Category Archives: Articles/reviews

September 13, 2013 · 8:15 pm

Joe Ponepinto’s “The Face Maker and Other Stories of Obsession”–A writer’s professionalism, generosity, and talent

For those of you who regularly follow blogs they’ve originally met up with on WordPress.com, the name of Joe Ponepinto, or “jpon,” as he is known on his site (The Saturday Morning Post, http://joeponepinto.com), will not be a stranger.  It’s one of the sites published at least once a week, on Saturday mornings, of course, and has an intelligent and loyal following of folks interested in the many and sundry questions and dilemmas facing the modern fiction writer and aficionado.  For those of you who haven’t met up with Joe yet, I would encourage you to visit his site and follow the dialogues thereon, because you are in for a treat.  Even more, I would encourage you to buy his new book, The Face Maker and Other Stories of Obsession, available from Woodward Press, LLC (and Amazon.com).  My post today is mainly to communicate my sense of Joe’s professionalism, generosity, and talent, in that order, with talent in the ultimate position for purposes of emphasis, as one puts the most overarching consideration or the most all-inclusive last.

I say Joe is a consummate professional because not only has he been the Book Review Editor of The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of The Delphi Quarterly, but he combines this with an additional career path of freelance editing.  Finally, and for many people the most important factor, he is a writer himself, and thus is emphatically not in the position generally reviled as “those who can’t do, teach”; rather, what he can “teach” us is derived from his own experiences with writing and submitting works, and he is both up-front and conversationally inclined when it comes to discussing the ins and outs of story and book publication and its rewards, woes, and pitfalls.

I say Joe is generous too, meaning it in more than one sense.  For starters, once he had given his time and energies to being instrumental in the formational and continued stages of the Woodward Press, he generously offered, if sent mailing addresses, to send a free copy of his book mentioned above to each person who had been following his site and commenting regularly for at least a year or so.  I myself was in doubt as to whether or not I qualified, because though I have commented regularly on Joe’s site, I have only been blogging since July 4, 2012 and began following his site sometime after that.  But never fear, Joe accepted my interest in his proceedings as valid, and sent me a copy of his book.  And what I was to discover therein made me feel that Joe is a generous person all around, with his characters as much as with his readers, and that’s a good feeling to have about a writer.  After all, his avowed subject was obsession writ large, and so many writers would have taken the easy path and created a collection of notable eccentrics and cranks and let that pass for an honest effort.  But Joe Ponepinto’s characters live and breathe both genuine feelings and heartaches and sometimes have tainted victories, and their obsessions are truly honestly come by in the course of their attempts to resolve their differing dilemmas.  We live with them through their trials and can see the sometimes twisted sense of the solutions they come up with, knowing even as we do that they are not twisted individuals except in the senses in which what they are going through could happen to any one of us, given the same pressures and incentives.

There is one issue I would like to address about Joe’s book which made me a little less than happy until I thought it through, but then I realized that it was almost certainly meant in a more traditional sense than it seemed.  As those of you who follow my own site probably know, I am an inveterate reader of blurbs on books.  Although I do sometimes pick up a book, take a look at the cover, the author’s name, heft it in my hand, and go by such tangibles and intangibles as linger in that process, I also always read the blurb and see what weight it carries in my mind.  Here’s what Kelly Davio, the Editor of The Los Angeles Review, had to say about the book:  “In stories that range effortlessly across time period and place, Joe Ponepinto delivers the kind of masculine character we crave in literary fiction; these characters wrestle with the most essential questions of morality, and they bare-knuckle box with their human frailties.  If the characters’ decisions are disastrous, they are passionately made.  If their fates are tragic, their efforts are heroic.  Ponepinto is unafraid to follow human nature to its final conclusions, no matter how difficult those conclusions may be.”  What could bother me about that?  you ask.  Here’s my quibble, and also my resolution:

There is a bit of an ambiguity in the expression “the masculine character we crave in literary fiction….”  Who craves masculine character?  Is this a reference to the fact that most of Ponepinto’s central characters are male?  But he does have female characters, and his touch with them is equally talented.  What, then, is “masculine character” in fiction?  (I would just interject here that in his posts as in his stories, Joe’s touch with women and female concerns and issues is both adroit and politically sensitive.  So, what does this remark of Davio’s mean?)  Traditionally (to take it that way, as I assume it is meant), when critics or scholars spoke of the “masculine character” of fiction or a writer’s touch of masculinity, an unintentionally backhanded compliment when not applied to men but which in that character was sometimes applied even to women writers, they usually meant that the writing topics in question had “rigorous thought structure” and were “gifted with creatively inspirational moments.”  By contrast, critics of bygone times meant by “feminine character” in writing to deny or negate in the topic treated strength and agility of composition, as well as indicating that there was a nebulous sort of “hands-off,” “squeamish,” or “lady-like” appeal to the fiction frequently but unfairly assumed to be the sole province of women writers.  Don’t get me wrong, some very fine fiction was characterized also in this light, such as the fiction of the literary craftsman Henry James, whose writings were sometimes spoken of as “feminine” and “too sensitive” (as indeed was Henry James himself, in half-earnest jest, by another writer).  In any case, Joe Ponepinto’s writing shows a great deal of “rigorous thought structure,” like the underpinnings or bones of a face, and a plethora of “creatively inspirational moments,” like the nerves and flesh.  (And here, I’m borrowing some imagery from his award-winning story in the collection, entitled “The Face Maker.”)  As well, none of it is “feminine” in the former pejorative sense, by which I mean that Ponepinto does not once in my reckoning shy away from a challenging fictional turn of events or become too “squeamish” or “lady-like” to give his characters (and his readers) their full due.  So, though I object to the characterization of fiction as masculine or feminine, in this case I can allow that the terminology, while slanted is, if correctly translated, just.  Joe Ponepinto is a very talented, accomplished, and mature writer.

Perhaps my favorite story in the whole collection is “Living in Dark Houses,” a story in which a troubled and abused teen finds a hero and unlikely mentor in another teen, slightly older, who has had his own childhood likewise taken away from him.  The surprising ending is one which I leave Ponepinto’s readers to discover, along with all the other fine fiction contained in the book.  It is a veritable treasure trove of perspectives, all of which overtly examine the topic of obsession while not obscuring the path to it, which we may find ourselves going down any day.  Ponepinto is not wincing away from the path that leads willy-nilly through it and to startling and marvelously evocative conclusions, true pictures of the human condition which make us wonder if we are really any of us free of eccentricity and oddness.  It is this ability first and foremost to connect with one’s fellows which characterizes the best and most talented achievers of all time in the field of fiction, and Joe Ponepinto is seemingly quite capable of laying claim in the course of time and further writings to be one of that august number.  Way to go, Joe!  You’re an excellent model to follow!  (And now, we’re all waiting for the next book to come out!)

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August 29, 2013 · 6:39 pm

“I come from a set of storytellers and moralists….The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.”–Victor S. Pritchett

My first remark on the short story I’m writing on today, after such a title to my post, should and must be that it is the most beautiful, meaningful, and worthwhile story I have ever read, my constant favorite, and yet it has no overweening moral emphasis whatsoever (except perhaps that generosity is not wasted, and should never be regretted, which may seem weak to those who like conclusive statements of purpose, never mind those who like conclusive endings, who will likely be perplexed by this story as well).  The story furthermore will offend those who insist that fantasy fiction is not to be mingled willy-nilly with realistic fiction without a “signal” of some surreptitious and covert kind being passed between the writer and the reader, and this story plays fast and loose with this convention, giving no hint whatsoever for about 3/5 of its length that it’s going to concern a dalliance between a woman and a wonderful, sexy male djinn, or genie.  It is moreover also about the purposes of stories en masse with special reference made to Eastern European and Asian stories in particular, which to some people forewarned might seem a dry topic, as they want, or think they want, to read just a story, and not a story about stories, to have the original blinding experience and not the reflexive experience of hearing the why and how of the what.  But I am issuing my own kind of forewarning for my readers:  A. S. Byatt’s short tale “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (which is the longest story–a novella, really–in her fairy tale collection by the same name) is not to be dismissed as a story just for specialists in the field of narrative, or for those who are themselves storytellers or moralists with an axe to grind.  It is simply the most beautiful story I have ever read, and yet it leaves many stories within it incomplete, trailing bits and pieces of connected and disconnected tales “floating redundant” (to pull out an original inspiring bit of poetry quoted by Byatt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein it describes the way serpents like the Tempter originally stood on their coils instead of being doomed to writhe on the ground).

