There had been a big snowfall on Thursday and there had been no thaw. The sun was warm on the slopes and mesas and brilliant in the branches of the evergreens, but the air was cold and the wind was raw in the unprotected clearings. Uncle Claude said it might drop to twenty below that night. They had got the ladybugs --Uncle Claude scraped them up with his hunting knife to Molly's exasperation for she used a spatula which seemed more humane and also more scientific -- and had started down. Uncle Claude was the first to get to the opposite bank of the gulch and just as Ralph and Molly began the ascent, he turned around and motioned them to come quietly. It was an easy climb and the path was deep in snow so that they made no sound. Once Molly broke off an ice-covered twig on a chokecherry bush but the noise was slight. Their uncle stood absolutely still, watching something. He had moved into the cover of a small deformed scrub oak laden with snow and he beckoned them to join him. They stepped carefully in his boot-prints, not seeing yet what he did. Then, when they were beside him, he pointed to the east side of the mesa and there they saw the mountain lion standing still with her head up, facing them, her long tail twitching. She was honey-colored all over save for her face which was darker, a sort of yellow-brown. They had a perfect view of her, for the mesa there was bare of anything and the sun illuminated her so clearly that it was as if they saw her close up. She allowed them to look at her for only a few seconds and then she bounded across the place where the columbines grew in summer and disappeared among the trees. Her flight was lovely: her wasteless grace and her speed did not make Molly think immediately of her fear but of her power. When you saw a running deer, you were conscious only of its instinct to flee danger. The lion had sensed peril and yet they, the watchers, sensed peril in her, under her tawny hide, in the way her tail had moved against the glint of the snow, in the way she streaked across the flat land. Molly shivered to think she might now have climbed a tree like a tame cat and might be sitting there observing them with large green eyes.
--Jean Stafford, The Mountain Lion
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Proposed Summer Reading and A Random Question
The official Books of Summer 2010 are:
George Gissing's Demos. My Victorian lit for the summer.
Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y. I love some quantum physics in my fiction. Just started it last night.
J.C. Hallman's In Utopia. Advanced proofs; it's being published in August.
Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion. NYRB is republishing this over the summer; I'm making do with an older University of New Mexico edition rescued from Compact Shelving.
Dorothy Canfield's The Home-Maker and Leonard Woolf's The Wise Virgins. Still more rescues from Compact Shelving instead of those nice Persephone editions everyone else has been reading.
J.G. Farrell's Troubles. I'm a little worried it'll get recalled before I get it read, but maybe no one else at the university is interested in the Lost Booker.
James Joyce's Ulysses. W. and I intend to have this finished by Labor Day. (I'm currently in the Circe chapter.)
Rebecca West's This Real Night. For my too-long-neglected Rebecca West project.
Wallace Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
J.D. Hallman's The Hospital for Bad Poets.
Mary Lee Settle's Know Nothing.
Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream.
Doris Betts' The Scarlet Thread.
Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand that First Held Mine. Review copy.
Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists.
Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge. My most recent purchase.
Justin Cronin's The Passage.
Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster.
And my random question: Are there any extroverts who prefer character over plot in their reading? I know some introverts who prefer plot over character, but I can't come up with any extroverted acquaintances who prefer riding a character's thought waves over watching the character pick up the surfboard and head to the beach.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Lorna Sage's Bad Blood
A friend called me a few weeks back to talk about a memoir that she was reading. She liked it, but was having some issues with it at the same time. No one could recall memories from when they were five years old in such detail, she complained. And all that direct dialogue! Surely no one could remember the exact words spoken from that stage of their life. Had I believed all this when I read it?
And all I could muster was an Eh, it's all just a marketing decision now, whether a book is classified as fiction or a memoir. You just have to accept it as a story, appreciate the writing if you can, rather than getting yourself worked up over whether everything in the book actually happened. There's a lot of seepage these days.
Well, now that I've read Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, the 2001 Whitbread Prize-winning memoir, I get to eat my words. This is a clear-cut memoir, free of the fictiony trappings I've grown so accustomed to in the genre over the years.
Literary critic, author, and professor Lorna Sage, who did not allow a teenage pregnancy and early marriage to keep her from obtaining an education and embarking on a career as the norms of the times would have had it, traces her own "bad blood" to that of her maternal grandfather. A Welsh vicar with well-documented vices (he kept a diary of his affairs with which his wife periodically blackmailed him), he taught Lorna to read at the age of four and took her on his round of bars: "I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children." She saw herself as being on her grandfather's side so she never told on him.
