The Danger of Satire

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Reading Juvenal’s satires can be exhausting.

Juvenal is the master of Roman satire (satura), an original Latin genre of poetry, and he relentlessly attacks Rome.   Indeed, he’s so critical that he had to set his satires in the past so as not to get himself exiled or killed. 

There is nothing good about Rome, according to Juvenal. The city is so noisy he never sleeps, the stench is unbearable, the nouveau riche serve wine “so rough a skeep-skin wouldn’t absorb it,” and he is indignant about gay marriage (there was no LGBTQ+ movement).

Perhaps he is most offended by bad poetry.  In Satire I, he complains, “Must I always listen?  Will I ever retaliate for being harassed by hoarse Cordus’ readings of his Theseid?” Juvenal adds,  “It is difficult not to write satire (difficile est saturam scribere)” after listening to so much drivel.  “Moderation is foolish, when you meet so many scribblers everywhere:  there’s no point in sparing paper that’s already doomed.”  (Stulta est clementia, cum vatibus tot ubique/ occuras, periturae parcere chartae).

I have met a Cordus on several occasions. This shameless narcissist babbles on and on to a restless audience. Even his performance can’t elevate his poetry. Mind you, famous award-winning writers usually impress me, but that’s because their poetry is better.

 For several years, it seemed that all my friends wrote poetry.  I’d be walking down the street, and they’d corner me and ask me to critique it. All my friends’ poems are excellent, of course – I support their work and always praise it – but it’s an awkward situation. Why me?

 One day I was sitting in a posh friend’s Mercedes Benz when she snapped open the glove compartment and took out several pages of rhyming poetry. “Read this, please.” I love thinking of her sitting on a high stool in her kitchen writing verse by hand.  And the rhymes were a welcome change from constipated prose divided into short lines that sometimes pass for poetry. I told her she was a retro-Edna St. Vincent Millay, a high compliment.

Another friend, a published poet, writes graceful poetry about nature. She has inspired generations of students in creative writing classes and workshops. And I think her methods of teaching and are the best:  a little gentle criticism, with lots of praise.

And then there was my raging, brilliant friend. Every time a poem was returned to her in a self-addressed envelope, she’d stomp on it and swear that it was as good as anything published in their magazines.  

What would Juvenal say?  “Whatever men do, prayer, fear, anger, passion, small pleasures, and wandering here and there, is the fodder of my little book,” he wrote.

A dangerous little book in the first and second centuries A.D., I would say, but good for Juvenal.

My Week of Two Time-Lines:  Margaret Kennedy’s “The Wild Swan”

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“And what’s her play like?” “Lousy. Period stuff. Crinolines.”

What’s happening, you may ask.  Why hasn’t Kat posted?  Is she wallowing in Robert Coover’s meta-fiction, or laughing over Betty MacDonald’s Onions in the Stew, trying to figure out which book is meta-, and which is humor – or are both both? 

Well, Onions in the Stew is on my bedside table. But here’s some more good news! I just read Margaret Kennedy’s amusing out-of-print novel The Wild Swan (1957), and enjoyed it very much. 

And I was astonished by its resemblance to Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company (1924), which I posted about here.  It’s obvious that Kennedy borrowed the two time-lines from Irwin’s best-seller, which cuts back and forth between the 20th and the 18th century. The Wild Swan is set mainly in the 20th century, with jaunts to the 19th.

The modern scenes are the most vivid. Roy, a cynical, good-natured young man who works in the scripts department of a movie company, arrives in Upcott village to research background and scout shots for a film about a neglected Victorian spinster poet.

When Roy tells his great-aunt May, a retired teacher in Upcott, about the film, she says, bemused, “I never heard anything so ridiculous.” In her view, a revival of Dorothea Harding’s work and reputation is absurd and unnecessary. Dorothea had been a popular writer of “very moral romances with historical or classical settings.” Her present reputation was based on some poetry discovered after her death.