The story is “about” Gillian Perholt, a narratologist (or, a specialist concerning the mechanisms, structures, and meanings pertinent to and inherent in the study of narrative).  In this sense, as we are neatly informed in the story, narrative can be anything in our world from a tennis match, to an advertisement, to a fairy tale, to whatever creates a size and shape mentally for us to consider fictively, or in the sense of “as if.”  (For those who at this point are intrigued more by the idea of narratology than by the tale itself–and at this moment, since I am investing my energies on writing about the story, not the discipline, I would just say “shame on you!”–I’d like to direct them to Mieke Bal’s excellent and easily readable book Narratology:  Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.)  But more than that, the story is about Gillian Perholt the woman, a woman of fifty-five (not, one would think at first glance even a popular age for a fairy tale heroine, most of them being nubile, naive, and even if intelligent, sexually attractive young virgins and neophytes taking their first run at life).  She has been deserted by her husband for a younger woman, but instead of feeling misused–though we get the point that the sense of feeling misused wore itself out long ago through much of the same sort of thing–she feels free, suddenly.  And freedom and its lack are other main subjects of the story, along with the generosity I first mentioned as a sort of undeclared “moral.”  If there is a moral about having the traditional three wishes granted and freedom, it is that regardless of what one wishes for, “Fate is fixed,” as Gillian says in a talk she gives at a conference.  But, as she continues, “‘In fairy-tales…those wishes that are granted and are not malign, or twisted towards destruction, tend to lead to a condition of beautiful stasis, more like a work of art than the drama of Fate.  It is as though the fortunate had stepped off the hard road into an unchanging landscape where it is always spring and no winds blow.”

But I am getting ahead of myself, and telling my own tale of reading the book all out of order!  At a conference in Istanbul, with side trips to view sights in Smyrna and places round about in Turkey, Gillian Perholt (who occasionally sees visions she has told no one else about, particularly frightening images which she believes sometimes to be premonitions of her own mortality) spends time with her good friend, Orhan Rifat, a male Turkish scholar of narrative, who alike has much to say about how and why stories function as they do.  In this tale, the “frame tale” of the woman and the djinn contains numerous other stories which the characters tell each other in the manner of frame tales and inset stories worldwide, and many of these tales are intriguing enough, particularly as they are narrated briefly and in a somewhat sketchy manner by the “experts” intent on finding their meanings, to make the average reader want to follow up the tales someday and read them in the original texts.  There are also new insights reported by the characters on well-known tales like the tale of “Patient Griselda,” which was told first by Boccaccio, then by Petrarch, then by Chaucer’s clerk in “The Clerk’s Tale” portion of The Canterbury Tales.  Byatt has her character say, quite honestly, that it is a very well-known tale which no one much likes, apparently because of the elements of the gratuitous cruelty involved in the character Walter’s testing of his wife Griselda’s faithfulness and attention to duty (I can remember studying this tale in school and having a professor tell me that it wasn’t so much the clerk’s purpose to get his “listeners” to admire marital faithfulness as it was to point to humankind’s duty to be faithful and dutiful to God though tested as Griselda was tested by her husband Walter in the parallel case.  All I can remember feeling at that analysis is resentment of  Walter, the professor, and God all three!)

Belief is an important element which is examined in Byatt’s key tale of tales, and I find that I “believe” it (or most easily practice what the poet Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”) just because it makes no special territorial claims for itself.  The explanation for most of my lifetime of being impatient with Scripture and annoyed by Christianity (in which faith I was brought up) was given to me gratis in this story, and I will never forget the strength of the emotion with which I read this portion:  “Angels had made Gillian think of Saint Paul.  Angels had sprung open Saint Paul’s prision in Ephesus.  She had sat in Sunday school, hearing a fly buzzing against a smeared high window in the vestry, and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true.  She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare:  she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true.”  This echoes or at least mentions tangentially something which I’ve heard several people say before, which is that Milton’s Paradise Lost is so monumental and believeable a work of poetic art because the poet allowed himself to be a poet, (and by the way to make his Satan more poetically moving as a subject than his angels and holier characters), instead of trying to be a theologian and only secondarily a poet.

At the moment when Gillian first meets the djinn, she has already finished what she was there in Turkey for, and is in her hotel bathroom after having had a shower.  She bethinks herself of the dusty bottle she bought in the bazaar, and takes it to the sink to wash off the dirt, and out pops–guess what?  You know already.  I would not tell even this much of the tale, not wanting to ruin the story and the buildup, except that I want to point to another very significant element of this story:  Gillian expresses no surprise, horror, wonderment, in short, A. S. Byatt does not try to persuade the reader via emotional mimesis (mimicking of the character’s mental state for the reader to follow and “fall into” by that special “contract” or “agreement” I mentioned earlier).  Byatt simply recounts the logistics of trying to get out of one’s bathroom when a huge foot is blocking the way.  This makes it far easier for us to accept the story than if we had read any special pleading to do so.  Any consideration of the matter is handled after the fact, when the characters have already been making acquaintance for quite some time.  We are told of Gillian Perholt:  “She was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging Oriental daimon in a hotel room.  At the time, she unquestioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dream–that is to say, with a certain difference, a certain knowledge that the reality in which she was was not everyday, was not the reality in which Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism with a robust kick at a trundling stone.”  Instead, Byatt engagingly uses in her story the traditional formula by which stories are told in Turkey, “bis var mis, bir yok mis,” “perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t,” which works because it lets the reader have the choice of whether to continue reading and be enlightened and amused or to be a lug who insists on only absolute fact and thus misses all the fun and learning alike which can be derived from fiction (or what purports to be fiction!).  For fact-lovers, though, Byatt even lets us know how she is manipulating the reader’s perceptions and reactions by mentioning outright the formula bis var mis, bir yok mis,” rather like a conjuror showing us empty hands before performing a sleight-of-hand which will astonish and amaze us.

And Byatt, as usual, succeeds in astonishing and amazing, so enchanting and enlivening is the tale she tells us.  I definitely won’t tell you how it ends, except to say that it is a hopeful, blissfully and perennially youthful story without a perennial youth in it on the face of it, and the ending is sufficiently “open-ended” (as Gillian tells the djinn her century prefers in stories) to lend itself neither to authorial fudging and lying nor readerly despair.  But enough about my reactions to the book and my experiences of it:  why not read it for yourself?  (And after you read it, why not read the four other stories in the same volume?  Yes, it’s like letting a djinn out of a bottle, a totally magical experience!)

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August 22, 2013 · 9:54 pm

A short post on an even shorter poem, and the resiliency of fleshly existence–Louise Bogan’s “The Alchemist”

As Louise Bogan both admits and examines in poem after poem, passion is a basic human need, an essential characteristic, the drive of the body (as it works out its contracts with spirit and mind) to survive and claim yet more and more territory.  As she writes in the later poem “Rhyme,” in speaking poetically to the ghost of a former lover, “What laid, I said,/My being waste?/’Twas your sweet flesh/With its sweet taste,–/.”  She progresses through the poem pointing verbally to the things which should be our meat and drink, such as the water of springs, or the bread we ingest.  She insists that “no fine body” “Should force all bread/And drink together,/Nor be both sun/And hidden weather.”  Her final conclusion to this poem, however, after she avows repeatedly the things that should content us with our lot, is “But once heart’s feast/You were to me.”  This is her usual emphasis on the things of the heart and flesh, which insist with us and have their own ways of forcing themselves into our awareness when we think we are most and best protected.

It wasn’t just in her late poetry, however, that Bogan explored this conundrum.  In her early poem “The Alchemist,” she speaks of the way in which we often isolate ourselves and explore our capacities for self-discipline, and the sometime failure of the effort, which ends in a strange contradiction.  As she relates in the first stanza, she follows what she regarded as the “science” of purification, attempting to conquer the pain and confusion of love and its frequent aftermath, grief:

“I burned my life, that I might find/A passion wholly of the mind,/Thought divorced from eye and bone,/Ecstacy come to breath alone./I broke my life, to seek relief/From the flawed light of love and grief.”

As often happened when the historical alchemists tried to transmute lead to gold, however, at least those who were making a literal attempt and not those who were attempting a change of the soul or being, the poet finds that flesh is stubborn, and has a firm reality perhaps as noble but certainly as constant as the mind.  As she concludes in the second stanza:

“With mounting beat the utter fire/Charred existence and desire./It died low, ceased its sudden thresh./I had found unmysterious flesh–/Not the mind’s avid substance–still/Passionate beyound the will.”

Thus, even though the poet figure is attempting the alchemical transformation of the life into a “passion wholly of the mind,” the natural physical world (and its concommitant reality, the “flawed light of love and grief,”) is too powerful to allow of its being dismissed and transmuted into something too ethereal, unrooted, or perhaps only insubstantial to feed the basic wholeness of the human being, the healthy whole that should be left to exist and engage in the interplay of its parts.

