Tag Archives: literary topics

November 18, 2013 · 6:38 pm

“‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free….”–Shaker hymn

In honor of the fall and of the upcoming American Thanksgiving season, this post is dedicated to all gentle melancholiacs who at the same time feel affinities with the fall weather and the approaching change of season.  Those of you Canadian readers who have already celebrated the earlier (October) Canadian Thanksgiving can still perhaps relate to this post and its subject, due to the fact that parts of Canada at least are still having relatively warm weather for this time of year, which means that they are no colder than a lot of areas in the Northern U. S.

This post centers on one of my favorite poems of all time, which tantalized and captivated me from the first time I heard it, feeling as I did so much in sync with its notions and ideas.  The main thing I want to stress about it, in fact, is that its obvious complexity, which centers around Gerard Manley Hopkins’s innovative style of what has come to be called “sprung rhythm,” hides an absolute clarity of line and simplicity of emotional statement often overlooked when the poem is discussed.  The poem is “Spring and Fall:  to a Young Child,” and as it appears on at least one internet site already in its complete version (www.readbookonline.net), I can freely reproduce it here without copyright violation, though I intend to give also Hopkins’s original stresses on the words, which indicate his notion of sprung rhythm for the poem.  Here goes:

Spring and Fall:  To a Young Child

“Márgarét, are you gríeving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?/Leáves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?/Áh!  ás the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/By and by, nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;/And yet you will weep and know why./Now no matter, child, the name:/Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same./Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed/What heart heard of, ghost guessed:/It ís the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”

My basic idea about this poem is that everyone, regardless of academic background or love or disinclination to whatever degree for poetry, innately and instinctively can understand this poem, because it is so very simple.  One can make false difficulties by concentrating or focusing on the accent marks, but the melancholy emotion discussed in the poem and its source, and the dramatic lyric voice of the adult looking on at the child and in the poem speaking to her and beyond the situation as well are simple:  we grieve for our mortality, as we see evidence of it in the seasons of change, which are especially spring and fall (with here an emphasis on fall).  Summer and winter, by contrast, are seasons of stability, but we always feel our own changes more in spring and fall, as we see the evolutions around us in nature.

But for the benefit of those who may doubt or still have questions, let’s take it line by line.  Margaret, the young child, is addressed by an indulgent but realistically inclined adult, who asks if she is sad at the change from summer to fall.  Leaves, he tells her, are like the passing moments and possessions and years of man, and because her thoughts are “fresh,” and therefore not accustomed by many years’ accumulation to the rotation of seasons, she can still be made melancholy in a child’s simple, somewhat clueless, and inarticulate way.  He speaks perhaps more to himself than to Margaret when he tells her that over the course of time, her “heart” will “come to such sights colder by and by,” and here perhaps the only ambiguity–and a creative one at that–creeps in:  not only does the word “colder” indicate that her heart will be “colder,” or less moved to grieve over such a simple thing, but also the sights themselves will be “colder,” or more momentous in human terms.  He indicates that her grieving then will be over things she can assign motives to, no longer the ones like falling and dead leaves, which make her sad without her knowing really why.  All sorrows, he hints, are really from the same well of emotion, regardless of their surface causes.  She has not been able to “mouthe” the feelings, nor to analyze them, he further notes for her benefit, but her “heart” has heard its far away death knell, and her “ghost,” or spirit, has guessed what is to come in the distant future.  He tells her finally that “it” (meaning not only mortality, but grieving over it and what cannot be changed, and centering oneself in nature on the presumption that man is the center of the universe in a humanistically prejudiced sort of way) is “the blight man was born for,” and then ends the poem by saying that she mourns in reality for herself, and not simply for the fallen leaves.  One could wonder at this juncture if again he really is not talking to himself more than to the child, whose understanding of these issues he raises is likely to be limited, but we have the poem we have, and it is not a dramatic duologue, but a dramatic lyric with an unknown adult speaker, so we are in the dark as to Margaret’s reaction.

There are also those who find difficulties in Hopkins’s neologisms, his newly coined words, but it is quite simple if we take them just as they seem to mean:  it is the neat compression of feeling and thought which produces them, and they are so obvious as to be even commonsensical, were they not also highly poetic.  “Goldengrove” is a grove of colored leaves, either in spring or fall.  “Wanwood” and “leafmeal” refer to the falling and dying leaves and dead trees, or denuded trees, left bare by whatever means or conditions.  These compressions are especially clever because they convey the word pictures of what the two people are seeing or have recently seen, and call up associations for the reader in an especially innovative way.

