1890s

Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley

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I’ve mentioned before how great Simon Evers’ narration is at Librivox – the free audiobook site where out of copyright books are read by members of the public. Understandably, it’s a mixed bag – but Simon Evers is brilliant, so I’ve been downloading whatever he reads. And the latest was Diana Tempest (1893) by Mary Cholmondeley.

This wasn’t completely at random. I have previously read Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, and thought it was brilliant. Diana Tempest does something similar – mixing sensation fiction with the sort of observational comedy of manners that we expect from a Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. It feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does, and I found Diana Tempest very funny and often nail-bitingly intriguing.

We don’t meet either Diana for a while – for there are two of them. One is Colonel Tempest’s wife, who died in childbirth. The other is his daughter. She, Colonel Tempest, and his son Archie are all left without a fortune when Colonel Tempest’s brother dies. The money, instead, goes to his brother’s son, John – whom everybody knows is illegitimate. Everybody except the infant John, of course, and it is a fact he is not told.

Colonel Tempest is a very unpleasant character – greedy, unfeeling, and with the sense that the world is very hard on him. It’s unclear what the dead Diana saw in him, because she is described as rather wonderful – not only that, she was engaged to his brother before he whisked her away. You can see why there’s no love lost.

And Colonel Tempest gets carried away, saying that he’ll give £10,000 (about £850,000 is today’s money, according to the National Archives calculator – or 1031 cows) to anybody who can redirect the fortune to him. In effect, he has put a bounty on John’s life.

Fast forward a few years, and daughter Diana has grown up. She is a charming, witty, wise, and rather delightful heroine – in the mould of Lizzie Bennett. Like Lizzie, she despises the idea of marrying for money alone, and has a friend who is clearly doing this. And like Lizzie, she finds herself admired in several quarters.

One of these quarters is John – who has grown up to be a rather serious, moral man. He tries to keep his cousin Archie is check, but is usually paying off his debts. Oh, and he keeps having brushes with death – whether that be almost burning to death, nearly being shot, etc. etc. It seems that the people who are trying to win that £10,000 aren’t super good at their job.

I loved listening to this. Cholmondeley has such a witty, ironic turn of phrase. Of course, because it was audio I have no examples – but imagine Austen’s way of exposing the ridiculousness of society in general and hypocrites in particular. On the one hand, we wait to see if she and John will discover that the other has fallen in love – on the other, we follow Colonel Tempest as he tries to track down the would-be assassins and undo his command. Will the relationship succeed, or will the killers get their target?

My only criticism is that, like many Victorian writers, Cholmondeley is never in a hurry. Chapters often begin with several minutes (/pages) of general thoughts about mankind, ambling through enjoyable aphorisms before we get to the crux of the matter. It all added to the enjoyment of the style, but sometimes I did wish she’d just get on with it, and curtail the flourishes a little.

I’m sure it would be fun to read – and it’s definitely a delight to listen to. Much recommended!

More by Max Beerbohm

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More by Max BeerbohmMax Beerbohm books are like buses: you wait years to read one, and then you read… well, I suppose ‘three’ would end this saying properly, but I’ve only read two. I bought another, if that helps you. Anyway, I loved More by Beerbohm, reprinted by Michael Walmer and reviewed in Shiny New Books. Full review here, but here is how it starts…

Max Beerbohm’s name is known today, if at all, as the author of Zuleika Dobson – a curious sort of modernised Greek myth, where a preternaturally beautiful woman bewitches all the undergraduates in Oxford. It is told in luscious prose, and is both entirely ridiculous and entirely enjoyable. Well, a dozen years earlier, Beerbohm was still in his 20s when he published More (1899), now reprinted by Michael Walmer in a rather lovely, good quality, striped edition.

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

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This post title could easily be a confessional moment for me, couldn’t it?  Well, fear not, we won’t be delving into anything too untoward today – rather we’ll be turning back the clock to 1896 and discovering that an irrational love of books is nothing new.  For it was over a century ago that Eugene Field’s posthumous book The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac was published, and it feels like a century ago (although it is in fact only two years) since my friend Sherry kindly gave me the book.

I should explain, before you wonder how tawdry this Victorian reader was, that the love affairs are strictly of the literary variety.  Mr. Field was a single man up until his death, but his love affairs with books were as lively and happy as many marriages.  