Meanwhile, in the 19th century, Dorothea is depicted as an Emily Bronte-ish young woman who goes for long walks in bad weather and writes in a little shed by the river. Like the three Bronte sisters, Dorothea, her older sister, Mary, and cousin Effie, created their own fictional world as children and wrote stories about the dashing male characters they invented. 

Of course marriage shakes up the family. When Mary gets married, Dorothea must take on her role of housekeeper and caregiver of her fussy father, because there is no one else to do it. She also raises her mad, savage, mentally challenged younger sister, Katy, whom everyone else wanted to clap in an asylum. And on the side, Dorothea writes historical romances to support the household as the family funds decrease.

Kennedy’s depiction of a woman writer who supports the family by writing pop genre novels is empathetic. Like Dorothea, Kennedy knew what it was like to be famous: her novel The Constant Nymph became a best-seller, and she adapted it as a play. But Kennedy was a respected literary writer. There’s a there-but-for-the-grace of God feeling about her portrait of Dorothea. Kennedy graduated from Somerville, Oxford, in 1915, while Dorothea was an autodidact, smothered by Victorian values and female stereotypes. Ironically, Dorothea’s , books, scorned by her descendants, supported future generations of her family.

So is this a feminist novel? Well, not exactly. But there’s more beneath the surface than is at first apparent.

Margaret Kennedy’s books seem to go in and out of vogue. In the 2010s, Vintage Classics reissued some of her books, and I recommend  Together and Apart, a novel about a couple who separate.

The assignment of “brows” defeat me, but I think Kennedy’s novels are middlebrow. And The Wild Swan is a fun middlebrow read.

Out for Coffee: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Me

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“I need a cappuccino,” I muttered when I decided to take a break from reading a 19th-century American novel no one has ever heard of.  I did not take the book because the coffeehouse resembles a very dark convenience store; even if you sit by the window – actually on a platform in the window of what used to be a store  – it’s too dark to read.  

You might want to know what I am reading, though.   Have you heard of  Catharine Maria Sedgwick?  She is the kind of writer one reads in Women’s Studies, or American Studies, because her intriguing, fast-paced novels, mostly set in New England in the early 19th century, are read more for her ideas about women, class, and money than for style.  

In her fourth novel, Clarence, published in 1830, Sedgwick considers the definitions of family, wealth, and courtship. Mr. Carroll, a struggling clerk, inherits money from a miser, Mr. Flavel, after his young son, Frank, befriends Mr. Flavel at the market (it involves dropping oranges).  Later, Mr. Carroll’s daughter, Gertrude Clarence (Clarence was the real name of Mr. Flavel), claims she will never marry, and struggles to keep her head in New York.  It’s a bit like reading the novels of Edith Wharton or Conrad Richter, both Pulitzer Prize winners, only less well-written. 

Yet it is certainly well-written enough for me. I am loving it.

The following quote seems appropriate after the dark coffeehouse:

At his usual hour, Mr. Flavel retired to bed, but not to sleep – the strange and strong emotions of the morning had been soon subdued, and his subsequent reflection had convinced him they must be groundless.  These reflections were in daylight, when reason bears sway; but alone, in the stillness, darkness, and deep retirement of the night, his imagination resumed its ascendancy.

Monsters in Literature:  Catherine and Heathcliff

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Many years ago, though not that many years, I made a list of literary monsters. I scribbled it in an exquisite Japanese diary, which had nearly transparent pages, illustrated with delicate flowers. 

 Monsters are not real, I told myself – they stay on the page- and yet the list got longer.  This week I fell ill reading a Gothic novel -there’s always some virus going around – and I tossed and turned, couldn’t sleep, tried to nap in vain, sat on the couch listlessly. Finally I drank a lot of herbal tea and  recovered.

But the illness began while I was rereading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a disturbing Gothic novel which I used to read as a romance. But I didn’t always revere Emily as I do now. When I first read Wuthering at 12 I was disappointed. I had expected Emily to be another Charlotte, and Wuthering Heights to be like Jane Eyre.

