A Retirement Community in Florida: “Sun City,” by Tove Jansson

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In Tove Jansson’s comic novel, Sun City, set in a retirement community in Florida, the residents of the Berkeley Arms engage in mischief and mayhem. Much of the action takes place in the rocking chairs on the veranda. If they choose a chair unwisely, they are stuck beside people they dislike, because no one ever changes chairs. (It is considered a breach of etiquette.) My favorite characters, two sisters who make trips to the library and read all day, are the only residents who die in the course of the novel. The question is: Who will get their chairs? Out of respect for the dead, the residents hesitate.

Yet this charming novel is not quite what you’d call cozy. There is constant friction between the characters. On the veranda, the cantankerous Mr. Thompson, the only man at the Berkeley Arms, pretends to be deaf, but hears when he wants to, and insults the women. Mrs. Morris, who arrived weeks earlier with a sore throat, sits in the chair beside him and pretends to have lost her voice, which allows her to think in silence. Her neighbor in the next chair, Miss Peabody, a timid soul, says very little, but is riddled with malice, which breaks out against Miss Frey, the unpopular, affected manager.

Not much happens, but this is a sweet, funny, unusual novel. Jansson, best-known in the U.S. for her children’s series, The Moomins, discovered the “sun cities,” i.e., retirement communities, in her travels to Florida. Her character portraits are filled with details that can be as startling and Gothic as Flannery O’Connor’s.

For instance, Bounty Joe, one of the attendants, is a Jesus freak who rides a motorcycle. In his girlfriend’s room, he ” fixed the altar above the bed and propped up the shelf so it would sit straight. He had run an electric cord to the lamp above God’s Mother, who stood in the altar with her plastic flowers and the sugar skulls form Guadalajara.” Throughout the novel, Joe awaits a letter from Miami announcing the Second Coming.

Sun City is a brilliant, elegantly-written novel, and a fast read. Translated by Thomas Teal, it is one of five of Jansson’s novels published by NYRB Classics.

My “-Ology” Phobia: Anthropology, Psychology & Biology

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Gym class?

Near the end of senior year, my advisor asked what I planned to do after graduation.

“Maybe the Peace Corps?” I said timidly.

He tried not to laugh. “I’m not sure your classics background would benefit the people of third-world countries.”

I felt a little relieved, because I don’t even like camping.

Then my advisor got down to business. “Are you aware that you need two more core courses to graduate?”

So that was the problem. ” I’m sticking around this summer. And I’m taking German, too, so I don’t go mad.”

Most students at the university hustle to get the core classes out of the way. I excelled in two subjects, and one might argue that they are the same subject: languages and literature. But I was not crazy about taking any class with the suffix “-ology.” My solution was to sign up for more languages and literature and hope no one noticed. Damn it!

Freshman year, I fulfilled the Social Science requirement: Anthropology and Psychology. Good God, if they could have made it more boring, I don’t know how. A friend and I stayed up all night before the psychology exam frantically reading the textbook (sometimes we just highlighted and took nothing in) and the Lecture Notes we had bought at the Student Union. We passed, but how? And the science class is a blur – perhaps it was called: Physics Lite?

But it was all worth it for the the “Culture” core requirement: I was enraptured by two semesters of Drama in Western Culture. Reading plays on the page has a special virtue if you don’t live in a city where there is “real” theater. We started with Greek tragedy and ended with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Leon, one of the T.A.s, pictured in the back at the right

And I adored the two kind T.A.’s who ran the discussion group: Leon was the co-founder of a whimsical comedy group, and Jan later founded The Haunted Bookshop, a used bookshop, in her home. (The shop has new owners.)

Jan and her husband founded The Haunted Bookshop in their home..

But back to that last semester senior year: I still needed a gym class, or was it called P.E.? And a science -ology class.

“I wonder,” I said, “if for gym I could do a study of whether women’s attitudes towards sports are changing. Are we taking over men’s sports or are we still rebelling against pointless, violent games?”

Did my advisor gasp at my genius? He was tactful. “That might be a controversial Women’s Studies thesis, but not, I fear, P.E.”