Though Bogan often poetically regrets love affairs and warns of the tangled emotions which result from the attempt either to subdue love or to hold onto love, sometimes, that is “scheduled to depart,” she participates fully in the consciousness that love and passion and the life of the flesh are more than just basic human experiences; more, the awareness of love, she seems to suggest, is at the very least a human obligation.  We refuse the obligation to submit our hearts to some form of love at our peril, she suggests, even though it is likewise at our peril that we do so.  It’s love’s trap that Bogan writes about in this manner most often:  we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t, to put it in the common colloquial.  For myself, I’d rather suffer from a “sin of commission” (from doing something that might cause pain to myself and accidentally and coincidentally to another) than a “sin of omission” (refraining from action and staying in a cowardly manner within supposedly “safe” bounds where while nothing is risked, nothing is gained either).  What is your view of Louise Bogan’s trap of fleshly existence?  Are you more likely to risk something and regret later, if necessary, or are you a “cowardy custard,” who likes to play it safe?  (Though I have expressed my own views, there really is no right answer to this question–the term “cowardy custard” can best be retaliated against, if you are of the “play it safe” persuasion, by referring to people of my ilk as “dangerous dipshits,” or “incautious idiots,” or other terms of abuse.)  One thing we can all be sure of, though:  Louise Bogan saw the issue from both sides, and would have appreciated the traumas (and dramas) inherent in both our perspectives.

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August 18, 2013 · 2:12 pm

My alter ego who apparently isn’t so alter, Aunt Josephine….

I have been told, by a child of ten named Charles who has every right to claim that he knows me well, that I remind him of Aunt Josephine, not as to the white bun on her head or in her manner of dress, but in her personality.  As I am the child’s aunt and my name is not Josephine, I took some exception to the remark, with apologies to all those out there who do happen to be named Josephine.  Charles made this observation to me in front of his parent, my brother, who grinned evilly and agreed with him.  Since Aunt Josephine is a fictional character in Book III of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (also known as Book III:  The Wide Window) it was agreed upon that I should read said book (and write a post on it) to see for myself whether or not I could recognize any of my own traits in Aunt Josephine, most especially my tendency to worry and to warn children of things they need to know for their own safety.

Always having been sensitive to the plight of fictional characters–you’ll remember that Barrie’s  Tinker Bell was in danger of disappearing unless readers said three times that they believed in fairies–I decided to give Lemony Snicket’s character a chance to entertain and enlighten me.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, or rather focusing solely upon myself.  Who is this Snicket?  I hear you ask.  To quote from the book’s biographical note itself, Lemony Snicket “was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well.  A studied expert in rhetorical analysis, Mr. Snicket has spent the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans.  His findings are being published serially by Harper-Collins.”  Short and succinct.  Next, you  probably want to know what the book’s about.  I had been told that the Snicket books were about the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, so I knew that, but gained further knowledge of this particular book from the book blurb as well.  You will notice the consistency of style with Snicket’s biographical note:  “Dear Reader, If you have not read anything about the Baudelaire orphans, then before you read even one more sentence, you should know this:  Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are kindhearted and quick-witted, but their lives, I am sorry to say, are filled with bad luck and misery.  All of the stories about these three children are unhappy and wretched, and the one you are holding may be the worst of them all.  If you haven’t got the stomach for a story that includes a hurricane, a signaling device, hungry leeches, cold cucumber soup, a horrible villain, and a doll named Pretty Penny, then this book will probably fill you with despair.  I will continue to record these tragic tales, for that is what I do.  You, however, should decide for yourself whether you can possibly endure this miserable story.  With all due respect, Lemony Snicket.”  What a way to write a blurb, with plenty of teasing clues and yet not one substantial spoiler or giveaway except the information that there are several of these books about, and that all of the adventures lack saccharine, which children don’t have much use for anyway!  You can easily imagine childish and childlike hands (of whatever age) grabbing this book eagerly off the shelf.

But back to Aunt Josephine (sort of).  In each book, the Baudelaire siblings (Violet, Klaus, and the baby Sunny) go to a different guardian or through a different situation trying to escape the plots of evil Count Olaf, who is attempting to obtain their fortune and then get rid of them.  In The Wide Window, they temporarily become the wards of their Aunt Josephine, who, like all their guardians, meets with an unsavory fate.  In each case, they have trials to contend with, which in this book include Aunt Josephine’s personality.  To give just a few instances, Aunt Josephine (and here is where I am supposed most to resemble her) greets the children with these words:  “‘This is the radiator….Please don’t ever touch it.  You may find yourself very cold here in my home.  I never turn on the radiator, because I am frightened that it might explode, so it often gets chilly in the evenings.'”  Aunt Josephine takes a similar line with other things:  she “so far appeared to be afraid of everything in [her home], from the welcome mat–which, [she] explained, could cause someone to trip and break their neck–to the sofa in the living room, which she said could fall over at any time and crush them flat.”  The telephone?  “‘It should only be used in emergencies, because there is a danger of electrocution.'”  But surely there could be no harm in a common doorknob?  “‘When you open this door, just push on the wood here.  Never use the doorknob.  I’m always afraid that it will shatter into a million pieces and that one of them will hit my eye.'”  Finally, there’s the question of what’s for dinner, and on a frigid evening you don’t like to find that it’s cold cucumber soup, but that’s inescapably what it is.  Why?  “‘I never cook anything hot because I’m afraid of turning the stove on.  It might burst into flames.'”  Taking yet another aspect of Aunt Josephine’s personality, there’s the question of correct English speech and grammar (those of you who’ve known me for a while or have read my bio know that I’m a former academician).  As Aunt Josephine says to her younger audience, which soon gets tired of having its speech and punctuation corrected, “‘I’m sure you all need some brushing up on your grammar….Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?'”

I hang my head.  I stand condemned in the tribunal of youth for resembling Aunt Josephine.  There’re only a few things that differentiate me from her, and prevent Fate from assigning me a grisly ending in Lake Lachrymose, which is adjacent to her home high on the cliff.  Let’s look on page 193, farther towards the end of the book:  “The Baudelaires had not really enjoyed most of their time with [Aunt Josephine]–not because she cooked horrible cold meals, or chose presents for them that they didn’t like, or always corrected the children’s grammar, but because she was so afraid of everything that she made it impossible to really enjoy anything at all.  And the worst of it was, Aunt Josephine’s fear had made her a bad guardian.  A guardian is supposed to stay with children and keep them safe, but Aunt Josephine had run away at the first sign of danger.  A guardian is supposed to help children in times of trouble, but Aunt Josephine practially had to be dragged out of the Curdled Cave when they needed her.  And a guardian is supposed to protect children from danger, but Aunt Josephine had offered the orphans to Captain Sham [the evil Count Olaf in disguise] in exchange for her own safety.”  No, I stand acquitted!  The only cold soup I’ve ever served my nephews and niece was one fierce hot summer when I served my famous gazpacho, and they ate it without complaint.  They’ve always liked my presents.  And they have accepted that I will occasionally correct their grammar, and that it usually keeps someone else from doing so later, though they still tease me about my verbal torment of them.  But of all the worst charges above, of deserting them in their hours of need or of being too afraid to protect them from strangers, they can’t justifiably accuse me.  So, all is well.  I’m merely being twitted by my nephew Charles about my personality, something he is acute enough to have noticed.  I do worry about the children, and I do warn them a lot about danger, and they find some of my danger bulletins and scenarios a little far-fetched.  But that’s what aunts are for (and they’ve even forgiven me for playing them as much of an opera as I could get them to sit through!).

And when all else fails, they have the marvelous Lemony Snicket to explain things to them:  “There are two kinds of fears:  rational and irrational–or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don’t.  For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them.  But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and has never hurt a soul.  Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors [one of Aunt Josephine’s fears] is an irrational fear.  Realtors, as I’m sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses.  Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, and so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them.”  You see?  It’s wonderful to know that even we antique Aunt Josephines of the world have found a children’s friend and ally so perfectly in command of all a child needs to know, and one who, as we will also admit if we are candid, is readable enough for us to enjoy as well, admitting us once again into that magical world of childhood where even “a series of unfortunate events” can be redeemed by authorial honesty and wit combined.  I’m very much afraid that I’m going to find myself borrowing the other Lemony Snicket books some day soon, the more especially because I hear that the last volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events has come out, entitled simply The End.  I predict, however, that just as these books have each had a number of readings-through by my nephew, who returns to them repeatedly, the books will have a long and happy life with children and their parents everywhere, regardless of their title or plot line.  Sadly, now, I have to give the book back; but now perhaps I will start with Book I and read through ’til the end.  Harry Potter, move over, you’re going to have to share center stage!

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August 16, 2013 · 9:03 pm

And now for something completely diabolical–The year without a summer (1816) and its monsters….

