Month: June 2022

Musings on Summer Days & Six Summer Reading Suggestions

The twentieth century was cooler, metaphorically as well as literally.  It used to cool off at night.

But my mother loved her air conditioning:  “Don’t cool the outdoors” was her favorite imperative as people ran in and out.

We found many ways to escape the heat, since we didn’t like AC. We drank lemon Coke at Woolworths, or went to Things and Things and Things for frozen yogurt.  Sometimes we perched on the steps of the limestone buildings on the Pentacrest on the tree-lined campus.  The limestone was cool to the touch on hot days.  On the hottest days, we went to McBride Hall, which had a natural history museum, glass cases of stuffed wild animals lining the halls on three floors. Or we headed to the River Room at the Union, where we could sit all day without buying anything.

  And so as we head into a hot July, let me stop my musings, pray for  cool days, and  celebrate summer with some good escape books.  Here are some suggestions:


1.  I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.  “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” is the first sentence of this charming English novel.  The observant narrator, Cassandra Mortmain, writes a lively diary of family life in a run-down castle:  her famous father, author of a Joycean masterpiece,  is either blocked or lazy; her stepmother, Topaz, a former model, communes with nature in the nude;  romantic Rose, the older sister,  longs for romance but knows no men; and the younger brother Thomas is still at school.   Naturally, comic romance drives the plot.  N.B. You can read about Cassandra’s Midsummer’s Eve rites in Chapter XII (p. 199 in the St. Martin’s paperback edition).
                      

2.  The Portable Greek Reader, edited by W. H. Auden.  This anthology of ancient Greek literature, philosophy and history includes excerpts from Hesiod, Homer, Plato, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes, Thucydides, all of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, but I keep it mainly for Auden’s introduction, which I reread.  I’m surprised by how many of these selections I read in Greek in my youth.  Auden does make a few odd choices, though.  Why include Plato’s little-read Timaeus in its entirety?  But it was fun to reread excerpts from Hesiod, and to rediscover Pindar. 

                         
3.  Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge.  Allingham is one of the greatest Golden Age Detective Novel writers, and I love this one because it is set in a publishing house.  Amateur sleuth Albert Campion, who is rather like Peter Wimsey, is called in when one of the directors is murdered.  The suspect couldn’t possibly have done it. He’s simply too naive.  But then who…?

                      
4.  The Murder of My Aunt, by Richard Hull. In this slight but entertaining Golden Age mystery, published in the British Library Crime Classics series, the crazed narrator, grumpy Edwin Powell, decides to murder his controlling aunt.

                        
5.  The Shivering Sands, by Victoria Holt. In this mediocre 1969 novel, which I read when I was revisiting ’60s Gothics, Caroline investigates the disappearance of her sister, an archaeologist, by taking a job at the estate where she was last seen.  A bit formulaic, and certainly not to be read for style – but the last suspenseful 100 pages are truly Gothic!

                               
6.  Darling Girl, by Liz Michaelski. I read an enthusiastic review of this modern retelling of Peter Pan.  I wish I were enjoying it more. The story is sinister, but it could do with some stylistic dazzle.  The basic plot: Holly Darling, the granddaughter of Wendy Darling – who knew Peter Pan – is a scientist and the CEO of a cosmetics company, with a complicated personal history. She was driving the car when she had an accident that killed her husband and one of her twin sons.  The surviving son has a rare blood condition.  And then her daughter, who has been in a coma for years, disappears.  Even if I don’t finish this, I assure you the daughter’s disappearance will be connected with Peter Pan.

Happy July 4 Weekend Reading!

A Neglected Classic: Fredrick Exley’s “Pages from a Cold Island”

Is Frederick Exley’s neglected novel, Pages from a Cold Island, one of the great American classics of the 1970s?  It is out of print, so it has few fans.  It is one of the best novels I’ve read this summer, along with such wildly disparate selections as Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Balzac’s Cousin Pons, and Seneca’s De Otio (On Leisure). Did the critics give Exley a break?  Not at The New York Times, where  Alfred Kazin droned on about how much he loathes the non-fiction novel (which is known as autofiction now.)

I am a great fan of Exley’s acclaimed novel, A Fan’s Notes, and  Pages from a Cold Island is a brilliant, if unconventional, sequel.  Much of it takes the form of a homage to Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972. 