Penguin hardcover edition

Years passed. One night, when I was jittery about being alone, and stayed with a friend, one of her roommates gave me her copy of Wuthering Heights.  She pressed it on me because she considered it the greatest English novel, a novel about soulmates, about separated halves of one person, and Catherine leaves her soulmate Heathcliff because she is materialistic and wants the comforts of being a rich man’s wife.. 

I have read Wuthering many, many times. There is an unforgettable scene in which Catherine storms out of the kitchen, and locks herself in her room, furious because her husband Edgar drives away Heathcliff, her childhood friend and would-be lover, who had returned after many years away. Catherine accuses Edgar of cowardice, since he does not drive out Heathcliff himself. Instead, he sets some strong, stocky servants on him. Strong Heathcliff lopes away unscathed.

And then there is illness as metaphor. Because of the violence and the aftermath of her violent emotions, Catherine becomes ill, as tends to happen in Victorian novels.  And no one heeds her until it is almost too late, because the housekeeper does not believe her. So is the housekeeper the real monster?

Catherine and Heathcliff metamorphose into monsters.  Catherine had loved Heathcliff, with whom she grew up, but deserted him to marry rich, soft Edgar Linton. Heathcliff disappears, and returns many years later, never saying where he’d been.  But Heathcliff revenges himself on Edgar and Catherine by marrying, then torturing, Cathy’s sister-in-law, Isabella.  The revenge continues after Catherine’s death.  Yet Heathcliff is truly in hell.  At one point, he digs up Catherine’s grave.  Eerily, she has not discomposed.

There are many monsters in Wuthering Heights. The second generation, however, has a chance of redemption..

So what is a monster? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it a psychological state? The word is derived from the Latin monstrum, which means “a divine omen indicating misfortune, an evil omen, a portent.”

It can also mean “monstrous man” (monstrum hominis) or “monstrous woman” (monstrum mulieris). And in Wuthering Heights, the monsters are human.

The gradual estrangement of Catherine and Heathcliff triggers monstrous behavior. But the arc of their story begins far back in the past.

A Charming Forgotten Classic:  Margaret Irwin’s “Still She Wished for Company”

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I wonder why it has taken me so long to find a copy of Margaret Irwin’s stunning historical novel, Still She Wished for Company (1924). I have never seen this cross-genre book at an American bookstore or library, and learned about it from a box of Penguin  postcards: one of the cards shows the cover of the old orange Penguin paperback edition.

This uncannily weird historical novel is laced with fantasy and elements of Gothic novels. There is gentle time travel, a decadent man’s eerie practice of mesmerism, and pop-up references to Jane Austen’s pragmatic love in Sense and Sensibility.  Many of the Gothic scenes are reminiscent of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories, Ellen Wood’s sensation novels, and Daphne du Maurier’s weird short stories.

At the center of the novel are two young women of different centuries.  Juliana is a bored young woman of leisure in the 18th century, who lives with her family on the elegant Chidleigh estate. Jan ilves in the 20th century in London, where she works at a job she hates in order to support her mother and sister. She is getting ready to take a long vacation in the countryside, near Chidleigh.

There is a link between the two heroines, who live briefly in the same place in different centuries. Juliana’s charming, decadent older brother, Lucien, uses techniques of mesmerism and hypnotism to make Juliana a conduit of communication to Jan. (The conduit doesn’t work very well.)   This isn’t a random use of magic:  Lucien has been in love with Jan for years.  It started with a series of dreams about Jan when he was a boy.

 What does happen because of Lucien’s magic is that Juliana and Jan find themselves walking into the past and/or future.  One day Juliana walks down the drive and wonders why the trees and flowers seen to have changed: she doesn’t recognize the flowers. And she is confused to see Jan, a woman in a strange frock coat, chatting with a casual couple oddly dressed (in shorts) who act as though they own the place. Jan asks them permission to wander on the estate. 