Initially I thought Field and I would have little in common – since he died before the end of the 19th century, he necessarily could not have encountered many of my favourite writers – and, even with the 19th century stretching out behind him, he makes no mention of Jane Austen, and only scant whispers of Hardy and Dickens.  Instead he reserves his fondest passions for Boccaccio and others of that ilk.  He quotes reams in Latin and Greek.  And he cares deeply about fine volumes from centuries ago, beautiful bindings, and the scarcity and value within a library.  I, on the other hand, don’t.  I love having books signed by some of my favourite authors (including E.M. Delafield, Rose Macaulay, and Dorothy Whipple) but aside from that, I don’t care whether a book is a first edition or a scruffy reprint – except for unrelated issues of aesthetics.  I’d rather have an attractive reprint from the 1980s than an ugly 1880s first edition.

So I settled down into Field’s company, expecting to enjoy the lust of a collector with the same detached interest that I read Wolf Mankowitz’s excellent novella Make Me An Offer about hunting down a valuable antique vase.  But then I found Eugene Field writing things like this:

Books, books, books – give me ever more books, for they
are the caskets wherein we find the immortal expressions of humanity –
words, the only things that live forever!

and this:

As for myself, I never go away from home that I do not take a trunkful of books with me, for experience has taught me that there is no companionship better than that of these friends, who, however much all things else may vary, always give the same response to my demand upon their solace and cheer.  My sister, Miss Susan, has often inveighed against this practice of mine, and it was only yesterday that she informed me that I was the most exasperating man in the world.

not to mention this:

All men are not as
considerate of books as I am; I wish they were.  Many times I have felt
the deepest compassion for noble volumes in the possession of persons
wholly incapable of appreciating them.  The helpless books seemed to
appeal to me to rescue them, and too many times I have been tempted to
snatch them from their inhospitable shelves, and march them away to a
pleasant refuge beneath my own comfortable roof tree.

A kindred spirit!  A fellow bibliomaniac, indeed!  No matter that the biblios he maniacked were centuries-old copies of Latin poets whilst mine are 1930s novels by middleclass British women, we are singing from the same song-sheet.  This collection of essays is a bit like other Stuck-in-a-Book favourites like Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing and Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, in that it bubbles over with a love for books and reading.  

Field’s collection of essays starts off quite generally, with the sort of sentiments quoted above, before getting increasingly specific.  Since our tastes diverge so greatly, it was the more general sections which I truly loved.  I wanted to reach out, across the entire 20th century dividing us, and shake his hand.  The beautiful essays at the beginning of this volume, tastefully over-written in the paradoxical way which so inimitably belongs to the 1890s, touch so closely at the shared love of literature we all have.  They could have been blog posts.  For even if his books are valuable, he does not appreciate them simply as valuable objects, as though books were no different from ornaments or houses or bank vaults.  As he says:

There are very many kinds of book collectors, but I think all may be grouped in three classes, viz.: Those who collect from vanity; those who collect for the benefits of learning; those who collect through a veneration and love for books.  It is not unfrequent that men who begin to collect books merely to gratify their personal vanity find themselves presently so much in love with the pursuit that they become collectors in the better sense.

I doubt many of us have, or want, valuable libraries – but I think many of us can empathise with the assembly of a book-collection which comes from ‘veneration and love for books’.  And there is one manner in which Field is simply a blogger ahead of his time.  I, with Project 24 under my belt, did have to laugh at this:

Whenever Judge Methuen is in a jocular mood and wishes to tease me, he asks me whether I have forgotten the time when I was possessed of a spirit of reform and registered a solemn vow in high heaven to buy no more books.  Teasing, says Victor Hugo, is the malice of good men; Judge Methuen means no evil when he recalls that weakness – the one weakness in all my career.
No, I have not forgotten that time; I look back upon it with a shudder of horror, for wretched indeed would have been my existence had I carried into effect the project I devised at that remote period!

Oh, Eugene!  There is a place for you in the blogosphere.  How many of us have had this absurd intention, and how few of us have seen it through?  And even fewer of us regret this decision!