At the time of Wilson’s death,  Exley is sobering up at his mother’s house in upstate New York and preparing to teach for a semester in Iowa City at the Writers’ Workshop.  He almost misses Wilson’s obituary in The Watertown Gazette, his hometown paper, because  he is riveted to an  article about the arrest of one of his ex-pupils for possession of unprescribed amphetamines.  The ex-pupil had once called him a cocksucker:  “we’d been reading Shakespeare and apparently his diseased mind had equated an appreciation for the Bard with a yearning to envelop inflamed penises with  my oral cavity.” (Exley then slammed the boy against the blackboard and slapped him.)

Exley is depressed by the brief death notice.  He considers Wilson, who grew up near Exley’s hometown, the greatest American writer.  Exley is indignant about the TV news coverage:  both the local news anchor and Walter Cronkite give Wilson only three or four sentences.  And Exley becomes obsessed with Wilson, as he tries to make a syllabus for his workshop students.  Should he assign Hecate County or To the Finland Station?  And then, while rereading Nabokov’s Pale Fire, he becomes convinced that the model for  Nabokov’s “‘shaggy’-headed, downhome, and aging poet John Shade was Wilson!”  

But Exley gets a grip and fussily explains his mania:  “Well aware of their celebrated feuds over Eugene Onegin and Wilson’s by no means that uncomplimentary portraits of ‘Volodya’ and his wife Vera in Upstate (both of which feuds, frankly, were carried to distasteful extremes suggesting both men were playing games), I thought that so gratuitously injecting Wilson into Nabokov’s novel resulted from nothing more than the guilt I felt that so hard by his death I had determined to read Pale Fire and hadn’t yet decided on the Wilson fiction.”

At Singer Island, Florida, where Exley lives in a beach hotel and spends most of his time drinking, he becomes obsessed with Gloria Steinem, the celebrity feminist writer who founded Ms. magazine and co-founded and organized famous feminist organizations and events.  He spends days preparing for what turns out to be an uncomfortable four-hour interview with Steinem, who is not the angry feminist he’d expected, but a charming, outspoken, well-informed woman.  But the interview doesn’t go well: there isn’t much connection between them, which he blames on using a tape recorder instead of taking notes.  She does not answer his final questions bu mail, as she’d promised, because someone told her nasty things about Exley.

He also describes his semester at Iowa, which he does not enjoy. The talented workshop students turn out to be such brutal critics of each other’s work that he dreads the mayhem.  The literature class goes well, because he teaches his beloved Wilson and Nabokov, and is accepted as an authority. However, Exley spends most of his free time drinking at Donnelly’s, a bar for hardcore alcoholics, or a dive called the Deadwood with the Epstein brothers, owners of a bookstore, and their store manager, Danny.  That apparently is great fun, but even so Exley cancels his seminars a week early and heads back to Florida – where nothing is expected of him.

Living in Dystopia: The Overturning of Roe V. Wade

A rally in the ’70s

The signs of dysfunction were all there – the rise of the Christian right, the closing of Planned Parenthood clinics in red states, the near-ban of abortions in Oklahoma – but I did not expect the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

If I may say so, I am not tactfully pro-Choice:  I strongly favor birth control and abortion. In our polluted, overpopulated world, it would be more sensible to limit the number of children to two per family than to criminalize abortion.  Now that would be another violation of a woman’s right to choose – but at least it would be good for the environment.  I’m just saying, Justices of the Supreme Court! 

One summer I worked for NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League), and, after arranging our flyers on a trestle table, I would call out to passers-by, “Keep abortion safe and legal!” Hundreds of people signed postcards and petitions that asserted I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE! (These were delivered to Congress and the Senate.) 

Despite the polls that say the majority of Americans support legal abortion, where are we now?

Dystopia!

The Sports Injury: Richard Ford’s “The Sportswriter” & Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes”

There is nothing more tedious than a sports injury.

I have been limping because of a sports injury. (I hurt my back during power yoga).  And so I have been thinking about sports in literature. The male protagonists tend to watch sports rather than play them, so their injuries are mental rather than physical. 

Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986), the first volume in the Frank Bascombe tetralogy, is an American sports classic. Frank accepts a job as a sportswriter because he has become indifferent to fiction writing.  He wants desperately to live on the surface, to feel nothing, since his oldest son died; he and his wife, X, a golfer and voracious reader, are divorced and unhappy.  But X must keep it together and raise their two younger children, while Frank sets out to be the most superficial man in the world.