Jan only vaguely remembers her dreams of Lucien. Near the beginning of the novel, before we know anything about Lucien, she has a brief unexplained meeting with him.  Jan is huddled in a doorway during a rainstorm in Soho when Lucien appears suddenly. She finds him attractive, but threateningly intense, and is put off by his black cloak.  When he leaves to find her a taxi – and she doesn’t want to be picked up by a stranger – she instinctively walks away.  She found him almost brutal, as she tells her sister when she gets home.  But she did admire his confidence:  he didn’t care what anyone thought of him.

In another scene in the future, Juliana looks over Jan’s shoulder and sees that she is reading Juliana’s own diary, which is now dusty and crumpled.  And Jan has similar experiences when she walks on the drive, and wonders why it looks so different. Is she hallucinating? On a few occasions. Julianna and Jan do see each other through the windows at Chidleigh, but they are unable to speak.  And as Lucien becomes more and more unhinged and intense with his use of mesmerism (or whatever on earth it is), he is careless of the effect on Juliana. One night, Jan appears at at the window to warn her against Lucien. 

The novel has some dark scenes but it is partly a domestic comedy. There are hilarious dinner parties and card games. And Lucien, when not practicing magic, is the life of the party. 

And Juliana’s funny journal is a scream, and it certainly helps us relate to her. Her mother gave her the journal, saying it would be appropriate for a young woman to record her meditations.  Anyone who has no idea what to write in her journal will laugh at Juliana’s attempts. She decides to copy the system from a favorite novel: she makes a time-table for herself, like Clarissa, “the peerless heroine of Mr. Richardson’s great novel.” Then she “debated with herself the next item of ‘One Hour to visit the neighboring poor,’ to give them brief instructions and good books. There were no neighboring poor at Chidleigh.” That’s a problem!

Irwin is known for her historical novels, especially a trilogy about Queen Bess, but I wish she had written more about Jan in London in the 1920s in this one.

Nevertheless, this is such a marvelous read that I have put it on my “reread” shelf.  And this is the highest honor for a book.

Don’t Burn Down the Library of Alexandria

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The Library of Alexandria

I recently considered enrolling in a Ph.D. program in classics.  It is not, however, the optimal time to study classics. 

The future of classics is in jeopardy, Many colleges have eliminated their language departments. And this week one university has recommended the cancellation of the B.A. classics major, due to low enrollment.

Classics has never been about the numbers. The numbers are always low, and have been for decades. But there is pleasure and urgency in reading classics: Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and history shaped the Western canon and Western culture.

And we don’t want to burn down the Library of Alexandria, do we?

I looked at the jeopardized department’s website. Alas, it makes a case against its own department. There may be seven full-time professors- the website is such a jumble that I challenge you to sort them out – but there is a huge subgroup of affiliated faculty, with primary appointments in Biblical Studies (how many New Testament Greek classes do you need?), something called The Teaching Center, and Women’s studies.

Even I wonder why so many people are needed to teach so few students. But it may be the fault of the confused presentation wrought by the disorganized website: Other classics departments manage to separate the lists of professors and affiliate professors.

Visiting the website was a bit like reluctantly attending a retro-hippie-classicist’s rock festival, in which the late Jim Morrison would reappear to sing Catullus’s lyrics to the tune of “Light My Fire,” while Carly Simon would sing her own versions of Sappho’s lyric poetry and Pindar’s odes.

But “Where are the porta-potties?” That is always the question.

I sincerely hope, however, that the Deans, the professors, the students, the alumni, and rich donors organize to preserve the B.A. major in classics.

Mrs. Gaskell, Classics, and Me

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Mrs. Gaskell is in the canon now, but that wasn’t always the case.  Years ago, on a visit to my boyfriend’s parents, I was reading her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughters, which I’d bought at a university bookstore.

And then Somebody’s Boyfriend (I can’t remember to whom he belonged) mocked Mrs. Gaskell.

“What are you reading?” 

I looked over my glasses.  “It’s a rediscovered classic by Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer.”

“Gotta be careful of those rediscovered writers.”  He thought it was a scream that anyone would read Mrs. Gaskell.  “It’s a con to sell books.”

I said coolly. “It’s a great book. Want to look at it?”

He did not take up this challenge.  He thought it was too, too funny.