Thank you, Sherry, for sending this book to such an amenable bookshelf, and to so kindred a spirit.  I hope this blog post will send Eugene Field to many other appreciative libraries around the world.

A word of warning.  There are lots of unattractive print-on-demand copies dotted around, and it can be difficult to find the pre-1900 editions on bookselling websites, even though they’re actually pretty affordable once you track them down.  To save you some time, they’re here on Amazon.co.uk and (cheaper) here on Amazon.com.

Red Pottage

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Turns out Burns was onto something when he talked about the best laid schemes ganging aft agley – mine ganged aft agley all over the place. I had intended to devote August to reading through some of the Viragos I have piled in various places – and had even picked a modest six or seven to read. And I managed to finish… one. True, I am most of the way through another, but somehow August ran away from me almost entirely Viragoless. Still, the one I did read ended up being pretty brilliant – step forward Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley.

I can’t remember who first put me onto Red Pottage (maybe Lyn?) but I do know that for a long time I kept an eye out for it, and snapped it up when I spotted it in the Bookbarn during this rampage.

The novel was published in 1890, and it couldn’t really have been published in any other decade. There are elements of New Woman feminism alongside Lady Audleyesque sensation, and all washed down with wit. There is a certain decadence to the prose which is never over the top, recalling a period where three words could be used where one would have done – because sparseness is not the only approach to literature, and what ‘would have done’ is a paltry second-best to what ‘can be done’. This paragraph, for instance, adds nothing to the plot – but it is a delicious sidetrack which would doubtless have been edited out ten years later.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendour of the sun-fired woods where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of grey stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

Virago insist in their blurb that the novel is about Rachel West and Hester Gresley, and ‘explores the ways in which two very different women search for fulfilment in a society bound by convention.’ I can understand how such a synopsis would cohere with Virago’s (admirable) publishing aims, but it does Red Pottage a disservice to summarise it in that manner – for it is really far more complex than that, as well as rather more entertaining.

Preparing for a George Gissing-type melancholy novel (I should mention now that I haven’t read anything by George Gissing – or, indeed, Lady Audley’s Secret, I’m just throwing around these references with no first-hand knowledge whatsoever) I was surprised when Red Pottage opens with neither Rachel nor Hester, but instead Hugh Scarlett. Scarlett is embroiled in an affair with Lady Newhaven, and Lord Newhaven challenges Scarlett to a duel, of a sort. They each take a taper – the one with the shorter taper must kill himself before the end of five months. Told you this was a sensation novel.

Except it is not simply a sensation novel. There’s quite a web running through the interrelations of characters, and it’s not long before we meet newly-rich Rachel West, a sensible and social girl who has endured years of poverty. She, in turn, is friends with Hester Gresley who, after having published an extremely successful novel, is now trying to write her second whilst living with her clergyman brother, his jealous wife, and their energetic children. These eight or so characters compose the principal cast – or at least those that are foremost in my mind a few weeks after finishing the novel.

Although the blurb talks about Hester and Rachel being very different, they seemed almost entirely identical figures to me – progressive, but with a firm sense of morals; artistic; loving. My favourite sections of the novel dealt with Hester and her brother’s family – she writing away whenever she had spare moments, and he unappreciative and unadvanced, while believing himself to be deficient in nothing. Any topic under the sun would be ‘thrashed out’ by him, and his judgement he considered final. As for his sense of humour, Cholmondeley pens a particularly delightful paragraph on the topic:

Why does so deep a gulf separate those who have a sense of humour and those who, having none, are compensated by the conviction that they possess it more abundantly. The crevasse seems to extend far inland to the very heights and water-sheds of character. Those who differ on humour will differ on principles. The Gresleys and the Pratts belonged to that large class of our fellow creatures, who, conscious of a genius for adding to the hilarity of our sad planet, discover an irresistible piquancy in putting a woman’s hat on a man’s head, and in that “verbal romping” which playfully designates a whisky and soda as a gargle, and says “au reservoir” instead of “an revoir.”(Shades of Mapp and Lucia, no?) And yet Cholmondeley is unswervingly fair in her portraits. Red Pottage is no attack on the church – indeed, there is a thread of faith through it which is done honestly and well. Rather, the novel contains (among many other things) an exposure of a certain type of clergyman, who is balanced out by a much more sensitive and sympathetic bishop. Even Rev. James Gresley is not solely a figure to be lambasted – his saving grace is the love he feels towards his children, which in turn is the only sort of love within Hester’s own novel which he does not consider overblown.

