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The Art of Urban Sprawl: Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollock, and Reading Too Much

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Query:  Where would we live if we had a choice? Not Midwest City 1, nor, we regret to say, even Midwest City 2.

Midwest City 2 was the more attractive of the two, celebrated for old-fashioned virtues, like a viable downtown, safe urban neighborhoods, and an excellent transit system. 

But things were changing in the early 21st century.  A huge mall was built on the edge of the city. The Chinese Tea Room closed. The department stores closed. Java Joe’s closed, The Breakfast Place and Arnie’s Pizzeria closed.  A special section in the newspaper was devoted to restaurant closings.

And that wasn’t the end:  deer began to move into the city.  When you see a herd of deer in the middle of the street you know something’s wrong with the ecology.

Sometimes, out of sheer idleness when I was new to the city, I went to the nearby art museum.  What I loved most was Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting, Mural, which was on loan from the University of Iowa.

Mural was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, and it hung in Peggy’s entrance hall in her townhouse in New York.  She donated it to the university in 1951.  It was installed in the university’s new museum in 1969.

The more I thought about it, the more impressed I was by Peggy Guggenheim’s intervention in his career, sponsorship of his work, and her influence on critics, curators, and gallery owners.  Looking at Mural is dizzying but also oddly calming:  the colors and patterns are perfectly intermeshed and one sees faces and animals, as well as other abstract figures. It is enormous: almost 20 feet in length and eight feet high. 

Pollock, known for his abstract expressionism, later developed his “drip style,” splattering paint or pouring it directly from the can on the horizontal canvas.  

A FEW WORDS ABOUT READING IN THE EARLY 2000s

When we first moved here I spent a lot of time – so much time – reading.  I complained to my doctor during the annual checkup:  “I’ve already read 100 books this year.  Don’t you think that’s strange?” By strange, of course, I meant pathetic. 

His reply: “The only strange thing is that you write it down.”

I laughed. Memo to Self: Give Dr. a book!

Reading the “Iliad” or Watching Sports?

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Here’s what you need to know.

A guy insists he is your friend.  Of course he is!  Who wouldn’t be?  That’s the reaction of any woman with self-esteem.

I mean, you didn’t invite him to your house, but so what? Men have nothing better to do, so they just hang out for months and confide in you about their girlfriend, or their boyfriend, and watch a lot of sports.

Is it baseball season, or is it basketball season?  It seems to be both simultaneously.

And so you retreat to your room to read Homer, and you have some “men’s” and “de’s” to take care of.

When they get too loud, you open the door and say, with a wildly irritated smile, “Guys, you wouldn’t be yelling if you had enough sex.”

And then they hoot and ask you if you’re having enough sex.  “I am or I wouldn’t be reading the Iliad..”

This cracks them up.  “The Iliad? Or is it the Iliddad?

Okay, one of my friends shows me his copy of Naked Lunch to prove he’s reading. I gave it to him, because I do not like Burroughs, and now he always brings it over so he can mockingly show me his progress.  He’s on page 10, he claims.

“Hey, fickle woman! Why does he get Naked Lunch and I get Pride and Prejudice?”

“I already told you:  I had six copies of Pride and Prejudice.“

Well, the others have no books to show me, which is a shame because you’re sure you gave William Faulkner’s Snopes books to one of them, and he told you about the scene where mentally-challenged boy had sex with a cow. If you had remembered that, you would never have given it to him. THESE GUYS! 

And so you meekly go back to your room to read the Iliad. Yes, you’re going to a schoolmarmish event soon, a lecture on the Iliad.  What could be more fun for a schoolmarm? Except sex, of course…

Book Martyrdom:  How Many Books Is Too Many? 

The movers sweated as they lugged boxes of books up three flights of stairs to our new apartment.

1950s Smiling Woman Teacher Librarian
. (Photo by Debrocke/ClassicStock/Getty Images)

The sweaty movers were good-natured, and joked around: “Which of you is the professor?” (Neither: we are amateur eggheads.)  But there was one grumpy exception: a man in a Frank Zappa t-shirt growled as he wiped the sweat off his forehead with one of my dish towels, which he had pilfered from the box labeled TOWELS.  “It’s like moving boxes of bricks. Are these yours, lady?”

I looked around wildly.  Should I deny it?  But no.  I was not going to prevaricate, though book martyrdom loomed.

“Yes.” I sounded wobbly, not dignified,. Then I picked up a box and headed upstairs with it.

A nice man intervened and gently took the box from me.  “If I may… Karl’s just a whiner, aren’t you, Karl?”

Indeed, Karl admitted he was a whiner.

But then they had to lug up actual boxes of bricks, for brick-and-board bookshelves, and Karl almost lost it.

