Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born (#CCSpin)

"What's good about it?, Vicky thought. He's in love with you and you're in love with somebody who's in love with somebody else--oh, splendid. Perfectly ducky, in fact."

It's that sort of comedy where one generally expects all of those mismatched loves to be resolved in the end. Is that true of this one? Hmm, maybe. The novel a bit leaves us hanging. If you've read it, did you think things were going to work out?

Ethel Carey, Amanda Keeler, and Vicky Havens were three friends at a private girls' school in Ohio. Vicky was the youngest and the pet of the older two. Now Vicky's heart has been broken when her fiancé runs off with her business partner in their small real-estate firm. Can Vicky bear to continue working with Mrs. Turner when she'd hoped to be? Everybody in Lakeville is sniggering behind Vicky's back.

So Ethel, born the wealthiest of the three, goes off to New York City to see her friend Amanda, who's made good. Can Amanda do something for Vicky? 

Since school, Amanda wrote a novel, which got boosted into success when she married Julius Evans, a very wealthy New York publisher. Now she's working on the sequel, writing for Julius' magazines, and since the year is 1941, helping with refugees. Amanda's run far away from Ohio; she'd prefer to forget it. But if Amanda sets up Vicky with a studio apartment, she can use it during the day as a love-nest. She's bored with her husband and thinking about her used-to-be.

Will the US get into the war? Seems likely. It's a serious time.

But the novel is funny: 

"But Lakeville was not hometown to Amanda, it was childhood, and childhood was something to be forgotten, like a long sentence in prison."

"She was so accustomed to only go to those places she was known that this anonymity was a new experience for her. She didn't like it."

[After a family squabble.] "Yet their public manners were charming, even to each other, and probably kept in all the finer condition by not being wasted in private."

[Vicky has been crying.] "...she blew her nose so many times you would have thought she had test the instrument thoroughly before permitting it to leave the factory."

Powell says in her diary she started the novel in January of 1941; on May 18th of 1942, she writes:

"Finished novel at 4:30--p. 402."

She sends it off the next day. But a couple of weeks before on April 25th, she wrote:

"I grow dissatisfied with novel--which is not like me. But it is the longest, most expansive book I've ever attempted and I'm afraid I'll not have the actual capacity for handling this big a theme. I still like it and feel cheated that I can't linger more over it and make it richer, which is what it needs. The title ought to be changed to a more provocative one--'Almond Tree Shall Blossom'--not so bad."

I suspect all writers go through such a phase with whatever they're working on and it doesn't necessarily mean much. It doesn't in this case. It's the third Powell novel I've read, and while I liked the other two well enough, this one amazed me.

Wikipedia tells me Amanda is loosely based on Claire Boothe Luce (Luce-ly?) which would make Julius Evans a stand in for Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life.

My Classics Club spin novel this time, and a rousing success.

 

  

 

 

Ossi di Seppia (#HYH25)

Eugenio Montale in his office at the Corriere della Sera

The Agave on the Reef: Sirocco

O rabid sirocco

gale that burns

the parched land's yellowgreen;

and in the sky alive

with pale lights

a few cloud columns pass

and are lost.

Worried hours, vibrations

of a life that flees

like water through the fingers;

unsnared events,

light-shadows, shakings

of the wobbling things of earth;

oh arid wings of air

today I am

the agave that takes root

in the crevice of the rock

and in the algae's arms escapes the sea

that opens its huge jaws and mouths the boulders;

and in the ferment

of every essence, with my furled-up buds

that no longer explode, today I feel

my rootedness as torment.

 

-Eugenio Montale (tr. Jonathan Galassi)

 

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa, Liguria, Italy in 1896 to a well-to-do family, and died in Milan in 1981. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975.

 

His first book of poems was titled Ossi di Seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones") and came out in 1925. Since cuttlefish are a marine invertebrate, a relative to squid and octopus, you might not think they have bones, but what they have is an internal shell, called a cuttlebone in English, osso di seppia in Italian, which they use to control buoyancy. After the cuttlefish dies, these cuttlebones wash up on shore. Montale called his poems ossi, 'bones' suggesting that they were things he found on the Ligurian coast.

 

'The Agave on the Reef' is the first in a series of three poems (I've only typed the one) about winds of the region. The sirocco is the hot wind from Africa; the second poem names the tramontane, the cold wind that blows down over the Alps; the third is the mistral (maestrale in Italian) from the northwest that blows in all that wonderful sunny weather on to the French and Italian riviera. 

 

Montale wrote many more books of poetry, some published abroad during the Fascist era, translations from English, French, and Spanish, and after the war was a regular columnist for the venerable Milan paper Corriere della Sera.

 

I read it in the bilingual edition from Farrar, Strauss that came out in 1998 with translations and notes by Jonathan Galassi:

The Italian:

 

L'agave su lo scoglio

 

Scirocco

 

O rabido ventare di scirocco

che l'arsiccio terreno gialloverde

bruci;

e su nel cielo pieno

di smorte luci

trapassa qualche biocco

di nuvola, e si perde.

Ore prepesse, brividi

d'una vita che fugge

come acqua tra le dita;

inafferrati eventi,

luci-ombre, commovimenti

delle cose malferme della terra;

oh alide ali dell'aria

ora son io

l'agave che s'abbarbica al crepaccio

dello scoglio

e sfugge al mare da le braccia d'alghe

che spalanca ampie gola e abbranca rocce;

e nel fermento

d'ogni essenza, coi miei racchiusi bocci

che non sanno più esplodere oggi sento

la mia immobilità come un tormento.

