Honorary Ph.D.s: Ovid, Reference Books, & Me

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One day in April, I began to chant, “Ph.D., Ph.D.” (The chant sounds like a cheer at a sporting event:  “Pee Aitch Dee, Pee Aitch Dee!”)  It was cuter than it was annoying, I think, but you’d have to ask Captain Nemo.  

In our sleepy town, where nothing much happens, it is the height of excitement to reread Ovid’s two elegies about abortion (one is pro-Choice, the other anti-Choice), Horace’s Ars Poetica (“The Art of Poetry”), and Seneca’s charming Letters on stoicism. (N.B. You can read my essay on “Ovid on His Mistress’s Abortion” here.)

And then I thought: Why not get a Ph.D.? I have a master’s in classics, have taught Latin at the college and high-school levels, and have avidly read classical literature for decades.  The problem is location. The nearest classics program is 200 miles away. And the one I want to attend is 500 miles away.

Captain Nemo got practical. “Graduate school was not what I’d call fun.” he said dryly.

Indeed, I remember not sleeping for two years. (I mean, not sleeping much.)

And so I’ve shelved the Ph.D. fantasy. And now the captain carries my Latin “library” (a shopping bag full of Latin reference books) when we want to get out of the house and work. The reference books are heavy, and held together with duct tape.

You’re not a serious Latinist if your books aren’t held together with duct tape!

By the way, did you know that super-talented celebrities get honorary Ph.D.’s? I wasn’t aware of this, and I’m sure they deserve it, but they don’t have to carry a Latin library in their Barnes and Noble shopping bags! 🙂

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.  This neglected classic, which I have read and reread over the years, is one of my favorite books.  I prefer Stafford’s novels but the short stories are also elegant and dazzling.  Every sentence is so exquisite that one must sometimes pause to admire.  And she is very witty:  I especially love the comical stories.  The stories are mostly set in Colorado, where she grew up, and Boston and Manhattan, where she lived as an adult.

 Stafford’s most famous short story, “The Interior Castle,” is autobiographical.  Stafford and/or the heroine, Pansy, record the intensity of pain after her nose is smashed in a car accident.  (Stafford’s own face was smashed in a car accident caused by the drunk driving of poet Robert Lowell, and she  needed six facial surgeries to reconstruct it.) In “The Interior Castle,” Pansy horrifically describes the painful reconstruction of her nose in surgery, the pain soothed somewhat by cocaine, but there are moments of hell. Although this is far from Stafford’s best story, it is a realistic record of what it’s like to be helpless and in pain in a hospital.

Stafford’s stories about married couples are especially striking. In the comical story, “Polite Conversation,” Margaret Heath, a writer, makes desperate excuses not to go to tea with her neighbor, Mrs. Wainright-Lee, who expects her to come to tea every day.  Margaret’s husband, also a writer, refuses to go point-blank, but Margaret doesn’t want to alienate the neighbors.

And the name, Wainright-Lee, tells us what we need to know.  Mrs. Wainright-Lee is a terrible snob, but doesn’t have good taste.  She may not like Margaret much, but she wants to have a writer at her tea parties. 

Here is an example of Stafford’s humor.  The story opens hilariously with Mrs. Wainright-Lee’s ambiguous greeting.

“It is so good in you to  come to tea,” said Mrs. Wainright-Lee as she plucked one last weed beside a petunia that grew out of the flagstoned terrace.  “I have seen so little of you lately.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Heath, casting about for a new excuse for her unneighborliness, but the effort, on this New England summer afternoon, was too great…

I am also a fan of her brilliant story about loneliness, “The Bleeding Hearts.” Rose Fabrizio, a college-educated Mexican girl, is the secretary to the headmistress of an Eastern girls’ school, and hopes to be “adopted as an Easterner.” But she has no friends, and is extremely lonely, so she  makes  up stories about her neighbors, whom she never sees.