And so I timidly signed up for Archery (I was under the influence of Daniel Deronda) and an -ology class.. In spite of gym and -ology, I graduated with honors. And then on to graduate school – which was far less cozy – did I even have an advisor? But the experience was worth it.

Anyway, I appreciated my undergrad advisor. Today I read his obituary and moaned, “How can you be dead? You were the wittiest and best!”

And he really was. Ave atque vale…

Reader on the Verge:  An Existential Comedy

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It was a beautiful day in April.  Crocuses, forsythia, etc.  Alas, I was on the verge of a reading breakdown.  First I read the cereal box.  Then  I read the slogan on a cough drop wrapper: “INSPIRE ENVY.”  (You will not find enlightenment from cough drop wrappers.)

And then I picked up C. H. B. Kitchin’s engrossing, witty novel, Mr. Balcony (1927),  a neglected book that deserves a revival. In the introduction to the Faber Finds edition, Francis King says it is “both the strangest of Kitchin’s novels and one of the strangest of the twenties.” 

I admit it is pretty strange.  The protagonist, Mr. Balcony, is a confirmed bachelor, i.e., gay, and a homespun philosopher who rejects not only the humdrum routine of “quiet lives of desperation” but deconstructs the English language.  

If only one could thus isolate the pure form of a whole language, expurgate a dictionary until a commonplace sentence like ‘Will you shake the other end of that cylinder?’ became meaningless – from the point of view of its translation into French. 

Although Mr. Balcony – who refers to his balcony as his namesake – is at the pivot of the action, he is not necessarily the main character.   Perhaps the most vivid, realistic character is the imaginative Gloria Swing, a wistful milliner with a hat shop, who wishes she would fall in love and marry. She is happy and hopeful as she prepares for a party on her balcony where she and her friends (most of them customers) will watch the parade.  They watch the royal carriage roll by, followed by a phalanx of women in uniform. 

One of the guests, the domineering  Lady Hoobrake, objects to the women in uniform.  “’Absurd,’ Lady Hoobrake continued, ‘aping the men like that.  How wretched they look!’”  She also compares them to waddling ducks.

We would hardly call Mr. Balcony a hippie, but he persuades Aubrey, Lady Hoobrake’s witty, hapless son, slightly reminiscent of Saki’s Bassington, to quit his deadening job and refuse to waste his days doing repetitive tasks.  Meanwhile, Mr. Balcony has divested himself of all his stocks and money. He uses what’s left to hire a yacht.

But Mr. Balcony doesn’t have any more friends than Gloria does. And so at her party, he invites the hostess and guests to travel on the yacht with him to Africa.  And on that existentialist journey, the character types evolve, with nods to disparate genres, including the satires of Horace and Apuleius, morality tales, Agatha Christie, Oscar Wilde,  Joseph Conrad, and H. Rider Haggard.

In fact Mr. Balcony does his best to take care of them, but whether he succeeds is questionable. Let’s call it an existential comedy!

My Accidental Success & Weekend Reading

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Success Alert: A Shortlist Story

I love book prizes, but never pick the winner.

This year I have read four of the six novels on the Women’s Prize shortlist. I wasn’t prescient: I picked them at random.  Some bloggers and vloggers read the entire 16-book longlist and then predict the shortlist and the winner. I’m strictly a Win, Show, or Place type myself.

I read the following four shortlisted books: Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, Miranda July’s All Fours, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, and Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally. 

And Now, for the Fun Part of This Post:  What I Might Read This Weekend!

