July 2021 – Thornfield Hall

The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

Why, you may wonder, did I choose The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher for the first of six essays about neglected American women writers? Short stories are not usually my métier. They often seem abrupt and vertiginous: just as I resign myself to fifteen or twenty minutes with characters I won’t have time to love, the story ends and I must get acquainted with new people – unless the author indulges the reader’s affinity for sameness in the form of linked stories.

The Collected Stories of Hortense is perhaps more suited to the needs of a keen novel reader like me than, say, the average story in The New Yorker (if there is such a thing). Calisher’s short stories have a density of detail and the long, convoluted sentences I love. Of course, many of her stories were published in The New Yorker, which seems to cancel my assertion that her stories are somehow other. But her range – from a group of linked autobiographical stories about the Elkins, a wealthy Jewish family in New York, to a delineation of a rebellion organized by “Johnny One” against the patronizing summer people in the inbred village of Hillsborough – is rivaled by very few American writers of short stories. Calisher had a devastating sympathy, curiosity, and understanding of class and psychology in America in the twentieth century. After graduation from Barnard in 1932 and employment as a social worker before her marriage , she became a writer and chronicled the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, unfazed by cultural differences that put off writers nowadays.

And she indulges our curiosity about the quirks of family in linked stories she originally meant to turn into a novel, she writes in the introduction. In “Time, Gentlemen,” which is narrated by Hester Elskin, the daughter of the family, we first encounter the mellowness of Father and the tension and drive of Mother. The irony of the title is that Hester’s father, a Southern gentleman born in the 19th century, has no sense of time – and his wife, who is 22 years younger, thinks of little else. Mother is a fan off 20th century efficiency, while Father believes in leisure.

The following passage, contrasting Hester’s mother’s work ethic with her father’s charm and popularity, is typical of Calisher’s dazzling disclosures about the mores and manners of different times.

My mother, however, although she had never been in the business world, had certain convictions about it which would have done her credit in a later era. She believed that a business run with such unpressurized ease, even enjoyment, must be well on its way to ruin…. She was a woman who would have felt much safer breathing hard and fast in the wake of one of those lunchless men whose race with their calendar ends only with death. And she was never to comprehend the real truth: that people loved to do business with my father because, in an already accelerating age, his dandified air of the coffeehouse, his relaxed and charmingly circuitous tongue – which dwelt much on anecdotes but only lightly on orders or due dates – and above all, his trust in the “plenty” of time, made them feel participants in a commercial romance, gentlemen met by chance on the Rialto, who had decided to nurture a little affair.

What a find! I believe these short stories are her best work, or at least my favorite. It is one of those forgotten books by a neglected American woman writer who was once celebrated and compared to Henry James. Calisher was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987 and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. She died in 2009.

The Summer of Folly & A Dalliance with Mysteries

On a 97-degree Wednesday, I am dejected by the consequences of human folly. The snapshot of my bicycle at the top of the sidebar, with the caption “Carbon treadprint,” seems naive now, doesn’t it? All those years of biking instead of driving – and people are usually so irritated by it – seem to have done little if any good. Even some SUV drivers may at this point have acknowledged it is rather hot this summer.

It is so hot that I need complete escape, and I am dallying with mysteries. Oh my God -what a pleasure to sit in the air conditioning and be spellbound by an unlikely crime novel, with lots of witty repartee, complemented by spare, unshowy prose.

I recently rediscovered Catherine Aird, author of the Inspector Sloan series. His Burial Too, published in 1973, shares many characteristics with Golden Age Detective fiction. The crime is committed off-stage, the characters are sufficiently well-sketched to seem real but have no off-putting psychological depth, and the emphasis is on solving the puzzle. This is my idea of perfect entertainment.

Set in an English village in Calleshire, it begins one morning when Fenella Tindall wakes up late and discovers that her father is missing. Since Richard Tindall, the director of a research and development firm, is absolutely reliable, and doesn’t stay out late, she and the housekeeper are convinced something has happened. But his car is in the garage, so the police think he has probably taken the train to London, and have no conviction that there is need to worry -until they find the body crushed under a marble statue in the bell tower of a church.