She also spends hours reading at the public library, where she is drawn to a handsome white-haired man in a yellow ascot and scholarly Oxford glasses. She also makes up stories about him.  But when she discovers he is her neighbor, who takes care of his sick mother full-time, and is desperate for a friend – any friend – she scampers away. He is more desperate even than she.

In “A Country Love Story,” we meet another lonely woman.  Her husband has been ill with TB, and absurdly believes she is having an affair with another man. Eventually she is so lonely and persecuted by her husband that she makes up an imaginary lover.

The last story in the collection, “The End of a Career,” is very different from the others; it is reminiscent of  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  A beautiful woman, who is not particularly bright, spends all her time maintaining her beauty, and in her forties regularly has plastic surgery.  But she goes to pieces when her hands show her age, because the plastic surgeon cannot do plastic surgery on her hands. In these days, when even “common people” have plastic surgery, this kind of thing may be a serious problem.

This is a delightfully intense collection of stories, but I do recommend skipping  the first part, “The Innocents Abroad.” The stories in the later sections are much more brilliant, and you can always go back to “The Innocents Abroad” later.

A Rerun: Jean Stafford’s “The Catherine Wheel”

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I published this review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jean Stafford’s neglected novel, The Catherine Wheel, at Thornfield Hall on July 30, 2022. This is a rerun.

Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel is a sophisticated, if chilly little book, told from the perspectives of two troubled characters.  

Tranquil Katharine Congreve, a middle-aged spinster, believes in “the pleasure principle” but dislikes change. Now she faces a sexual crisis.  In her youth, she was in love with John Shipley, an architect who fell for her bland cousin, Maeve.  Weirdly, John and Maeve invited Katharine to accompany them on their honeymoon, claiming that she had made the match.  (She had not.)

In the present, she is having an affair with John, who wants to divorce Maeve, and insists Katharine must marry him to “save” him.  This salvation is not what Katharine had in mind.

The Shipley children spend summers with Katharine in Maine while Maeve and John go to Europe.  The teenage twins, Honor and Harriet, are excited about having new dresses made and meeting new boys at tea; but 12-year-od Andrew, who is bullied at prep school and friendless in the city, is crestfallen because his local friend Victor has dropped him.  

Victor’s neglect of Andrew seems pathological. Victor is nursing his older brother, Charles, a sailor who has malaria.  Victor does not speak to Andrew when he passes the house.  He refuses to allow Andrew into the house to visit him and Charles.

And so  Andrew lies in a hammock all day, fantasizing about killing Charles. 

In this small town in Maine, everyone meddles in everyone’s business.  People  gossip when Katharine’s lights are on all night, and speculate that she is ill, or that she is up reading Gone with the Wind.  Katharine feigns calm and pretends she has been making a list for a grand outdoor party, which will end with her favorite firework, the Catherine Wheel, named after the martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria.

Needless to say, Katharine is no saint, and it is a difficult summer for her, despite her aristocratic manners and dependence on tradition.  Stafford, who was raised in Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado, learned the manners not from childhood from her husband, Robert Lowell, who grew up in a wealthy Boston family. 

A brilliant novel!

Walking, Running, Bicycling, & Camping:  What to Do in the Summer

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You won’t believe this – how could you, after all? – but Captain Nemo and I once bicycled from Conneautville, PA, to Geneseo, New York, and back. 

I trained for the ride for months. Well, perhaps one month. We were young, and we were fit;  we were both runners. He ran marathons, I ran 10Ks.  I ran a half marathon once, and promptly threw up.  My favorite race was The Don’t Fall Run.  No one seemed to know about the race, and hardly anyone signed up. We got lost, because there were no signs, so we all chased the leader, who was lost, too.  If our times were slow, it’s because we ran much farther than intended.  A half marathon?  No, not that far, because I didn’t throw up.

Anyway, I wish I still had the Don’t Fall Run T-shirt. 