  1. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf:  A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney.  I love Jane Austen.  What could be more exciting than reading about Jane Austen’s reading? Ann Radcliffe’s Gothics bore me, but I want to read Elizabeth Inchbald. Romney also explores why some of Austen’s favorite books have disappeared from our shelves.
  2. A Pocketful of Wry, by Phyllis McGinley.  McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. She wrote witty, clever poems about women’s lives, the pre-election vote, a letter to the American Medical Association, and “communing” with Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and L. MacNiece. Apparently poets were miffed when she won the prize because her poetry RHYMES. She has a light touch and a sense of humor. Read her poems in the bathtub, on the bus, or in your coziest chair.
  3.  City, by Clifford D. Simak.  In this charming science fiction novel, the last beings on earth are talking dogs and robots.  The dogs are puzzled by eight extant human tales in their archives. Were they really written by human beings? Did humans ever exist?.  Some scholarly dogs believe the tales are ancient doggish literature. In the faux preface, the dog narrator summarizes the criticism.  “Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with almost pure myth and that as a result no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with symbolism to which the key has long been lost.” There’s more.
  4. The Second Rumple Omnibus, by John Mortimer.  I left The First Rumpole Omnibus on a plane, so am glad I had the Second Rumpole Omnibus at home.  In this witty collection of short stories, the rumpled, eccentric Rumpole, a barrister who represents the poor and the assumed-guilty at the Old Bailey, investigates his clients’ cases between conversations with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (his wife).
  5. Homing, by Jon Day.  I bought this at Waterstones and promptly forgot about it.  Jon Day, a lecturer in English at King’s College London, has been fascinated by pigeons since childhood when he named one of his “rescue”” pigeon Psycho.  And after he moved to the suburbs as an adult, he built a coop and began to race pigeons.  In my neighborhood there are only chickens and bees.  Should I keep pigeons? There might be complaints.

All these books look so-o-o-o good.  And I’m glad to be done with contemporary fiction for the moment.

The Bacchantes, Part II: The Murder of Orpheus

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The Greek Dionysus and the Roman Bacchus are known as the gods of wine, but they are not gentle gods.

The Roman Bacchus is associated with Liber Pater, an ancient Italian god of wine and fertility who was celebrated at festivals. (They carried giant phalluses through the streets.) And Bacchus became, more or less, the Roman equivalent of Dionysus. In Ovid’s epic, Metamorphoses, the frenzied Bacchantes, without Bacchus’s permission, murder Orpheus because of his chastity.

A brief precis of Orpheus’s history:  Orpheus visits the underworld to plead for the return of his wife, Eurydice, who has died of a snake bite at their wedding.  Hades has one condition: Orpheus must not look back on the path to the upper world.. But Orpheus does look back: he can’t resist. And his hubris results in the loss of Eurydice a second time.

Ovid’s Bacchantes are not avenging the death (twice) of Eurydice.  They regard Orpheus as their contemptor: he must feel contempt because he declines to participate in their sexual rites.  Orpheus leads the life of a mourning poet, singing songs, playing the lyre, and charming animals and rocks with his music and poetry. But the Bacchantes loathe him.

Below is my prose translation of Ovid’s introduction to the Bacchantes.

And behold!  the Bacchantes, married women of Thrace. their maddened breasts covered with the skins of wild animals, stand on the top of a hill and watch Orpheus marrying song to the strings of his lyre.

The Bacchantes throw rocks, clods of dirt, and branches at him but the weapons are “conquered” by Orpheus’s songs. Even the rocks become his inanimate friends. Then the Bacchantes frenziedly drown out his song with noise: ululations, clapping, playing the pipe, etc.. The rocks and branches no longer hear his music, and the missiles strike Orpheus. The murder of Orpheus is one of the most violent scenes in Ovid’s poetry.

After the murder, the animals mourn Orpheus.  Again, this is my prose translation:

The sorrowing birds, the wild animals, the hard rocks, and the trees cried for you, having been charmed by your music  A tree mourned you, Orpheus, by cutting her hair, shaking off her leaves.

Unlike Dionysus in The Bacchae, Bacchus does not incite the violence of the women. He is disgusted by their murder of Orpheus, and they are punished. Bacchus transforms the women into into trees. Terrified, they scream, cry, and struggle while their feet become rooted.

The metamorphosis of women into trees is a common motif in Ovid’s poem. It can be a gift or a punishment from the gods. In Book I of the Metamorphoses, Daphne, a nymph, begs her father to turn her into a tree so she can escape Apollo’s pursuit of her and determination to “marry” her. Thus, she obtains sexual independence and is the first laurel tree..