What makes this mystery so diverting is Aird’s quietly compelling prose, the sharp dialogue, and the ironic observations of Inspector C. D. Sloan. The sardonic Sloan often seems to be the only adult in the room. Only the old crones (I mean that as a compliment) who live near the church seem to have their wits about them – they saw and heard a few things the night of the crime. Certainly Sloan’s assistant, William Crosby, a recklessly fast driver who hasn’t got a clue what is going on, and at one point mentions Batman, is very little help.

This is great fun, and I love all her books!

A Comedy of Terrors by Lindsey Davis. I am a a great fan of Lindsey Davis’s witty Marcus Didius Falco historical mysteries, set in ancient Rome, and characterized by much wise-cracking. A few years ago I discovered her equally witty Flavia Albia series, in which Falco’s adopted daughter takes over the family detective business.

A Comedy of Terrors, set in Rome in 89 A.D., takes place the week before Saturnalia, a rowdy winter holiday which involved heavy drinking, mayhem and rioting, and role-playing among slaves and masters. It gives Flavia Albia a perfect over-the-top opportunity for comic musings. Flavia Albia loathes Saturnalia, and is also irritated by the schadenfreude of friends who think she won’t be able to continue freelance work as an investigator now that she and her husband Tiberius have adopted two orphaned nephews .

Resigned to the horror of the holidays, she escorts the two boys for holiday shopping in an iffy neighborhood said to sell the best sigilla (statues). And what does she find instead? The corpse of the vendor covered with blood . “Oh, pigshit. And you try telling a three-year-old and a five-year-old who have been promised horrible figurines that they can’t have them.”

Well, this turns out to be a Saturnalia prank, not a murder, so one does understand why Flavia Albia hates Saturnalia. But unfortunately her husband is investigating a new gang which is taking over the nut trade – yes, nuts! – and murdering vendors who won’t sell their moldy poisonous product – which has actually killed some of the consumers.

Flavia Albia, always a savvy snoop, surmises there is a connection between the nuts gang and a new client, the battered wife of a dubious loan shark from whom she wants to escape – and this connection puts Flavia Albia and her family in danger. Their sheep, a family pet, is stolen and its head left at the gate. This is the kind of hooligan in the nut trade. There are many twists and turns to the plot, but the main reason to read it is Davis’s humor. Flavia Albia always has something witty to say even while catching criminals.

The Fate of Dead American Women Writers

This weekend, as I searched the house for The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, I noted with surprise the paucity of books by American women writers on our shelves. Anglophilia dominates the collection: one cannot apparently have too many copies of Middlemarch(my least favorite book by George Eliot); Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (my favorite Bronte Gothic); or Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the experimental masterpiece of the ’60s. As for American literature, I do know a few titles. I have repeatedly read The House of Mirth (Lily Bart and laudanum!) and Cornelia Otis Skinner’s humor pieces in Soap Behind the Ears… but, one wonders humbly, is that enough?

Well, I felt a little low, thinking about being an American who doesn’t much care for American literature. It’s a gap, I’ve always said cheerfully, but is it just a gap? No, really, I’ve read the American women’s canon, but what does it say that I’d rather drink cups of tea with Barbara Pym than watch Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier walk into the sea again (though I like Kate Chopin very much!)? Why are we Americans so intense?

Well, at least I have a Hortense Calisher collection, i comforted myself. Calisher (1911-2009) was a brilliant, prolific American writer, with a powerful, eclectic imagination and a wide literary range. In her novel The Bobby-Soxer, the most fascinating character, Aunt Leo, is a hermaphrodite; in Calisher’s slim novel, In the Slammer with Carol Smith, she chronicles the harrowing experiences of a woman who did jail time for peripheral activity with a bombing in the ’70s and now lives on the streets; and Sunday Jews, Calisher’s last novel, is a vast, unputdownable family saga. All three of these books, however, have vanished from my shelves: I practiced read-and-weed skills unwisely here. I did, however, find The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, published in 1975 – and have discovered she is a master of the short story.