For the second time this summer, a reader and/or writing colleague has written something that struck a chord and gave me the subject for a post.  This time, it was my friend DJ (the writer of some fine fantasy/science fiction/historical stories), who is also a frequent contributor to my “comments” collection.  He implied that he didn’t see the attraction of vampires.  Now, I don’t know that I do either, but when I was a lot younger, Barnabas Collins on the television show “Dark Shadows” certainly had me going.  But Barnabas was what we regard now as a “typical” vampire, a sort of middle-aged, mysterious, tall, pale, and thin brunette with a forbidding manner and a compelling, hypnotic way with the ladies all the same.  He wasn’t a neophyte teenager or young adult with bulging muscles and sex, sex, sex oozing out of his every faithful word.  In other words, he wasn’t in any way related to Edward of “Twilight” fame.

But at one point, even that aristocratic middle-aged vampire was news, hard though it may be to believe.  And he had his genesis in an odd summer shared by some famous poets and their hangers-on during “the year without a summer,” 1816, when the weather in parts of Europe and North America was violently stormy, full of crop failures and famine, and ripe for tales of monsters and demons to be born.  The entire tale of that summer is longer, and you can find it elsewhere, for example in the background history of the tale of Frankenstein:  or, the Modern Prometheus, which had its genesis in the same famous group of writers.  Let me set the scene….

It’s 1816, at the Villa Diodati, on the wind-tossed, thundery, and lightning-struck shores of Lake Geneva.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has accompanied her new husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s step-sister, who is pregnant with Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra) to visit Lord Byron (currently at work on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) and his personal physician John Polidori.  They are isolated by the weather and decide after reading some ghost stories (including William Beckford’s fantastic Oriental tale “Vathek”) to write ghost stories of their own.  When during this time Lord Byron reads aloud from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s scare-fest of a poem “Christabel,” the poet Shelley becomes so frightened and disorganized in his thinking as a result that he needs to rush from the room, and they find him in a near-hysterical state.  They go off separately to write.

Though the Frankenstein tradition (author:  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) is the most famous to come out of this group reading, both Lord Byron and John Polidori elect to write about vampires, with Polidori’s completed story being inspired by Lord Byron’s “Fragment of a Novel,” never completed.   Several important things happen as a result of this collaboration.   First, the vampire, which was merely a form of monster in European and pre-European folklore, something like the werewolf, begins to have human characteristics and traits, and a standard personality.  In his “Introduction,” Polidori attributes the legend to the Arabians and the Greeks originally, possibly a reason that the vampire’s “death” (and subsequent return to life) take place when a young friend, at first perplexed and then appalled by sensing that a former friend is a vampire, and the erstwhile noble friend–or should that be “fiend”?– are travelling in the East.  In both Byron’s unfinished story and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” the seemingly cynical and yet dying nobleman makes the request of his young friend (in Polidori’s case, swears him to keep an oath) that he will not reveal the death for a certain amount of time.  In both stories, this is evidently intended to be a way of allowing the nobleman to come back to life and find a place in society again unimpeded, though that is only implied in Byron’s story and not written out.  In Polidori’s story as opposed to Byron’s, also, the connection of the vampire with night (and even with the moon, more traditionally associated with werewolves) is evident, as the nobleman asks to have his corpse exposed to the rays of the moon.  Both of the literarily famous vampires have strange burial requests, moreover, something that is carried over in the by now hackneyed notion of the vampire’s necessary tie to his coffin.  Even the name of one of the two original vampires owes something to other parts of literary history:  Lady Caroline Lamb, a former lover of Lord Byron’s, wrote the Gothic romance Glenarvon.  In it, she chose to put a Byronic figure named Lord Ruthven.  When Byron’s and Polidori’s stories were published, both were originally attributed to Byron, because not only was the author’s name of Polidori’s manuscript given as “Lord Ruthven,” but even the vampire in the tale was named “Lord Ruthven”!

So much for the background.  Do you know an aristocratic, cynical, not yet old but seemingly eternally young man or woman who frequents high life without seeming to gain much actual pleasure from party-going, though all the women (or men) in his or her life seem to be drawn thitherwards without being able to stop themselves?  Does this person go around at night a lot more than in the day?  In fact, when’s the last time you saw them during the day?  Do the victims of the opposite sex seem to wither away and die, and have strange marks on their necks that no one can account for?  (But they do look like bites, don’t they?  No, you’re being overly imaginative.)

If you’re the young hero, here’s what you’ve of course told yourself when you doubted your friend the nobleman, à la Byron from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:  “Yet must I think less wildly–I have thought/Too long and darkly, till my brain became,/In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,/A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:/And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,/My springs of life were poisoned.  ‘Tis too late!/Yet am I changed; though still enough the same/In strength to bear what time can not abate,/And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate.”

And I think that could the “vampyre” speak from the heart, he would utter another stanza from that long poem, to explain his fall from grace:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me;/I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed/To its idolatries a patient knee–/Nor coined my cheek to smiles–nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd/They could not deem me one of such; I stood/Among them, but not of them; in a shroud/Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could/Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.”  (Standing “among them, but not of them” is in fact exactly how Polidori first paints the picture of his “vampyre,” one who is in an earlier poet’s words both “daungerous” and “digne,” that is “high and mighty” and “overly proud.”)

Finally, the fact that Byron was also working on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” when he experimented with his vampirish “ghost story” is perhaps even indicated by a sort of cross-fertilization of topic and theme here.  For, unlike the proud nobleman, who continues the fatal course of holding himself apart from his fellows in a high-handed way, Byron in the very next stanza continues speaking of his character-narrator’s frame of mind:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me–/But let us part fair foes/ I do believe,/Though I have found them not, that there may be/Words which are things,/hopes which will not deceive,/And virtues which are merciful nor weave/Snares for the failing:  I would also deem/O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;/That two, or one, are almost what they seem–/That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.”  Perhaps having this in mind was what kept Byron himself from turning into a metaphorical “Lord Ruthven,” and certainly he went on in his next long poem “Don Juan” to parody the picture of the proud and distant Byronic hero who slays women’s hearts with a glance (never mind a bite), a sure sign of emotional health:  after all, when have you ever heard of a vampire making fun of himself?  (If Edward does it, be sure it’s only because he’s in his first reincarnation and still has time to get old and bitter–maybe we should look to Anne Rice for that chuckly innovation!)

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August 15, 2013 · 6:11 pm

“On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert….”–Ann Ward Radcliffe

From not having said much of any real help for my readers about George Sand in my last post, I go now to Ann (Ward) Radcliffe, about whom I could say much more had I “time and space,” as Chaucer has it.  First, a dab at biography, just to allow you to get yourself situated.  And it will have to be a dab, because Radcliffe was something of a congenial recluse and nothing much is known about her life.  In fact, when Christina Rossetti attempted to write her biography in later years, she had to stop for lack of factual information (and this was in an era when fanciful notions and apocryphal stories about authors were still able to pass as currency).  Ann Ward was born into a merchant family which had professional connections with medical practice, in 1764.  In 1787, she married William Radcliffe, and shared a childless but happy marriage with him until she died in 1823, of a serious asthma attack.  They were companionable, as was evinced by the fact that she started her writings as a way of occupying her time while he was out late, and reading her compositions to him when he came home at night.  She kept an exceedingly private life, and despite her many travel descriptions in her books, did not travel extensively herself, but took her descriptions from art works and others’ accounts.  Most readers, however, find them convincing and properly detailed, full of the Romantic love of scenery which was current at the time, particularly love of the more dramatic and wilder aspects of nature, varied with a love of the simple pastoral as well.

Though originally, I had planned to read several novels of Radcliffe’s for purposes of comparison, I still retain a fond memory of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and as it is 676 pages long of tiny, close type and has moreover been described by several commentators not only as the archetypal Gothic novel but as the best one, which was imitated by many other writers, I decided to write my article on it alone, and leave the reader to perhaps pursue The Romance of the Forest, The Italian, and Radcliffe’s other works.  This one work alone, however, made Gothic romance more acceptable to a larger audience, which might have dismissed genuine supernaturalism.  As well, the book advocates female sufferage, and the triumph of the mind over the more fantastic of the emotions.  The book is parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, whose heroine Catherine Morland has read Radcliffe and been superstitiously affected.  In her writings, Radcliffe practiced what she referred to as “terror” instead of the “horror” (terror with a mixture of the gross, reviled, or repugnant) espoused by other such writers as “Monk” Lewis, and she tried to exemplify this not only in her last novel, The Italian, but in an essay as well (which was published after her death by her husband).

