My fried Hen and I left our jobs at the same time. We didn’t dislike the work, and no doubt would have become Ms. Chips if we’d stayed, but you have no idea how exhausted we were, how little we liked the administration, and how bored we were by James Hilton’s sentimental novel, Good-bye, Mr. Chips.
Of course we weren’t of Mr. Chips’ generation. We weren’t yuppies, either, which was the trend of the time. Our most glamorous friend (our only glamorous friend?) said flippantly, “Face it, everybody wants to be a yuppie.”
Perhaps she was a yuppie: she dressed beautifully – she bought her clothes at boutiques instead of The Gap and The Limited – taped the David Letterman Show on a VCR (hardly anyone had VCRs yet), and lived in a stunningly beautiful house. Like Hen and me, she was a great reader.
Socially, however, Hen and I were on a different plane. We lived more modestly, and spent our money on books, not clothes. Our idea of a great time was to spend an afternoon going from bookstore to bookstore. And we didn’t just read the latest books: we were also very keen on 19th-century literature.
Sometimes we talked about our favorite characters and who we’d want to be if we could time-travel. Wuthering Heights was my favorite book, but I certainly did not want to be either of the Cathys. My favorite character of all time was Esther Summerson in Bleak House. I absolutely loved her bright, intelligent, witty diary entries. Hen wanted to b Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? because Hen, too, was political. “No, wait I want to be Alice, too.” “No, wait, I want to be Esther!”
Anyway, we agreed to memorize a few choice quotes from these books for our Victorian luncheon party. We ate cress sandwiches (“What is cress?”) and threw the awful plum pudding away. We threw out a few quotes and then cheated madly. I recited a brief poem by our favorite American poet Emily Dickinson, and Hen cheated and quoted the modern poet Sharon Olds. Wrong country, wrong century: What were we thinking?
But, seriously, we loved book chat. For one of our “book club” luncheons, we discussed Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, which both of us preferred to Little Women. Hen had her’ grandmother’s copy, a battered brown book published in the 19th century, which had been read by her grandmother, great-aunts, aunts and sisters. We both loved the heroine Polly, especially when she grows up to be a musician and piano teacher, and belongs to an informal kind of women artists’ co-op.
We weren’t yuppies: were we Alcott-ites? She had been one of our favorite children’s writers. Alcott also wrote an adult novel, Work, sensation stories for tabloid magazines, and a satire on the failed commune her father had founded (they almost starved to death). After they moved to Concord, where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville lived, she developed a crush on Thoreau, which is hard to imagine. We agreed that Alcott’s books shaped our moral philosophy when we were seven or eight. We actually enjoyed the morals at the end of each chapter.
Hen and I wondered if our generation was closer to our mothers’ than to the new generation because we were raised on Louisa May Alcott. My mother read all of Alcott’s books, and thought it was “important” that I read them. And of course Hen’s grandmother had passed hers down.
My dad also read Little Women, because one of his sisters had “left it lying around. ” He claimed he had not been impressed. “It’s not that great” were his exact critical words.
But how many people can say that both parents read Little Women? I can’t say what it means, but it must be significant.