The conversations between James and Hester are amongst the chief delights of the novel. Jane Austen would not have spoken slightingly of them – some of the exchanges reminded me, in their linguistic delicacy and exactness, of that wonderful scene between Lady Catherine de Burgh and Elizabeth Bennett. Hester’s dialogue is always carefully inoffensive, and yet subtly demonstrates how far she is from agreeing with her brother’s values and pronouncements. To pick one example out of the air: ‘But from your point of view you were right to speak – as – as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it.’ I shan’t spoil the outcome of the relationship between Hester and her family, but I will mention that it involves one of the most moving deaths I have ever read about – and it is not even the death of a human.

Cholmondeley’s constant fairness can confuse, at times – simply because the more sensational aspects of the novel feel as though they require less complex characters. It would be tempting to view Scarlett as a cad and bounder, and a cowardly one at that, but Cholmondeley makes the reader question these assumptions:

But was he a coward? Men not braver than he have earned the Victoria Cross, have given up their lives freely for others. Hugh had it in him to do as well as any man in hot blood, but not in cold.It would be ridiculous to fault Cholmondeley for creating rounded characters, and I don’t intend to do so – only perhaps occasionally (only occasionally) her plot-lines are not quite so well rounded, and the consequent discord is a little unsettling.

I have done little justice to the overlapping and interweaving storylines of the novel, nor the wry humour which so often made me laugh aloud. Cholmondeley is an excellent observer of human nature, and (which is rarer) a generous one. Her generosity does not preclude laughing at traits and actions, but it does forbid pillory or scapegoating. Red Pottage is a rich, moving, funny, and deeply perceptive novel. I may only have managed to finish one Virago Modern Classic this August – but at least the one I finished turned out to be rather brilliant.

Lazy Girl

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Three years ago, I read and love Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) – brief thoughts here. At that point Hesperus were also promising to republish Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl (1891) by ‘Jenny Wren’ (a pseudonym, of course) but it never appeared… and then, years later, it did! And my brother bought it for me for my birthday. I read it quite some time ago, and of course forgot to write about it (I need to come up with an abbreviation for that, I say it so often. My online reading group have similarly come up with acronym HIU for ‘have it, unread’ since we were writing this about nearly every book anyone else mentioned.)

Jenny Wren’s riposte to Jerome is in much the same vein, albeit from the female’s perspective rather than the male’s. It doesn’t have quite his edge of brilliancy, but her views on love, bills, afternoon tea, children and dogs etc. are all diverting and fun. I can best explain by example, and here she is on the topic of train journeys:
Then again your fellow passengers are not always all that can be desired. Often they are neither pleasant in themselves nor interesting as a study. I travelled with an awful old lady the other day. She had six small packages with her in the carriage, besides her handbag and umbrellas and half the contents of an extra luggage van. The long-suffering porter who had looked after her boxes and finally put her in the train was crimson with his exertions. The generous lady, having searched several pockets before finding the necessary coin, bestowed on him a threepenny piece for his trouble! “Thank yer, mum,” he went off muttering grimly, “I’ll bore a ‘ole in the middle and ‘ang it round my neck.”

This good dame never ceased to worry all through the journey. She pulled her things from under the seat and put them up in the rack, and then reversed their locality. At each station she called frantically to the guard to know where she was and if she ought to change. Finally, when we reached our destination, it was proved that she had taken her ticket to one place and had her luggage labelled to another; and there she was, standing on the platform gesticulating violently, while the train was steaming off with her belongings. What happened I do not know, for I was hurried off by my friends; but I should think it would be long before she and her luggage met again.

Fortunately she never knew how near she was to her death. If ever I had murderous intentions in my heart, it was on that journey north.
I wonder if E.M. Delafield ever read this?

It’s all joyful nonsense, of the very best sort – and I think would be enjoyed by anybody who likes to laugh at the silly foibles of life, preferably those evinced by other people. I can imagine each chapter of this book being a separate newspaper column, and they’re diverting in the way that the funniest section of a Sunday newspaper magazine is diverting. And with the added advantage of being from the 19th century, you can even feel fairly cultured whilst you read them.

