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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August 7, 2013 · 12:54 pm

Not sticking to one’s commitments, or, how one thing so easily leads to another….

Hello, there, readers!  I hardly know how to excuse myself for more than a week’s silence except to tell the truth and say that I’ve had other things going and posting has gone on the back burner for now.  I know, I know, I had just committed myself to posting more frequently.  But first there was a week of pre-adolescent company here at our house (and many thanks to those of you who welcomed my young relatives with your kind comments and observations.  They were suitably proud of themselves to know that they had excited so much comment in the blogosphere).  Then, there was taking room for a breather to get one’s life reorganized when they were gone (we really miss them every day, especially because it’s so quiet now!).

The next part I have no easy excuse for, and that is that for almost a week now, having been a Monsters’ Den:  Book of Dread fan, I’ve been fascinated by their new RPG called Monsters’ Den Chronicles.  I know I’m older than the average player, but I like to think that gives me added experience and wisdom (at least in the dungeons) and anyway after having waited for what seems like three years for the Kongregate website to come out with the new game, I had to try it out for myself.  The news is mostly good, though it will only make sense to those of you who regularly play RPG games on the computer:  I’ve made it past Tier 5 (only one more Tier to go, though Tier 6 is neverending and can be played until you get tired of playing, as it is the last Tier in the game).  But something mysterious happened:  when I got ready to get off last night after being awarded the biggest reward I’ve had yet, and felt like I had earned a well-deserved rest, the computer made a huge clanging sound, like the resonance of a huge door being slammed behind me, and so I’ve got to go back into the dungeon today to find out what that noise portends (it wouldn’t let me back in last night when I decided to look a little more closely at the part of my reward which wasn’t just filthy lucre, as the phrase goes).

Just in case you’re ready to dismiss me as a serious contender for keeping a writer’s/critic’s blog, however, I should tell you that I do have one more respectable chore in hand this week, though, and that is re-reading a friend’s manuscript.  He is going for publication of a worthy, highly intelligent and quite gifted book on rhetoric, and I have asked to see it again as a whole piece of work so that I can put together all the pieces I’ve learned so far.  So, you see, I’m not just resting and goofing off.

I still will be posting on George Sand once I get through the books of hers that I’m reading, just as I originally committed myself to do about a month ago, and the last female progenitor of fiction after that will be Mrs. Radcliffe.  I really also have to apologize, I suppose, for dragging this quest into the literary natures of important writing women out over a whole two months, but I simply can’t cover the reading material in less time than that.  Also, I’ve interspersed other posts in between the ones about our female forebears, so the whole thing has taken a bit longer, though perhaps it has also been lightened up by a little variety; I hope so, anyway.

So, I have once again to ask my readers to be patient with me as I muster my forces to do these things I really want and intend to do and have every intention of finishing.  Probably once the fall comes, my posting schedule will pick up naturally, because I was in academia for so long that I got used to the natural rhythm of the fall and spring semester system, and can be a real workhorse when I once get back into the swing of things.  This whinging, apologetic post is just a stopgap to let you readers know that I haven’t stopped annoying you with my literary pap just yet (in case you were hoping, that is).  For now, I’ll just say “Until next post,” and leave it at that, since I’m sure you’re tired of this apologia already.  Ta! for now, and be watching for a post on George Sand soon.  I really won’t disappoint you for much longer.

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July 30, 2013 · 1:19 pm

Introducing Layla, Charles, and Jack–appearing as a trio here for the first time….

Hello, readers!  I know, I know, I promised recently to do more frequent posts.  But this week, there is other business (read:  fun) on the agenda.  I have my niece and two nephews staying with me for a few days, and we are busy, busy, busy, in direct proportion to the fact that they are young, young, young (and very vibrant).  They have been to the library here to use the computers, had a near miss with accidentally getting a finger caught in a rolled up car window, gone swimming, watched part of “The Barber of Seville,” read lots of books (they are big readers, all three), drawn fearsome monsters which make my blood run cold (the boys) and a loveable kitty (Layla), eaten ice cream and had good meals, and taken car trips to places they’ve not seen before.

