Virginia Woolf's The Years

 

     "All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down," she said, stirring her coffee.

     Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

     "And even if it isn't," she said.

     "But it's the only way we have of knowing each other," Rose protested.

  

The Years was the last novel completed by Virginia Woolf during her life, and came out in 1937. It was the biggest financial success of her lifetime, though I have to imagine Mrs. Dalloway has sold more copies now. It's the story of the Pargiter family across three generations. Colonel Abel Pargiter, who served in India, and his wife Rose, are the parents of seven children; they form the core of the novel, though there are also cousins and family friends.

 

The novel is arranged in ten chapters, each labelled with a year. The longest are the first, 1880, and the last, 'The Present Day,' presumably 1936 or so, just before the novel appears. In 1880, we meet the seven children--Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose. Mother Rose has been bedridden for years, and may finally be dying, and we see the children's (and husband's--who keeps a mistress) reaction to their mother's imminent death. Delia, the rebellious one, thinks it's time for her to go; others are more uncertain, but it's true Rose the mother doesn't have much of a life by then. At the end of the chapter, after a couple of dream-haunted days of collapses and rallies, she dies.

 

The other year chapters all take place on a single day, and are built around a meeting of family members. In 1891, it's the day of Parnell's death, the advocate for Irish Home Rule; Colonel Abel goes to visit his brother and sister-in-law for his niece Maggie's birthday. Abel, perfectly content in his imperialism, had no use for Parnell, but admires his sister-in-law's emotion at the death. In 1917 Maggie, now married to a Frenchman René (Renny), host Eleanor for dinner; German air raids on London occur that night. 1918 sees the day of the armistice; we follow Crosby, the Pargiter nurse and maid, now pensioned off, in the shortest chapter; she's annoyed by all the celebratory guns going off. In 'The Present Day', Delia and her husband Patrick, throw a party; all the surviving family members appear; there's a dance and dinner, and the party ends at dawn:

"The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace."

So it's a family novel, but if so, it's quite different from what you might expect; it's impressionistic in its style, sketch-y, even, so long as you don't imagine that as a derogatory adjective. It's half the length of Buddenbrooks, for example, and avoids scenes that might have been expected: Charles, one of Maggie's children, dies in World War I, but we only learn that obliquely and long after the event.

 

Woolf conceived the novel after she'd given a lecture 'Professions for Women' in 1931:

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say." 

That set her to thinking and she initially imagined a novel-essay about the Pargiter family, a blend of essays about the status of women mixed with fictional episodes. That book was reconstructed after her death and is available, titled The Pargiters, but I haven't read it. In the end, though, the essays became her book Three Guineas and the fictional episodes became the novel The Years. That initial conception is still visible; in the first generation, there aren't many possibilities for women: Eleanor ends up looking after her widowed father, only becoming a great world traveler after his death; Kitty, a cousin, whom  Edward Pargiter loved and wanted to marry, marries instead a great lord and lives that lifestyle; Delia, in that first generation but somewhat younger, becomes a suffragette and is sent to prison for her agitation. It's only in the third generation that real professional possibilities open up for women: Peggy, Maggie's daughter, becomes a doctor, though it doesn't seem to make her very happy.

 

But a schematic essay-novel is not the novel Virginia Woolf has given us (though the idea of it definitely colors the criticism from what I've seen). Several of the male characters are also well-rounded, particularly Abel, the patriarch, and North, Peggy and Charles' brother, who also served in World War I, but then went to be a farmer in Africa.  Like any family novel of multiple generations, it's interested in the passing of time, and 1880 to 1935 are a time of great changes in England. In 1880, tea is being made with a spirit lamp and people travel in horse-drawn carriages; in 1936, the flash and circle symbol of the British Union of Fascists is graffitied on walls, and Eleanor discusses traveling by plane (though she doesn't).

 

It's also very good on family relations. As aunt and niece suggest in that opening quote, there's never perfect understanding or communication. During that final party, Edward, by then a professor, quotes Sophocles, but refuses to translate:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin, who was gesticulating too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what?"

And yet that's not the whole of the story either; again as that opening quote suggests, there is communication. North dances with a girl at the party, asks her for a date, she accepts. The next generation? Another way in which this would be unlike Buddenbrooks. This is a family with a decent amount of good will toward each other--not true of all families-- even if they don't always articulate it. The party is a success; it, and the novel, end with 'simplicity and peace.'

οὔτοι συνέχθειν, άλλα σθμφιλεῖν ἔφυν

-Sophocles, Antigone, l.523 (Antigone speaking) 

And what was it Edward was unable to say in English? Elizabeth Wyckoff translates as, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love."

 

Nothing of Virginia Woolf's is exactly unknown or ignored. As I noted, you can easily enough find the novel The Pargiters she decided against giving us. But when I first was reading Virginia Woolf, thirty years ago or whatever, I read Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, the Common Reader series, etc., but it didn't occur to me to read The Years. I don't know what bit of received opinion I picked up that I didn't need to read it, but it was wrong. 

 

This was my spin book for Classics Club Spin #44, and a very good spin it was! 