He takes his girlfriend, a nubile young nurse, Vicki, to Detroit, which she pronounces DEE-troit.  Frank seems to regard Vicki as a pet, which she figures out eventually. 

And Frank is too cheap to pay for the weekend, so he arranges to interview  Herb Wallagher, a paraplegic ex-ball player in Detroit.  But Herb is so bitter that Frank’s interview will prove unusable.  And we can’t really blame Frank or Herb. 

“Do you ever miss athletics?”

Herb stares at me reproachfully.  “You’re an asshole, Frank, you know that?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t know me.” 

“That’s what I’m doing here, Herb.  I’d like to get to know you and write a good story about you.  Paint you as you are.  Because I think that’s pretty interesting and complex in itself.”

“You’re just an asshole, yep, and you’re not going to get any inspiration out of me.  I dropped all that.  I don’t have to do for anybody, and that means you.  Especially you, you asshole.  I don’t play ball anymore.”
 
 

Frank’s attitude towards sportswriting is comparable to Herb’s attitude toward sports.  There will be no joy in the interview for Frank.  In the next volume of the tetralogy, Independence Day, Frank has given up sportswriting and gone into real estate.

Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a fictional memoir published in 1968,  is an early example of autofiction.  The narrator, Exley, an alcoholic, is anxious before every Giants game. His personal life is also anxious: he is in and out of mental hospitals, sponges off his parents, or occasionally lives at a bachelor friend’s apartment.  

His obsession with sports is almost manic-depressive. His father was a local high-school and college football star. And then Exley went to USC with Frank Gifford, who became a player for the Giants.   Exley never knew Gifford. He partly identifies with him, but also hates him. 

When Exley lands a teaching job at a high school, we hope he’ll prosper. But he is disturbed by the limitations and ignorance of the English faculty.  One of the teachers tells him not to talk during meetings:  it takes up too much  time.  Exley pities the  chair of the department, who talks into a void.

Unsure of our ability to read (our ability to talk hadn’t encouraged him), he read each and every item [on a mimeographed sheet] to us….  Matchlessly vapid, the items were such that I remember only one of them, and that only because to this day I have no notion what he meant by it:  The best place to make out your lesson plans is at your desk.


It’s no wonder that Frank drives every weekend to another town so he can sit in the bar, drink too much, and watch the Giants games.  This novel is unflaggingly male, teeming with beer, gin, football, TV, depression, hospitalizations, and bachelor’s pads. The obsession with a sport he’ll never play seems to be part of Exley’s mental illness.


 You have to read past  Exley’s sexist attitudes, because this is an American classic.

We need a revival of Exley’s work.  A Fan’s Notes is the first of a trilogy. Perhaps a Library of America edition?

These brilliant sports novels are not just for men. I wish I could think of one by a woman, but nothing comes to mind.

Gaslighting in Balzac’s “Cousin Pons” and a Reread of G. S. Kirk’s “The Nature of Greek Myths”

I am reading eclectically this summer.  It began with a little-known classic by Balzac, Cousin Pons, which is perhaps the greatest 19th-century novel about an inheritance scandal – greater than Middlemarch.  Then I hunkered down with G. S. Kirk’s The Nature of Greek Myths,  a definitive work first published in 1974.  Kirk takes an intellectual approach: he explores the difference between myths and folktales;  subdivides myths into categories; skewers psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of myth; compares literary versions of myths by Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Callimachus, and the tragedians; and describes the transformation of  a myth-dominated culture into one which valued philosophy.

That is enough about Kirk, whom few of you will read. 

Let me unreservedly praise Balzac’s Cousin Pons (1847), which he paired with Cousin Bette, his brilliant novel about greed, money, art, and family revenge. Unlike the scheming, vengeful Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons is a good, generous man, an impoverished theater orchestra conductor whose wealthy distant cousins no longer welcome him to dinner as he grows shabbier and older. Then he falls ill, and is circled by human vultures who have discovered that his collection of  rare paintings,  fans painted by Watteau, snuff boxes, and bric-a-brac is priceless. He has spent years searching shops for masterpieces. and spent what little money he has on his collection.