That isn’t really the point of this post, though. (I will write about Calisher’s stories later.) The point is that I wonder how often the fame of even the most lauded of American women writers outlasts their lifetime. Philip Roth’s work (deservedly) will never die, nor will the Rabbit books of John Updike, but no one talks about Calisher any more, and the fate of Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was hanging by a thread until Library of America took her under their wing and revived her work recently. (N.B. I once attended a reading by Spencer at a book festival and got my copy of The Southern Woman autographed. I felt a kinship with her because she had a cat tote bag!)

In the U.S., Library of America and NYRB classics have picked up some of the slack with forgotten women writers: LOA is publishing more women these days, though NYRB Classics seems shaky on the gender question.

Well, we don’t have Virago here. And that’s a shame. We could do with an American women’s press. There is the Feminist Press, but alas! they publish only a limited number of titles. A limited budget, no doubt.

And so I must turn to my shelves for neglected writers. I guarantee, you will be hearing about women writers whom, well, you’ve never heard of.

I am still a confirmed Anglophile… but really, Kat, enough is enough!

Who are your favorite neglected American women writers?

Nancy Hale’s “The Prodigal Women” and “Where the Light Falls”

When I discovered Nancy Hale about ten years ago, I believed I had found a hidden portal to a Nancy Hale Elysium. Nobody had heard of Hale, none of her books were in print, even the university library had discarded all her books but one (A New England Girlhood). By chance I read one of her stories in a 1930’s anthology of New Yorker Stories, so I ordered a used copy of Hale’s 1942 best-selling novel The Prodigal Women – which was the easiest of her books to find online, and at that time was very cheap.

The Prodigal Women is a ripping good read, a fun “literary pop” novel, saved from melodrama by Hale’s extraordinary plotting and life-like characters. The style is sometimes awkward, as if Hale’s thoughts were rushing ahead of her pen, but the women’s relationships and, most important, their actions, keep this scintillating novel alive. The heroine, Leda March, morphs from sympathetic outsider to a cold horrific bitch. (Don’t be fooled by the allusion to the Marches in Little Women.) As a lonely New England schoolgirl, she meets the Jekylls, an unconventional southern family who moved to Massachusetts so flamboyant Mrs. Jekyll could conquer Boston society (which of course doesn’t happen). Leda and Betsy Jekyll become inseparable, and the two girls worship Maizie, Betsy’s beautiful, popular older sister. But as an adult, Leda ruthlessly falls in love -without conscience! – with Maizie’s husband, Lambert, who is in turn a talented artist and a vicious philanderer, who psychologically tortured Maizie until she submitted to an illegal abortion on their honeymoon in South America, the results of which permanently ruin her health. (Lambert says she is malingering.) Betsy goes to New York and is breezily happy until she falls in love with an abusive writer. Are you saying, WOW!? All this in a single book! Well, it is a very long book, and it influenced Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Jacqueline Susann‘s Valley of the Dolls.

Nancy Hale is a smart, unflinching literary writer, but she doesn’t mind descending into pulp fiction, and that’s one thing I like about her. In recent years literary writers – or rather, the very few that read Hale – seem to prefer her short stories. And perhaps the stories are more consistent, though somehow I do not read her for style. She seems to me to be a talented sidewalk painter of vivid, offbeat portraits of New Englanders and Southerners, with a genius for conveying a sense of place – and at the same time there is an endearing sloppiness. Mind you, I am the only reader who does not entirely admire her style, but that doesn’t mean I love her any less.That said, I am very enthusiastic about Where the Light Falls, Selected Stories of Nancy Hale, edited by Lauren Groff, and published by the Library of America in 2019. Most of these stories are well-crafted, some of them brilliant, and I found myself flying through them. Though some of the stories are slightly dated , we are entranced, because they capture historical events and attitudes in real time. The stories span the years 1934-1966 – and you will always recognize the specificity of the period.

Her 1942 story, “Those Are As Brothers,” is very much a World War II story. It is a Connecticut idyll, but the Nazis and concentrations camps cast long shadows. It begins with a glorious running sentence, which contains a subtle statement about American “freedom” – in Connecticut!