Georgi Gospodinov's Death and the Gardener

"Surely this is why we tell stories. To create another parallel corridor where the world and everything in it are in their rightful places. To divert the story down another furrow when danger and death flood in, just as he would divert the water into another row in his garden."

He, in the sentence above, is the dying father of the narrator; the father liked to garden. The narrator is a middle-aged Bulgarian novelist whose name is only given as Georgi, and that only in the flap description.

Of the four novels of Gospodinov's I've read this easily feels the most autobiographical, but Gospodinov in a headnote insists it is a novel.

The father Dinyo had been diagnosed with fatal lung cancer seventeen years earlier. Rather miraculously at that time it had gone into remission, but now, in the late fall of 2023, it's come roaring back. Georgi starts a handwritten diary to deal with his feelings. When the first set of scans comes back, there's basically no hope:

"Well, at least till Christmas, we'll get together, see the snowdrops spring up, my father said, looking at the doctor with such expectation. Christmas was twenty days away, almost no time at all. 

Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied.

And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard."

Georgi's father was a storyteller himself, not professionally, just in conversation, and when the present becomes too difficult to bear, Georgi recalls one of his father's stories. It's clear Georgi simply likes his father in addition to loving him. Georgi, the writer (and reader,) turns to other writers for consolation. There's Sontag, unsurprisingly, who herself was diagnosed with a cancer that was supposed to kill her, which went away for a number of years, but in the end did return; also Montaigne, various stoics, Borges. Homer, and here as well, is a frequent touchstone for Gospodinov.

There are a few markers this is a novel. Gaustine, a recurring character in Gospodinov's fiction, shows up in this, but mostly to be quoted. Gospodinov uses himself as a character in other novels; The Physics of Sorrow is in some ways a generational family novel, but with an amusing medical/science-fiction-y twist to aid the narration. In the Booker International winner, Time Shelter, the writer Georgi Gospodinov is hired as a consultant for a psychological therapeutic project, because he's good at storytelling; Gaustine, though, makes the plot go in that novel. The distance in this between Georgi the character and Georgi Gospodinov the actual novelist feels much smaller. It's less expansive, less playful than his other novels, but also very touching. 

The Tragedy of X

"Well," said Inspector Thumm suddenly, "plain or fancy, it's a puzzler, and Mr. Bruno thought you'd be interested."

Inspector Thumm of the New York Police and Walter Bruno, the district attorney, call up on Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor, for help in a particularly puzzling murder case. Lane had been a help on a previous case. 

Harvey Longstreet, of the brokerage firm De Witt and Longstreet, was poisoned on the streetcar. He was a travelling with his business partner and other associates, but Longstreet wasn't very popular, and any of them would cheerfully have seen him dead. But how was it done? It was raining and the windows were closed; the streetcar was full after the Longstreet party got on and they didn't make any stops. The poison was fast-acting and everyone who could have done it was there.

The conductor of that street car sends a letter to Thumm saying he had information; his body is found bashed on the head and thrown from a ferry boat. And Longstreet's partner De Witt is murdered on a suburban train. The Commuter Murders! 

After Lane has heard the facts of the first murder, he says he knows who did it, but can't prove it. I read this twenty-five years ago, and I remembered the nature of the clue that Lane sees (though he doesn't disclose it until the end) but had still forgotten who the muderer was. But it is one of the best Queen mysteries, and shows up on best overall mystery lists as well. After reading Drury Lane's Last Case recently, I thought it was time to reread this one. Highly recommended!

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Train. 

Drury Lane's Last Case

    "Sure, sure," said Thumm in a trembling voice. A thousand dollars! Tears of joy gathered in his stony eyes. These were lean days. A thousand dollars for keeping a skinny envelope in his safe!

    "Second," and the man went swiftly to the door, "if I should fail to call on a twentieth, you must not open the envelope except in the presence of Mr. Drury Lane."

 

It's 1933 and Inspector Thumm has retired from the New York police to hang up his shingle as a private investigator. But when he was still with New York's finest he'd solved three earlier cases with the aid of Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor. 

On the 20th of May, Thumm receives the needed phone call, but on the 20th of June, nothing. He prepares to contact Drury Lane and open the envelope.

 

But in the meantime he's got another case. Donoghue, an ex-cop, but now a guard at the Britannic Museum, has disappeared. The same day that he disappeared, someone smashed a display case at the museum. At first it seems nothing has happened, but eventually it's discovered that someone replaced a 1599 printing of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare with a 1606 printing from the same publisher. The 1606 printing is actually rarer, and presumably more valuable.

 

Are the two cases connected? Of course they are!

 

Well, what's in the envelope unsealed in the presence of Drury Lane? It's that note shown on the cover, on Saxon Library stationary, with the mysterious letters 3HS wM. The Saxon Library has just given that 1599 Shakespeare to the Britannic Museum, so there's your connection. But what do those mysterious letters mean? 

 

Actually that was the most disappointing thing about the mystery. Turn the picture upside down--well, since that may be a little difficult unless you're reading this on a phone, let me do it for you. 😉 Ah, now it reads Wm SHe. Since we're dealing with stolen copies of Shakespeare's poetry, you probably can guess the nature of the clue. But Thumm couldn't, and nobody else could either, except maybe Drury Lane, who was coy about what he knew.