They want me to tell you they are beautiful (Layla), awesome (Charles), and epic (Jack), though were they to approach you in person they would probably be their somewhat shy and polite social selves with strangers and say “Yes, please” and “No, thank you.”  At this exact moment, Layla is reading and eating an apple, the boys are rough-housing in the middle of the floor (as usual, says Layla), and in short, we are getting ready for breakfast and another day.  Such is the life of childhood in the summer for our three young adventurers.

Later this week, I will post (when I have a chance to draw breath and get my older bones and brain into action), but for now I am living vicariously a life I had long ago, when summer was endless and every small event a major happening.  Have a great few days, and try to find an opportunity to share some time with your young people in summer activities:  it always repays the effort put forth.  Shadowoperator

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July 25, 2013 · 10:25 pm

“[W]hen feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace”–Loving and being loved in high Victorian style

How many times have you heard that we live in a cynical and harshly knowing age of decline? How many great poems have you sighed your way through, wishing that the notable He or She loved you in such and such a way as that, thought of you that way, or wasn’t seeming to be trying to negotiate a trade-off of his or her worst qualities for yours, in which each person accepts the other’s flaws while wanting in secret the best the other has to offer (and where is that best, anyway, that was so notably there “at the beginning”?).  I have a new friend (and this friend is someone in need of a sympathetic ear, so I am doing my best to listen and respond) who has asked me, via e-mail, to try to figure out why her relationship isn’t working out just the way she wants it to.  And the reason she thought of asking me to cogitate and come up with a post on it is because she feels that with my capacious memory of literary love texts and the noble expressions of poets on the subject, I might qualify as a kind of expert.  “Don’t I wish!”  I told her.  Were I an expert, my own love life might be in better shape, Mr. Right would be lovingly languishing and simultaneously flexing his poetic “muscles” at my feet, in short, I would have put my own knowledge to good use for my own benefit.  So far, my moments of hope for the eventual rightness of my individual fate repose in such historical knowledge as that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though an aging invalid and hemmed in by family disapproval, still managed to enchant Robert Browning to the point that he married her and bore her off to a happier fate than old maidishness.  Today, of course, the concept of being “an old maid” or “a born bachelor” is supposedly outdated, though people cast other sorts of aspersions, suppositions, and assertions at those who stick close to the family or who live alone without a partner, everything from being “a weirdo” to “playing for the other team” to “disliking human interaction.”  The fact is, some people just aren’t as lucky or as outgoing as others, which I suspect is my friend’s case (we’ll call her Lucy).

Though I have never seen Lucy face to face, she communicates that she is of ordinary appearance, not especially pretty nor the reverse, and carries a few extra pounds which come and go with her moods.  She says that she has had romantic interludes and experiences with various men during her lifetime (she is about ten years younger than I, which makes her in her mid-forties), and is willing to have more, with the right party.  But she also reports that she is “sick and tired” (that old phrase!) of going out of her way to try to: 1) meet eligible men 2) get their attention 3) hold their attention through enough dates or encounters to ensure that they are well-enough known to go to that formidable “next step,” intimacy, and 4) win the prize she at least thinks she wants, a long-term or life-time commitment of some kind (Lucy wants a small private wedding ideally, but is not averse to the concept of a permanent partner).  The man currently in her life is not as much in her life as she would prefer.  When I asked her what her favorite poet had said about love (just to get a handle on the assignment she was handing me), she said she had lots of favorite poets, but she liked that poem–what was it?–something about “How do I love thee?”  I sighed.  My task, I could see, in this era of waning romantic faith, was gargantuan by those terms.    Because unwittingly, Lucy had chosen Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the very poet whom I had had in the back of my mind as a fortuitous model for my own hopes!  Let me refresh your memory:  here’s how Sonnet XLIII (from E. B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese) goes:

“How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways./I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace./I love thee to the level of every day’s/Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight./I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;/I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise./I love thee with the passion put to use/In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith./I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints–I love thee with the breath,/Smiles, tears, of all my life!–and, if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death.”