The long, clear American summer passed slowly, dreaming over the Connecticut valley and the sound square houses under the elms and the broad living fields and over the people there that came and went and lay and sat still, with purpose and and without but free, moving in and out of their houses of their own free will, free to perceive the passage of the days through the different summer months and the smells and the sun and the rain and the high days and the brooding days, as was their right to do, without fear and without apprehension.

Wouldn’t we all love summer in Connecticut? But not everyone in Connecticut has this experience of freedom – certainly not the German immigrants and Jewish refugees. Every night the German governess, known as Fräulein, who takes care of Mrs. Mason’s two little boys, chats with Mr. Loeb, the neighbor’s German Jewish gardener. Mrs. Mason, too, befriends the quiet Mr. Loeb, who becomes a member of her extended family of evening visitors. But one day his miserly employer threatens to report Mr. Loeb to the refugee committee because he talked back when she accused him of painting the fence too slowly (painting fences! an American allusion to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Mr. Loeb is terrified, haunted by the concentration camps, and believes he will never get another job. But Mrs. Mason says she would never let anything happen to him. And will she be able to protect hie, or is it the naivete of Connecticut? I prefer the former.

One of the saddest stories is “Who Lived and Died Believing.” Elizabeth, a compassionate young psychiatric nurse, stops in at Massey’s Drug Store for a soda before work; her boyfriend, Dave, a medical student, works at Massey’s during the summer. Elizabeth tells him that her patient, Mrs. Myles, is scheduled for shock treatment in the morning, which upsets Elizabeth, because it does not seem to benefit the patients. Elizabeth thinks it would calm Mrs. Myles if Dave stopped in after work, so Mrs. Myles could see an ordinary couple in love in ordinary life. And then Hale portrays the garbled thoughts of poor Mrs. Myles, sitting by the window in the “vicious heat.” “And a little part of the rotted grapes that rolled about her brain watched the faces…” But Mrs.Myles is impressed by the love between Elizabeth and Dave, long after they have ceased to be a couple.

My favorite story by far is “How Would You Like to Be Born…” about New England duty. One thinks of Henry James. Miss Florrie Davenant, whose sister Laura has just died, finds herself alone in the family house. At first, as the new Miss Davenant, she imagines breaking all the family customs. Why on earth, when she is poor and can’t pay the bills, should she send money to defend “the Negro adolescents in Georgia who were going to be tried for the murder of a white farmer”? But the impoverished Davenants are descended from abolitionists, and they always give money to such causes. She tries to break other rules – she wants to befriend the common people in her neighborhood – but nobody smiles at her, and people imitate her aristocratic accent. Are the rules there for a reason? Miss Florrie Davenant is frightened, and we are frankly frightened too for this naive woman alone in the world.

Remarkable stories and extremely enjoyable, even if you are not a short story person. I jumped breathlessly from story to story, experiencing each situation as if I were there.

The Ghosts of Booksellers: Collectibles in Glass Cases

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, or perhaps in another dimension altogether, sellers of musty secondhand books were important members of the community. In every town you would find at least one used bookstore, whose owners were frankly an eccentric lot. The men wore fresh, tidy bow ties and dashed around the store with feather dusters, or looked like Beatnik refugees from the fifties who had just smoked reefer. The charming women store owners wore black dresses feathered with cat hair and dreamily recited the poems of H.D. I reverently tiptoed , trying to avoid the disapproval of the feather duster men, whose motto clearly was DON’T TOUCH THAT BOOK! and to circumvent six-hour chats with the black-clad chain-smoking women about their favorite author, Simone Weil, whom I had not yet read.

I went through an anti-social phase, when I took to peering at the rare books in glass cases, as if there were some possibility I could buy them. It was like going to the British Library, only there you peer at manuscripts of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Angela Carter’s Wise Children. The cases in our bookstores were full of old books I could hardly imagine anyone coveting. Does anyone really want a first or second edition of Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, though perhaps one does want a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Years? Dare I say it? My paperbacks are usually nicer.