The submerged subjects here–and every poem has submerged subjects, be they ever so simple–are projection and empathy.  We are led to believe that Margaret, the child in question, empathizes with nature and feels “low” because she sees the decline of the fall season around her (and “sorrow’s springs” is of course a pun on the season of “spring,” which indicates that as long as Margaret lives, there will be a renewal in the spring, which, however, will be sad in its own way because there is always decline to come).  But with a certain amount of cynicism, the speaking adult says that it is not so much empathy as projection, that is, projection of her own feelings about being human onto the weather and nature, which in poetry circles is known as “the pathetic fallacy.”

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “gift” of “being simple” and “free” in his self-expression is a gift to us his readers as well, because the shortness of the poem makes for easy memorization and recitation, two activities which used to be a large part of our literary culture, and which still should be.  People used to get together and recite poems as eagerly as they read stories to each other aloud, and told tales, and sang old ballads.  Therefore, this poem is my candidate for such endeavors, which should be started young, as young as one might guess the fictive “Margaret” is:  acquaintance with words poetic which one can recite under one’s breath to oneself sometimes in affection for the lines and enjoy again and again by this method is a gift which children never outgrow.  The funny thing is, in my childhood–which was some time ago–if one saw an adult person mouthing something to himself or herself aloud and no one else was close by, there was an even chance that it was a poem, not just a grocery list or a grumbling about something negative which had happened, or mental illness manifesting itself.  Now, it usually means that the person has a smart phone ear bud in and is conversing with someone else by that means!  Whatever your case, if you have an ear bud in and are talking to your best chum, why not take the opportunity to recite a short poem of your choice to them, even just a limerick:  words are so much a part of what it is to be human, that we should never forget how much of a gift they are from other people, and how wonderful it is to share the best and most glowing, witty, and beautiful of them with another person!

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November 17, 2013 · 4:45 pm

An old friend with a new face–“The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin”

Just yesterday, I was musing nostalgically over all the things I “learned” when I was an undergraduate, including the many authors I came to be acquainted with in my Comparative Literature courses, authors whose works covered many different areas of world literature.  True, the acquaintance didn’t run very deep and was instead broad; still, it was an instructive “placement” issue in relation to stories, novels, and tales all around the world and my place-to-be in relation to them.  One of my favorite authors was Pushkin, and the book of his we read from front to back was a Norton publication called The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin, translated by Gillon R. Aitken.  I checked and verified that it is indeed still in print, though of course the cover or “face” is different.  The book is available from Amazon.com (just in case any of you are looking to make Pushkin’s acquaintance in translation).  Accordingly, here is an excerpt from the Introduction, and a short précis of one of my favorite (though quizzical) Pushkin tales:

“Pushkin holds the supreme position in Russian literature.  It was his genius, in his prose as well as in his verse, which created, in the fullest sense, a national literature, and which laid the foundations upon which that national literature could subsequently be built.  Until his emergence, writing in Russia, with the exception of a handful of works, had been mainly imitative, pursuing pseudo-classical principles, and reflecting closely the trends of various Western European cultures–French, in particular.  The lyrical simplicity and the absolute precision of Pushkin’s poetry, the natural, straightforward grace of his prose perfectly expressed the Russian mood; and, in that expression, Pushkin gave to Russia for the first time in her history a literature whose inspiration came from herself, and which succeeded in setting the tone for successive generations of Russian writers.  But, of course, his achievements were more than national:  his universality of vision, his ablity [sic] to transmute what he saw and what he understood into language of the utmost purity and point have created for him a permanent place in the literature of the world.”

