Stuck in a Book

It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.