The Mysteries of Udolpho begins with the heroine Emily St. Aubert in the bosom of her small family (death is ever present in her life; her two young brothers die as infants, and first her mother passes away when Emily is a young woman, and then her father dies when he and Emily are travelling afterwards).  Lest you be concerned that you won’t have enough plot tangles, twists, and mysteries to keep you busy, however, the book even from the beginning is bejeweled with smaller mysteries throughout, beginning with a mysterious unseen lute player and a poem with Emily’s name in it written on a wall of a fishing-house she and her parents frequent, as well as a miniature picture Emily sees her father kissing after her mother’s death (and which is not, needless to say, a portrait of her mother).  This early history takes place in a pastoral setting much celebrated in the classic “novel of sentiment.”  To give you just a taste of the lovely prose which is so much better than that in the average Gothic novel or novel of sentiment, I will quote from a couple of passages in the book relating to Emily’s father:  “M. St. Aubert loved to wander, with his wife and daughter, on the margin of the Garonne, and to listen to the music that floated on its waves.  He had known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of mankind, which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had too sorrowfully corrected.  Yet, amidst the changing visions of life, his principles remained unshaken, his benevolence unchilled; and he retired from the multitude ‘more in pity than in anger,’ to scenes of simple nature, to the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues….To [his small estate in Gascony] he had been attached from his infancy.  He had often made excursions to it when a boy, and the impressions of delight given to his mind by the homely kindness of the grey-headed peasant, to whom it was intrusted, and whose fruit and cream never failed, had not been obliterated by succeeding circumstances.  The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom–the woods, under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy which afterwards made a strong feature of his character–the wild walks of the mountains, the river, on whose waves he had floated, and the distant plains, which seemed boundless as his early hopes–were never after remembered by St. Aubert but with enthusiasm and regret.  At length he disengaged himself from the world, and retired hither, to realize the wishes of many years.”

Madame St. Aubert is an equally admirable character, who participates fully in her husband’s and daughter’s enthusiasms for nature, and often roams with them.  As to Emily herself, we are given an interesting insight into her character which later may cause us to question her insights (and thus have those delicious doubts of the main character’s state of mind which Gothic readers revel in).  We are told:  “She had discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace.  As she advanced in youth, this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits, and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposition.”  We are told, however, that her father attempts to correct her “susceptibility” and “strengthen her mind,” to teach her “habits of self-command; to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, and to look, with cool examination, upon the disappointments he sometimes threw in her way.”

After her mother dies and Emily and her father begin to travel, they first meet the man who is destined to become the romantic hero, Valancourt.  His consideration for her now ill father impresses Emily’s mind, heart, and sensibilities (and at the end it will turn out that he fortuitously lives only 20 miles from their old home).  It is at this point that her father tells her that he is ruined and that they are in danger of losing their home.  Some time after this, Emily’s father dies due to illness as well.  Emily now has to be protected by her aunt Madame Cheron, who marries an Italian brigand (the owner of the castle Udolpho).  He in turn imprisons Emily there, trying to force her to marry a fellow countryman of his own, and Emily wonders if she will ever see Valancourt again.  The tale twists and turns with all the tortuous (and torturous) windings of high mountain passes, and many more characters are introduced.  At this point, I cease my retelling not so much to avoid a spoiler (though there is that) but as much to observe some reasonable measure in the length of my post, which simply cannot be allowed to be long enough to tell all the gritty details.

A few more remarks about the book are in order, however.  While the long essays at poetry supposedly written by Emily are a trifle tedious (and the quotes from famous poets a bit short), the prose is not only moving and suspenseful, but often full of high sentiment as well.  As I said before, there is much incident and plot complication to keep readers occupied, and for once this standard Gothic series of devices works quite well.  What works less well for modern sensibilities and ethnic beliefs is the manner in which the main negative characters are often Italian and Catholic, which speaks of a frequent prejudice of the English Gothic novel of the period:  they were suspicious of the Catholic Church and of a stricter society, and often relied on cultural stereotypes.  It must also be remarked, however, in all fairness, that some of the main negative characters are Emily’s own aunts and uncles, so I suppose this in a way redresses the balance.  The combination of lovely descriptive travel and landscape prose as well as the overwhelming characteristics of Gothic mystery (the latter of which always turn out to have a realistic explanation, however, which added to Radcliffe’s renown and stature) make this book one that you should read if you read no other classic Gothic romance.  After all, if so notable a literary light as Jane Austen felt she needed to parody the book, can we do less than investigate what aroused her ironic tendency and set her pen a-writing?  I submit that The Mysteries of Udolpho is not only a good Gothic novel, in fact the best I’ve read so far, but just a plain all around virtuoso performance by a woman who preferred to appear only as an author, and keep her private life as mysterious as Udolpho itself, if not as wicked!

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August 12, 2013 · 6:55 pm

When “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is a useless remark….or, George Sand and me….

Well, I’ve waited long enough to spring my no doubt invalid responses to George Sand on the world, and after exchanging a few remarks with my friend DJ in the comments to my last post have decided to cut the crap and get down to it.  I don’t care for George Sand.  Now, this would not be such a disappointment had I not already slotted her in as one of the luminary lights in my pantheon of important female forebears (also spelled forbears, I’ve been told), and did I not have personal reasons for being predisposed in her favor sight unseen, and wanting to like her.  Many years ago, when I was younger and a lot more foolish (we’ll hope) than I am now, a pompous, overbearing, full-of-himself slightly older literary twit with whom I happened to be under the illusion that I was in love dismissed George Sand with a facetious condemnatory remark about her socialism and her feminism and said she was a bad writer.  It gave me a bad impression of him, because I knew she was loved by feminists everywhere, and when I recovered from my own fixations with him à la Sand, I resolved to read her as soon as possible (which doesn’t explain why it took me nearly twenty-five years to do so–but then we all have to forgive ourselves for some derelictions of this sort).  So you can imagine my disgust and chagrin to find, over the course of the last month or so, that though her shorter works are passable, her novel Indiana, the first novel she published under the name George Sand, was so unreadable that I actually must simply disappoint you and tell you that I was unable to finish it for this post (I did valiantly soldier through 166 of 272 pages, but just decided that I had better things to do and more valid and important chores than listening to her dither on about every emotional qualm and quirk and in and out–though there were amazingly few “ins and outs” of a sexual nature for a novel supposedly about love and lust–of some tepid love affairs which her narrator kept telling me were hot stuff, without being able one whit to convince me.  In this case, she could’ve made do with a little more “showing” and a lot less “telling”!).

But to be fair to you my readers, I should begin at the intended beginning of my post and give you the good parts that I can reproduce (from Wikipedia) about her life, because her life was apparently far more interesting than her works, just to judge by what I’ve seen (and I’m going to refer you to Wikipedia for a fuller biography as well, because I don’t want to tax your patience here by retailing absolutely every detail).  George Sand was born Amantine (or Amandine) Lucile Aurore Dupin, to an aristocratic father and a petit bourgeoise mother, and was raised largely by her paternal grandmother on the family estate of Nohant at Berry.  She was born in 1804 and died in 1876, thus living through several changes of government in France.  She became a French novelist and memoirist of world fame.  Aurore (as she was often known to friends) had two children, Maurice and Solange, with her legal husband, Casimir Dudevant, before a separation finally was agreed upon by the two of them.  She had numerous affairs with famous men, among them Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin.  Franz Liszt and Gustave Flaubert were close friends, Flaubert having started out as a “pen pal,” and George Sand was much admired by Honoré de Balzac.  There was also some hint in her letters and in her life of a lesbian affair with the actress Marie Norval.  Sand’s literary debut was the result of a liaison with the writer Jules Sandeau, whose name she partially borrowed for her own nom de plume.  Indiana was her first complete novel under her new pen name.  Sand also was the author of some literary criticism and political texts as a socialist.  Some of her less significant but more startling and apparently memorable characteristics to people at large were that she often dressed in men’s clothes and smoked in public, not usually permitted to women at that time.

The first novella of Sand’s that I read was passingly interesting, inasmuch as it reversed a formula for writing with a lot of both male and female writers even now, in which the woman is the object of a man’s attentions and desires.  In this novella, entitled The Marquise, a French noblewoman falls in love not with her socially accepted actual lover, the Vicount de Larrieux, but with a somewhat seedy actor named Lélio, who enchants her by the nobility, grandeur, and passion which he assumes in his roles on the stage.  She is the subject and he is the object, and he falls in love with her too, but the ending is not what you might suppose it to be (no, you’ll have to read it for yourself, but it’s more interesting than Indiana, and it’s shorter, too.  It also comes in a volume with another novella by Sand, Pauline, both ably translated by two collaborators from the Academy Chicago Publishers, Sylvie Charron and Sue Huseman).  As one of the two commentators remarks, “Sand deconstructs the myth of the seducer (Don Juan) by reversing roles….”