To sketch a brief biography of Pushkin, he was born in 1799, to a boyar-descended father and a mother whose descent was from an Abyssinian prince, and whose ancestry is reflected in one of Pushkin’s unfinished novels entitled The Moor of Peter the Great.  Pushkin’s father and uncle were both inclined to literary pursuits, but this had a less direct influence on him than the tales of Russian folklore told by his nurse, Anna Rodionovna.  His reading and writing both started early, and were at first in French.  When he was twelve, Pushkin was sent away to school, where he started to compose poetry for perhaps the first time.  By 1814, he was already in print, and by the time he left school in 1817, he was already seen as a new young literary spirit.  He released his first important long poem, Ruslan and Ludmilla, in 1820, which “established his reputation beyond question.”  Pushkin’s life wasn’t without its travails and hardships–he was exiled to a minor officialship in Southern Russia by Tsar Alexander I because of his role as a liberal.  Still, he was able to make good use of this time as a literary force, and blossomed in his literary work.  It was during this time that he first read Byron, who made a strong impression on him.  It was between 1820 and 1826 that he wrote a number of long poems, lyrics, ballads, plays, and a novel.  Two of the things he wrote, a play called Boris Godunov and “the masterpiece for which he is best known,” Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, have both since been made into powerful and resonant operas of which there are Russian film versions available.  In 1829, Pushkin got engaged to Natalya Goncharova, and this had a gradual influence on the tenor of his work:  before, he had been a passionate liberal spirit; after his marriage in 1831, he became more of a serious conformist, and incidentally also more of a prose writer.  “In 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous letter suggesting that his wife was having a love affair with a Baron d’Anthès.  He was persuaded to withdraw his challenge to [the baron] to a pistol duel.  Fresh insinuations made a duel inevitable, however.  It took place on January 27th, 1837…[and the baron was only a bit injured].”  Pushkin, however, received his death shot, and died at the relatively young age of thirty-seven.  The odd and interesting thing is that the story I am going to comment upon today, “The Shot,” a story of a strange duel, rather non-duel or quasi-duel, was written in the years before Pushkin himself ever had a reason to fight, and was published in 1831.

At the beginning of the story “The Shot,” we become acquainted with the perspective of a young army officer stationed in a small town, whose social opportunities are small and restricted largely to his fellow soldiers and a mysterious former soldier named Silvio, who also lives in the small town.  Much of the story is devoted to establishing Silvio’s eccentricities and quirks, such as his seeming to avoid any serious cause for quarrel with anyone.  The young officer from whose perspective the story is narrated has what would appear to be a typical young fire-eater’s view of things, which is that however small the slight to one’s honor, it must be avenged.  He relates how, after a possibly drunken lieutenant insults Silvio over a game of cards, Silvio, instead of challenging him to a duel as would be his right, “contented himself with a very slight apology and made peace with the lieutenant.”

This lukewarm attention to honor affects the narrator’s respect for Silvio, the older man who up until now has obviously been his hero.  It also for a while lessens his following among the other young men, although this doesn’t last.  But for the narrator, it is a serious matter.  He becomes cold toward Silvio, which fact the older man notes, and after a few attempts to befriend him again, gives up what had been their private talks together.  This continues until one day a message arrives for Silvio, and he calls all the young men together to announce that he must depart, and wants them all to attend him for one final dinner.  After the party is over, he asks the young narrator to remain behind; apparently, he has a tale to tell, and it is a strange and provocative one.

It seems that when Silvio himself was a young soldier, he was brilliant and rakish and all hellfire and was followed and admired eagerly by all others in his unit until suddenly a young man still more brilliant in his prospects and qualities entered the regiment.  The two could have been friends, and indeed the new recruit tried to make friends with Silvio, but Silvio resisted, eaten up with envy of the other’s qualities.  Matters accelerated until Silvio insulted the opponent, who by the traditions of the time challenged him to a duel.  When they fought, the opponent drew the winning lot for first shot, and placed a shot squarely through Silvio’s cap.  Silvio, however, determined to have a thorough revenge, said that he would reserve his shot until another time, and refused to draw on the young aristocrat.  As Silvio tells the young officer in the story’s present tense scenario, he has to go now because the time has come when he can properly get even with his enemy:  as he says, “We will see whether he regards death with the same indifference on the eve of his wedding….”

There is a passage of some time, and the young officer finds himself in another small town again.  It is a tiny and boring village, and has nothing to recommend itself in the way of social activity.  For a while, the soldier’s housekeeper tells him tales, for a while he reads all the books he can lay his hands on, and he is quite frustrated and is afraid of becoming an alcoholic because there is so little else to do other than to drink.  Then, however, he hears that a short distance away from him, there is a rich estate of a Count and Countess, and that they are coming to visit it in the summer.  He determines to make their acquaintance as a humble visitor, and in fact does so.  The conversation passes to how good each is with a pistol because of a couple of shots that the young visitor sees and asks about which have penetrated a landscape of Switzerland hanging on the wall.  As they compare notes on the best marksmen they have known, it turns out that Silvio, the hero of the young officer in the recent past, is known to the Count.  In fact, the Count is the same young aristocrat whom Silvio reserved his duel shot against years before.