That’s goin’ some, ain’t it?  Whoo-ee!  And note the capitalized words “Being,” “Grace,” “Right,” “Praise,” and most of all “God” (Lucy had already confessed to being a partial disbeliever, or at least an agnostic–so what was she wanting to do with and about that “God” crack, as well as the other emphasized words?).  Why is it that we often want what we possibly would not know what to do with if we had it?  Or was Lucy just wanting a shove from the right quarter to make her into some kind of a believer again, if not a religious one, then a believer in high-flown ideals and morals and all the rest of it, or perhaps in high Victorian style alone?  But high Victorian style (when not of the Pateresque and art for art’s sake kind) was based upon genuine belief in the eternal verities, or at least upon knowing where to look for them (as Tennyson himself, the Poet Laureate, said in his long poem In Memoriam, “There lives more faith in honest doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds”).  Not to mention that “feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace” is one hell of an attempt to “cop a feel”!  (Sorry, Lucy, my twenty-first century nature couldn’t resist the word play).

But E. B. Browning didn’t just write this sonnet, she wrote the whole series of them.  So, as an attempt to deal seriously with, if not to answer, Lucy’s dilemma, let me quote yet another sonnet by Barrett Browning, and one which, instead of only sounding the noblest sentiments of love, gives credence to a certain sort of pragmatism of love, though it still purports to lead the lover to “eternity.”  In this sonnet, Sonnet XIV, we see the speaker warding off half-way measures and ill-luck, and seeking the best kind of love that it’s possible to have and still be humanly vulnerable:

“If thou must love me, let it be for naught/Except for love’s sake only.  Do not say “I love her for her smile–her look–her way/Of speaking gently–for a trick of thought/That falls in well with mine, and certes brought/A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”–/For these things in themselves, Beloved, may/Be changed, or change for thee–and love, so wrought,/May be unwrought so.  Neither love me for/Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry–/A creature might forget to weep, who bore/Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!/But love me for love’s sake, that evermore/Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.”

Really, all the less noble kinds of love mentioned in this second sonnet are kinds of love we see all around us every day, the physical, the mentally companionable, the charitable–and there are many more less-than-total types of devotion which we are being invited to imagine, as in our own thoughts we ponder these few examples.  But I say that this is a more pragmatic poem than the first because it relies not on so many superlatives of the imagined world we inhabit as it does upon one single one:  “love’s eternity.”  In fact, the only word capitalized for emphasis here is “Beloved.”  There is no appeal to God, or Being, or Grace–the poet’s only claims are that there is love in the present tense of the person being addressed, and that love has some sort of eternity, some longer life, that will persist if the correct attitude is achieved.  Now, where exactly does that leave my friend Lucy?