 

A second somebody also disappears before a body is found murdered, blown up in a building. First they have to determine just who it is who has been killed, and then who did the killing. The ending was both surprising and satisfactory.

 

The cousins behind the Ellery Queen pseudonym wrote four novels with Drury Lane as the hero detective; they originally came out under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, though eventually they fessed up it was them. The first two--The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y--often show up on lists of all-time greatest mysteries. This isn't quite in the league of those two, but it's still pretty entertaining.

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1933). Book.
 

Quoting Walt Whitman

 

Tears 

 

Tears! Tears! Tears!

In the night, in solitude, tears.

On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,

Tears, not a star shining, dark and desolate,

Moist tears, from the eyes of a muffled head;

O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?

What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?

Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries,

O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!

O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and desperate!

O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,

But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosen'd ocean,

Of tears, tears, tears!

 

-Walt Whitman

 

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe writes and organizes a pageant depicting the history of England at a country house. It was a benefit to fund new lighting for the local church. The pageant was held outside, and the weather mostly cooperated, but it did rain for a bit in the middle. (It is England after all.) After the pageant is over, one of audience says, "While we're waiting, tell me, did you feel when the shower fell someone wept for us all? There's a poem, Tears tears tears, it begins. And goes on Oh then the unloosened ocean...but I can't remember the rest."

 

More than I ever knew. I was somewhat surprised to discover it was Whitman. I almost titled this post Still More Weather, but I'm still a little uncertain whether the poem is about weather, comparing a storm to a person crying, or about a person, calm enough during the day, but crying in the night, and comparing that person to a storm on the shore. Not that one really needs to decide, of course.

 

Post coming soon-ish on Between the Acts. 

 

May Wrapup

Poetry Department

Richard Howard/No Traveller

From 1989, one of Howard's best collections. It opens with a wonderful sequence of imagined letters, set in 1953. Two young gay men, frenemies, are in Paris and they're both writing to somebody Roderick, back home in the U.S. Ivo is gossipy and tart; his great moment is when he sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and and Wallis Simpson. Richard is more serious; he spies the poet Wallace Stevens, and insinuates himself as Stevens' guide to Paris.  

        "To hear her talk, as she does,

about her escape from France,

you would suppose she had swum the Channel,

with her maid between her teeth!"

 

From one of Ivo's letters, this is supposed to be Wallis Simpson talking about Lady Diana Cooper. Meow!

 

Just now typing this, it occurred to me that we have Wallis and Wallace. Deliberate? Oh, probably. It's all made up--Wallace Stevens apparently never got to Paris--but so very convincing. And so very fun.

 

7 Greeks (tr. by Guy Davenport)

 

The seven are Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, and Herondas. Numbers 5 and 6 are philosophers; the others are poets. I think Davenport is a great translator, and his introduction was superb. I do have doubts about translating scraps where all that survives is one word per line. (The same applies to Anne Carson's translation of Sappho.) That's what we've got, but it feels a bit like a romantic preferring the ruins of Tintern Abbey to an actual building.

 

Here's an Archilochos poem in Davenport's translation that made it on to the blog before.

 

Karl Shapiro/Trial of a Poet

 

This is Shapiro's book of 1947. He'd been a clerk in the Army, serving in the Pacific for most of the war; his Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry written from New Guinea, V-Letter and Other Poems, showed up on the blog earlier. This is still quite engaged with his war experience. Like a lot of American poets of that time his poetry is moving from formal to a more free verse; this is interestingly transitional.

 

And one of the poems, one that he uses for the title of the middle section, is 'The Progress of Faust':
 

He was born in Deutschland, as you would expect,

And graduated in magic from Cracow

in Fifteen Five.

 

Which brings us to:

 

 

 

Poetry Department (Faust Subdivision)

 

After reading a bunch of Goethe last summer, and traveling to Germany last fall, I'd been thinking about rereading Faust, which I've read before but not in forever. I read Part I in Kaufmann's translation and Part II in Philip Wayne's. Kaufmann only translated the first part; he says the second part isn't as good. Is that true? Well, it is true that in Philip Wayne's translation the second part isn't as good, but I remain uncertain about the German. Wayne is certainly the inferior English poet.

 

Goethe's house in Weimar from its garden

 

Christopher Marlowe/Doctor Faustus

 

But better than either as an English poet, of course, is Marlowe. I do think that Shakespeare is better at shaking a scene, but when it comes to bombasting out blank verse, Kit strikes me as fully the equal of William. One interesting bit from all the Faust/Goethe reading I've done is that Goethe (and most Germans of that era) first knew the Faust story from puppet shows, and that German puppet shows were based on Marlowe's version carried back over into Germany.

 

Literary Criticism

 

Erich Heller/The Artist's Journey Into the Interior and Other Essays

 

I was reading something about music the previous month--Peter Kalkavage's Music and the Idea of a World--and Kalkavage said one of the best books about Thomas Mann was Erich Heller's Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. My library doesn't have a circulating copy of that, but they did have this. Pretty fascinating stuff. Good on Thomas Mann (as was the Kalkavage) and also on Goethe.