Now it is the Count’s turn to tell a tale.  He relates how Silvio, soon after the Count’s marriage, turned up during the honeymoon to take his long-delayed revenge.  Silvio, however, had distaste for the thought of firing on an unarmed man, and so invited the Count to fire first, and when they drew lots, this is how it in fact turned out.  The Count hit a landscape picture on the wall.  Silvio took aim, but just at that point, the Countess rushed in, shrieking and throwing herself on the Count.  He told her they were joking to calm her, but Silvio responded, “‘He is always joking, Countess….[H]e once struck me in the face for a joke, he shot through my cap for a joke, and just now he missed his aim for a joke; now it’s my turn to feel in the mood for a joke….'”  He takes aim again, and the Count in frustration challenges him to fire and to quit making fun “of an unfortunate woman.”  Silvio, however, says that he has had his revenge in seeing their “alarm” and “confusion,” and says further:  “I forced you to shoot at me, and that is enough.  You will remember me.  I commit you to your conscience.”  On his way out, hardly even looking, he puts a second shot through the landscape picture.  The original narrator, the young officer who has just heard the Count’s story, understands that now he has finally heard the last of Silvio, and the tail-end of his story.  The story ends thus:  “I never met its hero again.  It is said that Silvio commanded a detachment of Hetairists at the time of the revolt of Alexander Ypsilanti, and was killed at the battle of Skulyani.”

A few points about this story:  first of all, the “shot” is in fact fired, because not only is Silvio’s revenge complete, but the landscape, a symbol of peace, tranquility, wealth, and privilege, is what he breaks into by deloping and firing at it.  Also, the “shot” is fired because he has attained his revenge at the end.  Another note on the story:  it is a complex and satisfying story to read, but except for Pushkin’s clarity and smoothness of relation could be a bit confusing because of the complicated story-within-a-story structure which occurs first when the young narrator tells of Silvio, relates the first part of the interior story from Silvio’s point of view, goes back to telling of himself and his own presence in a second small village, and then ends by giving the rest of the interior story (this time from the Count’s point of view) and reveals at the very last what happened to Silvio.  Making one final complication, the tale “The Shot,” along with four other tales, is published under the overall title “The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovitch Belkin,” an alter ego for Pushkin, and he even inserts an Editor’s preface to them which contains a short “biography” of Belkin supposedly written by a neighbor.  The lives of the real author, Pushkin, and the alter ego, Belkin, are mainly alike only in one respect:  both of them have heard many tales from a housekeeper.  Thus, Pushkin was giving credit of a sort to one of his own sources.

This tale is one of the shorter stories in the volume, but even so it packs quite a punch literarily speaking; it is my hope that if you have not yet had the chance to make the acquaintance of this particular Russian literary master, that you will be intrigued enough to take the opportunity to read him.  To make a bad pun with a Pushkin title, his works don’t “Boris” and are certainly “Godunov”!

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October 3, 2013 · 2:24 pm

Cigars, port, and “First Love”–Perspective gained on youth

It has always seemed to be a staple of the traditional old-fashioned story (and some very good stories at that) that an assorted group of people have much to say to each other after dinner (usually a small group of men over their port and cigars, but sometimes in other tales a small group including women).  They sit together and suddenly a topic for stories comes up–and they all acquiesce in taking their turns at telling something that once happened to them, something they saw which seemed remarkable, something they’ve made up for the occasion, or something on a certain topic.  It happens so often that it seems likely people used to do this regularly, not just in fiction, but in real life, in the days before television.  Many writers have used this frame story convention to both good and poignant effect, among them a trio of writers  who were associated with each other during the mid- to late 1800s, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ivan Turgenev.  Today, my subject is a short, seemingly slight and negligible tale by Turgenev called “First Love,” which is as much a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of adolescent crushes in all their neophyte grandeur as it is an actual tale of a particular young man and his first love.

As Vladimir Petrovich–a middle-aged bachelor–tells it, he was but sixteen when his parents and he lived in the country in a villa containing a manor house with three wings, the other two of which were to be used by other people.  Rather, on the first night when the storytellers gather, Petrovich refuses to tell his story, but offers to write it out and bring it back in two weeks’ time:  this seemingly odd device underlines the whole question of perspective, and how time and distance from the topic leave their mark.  After orienting the reader to his setting, Petrovich tells how a shabby genteel princess, Princess Zasyekin, and her daughter, Zinaida Alexandrovna, come to live in the most run-down of the three house wings, and what the effect upon Valdimir’s youth and young adulthood was.