And yet I did make friends, or at least acquaintances, with booksellers, because I was a regular, and a buyer of books. One Christmas Eve, I was wandering around a bookstore gloomily, because I had trouble buying gifts for parents and other acquaintances. A shaggy-haired bookseller with rare social charm noticed me admiring a Folio Society edition of The Virgin and the Gipsy. “Take it. Merry Christmas! Nobody wants it. It’s been here for years.” “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” Bring out the midwestern self-depreciating manners! He insisted. It was a dilemma. Would it be wrong to accept the book? But he was not a dirty old man, looking for a snuggle, and I was a longtime customer, so I said Yes. It is far from Lawrence’s best book, but I loved it from this moment.

Heritage Press edition of *Anna Karenina*, trans. by Constance Garnett

Now I know you will expect to hear that I became a collector after this. I did not. I prefer reading copies, whether they be old hardcovers or new paperbacks. I have acquired a few collectibles, of the kind that are not of great worth: a lovely 1952 Heritage Book Club edition of Anna Karenina, illustrated with lithographs by Barnett Freedman; a weirdo boxed Folio Society set of the Brontes in silk covers; and a Literary Guild abridged edition of Bleak House illustrated by Edward Gorey. Damn! I bought it for the illustrations, but don’t like abridged editions. Still, the Gorey illustrations are worth it.

The problem with these charming collectibles is that they are not all in great shape. I love the Anna Karenina, but I am almost afraid to read it, because the spine is cracking. Do I simply look at it from time to time, or do I read it? One must read! And the Bronte set, with the silk covers, is not really attractive at all. (I bought it at eBay.) There are illustrations in the silk books, but the new Folio editions of the Brontes are much nicer.

Doesn’t this silk edition look a bit weird?

The thing is: used bookstores seem to be in crisis now, because of the pandemic. The prices of used books online are ridiculous, $100 (and even $700) for mass market paperbacks I am sure are not in demand, by forgotten, possibly inferior, authors of the twentieth century. But offline, in their bookstore, the owners face different problems. I know of one used bookstore that is not open to the public, unless you are willing to pay $25 for an appointment. Perhaps the $25 includes the price of $25 worth of books? But I have noticed at the few used bookstores I’ve visit, that prices are way down, not up. Good for me, but probably not for them

Strange to see the high prices online, and to discover that pulp science fiction is now valuable. You buy it in a plastic bag for $10 and just wait what happens to the paper when you open it! In the stores, you can get much cheaper deals on pulp fiction. I say, let’s go back to the physical stores, if the poor owners can afford it.

A Great Covid Story: Hilma Wolitzer’s “The Great Escape”

I am writing early about Hilma Wolitzer’s charming new collection of short stories, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, which will be published next month. Why? I am bursting with enthusiasm over “The Great Escape,” the last story in the collection, a poignant, witty masterpiece about Covid-19. The other stories appeared in magazines in the ’60s, ’70’s, and ’80s, and I love the wry voices of the women. In the early days of Second Wave feminism, her characters cope with domestic overload, accidental pregnancies, touring model homes in suburbs (and making fun of them), worrying about a “sex maniac” loose in the apartment complex, and witnessing a woman who has gone mad in the supermarket. The stories are light, simple and graceful, fast reads, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

But “The Great Escape” is on a higher level, truly a great work of literature. I am sure there are many Covid stories now, but this is the first I’ve read, and it is exquisite and breathtaking. The narrator, Paulie, and her sexy husband Howard, whom we have met in previous stories, have grown old: they are now in their nineties. They pop pills, squabble, and watch the news on TV, but are satisfied with their lives. Paulie, though annoyed by the loss of her curvy figure and grieving the devastation of Howard’s looks, is spirited and funny about old age.

We’d both become relief maps of keratoses, skin tags, and suspicious-looking moles. “What’s this thing on my back, Paulie?” Howard would say, yanking up his shirt while I searched for my reading glasses. “It’s nothing,” I’d tell him. “I have a million of those.” Cheerleader and competitor at once.

And here’s another:

There were running death jokes in our family. My father, driving past a cemetery: “Everybody’s dying to get in.” My mother: “Death must be great—nobody ever comes back.” Howard’s mother: “When one of us dies, I’m going to Florida.” That would have been funny except that she actually meant it. Now, none of them was laughing or ever coming back.