One Bad Turn…

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A few of you commented on my mention on The Turn of the Screw the other day, and I’m afraid this is confession time. I’m well aware that this almost certainly a case of wrong reader/wrong time, rather than wrong book, but… it didn’t work for me at all.

I’d seen the production at Christmas (partly filmed in the graveyard of my church in Somerset, doncha know); I’d seen another production about a decade ago. I’m reading lots of fantasy theory books at the moment, and it keeps being mentioned as a famously ambiguous text. Simon, I said to myself, get over your dislike of Henry James (based entirely on one interminable ‘short’ story) and get The Turn of the Screw off the shelf.

So I did. The plot is well known. A governess is hired to look after a man’s niece and nephew, Flora and Miles, the latter of whom has recently been expelled from school. The uncle puts her in charge, with only one stipulation: he is on no account to be disturbed. But it’s the governess who is disturbed – she starts to see mysterious figures wandering the grounds, who don’t seem to be seen by any other members of the household. And she learns that the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover Peter Quint, had died under curious circumstances… events come together to convince the governess that the figures she sees are their ghosts, and she suspects the children may not be as unaware and innocent as they seem… Even writing that synopsis, I am intrigued – I’m imagining it in the hands of Shirley Jackson, and am enthralled. I daresay she owes a lot to James. But…

The novella is one of those stories-within-a-story, and is framed by an unnamed narrator reading a manuscript account to a friend. This is just the first of the techniques which put the reader as a distance – the most strident being James’ complex style. The tangle of his sentences means that the reader – or at least this reader – clambers along the surface of the text, never dipping below the words on the page to the caverns of images they should produce.
The day was grey enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognise, on a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won’t say greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same – he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the dining-room was on the ground-floor, not going down to the terrace on which he stood. I picked that section more or less at random, but it is actually one of the few moments which actually made an impression on me – but even now, re-reading it, his sentences are so convoluted and intricate that I am barely able to rescue a picture from the effort of disentangling his syntax. It’s not because I’m unused to 19th century books – I’ve read a lot in the past, and quite a few recently. It’s definitely James.

Is this all deliberate? Is it worthwhile? Did The Turn of the Screw flounder for me because I was so tired when I read it? I can admire James – I can certainly admire the imagination which structured the ambiguity of the novella’s conclusion, but I cannot love or enjoy him. Worse, a lot of the time I can barely understand him. Please, counsel for the defence, step forward and tell me what I’m missing?

In which we learn that Our Vicar is usually right…

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Please note… I accidentally scheduled two posts to come out in the space of half a day… don’t miss my thoughts on Matty and the Dearingroydes by Richmal Crompton, if you fancy some indulgent middlebrow reading!

Most of the books I write about on Stuck-in-a-Book are either new(ish) novels, or older ones which are a little more obscure. In those cases it’s fine to assume that the blog reader starts off not knowing a huge amount about the book in question, and it’s also fine for me to lay down my opinion – for better or worse. That’s not quite the same with Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. In fact, even writing ‘by Thomas Hardy’ makes me feel a little patronising, because of course you all know that it’s by Thomas Hardy. You also probably know a lot about it, even if you haven’t read it – and it can be taken for granted that the novel is well written, can’t it? So where to go from here…

We can have a lesson in how Our Vicar is usually right. He’s off in Cornwall at the moment, on holiday with Our Vicar’s Wife and a couple who are friends of the family (and saved Colin’s life once or twice, incidentally!) so he won’t see this for a while, but… he’s been recommending Thomas Hardy to me most of my life. The same story happened with Oxford by Jan Morris, which he gave me (or possibly lent me, I should find out…) when I went to university, and which I finally read last year. It’s great, by the way. And, although I did read Tess of the D’Ubervilles back in 2003 or thereabouts, and started The Mayor of Casterbridge once upon a time, I had never really turned my attention Hardywards.

But it really is a rather brilliant novel. And, despite my misgivings, very readable as well. I always think of the Victorians as wordy and difficult, but I more or less raced through Jude the Obscure. I suppose, with a publication date of 1895, it is on the edge of the Victorian period – but still. My misconceptions were put right.