As to Pauline, the second of the two novellas I recently read of Sand’s, it’s centered rather more on the relationship between two women than on any romantic relationship featuring a woman and a man, though there is a relationship between one of the two women and a man which is of secondary plot interest.  What I mean is this:  the two young women, Pauline and Laurence, have diametrically opposed lives and interests.  They part when young, but meet up again before they are old.  Pauline has spent years taking care of her mother while Laurence, while living with her own mother and two younger sisters, has had a successful career on the stage (at a time when the theatre was still a somewhat scandalous career for a woman).  Pauline goes to live with Laurence, and meets a male friend of hers who is not trustworthy, but whom Laurence does not at first suspect to be out to wreck the peace of the household.  Montgenays, the male “friend,” wants to be a lover of Laurence’s, but tries to achieve his objective of making her jealous by making up to the more naive Pauline, who falls in love with him.  Laurence figures the schemer’s motives out and tries to prevent Pauline from ruining her life over him, but Pauline is jealous of her and suspects her motives to be interested.  Again, I’m not going to give a spoiler, because this one is good enough to read for yourself.  The novel Indiana is a different matter.

With every intent to be fair (Sand wrote Indiana not long after she had started out as a writer), I can’t like this book.  But I will tell you a bit about it, so that if you are interested by the topic, you can read it yourself in spite of me and perhaps have something more vital to say about it than I do.  It has plenty of promise, dealing with the topics (which are potentially titillating enough for everyone) of “adultery, social constraint, unfulfilled longing for romantic love,…[the] exploration of nineteenth century female desire” complicated “by class constraints and by social codes about infidelity,” and by the question of “women’s equality in France…[u]nder the Napoleonic code.”  No one could claim that this book doesn’t go by the old saw “all drama is conflict.”  After all, when people want to share passion and everyone and everything around them frustrates them (note the restraints mentioned just above), that’s conflict!  In addition, there’s historical interest (possibly) in the picture of the “subordination of the colonies to the French empire.”

The story concerns Indiana Delmare, an aristocratic Creole from the French colony of Bourbon (now called Réunion), married to a much older husband, Colonel Delmare, and living in the small family circle of him, herself, and her British cousin Rodolphe (Ralph) Brown.  Noun, a less aristocratic Creole, her “milk sister”–the literal translation for “foster sister,” i.e., a baby who was fed by the same nurse’s breasts, and who becomes a companion or servant to the primary character–meets a young aristocrat named Raymon de Ramière, and becomes his sexual victim, while he is really in love with Indiana and wants to be her lover instead.  Noun becomes pregnant by Raymon and when she finds out that he loves Indiana, drowns herself.  After this, this book promptly becomes less and less interesting.  Noun is really the most interesting character in it, for the short time she is there.  This is because, I think, of something else that Wikipedia generously offers up, in its wisdom:  the book is full of the “conventions of romanticism, realism, and idealism.”  That’s a lot of isms in one novel to be dealing with, back and forth, back and forth.  First, the characters are saying ridiculously romantic things to each other, then the narrator is putting the reader at least firmly back on his or her feet by realistically focusing on what the characters actually hope to gain (psychoanalyzing them, pre-Freud, that is).  Finally, the characters (particularly Indiana and her cousin Ralph, with whom I’ve been told by Wikipedia that she actually ends up living on a farm in the colonies–sorry, no way to avoid this spoiler) are idealized versions of people.  It’s hard to imagine even the two most noble characters trying out life together on a farm such as the kinds that were often resorted to in the Romantic period and later by idealistic poets and writers:  so there’s the idealism.  I want to emphasize, though, that even the idealism is tempered by investigation of motives:  even Ralph, who is said to seem boring and phlegmatic to all the other characters because they don’t understand him, and who has possibly even better motives than Indiana herself, is examined in depth in some parts of the novel.  As Sand says of Raymon and Indiana, respectively, one was mind, the other was heart:  in retelling their stories, she is both mind and heart, and is to be commended for having both, even though I find her terribly tedious in this book.  I did like the two novellas, and might even like other books of hers, who knows?

It’s only fair, after panning Indiana so thoroughly, to tell you what its commentator says:  “Filled with autobiographical allusions, psychological undertones, brilliantly drawn characters, and the well-reasoned attack on male domination of women that so frightened its [original] reviewers, Indiana remains a mesmerizing classic and a wonderful introduction to one of the greatest women authors of all time.”  In an odd way, the drawbacks of the book are at the same time its virtues.  While it painstakingly examines the characters, their motives, and their causes, and does so with an energy and knowingness that proclaims its writer’s inner knowledge of that of which she speaks, it does go on and on, and there’s a point at which so many twists and turns of the emotions could only be interesting to the people involved (you know, when you hear lovers arguing intensely about something, or overhear a woman or man trying to describe a lover’s quarrel to a best friend, how you sometimes get the feeling that you “just had to be there”?).  Well, even though I’ve been there, I find it painful rather than enlightening to go over so many old conundrums and riddles of the heart and mind so intricately dealt with, at least as Sand does it, and since I know you don’t want me either to “go on and on,” I leave you with this thought, expressed better than I can say it by another expert on love, also with the first name George (Gordon, Lord Byron):

“So, we’ll go no more a-roving/So late into the night,/Though the heart be still as loving,/And the moon be still as bright./For the sword outwears its sheath,/And the soul wears out the breast,/And the heart must pause to breathe,/And love itself have rest./Though the night was made for loving,/And the day returns too soon,/Yet we’ll go no more a-roving/By the light of the moon.”

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July 18, 2013 · 5:18 pm

“Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.”–Wikipedia quote

Though of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s works I had originally intended to read and post on both the volume I picked up entitled The Cranford Chronicles and the very long novel (incomplete at the time of the author’s death) Wives and Daughters, because it took such an unconscionably long time to read The Cranford Chronicles (which is in fact composed not only of the novel Cranford but also of two related novellas), I have decided to post on the first only and to leave Wives and Daughters as a project for another time.  When I looked up Mrs. Gaskell’s works, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Harrison’s Confessions and My Lady Ludlow, which bookend the novel Cranford in the volume The Cranford Chronicles, are in fact novellas usually published separately, so I can only imagine that the unnamed editor/collector at Vintage Books saw some connection amongst the three works, perhaps that of similar fictional locale, since they all three take place in sedate, small villages.  It’s true, of course, that these three novels are not among the novels largely and ostensibly about the industrial North of England, which Mrs. Gaskell is so noted by social historians for having written about; nevertheless, she makes her points about the changes which came to England at the time and their effects upon the poor by showing the changes as they had their impact upon the small family seats and villages [I refuse to say “impacted”–that’s not a correct verbal usage].

First for a bit of background about Elizabeth Gaskell, née Stevenson, courtesy of Wikipedia, the rapid poster’s friend.  Her father was a Unitarian minister who gave up his orders for conscientious reasons and was finally appointed Keeper of the Treasury Records.  Her mother, who produced eight children–only two of whom survived to adulthood–died when Elizabeth was thirteen months old, which her father felt left him no recourse but to send the infant to her mother’s sister, one Hannah Lumb, for raising.  Elizabeth led a life with an uncertain future, but was a “permanent guest” at her aunt’s and at her grandparents’ house.  Her father remarried but Elizabeth did not see her father’s new family for many years.  Her older brother John, however, visited her and her aunt regularly before he went missing (he was a sailor with the East India Company on an exploration to India).

Leaving school at the age of sixteen after having been taught the usual basic skills, lessons, and accomplishments of a young lady of her time, Elizabeth spent some time in London, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Edinburgh with various cousins and friends.  When she was almost twenty-two, she married a Unitarian minister named William Gaskell.  They settled in the northern city of Manchester.  Her married life was apparently checkered with some heartbreak.  The subjects, though not the steadfastness of her tone in her fiction, seem to show it:  her first two children died.  The other four, however, survived.  In 1835, she began a diary on family events and her opinions, which probably put her in the frame of mind to continue to express herself through writing.  The next year, she and her husband co-authored a cycle of poems which were published in Blackwood’s Magazine.  She continued to write for the magazines under various pseudonyms, penning her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s friends and visitors included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Eliot Norton, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Hallé.  Her novel Cranford (her best-known work) was published in Dickens’s journal Household Words.  She continued to write novels for the rest of her life, some of which required travel.  Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 of a heart attack while looking at a house she had purchased.  Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, though unfinished when she died, was the one she thought her best.  In 2010 there was a memorial for Elizabeth Gaskell placed in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

Now for my own opinion of the three works of hers which I read in the omnibus The Cranford Chronicles, an opinion perhaps not as humble as it ought to be, given that Mrs. Gaskell was such a prolific and talented writer, and occupied and still holds such an important place in English literary history, especially since the revision of the literary canon has been going on.  Her work drags.  I suppose I had been led to expect, by the snippets and fragments of “Cranford” which I managed to catch on the BBC production featured on American PBS programs a few years back, that I would be meeting up with a character as coyly dimpled in the delivery of her lines as Dame Judi Dench, or a railway martinet as sure of his own beliefs as the character whom all the ladies went in dread of on that show.  But as I came to find, the railway scenes from the BBC were a total fabrication when it came to the three works I was actually reading, which Alex, in her recent comments on her own site when she wrote her talented post about Cranford, had warned about.  As she noted, the television mini-series seems to have been a compilation of Mrs. Gaskell’s works.  But to blame Mrs. Gaskell for not having written a BBC mini-series attuned to modern tastes would be a real case of unfairness, wouldn’t it, as well as an unpardonable anachronism?  So instead of saying what’s wrong (the slow pacing) and what’s not there, let’s look on the bright side (now that the task is accomplished) and say what was good about it, or charming, or thought-provoking.