Cooking

 

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi/The King Cookbook

 

King is a restaurant in New York City.  I have to admit to not having cooked anything out of the book yet, but I scanned several pages before I returned it to the library... The recipe for Tunisian Chicken looks very tasty. One of the desserts is likelier to be first, though: our local farmer's market had local strawberries for the first time today, and their recipe for Eton Mess looked particularly yummy.

 

Mystery Department

 

Ovidia Yu/Aunty Lee's Delights

 

The first (2013) of a series of mysteries set in Singapore involving Aunty Lee. She's a recent widow who runs a tea shop, and has a murder on her hands to solve. Enjoyable characters, though I knew who the murderer was practically from the start. And while I would agree with Yu's politics I'm sure, they seemed a little dogmatic in a mystery novel. Still, I'm likely enough to carry on with the series.

 

At one point Aunty Lee says, explaining why she knows somebody convenient to solving the mystery, Singapore is a small town and everybody knows everybody. Pooh, I thought: I've been to Singapore; it's not that small a town. But then when I told a friend who's from Singapore I'd read the novel, she said, oh, yes, my brother went to high school with her, and that she had been a stagehand for one of Yu's plays.

 

Literary Novels

 

Four novels from Canadian publisher Biblioasis made it into this post.  The real find of those I felt was Alice Chadwick's Dark Like Under.

 

Richard Hell/Godlike

 

This takes the romance of French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and translates it to 1970s New York City. I somehow missed it when it first came out in 2005, but it's recently been reissued by New York Review Books. I listened to a lot of Television and Voidoids back in the day.

 

Richard Hell came to Toronto's Appel Salon at the downtown library. It was a pretty good author event. Surprisingly for a seminal punk musician who took Hell for his stage name, he was a pretty genial guy. Unsurprisingly he's a bit hard of hearing. He said after his first novel had been taken as nothing more than thinly disguised biography, he decided to write about homosexual French poets for his second novel; then nobody would think this one autobiographical. Ha. He still gets told, I didn't know you were gay. (He's not.) But it is quite believable, and some of the drug-taking may have autobiographic elements, though he's supposed to have straightened up since.

 

Sent me off to read some Verlaine poetry. 

 

Comics

 

Quino/Mafalda

 

An Argentine comic strip about a little girl and her friends. The whole run (1964-1973) is being issued in an English translation by Frank Wynne in five volumes. This was the first and it came out last year; the second later will appear later this year. Quino only ended it because he felt it safer to flee the country. They're pretty great.

 

All in all a pretty good month's worth of reading. 

 

For the Commonplace Book 

 

"He [Caspar David Friedrich] was probably the first European painter to whom it happened that a picture of his was hung upside down." 

-- Erich Heller

 

"I don't see why/people can't look things up, I always do." 

-- Richard Howard's 'Love Which Alters" (voicing Proust)

 

"And yet he himself did not seem to think as a matter of free choice, but rather yielded philosophy as a cow yields milk--in helpless bondage to a dispensation of Nature." 

-- Erich Heller (of Hegel)

 

Mephistopheles: "I am the spirit that negates."

Mephistopheles: "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."

--Faust, Part I, l. 1338, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: I am too old to be content to play

Too young to be without desire

 

Faust: Ich bin zu alt, um nur zu spielen

Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein

-Faust, Part 1, l. 1546-7, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: A petty case of paltry legacies

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. i, l. 27

 

(I feel like somebody needs to write a mystery novel with that as the title.) 

 

Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. iii, l. 75

 

One wrong will not balance against another: to be honorable and just is our only defense agains men without honor or justice.

-Diogenes 39, English by Guy Davenport

(Why does this one seem especially relevant?)

Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race you break into a burst of speed.

-Diogenes 124, English by Guy Davenport

 

The books still around the house

 

How was your month of reading?

Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full

 

George Glenn, an Irish shepherd, has been found dead in his pasturage with a spade driven through his chest. Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill, and possibly the world, says, "I think we ought to find out what kind of human. We owe old George that. If a fierce dog took one of our lambs he always tried to find the culprit. Anyway, he was our shepherd. No one had a right to stick a spade in him. That's wolfish behavior."

Turns out there's a suitable list of suspects: an earlier unsolved murder in the village, the drug trade passing through since Glennkill is on the coast, George had a complicated love life. The elements of a decent mystery story are there.

The gimmick, of course, is the sheep, and when I got the book from the library, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to read it. There are a number of ways it could have veered off into ridiculousness. But it does pretty well. The sheep still feel sheep-like, and the different point of view is fun. In fact, if you were looking for an easy-reading, but pretty perfect example of defamiliarization, this would do nicely. 

The sheep also fill the Watson role in an interesting way. Watson sees and fails to understand; it's important to keep the story hidden; the sheep, who live with humans, see them pretty closely and quite often fail to understand the things humans do. (How can they not smell that!) 

It's my visit to Ireland for the year...

 

...but the novel orignally came out in German in 2005, and was translated by the late, great Anthea Bell.  I'm not sure now where I saw mention of the book, but there's a movie version just come out titled The Sheep Detectives, so I'm sure it had something to do with that.