People love people with money – especially people who want to take it from you!  Suddenly everybody wants to be Pons’s friend – or should I say” friend”? – though he hasn’t a franc in actual money. The wicked concierge, Madame Cibot, one of the most memorable liars and villains in French literature, “gaslights” Pons by admitting ghoulish antique dealers into the flat at night to pick over what they want. (She gets a percentage.)   Pons awakens and sees them, though Madame Cibot says he is dreaming.  But he hobbles with great difficulty into the front room after her departure and is appalled to see that minor paintings from a back room have now replaced his masterpieces. Pons’s guileless German musician roommate, Wilhelm Schmucke, an old man, approved the sales because Madame Cibot bullied him and claimed he and Pons were in debt to her. As Pons puts together what is going on, he determines to stay alive long enough to take care of sweet, silly, Schmucke – and make sure Schmucke inherits his  fortune, rather than the greedy dealers and his cousins.And vultures they are!  An unscrupulous lawyer, Monsieur Fraisier, and an unethical doctor, Poulaine, descend upon  Pons with a plot to hasten his death and  to prove him non compos mentis to win the inheritance for  Pons’s aristocratic cousins –  in return for prestigious jobs for themselves.   


Are there any good people in Balzac’s world?  Well, yes, there  are.  The people of the small theater, whose morals might not stand up to those vaunted by Pons’s cruel, hypocritical, rich cousins,  are loyal and unselfish, if not especially interested in the old man Pons.  They willingly help him trick Madame Cibot and Monsieur Fraisier by witnessing a will that leaves everything to the Louvre – which the deceitful Cibot and Fraisier read with horror and purloin in the night. But in the morning Pons makes  a second foolproof will with a different notary, which also is witnessed by friends, making Schmucke his sole heir.

.Does it work out?  I was breathless till the end.   It doesn’t end as I had hoped,  but it  does not end without hope.  It’s not that people are VERY good – Balzac certainly vilifies most of the characters in Cousin Pons – but a few are incorruptible.  And it fascinated me that these few are actors and musicians involved with a small theater, where they must struggle to make ends meet. 

N.B.  I very much enjoyed Herbert J. Hunt’s translation of  Cousin Pons (Penguin)

Thomas Hardy’s Masterpiece, “The Mayor of Casterbridge”

Writers have radically different views on Thomas Hardy.  D. H. Lawrence considered Hardy the best novelist of the 19th century; Stella Gibbons criticized Hardy’s (and Lawrence’s) “loam-and-lovechild” novels and satirized them in Cold Comfort Farm.  Hardy’s fans have their differences:  some prefer his reputed masterpieces,  Tess of the d’Urbervilles (one of my favorites) and Jude the Obscure (too melodramatic even for me), while I dally with The Woodlanders and A Laodicean.

My favorite is The Mayor of Casterbridge, an almost- perfect Greek tragedy set in England in the 19th century.  The prose is exquisite, the plot intricate, and the structure a superb ring composition. 

In this masterpiece, Hardy charts the rise and fall of Michael Henchard, who, as a young man, tragically gets drunk at a fair and sells his wife, Susan, to a sailor, Newson, for five guineas, along with their daughter Elizabeth-Jane.  When Michael sobers up, he searches for them but cannot find them. And so he vows to abstain from alcohol for 20 years, and moves to Casterbridge, where he succeeds as a grain merchant – and becomes the mayor.Years later, Susan and Elizabeth Jane return to the scene of the fair, where Susan tries to find word of Michael, because her other “husband,” Newson, has died.   They find Michael in Casterbridge, and he makes amends by marrying Susan, who is awed by his beautiful house and riches; but he had planned to marry his long-time mistress, Lucetta.  Eventually, Lucetta moves to Casterbridge. 

Ironically, Michael’s marriage to Susan, which raises both Susan and Elizabeth Jane up several classes, is the beginning of Michael’s downfall.  There are many twists:  there is a mystery about the identity of his daughter, not revealed until after Susan’s death.  


But mostly this is a novel about jealousy.  Hot-headed Henchard  becomes jealous of the popularity of a  brilliant young Scotsman, Farfrae, a scientist, whom he once liked, and hired as the manager of his business; he fires him, but then cannot compete with Farfrae as a rival businessman.Farfrae and Elizabeth Jane are interterested in each other, but Henchard forbids him to see her.   Farfrae gradually obtains everything Henchard has or had, including Lucetta.  Henchard thinks Farfrae is deliberately setting out to wreck his life  – and one can see why he thinks it, but Farfrae regrets the loss of their friendship.