How does one match the correct attitude to the correct recipient?  Hasn’t it always been that we think we have to find the correct recipient for what we already have estimated that we have to offer?  But perhaps our estimates are off.  If one starts to build a house, and the final cost is more than the estimates, there’s bound to be legal trouble a-brewin’!  So, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t trust our own estimates of what we have to offer, right?  Maybe we should find a good friend to help us estimate what we can claim to be all about, romantically speaking–but the good friend (in this case, I’ve ended up more or less estimating only my own sense of difficulty in this role) may likewise be too strict or too generous, or enters the human equation with other defects of attitude, capability, or experience.  So, Lucy, here’s my answer to your dilemma, which you asked to see appear on my website:  in this case, attitude-correction and altitude-correction may be the same thing.  If your present lover doesn’t inspire confidence in you with his abilities as you have perceived them so far, rather than reproaching yourself for wanting to be loved as a high Victorian, in punctilious faithfulness and somewhat sentimentalized Romanticism, or reproaching him as do-less, faith-less, without feeling, and the rest of it, try a little forthrightness, which was above all what E. B. Browning was all about.  She not only confessed the “depths” and “breadths” and “heights” of her own love, but told her lover what she wanted, and spelled it out directly and exactly.  And though she still used a word we sometimes scoff at these days (“eternity”), she “came down” from her high altitude up there with “Being” and “ideal Grace” and at least referenced precisely what she had in mind.  So, how should you do this?  If your lover wants to watch burly men bash each other over the head with hockey sticks, make a deal:  you’ll do this if he’ll listen to you read E. B. Browning’s sonnets, at least these two.  I know, you’ve already struck compromises like this, and often they come under the category of doing something I’ve already mentioned in my first paragraph, that is, making a trade-off of your worst qualities (from his point of view, perhaps) for his (perhaps, from yours).  But stick with it.  Give him a chance to express just exactly what he finds over-the-top (or lacking) in your view of love.  After all, E. B. Browning didn’t say that she “saw” what she was angling for immediately when she strove with the equations of love:  she said she was “feeling out of sight/ For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”  And, to cap this whole quotation-game-with-serious-consequences off, it was her own ideal mate, her husband Robert Browning, who wrote about at least the artistic effort itself that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?”  So, since you are looking to the artistic effort of E. B. Browning for inspiration with how to handle your lover, why not look to how her lover might have answered too, accepting that it’s heaven itself which if we believe in it can finally answer all our hopes, but because we are finite at least in this life, we may have to reach and reach and reach, and still be less than perfectly satisfied?  Note that I’m not telling you to “settle,” but why not give your lover a dose of the poetry that you feel frees you up and feeds your soul?  You may find that his notion of the steamy love affair is just as excited by a woman’s poetic voice avowing eternal love as yours is by the idea of seeing strong men forget themselves when possessed by powerful emotions (I’m blurring the lines between love poetry and hockey here to make my point).  Dear Lucy, I hope this piece of writing satisfies some need you’ve felt to have your problem considered as seriously as I know how to consider it, which is to say, with the occasional jest, but no less seriously than I do for myself.  All the best with your man, or failing him, with his potential successor, and the best of hopes for general love and happiness.

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July 25, 2013 · 4:14 pm

If the light at the end of the tunnel goes out, or upon re-kindling the spark….

I start today’s post with a decided disadvantage, my short-term memory having decided to play an Alzheimer’s-like trick on me and “disappear” a key phrase I had planned for this post before I could write it down.  But the gist of my remarks was as follows:  when the light at the end of the tunnel goes out, re-kindling the spark of the torch that was there is an arduous and painful proceeding, and one that I was hoping to work through here, with my readers watching and waiting (however impatiently) for me to get to the point.  And then I forgot my line.

How many times, how many times, since appearing on stage in my first student play, have I had nightmares about not having learned my lines and being on stage speechless, or nervous fantasies about having learned the lines with great effort and apparent aplomb, but forgetting them the minute I step upon stage?  As you may have guessed, I’m suggesting that there is something God-given (and God-taken-away) about most inspiration:  you have a window of opportunity to nail the important words, and then shadows of other phrases and sentences and bugbear-like-clichés such as “the light at the end of the tunnel” and “re-kindling the spark” come along and drown out the really innovative and perhaps for-all-time original (maybe) thought you were trying to express.

As far as I can recall, the inspired remark had something to do with finding self-direction after a long period of following in a certain pre-determined path.  I was partly thinking of the long time I spent working on my doctorate, and the let-down and lull I felt after finishing/graduating, and the transition to my website and my renewed work on my novel sequence (published on this website).  I comfort myself with the reflection that so great a soul as Virginia Woolf went into a depressive decline at the end of each of her works, until she took up the next one.  But then I say, pragmatically to myself, “But I don’t want to end up walking into the lake with stones in my pockets, either.”  So I turn again to my reading lists.  It’s true, I have things to do.  And the things are activities that I have elected on my own to do, with no one putting me up to them or prompting me.  But lately, the traditionally acclaimed “spark” has died out a little, and I have felt slow and sluggish, and have blamed it on the weather, on overeating a summertime holiday diet, on not hearing from enough of you (and yes, there is that thrill of communication which has lately been attenuated or missing), on the summer being almost over, on the fact that I’m a year older (why should this matter any more this year than last?–it’s only one more year); in fact I have become a veritable deep resounding well of complaints and caveats, giving forth with my problems every time someone drops a penny in for luck.  Can’t you just hear the echo?