Ovid’s Bacchantes resist their metamorphosis into trees.  And I wonder if their fear of growing roots – of being rooted – is partly the reason for joining Bacchus’s cult. Perhaps they they were bored housewives, longing to escape their limitations in a sexist society. Beware the Bacchantes!

The Bewildering World of Bacchantes

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“Gods should be exempt from human passion.” – The Bacchae

I’m not a Bacchante. You know that.  I’m a mad reader. I do not even drink wine. Iced tea, please. But wine is the chosen drink of Dionysus. And his followers, the Bacchae, get drunk and are possessed by the god, dance wildly, tear animals apart with their bare hands and eat the raw flesh, and perform other sacred rites. 

Perhaps rereading Euripides’s The Bacchae is a sacred rite.

I learned that Dionysus is a secret blonde.  Who knew? Early on in Euripides’s tragedy, Dionysus assumes the form of a golden-haired man. He does this to tease Pentheus, the young Theban king who despises the new rites and wants to abolish them. Pentheus’s mother, Agave, and other Theban women have already been driven mad by the god and lured from the city.

Euripides stresses the youthful nature of Pentheus, who considers the worship of Dionysus superstitious and morally suspect. The chorus of Asian Bacchae who have followed Dionysus to Thebes observe the young king’s rashness.

The chorus recognizes Pentheus’s hubris. They sing,

A tongue without reins
defiance,unwisdom -
their end is disaster.

Pentheus does not acknowledge Dionysus, the effeminate god of wine, intoxication, and ritual madness. But each god must be acknowledged, each must receive sacrifices. And Pentheus is punished violently for his hubris, his arrogance. He does not know his own nature yet, and does not understand the nature of the gods. In Greek tragedy, Dionysus is not a jolly lover of the grape. The destructive side of Dionysus is emphasized.

The Bacchae is violent and horrifying almost beyond imagination.  It is not just Dionysus, it is the violence of the Bacchantes. I used to be able to separate myself from literary texts, but no longer. The excess, the malice, and the cruelty of Dionysus exhausted me, despite the beauty of Euripides’s language.

What does Euripides mean by it? Why does Pentheus, so young he does not have a beard, suffer such a cruel punishment? And the ancient Greeks tended to be lenient to the young because they are impetuous, inexperienced, and unwise. Euripides seems to feel the injustice of the punishment, and is subversive in the graphic description of the ah-tay, or fall, of Pentheus.

Can I read this as a radical condemnation of the god’s violence?  I can and I will.  But there are other factors to consider, if I had time: the relationship between religion and government, the culture and the conventions of Greek tragedy,. There is usually a murder, a hero in disguise, characters who rant against injustice, and a fall, or ruin, after hubris. And the ravings of the chorus express the anxiety of the general population.

Necessity requires the Greeks to worship Dionysus.  It is necessary to indulge themselves, to get out of themselves, to be mystic, to forget self..  

But often they’re just at a theater festival -very popular – or even a Dionysian festival.

There will be wine!

The quotes are from the translation of The Bacchae by William Arrowsmith.

Amaryllis’s Choice:  Richard Jefferies’s “Amaryllis at the Fair”

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“The reader who expects a novel will be disappointed.”–  David Garnett in the introduction to Richard Jefferies’s Amaryllis at the Fair (Everyman’s Library)

Certainly I expected a novel, and it is extraordinay. David Garnett bases his criticism on the lack of plot. The book is static, but I glimpsed various plot-lines. What we expect is a Victorian marriage plot: Jefferies sets it up again and again and then swerves away.   But his heroine, Amaryllis Odin, is fan intelligent country girl with no interest in marriage. That in itself makes her extraordinary.

I admired Jeffries’s lyrical style and his description of Amaryllis’s intense relationship to the land. Amaryllis is besotted with country life, and proud of her father, Iden, a hard-working but unsuccessful farmer.  She is ecstatic when she finds the first daffodil of spring, and rushes to show it to him.   Odin loves the land, but he tells her, “Flowers bean’t no use on.” Amaryllis is crushed. She herself is a flower; hence her name.

