Doris Lessing’s “If the Old Could…”

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Doris Lessing published the novel If the Old Could… under the pseudonym Jane Somers. She wanted to be reviewed on her own merit rather than as Doris Lessing. Somers’ two novels were well-reviewed: one feckless reviewer compared her to Barbara Pym. (There is no resemblance.) No one connected Somers with Lessing, except the editor Robert Gottlieb in New York, who asked, “Who are you kidding?”

I think this is one of her best novels, pseudonymous or not.  Certainly it is a long way from her experimental works The Golden Notebook or The Four-Gated City, and it should appeal to non-Lessing fans. Even readers of romance will find something here.

As it happens, Jane is a writer of romantic novels as well as a high-powered editor of a women’s magazine, Lilith. The fairy tale romance begins when she is on her way to work. Jane stumbles, not “minding the gap,” as she gets off the tube, and falls into Richard’s arms.  The next day, he is waiting for her at the tube stop: he tells her he hoped he would see her again.

Thus a romantic idyll begins, the kind one dreams about when one is young.  They are enchanted with each other. They spend whole days together, sitting in coffee shops or bars, chatting or being silent together, walking all over London, exploring parks, holding hands, sometimes embracing, but they don’t kiss, nor do they have sex. 

And that is partly because of their living circumstances.  They don’t share much about themselves, because Richard insists it will ruin everything.  (As it turns out, he has more to conceal than she does.) Jane’s incompetent “punk”niece, Kate, has moved in with her and rarely leaves the apartment, except to visit some squatters, who on one occasion trash Jane’s apartment.  Jane can hardly bring Richard to her bedroom with unhealthy Kate in the next room. And Richard’s daughter Kathleen is so infatuated with him that she stalks the couple. An unhealthy niece and an equally unhealthy daughter, Kate and Kathleen. The dysfunctional family of the 20th century may not have changed much.

Actually, Jane’s work also interferes with the idyll.  Jane must spend hours every day on her clothes, hair, and makeup in order to present herself as perfect in the office at Lilith magazine.  She is 50, and her beauty has waned, but she is still the most glamorous woman in the room.

And Jane has other commitments.  She is a volunteer assigned to visit a cranky old woman. Annie. Annie refuses to shower or use the toilet: the home help must wash her with a sponge, and Annie insists on using the commode.  Lessing describes Annie’s lonely, dragging days.  Even when she discovers that one of he home visitors is cheating her, and steals money from her purse, Annie is so desperate for company that she begs her to stay and have a cup of tea.

 Gradually, the couple tell each other about their private lives.  It’s not a case of “if the old could…” – Jane is only 50 – though Richard is older, perhaps 60 – it is a case of family obligations.  Richard has been married for 36 years to the same women, and has three children, and one of them has Down syndrome. Jane feels hurt when she learns of his long marriage. It is a stabbing pain.

And Jane begins to dream about her husband Freddy every night  She realizes that she never gave him what he deserved, that he was very much second-place in her life, and that she hadn’t loved him enough to give him all the care and love he needed when he was dying of cancer.

So Jane falls in love with Richard to learn about Freddy?  That is the question Lessing’s heroines would ask in one of her experimental novels.  It is a question I also ask.

Here is a paragraph that will please romance lovers:

“We were both of us filled with a wicked, wild racing delight, we could not stop smiling when we looked at each other with a frankness which, because it was so natural, was the best of it. He is weathered-handsome, tawny, with grey-blue eyes, not sea eyes like Jill’s, but direct and shrewd.  A handsome man:  what must he have been when he was younger?  And I was thinking how well we were matched physically, and how well we would have been, younger.”

If the Young Could… and If the Old Could... would almost be the same novel.

The Lonely Social Lives of Zoomers

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One cold sub-zero winter day, I spent the morning watching two screwball comedies, Balls of Fire and Harvey, and intended to spend the afternoon rereading Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey. Then my husband intervened.