In the first part of The Cranford Chronicles, Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, I was pleased to watch Mrs. Gaskell leave the safe and well-known (to her) ground of the female character and venture into the more hazardous waters of the male mentality.  Hazardous because of course Mrs. Gaskell, though clearly understanding men quite as well as women, excels in her portraits of women in different walks of life.  It was a sheer delight, after the basic comedic “givens” of the situation were set up, however, to watch Mr. Harrison (a new doctor) try to follow the sometimes self-contradictory dictates of his older and authoritarian colleague all the while also trying not to get himself married off to the wrong woman (which in this case multiplied itself into “women,” as every single woman within the tiny village of Duncombe who wasn’t absolutely ancient seemed to have an interest other than medical in trying to monopolize the young doctor’s attention).  This shortest of the three works was my clear favorite, not because it was short in this case, but because Mrs. Gaskell managed so much in so short a compass (that is, not because of the shortness, but in spite of it).  Though it’s clear that the novella will have some sort of happy ending, the tensions are handled excellently, and when I finished reading it, I was wanting more.

Cranford itself, occupying the middle position in this volume, has a very slowly emerging main character, Miss Matty, whose gallant modesty itself seems to constitute the nature of the whole volume.  Which is to say, though this was not my favorite of the three works, I can clearly see that it’s in contention for the position of “the best” (it’s priceless in its portrait of what’s often referred to derogatorially as “decaying gentlewomen,” but contends with My Lady Ludlow, the third work, for first place in the category of comprehensive portraits of society.  As most of the main characters in Cranford are “gentle,” their society is thoroughly painted, but the characters in My Lady Ludlow supply more of a range of different societal positions, and thus have a different kind of interest and variety).  Miss Matty’s and the other ladies’ even more recessive biographer, a person who until almost three-fourths of the way through the book is unnamed, focuses all her discussion on the minor and (as it turns out) not so minor fortunes and misadventures of these ladies, not omitting their foibles and vanities, but encouraging us to appreciate their individuality while particularly and gradually concentrating more and more attention on Miss Matty herself.  It’s rather as if the commonly named narrator Miss Mary Smith is a foil in her constant focusing of attention on the most genuinely humble of the ladies and in her own refusal to say much about herself (and I mean “common” only in the most inoffensive way, i.e., a “frequently occurring” name, as goodness knows, it would not flatter me myself to refer to the name “Mary Smith” as “common” in any rude way, having both Marys and Smiths in my own family tree!)  After quite a lot of rueful comedy is generated by the way in which the ladies gossip and are motivated by silly though human questions of precedence and correct behavior, we see them draw together and operate as a supportive group, disregarding their differences, when Miss Matty has a stroke of ill fortune.  There is an equally modest happy ending which ties up all loose ends, and though the main characters have often been figures of fun, they have humanized their readers, perhaps, by their very lack of major vices and their jumping at the shadows of even small hints of vices.  Though the atmosphere is rather claustrophobic for my tastes with so many maiden ladies and widows and so few men in the mix, yet they are strong and determined women, and thus Mrs. Gaskell has given feminism its due though in the way of her time and taste.

As to the last of the three works I’m considering today, My Lady Ludlow, it’s a rather rambling work which takes place at Hanbury, the family seat of the widowed Lady Ludlow.  A character named Margaret Dawson is the narrator, and here again we have a portrait not only of a main character, Lady Ludlow, but also of those who surround her and constitute her daily society.  In this case, however, the characters run the gamut from Lady Ludlow’s aristocratic relatives to the lowest of the characters on the totem pole, the poachers and tinkers whom Lady Ludlow herself, at the opening of the fiction when Margaret Dawson first meets her, would never think would have contact with the more fortunately placed characters.  Nearly as long as Cranford, this novella describes the gradual (very gradual) relaxing of Lady Ludlow’s strict upper-class beliefs about religion, society, business, in short, upon all areas of life which impinge upon her.  Time after time, some aspect of progress which is usually for the benefit of the poorer characters meet up with opposition from Lady Ludlow.  It’s not that she’s unkind, but she is quite adherent to the preferences of the upper classes to give charitably to those who are under their thumbs rather than to increase the privileges, rights, and capabilities of the lower-class characters by changing the way society operates.  For the longest time, she stubbornly though politely opposes her own steward and the village rector who both have in mind improvements, and it’s a mark of how much she is respected that all but a very few characters follow her absolutely and unquestioningly (until such time as she gives way and changes her mind).  It in fact takes most of the length of the novella for her to change the staunchest of her opinions and procedures, and it is only after a deep personal loss that she eventually brings herself to do so.  It is in fact while she is sad and in mourning that she seems the most to reach out to those to whom she has in the past opposed, and they are more than ready to accept her olive branch.  Once again, the requisite happy ending is in order, in which all parties seem to relax their former standards slightly and to strive to get along as a group.  Mrs. Gaskell is nothing if not supportive of the basic structure of society in these three works, however society may need change from time to time or come to be refigured.

All in all, I am quite glad I read Mrs. Gaskell.  She will never win a prize for the rapidly occurring “hook” at the beginnings of her works, for it takes her some time to build up steam and provide a basic conflict or drama for her characters to participate in.  Her works instead excel in character portraits, to judge only from these three-in-one, and as such the action is secondary.  She is not one of whom Henry James’s dictum that plot is character and character plot is very convincing, because while for James this is true and he shows a tight and firm connection between the two, she by contrast often seems to have very little in the way of plot for long stretches of at least the two later works here, and this disjoins the two elements of structure which for James were so intimately connected.    Of course, she wrote so much that I am quite prepared to be contradicted by others who may have read more of her works.  I would also advise anyone having trouble with characterizations in particular to observe her techniques, her pacing being of less significance in that regard.  She is a highly talented verbal portrait painter, and though she is capable of capturing a significant incident with a few lines, these incidents are quite often moments indicative of interior states of mind or of character analysis going forward.

So, during this long, seemingly never-ending summer, when you’re looking for a book to spend time with and really get in the midst of, you could do worse than to spend time with Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell and to watch her cause characters to materialize right before your eyes.  If nothing else, start with Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, full of gentle though sometimes quite pointed humor, and expect to step back in time with a Victorian chuckle rather than a contemporary guffaw (because, you know, the true ladies and gentlemen in Mrs. Gaskell’s worlds don’t guffaw!).

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July 12, 2013 · 2:49 pm

An Update (Intermission) Post of a Talented Fantasy, Historical, and Sci-Fi Writer

Though my next scheduled post on famous women forebear writers is due soon,  I couldn’t resist offering an intermission here covering the works being done by a talented and imaginative writer whose blog I’ve covered before when it was under another title.  D. James Fortescue is the writer in question, and for his territory he has carved out the broad areas of historical fantasy, fantasy, and science fiction.

The first story of his I would like to mention is currently completed, and is entitled “Mune and Mura.”  It is a historical work about two Japanese swordsmen, actual historical figures who in reality were from different eras, brought together by DJ as friends and accomplices.  This story is a tribute to friendship and an energetic and insightful view into feudal Japan and its history.  (I’m not going to tell what happens finally in any of the tales, in this case because I don’t want to spoil the fun and in the case of the next two stories to be described because I don’t yet know what the endings are and wouldn’t want to spoil them in any case.)

A work which DJ has nearly finished and has been posting in segments is a work of fantasy named “Sayeh and Zia.”  It’s yet another fine work, this time set in ancient Persia and Egypt, concerned with the merchant and cavaranserai cultures, and composed largely of fictional characters from DJ’s rich imagination, though real people and historical places are mentioned.  In both this and the aforementioned swordsmen historical tale, magical objects figure importantly, in “Mune and Mura” magical scrolls and swords, in “Sayeh and Zia” magical masks.  I leave the reader to unearth how these objects are used and their pertinence to the characters involved.

Another work which DJ has nearly finished is “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine,” a work of science fiction which explores the relations between people and between peoples nearly as much as it does between planets.   This work is as gripping and suspenseful as a whodunit, which in a sense it is, because when one of the members of the mining team on Venus comes down with strange symptoms, “whodunit” is indeed the pertinent question, not why.  I won’t say more, but this tale, in its trip from Venus to Earth and back to Venus, is my favorite of the short fictions DJ has given us, though they are all three meritorious and worthy of respect.  I eagerly scan my mail every day for signs that “Sayeh and Zia” and “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine” are being continued for me to read, and I sometimes imagine that I am like an old-time reader of Charles Dickens’s serially published works, waiting for the next installment to come out, or like an aficionado of the radio in the old days when cliffhanger endings were provided for each on-going radio adventure series.