Richard Jeffries

There is no sense in the Odins’ poverty, but his choice of work set him apart from his class, and he has quarreled with his father.  He spends most of his time hunched over the potato plot, or talking in dialect to other country folk. The latter exasperates his wife, because he is well-educated, and has many career options. Jeffries portrays this cross woman sympathetically: there are reasons for her anger. The family is almost starving. And she is the one who must persuade shopkeepers to supply them with food on credit.  

This enchanting, formless little novel is elevated by Jeffries’s poetic language.

The moss on the ridge of the wall… looked shriveled and thin, the green tint dried out of it.  A sparrow with a straw tried to reach the eaves of the house to put it in his nest, but the depending straw was caught by the breeze as a sail, and carried him past….

 But back to the plot that Garnett thinks isn’t a plot. The marriage plots unfold on the day of the fair. It begins when Amaryllis refuses to ride to the fair with a potential suitor. She insists on walking, much to her mother’s annoyance.  And then, after looking around at the fair, Amaryllis has dinner with her grandfather, who takes her on a walk to meet Hon. Raleigh Pamment at his mansion. Her grandfather praises her beauty to Raleigh as if she were a cow, and she rushes away in a huff during a tour of his portrait gallery. Raleigh runs after her, but she escapes. She is a bit of a socialist. Jeffries writes, “To her the Pamments were the incarnation of everything detestable, of oppression, obstruction, and medieval darkness.”

There is a brilliant sketch of Raleigh, who is likable and appealing, in a comic way.   He spends all day at his desk, studying the sports page and writing telegrams, so he can bet on the races.  The contrast of the cluttered desk with his racing form is very funny, because he appears to be absorbed in respectable business. And then we learn that Raleigh and his friend Freddy have retired to the country manse after a huge bloody fight at a bar in London.  They are wanted by the police, or so they think.  Jeffries suggests that if the people had found him, Raleigh would have been a hero, hailed as Caesar.

This is a series of beautifully-written patoral sketches, woven together loosely. Is it a novel? Of course it is . And if you like Thomas Hardy, you will like Amaryllis, Thomas Hardyish heroine with more choices.

The Muddle of Acronyms:  Do You “DNF?”

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The other day my husband and I ate popcorn and drank Diet Snapple in front of a BookTube vlog chat. “Why didn’t you DNF it?” the thirtysomething vlogger asked a guest.

My husband is new to BookTube. “What’s DNF?”  he asked me.

“’Did not finish.’” How I know this, where I learned this, how I translated it I cannot say.  It’s just there, it’s in the air, it’s on the internet. 

The guest vlogger told the hostess that he didn’t DNF because the book was a prize finalist and “too serious.”  He seemed shocked by the DNF question.

He’s a little older than his vlogger hostess, so perhaps he isn’t as casual about putting aside a book. It probably is a generational thing.  We didn’t grow up DNF-ing. In general I finish the books I start, though I recently gave up re–reading David Copperfield after 300 pages. 

My husband vaguely disapproves of the DNF concept. Only under extraordinary circumstances does he not finish a book. I do reject many new, much-lauded books, but I admit, I can’t remember not finishing a book till my thirties, when I gave up on the fifth volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Perhaps if we’d had the acronym DNF we wouldn’t feel obligated to finish our books. Language does influence our views.  And DNF is so cute: I like the sound of it, but on some level it trivializes the act of finishing a book. It implies that we deserve instant gratification, and that we should stop reading any book that ceases to amuse us. It’s not to stick it to the man, like Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner; we’re giving up the race because we’re self-indulgent.

Still, David Copperfield is a shocking book to DNF, isn’t it?  But perhaps I didn’t quite DNF it, since I’ve already read it four times.