More Weather

#315

He fumbles at your Soul

As Players at the Keys

Before they drop full Music on --

He stuns you by degrees --

Prepares your brittle Nature

For the Ethereal Blow

By fainter Hammers -- further heard --

Then nearer -- Then so slow --

Your Breath has time to straighten --

Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --

Deals -- One -- imperial -- Thunderbolt --

That scalps your naked Soul --

 

When Winds take Forests in their Paws --

The Universe -- is still --

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

It's possible thunderstorm weather for us, sticky, though now there's a breeze picking up.  Fainter Hammers have indeed been further heard. So far not any nearer. It's still possible any actual rain will blow right past us.

 

Emily Dickinson, of course, didn't title her poems with numbers--they had no titles--and the numbers I use come from the Thomas H. Johnson edition of 1955. It's popular and it's what I have. He numbers the poems in the order he believes they were composed. Last week's poem was number #316, and he assigns them both to 1862. Assuming his dating is right, she was working out a theme at the time. And just what was the weather like in Amherst in June of 1862?

The Wind

 

#316

The Wind didn't come from the Orchard -- today --

Further than that ---

Nor stop to play with the Hay --

Nor joggle a Hat --

He's a transitive Fellow -- very --

Rely on that --

 

If He leave a Bur at the Door

We know He has climbed a Fir --

But the Fir is Where -- Declare --

Were you ever there?

 

If He brings Odors of Clovers --

And that is His business -- not Ours --

Then He has been with the Mowers --

Whetting away the Hours

To sweet pauses of Hay --

His Way -- of a June Day --

 

If He fling Sand, and Pebble --

Little Boys Hats -- and Stubble --

With an occasional Steeple --

And a hoarse "Get out of the way, I say,"

Who'd be the fool to stay?

Would you -- Say --

Would you be the fool to stay?

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

This just seemed to fit the season. The wind frequently leaves Bur/pine cones on our doorstep, though I moved this one up a couple of steps to get the door in. We know where those come from: there's a giant pine tree in our front yard, so I Declare I have been there. Our backyard Orchard is two apples and a pear--none of which bear much fruit, alas, too shady and too many squirrels--but if we get blossom smells, which we did last night, it's from the lilac bushes of our neighbors to the north.

 

The Mowers have been busy this season, and we get plenty of Clover smell, too. So far--fortunately--no occasional Steeple has landed in our front yard, though the Anglican church is only a block away...

 

 

A Biblioasis Bender

 

Biblioasis is a small Canadian publisher and bookshop based in Windsor, Ontario. One of their successes--so much so she's moved on to Knopf in the meantime--is Anakana Schofield, who came to Toronto's main library for an event on Thursday. I was thinking about reading/rereading some of hers, and that got me to look at the Biblioasis website. Why look at all those books I hadn't otherwise noticed!

Anakana Schofield/Martin John

I had passed on this one when it first came out in 2015. Martin John is a OCD serial sexual abuser, living in London, England. Now such a novel can either be good or bad, right? If it's bad why are you reading it? But if it's good, you've just spent 300 pages (in this case) inside the head of a seriously unpleasant person. I did think this was quite good, but it's written in a close third person, and there's no escape. The back cover says it's 'darkly comic,' and so it is, but maybe not funny enough? (Though how could such a thing be all that funny.) Certainly sometimes novels like this work, are even important--Notes from the Underground, Lolita--but in any case you have to be in a mood to read them. 

Anakana Schofield/Malarky

Malarky has got some darkness, too, but more plain humour. Philomena, Phil, often just known as 'Our Woman', is living on a not very successful cattle farm in Ireland. She learns two things: her husband is having an affair with a woman she labels Red the Twit, and her youngest and only son, Jimmy, is gay. She doesn't use the words, but there's a sexual revolution going on, and maybe she should take part, too! She seduces a traveling salesman her own age and then a lonely security guard, handsome and younger, who has emigrated from Syria. But can a middle-aged Irish woman from a small town really join the sexual revolution? Maybe not.

The novel occurs in a couple of time streams, and Schofield writes in a softened Irish dialect:

    "Get out and about a bit, my husband urged me, go in to town, have a look at the shops. I lived alone then with my husband. If you're wondering I have three children, though now I have only two and no husband neither...

    It was the second time my husband instructed me on that day. The shops, to the male, ever the solution to the glowering female, but in this instance they were no use whatsoever for unbinding me from misery."

The language is fun. The time shifts make it a little tricky--Schofield is often labelled an experimental novelist--but this wasn't especially difficult, and the shifts are well-signaled.

What I hadn't realized until this reading is that Martin John and Bina (the main character of her third novel) both appear in this volume, making the three a sort of loose trilogy.

Her new novel--I'm currently number 38 on the hold list--her fourth, Library of Brothel, sounds interesting. Since they bought 45 copies, I might even see it pretty soon. At the Appel Salon event, she was fun: lively and thoughtful both, and while she lives in Canada now, I wonder how long it's been, because she still has a strong Irish accent, which is just one of the best ways to hear English spoken.

Ivana Sajko/Love Novel

Ivana Sajko/Every Time We Say Goodbye

 

Two novellas by a contemporary Croatian writer. Love Novel is about a married couple in an unnamed EU country; it's 'love in late capitalism' according to the back of the book. She's an underemployed actress; he wants to write. They're not poor by African standards, but they're poor by modern European standards. Will their marriage survive?

