thoroughly generous and warm-hearted book.

Note: A percentage from the book’s sales is going to the Women’s Legal Service Victoria.

aww2017-badgeMaria Katsonis and Lee Kofman (eds)
Rebellious daughters: True stories from Australia’s finest female writers
Edgecliff: Ventura Press, 2016
322pp.
ISBN: 9781925183528

(Review copy courtesy Ventura Press)