Zinaida and the young man are both described, the young man as the central character being described in his sometimes wild and heady moments of adolescent exultation, Zinaida in scenes with others, as she affects them by her quirks.  Petrovich describes his first night alone in his room after Zinaida has entertained him along with a group of other, slightly older men in her mother’s house (the reader gradually becomes aware that this is something unusual, a young girl entertaining a group of men alone, with only a casual sort of supervision from the next room by her negligent and debt-ridden mother, but the perspective of the story is angled so that the young man is shown accepting this as more or less normal for a young Princess).  Petrovich describes his sleepless night:  “I seated myself on a chair and sat there for a long time, as though enchanted.  That which I felt was so new and so sweet…I sat there, hardly looking around me and without moving, breathing slowly, and only laughing silently now, as I recalled, now inwardly turning cold at the thought that I was in love, that here it was, that love.  Zinaida’s face floated softly before me in the darkness–floated, but did not float away; her lips still smiled as mysteriously as ever, her eyes gazed somewhat askance at me, interrogatively, thoughtfully and tenderly…as at the moment when I had parted from her.  At last I rose on tiptoe, stepped to my bed and cautiously, without undressing, laid my head on the pillow, as though endeavoring by the sharp movement to frighten off that wherewith I was filled to overflowing….I lay down, but did not even close an eye.  I speedily perceived that certain faint reflections kept constantly falling into my room….I raised myself and looked out of the window.  Its frame was distinctly defined from the mysteriously and confusedly whitened panes.  ”Tis the thunderstorm,’–I thought,–and so, in fact, there was a thunderstorm; but it had passed very far away, so that even the claps of thunder were not audible; only in the sky long, indistinct, branching flashes of lightning, as it were, were uninterruptedly flashing up.  They were not flashing up so much as they were quivering and twitching, like the wing of a dying bird.  I rose, went to the window, and stood there until morning….The lightning-flashes never ceased for a moment; it was what is called a pitch-black night….I felt great fatigue and tranquility…but Zinaida’s image continued to hover triumphantly over my soul.  Only it, that image, seemed calm; like a flying swan from the marshy sedges, it separated itself from the other ignoble figures which surrounded it, and as I fell asleep, I bowed down before it for the last time in farewell and confiding adoration….Oh, gentle emotions, soft sounds, kindness and calming of the deeply-moved soul, melting joy of the first feelings of love,–where are ye, where are ye?”  This is the very stuff of adolescent emotion at first love, which both men and women can surely relate to.  Even the very elements of the heavens contribute to speak to the young man of love, as he stands by his bedroom window, taking in the stormy night.

As the young man is also aware of and relates a few pages later, Zinaida is a thoughtlessly cruel young girl at times.  “…I was not the only one who was in love with her; all the men who were in the habit of visiting her house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in a leash at her feet.  It amused her to arouse in them now hopes, now fears, to twist them about at her caprice–(she called it ‘knocking people against one another’),–and they never thought of resisting, and willingly submitted to her.  In all her vivacious and beautiful being there was a certain peculiarly bewitching mixture of guilefulness and heedlessness, of articifiality and simplicity, of tranquility and playfulness; over everything she did or said, over her every movement, hovered a light, delicate charm, and an original sparkling force made itself felt in everything.  And her face was incessantly changing and sparkling also; it expressed almost simultaneous derision, pensiveness, and passion.  The most varied emotions, light, fleeting as the shadows of the clouds on a sunny, windy day, kept flitting over her eyes and lips.”  The young man, Vladimir, being only sixteen to Zinaida’s twenty-one, takes her at her word when she tells him that he is a child compared to her:  but this very complex picture of her which the mature man reads out to his friends years later proves something that the character when younger did not have the perspicuity to see about the girl:  she too shows immature character traits, and childish whims rule her quite often.