Bicycling is much easier than running. We didn’t buy special gear for our bike trip. We wore gym shorts, t-shirts, and sneakers.  And, since of course there were no vans to carry our gear, we stowed it in panniers or tied it to the rack on the back of the bikes.

Before we left, I took my old Schwinn 10-speed in for a tune-up.  The shop employee said the Schwinn wouldn’t make it and tried to sell me a Japanese bike.

“No, thank you!!” I  had no trouble with the Schwinn.  (N.B. The company is no longer based in the U.S., and the quality of Schwinns has gone down, I hear.) We traveled up the green hills of Pennsylvania (miles and miles uphill, and where was the downhill?), then up more hills in New York (the worst was from Jamestown, NY, to a campground at at the top of a hill peak: I was assured it wasn’t a mountain peak.)

After all those miles, I lost – one pound!  Pathetic.  Biking isn’t for weight loss.

WALKING IS CHALLENGING, TOO,

 It is my goal to take long, long walks with Captain Nemo. We love the  challenge of a four-mile trail around a beautiful lake in a park in the midwest. The gorgeous, hilly woods are shady and cool, the rhythm of walking calms us, and we had glimpses of the blue lake as we walked.  I felt like a character in Conrad Richter’s The Trees,  or perhaps Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods.

There were few walkers.  Most people were fishing. And most of them were overweight: no body shaming, thank goodness!  There were people fishing in kayaks, people fishing on the shore, and a very thin cool guy fishing in a boat with a hushed electric motor.

Motorboats are banned in the park, says Captain Nemo, but some of the electric motors make almost no noise.  This man seemed to have no oars.  He turned the boat with what looked like a TV remote.

The hilarious thing is that no one caught any fish.  The cool guy caught no fish, the fishermen and fisherwomen on the shore caught no fish, and the Kayakers had no room for fish.

“Where’s the fish?”  we kept asking.

I was doing fairly well on the walk until we reached the campground about two miles from the beginning. 

 The campground was a giant parking lot.  No trees, just hot sun and concrete.  One couple huddled under an inadequate RV awning, but everyone else was indoors. 

It was dismal.

I should be used to RVs by now, but it’s such a waste of gas.  Why go camping if you’re not outdoors?  Do you have to replicate all the comforts of home?  If you need the amenities, most parks have restrooms and there are often showers.: And if the mosquitos are terrible, you crawl into the tent at 7 and read a book by flashlight.   It’s just sad to go camping in an RV. 

And yet some camping trips are more fun than others  Once, in northern Wisconsin, a storm knocked over our tent, and I had to lie down and splay my arms and legs to the corners to make sure the tent didn’t blow away. After we put the tent back up, we sat in the lodge till the rain was over.

The walking trails at this park were beautiful, in the deep woods, but it is very buggy in the summer.  The best time to camp in northern Wisconsin is in the spring or fall.

We had a mellow camping experience near Thunder Bay, Canada. We camped next to a pebbled beach (well, perhaps they were rocks; it was in the ’90s so I don’t recall exactly), and there were birds everywhere, and placards about the birds.  It was silent except for the birds  It was the most silent place I’ve ever been.

On some camping trips in state parks  noise has almost defeated us. The people in the next tent at one park were drinking and playing loud, bad music all night. We politely asked if they would turn the music down so we could sleep.  They said Yes, but of course they did not. We had to lie there sleepless all night.

 The next day, I sat bleary-eyed by the lake reading the latest Oprah Club selection, and by the time I finished it, I was ready to hike again.

Lawrence Durrell & The Doll People

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Some of us like dolls, some of us do not.  My mother loved dolls.  We had Suzy Smart (she came with her own desk and blackboard), and Tammy and Pepper, my favorites, who seemed to be just about my own age, so I could  imagine stories about them, and act them out with the dolls. Tammy had her own soda fountain in her cardboard Tammy house!  Pepper had a plastic treehouse!