Then one day their anxious daughter calls to warn them about the novel coronavirus, which, as far as Paulie can tell, is only happening in a nursing home in Washington. Eventually, Paulie and Howard are housebound in New York, wearing their “disguises” (surgical masks and vinyl gloves) on the rare exoduses from their apartment. There is a hilarious segment when Paulie’s book club attempts to meet on Zoom. Nobody can find the mute button, or the unmute button, and they are suddenly disconnected – after Paulie has actually raised her hand to talk.

And then someone catches Covid. Everything you have imagined or experienced, including separation from loved ones, is documented in great detail and with an admirable lack of sentimentality. And yet while the plague rages, dysfunctional though they may be, history holds them together.

By the way, Elizabeth Strout wrote the preface to this wonderful collection. Though England entertains us with The Diary of a Provincial Lady, we have the witty Hilma Wolitzer. And you can read the title story at The Saturday Evening Post.

A Psychedelic Experience: Thucydides & Thackeray

It was a psychedelic experience to read Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon the same week. The pairing is not what I call ideal, but at least the drunken revels of Barry Lyndon temper the graves and gore of Thucydides.

“Twenty-seven years!” I jotted at the bottom of a page of Thucydides. Yes, the war between Athens and Sparta lasted twenty-seven years (431- 404 B.C), and a careful reading might take even longer. Maps have been involved: “Athenian Naval Raids,” “Origins of the Plague; Athenian Raids in the Peloponnesus.” I imagine myself still dragging this book around in my dotage (in 27 years). I am fascinated, however, by Thucydides’ description of the Plague, which he caught and survived. Many were less lucky. “On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect: indeed, many houses were emptied of inmates for the want of of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence.”

I was very happy to turn from Thucydides to Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon (or The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.). But, Dear Reader, It is nothing like Vanity Fair, his comic masterpiece. Barry Lyndon is mildly funny, somewhat bawdy, and a relatively fast read at 311 pages in the Oxford edition (349 counting endnotes). It grew on me, after a slow start.

Written in the form of a witty autobiography, boastful Barry Lyndon, who is born Redmond Barry, relates his swashbuckling adventures from Irish boyhood to impecunious old age. Set in the eighteenth century, this picaresque novel is reminiscent of Fielding’s Tom Jones: the sensibility is eighteenth-century, not Victorian. Barry is most sympathetic as an idealistic youth in love with his flirtatious older cousin. When he learns she plans to marry an English soldier, he challenges him to a duel and goes on the run after killing him. (So he thinks: the cousins substituted fake bullets so he wouldn’t interfere with the wedding) .

And then things go wrong. It is one mishap after another. In Dublin, he falls in with a bad crowd, who swindle him until he has run up many bad debts he doesn’t understand he has to pay. From there, he escapes into the British army to fight in the Seven Years’ War, which he confesses he doesn’t understand. (Thank God! I’d already done Thucydides 27-year-war!). He deserts, befriends one of the enemy, becomes a spy, and then a successful gambler, who learns about cards from a renegade uncle. Traveling around Europe together, they are popular at many courts.

Amusing as Barry is, we are aware that he tweaks the truth, and if we don’t suspect, we are interrupted by footnotes to that effect by the (fictional) commentator G. S. Fitz-Boodle. But am I interested in Barry’s exaggerated accounts of sword-fighting and gambling? No, not particularly. What I like is the voice of the narrator. And then since I always like love scenes, even when they go badly, I was thrilled by his courtship of the rich and beautiful Lady Lyndon – while her husband is still alive! When she is a widow, he bullies her favorite suitor so he daren’t go near her and tricks her into agreeing to marriage. And from this point, things go downhill for Barry -who now calls himself Barry Lyndon.

I do find Lady Lyndon a sympathetic character, even though she is pretentious and haughty. But Barry simply beats her down pyschologically. Thackeray’s wife apparently went mad after five years of marriage, so I wonder if he gave Lady Lyndon some of her characteristics . It is truly horrible to see Barry change from a sunny young man into a callous, brutal middle-aged man, and Lady Lyndon into a wreck.