Because the grandmother! Many women of her generation found themselves married to philandering men taken to drink. "What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot," Sage writes. "She stayed furious all the days of her life -- so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife. Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar's helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her. When he took to booze and other women (which he might well have done anyway, although she provided him with a kind of excuse by making the vicarage hearth so hostile) her loathing for him was perfected. He was the one who had conned her into leaving her real home, her girlhood, the shop where you never had to pay for anything, the endless tea party. It was as though he'd invented sex and pain and want and exposure. She turned patriarchal attitudes inside out: he was God to her. That is, he was making it up as he went along, to spite her and with no higher Authority to back him up."
Needless to say, being raised by such a brawling pair worked a number on Sage's mother. Used as a household drudge during the War years when she and the young Lorna lived with them in the filthy vicarage, she never managed to throw off her early influences: she couldn't cook, keep her modern council-house clean, "she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science." Her husband willingly takes on the role of realist protector to her inept dreamer when he returns at the war's end and Sage observes: "in truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had one story between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it. I regularly cast myself in the part of the clever, unwanted child who's sent out to lose herself in the forest, but manages nonetheless to find her own way, being secretive, untruthful, disobedient, and so on and on, as they never ceased to complain. The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too -- all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side."
But the memoirs of those raised in happier marriages are often hamstrung as well. The most interesting characters in Bad Blood are certainly the grandparents, whose stories are told at the beginning. As the dysfunction dissipates in Sage's family, despite Sage's claims of virtuelessness, the lives of the characters become less compelling to read about. The story becomes more one of growing up at that particular time, in that particular environment. Sage and her husband may have broken the rules and gotten away with it, and their daughter may well have been the future, but the bad blood they're predisposed to seems to have been less influential than that of the changing environment. That's a loss for non-fictionalized memoir writing, but heartening news for reality.
Please feel free to join in the discussion of Bad Blood at Slaves of Golconda.
And all I could muster was an Eh, it's all just a marketing decision now, whether a book is classified as fiction or a memoir. You just have to accept it as a story, appreciate the writing if you can, rather than getting yourself worked up over whether everything in the book actually happened. There's a lot of seepage these days.
Well, now that I've read Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, the 2001 Whitbread Prize-winning memoir, I get to eat my words. This is a clear-cut memoir, free of the fictiony trappings I've grown so accustomed to in the genre over the years.
Literary critic, author, and professor Lorna Sage, who did not allow a teenage pregnancy and early marriage to keep her from obtaining an education and embarking on a career as the norms of the times would have had it, traces her own "bad blood" to that of her maternal grandfather. A Welsh vicar with well-documented vices (he kept a diary of his affairs with which his wife periodically blackmailed him), he taught Lorna to read at the age of four and took her on his round of bars: "I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children." She saw herself as being on her grandfather's side so she never told on him.
Because the grandmother! Many women of her generation found themselves married to philandering men taken to drink. "What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot," Sage writes. "She stayed furious all the days of her life -- so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife. Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar's helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her. When he took to booze and other women (which he might well have done anyway, although she provided him with a kind of excuse by making the vicarage hearth so hostile) her loathing for him was perfected. He was the one who had conned her into leaving her real home, her girlhood, the shop where you never had to pay for anything, the endless tea party. It was as though he'd invented sex and pain and want and exposure. She turned patriarchal attitudes inside out: he was God to her. That is, he was making it up as he went along, to spite her and with no higher Authority to back him up."
Needless to say, being raised by such a brawling pair worked a number on Sage's mother. Used as a household drudge during the War years when she and the young Lorna lived with them in the filthy vicarage, she never managed to throw off her early influences: she couldn't cook, keep her modern council-house clean, "she had a kind of genius for travesty when it came to domestic science." Her husband willingly takes on the role of realist protector to her inept dreamer when he returns at the war's end and Sage observes: "in truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had one story between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it. I regularly cast myself in the part of the clever, unwanted child who's sent out to lose herself in the forest, but manages nonetheless to find her own way, being secretive, untruthful, disobedient, and so on and on, as they never ceased to complain. The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too -- all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side."