 

I thought this was strong, and I might say something more after I've read Every Time We Say Goodbye.

 

Ray Robertson/Estates Large and Small

 

Ray Robertson is a Canadian writer. I've read a couple of his novels before, but his more recent work seems to be non-fiction on popular music (a long time interest of his) and aging (and aren't we all more interested in that as time goes by...) None of which I've read. This novel from 2022 had slipped past my notice.

 

Phil (could there be a Biblioasis pattern here?) runs a small used-book store. Business has been getting worse, and during the pandemic, he decides a bricks-and-mortar store no longer makes sense. He hires a service to setup his eStore; Cameron, a young woman confined to a wheelchair after an car accident, organizes the website; he hires his nephew to enter in the books. There was a wife, but she's long gone. He smokes dope and listens to Grateful Dead board tapes.

 

Phil is still buying books from estates (large and small). Mostly they're husbands who collected, and widows who decide to sell, but at one home with a good collection of interesting and saleable books, Phil tells the woman something conventional, I'm sorry for your loss, but it turns out she's the one dying, stage four lung cancer, and it's time for death-cleaning. But wouldn't you want your books, at least until... They work something out.

 

At first I thought this novel was just a little too low-key and short on event, but I came around. (You see the possibility of the Cameron-nephew romance, right?)  It's certainly not a thriller, but I now think it may be the best of Robertson's novels. (At least of the ones I've read.)

 

Alice Chadwick/Dark Like Under

 

This was the real discovery for me. I hadn't heard about it at all. It's a day in the life of an English public school (that's private for North Americans) in the 1980s. The school is in some unnamed small town--one of its students is from a farming family. The students are told to look down upon students from the other (public if you're a North American) school, but our story's school is hardly Eton or Rugby. Two main things happen at the start of that day, just after midnight.

 

Robin is seen leaving a party with Jonah, Tin's (Thomasin's) boyfriend.  Tin is good-looking, somewhat damaged--her mother committed suicide when she was a kid--and trouble. Robin worships Tin, and Tin doesn't actually treat Jonah very well, but Tin still wants him.

 

But also that night, popular teacher Mr. Ardennes died. He was the leader of the school faculty's liberal faction; the principal Gomme won't stand for any infractions at all, such as being in the hall without a hall pass, or refusing to wear the school blazer on a hot day. We gradually learn that Mr. Ardennes committed suicide and that Robin and Jonah were the last ones to see him alive.

 

This was Alice Chadwick's debut novel and it came out last year. It's possible the novel had too many characters for 330 pages, but I thought it was a pretty remarkable debut, and a very good read.

 

Biblioasis isn't just novels, though!

 

They have a nice line in contemporary formal poetry, something I like, and I just pulled all those off the shelf for their photo op, after posting a poem of Alexandra Oliver's earlier this week. Pino Colluccio has also been on the site once, though not from this book.

 

Do you read books just because of the press? Do you have particular publishers you like?

 

 

 

Template for a Conversation With a Single Friend (rondeau)

Template for a Conversation With a Single Friend

I'll call you back when Junior is in bed

(addressed to Isa/Janet/Winifred).

My hands are full of turkey parts and string;

I know you want to talk about the thing

that happened at the staff retreat with Ted.

 

I have to see the kids are bathed and fed.

Of course I'd rather talk to you instead.

I'm sure he doesn't view it as a fling--

I'll call you back.

 

I'm sure he only means to clear his head.

You can't expect a man to go to bed

with someone from the office and then ring.

You have a lot to give. Stop hollering,

stop saying that you wish that you were dead.

I'll call you back.

 

-Alexandra Oliver

 

I pulled this book off my shelf and was browsing through when I saw this witty rondeau. Having posted Leigh Hunt's half a rondeau, Jenny Kiss'd Me, not so long ago, when I saw this, I thought that's the ticket. Though the title poem is awfully good, too, and well, a whole bunch of the others as well. The book won the Pat Lowther award for best book by a female Canadian poet in 2014.

 

Who exactly is it that's hollering? I'm voting for Junior, with the narrator carrying on two conversations at once, but I suppose it could be Janet.

 

Alexandra Oliver is a contemporary Canadian poet.

 

And why did I have the book off the shelf? Consider this a teaser for a longer post on Ontario publisher Biblioasis... 

 

The Termite

 

The Termite

Some primal termite knocked on wood

And tasted it, and found it good,

And that is why your Cousin May

Fell through the parlor floor today.

 

-Ogden Nash

 

OK, obviously feeling a bit lazy this evening, but if you didn't already know the poem, you should! And if you do, it likely amuses you to be reminded, right?

 

Good Intentions is Ogden Nash's book of 1942. 

It's Spin Win Sunday!

Hubert and Gumby are crowded round for the results:

It's number 9, which means Virginia Woolf's The Years. An excellent choice. The spin gods have a certain liking for Virginia--this is the second time they've landed on her; the first was A Room of One's Own. 

Do you know this one? Do I have a treat in front of me? 

Did you spin and did you get something good? 

