15 | June | 2024 | Thornfield Hall

Readers are among the most nostalgic people in the world. And re-readers are even more nostalgic: they seek to capture the meaning and mood of the first reading.

Nostalgia often doubles as a word for sentimentality. But that is not quite its meaning. It comes from the Greek word nostos, which means “homecoming” or “return,” and from the word nostew, “to go home” or “return home.“ The English definition, too, centers on home: “a wishful desire to return in thought or in fact to one’s home, homeland, or family friends.” Another common meaning: “a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.”

Nostalgic readers stand out at bookstores. They not only wish to return to and reread their favorite books, but they seek multiple editions, or the original edition in which they read it. In 2011 HarperCollins reissued four paperback omnibus editions of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, with forewords by Judy Blume, Anna Quindlen, Meg Cabot, and Laura Lippman. I swooped upon them, not because I intended to read them, but out of nostalgia. My best friend and I loved this series about best friends Betsy and Tacy, who live in Deep Valley, Minnesota (actually Mankato, MN), in the early 20^th century. (We had Betsy-Tacy revivals.) And when I mentioned these books to a student, he dashed out to the bookstore to buy them for his wife, because she, too, is a fan. Nostalgia and word-of-mouth are great sellers of Betsy-Tacy.

And then there is Zola’s Germinal, one of my favorite novels. Can you have too many copies? Well, you probably can, because it is a very dark book. I briefly had three editions: a Penguin translation by Roger Pearson, an Oxford by Peter Collier, and an old illustrated Heritage Press copy translated by Havelock Ellis. Of the three, Roger Pearson’s translation for Penguin was my favorite and the most readable, though all are good in different ways. Oxford has reissued new translations of Zola over the last 20 years, many of which had not been in print in English for a long, long time.

Many readers are nostalgic for Angela Thirkell’s distinctive 1930s and ‘40s humor. There is an Angela Thirkell Society and an Angela Thirkell listserv group. But much as I enjoy Angela Thirkell’s nonsensical Barsetshire series, I have not been impressed by the covers of the newish Virago editions. Why? The cover of The Headmistress looks more Jane Eyre-ish than Pomfret Towers-ish. Cover art isn’t everything, but I am satisfied with 1990s used copies of Carroll & Graf paperbacks, which are sturdy, have bigger print, and pretty good cover art. Still, kudos to Virago, because a friend looked for Thirkell’s Pomfret Towers in vain for years! And now there’s a Virago.

Did you struggle over the Doctor Zhivago question? It is one of my favorite novels, but in a way it is two books: the two English translations of Pasternak’s masterpiece are so different. I prefer Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky‘s lyrical translation (2010) to the spare first translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (1958). But there was quite an uproar over the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation by those who preferred the Haywar-Harari. Out of nostalgia, I hang on to both, and also because who knows? Maybe I’ll want to return to them, out of nostalgia.

When the public library weeded Gladys Taber’s hilarious novel, Mrs. Daffodil, I was likely to have a conniption fit. It is funny and endearing, and the writer heroine raises recalcitrant chickens. But the cheapest edition I can find online is $100. I would have happily donated that to the library for a copy, but it seems a rip-off online.

The heroine, Mrs. Daffodil, lives in the country and writes for a living, just like Gladys Taber. In addition to her syndicated column, “Butternut Wisdom,” she writes short stories about young love: readers are not interested in stories about older people like herself, she has learned. As a prolific writer, she supports herself, her married daughter and graduate student husband, and presumably her housemate, Kay, a widowed college friend who agreed to share Mrs. Daffodil’s country house after her husband died. When, when will I be able to read this book again? Maybe Persephone could publish it…

Who isn’t nostalgic about books? My rediscovery of James Wilcox’s Tula Springs series has recaptured one of the happiest times of my life. Books bring out the nostalgia in all of us! So rock on!

Every weekend we cogitate on taking a camping trip in a state park. We have a tent, though other camping gear must be replaced. For instance, my sleeping bag is an old-fashioned “mummy” bag, which I have never slept a wink in.

A friend and I once camped off-trail in a park where camping was forbidden. We were teenage renegades who mockingly called ourselves a “girls who dare,” but we could not figure out how to put up a tent. Two boys in our class, both Boy Scouts, did it for us. Then we walked around, fell in the creek, walked back to the tent, and dined on Ding Dongs.. We complained bitterly about having to pee in the woods. We got up early, after sleeping very little, and vowed never to go camping again.

Camping with my husband, another former Boy Scout, is more enjoyable, though I am not really the camping type. And so while we debate the pros and cons of the trip, we compile a“campable” reading list, i.e, books we can concentrate on outdoors.

So let me recommend a delightful comic novel, Mrs. Undine’s Living Room, by James Wilcox, published in 1987.

Mrs. Undine’s Living Room is the third book in Wilcox’s series of Tula Springs novels, and my personal favorite. Wilcox has been compared to Anne Tyler, and, indeed, Tula Springs, Louisiana, is as quirky as Tyler’s Baltimore.

This novel is so funny that I can hardly turn a page without laughing. One of the main characters is Olive Mackey, a bossy secretary at City Hall who spends little time at the office. In the beginning of the novel, she has left the office to check up on Uncle L.D., a 91-year-old man who lives in an apartment above Sonny Boy Bargain Store and prides himself on his perfect memory.

While Olive struggles to change his diaper, she reminds him not to pay Mrs. Undine, a volunteer who is scheduled to visit him. He has no intention of obeying Olive. “In my dull, retarded way, may I suggest that I am able may be able to make up my mind about paying Mrs. Undine?”

We cannot help but empathize with L.D., who is practically bedridden and wants to talk to someone more on his level than Olive. He also annoys Olive by refusing to wear the Lacoste shirts she has given him, and insisting on dressing up for Mrs. Undine in “his vest and the hundred-percent silk coat from Marshall Fields in Chicago, where he was from, or somewhere near there.”

Although Wilcox is so witty, and his characters are close to caricatures, he conveys their underlying loneliness. L.D. begs Mrs. Undine to stay and make him a grilled cheese, but she refuses – he didn’t eat the last one she made, and she is supposed to stay only 20 minutes.

Mrs. Undine is low-key but fascinating. A former civics teacher and now a Ladies’ Society volunteer, she also works as a substitute teacher at a fundamentalist Christian private school. She doesn’t believe in creationism, and doesn’t intend to go near evolution in her lessons, but is so grateful to be teaching again that she ignores the school’s peculiar philosophy.

And Mrs. Undine, though in her 60s, is surrounded by men who need her in one capacity or another. Martin Bates, her ex-son-in law, an incompetent dental student, lives with her (even she finds this odd) and is always in her way. She urges him to go out and meet women. “Would it have killed you to go to that social?”

Like most handsome men, Bates is used to women doing what he wants. He gets on his high horse when he hears Mrs. Undine will be teaching science, because of the creationism issue. He threatens to move out.

“Well, dear, if that’s the way you feel about it. I put your suitcase in the hall closet… And I believe there’s some of your underwear in the dryer.”

Never has a man so quickly backed down!

There is even a possible murder. Why did L.D.’s paid caregiver fall out of the window?

Yes, even the mystery is comical. I can’t wait to reread the other Tula Springs books.