As well, DJ is engaged in writing a lengthier WIP which seems to have stalled sheerly because his brain is teeming with so many good ideas at once that he has been rushing to put them down for us to read.  The three aforementioned short stories are a case in point.  As well, he not only takes time to mention the works of others and pay tribute to published authors, of whom he keeps up a rigorous reading schedule and posts on his site the names and some assessing information about the works he reads, but he also generously covers the works of others like himself whom he calls “aspiring fellow writers,” of which I have been lucky enough to have been one, even though we don’t write similar sorts of fiction.

In all of these ways, DJ has clearly thrown his hat into the ring to be considered a serious and valuable addition to every reader’s library from the ‘net, and I hope you will travel across to his site and have a look at all the work he has done and what he has accomplished:  I promise you won’t be disappointed.

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July 9, 2013 · 8:43 pm

Catching up with Aphra Behn–More than 324 years later….

Who was Aphra Behn?  The name has passed by me in literary period histories numerous times, and I’ve always thought, “Oh, yes, research for a more convenient time.  I’ll have to look her up some day.  Important and groundbreaking woman writer, you say?  (What an unusual name!).  Yes, I guess I’ll have to read her sooner or later.”  Perhaps the best brief information which I can supply that simultaneously informs and tantalizes the reader comes from Wikipedia sources, for all the blurb on the book says is that she was “a Restoration poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and spy, considered by many to be the first English professional female writer.”  And as the reader may or may not know, she wrote the first epistolary novel, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, decades before Samuel Richardson first wrote (and got first credit for) his three epistolary novels.  To quote some tidbits from Wikipedia for convenience’s sake:  Aphra Behn was a contributor largely to the “amatory fiction genre of British literature.”  She and two other writers even less famous by name (Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood) were referred to as “the fair triumvirate of wit.”  But all of Behn’s fame, such as it is, is constituted around her adult life:  her early life is more or less a mystery, and features parents of the names of Cooper, or Johnson, or Amis, or Johnston.  One certain fact is that she had some relation to Francis, Lord Willoughby, who was responsible for her real or imagined family trip to Surinam, which trip provoked her most famous work, a novel, Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave.  In 1664, she had a short-lived marriage to Johann Behn, a man of German or Dutch extraction.  She may or may not have been Catholic (she said at one point that she was meant to be a nun), but she was definitely a Stuart monarchist and Tory supporter when the parties Tory and Whig emerged.  A bit later, she was drafted as a spy for Charles II to Antwerp, her code name being Astraea, which she also published under afterwards.  Charles, however, didn’t pay his spy, and she was forced to borrow money to return home, where she was placed in a debtor’s prison until an unidentified benefactor in 1669 bailed her out.  After this, she wrote as a scribe for the King’s Company, and from 1670-1689 crafted plays, novels, poems, pamphlets, and one translation of a French popular astronomy guide.  She died on April 16, 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Though her writings were disdained as improper during the Victorian era, during the 20th century and since, she has been seen as an important feminist influence and writer upon such issues as slavery, race, gender roles, and sexual desire (sometimes including same-sex groupings and a staple of her own time, transvestitism on the stage).  Now to qualify and expand these remarks with some of my own and others’, based upon three different genres of her writing which I myself read.

Lest you run away with the idea that she is easy to read, be warned:  her writing is full of errors of various kinds, not excluding errors of fact regarding racial and ethnic issues and misspellings and words capitalized for emphasis which we no longer treat so in modern English.  In fact, the modern reader would probably find Shakepeare, an earlier writer, easier to read because he has been so modernized in most versions in print.  Nevertheless, I chose to read “The Unfortunate Happy Lady:  A True History” (a sort of early short story before the form existed formally, in which the paradox in the title is carried out in the fiction); “The Younger Brother; or The Amorous Jilt” (a Restoration comic play, one of her best known, played for the first time posthumously); and her novel Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave.  The three different forms, though each example has its faults of writing, show the width of her life experience and sources of reference, and the ease with which she was able to enter into others’ experiences.  I will deal with each briefly here, just to give the reader whose curiosity has been whetted by this strange writer a taste of what she could do.

In “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” Behn writes a story with a happy ending (I’m not giving you much of a spoiler here, since she herself prevaricates with one in her title).  This concerns a daughter of a family who, her fortunes being left in the care of her dishonest brother, finds herself put by this brother in a bawdy house where she is deprived of her share of the family fortune and left to work out her own compromise with the powers that be.  That’s the unfortunate part of her “history,” though many people might take leave to doubt, by the time they finish the storybook ending, that it’s actually a “true history.”  The lady has good luck, however, because the very first of her intended seducers is a gentleman (and this bit requires that one imagine a gentleman to be a single gentle man who yet might visit a bawdy house and still be a good person, not I suppose the absolute widest stretch of the imagination).  He chases her around the room for a bit but then condescends to hear her story, whereupon he becomes less inflamed with passion and more inflamed with moral outrage that her brother could treat her so (this provides an interesting psychological link, for those concerned to follow it up where it leads, between moral outrage and envy at someone else’s moral freedom from restraint, a link which Freud must surely have mentioned in conjunction with judges and Pharisees somewhere in his works!).  I found this story mildly enjoyable, and it was certainly the shortest work of the three, and supplied the fewest stops and halts for the reading eye trying to penetrate anachronisms in language.

The second piece I read (and I’m persuaded that had I seen a production of it it would have fared better in my judgement) was the play, “The Younger Brother; or, The Amorous Jilt.”  This piece exasperated my patience, but not perhaps by its own fault.  I simply have read too many other and better bits of Restoration playwrighting which are easier and less exhausting to read.  In this piece on nearly every page there is an aside by one character or another, first of all.  Then, there is a proliferation of characters in disguise so eagerly thrown off repeatedly that it’s hard to take up the readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief” and agree to the fiction that others on stage didn’t know who they were when they were in others’ clothes.  Finally, the characters one and all seem to be visited with a kind of casual attitude towards standards of faith and piety of various kinds, not just the “amorous jilt” Mirtilla, but all, even the parent who repeatedly tries to run one son through with a sword and at one point or other wants to disinherit both sons.  It’s a fine excursion into the staples and set pieces and stereotypical actions of Restoration comedy, but it has rather the nature of an imitation of too many plays watched in too rapid succession one after the other, and none of them very original.  It’s again mildly amusing.

Where Behn has her greatest success among the three works I examined is with the novel Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave (and I note that these were the only three I had time for in my review of famous women precursors, which I took up a week or so ago with Colette, and which I will continue with Mrs. Gaskell next).  I would first caution the reader of my post to be aware that fashions in political awareness and humanity, like fashions of any kind, age and date, and Aphra Behn was for her time a relatively keen enthusiast of a movement to end slavery.  Her sympathy was many times expressed outright, and moreover the entire slant of her novel was bent toward showing the outrageously unfair and inhumane treatment of one slave in particular.  Nevertheless, in the book the nobility of this slave in character terms was tied to his being royal in lineage terms, a caste preference, and she several times seems to be siding with the white colonists in their fear of their black slaves and the native Americans with whom they also have dealings.  The Africans and native Americans are judged to be beautiful or the reverse often according to how close they come to white standards of beautiful limbs and features, though Behn often comments on the attractiveness of these peoples, “except for” whatever characteristic she finds objectionable.  This is per the writings of her times by other commentators as well, and I suppose that it’s possible that the Africans and native Americans were thinking similar thoughts in reverse, that is, finding the white colonists appealing or the opposite according to native standards of beauty.  The ending is tragic, as of course it had to be, for she was seemingly unable to concede a victory against the white colonists by a slave revolt, though some revolts in history were successful at establishing black colonies elsewhere that were independent of the white colonists and their control.  That is to say, the only way to control white sympathy for her main black character, the prince Oroonoko, was at the time to have him die heroically in vastly outnumbered conditions, in a brutal and repugnant sacrifice of the prince at the stake which, if it is true, is as horrific if not more so than many lynchings in the later established American South.  My best advice for the reader who wants to penetrate this book to its depths is to get a copy of the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Joanna Lipking; this edition has numerous essays and fragments of accounts of the time which add to the experience of the fiction itself, a short novel of only about sixty-five pages.

And this concludes my perhaps too brief and first encounter and my introduction for you of Aphra Behn, a remarkable woman in anyone’s terms, more than 324 years after she herself passed out of this world.  While I cannot say I liked her without reservation, I can without restriction say that it has enriched my knowledge of people and of literature to have read her.  I hope you will cast among her works for some that suit you (and there are many) and be equally surprised and provoked to thought.

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