 And then there are triangles within triangles within triangles.  We have Michael, Susan, and Newson; Michael, Susan, and Lucetta;  Michael, Farfrae and Lucetta; and Farfrae, Elizabeth-Jane and Lucetta…


I love nothing more than a good wallow in a Hardy novel:  an uncritical enjoyment of his lyrical if occasionally heavy-handed prose (but the style is uniformly elegant in The Mayor), the characters’ tragic love affairs, the descriptions of Wessex (the fictional county where his novels and stories are set),  and the complicated structures of his novels.

However, J. I. M. Stewart (a Hardy scholar, novelist, and  writer of mysteries under the pseudonym Michael Innes) is not as partial to The Mayor of Casterbridge as I am.  In his introduction to the Modern Library edition, he cannot resist applying a certain dry mockery to his criticism. He thinks Hardy’s novel benefited from being written as a weekly serial: “Above all, the quick manipulation of event and character required by his crowded fable keeps Hardy’s hands fully occupied so that he has leisure for but few of those large cosmic gestures which have threatened to become routine with him.”  


And there are more observations in this caustic vein.  He writes, “[The characters] seem resigned to parting or coming together, to dying or bobbing up from the dead, with a precision and punctuality in terms of the proposed exhibition suggestive of a factory in which an advanced state of automation has been achieved.” 


 Very witty, but…   I do at least agree with Stewart when he says that Michael Henchard is one of Hardy’s most memorable male characters – and one of the best in English literature.  


J.I.M. Stewart is a  scholar and the author of Thomas Hardy:  A Critical Biography. I have enjoyed J. I. M. Stewart’s novels, but found his critique of The Mayor of Casterbridge a bit depressing.  It is a mistake for Hardy fans to get mixed up with the critics, I always say.  And I have read this novel so many times –  why did I bother with the introduction?

What Would Doris Lessing Say? The Implosion of Sex in the Arts

What would Doris Lessing say?

In the year of our Lord 2016, madness began to consume the world of arts.  Let us bear witness to a subset of that world, the  literary scene, which has imploded on itself with the new fashionable Puritanism and political correctness.


What would Doris Lessing say? Like Lessing, who, as she grew older, used to talk about the days “when she was still a woman,” I don’t feel particularly feminine these days; indeed, aging makes one less conscious of gender issues, and more exasperated with gender politics.  Lessing, who denied she was a feminist, even though we feminists claimed her,  pitied  men who lived in our times, because she thought – and this must have been the ’90s, so think how appalled she’d be now – they had lost their place in the world and weren’t allowed to fight back. No, I don’t go that far. But the current atmosphere of witch hunts and victim-heroines has had a political result:  the derailing of men’s careers on sexual misconduct charges has produced job opportunities for women.  


I read mostly women writers and respect women editors.  Still, at the back of my mind I am aware of the “erasures” that have plagued the literati in recent years. By 2017, I could not open a newspaper without finding a list of proscribed men.  On a personal level these men might have been cretins, but surely they couldn’t all be guilty.  (By the way, I kept expecting to see Cicero’s name;  he was proscribed – but for political reasons.)   Some of the misconduct scandals were horrifying, but most amounted to very little – is touching a woman’s back really sexual harassment?   My generation must have been tougher. 


In the aftermath of multiple scandals, women have become editors of prominent magazines.  Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, resigned from his job in 2017 during an internal investigation of his sexual misconduct. He made the requisite apologies for blurring the lines of professionalism with women employees and writers – and then disappeared from view.  Emily Neman succeeded him as editor in 2018, and Emily Stokes succeeded Neman in March 2021.  It’s a remarkable magazine – but two Emilys in a very short time!


What happened to Lorin Stein?  I don’t know.  But Katie Roiphe wrote about him in a brilliant article in 2018 at Harper’s, “The Other Whisper Network:  How Twitter feminism is bad for women.” 


…Not long ago, I was sitting on a friend’s couch, and she was talking about Lorin Stein, an acquaintance of mine for many years, with a special intensity. She also knew Lorin Stein, who was then still the editor of The Paris Review. Of course, Stein has since resigned under a cloud of acknowledged sexual misconduct….My friend was drinking chamomile tea and telling me second- and thirdhand stories about him with what, for a minute, I thought was gusto, but might have been political concern. “I like Lorin,” she told me. “I don’t have a personal stake in this.” She then informed me that he had sexually harassed two interns at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he had worked before his Paris Review tenure, leading to hushed-up, sealed settlements. She delivered this piece of highly specific information so confidently that I did not stop and think, even though I teach in a journalism department: Is this factually correct?