And lo!  At least one part of the mysterious meditation comes back:  the remark was one about “finding inner resourcefulness.”  My inner resourcefulness is what I am in search of, and what I feel is lacking at the moment.  For, it’s not merely a matter of self-direction, one has to be directed from some initial glowing hot coal-bed of creativity to one’s lava-like course down the mountainside called “the path of communication” to where others wait at the end of the course of the rich ash-bed and fertile soil (sorry about this really quite imperfect metaphor–it’s the best I could do with such an impeded “flow” of inspired thought).

“Inner resourcefulness” is the constant mystery, the be-all and end-all of writing and creativity in general, whose inner enemy is the famous “writer’s block” for writers and poets, whatever it may be for musicians, sculptors, and others of the artistic ilk.  How does one court one’s muse, if we should call it that, how appeal to that oracle to get it to trundle forth some truth, some gifted thought, something we can share with our audience, colleagues, and cohorts?  It puts one on the spot, as if one were Cordelia, one of King Lear’s daughters, being asked “[W]hat can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your sisters?”  Duh.  Dunno.  But Cordelia put it better, with the help of Shakespeare, paradoxically doing what she claims in the same words she cannot do, though Lear hears the paradox in simple denial terms, in terms of refusal to cooperate:  Cordelia says, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth.”

So, try as I might to “heave my heart into my mouth,” there are some things that remain inarticulate and inexplicable, such as my tendency since about the winter to post less frequently.  Of course, I can give you an excuse, a rationale, an explanation (not quite the same things as reasons, real reasons having a bit more muscle and “bite” to them):  I’ve gone through already a lot of the books I was interested in posting about, and I’m slowed down because I need to read more books to get them under my belt and comment on them.  But this is a “shadow-boxing” sort of reason, because the books I’ve read in my life are innumerable to my own memory, and the ones I could still say something intelligent about are, one trusts, quite a few, had I enthusiasm.  And now we get to the point, perhaps:  I’ve lost some enthusiasm for attempting to craft the well-written literary article, and it’s not because it’s not great fun, or because I don’t think it worthwhile.  It’s because, perhaps, other things in life which I can’t express are beginning to take their toll on my spirit; my daily life is dragging me down.

Yet, just as I express this quibble (and it’s larger than a “quibble,” but I’m trying the rhetorical move of understatement to cut it to size), I feel a certain free flow in my heart, and a desire to say something else:  perhaps the answer is that I have expressed my feeling now, and can go on from there.  Perhaps (following advice I’ve heard from others) the answer is not merely to express the feeling, then, but to insist with myself that I go ahead and post on something more frequently than I have been, even if it’s only an “other than literary days” post like today’s, when I would rather be writing about literature.  Just to keep my hand in.

The downside of this plan?  Why, that you, my loyal readers, may after a while decide that I’m not much fun anymore, and may decide to stop following my site “if all she’s going to do is babble about something other than books.”  For, the undeclared purpose of my site is to write books, to publish my books, and most often predominantly to feature the poems, stories, and books of other writers to whom I feel I owe literary debts.  Yet, I ask myself, is not even such a humble entity as this very self-focused and possibly therefore boring post a type of literary endeavor?  Isn’t reaching out to you and to the great ether beyond us all a sort of creative event?  I do hope you’ll think so, because I have decided to try to post on some topic or other more frequently, though I still hope my posts will feature my thoughts and inspirations more often than not in terms of how they are demonstrated in books and other works of literary merit or concern.  But I can’t promise not to “babble” now and then–I’ve accepted the minute glow at the end of the tunnel as the faith of a tiny spark, and am willing to try this way to re-kindle it:  I hope you’ll make the trip with me, commenting or not, as you see fit, but at least reading.  Who knows, maybe I’ll hit upon something that helps you find your own feet again when you’ve lost your balance temporarily:  and what more can any of us ask of literature or writing endeavors than that they restore to us some of what we lose through the vicissitudes of life?  Such grand aspirations!  But we all need some large hopes to carry us through the day.  Join me, won’t you? and if you can use my odd brand of curative powers, so much the better!

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July 23, 2013 · 3:56 pm

When people die–the thoughts and grief that are called forth from us when we lose friends….