“Would you like to go cross-country skiing?

The last time I tried to x-country ski, I ran into a tree.  But I do like sitting in the car and watching him ski.  Every time he emerges from the woods, I yell.  “Hurrah!” and remind him  I’ve got cocoa in the car.

Later, after pancakes at a restaurant, he suggests, “You could attend that Zoom meeting today.”

“Hm, maybe.”  A few hours ago it would have seemed like a bad idea, but I was reckless after watching him cross-country skiing.

Sponsored by a Victorian lit group, this Zoom meeting seemed less intimidating than most tech events.   There must have been 100 people there, mostly women, and a handful of men.  We went around the group, and each named his or her favorite Victorian writers. When it was my turn, I named three of the “Mrs.” writers: Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and Mrs. Oliphant.

One woman punched that hands-raised button and was allowed to speak.  “I’ve never heard of them.  How do you spell Oliphant?”

O-l-i-p- ….  It must have sounded like Elephant.

Never fashionable, usually be-jeaned, I love to see what people wear.  At the last minute, I had pulled a black sweater over my Cat Mom t-shirt, though originally I had opted for the Cat Mom look. The men were dead-casual: bearded and uncombed, wearing  boxer shorts and tatty Oxford shirts, or jeans with sweatshirts with University of __ stenciled on the front.  A young woman with flowing hair lounged in sweatpants on a divan: she was drinking wine.  An old woman in a very smart dress and so-called kitten heels drank coffee out of a Jane Austen mug.  A middle-aged woman in ancient Oshkosh overalls clutched a copy of Scenes of Clerical Life. 

I thought we’d be like the Lonely Hearts club, and I’m sure there WERE some lonely people, I among them at times, but this cheered everybody up. At least I hope it did.

Any favorite Zoom events? Technology for fun: that’s my goal.

A Soviet Dog Story:  “Faithful Ruslan”

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This is the saddest dog story you will ever read.

Translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny, Georgi Vladimov’s novel is told from the perspective of Ruslan, a guard dog in a Soviet prison camp. Ruslan has been trained from puppyhood to be violent, to bite, bare his teeth, intimidate prisoners, and round up runaways. And the Gulag labor camps, which housed millions of political prisoners and criminals in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1950s, are Ruslan’s Soviet Union.

Ruslan is in a sense a prisoner, though he does not intuit this. He worships his sadistic master, the only man (or dog!) who pays attention to him.   Unconsciously, Ruslan adopts his master’s attitudes (the dog’s Russian is fluent) and scorns the prisoners who converse seriously about leaving the camp to return to a better life in towns and cities.

And then in the 1950s, Ruslan wakes up one morning to find the camp deserted.  All the guards, dogs, and prisoners are gone, except Ruslan’s master, who drives Ruslan out of the camp to town. Ruslan does not understand that he and his master must be separated forever:  he spends his days searching for his master in town.

Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, writes the excellent introduction to Faithful Ruslan. Adams knows dogs very well:  his novel The Plague Dogs is the story of two dogs who escape an animal testing center.

Adams writes, “For Ruslan, of course, whether man or dog, is a Soviet citizen, an honest, decent fellow (like Boxer in Animal Farm), self-respecting, good-hearted, full of courage, trying his level best to do what he feels is expected of him by those – men? gods? – who must surely know better than himself.”

And certainly I am taken by the idea of Ruslan as a Soviet citizen.  He is loyal to the Gulag system: he doesn’t understand the town.  He is absolutely faithful to his master, and cannot comprehend how other dogs can transfer their affection to new masters.

Thinking of other dogs in literature, I am reminded of Gabriel Oak’s dog, George, in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.  Instead of herding the sheep, George chases the entire flock over a precipice. 

Hardy writes, “As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still under the impression that since he was kept running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better, had… collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.”

As for Ruslan, he has many adventures and eventually is adopted by a kind ex-prisoner.  A small dog, Treasure, befriends him.  When Ruslan is thoroughly beaten up by some men, Treasure licks his wounds and leaves because he expects him to die soon.