The Ars Poetica of Paul Verlaine

 

Ars Poetica

Music first and foremost! In your verse

Choose those meters odd of syllable,

Supple in the air, vague, flexible,

Free of pounding beat, heavy or terse.

 

Choose the words you use--now right, now wrong--

With abandon: when the poet's vision

Couples the Precise with Imprecision,

Best the giddy shadows of his song:

 

Eyes veiled, dark with mystery,

Sunshine trembling in the noonday glare,

Starlight, in the tepid autumn air,

Shimmering in the night-blue filigree!

 

For nuance, not Color absolute,

Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue!

Nuance! It alone is what lets you

Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!

 

Shun all cruel and ruthless Railleries;

Hurtful Quip, lewd Laughter, that appall

Heaven, Azure-eyed, to tears; and all

Garlic-stench scullery recipes!

 

Take vain Eloquence and wring its neck!

Best you keep your Rhyme sober and sound,

Lest it wander, reinless and unbound--

How far? Who can say?--if not in check!

 

Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?

What deaf child, what Black of little wit

Forged with the worthless bauble, fashioned it

False and hollow-sounding to the file?

 

Music first and foremost, and forever!

Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,

Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flying

Off to other skies and loves, wherever.

 

Let your verse be aimless chance, delighting

In good-omened fortune, sprinkled over

Dawn's wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover...

All the rest is nothing more than writing.

 

-Paul Verlaine (tr. Norman R. Shapiro)

 

 

I've been reading Richard Hell's novel Godlike, which retells the romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but setting the story in New York City in the 1970s instead of Paris of the 1870s. Pick your drug of choice: absinthe or something more modern. The novel is told from the point of view of the Verlaine character after the death of Rimbaud, with flashbacks to when the affair was at its hottest.

I didn't really know the poetry of Paul Verlaine at all, so I looked up some poems on-line to see what they were like. 

Richard Hell is coming to the main Toronto library to discuss the book. Will he sing a few bars from Blank Generation? Probably not, alas, he's supposed to be retired from performing music.

 

 

Classics Club Spin #44

 

Mr. Dickens ponders the possibilities of chance.

Yes! It's time for a Classics Club spin. You know the rules, but what are the books I'm ready to read based on the dictates of chance? Well, it's actually a pretty quiet time for me over the next month and a half, so I'm allowing a few of the longer choices on this list. I also prioritized ones that weren't on my last list. So here we go...

1.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

2.) Elizabeth Gaskell/Wives and Daughters

3.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

4.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

5.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

6.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

7.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Virginia Woolf/The Years

10.) Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

11.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

12.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger

13.) Halldor Laxness/Salka Valka

14.) Diogenes Laertius/Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

15.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

16.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

17.) Nazami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

18.) Lucan/The Civil War

19.) Nikos Kazantzakis/Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

20.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

 

I'm guessing the Kazantzakis and the Diogenes Laertius are the difficult ones on that list, but that's OK, I should have time. Which look good to you?

 

Sunday, May 17th, will reveal all. 

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

(in Springfield, Illinois)

 

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down, 

 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.

 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,

A famous high top-hat, and a plain worn shawl

Make him the quaint, great figure that men love,

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

 

He cannot sleep upon his hill-side now.

He is among us:--as in times before!

And we who toss and lie awake for long

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.

 

His head is bowed, he thinks on men and kings.

Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?

Too many peasants fight, they know not why,

Too many homesteads in black terror weep.

 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.

He sees the dreadnoughts scouring every main.

He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now

The bitterness, the folly and the pain.

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn

Shall come;--the shining hope of Europe free:

The league of sober folk, the Worker's Earth,

Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea.

 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon his hill again?

-Vachel Lindsay

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet who was born and died in Springfield. This is from his book The Congo and Other Poems of 1914. 

 

One wonders if he's walking again. 

 

The young Abraham Lincoln reading by firelight (at midnight?) is a pen-and-ink drawing by my grandfather. 

 

 

 

Nicholas Blake's The Worm of Death (#1961Club)

 

Dr. Piers Loudron is a successful and well-to-do doctor living in Greenwich, the eastern end of London. 

Nigel Strageways (our series detective) and his partner Clare Massinger have just moved to Greenwich. They're invited over to meet their new neighbours the Loudrons. Dr. Piers' wife has passed, but there are also his adult children, three sons (one adopted) and a daughter.

Dr. Piers disappears on a foggy night. The Loudron children approach Strangeways for advice. A week later his body is found floating in the Thames. Both wrists have been slashed.

Suicide? But the wrists are slashed in such a way that suicide is unlikely, and if it was suicide how did the body get into the river? (As the cover suggests, a slashed-wrist suicide often takes place in the bath.) And just in case you were inclined to the suicide theory, Dr. Piers' daughter-in-law is strangled halfway through the book.

All four of the children have plausible motives to murder their father as does as the daughter's boyfriend, whom Dr. Piers didn't approve of. Strangeways hints he knows who did it pretty early (and I kind of did, too) but Blake does a pretty successful job of keeping us on our toes. I've had mixed results with the Strangeways series, but I thought this one a pretty good entry.