…The next morning, I related the troubling new fact of the FSG settlements to a journalist friend. Could it be true? She checked it very thoroughly and called that evening to tell me she could find no truth at all to the settlement rumors. I was disgusted with myself for repeating what was probably a lie about someone I liked and had nothing against. What was wrong with me?

At The New York Review of Books, the editor Ian Buruma was fired  in 2018 after publishing a piece by former Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who had been accused by 20 women and acquitted of charges of one count of choking and four counts of sexual assault.  I never saw this unsavory article, and it is unlikely that I would have read it anyway, so I cannot judge whether it was good or bad – but clearly the timing was bad, and editors have to be savvy about those matters. 

Perhaps Lydia Polgreen, the  editor of the Huff Post, put it best when she  said amusingly, “I really think the outrage was over the sloppy editing and then his intellectually incoherent justification of the piece.Truly unworthy of a publication with NYRB’s aspiration.”


Let me just mention the cultural appropriation fanatics.  They consider it morally wrong to write about any group, race, religion, or country unless one is a member.  This is not even practicable, is it?  And yet a group of Latinx writers in 2020 protested at bookstores and sent death threats to Jeanine Cummins, a white writer whose novel, American Dirt, centered on a Mexican woman and her child fleeing from a cartel hit and finally making it  to the U.S. border.  Because of the death threats, Cummins canceled her book tour, but American Dirt was still an Oprah Club pick and a best-seller. 
 
Going off the track a bit:  may I admit I am glad that Johnny Depp won his defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who in 2018 published a short op/ed piece in The Washington Post saying she was a victim of domestic violence and implying that Depp had abused her?


I began to read about the trial after reading Marius Kociejowski’s memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade.  Kociejowski writes that Depp came into Peter Ellis bookshop one day and bought a second edition of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.  Naturally this heightened my respect for this excellent actor, though I’m a fan anyway.  And during the trial, Depp was the more articulate and credible of the two.  I was also impressed by the women who testified on his behalf, among them Kate Moss, who assured them that Depp had never pushed her down a flight of stairs at a hotel – that he wasn’t even there when she fell. 


Ironically, Heard’s op/ed piece had repercussions for the careers of both actors.  After its publication, Depp lost a lucrative movie deal reprising his role in The Pirates of the Caribbean.   Heard hadn’t worked for a while. Why Heard had continued the battle in print is a mystery – they were already divorced.


It all makes me very tired. Doris Lessing, too, was tired of the battle of the sexes.  

Staircases and Ladders: Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha

Every detail of my trip to London has been lived and relived, doubtless because life has been so dull since the pandemic struck in 2020.  Remember when we quarantined books?  I quit that early on. But I have decided to record my London adventures here, in some form or other, in various degrees of verity, or rather veraciously but from various points-of-view, and I may interweave them with new adventures in the U.S.

And so I begin.

“Nothing ever happens to me,” Camilla Haven, the heroine of Mary Stewart’s witty Gothic novel, My Brother Michael, claims in a cafe in Athens.  (I wrote about this novel here.) And then Camilla makes an impulsive decision to drive someone else’s hired car to Delphi, and turn it over to the  mysterious Simon, who allegedly needs it, while she needs to see the Delphi ruins.  But suddenly she is in danger and the adventure turns Gothic as she roams and scrabbles up the mountains!

Ah, I know just how Camilla feels.   At the Royal Academy in London I commenced a Gothic climb up a gorgeous but treacherous glass staircase.  Instead of admitting to vertigo as I neared the top, and sitting with my head between my knees till the dizziness passed,  I actually hastened my footsteps because I heard someone behind me. Did I fear a villain in pursuit? No, I did not.  It was my spirit of competition!  Camilla?  Are you hearing this?  God  forbid that anybody should pass me on the glass staircase!  Now climb that mountain faster!

  Well, my dears, I have something new to record  in American life.  We visited Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha – a huge, excellent used bookstore, established in 1993, which has an eclectic collection,  as good as anything I saw in London, and many ladders, because the bookcases are floor-to ceiling. According to the website, and to what we have seen over the years, it has ” a special interest in scholarly titles in all fields with a focus in the subjects of art, literature, architecture, design, history, science and philosophy.”