“It was, however, Ruslan’s fate that even in his last hour the Service did not leave him. It summoned him at the very moment of his crossing to another shore – calling upon him to make some last response.”

The most loyal of Soviet citizens, a dog, fantasizes while dying about the days when the master would say, “Get him, Ruslan!… Get!”

As I said, the most tragic dog story.

Saving the Nishnabotna River

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I picture myself on the shore of the Nishnabotna River in Red Oak, Iowa, notebook in hand, phone in camera mode.

In March of 2024, the Nishnabotna River was contaminated by 265,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen spilled from a fertilizer plant into a storm ditch after an employee left a valve open.  Thence it flowed into the Nishnabotna, which flowed 60 miles to the point where it converged with the Missouri River, which was then also contaminated. 750,000 fish were killed in the Nishnabotna, the fifth largest fish kill in Iowa.

In the fall of 2026, we are mourning many rivers.  NPR reports that the Rio Grande in  Albuquererque is completely dry, no water at all, due to climate change. . As for Colorado River, it is dry because of  a 36-year drought.  I wonder, Where are people getting their water?

Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 book, Is a River Alive?, explains the concept of rivers as living beings.  On his journeys to three countries he “meets” rivers and converses with scientists and activists.  He writes about the personhood of rivers.   He says that a city council in Sussex in England “has acknowledged the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.”   

I have been assured that the Nishnabotna River will revive. It will take years, and perhaps I’ll visit the river then. By that time, it may be in better shape than the Rio Grande and the Colorado River.

Meanwhile, the state made a settlement with the fertilizer company. It required the company to pay a $50,000 penalty and a $50,000 contribution to a county environmental project

Rereading “The Odyssey”:  Translations and the Film 

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After the release of the new film, The Odyssey, translations of Homer flew out of the bookstores. I read that Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey sold more than a million copies. Yet she distanced herself from the movie in an essay in The London Review of Books.

Every decade there is a popular new translation. In the 1970s and ’80s, it would have been Richmond Lattimore’s, with its pared-down style, then considered closest to the Greek.  And Robert Fagles’  gorgeous, lively translation, published in 1996,  outdid Lattimore’s in beauty of language and poetic style.   And now there is Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, published last year, which was praised by Jorie Graham and Lee Child.

Of course seeing  the film of The Odyssey  – twice –  has inspired me to reread the epic poem (Fagles’ translation).  Before I make a few comments about Book 22, let  me talk about the cast of the movie.

With Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Matt Damon as Odysseus, Samantha Morton as Circe, and Charlize Theron as Calypso, you can hardly go wrong.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope is quiet and dignified, beautiful but beleaguered by the suitors who have moved into the hall. We often see her weaving, to distance herself from the suitors, and when the suitor Antinous invades her space to say he’s on to her, that he knows she unravels her weaving at night, she stands up to him, but is clearly exhausted, knows she has been betrayed by one of her maids. She does not become violent – she needs Odysseus to do the violent part. And in that respect, she is Everywoman, because like Penelope, we are not able to expel intruders from our homes. (And I don’t necessarily mean male intruders. You can talk them out of your space. In my experience, women are much more violent. A psychologist once said that I was terrified of women. I hadn’t thought about it, but it’s true.)

Of course Matt Damon is superb as Odysseus. His interpretation of the role is original, in part based on close reading, His Odysseus is quiet and  observant, shrewd and quick-witted.  It is the almost meditative stillness that sets him apart. He does everything without rushing.  Even after he and his men emerge from the Trojan horse, which he himself had designed,  in order to fight and sack Troy, he pauses on the steps, as if weary, as if he regrets it,  and then he goes on.   There is blood-curdling screaming in the city.

Next time I see this, I’ll take notes on this scene.

