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.

History or Memoir?  The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas

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Perpetua and Fecilitas

First, let me say that The Passion of the Saints Perpetua and Felicitas (Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Feliciatas) is not a  memoir.  Yet Passio has many aspects of a memoir, tempered by the history of the Christian martyrs, and the pagan myths that were a part of Roman culture. 

This short book, written in Latin in the early third century A.D, is regarded as the most important, and certainly the liveliest, of a genre known as the Acts or Lives of the Saints. Vibia Perpetua is the heroine, a Christian martyr who wrote a vivid account of her life in prison before her death in 203 A.D.  She and five other Christians were sentenced to be killed at the games in Carthage in a fight with wild animals.

Perpetua’s narrative occupies seven very short chapters.  We learn that she is honeste nata, liberaliter instituta, matronaliter nupta (well-born, liberally educated, and a married woman). She is also a mother.  Her sentence would be revoked if she denied that she was a Christian, but she will not retract her statement.

Perpetua’s father is nearly mad with grief.  He longs to save her from prison, and he begs her to return to her family:  himself, her mother, two brothers, an aunt, and her baby.  At one point he attacks her physically, hoping he can drag her out of jail by violence.

Perpetua remains calm, and tries reasoning with him.   Below is my literal translation of their very brief but logical dialogue from the Latin.  The Latin appears beneath my translation.  

“Father, I say, do you see for the sake of argument this dish lying here, or is it a pitcher?  And he says:  I see.  And I say to him:  And can it be called by another name than what it is?  And he says: No.  Thus I cannot say that I am other than a Christian.”

Pater, inquam, vides verbi  gratia vas hoc iacens, urceolum sive aliud?  et dixit:  Video.  Et ego dixi ei: Numquid alio nomine vocari potest quam quod est?  et ait:  Non.  Sic et ego aliud me dicere non possum nisi quod sum, Christiana.

The Christians did not compromise. Heads down, is what I would have advised in that pagan age.  But Perpetua and her five companions, including her pregnant slave,  Felicitas, are determined to be martyrs.

Her father continues to try intercede,. He reminds her about her baby, who he says is starving without her. Perpetua is allowed to have her son with her in prison for a time, though eventually her father must take him back. She worries about the boy’s nutrition, and that her breast will be infected from not nursing.

Perpetua also has visions. In one vision, she sees her unbaptized brother suffering in hell.  He died at age seven of cancer, and now he is doomed to stand in a pool, yet never reach the water that will sate his thirst.  (This is a common motif in Greek myth, though I hardly think Tantalus has a connection to her brother). But Perpetua’s constant prayers for her brother save him, and she sees him happily drinking water (baptism?).

There are other visions, one of them involving a bronze ladder, the description of which is fantastic,  bordering on magic realism. In another vision, she is turned into a man, and must fight a terrifying Egyptian.  If the Egyptian wins, he will be allowed to kill her, and if she wins, she will receive a green branch on which golden apples grow. (Again, the golden apples are a mythic element.)

Perpetua is he star of the book, but her Christian slave, Felicitas, is connected to Perpetua because both are mothers.  Felicitas gives birth to a daughter on the road while traveling to the games. The men, too, have interesting stories, but I was most interested in Perpetua.

After reading widely about Perpetua, I realize that almost nothing is known for sure. It is all based on conjecture, even the date of her death.  Nonetheless, it is fascinating and moving, whether you’re interested in memoirs or lives of the saints.

Lawrence Durrell’s Discrete Voices:  “The Alexandria Quartet” & “White Eagles over Serbia”

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It is hot, it is muggy, it is dusty, and if it is not quite Alexandria, the smouldering summer in the Midwest post-Climate Change prepares you for Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quarter.  This neglected 20th century masterpiece is told in four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, each named for a titular character.

Durrell was a brilliant poet, a translator of Cavafy, a humor writer, and a novelist.  His mesmeric style in The Alexandria Quartet is lush and poetic.  He intended the quartet to be read as one novel, though it can also be spaced over a long period of time. For a satisfying Durrell reading experience, head for that cafe with whirling fans on the ceiling and order an espresso.  No, air conditioning would be cheating.

Durrell mines his experience in Alexandria for the colorful characters, the derealization in the shimmering heat, and the intricate politics and conspiracies. The narrator, Darley, a novelist, is Durrell’s alter ego: he has “escaped” Alexandria and is living on an island, where he is writing about Alexandria. In the first volume,  Justine, Darley describes his love affair with Justine, a siren with a tragic past who sleeps with everybody. The other titular characters in the quartet are Balthazar, a doctor and a mystic, Mountolive, a diplomat who becomes Ambassador of Egypt, and Clea, an artist who is a shrewd observer of humanity.

If you don’t like luxuriant prose, you might want to try Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia, a taut thriller set in the Balkans. Metuan, a spy, burned-out after an assignment in Malay,  is determined to retire and spend his leisure going fishing.  But Dombey, his boss,  entices him to accept the assignment: he can go fishing in the mountains of Serbia, where he is needed to investigate the murder of the former agent. Metuan, who knows the Serbian languages, will impersonate a peasant. And he takes his fishing rod.

Beautiful, spare writing and a good spy novel. It reminded me slightly of the actor Anthony Quayle’s Eight Hours from England, a brilliant novel set in the Balkans during World War II.

N.B. Peter Stothard, former editor of the TLS, is the author of a fascinating book called Alexandria. He visited the city, looking for traces of the past, but no Cleopatra, and certainly no Lawrence Durrell.