This is the kind of interaction women used to have with men about women’s literature. The professors (mostly male then) were vague about women writers. Occasionally they’d teach Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. It was in Women’s Studies classes that you readSusanna Rowson, Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, and Dorothy Richardson.

I am a great fan of the liberal arts. I graduated with honors in School of Letters (a major long ago eliminated by the university), with an emphasis on classical languages.  I was so attuned to Latin that I won the Latin Prize.  But it’s when you start dreaming in Latin that you realize you’ve been enchanted by Roman magic.

And then I went to graduate school to get my M.A. in classics, a mystic, if rigorous experience.  I was elated by the strange sound and sense of lucid, mysterious Greek tragedy but I relate more to the exquisite Rpman poetry. In graduate school, I taught first-year Latin and Virgil as a T.A., then worked for a year as a Visiting Lecturer.

How can I explain the enchantment of the classics? In T. S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “What Is a Classic?”, he vigorously claims Virgil’s Aeneid is the only classic in the Western canon. He believes the Latin language was at the height of maturity in the first century BCE, and Roman civilization at its apex during Augustus’s reign. 

And so I was devastated to read in a newspaper that the state university is considering cutting majors in six low- enrollment programs: classical languages, Italian, Russian, women’s studies, African-American studies, and applied physics.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. The university has hung on to classics for years, even when some eastern colleges eliminated it.

We don’t believe in signs in the yard, but I may be the first on the block with a SAVE THE LIBERAL ARTS sign.

To celebrate and promote the endangered classics, I am posting a link below to an essay I wrote in 2022 about Ovid’s two poems about abortion (Amores).  These are, to my knowledge, the first poems about abortion. 

https://thornfieldhall.blog/ovid-on-his-mistresss-abortion-2/

Sadness at the Party: Arturo Vivante’s Writing Class

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Arturo Vivante as a young man.
Have you heard of Arturo Vivante?  He was my Fiction Writing teacher when I was 19. He published many short stories in The New Yorker and several collections of short stories.  His books are out-of-print, but if you are a New Yorker subscriber you can read his stories at the website.  He was a writer’s writer, a member of the literati. 

This was my second Fiction Writing class. I loved writing fiction.  You could take Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing  again and again for credit.  You wrote your heart out, the secretaries made copies for the class, the students picked them up at the office, and in class the students’ criticism was polite.  And my first Fiction Writing teacher was a very kind T.A. who gave helpful advice. He went on to became a famous writer.

Fiction Writing was a delightful break from academic subjects. The writing was fun, even if the critique was stressful (though inevitably positive).  But the visiting professor, Arturo Vivante, an Italian doctor who gave up his medical practice to write, seemed astonished to find himself in the Midwest. “What am I doing here?”That was in a bubble above his head, I swear to you.   One look at us tragically hip midwesterners and he wondered, “Why did I agree to teach summer school?”  (That was another bubble above his head.)
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You’re here, deal with it.  That was my motto.   But he didn’t want to deal with it.  That was part of the problem.

I can see it from his point of view:  we were not the kind of people a guy like him wanted to hang out with.  Most of us were undergraduates. You know, we all wore t-shirts, often bearing political slogans (mine said KEEP ABORTION SAFE AND LEGAL), or proclaiming that the wearer had run a 10K race.  There were also two high school teachers from a town 30 miles away, a busker who played a violin, and a couple of Vietnam vets.
 
Vivante’s focus was on the Vietnam vets.  We all were concerned about them at the university. Some of them were not – quite there. They were dazed and silent, or joked around constantly, but the jokes were a wall. They seemed old and weary, and a bit desperate, as if they had just dropped Agent Orange on a village or seen their whole squadron killed in battle.  And yet they couldn’t have been much older than I was. I never quite took that in. They were bitter, partly because of their reception when they returned from this much-protested war. But one told me that the army was the best thing that happened to him, because of the G.I. bill.

Here’s what happened in class:  Vivante shot down the short stories of both the teachers.  RAT-A-TAT-TAT. He told them they needed more than good grammar to write a story.  Was he insulting them for being high school teachers?  Yes, he was. 