A perfect book! I realized only at the end that this will become one of my rereads.

Any thoughts on Thackeray or Thucydides?

Happy Weekend!

Sneakers or Tennis Shoes? The Ray Bradbury Life-Style of the Mid-Twentieth Century

Before the age of clunky running shoes, circa 1975 – and by the way, my first running shoes were Brooks Villanovas, recommended for beginners because of the cheap price – I never ran a step in my life. God, no. What was I, a jock? I walked around the track in gym. My friends and I walked to class, we walked downtown, we walked to the mall, and we walked to the park. Every summer we shed our loafers, Earth shoes, or whatever and slipped into canvas shoes, known as tennis shoes or tennies. Oh, we didn’t play tennis. But tennies were ideal for our kind of walking.

In other parts of the country such shoes were called sneakers, as I was aware from reading literature set in New York. But in the midwest the term tennis shoes prevailed. You can confirm this by Ray Bradbury’s sentimental novel, Dandelion Wine (1957), which is set in a midwestern town. The first chapter is a paean to tennis shoes.

…Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He glanced quickly away, but his ankles were seized, his feet suspended, then rushed. The earth spun; the shop awnings slammed their canvas wings overhead with the thrust of his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him. Douglas walked backward, watching the tennis shoes in the midnight window left behind.

Although I prefer Bradbury’s science fiction, I certainly know the magic of tennis shoes. In our family, buying tennies was an exciting summer ritual. My mother took us to Kinney Shoes, a long-defunct chain, to buy Keds tennis shoes. These shoes, as I remember, came in white, red, navy blue, or light blue. Mother begged me not to buy white. Though they could be washed in the washing machine, she thought they looked dirty after a few days’ wear. (She was right.) But after donning our tennies, we mothers and daughters had a spring in our step as we did yard work, walked to the small neighborhood store, or dragged lawn chairs from the car when we attended ghastly Little League games. Cousins and male friends wore black canvas shoes with white rubber toes – they were usually Keds, but I do not know if they were called tennis shoes.

Are tennis shoes and sneakers the same shoe? Perhaps, perhaps not. According to a 1980’s Webster’s Dictionary, a tennis shoe is “a sports shoe with a rubber sole (usually pebbled) and a stitched canvas upper that laces over the instep (1890-95).” A sneaker is “a high or low shoe, usually of fabric, such as canvas, with a rubber or synthetic sole (1590-1600).” It’s a fine line, isn’t it?

This summer I am wearing tennis shoes for the first time in years. They are so light, and perfect for going out in the yard or a quick trip to a store. No arch support, of course. You don’t go hiking in tennies. But they are more practical than sliders, flip-flops, or sandals, through which small branches (and where do they come from?) seem to wedge themselves when you take a walk.

Any thoughts on the difference between tennies and sneakers? What do you/did you call them?

My Geekish Old Greek & a New Greek Dictionary

This crumbling Greek dictionary needed a replacement!

Ancient Greek is a bit like a crossword puzzle, perhaps more like a double acrostic. It is economical: in general, it takes four Greek words to translate eight English words. If you are a fan of Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Aristophanes, and Euripides, you adore the poetry and are also intrigued because the Greeks are not like us. We read from the perspective of Americans in the twenty-first century, so our interpretations do not always match those of the Greeks.

Classics geeks have the advantage of reading the real thing in the real language. At some point, every Greek student reads Euripides’s Medea (in Greek). And not only were we hypnotized by Euripides, we thought we might like Medea as a person. At one point she affirms, ” I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” Very dramatic. We feminists loved it! She delivers brilliant speeches, but along the way we forgot she was a wicked witch: she cut up her brother into tiny pieces and scattered them on the ocean to slow down her father in his pursuit of Jason; and she killed her own children. And more.