For those who have been happily oblivious to the work of Dorset’s finest, Jude the Obscure is about a country lad with big ambitions. Those ambitions centre around getting to Christminster University – i.e. Oxford under a thin disguise. It’s all getting a little Oxford-centric, following on from Trapido’s novel the other day, but my favourite section of the novel was this first part. Especially poignant is the scene where Jude looks out over the misty fields to Christminster, with all his aspirations and hopes intact. I’m not usually affected by visual description, but Hardy really knows his onions. Cue long and rather beautiful extract: In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun’s position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to the west, he saw that the sun had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras. Isn’t that some spectacular writing? But, as I hinted, his ambitions don’t stay long intact. Hardy’s reputation for being all a bit tragic isn’t misplaced. This is, after all, a novel including characters who say: “All is trouble, adversity and suffering!” and “Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!” Warms the cockles, doesn’t it? And of course things start to go wrong for Jude – not least owing to the women in his life, Arabella and Sue. The back-and-forth qualities of the relationships in the novel led to one inspired comment by a member of my book group, that it was all a bit like Abba.

But I don’t find Hardy gratuitously gloomy. Jude the Obscure is definitely driven by more than tragedy – I think Sue and Jude are incredibly complex characters, especially Sue. She is spontaneous, but often regrets it or changes her mind afterwards; selfish but caring; passionate but fickle; headstrong but self-doubting – so many believable contradictions go into the make-up of her character.

For those who have been hesitant about approaching Hardy, I really encourage you to give Jude the Obscure a read. Although it will never be a bedtime story or beloved companion, it’s one of the most impressive, complex, and well-written novels I’ve read for a while.

Books to get Stuck into:

I can’t think of anything like Jude the Obscure, so instead I’ll recommend some of my favourite Victorian novels. I haven’t actually reviewed any on here, because I read them six or seven years ago, but…

Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë: by the most neglected Brontë sister, and my personal favourite. This doesn’t have the power of Wuthering Heights, but it’s infinitely more likeable – and, in its neat structure, practically the perfect novel.

Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell: We all loved the TV series, and Gaskell’s novel is a delight. A bit disjointed, because the first few chapters were initially supposed to be the whole thing, but we can forgive her that when she gives us such wonderful characters and amusing incidents.

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens: don’t be scared of Dickens. This rambling novel has dozens of characters, but they’re all brilliantly drawn, and I always find Dickens absolutely hilarious.

Heart of Darkness

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Apologies for the lack of content here in the past few days – as I rather anticipated, my degree has been taking up quite a lot of my time! It’s not so much that I have a huge workload, but more the fact that I don’t have designated leisure time… and so no time to assign especially for this blog. But fear not, I shall continue apace!

Not a very enthused review today, however, and one I hope won’t upset my tutor if she comes across it… we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the course on Empire Writing. I think a few of you expressed distaste for the book when I mentioned it a while ago – and I have to say I agree. Not distaste, actually, just a complete indifference. I sat and read the novella (if such it is) in one sitting, and just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of it – certainly some is well written. The final scene, and ‘the horror the horror’ demonstrate an interesting dabbling in Modernisty writing, but in general… well, let’s just say I finished it with only a minimal idea of what it was about, having already forgotten all the details. Which is quite shameful.

I’d be very happy for someone to offer a counter-argument… please step forward if you love Heart of Darkness, I’d love to here the case for the defence.

But, this possibility aside for now, I’m intrigued – how on earth did Conrad’s book become so renowned? As far as I can tell, from my fairly early copy, it was initially only a subsidiary to the story ‘Youth’ (my copy is in a volume called Youth and Two Other Stories), which is in itself a rather underwhelming story. Perhaps Heart of Darkness revolutionised narrative or something, and I daresay I should appreciate it as a benchmark of literature, but… well, people my age have a little expression which goes like this: “meuh”. That about sums up my feelings for this novella.

Those of you who aren’t tutting in disgust – which ‘classics’ leave you feeling “meuh”? Not hatred, or even dislike, just indifference….?