This state of things goes on for some time, but gradually begin to change.  Zinaida hints to her admirers that she is in love.  She doesn’t say with whom, but one and all they are on tenterhooks.  Then, she excuses herself from receiving them for several days, claiming to be ill.  When Vladimir next sees her, she is different, somehow, calmer, older perhaps.  He is simultaneously becoming aware of gradual change in his parents also, in his mother, who mainly nags at him about visiting the Princess’s house too often, and who shows him no real affection, and in his father, who according to him has always been capricious in his affections for the boy, occasionally cosseting him but more often rejecting his overtures.  But the most startling change comes about as the boy slowly notices that his father is going about late at night in a cape in the garden, and then notices one day, finally, that his father is riding horses with Zinaida.  As it turns out, to his great disillusionment and surprise at them both, it is his father with whom Zinaida is in love, and as becomes apparent also in the story, the older Princess her mother benefits from their trysts financially, though there is no absolute indication as to exactly how far the relationship has gone.  One has one’s suspicions, however, just as Vladimir does.

The great searing of Vladimir’s soul happens one day when he happens to see his father strike Zinaida’s arm with a whip, and Zinaida accept this and kiss the mark.  And Vladimir thinks to himself that “The last month had aged me greatly, and my love, with all its agitations and sufferings, seemed to me like something very petty and childish and wretched in comparison with that other unknown something at which I could hardly even guess, and which frightened me like a strange, beautiful but menacing face that one strives, in vain, to get a good look at in the semi-darkness….”  He enters university, and soon after his father dies of a stroke, leaving behind these words for him:  “‘My son…fear the love of women, fear that happiness, that poison…’.”  Of course, it’s his father’s own nature which has created his own hell, and Vladimir dimly perceives this, but four years later, when Zinaida is married to a wealthy young man and dies in childbirth, Vladimir cannot forgive himself for seeming to shun her company and not visiting her before she died.

Vladimir’s final statement on young love and youth is rather a statement of the mature man, and by the flowing literary quality of it, one can assign a inter-fictional reason as to why the mature man Vladimir wanted to ponder and write out his statement to his two dining friends:  this statement has all the roundness and literary character of poetry and life philosophy:  “O youth, youth!  Thou carest for nothing:  thou possessest, as it were, all the treasures of the universe; even sorrow comforts thee, even melancholy becomes thee; thou art self-confident and audacious; thou sayest:  ‘I alone live–behold!’–But the days speed on and vanish without a trace and without reckoning, and everything vanishes in thee, like wax in the sun, like snow….And perchance the whole secret of thy charm consists not in the power to do everything, but in the possibility of thinking that thou wilt do everything–consists precisely in the fact that thou scatterest to the winds thy powers which thou hast not understood how to employ in any other way,–in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a prodigal, seriously assumes he has a right to say:  ‘Oh, what could I not have done, had I not wasted my time!'”  This is surely not only one of the most moving tributes to the vicissitudes of youth and young emotions and endeavors, but also one of the most accurate:  what young person, male or female, has not felt their own powers swelling and becoming great in them, only perhaps some years later to regret not having done all that they could to fulfill their early promise?

At the end of the story, the character relates how some time later he attended the deathbed of an anonymous old woman who had never had anything grand or costly in her life, and he ended with a deep desire to pray for both himself and his father.  And the question here is, why does he want to pray for them, rather than for the women in his life who have been mistreated or wronged, or who have suffered, like Zinaida, or Vladimir’s mother, or the old woman, or even the money-squandering old Princess, Zinaida’s mother?  Knowing Turgenev and his concern for unfortunates and humanity, the answer is probably that the men have been the source of some of the wrong done to the others, and so are “greater sinners” and need prayers more–if, in fact, one can do any such arithmetic with such a poetic ending.  But the story thus ends on a note of psychological depth and reality also, because often when people are too deeply moved by one situation to be able to let their feelings about it loose for relief, some quite unconnected tragedy or misfortune will free their tears and allow them to grieve:  and Turgenev was nothing if not a great master of psychology in his characters.

Though this is a story of a particular love relationship and its disappointments, the most evocative moments in the piece are built around what all young loves have in common, and thus the specific details are made extra convincing because they are supported by what we nearly all have known or experienced at one time or another in our youths.  And as I have I believe shown, Turgenev’s control of perspective, with the older man looking back and insisting on making a literary artifact of his tale instead of just telling it to his friends, then gradually developing the youth’s awareness of what is going on around him in a more adult, more cynical world, creates a masterpiece of world literature.  I hope everyone will have a chance to experience it for themselves, and perhaps to compare it with their own early experiences of love and youthful emotions.

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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 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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