And so I just finished Book 22 of my rereading of The Odyssey, when Odysseus finally returns home to kill the suitors. Fagles calls Book 22 “The Slaughter in the Hall.” The opening describes the beginning of the violence that will clear the hall of suitors.

Now stripping back his rags Odysseus master of craft and battle
vaulted onto the great threshold, gripping his bow and quiver
bristling arrows, and poured his flashing shafts before him.
loose at his feet, and thundered out to all the suitors:
"Look - your crucial test is finished, now, at last!
But another target's left that no man's hit before -
we'll see if I can hit it - Apollo, give me glory!"

Everything is action in the opening stanza. There is stripping, vaulting, gripping, pouring, thundering, and hitting.

It is truly slaughter, a holocaust. With the help of his son Telemachus and two servants, Odysseus defeats the suiters in pitched battle. After Odysseus runs out of arrows Telemachus provides other weapons. But I’m simply amazed by the archery scene. The only other archery scene I’ve read is in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. What an archer Odysseus is!

Odysseus will find peace and quiet after the killing, but at what price? Odysseus is a soldier, a retired general, skilled in close combat, a killer of monsters, used to violence. Perhaps he isn’t tired at all. Perhaps I’m the tired reader.. What a violent, grueling book of The Odyssey. But at least he is finally home, where he wanted to be.

Loneliness and Love Charms:  Sophocles’ “The Women of Trachis”

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Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis is seldom read, a little-known tragedy that focuses on a woman’s loneliness and love charms. There is nothing quite like this in Greek literature. The complicated heroine, Deianira, the lonely wife of Heracles, an absent husband, dominates the play, with 946 of the 1278 lines.

Many heroines in Greek tragedy have absent husbands. Clytemnestra in Agamemnon does not grieve for her absent husband: she takes a lover. They murder Agamemnon when he returns from Troy, accompanied by Cassandra, his enslaved concubine.

Deianira is charming and sad, floating and mooning around in front of the house, anxious about Heracles’ future and her own. She has no one to talk to, except the nurse, the messenger, and the chorus, and if they don’t advise her, she wavers, or when she makes decisions, they are bad.

But Deianira has one secret that she may use to get Heracles back. She has a love charm given her by a supernatural being, a centaur.

Perhaps we should all be given love charms, hidden like Deianira’s in a copper urn. Heracles absent-mindedly visits Deianira occasionally, but doesn’t stay long. She is in agony when she learns he is in love with a younger woman. He sacked a city so he could possess this woman. The sacking a city concept would drive all of us mad.

Deianira worships Heracles in theory. As a beautiful young woman, she was accosted by monsters. Heracles defeated lchous, a terrifying river that took three forms, that of a bull, a serpent, and a man with a bull’s face, who was determined to marry her. Later, Heracles kills a centaur who attempted to rape her.

Perhaps Deanira loves monsters, after all.  When the centaur was dying, wounded by one of Heracles’ poisoned arrows, he told her to take blood from his wound, where it was black with serpent’s bile, as a love charm to assure that Heracles “would never look at another woman and and love her more than you.” 

Certainly it is a tempting offer, and it is easy to see why she decides to use the charm. It was there, after all, in the copper urn.

And so it’s time to get out the love charm. She dips a new robe for Heracles in the love charm, and sends it to him as a gift, believing it will bring him back to her.

She chants,

Let him come from there
all desire when the beast’s
inducements, all dipped in persuasion, have melted him.

The robe is dipped in poison. not persuasion, and it melts him. He dies an agonizing death. And before he dies, she commits suicide.

Critics have different views of Deanira. Some believe she is innocent, others that she is a cold-blooded killer, who knew what she was doing when she dipped the robe. It is true that Deanira didn’t worry about the quality of the love charm until after she sent it. She wonders if she was impulsive, if it would hurt him instead. But I also think she was not quite in her right mind. I have seen her dependence on the views of the nurse and the messenger. This is what happens when Heracles isn’t around.

The love charm is hidden, so no one will find it, and it is not a love charm at all.