Tammy and Pepper

Of course we had Barbie, but Barbie never had adventures, because we didn’t have the faintest idea who this adult doll was. She didn’t have a soda fountain in her cardboard Dream House; she had a vanity table (that says it all). We preferred Barbie’s freckled best friend, Midge, Barbie’s sister, Skipper, and Skipper’s best friend, Scooter. Again, it was not much fun to play with any of them. It defied our imagination.

Barbie’s Little Theater drove a friend of mine mad.  My crazy-funny best friend laughingly lynched Skipper from the proscenium arch,  which was shocking at the time and, in retrospect, disturbing. But it never happened again. That was the end of Barbies for all of us. 

Lawrence Durrell seems to have been as disturbed by dolls as my friend was.  When I was writing about Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, the first novel in The Avignon Quintet,  I forgot to mention the doll scene. It is violent and disturbing.

One of the main characters in Monsieur, Rob Sutcliffe, a sardonic novelist, is obsessed with a box his wife Pia takes with her everywhere, even when they travel.  Rob has promised Pia not to look in the box, but one day he sneaks back early, hoping to open the lid and find the secret. In the hotel room he  finds Pia happily having a tea party with dozens of dolls in international costumes.

For some reason, the dolls drive him insane.  He screams, he pulls off their limbs, he throws them in the fire.  Poor Pia!  Why didn’t she protect her dolls?  And so how can we be surprised that this sad soul  runs away with a “negress” named Trash.  Pia had issues, and so did violent Rob. 

P.S.   When I was middle-aged, a well-traveled relative gave me an “international”  doll who wore a Japanese kimono and carried an umbrella. Not knowing what else to do with it, I stuck the doll on a shelf in the closet.  Every time I reach up to that high shelf, the doll falls on my head.   

Lawrence Durrell’s “The Avignon Quintet”

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No one reads Lawrence Durrell anymore. 

And yet his sultry postmodern masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is still read by angel-headed hipsters.  Set in Alexandria, Egypt,  these four novels, written in a lush, lyrical style, describe life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Alexandria through the eyes of an English writer, Darley.

Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, a later, darker series of novels, is completely unlike The Alexandria Quartet.  The first volume,  Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, won the James Tait Black award in 1974, but even the Durrell fan may wonder why. The novel seems dated, the style is awkward, and though there are many comic scenes, it is wildly incoherent and pretentious, veering from dreamy descriptions of Avignon to repulsive meditations on death, suicide, and gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D. that those of us who read about it in The Alexandria Quartet hoped never to hear about again.

 The novel Monsieur begins with a violent death. The narrator (or apparent narrator: we’re in postmodern territory) is Bruce, a doctor who returns to Avignon when he learns of his best friend Piers’ death. Bruce is a nice chap: he organizes the funeral. He and Piers were not only close, they were in an incestuous ménage à trois with Bruce’s mad wife, Piers’ sister.

Bruce believed that Piers committed suicide, until during the funeral he learns that the corpse is headless.   Bruce and Toby, a shaggy history professor, believe that the  cause of death was rooted in gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D.  PIers joined a gnostic cult after attending a lecture in Alexandria, then eating mummia (bits of mummies) and hallucinating about snakes.

Anyway, headless corpses, snakes, incest. And then there’s Rob Sutcliffe, a character who wrote a satiric novel about the ménage à trois, who is also haunted by sex and death.  He was obsessed with his wife, Pia, Bruce’s sister, who left him to have a lesbian relationship with a Negress named,,, Trash.  Eventually, he commits suicide.

That said, this novel is not only incoherent but is actually disgusting.

I do love Durrell and recommend his other books, espeically The Complete Antrobus, a Wodehouse-ian collection of satiric stories about a diplomat.

A Cozy Mystery: Nicholas George’s “A Lethal Walk in Lakeland”

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I am not an avid mystery reader.