A Moving Novel:  Elizabeth Strout’s “Tell Me Everything”

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Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything brought tears to my eyes.  Longlisted for the Women’s Prize, this gracefully-written, moving novel brings together characters from Strout’s previous books, including Lucy Barton, a successful writer who moved from New York to Maine with her ex-husband William during the pandemic, and Olive Kitteridge, the cranky retired schoolteacher in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. 

Set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, Strout’s latest tells the stories of Maine natives as well as newcomers. Perhaps my favorite character is Bob Burgess, a lawyer who is Lucy’s best friend. An accusation of accidental patricide shaped his childhood. His older brother was responsible for the accident, but Bob, who is still confused about it, took the fall. In the course of the novel, Bob saves a gentle introvert, Matt, from a charge of matricide. Although Bob doesn’t think about it, he is saving himself as well as Matt.

There is almost a romance in this novel. A gentle love story unfolds during Lucy and Bob’s long walks. Will they become romantically involved, we wonder? They seldom touch each other and never kiss, because Bob is married to Margaret, a minister with whom he isn’t getting along at the moment, and Lucy is living with her ex-husband William, a self-centered, obsessive parasitologist. Lucy and Bob are loyal and reluctant to judge others, but if only…

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Then there’s grouchy Olive Kitteridge, the heroine of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge.  Olive was a teacher in Crosby for many years.  Now she is in her 90s, complains that her son hates her because he never visits, and laments the changes in the culture. But her best friend lives in a nearby retirement home, so she is not alone.  Lucy enters her life, because Olive tells Bob she has a story to tell Lucy.  Lucy refers to Olive’s fascinating stories of local people as “unrecorded lives.”

 It could be said that the main theme of the book is unrecorded  lives. There is a link between fiction and these unrecorded lives.  Oral storytelling is different from writing, but how different is it really?  Olive tells stories of tragedy, romance, fortitude, stoicism, and, occasionally, death.  Lucy is the repository of these stories. Olive has chosen well.

Strout’s graceful, carefully-shaped sentences are a pleasure to read.   She has won several prizes in the U.S., including the Pulitzer Prize, but the esteem of the Women’s Prize judges is another distinction. I hope she wins!

Moments of Misguided Vanity (Revised Version)

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 Misguided vanity.  It might be in a Psychiatrist’s Handbook.  I looked at a space in my mouth where a molar had been removed and decided I wanted an implant. The insurance company wouldn’t pay for it, though, because it is cosmetic. 

“A moment of misguided vanity,” I muttered.

“Hm?”

“Thank you!”  Click.

Literary heroines suffer from misguided vanity.  Amy in Little Women sleeps with a clothespin (or something) on her nose because she thinks it will straighten it.  In Valley of the Dolls, Jennifer North refuses to have mastectomy when she has breast cancer because her boyfriend might not love her without a breast.  And so she dies.  In Anna Karenina, Anna outshines Kitty at a dance, and Kitty’s boyfriend, Vronsky, runs off with Anna. But Kitty ends up with Levin, a handsome estate owner who is madly in love with her.  So that’s actually better. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s silly younger sister, Lydia, is vain and thoughtlesss:  she runs off with Wickham, a rake and a liar, but isn’t a bit fazed when he refuses to marry her at Gretna Green.  Darcy and Lydia’s uncle track them down and force Wickham to marry her.

It’s hard to think of a literary heroine who isn’t vain.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles isn’t one to look at herself in the mirror.  In Margorie Kellogg’s novel, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, the heroine’s face was disfigured by a lover.  In Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, Prue Harn has a harelip but a beautiful body. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s best friend marries a ridiculous minister, because she wants her own home and is still on the marriage market at 27. In Villette, Lucy Snowe is plain, and decides to marry an absurd little middle-aged man, but then something happens. And so Charlotte Bronte, urged by her publisher, wrote two endings!

As I said, we all have our moments of vanity.  We dye our hair, wear fashionable clothes, go on crash diets, or have facial peels.   Sometimes looking in a mirror is enough.   You lament that you aren’t in your thirties but later cheer up.  Then you become sensible and don’t bother with beauty regimens. Or perhaps you do even more so!

Do tell me about your moments of misguided vanity, if it’s not too embarrassing!