 

-Eugenio Montale

 

Galassi reproduces the alliteration of the Italian in 'alide ali dell'aria' but doesn't do much with Montale's rhymes. It's easier to rhyme Italian than English, so maybe it would feel less significant in Italian than in English, but I do feel it's a loss: the Italian ends on a rhymed couplet which adds a weight that's not quite there in English. 

 

Embarrassingly enough, I started reading Ossi di Seppia in October for the 1925 Club, but only finished it now. Well, I did try to read the Italian first. Fortunately there's still Neeru's Hundred Years Hence challenge, running until the end of the year, which I will squeak in on:

 

 

 

Twilight

Twilight

Looking across 

The water we are

Startled by a star--

It is not dark yet

The sun has just set

 

Looking across 

The water we are

Alone as that star

That startled us,

And as far

 

-Samuel Menashe

 

Samuel Menashe was an American poet born in New York in 1925 who died in 2011. He was the first recipient of the Poetry magazine's Neglected Masters award, and this Library of America volume was the result.

 

Twilight comes early this time of year and it's a little cold to go down by the lake without a good reason... 

Charlie Chan (plus a November wrapup)

Not Pictured: Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan

As threatened in my NonFicNovember post, I did carry on. When I first read the Charlie Chan mysteries about 25 years ago, I read them out of order as I happened to find the books. This time I read them in order. Not essential, but it does add something. Each one refers back to the events of the previous novel or even further back.

The first one has less of Charlie, but he was the most popular character, and fans wanted more of him in the books. Biggers supplied. There's not that much Hawaii, though, which I hadn't really thought about--only two and about a half of the books are set there. In the second, The Chinese Parrot of 1926, Charlie Chan has agreed to carry some pearls to the mainland for a friend; there's murder done in the valley near Bakersfield. In Behind That Curtain (1928) he's gotten as far as San Francisco on his way home when he's lured into another mystery. It's the former head of Scotland Yard who's murdered in this. Finally he's back home, when the movie star Shelagh Fane comes to Honolulu only to get murdered in The Black Camel (1929). A tour group is circling the world in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and a first murder occurs in London--"murder like potato chip--cannot stop at just one"--there's four dead (including another Scotland Yard man) by the time the tour group arrives in Honolulu. Charlie boards the ship with the tour group as it departs and has solved it by the time they reach San Francisco.

Biggers did live in California at the time, and only got to Hawaii a couple of times before his early death. 

I just finished today the last one The Keeper of the Keys (1932), which is set in Truckee, California, on Lake Tahoe. Just across the border from Reno, Nevada, land of quickie divorces, which is an important plot element.

I'm not sure how much read the Charlie Chan mysteries are these days. There's plenty of casual racism (alas!) in Golden Age mysteries, anti-Semitism, anti-Black, etc., but it's an astonishingly a-historical reading to think these books are anti-Chinese. Prejudice exists in them; Chan confronts it when he sees it. Biggers was by his lights trying to improve the situation. In Keeper of the Keys, a number of Anglos are ready to dedicate a statue for benefits of Chinese immigration to California. Major Yammerton suspects and I would agree that the anti-Charlie Chan feeling is due more to the movies than the books, but Huang thought even the movies were defensible (and clearly liked them himself). Are they? I haven't see a Charlie Chan movie since I was eight and they came on after the Saturday morning cartoons. But thanks to the Major, I'm now aware they can be found at YouTube.

Novellas in November

I read two: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires and Machado de Assis' The Alienist. Blogged about them here. 

Pynchon

I reread Gravity's Rainbow and have subsequently finished rereading Vineland. Shadow Ticket is on the stack. Pynchon post coming soon? Well there is the Doorstoppers in December challenge going on:

Literary Criticism

I read Robert Boyers' memoir Maestros and Monsters about his relationship with Susan Sontag and George Steiner. Boyers is the founding editor of the little magazine Salmagundi and knew both Sontag and Steiner for years in that context. It's a defense of literary criticism for a readerly, but non-specialist audience (me) as well as being amusingly gossipy about both of them, who could be quite difficult in person. I've read or reread most of Sontag pretty recently. It made me want to go read those Steiner books I haven't read.

MARM 

I also reread Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin for Buried in Print's Margaret Atwood Reading Month, though I didn't finish it until this month (so it didn't make the picture). It would be another doorstopper, though...

That was my month of reading. Did you take part in any of the November challenges? For December, in addition to any doorstoppers, there's also Dean Street Decmber, which I hope to read something for.

Searching For It

Searching For It In A Guadalajara Dance Hall

You go in from the cobbled back street.

Into an empty, concrete one-room building

where prim youngish women sit in a line

of straight chairs. The women are wearing

tea dresses thrown away by rich Texan

women two generations ago. The men are

peasants, awkward in a line of chairs opposite.

Nothing is sexual. There are proprieties.

No rubbing against anyone. No touching

at all. When the music starts, the men

go stiffly over to the women. It isn't

clear whether they say anything. The dance is

a slow, solemn fox trot. When it stops,

they stand still while the men

find a coin. The women stow it and all

of them go back to the chairs to wait for

the music and another partner. This is

not for love. The men can get love

for two coins at a shack in the next field.

They know about that. And that they will

never be married, because it is impossible

to own even a little land. They are

groping for something else, but don't know what.

 

-Jack Gilbert

 

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. He was born in 1925 in Pittsburgh, and died in 2012 in Berkeley, California. He lived in various places in between, but a good deal of it in Europe. He wasn't especially prolific, publishing a half-dozen books over his long life. This is from The Dance Most of All, his last book, which came out in 2010. He was featured on the blog once before.