All of us at some time or other either have lost or will lose a friend, family member, mate, or acquaintance, and the older we get, the more of these people we lose to death.  We may decide to interrogate our own mortality with William Shakespeare, in one of his most well-beloved sonnets:

Sonnet 146

“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,/Lord of these rebel powers that thee array,/Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,/Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?/Why so large cost, having so short a lease,/Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?/Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, /Eat up thy charge?  Is this thy body’s end?/Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,/And let that pine to aggravate thy store;/Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;/Within be fed, without be rich no more./So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,/And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

Thus Shakespeare makes the argument for asceticism, though from what we know of him, he was far from being an ascetic.  But a sonnet is a form sometimes of a particular mood, and in Shakespeare’s sonnets we see him in a number of different moods, from bitingly ironic to loving and joyous.  Here, he is in his final couplet using one of those paradoxes he was so fond of to put an end to death itself, through the life of the soul.  And indeed, for those of us who have been fortunate enough to know someone who feeds their own and others’ souls first and foremost, we can say in our memories of them that we are defeating death:  they have created a sort of immortality for themselves that we prolong as long as we remember and revere them, and pass on their exploits and knowledge of their endeavors to others.

There is always, of course, the belief in God and a more conventional afterlife to aid in our battle against mortality, though even the devout churchman John Donne, in his sonnets, often resorted to word play with paradoxes, puns, and riddles to make his point.  The most famous of his sonnets on death is probably “Death be not proud, though some have called thee”:

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,/For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,/Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me./From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,/Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,/And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,/Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie./Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,/And dost with poyson, warre and sicknesse dwell,/And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,/And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;/One short sleepe past, we wake eternally,/And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

Here, of course, the paradox is that death shall die when our “short sleepe past” (our individual death to earth) is over, and “we wake eternally” to the afterlife in heaven.  And Donne’s riddle (did you spot it?) is one that Shakespeare also used more than once, that the work of art itself outlives the poet and creates a sort of eternal life in the memories of humankind, for itself, its subject, and its author (this is what the partial line “nor yet canst thou kill me,” indicates; that is, the “me” there is the sonnet speaking, for its author).

But if we are not given to poetry reading when a friend or loved one passes (though it might be a good time to start), and instead feel shuttered in with our grief and heartache, we are following the wisdom of more than one species if we attend a memorial service or exchange memories with friends at a wake or funeral (in recent years, biologists have even discovered animal species, like elephants, who mourn their dead and in a sense “pass by the casket” by touching and caressing the remains of their fallen comrades).  This community activity not only acknowledges the loss of a unique individual, but also allows a gathering together around the now empty space and the forging of new bonds across it amongst those remaining, where the person now absent in the flesh will always have a place in the spirit.

Though there are times when nothing seems to serve to break through the sense of loss and futility attendant upon the death of a beloved fellow being, yet our resource is always to look to others and trust them to help us occupy ourselves with those who still live.  If we live in the spirit of those loved ones gone, we will relinquish them in the body and attempt to live the rest of our own lives as they would have enjoyed seeing us do, thus fulfilling the promise of their previous relationship with us:  they would want to be mourned, but they would not want us to let others down who might benefit from us acting well and truly in the spirit they created in us.

I lost my father to cancer when I was eleven and a half, and I can remember walking through my days at the first feeling paralyzed and inert, even though my mother had told me a few months before that the prognosis was not good.  But no one could say anything to break through my wall of grief (I didn’t know much about Shakespeare or Donne then, and chances are they might not have helped at first).  It took a sympathetic aunt whom I rarely saw and my mother saying “It’s all right to cry, Vicki,” to start the (sometimes long) process of grieving in me.  For some reason, there was an attached feeling of shame to no longer having a father that I was hard put to it to shake.  After I once got through the “stiff upper lip” routine at the late age of forty-three or so, however, I realized how much I had missed of the community and friendship I might have had with other people who mourned my father:  I would thus wish for anyone who has lost someone that they might have the sense I lacked as a person growing up, and that they might rely upon those still living to forge strong bonds around the protected emotional areas of losses to death.

Remember, the dead were not always dead or ill or injured:  they were often happy and achieving and full of all the life of the world around them.  Remember them that way, as they are likely to be remembering you from whatever corner of the universe they are in now.  That’s the way truly to have a connection with the infinite, as it is found in other people.