An Interview with Robert Hellenga, Author of “The Confessions of Frances Godwin”

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Robert Hellenga (1941-2020)

In 2014, Robert Hellenga, a novelist and professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, agreed to an inverview about his novel, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, a woman’s version of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. He was fascinating and one of the most generous writers I have interviewed.

An Interview with Robert Hellenga

Kat: The love of classical literature has shaped the identity of the narrator, Frances, a brilliant Latinist whose translation of Catullus has been accepted for publication. Why did you choose to make Frances a classicist, and is this an integral part of her character?

Robert Hellenga:  I like to use the classical world as a frame of reference. It give us (me, Frances, the reader) a place to stand outside the modern world. Other things being equal I would have gravitated toward a college Greek professor rather than a high school Latin teacher, but I’ve already written a novel about a college Greek professor (The Fall of a Sparrow), so I didn’t want to do that again. I’ve studied Greek and Greek literature, but not much Latin or Latin literature, so I had to work up a “frame of reference” that resonated with me. So I reread Virgil and Catullus. The Aeneid gives us a sense that with the founding of Rome the world has turned a corner, that history has a sense of direction (as opposed to the Greek view that history just goes round in a circle). This is a view that Frances has to abandon at the end, when Father Viglietti tells her that what she needs is no absolution but a grappa and a nap. Catullus is already closer to this view. My wife and I have lived in Catullus’s home town (Verona) and last year we spent six weeks in Rome, so I had a sense of place to draw on in both cases.

Kat: I’m always interested in novels with Midwestern settings, because I’ve lived most of my life in the Midwest; yet there seem to be few Midwestern novels. Were you making making a radical decision by setting a novel in Galesburg, Illinois?

Robert Hellenga:  The Midwest has been a theme in all my novels, generally in contrast to Italy. Our family spent a year in Florence in 1982-83 and it was a turning point in our lives. It’s hard for me to write a novel in which no one goes to Italy, although in Snakewoman of Little Egypt, the protagonist, Sunny, goes to France rather than Italy. Like the classical world, Italy offers a place to stand outside the Midwest, but in every case my Midwestern characters hold their own against their Italian counterparts. They love Italy, but the Midwest is home. In The Fall of a Sparrow, Woody is in love with a wonderful woman from Bologna. He wants her to move to Illinois; she wants him to stay in Italy. In a later novel, The Italian Lover, the same thing happens again, with a different wonderful woman.

The decision to set Confessions in Galesburg was a conscious decision but not a hard one. I didn’t need a big city (Chicago) for this novel; I didn’t need a big university, as I did in Snakewoman, which is set in a fictional town very near Galesburg. Galesburg has the last remaining site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate; it’s got Carl Sandburg’s old house. It’s got a great college, which I taught for many years. I didn’t need anything else.

Kat: Frances’s intense pain over the tragic decision of her daughter Stella, a poet in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to live with the dangerous ex-con, Jimmy, is intensely, disturbingly realistic. How were you able to portray the psychology of this fraught mother-daughter relationship?

Robert Hellenga:  As I’ve often said, “A man with three daughters will never run out of stories.” My wife and I have never been seriously at odds with our daughters, but I think that all a father has to do it tap into his fear-fulfillment fantasies to come up with someone like Jimmy.
At an early stage of Confessions my agent said that he couldn’t understand what had happened to Stella to make her such a piece of work. “Abuse” would have provided a convenient explanation–the dark secret that eventually emerges–but that was out of the question for me. So I gave Stella a long history of making bad choices about men, a history going back to high-school bad boy Howard Banks, and later on the fact that she enters into a stable lesbian relationship with Ruthy suggests that maybe her sexual orientation was the problem all along, but I didn’t want to make too much of this. I just wanted it to be part of the frame, and Frances feels the same way.

Kat: Did any writers influence you in the writing of The Confessions of Frances Godwin?