But the memoirs of those raised in happier marriages are often hamstrung as well. The most interesting characters in Bad Blood are certainly the grandparents, whose stories are told at the beginning. As the dysfunction dissipates in Sage's family, despite Sage's claims of virtuelessness, the lives of the characters become less compelling to read about. The story becomes more one of growing up at that particular time, in that particular environment. Sage and her husband may have broken the rules and gotten away with it, and their daughter may well have been the future, but the bad blood they're predisposed to seems to have been less influential than that of the changing environment. That's a loss for non-fictionalized memoir writing, but heartening news for reality.
Please feel free to join in the discussion of Bad Blood at Slaves of Golconda.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The latest stack
Although I'm not making a lot of progress reading-wise this month, I'm still acquiring books at a steady clip.
Three books influenced by the recent Persephone week and my first ever Persephone catalog: Mathilde Wolff-Munckberg's On the Other Side (in a cheapo used mass paperback edition); Penelope Mortimer's Daddy's Gone A-Hunting; and Susan Glaspell's Fidelity.
Just out in paperback, Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze.
Dezso Kosztolanyk's Skylark.
The Essential Rebecca West. Uncollected prose: seven essays, fifteen book reviews. I think a volume of all of West's uncollected book reviews much more essential than this skimpy offering, but obviously, I'm going to snatch up whatever's out there.
Forrest Gander's A Faithful Existence. Essays.
Jonathan Dee's The Privileges. From the new book exchange in the staff lounge.
Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. I do believe the buzz, I do, I do.
Jane Smiley's Private Life. I've already read this and I liked it very much.
Michael Crummey's Galore. It's autographed! And I think it won an award, too, but I bought it because it's been highly touted at Book Balloon.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
I have decided to vent my spleen by embarking on a series of books that, I hope, will be of no interest whatsoever to the readership of this magazine.
--Nick (He's back!) Hornby, The Believer
Be so glad, constant readers, that I have not been blogging these last many days. I have been in a pissy little mood and I have spared you all the ill effects of that. There have been changes afoot at work--Superdesk-size me!-- and my six-word memoir has not been out of my mind in weeks; let's leave it at that.
So the passive-aggressiveness of reading books no one else would be interested in and blogging about them appeals to me enormously.
If only the people who deserve such treatment read my blog--I'd know just how to handle them.
--Nick (He's back!) Hornby, The Believer
Be so glad, constant readers, that I have not been blogging these last many days. I have been in a pissy little mood and I have spared you all the ill effects of that. There have been changes afoot at work--Superdesk-size me!-- and my six-word memoir has not been out of my mind in weeks; let's leave it at that.
So the passive-aggressiveness of reading books no one else would be interested in and blogging about them appeals to me enormously.
If only the people who deserve such treatment read my blog--I'd know just how to handle them.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee
It is times like these that I wish you all had e-book readers so that I could implore you to download a freebie copy of George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee and commence staying up all night to read it. I would love discussion buddies for Jubilee, particularly for the ending, when the natural, organic conclusion we've been traveling toward for our appealing female character (would Gissing's contemporaries have been appalled by an ending we expect as a matter of course?) is replaced (quite abruptly) by Gissing's own misogynistic late-Victorian views. Submit to the patriarchy, ye educated yet still lowly wenches! Biology and the Bible will unite to beat you over the head until you embrace your inescapable inferiority! This, from the author of The Odd Women?
It's as if Gissing undercuts his own artistic creation in order to advance the conventional ideology of his day. Part of what makes In the Year of Jubilee such a fascinating, albeit at times infuriating, read is that current of tension pulsing through its pages. We empathize with the female lead, we see her worth, only to be told, basically, at the end that it's all been a cosmic joke at her (and any woman's) expense--and she'd better acquiesce cheerfully to that fact of life.
"It comes to this. Nature doesn't intend a married woman to be anything but a married woman. In the natural state of things, she must either be the slave of husband and children, or defy her duty. She can have no time to herself, no thoughts for herself. It's a hard saying, but who can doubt that it is Nature's law? I should like to revolt against it, yet I feel revolt to be silly. Once might as well revolt against being born a woman instead of a man."
. . . . "After all, one can put up with a great deal, if you feel you're obeying a law of Nature. Now, I have brains, and I should like to use them; but Nature says that's not so important as bringing up the little child to whom I have given life. One thought that troubles me is, that every generation of women is sacrificed to the generation that follows; and of course that's why women are so inferior to men. But then again, Nature says that women are born only to be sacrificed. I always come round to that. I don't like it, but I am bound to believe it."