These days, I prefer Greek comedy, but I must say the experience of unraveling the jokes is weird as well as surreal and funny. You don’t sit down and read Greek. Oh, no. You pore over dictionaries and commentaries and work to find the right words. I was tickled pink, as my mother would say, when a note in a commentary explained that “Tartessian eel”(now there’s a baffling phrase!) is “a delicacy for Athenian tables” (from Tartessos, Spain). Then the commentator refers us to Thompson’s Glossary of Greek Fishes. These notes are so much fun – and I especially enjoyed the reference to Thompson.

Greek dictionaries are a source of entertainment this summer. My inspiration for reading comedy is the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon, a much-needed supplement or alternative to Liddell and Scott, the scholarly Greek dictionary written in the nineteenth century which is still used by scholars – and the rest of us. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is a beautiful two-volume boxed set, and the books have blissfully biggish print and modern definitions. Mind you, Liddell and Scott is useful, but the print is tiny and the definitions of the words often quaint. I am thrilled to have both “brand-name” dictionaries now!

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon has a brisk, business-like approach to to updating definitions. For instance, my old Liddell and Scott defines the word kobalos as an “errant knave” or “impudent rogue.” Love it! But the Cambridge is concise: the definition is “scoundrel.” And isn’t that better English?

The Cambridge print is the right size for near-sighted readers.

Like Netflix, Greek comedy abounds with vulgar jokes. The Liddell and Scott obfuscates the meaning with circumlocutions – and then they make no sense. The Greeks love toilet humor, but don’t look to Liddell and Scott for enlightenment. The word engkezo was new to me. First I consulted Liddell and Scott, who use the phrase”to be in a horrid fright at.” The Cambridge comes right out and says: “shit oneself.” Now I know.

There is also a joke with the word kusthos. My abridged Liddell and Scott does not include this word, so shocking is it. And the complete Liddell and Scott dictionary defines it with the Latin pudenda muliebria. Thank you, Liddell and Scott, for your wisdom! Fortunately, the Cambridge straightforwardly defines it as “female genitals” or “cunt.” Personally, I prefer the word vulva… but now I understand the smutty joke.

And so the Cambridge Greek Lexicon facilitates my journey through Greek. If, like me, you wear bifocals, I recommend the Cambridge with its larger print – yes, size matters! – but hang on to your Liddell and Scott, too.

The Blog As Performance Art: Are Critics Cool with Us Now?

When did my blog become performance art? Not today; it was definitely not yesterday. The years have rolled by swiftly, like an interlude in To the Lighthouse, only with less glamour and sophistication – so much less.

Perhaps the performance art aspect began in 2012 when, annoyed by the glut of attacks on blogs by critics, editors, and writers who regarded book bloggers and Goodreads reviewers as amateur rivals from hell, I decided to fight back. Gently.

The word “gently” meant, for the most part, ignoring them. First, we were not necessarily reading the critics; second, we could not comprehend the oddity of a witch hunt launched upon their fellow readers; and third, we had no intention of competing with them. Heavens, I wrote my heart out almost every day, rapidly and often awkwardly, at a goofy (now defunct) blog. I sincerely doubt this blog (700 subscribers) had any effect on the future of criticism. The subtitle: “A BOOK BLOG.”

Though I do not write literary criticism, nobody can say I am not a friend of the book. I may not love every book, but I love plenty of them. Mostly I read books by the dead, who are never offended by what I say. But I soon learned that no hint of negative criticism went unpunished. Someone emailed me about the death of a favorite writer but then went on to deride my blog. I was devastated by the writer’s death but did consider the bearer of bad news fucked-up.

Sometimes writers “like” my reviews. Cool, cool! Another time a writer sent me a card. Cool, cool, cool, cool! but then it was a disappointment. Neither my husband nor I could decipher it but we thought we caught the word “mean.”

“Take it as a compliment,” Mr. Nemo said.

Well, the critics, writers, and editors have forgotten about blogs now – they have bigger things to worry about. Other social media have taken over and blogs are now “old-school.” And so we reside in peace together – at least I think we do.

Before I end this post, you will want to know what I am reading: Robert Graves’s The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose. Patricia T. O’Conner in the introduction calls this “the best book on writing ever published.” So far, it is very good indeed, and more about this later.

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