Robert Hellenga:  I keep going back to the same sources for inspiration: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, and Gail Godwin’s Finishing School, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and now, Flora. I didn’t exactly name Frances after Gail Godwin, but I sort of did. I started out with a name I liked, Frances Cochrane, but (a) I’d already used that name and (b) I didn’t want to suggest an Irish theme. I liked the way “Godwin” hints at a relationship with God (= “God-friend” in Old English).

Kat: What are you reading now and who are your favorite authors?

Robert Hellenga:  Confessions was one of two novels assigned for a religious-studies course at Beloit College. The other was Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. I read a library copy and liked it so much I bought my own copy. Right now I’m rereading Kent Haruf’s Benediction and Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.

I’ll probably reread Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteredge and Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, while I’m working on a new novel, and Anna Karenina too, though I’ve read it so often that I tend just to dip into in when I need a shot of writing adrenaline.

Alice Adams: Listening to Billie

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Many years ago, I reviewed Alice Adams’ novel,  Second Chances, for The San Francisco Review of Books (a defunct little magazine).   I was already a a fan of Adams, a San Francisco writer, so I was thrilled when they sent me the book.

And then I went back and read her early novels. One of my favorites is Listening to Billie (1975). The heroine, Eliza, is a Billie Holiday fan.  The novel begins at a club where Eliza and her boyfriend have gone to hear Billie sing. Throughout the novel, Eliza listens to Billie Holiday records.

“Billie is late – of course, she is always late – but the crowd in this small packed rooom is not resigned:  people are restless, and tense.  There is a lot of lighting of cigarettes, looking at watches, loud orders for more drinks.” 

Adams (1926-1999) is a graceful writer, underrated, seldom read anymore.  Her work is consistently absorbing, usually set in San Francisco, and her female characters are complex,  literary, and sexy.  What I like about Eliza is that she is so relaxed about sex.  She loves men, but is not looking for a husband. 

Adams’ description of the workplace is also spot-on.  Eliza, a poet, works part-time as a secretary at a doctor’s office. The office politics are strained: Kathleen, the supervisor, rages against men. Her boyfriend has moved to L.A., and she knows he is cheating on her. She is also verbally abusive to Miriam, a young Black junior secretary, who lives in the ghetto, gets  high a lot, and briefly considers becoming a prostitute.

Adams’ characters are so well-depicted that we can see them vividly, hear Billie Holiday’s music, and feel the anxiety that comes of being a woman on her own. It is also an unusual novel, in that the heroine is so independent, though she worries that her many casual relationships with men mean she is promiscuous.

I loved this well-written novel, and I discovered that it was not just a women’s novel, when Tony, the author of the blog Tony’s Book World (we miss him), reviewed this and some of Adams’ other books.

Medea and the Labradoodle

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“Hate me.  But I tire of your barking bitterness.” – Euripides’ Medea

If you frequent the coffeehouse at the corner of X and Y,  you probably know the owner’s adorable Labradoodle.  That Labradoodle is one of my closest friends. It sits by my feet and stares at me with love.  That is how it demands a tip – half a scone will do – and then it yaps in sympathy, whatever I say.  

It’s one of those days when I quote The Medea from memory:  “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” 

 I was a naive reader when I first perused Euripides’ Medea.  I thought she was a feminist! Even when I read it in Greek, I may have regarded Medea as a feminist. Many feminists are monsters, of course: there is a tendency to be simplistic and to think in meaningless cliches. Medea, however, is a murderer.  She cut up bits of her brother and threw them into the sea to slow down her pursuers; and when Jason left her for a princess, Medea killed that unlucky woman with the gift of a  poisoned dress; the king was killed accidentally when he tried to tear the poisoned dress off his daughter; and Medea killed her two sons for the ultimate revenge on Jason.

She is an eloquent politician.  In Euripides’s tragedy, she persuades the chorus to empathize with her.  Of the three tragedians, Euripides is the one who most sympathetically portrays women, and that is why this play can be read and read again, with different shattering interpretations each time.