Like Mother, Like Daughter:  Cake Wars

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Our Mother’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” my mother muttered in the car on the way to Devil’s Lake. (That’s what the Roman gladiators said when they entered the arena: “We who are about to die salute you!”) She’d studied Latin at the Catholic school across the street from our church before it was converted into an elementary school. However, she sent us to public schools. “The public schools are really better.”

Mom was a good fighter. And, indeed, the barbs, digs, snottiness, and gentle feminine quarrels were about to begin in the aptly-named Devil’s Lake, which was so cold that only devils could survive there, or so they said.  Mom had vowed three years ago that she would never make this terrible trip again.  Dad insisted on bringing us kids, and she would not let us go to those wild parts without a chaperone. 

“Here we are,”  she said as we pulled up in front of a dismal bungalow on a bare treeless street. Mom refreshed her lipstick in the rearview mirror, then smiled a fake smile that told those who knew her, “Beware!”

There was a cake war in Devil’s Lake. The aunts had been getting ready for days. Mom was not a baker. She bought an angel food cake at Hy-Vee for this occasion.  “It will be the best-looking cake there,” she predicted.

She still stung from last time when the aunts patronized her for bringing a Duncan Hines cake.  The aunts had made their cakes from scratch, and though they were lopsided, like something I might make, and the Duncan HInes cake tasted better, they were intense about cake.

But this time the aunts did not thank her for the angel food’s cake. Instead, they offered to teach her to make homemade.

“No, thank you,” she said, and gathered up her purse.

Anyone who didn’t like the Hy-Vee angel food cake ranked very low in her estimation. Anyone who didn’t thank her for it ranked lower. “Mom, can we take the cake with us?” we asked as we got ready to leave.

“Manners,” she hissed.

These women were at war: cake was the weapon.

The Daughter’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” I said as my boyfriend drove at a snail’s pace through a blizzard. This time, my mother’s favorite slogan, “We who are about to die salute you!”, was appropriate. While we looked for signs or a rest stop, I rolled down the window and wiped the snow off the windshield with a mitten.  The snow fell faster than I could wipe. Then the car broke down.

This was a letdown for my macho boyfriend, not to roll into town on his own wheels. His reticent father (in retrospect, my favorite in-law) picked us up and gave us an impromptu tour of the city as we drove through the blizzard in the dark.

However, many surprises lay ahead. I thought my boyfriend was poor, because of his shabby clothes: instead of a winter coat, he wore layers of jackets over a sweater with a hole under the arm. I’d expected to meet his warm, working-class family. But, alas, there was no warm welcome at childhood home of the love of my life. If we’d worn a mood ring, it would have been CRANKY.

The three-story house was enormous. It was in a posh neighborhood! What the…? Who were these people?

His mother barely said hello, and two of his sisters stared balefully. “I hate this,” one said, possibly after I said hello. “I know,” the other equally charming girl said. During the next 10 snowbound days they did not talk to me. I tried to make light conversation, even about books (a desperate topic, but one was an English major) but these snobbish girls just grunted, nor did they chat much to their brother.

“They ignore you because they hate me,” he said.

“I do not accept that explanation,” I said.

Several times a day we walked at a nearby park. At night we went to a hockey game, or the movies, or played Scrabble with the family: someone’s boyfriend had a breakdown because he didn’t have any letters – that is always the luck of the draw.

You get the idea: but I must tell you about the pancake war!

On a cold winter morning, is there anything better than pancakes? The family did not breakfast together; everybody got up at different times, and ate cereal or whatever; but one morning I caught my future ma-in-law making pancakes for my boyfriend.

“How lovely!” I said. “Mrs. _, I love pancakes.”

Too bad, because she shut down the operation and walked away. No pancakes for me!

Welcome to the family!!!

What is it about cakes, or pancakes, and in-laws?

Underemployed in an Alternate Life

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What would have happened if you never left your hometown?  

That’s a haunting question. In memory, the hometown was idyllic:  five bookstores, two libraries, a Jackson Pollock at the art museum, a gorgeous park with woods, and meadows with cows.

It would have been great if the town hadn’t changed, and if we were still 20 years old.  But “my city is gone,” as  Chrissie Hynde sang about Akron.  Our town has doubled in size.

People now live in the suburbs.  There never used to be suburbs.  God, we all despised the suburbs!  (Was it because of John Updike and Richard Yates?)

But if we had stayed we would not have found a professional job.  There simply were no jobs for liberal arts majors.

Here’s what happened to some of the people who stayed.  The portraits below are VERY loosely based on some of some of the lifers.

Lynn:  unemployed, agorophobic, single, still lives in her late parents’ hourse, and is now a bit like a character in We Always Lived in the Castle.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Not a college graduate.

Susan: underemployed, flunky office clerk (slightly reminiscent of Harvey Pekar in his comics), reputed to be a witch and drug addict.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR (besides drugs):  Not a college graduate.

Jessie: married, self-employed, underemployed, keen on rock music, critical of the late Tom Petty’s appearance, and knows TV trivia.  I mean all of it.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  college graduate. 

GWEN:  married, underemployed, book club maven, sociology teacher in a high school.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Ph.D. in sociology but no jobs for sociology professors.  

ANNA:  single, employed, former actor, returned to hometown to get M.D., oncologist,  columnist in local paper, and gardener. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS: B.A. , M.D..

LIZZIE: marital status uncertain, former hippie, banks in the Cayman Islands, reinvented herself as a devout Christian.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR: no college degree.

So are you nostalgic for your hometown?