It was fun as a 1961 book because it makes good use of the old East End of London, which, of course is all changed now:

     "When he [Strangeways] got home, Clare kissed him, 'My goodness you've been drinking port.'

     'Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs." 

The Isle of Dogs isn't the sort of place old tarts live anymore I think.

 

My original list of 1961 candidates is here. 

Nicholas Blake is a pen name for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, probably better known now as the father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1961). Dead body. 

Some Previous 1961 Reads

Two books from 1961 have made it on to the blog before, both by Erle Stanley Gardner. One was a Perry Mason story, The Case of the Spurious Spinster:

The other was a Cool and Lam tale, Shills Can't Cash Chips:

It being Gardner, those two weren't even all the books he wrote in 1961, but I thought both were pretty good entries in their series.

Also in the mystery department, but not on my blog, The Wycherly Woman is one of the best of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. 

I've seen lots of people remark how many great choices there were for 1961 and so, of course, some things will be neglected. But there were two I read before I started blogging that I felt were kind of masterpieces when I read them and they didn't seem to be on anybody's radar, so I thought I'd drag them in:

Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White (1912-1990) was the Australian novelist who won the Nobel in 1973. In his Riders in the Chariot--in spirit the chariot is that of Elijah--four otherwise unrelated individuals in suburban Sydney are marked by mystical experience as hidden saints in a world of prejudice and contempt. Can an Aboriginal artist, an evangelical washerwoman, a childlike heiress, and an Auschwitz survivor redeem this world? 

A clue: in the epigraph to the novel, White quotes William Blake's idea of Isaiah speaking, "...the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for the consequences, but wrote..."

The Death and Life of Great American Cities 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a writer and activist on urban issues. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her major work. It's full of surprising and brilliant insights: she's a theorist of urban planning who quite often thinks too much planning is bad for cities. I have a couple of pages from an old New Yorker tucked in my copy and in it she says of the city, "...a place full of hope and expectation, and this is has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy." Her book isn't Theory with a capital T. It's often said she had a novelist's eye, and it's true: the book is wonderfully readable.

Jacobs cut her teeth as an activist saving Washington Square in New York City from an expressway. She moved to Toronto in 1968, and did the same for us here by helping to squelch the Spadina expressway. The last thirty-five years of her life she lived in a house shown on her Wikipedia page:

  

And the last four years of her life, she was my neighbour. (We live on the opposite side of the street about eight houses up.) In any halfway decent sort of weather I used to see her sitting on the porch--"Eyes on the street" was an important concept for her--but I never had the nerve to introduce myself.

What other 1961 books would you have liked to see?

 Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Symptoms of Love (#1961Club)

 

Symptoms of Love

Love is a universal migraine.

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.

 

Symptoms of true love

Are leanness, jealousy,

Laggard dawns;

 

Are omens and nightmares--

Listening for a knock,

Waiting for a sign:

 

For a touch of her fingers

In a darkened room,

For a searching look.

 

Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such grief

At any hand but hers?

 

-Robert Graves

 

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was an English poet who conveniently wrote a short book called More Poems 1961. What could be better for a year club poetry post, I ask you?  😉

 

 

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I don't actually have that first edition shown above, of course. Allow Gumby to introduce the beat-up paperback I do have:

 

 

John Hawkes' The Lime Twig (#1961Club)

 "And in gloom, with the bells stroking and the wipers establishing the uncomfortable rhythm of the hour, the two wet men withdrew to the cars and in slow procession quit the sooty stables in Highland Green, drove separately through vacant city streets to uncover the particulars of this crime."

In Aldington, there's a horse race, the Golden Bowl. William Hencher lures his landlords, Michael and Margaret Banks, into a scheme to run a dodgy horse. It doesn't work out. Two detectives have just been led to Hencher's body in a stable, seemingly kicked to death by the horse. Things ended no better for Michael and Margaret Banks. 

It's a crime story, but what I've quoted above is the very end of the novel. We have no particular reason to believe that the detectives will solve the crime.

The novel is divided into eight sections plus a prologue; each is prefaced by excerpts from the column of (fictional) sports writer Sidney Slyter. The prologue takes place during World War II when Hencher's house in London is bombed and his mother killed; later after the Banks have bought the restored house, Hencher takes one of the flats and starts the scheme.

The American John Hawkes (1925-1998) is usually labeled an experimental novelist. But as you can see from above the prose isn't Joycean-level difficult. It's not plotless. There are characters that feel real enough, even if they're generally objectionable--half of them gangsters, and the other half would-be crooks. The Lime Twig was his fourth novel, and was his breakout.

It's a violent story, though if you read Andrew Vachss or the Jack Reacher novels of today, it may not seem all that violent. But sometimes that's the way: something that seemed outrageous in 1961 comes to seem middle of the road later on. But I'd read another Hawkes before another Vachss or Child.

Hawkes seems to have been the anti-Hemingway: he wrote his rather violent novels, but in this interview aired on PBS, he says, "I like the idea of the author as an ordinary person." No need to hunt lions or go to war for him.

He taught writing at Brown for most of his professional career. He and his wife and kids would go every three years or so to the South of France where he'd write a new novel. He seems rather a nice guy for such a violent story... 😉

It's 1961 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting. 

My original list of candidates is here.