Jackson Street Booksellers

Do you want a complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary?  Are you looking for a particular Library of America book? The novels of Hugo Charteris? The Penguin Virgil in English?  A history of the 1960s?  Civil War books?  Essays by the Transcendentalists? Books on anarchism? Frederick Exley’s trilogy? Poetry published by Black Sparrow Press and  Folio Society Trollopes?   Old, valuable books locked in glass cases? 


I personally am a fan of Hortense Calisher, but did not care to to climb a FOUR-STEP LADDER to look at these books.    No, I would have to find someone to climb for me, because the glass staircase in London was challenging enough for one year. After an hour and a half, I spotted my husband in one of the aisles and he clambered up the ladder to retrieve some books for me.  It wasn’t easy, because he had to remove books piled on top of the top-shelf books. He gingerly juggled them and moved them aside  then handed down  my books.  Eureka!  They were in stunning shape.

Carl Ashford, co-owner of Jackson Street Booksellers


 I only bought two books, now that I am no longer a bibliomane.  One was $4, the other $6.  My husband bought a book for $6.  

By the way, Jackson Street Booksellers is as good as – or better than – the bookstores I’ve visited in London. The books are in superb condition.  That is because they have guidelines for what they will or will not buy.They will not buy:

  • Book Club Editions
  • Textbooks
  • Ex-Library Books
  • Romances
  • Out-of-date Travel Guides
  • Computer Programming Manuals
  • Anything that is highlighted or underlined
  • Any book which has a broken binding or missing pages.

And that, in my opinion, makes them a super bookstore! Do visit:

Jackson Street Booksellers, 1119 Jackson Street Omaha, NE 68102

Second location: Solid Jackson Books, 3925 Farnam Street, Omaha, NE 68104
And they also sell on Abebooks.

What Happened to the Gothic Novel? Mary Stewart’s “My Brother Michael”

Gothic novels are thrilling.  When we recall the intoxicating pleasures of the Gothic, we think of 18th- and 19th-century ghost stories, haunted castles, secret passages, unexplained lights wavering, and supernatural phenomena revealed to be the product of human agency.

Victorian writers manipulated these tropes to great effect. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a mad woman escapes from the attic and terrorizes Jane and Mr. Rochester. In Charlotte’s later novel, Villette, the teacher Lucy Snowe sees the ghost of a nun in an attic and later is drugged by the villainous headmistress/owner of the school.  In The Rose and the Key, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Maud Vernon thinks she is going to a party only to find herself kidnapped and locked in an insane asylum. 

In the twentieth century, Gothic tropes remained vigorous.  Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is full of grotesque Southern characters and suffused with a moody atmosphere.  In Shirley Jackson’s novels and short stories, there are haunted houses, good families gone bonkers, and ignorant villagers who will stone a person as soon as look at him. 


But what interests me this summer is the renaissance of women’s Gothic novels in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.   If you have read Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Dorothy Eden, and Anne Maybury, you know these engrossing mysteries with Gothic elements.  The heroines travel, visit mansions, meet very masculine men, solve murders,  and investigate crimes, but are often startled by strange, unexplained apparitions.  And, of course, there is romance.  Falling in love is probably the most common trope in the history of the English novel.

These mid-century Gothics are now reclassified as romantic suspense. Perhaps the term Gothic no longer sells.  These heroines do meet attractive men – quite often two, as in Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic – but there is the Gothic possibility that one of the men is himself the murderer/smuggler.  

The most elegant of these Gothic writers is Mary Stewart, who published her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, in 1955. I am  fond of My Brother Michael, published in 1959, and recently reread it.  In this Gothic thriller, the heroine, Camilla Haven, a Latin teacher, travels alone on vacation in Greece. Camilla’s solitary trip goes about as well as these things can, until a Greek man approaches her in a cafe in Athens and insists on giving her the keys to a hired car.  She did not hire the car, but he says it was for Simon in Delphi, “a matter of life and death.”

But before I go on, let me share the Author’s Note, which shows Mary Stewart’s intellectualism and knowledge of Greek literature – and how she differs from the Gothic writers of her time.

She writes,


The quotations from Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Electra of Euripides appear by kind permission of Messrs. Allen & Unwin.  I am also indebted to the editors of the Penguin Classics for permission to use extracts from Sophocles and Euripides in translations by E. E. Warling and Philip Vellacott; to Messrs. Faber and Faber for their leave to use the lines from Dudley Fitts’ translation of The Frogs by Aristophanes…

Stewart often uses the quotations as epigraphs, or interweaves them in the text. The following epigraph in Chapter 1 draws attention to Camilla’s character, as it complements the opening passage.