Nancy Lord and her brother Horace have been educated beyond the level expected of their lower middle class London suburb; yet their stubborn piano dealer father refuses to move the family to a more refined neighborhood. Horace demonstrates no aptitude for a profession and falls for a vulgar young gold-digger; Nancy expresses social discontent and a mind for independent thought. When he realizes he's dying, Stephen Lord changes his will-- if either marry before the age of 26, they won't inherit a dime.
Unfortunately, Nancy is on holiday with a friend and her friend's mother while the will is being changed. She allows herself to be seduced there by a man of higher social status, a man she's been interested in for some time. To his credit, Lionel Tarrant is technically enough of a gentleman to marry her immediately afterwards, but he's all for keeping the marriage secret and treating Nancy as his mistress--even before they learn the conditions of Nancy's father's will, or that Tarrant's own expected inheritence has vanished, leaving him with nothing. Or that Nancy is pregnant.
Nancy determines to keep both her pregnancy and her marriage secret in order not to lose the money she's sure her father wanted her to have--Horace was the one he expected to marry badly, not her. Lionel ships off to the Bahamas, then to America, more to escape the day-to-day responsibility of caring for a wife and child than to find a financial means of providing for them. Nancy must fend with suitors and her jealous frenemies' threats to expose her fraudulent endeavors; she must find the means of providing for herself and child when her husband proves unreliable. And then Gissing botches the ending with a lecturing love song to inherent masculine superiority. Boo! Hiss!
But until then, what a fascinating look at life at the end of the 19th century--the rise of the middle class, the Queen's 50th Jubilee, lending libraries, educational theory, mass culture, advertising. . . What's the point of reading only material you're going to agree with wholeheartedly, right?
Recommended.
It's as if Gissing undercuts his own artistic creation in order to advance the conventional ideology of his day. Part of what makes In the Year of Jubilee such a fascinating, albeit at times infuriating, read is that current of tension pulsing through its pages. We empathize with the female lead, we see her worth, only to be told, basically, at the end that it's all been a cosmic joke at her (and any woman's) expense--and she'd better acquiesce cheerfully to that fact of life.
"It comes to this. Nature doesn't intend a married woman to be anything but a married woman. In the natural state of things, she must either be the slave of husband and children, or defy her duty. She can have no time to herself, no thoughts for herself. It's a hard saying, but who can doubt that it is Nature's law? I should like to revolt against it, yet I feel revolt to be silly. Once might as well revolt against being born a woman instead of a man."
. . . . "After all, one can put up with a great deal, if you feel you're obeying a law of Nature. Now, I have brains, and I should like to use them; but Nature says that's not so important as bringing up the little child to whom I have given life. One thought that troubles me is, that every generation of women is sacrificed to the generation that follows; and of course that's why women are so inferior to men. But then again, Nature says that women are born only to be sacrificed. I always come round to that. I don't like it, but I am bound to believe it."
Nancy Lord and her brother Horace have been educated beyond the level expected of their lower middle class London suburb; yet their stubborn piano dealer father refuses to move the family to a more refined neighborhood. Horace demonstrates no aptitude for a profession and falls for a vulgar young gold-digger; Nancy expresses social discontent and a mind for independent thought. When he realizes he's dying, Stephen Lord changes his will-- if either marry before the age of 26, they won't inherit a dime.
Unfortunately, Nancy is on holiday with a friend and her friend's mother while the will is being changed. She allows herself to be seduced there by a man of higher social status, a man she's been interested in for some time. To his credit, Lionel Tarrant is technically enough of a gentleman to marry her immediately afterwards, but he's all for keeping the marriage secret and treating Nancy as his mistress--even before they learn the conditions of Nancy's father's will, or that Tarrant's own expected inheritence has vanished, leaving him with nothing. Or that Nancy is pregnant.
Nancy determines to keep both her pregnancy and her marriage secret in order not to lose the money she's sure her father wanted her to have--Horace was the one he expected to marry badly, not her. Lionel ships off to the Bahamas, then to America, more to escape the day-to-day responsibility of caring for a wife and child than to find a financial means of providing for them. Nancy must fend with suitors and her jealous frenemies' threats to expose her fraudulent endeavors; she must find the means of providing for herself and child when her husband proves unreliable. And then Gissing botches the ending with a lecturing love song to inherent masculine superiority. Boo! Hiss!
But until then, what a fascinating look at life at the end of the 19th century--the rise of the middle class, the Queen's 50th Jubilee, lending libraries, educational theory, mass culture, advertising. . . What's the point of reading only material you're going to agree with wholeheartedly, right?
Recommended.
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