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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 14, 2013 · 4:05 pm

What do the philosopher-historian Herodotus and Zippy the Pinhead have in common?

Here I am yet again on a Sunday morning in the summer, sitting inside in the air conditioning and wishing I could open the windows instead.  And it’s not because it’s so hot where I am that I can’t:  but it’s so humid that the moisture in the air makes it seem hotter than it actually is, and so I sit here, thinking about doing a free-style post just for enjoyment’s sake, and wanting to open the windows so that I can hear the sounds of pleasure and excitement drifting up from the sidewalks below where people are passing in their Sunday-funday haze.

Don’t get me wrong, the sun is shining, and the birds are chirping, and there’s no rain in the immediate forecast.  But the air conditioning goes on, relentless fake atmosphere blowing down in my face from the air vents above.  Still, I have decided to go ahead and follow Herodotus’s implicit advice in his remark from Histories, bk. II, ch. 173:  “If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”  Though you may already think I’m unstable without knowing it, because I don’t know it, it’s not a problem.  So, this post is just for fun and games, no serious endeavors intended.  Now that I’ve declared my purpose, however, I’m left with my guests on my hands (you, my audience) and no precise plan of action for how to forge ahead on this fun-expedition.

It’s true, I’ve been slacking off for quite some time now, when I used to post almost every other day.  But just now, I’m engaged in following the somewhat slow and sedate pace of Mrs. Gaskell’s The Cranford Chronicles and am at the section where Miss Matty goes over all the old family letters she’s been saving, and burns them so that no one will desecrate the memories contained in them by reading them when she’s gone.  Frankly, she might as well not have bothered:  the subjects of the letters are tame, and even the narrator reading with her (who is an unnamed friend) clearly finds them so.  It’s rather like Andy Warhol’s eight hour movie about sleeping for eight hours:  I don’t understand why we have actually to experience the reality in order to know that the letters are such as only an old maid in a backward English village would think it necessary to burn.  But having declared my purpose of becoming better educated and covering one if not two of Mrs. Gaskell’s gargantuan novels (at this rate, I don’t know if I’ll ever get through Wives and Daughters as well), I’m committed to my purpose.  I will finish at least this book about Cranford.

“So where’s the fun?” I hear you ask.  “All you’re doing is complaining about the air conditioning and Mrs. Gaskell, and dragging in Andy Warhol to make the whole a little more titillating.  We demand to know, where’s the fun?”  I can see that just as Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens and other writers of the nineteenth century had audiences who expected good value for their money in the way of long, often prosy, and (let me say it again) long narratives which wouldn’t too much offend their Victorian sensibilities (or would at least mitigate the minor scandals contained in their pages by carefully calculated build-up to the surprises and an adequate degree of moralizing in some trusted character’s voice or other), so my own long-suffering audience is wondering where all this is leading, and asking how it can be to fun, since it’s not usually considered fun just to listen to a blogger complain about something he or she finds annoying.  Unless, of course, he or she is a sterling performer, a regular stand-up comedian, which at this precise moment at least I am not.

Let’s just say that I wanted to reach out this morning to my readers without any precise purpose in mind, just to touch base, to let you know I’m still here (which probably won’t thrill everyone equally, but hell, we all have some disappointments in life), and to play little trills and pseudo-musical tricks with my writer’s voice, and to pass off the whole possibly unnerving experience by quoting Herodotus and calling it “fun.”  And now, it’s your turn:  I’ve just quoted Herodotus in his august and seriously-intended and solemn tones of advice, and you can retort with however much irony you see fit in the manner of Bill Griffith’s 1979 comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, “Are we having fun yet?”  I don’t know if you’re having fun or not, but as it’s a free-style post day, feel equally free to retaliate in kind with your own jokes, complaints about the weather, tales of boring reads, or whatever turns you on (as long as you don’t offend my too recently Victorian sensibilities by sneering at my attempts to read Mrs. Gaskell–I will become better educated, I will, I will!).   Enjoy your summer weekend, too–we don’t have many more of them left!  Shadowoperator

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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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