Why, woman,
What are you waiting for?
                    Sophocles:  “Electra”
                   (tr. E. E Watling)

“Nothing ever happens to me.”
I wrote the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the cafe table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.

An amusing, brilliant opening of a novel!

Camilla dithers when the Greek drops the car key on the table, but she is running short of money and  has longed to go to Delphi, so she takes the car – Delphi  is so small she should be able to find Simon, she reasons.   And along the way there is much humor, because she is not an experienced driver, and has a few adventures en route – including an encounter with a macho bus driver who will not let her pass.

Simon Lester, an Englishman, the only Simon in Delphi, has not hired the car but tries to help her find the other Simon. (There is none.) There is a natural sympathy between them:   Simon is a classics teacher and housemaster, while Camilla, of course, teaches Latin.  As Camilla wryly tells Simon, she is not quite a classicist, because at girls’ schools only Latin is taught.  And, so, yes, the man who knows Greek is acknowledged by Camilla as superior, which is, by the way, unusual in Stewart’s books. But quiet Camilla becomes stronger as the plot unravels – and God knows she has to use her wits, because Simon is investigating the murder of his brother Michael 14 years ago in Greece, where he was stationed during World War II and then worked  in the Greek resistance.  Stewart also outlines the fascinating history of the war and the resistance in Greece.

Before I go,  I must describe one of Stewart’s travel scenes:  she is a natural travel writer, and traveled in order to set her novels in different countries. At night, Camilla and Simon visit the temple at Delphi. It is a magical experience. And then in  the small theater, Simon, at Camilla’s request, recites some Greek.  He chooses a passage from Sophocles’s Electra.  The acoustics are marvelous, and the passage evocative.  The spirits of the ancient Greeks seem eerily present. This is a charming, brilliant novel, which I cannot recommend too highly.  I would call it a mystery with Gothic elements, rather than a pure Gothic novel.  But that is often true of this particular subset of women’s novels.  I will, however, post soon about a purely Gothic novel of the ’60s. 

If you enjoyed this, let me know, and look forward to more posts on the Gothic reading experience.

                                   

Oh, Dear, I’m a Bibliomane!

It is possible to have too many books.  Sometimes we idly chat about opening a bookstore. 


 While light-heartedly organizing a bookcase the other day, I discovered we had two, sometimes three, even four, copies of each of Thomas Hardy’s novels.  It seems excessive – but if you read and reread a dingy, dusty, coffee-stained library discard of Two on a Tower, you might replace it when it gently disintegrates.   You might- but I might replace it with two Penguins with different covers! And why do I have two copies of The Well-Beloved, surely Hardy’s worst novel?  Well, one of them is used to prop open a window.  But why the other copy?

Oh, dear, I really am a bibliomane! 

 And after reading Marius Kociejowski’s  charming, poignant memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade, I had a wake-up call – not the point of the book, by the way.  Kociejowski differentiates between bibliophiles – book lovers who buy books in moderation – and bibliomanes – book lovers who manically can’t stop buying.


Some of the collectors he describes really are mad – misers who have no furniture, just boxes of books, and dress in rags so they can spend all their money on first editions.  They are obsessed with chasing down a book they really must have.  

Am I so different?  I fear not!  I have a mad number of books.   I wasn’t consciously collecting, but isn’t that collecting if you unwittingly collect multiple copies of Hardy’s books – I’ve even got The Dynasts!  


I don’t buy rare books – I am a common reader – but  I love 19th-century novels, and I do have multiple paperbacks of some of my favorite authors. I have at least six copies of War and Peace in different translations.  Now I will hang onto these copies -Tolstoy is one of my favorite writers – and my husband pretends not to see the different editions, because he knows I’m obsessed with that book.  One  day when I put it in my bike pannier, he said I didn’t need to carry such a big book..  I pointed out that I was reading it and needed it for our coffee break.  


“No wonder you have a bad back!” He offered to carry it in his pannier, but I refused.

I’m like my mother, who used to collect knick-knacks.  She collected so many that she had to store boxes and boxes and boxes of them in the basement.  And from time to time she would bring up favorites from the boxes and box up those she tired of.


Perhaps it is a genetic trait.