The Yellow Wallpaper

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Two of the least successful advertising campaigns imaginable, there…

Sorry, starting in a frivolous mood. It shan’t persist, promise.
I’ve got this bug that’s going round (isn’t there always one going round?) and spent much of the day in bed – what better, thought I, than The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman? When I mentioned it the other day, there was quite a response from you guys telling me to drop everything and read it (including Angela, who writes about the book here). I’m nothing if not obedient…

Wow. I don’t know whether to call The Yellow Wallpaper a novel or a short story, probably the latter, but whatever it is: wow. What an effect, and what writing.

Sorry, I appear to be dissolving into cheerleaderdom – but sometimes a work is written so excellently that no other response is possible.

An unnamed woman is suffering from a nervous complaint (“nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression”) and sent to rest in a rented house, while her own (and her physician husband’s) is being repaired. She is given the large old nursery, at the top of the house, which has windows on all sides and is covered in patterned, yellow wallpaper. Her reaction to this wallpaper is measured and aesthetically based, at first:
‘I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destory themselves in unheard of contractions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.’

There are already hints of extremity – the suicide metaphor; the intense description of the colour. As the story continues, the heroine becomes increasingly obsessed by the wallpaper – trying to understand the pattern, and whatever may be secreted behind it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman subtly portrays the woman’s plight through a naive and confused first person voice, and sublimation of her depression into obsession with the wallpaper. Many now think the story depicts post-natal depression (‘Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.’) and it does so extremely sensitively. Deservedly a classic, The Yellow Wallpaper makes subtle mastery seem easy – but was almost certainly far from it.

It’s great to have this story in one of those beautiful Virago Modern Classics editions, but sadly it comes with an appalling afterword by Elaine R. Hedges. Hedges takes what is a poignant and deep example of sensitive feminist writing, and tries to turn it into the most militant variety. The sort which throws around terms like “marriage institution” and claims that no woman has ever voluntarily entered marriage, and all men seek to control and destroy women. She crushes all the beauty of Perkins Gilman’s story, and I found the whole Afterword belittled post-natal depression and insulted those who suffer from it, as though it were not significant enough an issue to which to devote a narrative. Tsk.

But – to end on a positive note – what a story. Thank you for pushing it to the top of tbr pile, folks.

50 Books…

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments


I’ve posted pictures of this book a couple of times, exemplifying either its attractiveness, or the fact that it contains short stories, but I’ve never really commented on its contents properly. And Kate Chopin’s Portraits was always going to be an inclusion on my 50 Books You Must Read… and here it is, as we reach (just about) a quarter way through the list.

I came across Chopin in 2004, when dovegreybooks started up their Postal Book Group. The idea was – indeed, still is, as it is still going strong – that you select a book, and a nice notebook, and send them on to a given address. Repeat every two months, and eventually your book comes back to you with a notebook of comments, and you’ll have read lots of other, interesting books, across which one might not have come, were it not for the group. Great fun. I sent off AA Milne’s The Holiday Round, whilst dovegreyreader – or just plain Lynne as we knew her then (I mean we knew her as Lynne, not as plain Lynne) – sent Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. I read it in a caravan in Devon, one of the last books I read before heading off to university. And I loved it. I wanted more.

That brings me onto Portraits. You know by now that they’re short stories – but when Chopin does short, she really does short. Some are less than two pages in length, and these, to my mind, are the most successful. They either hinge around a specific denouement or surprise – like ‘Desiree’s Baby’, give or take an accent or two – or are miniature portraits (!) of characters. My favourite of these is ‘Boulot and Boulotte’, a tiny story about twelve-year-old twins, deemed old enough to buy shoes; they go and select them at the market, but are incredulous when asked why they return barefoot: “You ‘spec’ Boulot an’ me we got money fur was’e – us?” she retorted with withering condescension. “You think we go buy shoes fur ruin it in de dus’? Comment!”

As you can see, Chopin often adopts typographical means to portray black or Creole vernacular – I find this quite wearying, quite apart from being a potential p.c. minefield. But the quality of Chopin’s writing more than rises above these issues (Chopin does, I must add, show a great deal more respect to other races than many of her other late-Victorian contemporaries… can one be late-Victorian and not British? Well, you know what I mean.) She uses language in a sparing but powerful way, and is great to flick through and pick stories arbitrarily. That’s how I read it, anyway. And, if nothing else, the cover is great…(!)