I butted in. “I really believed in the woman’s sadness at the party. That was moving. That’s what parties are.”

What that meant I couldn’t tell you, but I wanted her to know that she shouldn’t take Vivante too seriously. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but it is a complete blank in my mind.  I don’t remember what Vivante said about it, either.  That means it was neither too good nor too bad. I got an A, but I threw the story away long ago.

Now we get to the sad part.  One of the Vietnam vets wrote a story about rape. The guy was a mess.  This story should not have been discussed in class, but in a one-on-one conference. It was offensive, crazy, and terrifying.  Was this graphic rape scene based on an experience in Vietnam?  Or was it a warped fantasy that had nothing to do with that?  At 19, I did not know.  Vivante actually praised the story. I felt myself derealizing during his critique.  But I think he felt he had to praise the Vietnam vet.  He himself had been through a lot during World War II: in 1938 his family fled to England because of growing anti-semitism. The British sent Arturo to an internment camp in Canada, separating him from his family. We didn’t know that, of course.

Still, his disrespect for women’s feelings felt unforgivable.

So these are the two things I remember about the class:  his dismissing the high school teachers’ stories as exercises in grammar, and his praise of a rape story.

N.B. I would never have written this if Vivante was still alive.

Adventures of Ms. Ph.D.

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I have a new routine. Just call me Ms. Ph.D. If I need to clean the house or run an errand, I murmur, “I’m working on my Ph.D.”

Getting a master’s required discipline, daring, and caffeine. I rushed from the coffeehouse to seminars to teaching a class and then to the library and back to the the downtown apartment where our wild Siamese cat perched on dictionaries and batted my pen, resulting in Sortes Virgilianae and Ouiji-like messages from the dead. 

Now why would I want to return to that busy life-style? Well, it is (a) something to do, and (b) more intriguing than looking at screens. This winter I’ve been spinning theories about classical writers, because I figure, at my age, it’s better to write the dissertation before you apply to graduate school. 

Of course, there is a down side:  I need to include “three letters of recommendation from faculty who know you well.” I’d happily comply, if they weren’t dead.  Perhaps I could submit affectionate reminiscences and translate passages from my profs’ favorite writers.

The other down side:  I’d have to move to a university town, and my life is here in a city.  Do I want to move at this point?  Perhaps I could attend classes on Zoom and breeze into town once a month for a face-to-face meeting.

So is it better to be an official Ms. Ph.D?  Or continue work on my personal Ph.D.?

If I can do a Ph.D. at home, you’ll hear about it.

International Booker Prize:   Shahrnush Parsipur’s “Women Without Men”

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“How can they tell people their daughter or sister has turned into a tree?” –  “Women Without Men,” by Shahrnush Parispur

Penguin UK edition

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, translated by Faridoun Farrokh, is longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The style is lyrical and hypnotic, and the book laced with magic realism. I am spellbound by the imagery of the garden.

In this brilliant, original novel, set in the 1950s, five Iranian women resist the bonds of sexist society, and, by luck and magical agency, find themselves in an Edenic orchard. A teacher walks out on her job without giving notice: she plants herself as a tree.  A former prostitute gives birth to a water lily.  A spinster, murdered by her brother and rescued from the grave by a spinster frenemy, helps the gardener gather dew drops.  A wealthy widow, formerly an oppressed housewife, hopes to build a literary movement around the woman-tree.

The Edenic garden heals and renews. The women escape from the dysfunctional city, with its crime and riots. Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a garden?  The magical gardener has only to touch a plant to make it flourish.

I predict this stunning book will win, or at least make the shortlist. It is not technically a new book, but it has an unusual history. The Islamic government banned it when it was published in Iran in 1989 and Parsipur went to prison for it. She now lives in the U.S.

Feminist Press edition, U.S.

Penguin recently published the English translation by Faridoun Farrokh,which was first published in 2011 by the Feminist Press in the U.S.

This book is truly an international venture, with roots in many countries.