I do know people who read a mystery a day, though.  Every day it’s off to the library for another mystery!

That said, I recently read and enjoyed Nicholas George’s cozy mystery, A Lethal Walk in Lakeland, the second in the Walking in England series. 

In this entertaining novel, the narrator Chase, a gay sixtysomething former police detective, is on a walking tour in the Lake District in the UK.  He and his librarian friend Billie enjoy the scenerylf, but the violent Upsons, a wealthy family from Texas, are spoiling the walk. Every day Chase and another walker, Joe, must break up the Upsons’ arguments and physical fights.  Surprisingly, the women characters are as violent as the men.

(Digression: Why I am surprised by the violence of women?. In my experience, women can be more violent than men. Once a furiously wan mousy woman sent me a very nasty cartoon she’d drawn of an editor who rejected her work. She also approached a lecturer and denigrated her friend, the organizer of the event.)

But back to A Lethal Walk, Chase considers going home, but resigns himself to concentrating on the walking, as Billie suggests.

And then there are two murders, which Chase must solve.

George’s style is is a bit awkward, but you don’t read this mystery for the style. The plot jogs (walks) along, and the characters are likable.. And there’s something slightly Agatha Christie-ish about it, a reference to And Then There Were None, and a locked-room scene where all the suspects are gathered.

If you would like to go on the Rovers Walk tour in the Lake District, you will enjoy this cozy mystery.

Menopause for Everyone!

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Menopause for Everyone!

This is total bullshit.

  Menopause is a blessing!

The articles in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, the Mayo Clinic newsletter, and other publications claim that women suffer from hot flashes and other symptoms during menopause.  We’re the fragile sex. Yay, us!  Personally, I’ve had no side effects, nor did my mother. We love menopause! No more menstruation! No more tampons! No more bleeding through tampons! Still, the doctors try to prescribe cancer-causing drugs to help with hot flashes and other symptoms.

Why do we need drugs? Are we ill? We are not. But on TV women fan themselves during hot flashes at the office, very funny indeed, and apparently must strip off their shirts and wander around in their camisoles in public places.

Some women boast about still menstruating in their 50s.

Poor them!  We know better.

But if you have symptoms, I am sorry for you.

The Lucretius Club, or Why We Don’t Drink out of Teacups

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So I’m 23 years old, and I’m trying not to drop my teacup, because the professor’s wife might come home, and how to explain our illicit tea-drinking club?  I was a nubile blonde back then, no, a nervous nubile blonde, he said fondly, and despite our difference in status, we enjoyed our Lucretius-translating tea parties.

For the first time, atoms were clicking around in my head. Lucretius adored atoms, and I began to understand physics.  Incredible, isn’t it?  what poetry and Epicurean philosophy can teach you.

The prof always offers milk and sugar.

“No, thanks,” I say.  I can balance a cup of tea on the saucer, but not the spoon.

He and I were sort of friends, sort of buddies, really.  We talked in the conference room about what novels we were reading until an irate professor ordered us to go to the lounge so he “could think.” My laid-back prof recommended  Rosellen Brown and Barbara Pym, while I urged him to try Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Andre Dubus.  

Reading was our passion: that was our bond. While waiting at the reserve desk for the return of a scholarly journal on reserve at the library, I devoured the short stories of Raymond Carver and John Updike in The New Yorker. The library inevitably had only one copy of the journal with the assigned article, so I sometimes had to read the entire New Yorker.

But the Lucretius club was the highlight of the semester. Our bubbly casual chats about philosophy, broken up occasionally by literary analysis, bridged the gap between student and professor. In retrospect, he was a charming older man, though I took his charm entirely for granted. When you’re young, everyone is charming to you, because you see the world more kindly.

The memory of those rattling china tea cups remind me of Lucretius and his atoms.  I drink tea in mugs these days – they’re more stable, and hold more tea – but I might take out the old china in homage to this long-dead brilliant professor.