You see, Karl was not a bookish person.  He was not a bricks-and-boards person, either. He didn’t understand the life-style. Sure, we had lots of books, but we not only read them, we needed to have them.  Because one day we would want to read Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, and we wouldn’t want to go through Interlibrary loan, which is ghastly, because the paper in the books is often yellow and the pages are uncut. And it could take years to find the Charlotte M. Yonge at a used bookstore.

Fortunately, Karl didn’t have the power to evict me. But in New York, an avid reader was recently evicted from his apartment for having, oh, say, 100,000 books, or maybe 200,000.  The landlord said he feared the heavy books might crash through the floor.  Is that even possible? Well, that is a lot of books.

During my college days, a Dickensian graduate student, whom I shall call “the lodger,” because that’s what I called him, lived in a book-filled studio apartment below our apartment. It was arranged like the stacks at the public library.  There were narrow aisles between thousand of books crammed into metal bookcases of the kind the library uses. I can only suppose he found a special public library furniture store. 

At a book sale at his apartment, I learned that our landlord had refused to rent our apartment to him because he was convinced the bookcases would fall through the floor and damage the house.

I was very emmpathetic, but in the back of my mind, I thought, Someday I’ll have thousands of books, too!  Well, perhaps we have 1,000, 1,200 tops. Not in the lodger’s range!

The odd thing is that even fanatical readers disapprove of having “too many books.” Oh, they might have a cute t-shirt, saying Too Many Books, Too Little Time, but they don’t mean it.  They would rather pay $4,000 for soccer tickets, or $5,000 for rock concerts, than buy books they can “get at the public library.” The thing is, you can’t get them at the public library. The library discards many newish books, and the backlist is even more ephemeral.

We buy books instead of soccer tickets, or that trip to Hawaii we’ve never wanted to take.

And the important thing is: We refuse to be book martyrs!

The Mysteries of Modern Technology

One day in the 1990s a free AOL disc arrived in the mail.  I did not have the faintest idea what it was.  I did not understand what “online” and “world wide web” meant, either.

Several friends urged me to try it. And suddenly I was part of the AOL community. Lo and behold! bibliophiles wrote about trying to persuade bookstore clerks to sell them the latest Diana Gabaldon before the publication date. On another occasion, an online friend agonized over whether to buy a limited illustrated edition of David Copperfield.  

I felt more “connected” online, as I literally was. And years later I discovered book blogs, Dickens discussion groups, the Goodreads Challenge, Netgalley, and many bookish sites. 

David Copperfield and the Micawbers

But not everything is jolly online.  There are the dicey dating apps.  Friends and acquaintances have reported disappointment. There seems to be a loneliness industry online.  The app basically arranges a blind date with a stranger, only none of your friends know him or her or can vouch for him or her.

 Pop culture has normalized dating apps. (I am married, so it doesn’t concern me.) But on TV sitcoms gorgeous actors and actresses sit on barstools (never in booths) and scroll through dating site responses until they find an attractive man.  (No nerds need apply.) So then they meet at the bar and have quick sex in the grimy restroom.  Or if they take the stranger home, they kick him or her out before dawn.  It’s very cold. Does life influence sitcoms, or do sitcoms influence life?  And being practical, I wonder about the incidence of STDs. Does anyone catch gonorrhea?

In real life, the results of the dating apps are less benign than advertised.  According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study,  many women report being sexually harassed at the dating sites.  The study says, “57% of women between age 18 and 34 said they’d received sexually explicit messages or images they hadn’t asked for at the dating app sites.”  

And a study at NIH (the National Institute of Health) reports that dating apps can cause depression and anxiety..

The majority of the population are reliant on dating apps to meet prospective partner, and such apps are having an impact on their mental health; these factors may very well make this into a public health concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Household Pulse Survey estimates that depression and anxiety are now affecting 34.2% of the population, making them the two most common mental health disorders in the United States, and to some extent, the increased numbers have been associated with dating app use.

Of course I wonder about the validity of these studies. Does “the majority of the population” actually rely on dating apps?  What does that meant?

But let’s hope that there is still the possibility of a “meet cute.” We all want to be Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.  (In fact, I think I will watch it tomorrow.) I also recommend the poet and editor Jill Bialosky’s brilliant book, Poetry Will Save Your Life. In one chapter, she writes about the difficulties of meeting men in New York when she was in her late twenties.  And then she attended her high school reunion and met her dream man, an old friend.  They fell in love and married, and presumably lived happily ever after.

Meanwhile, don’t expect too much of the internet. I recommend that you turn to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  Mr. Collins may be wrong for Elizabeth Bennet, but he is an okay match for her friend Charlotte, who wants to leave home and have her own house. Charlotte is in her late 20s and her expiration date is near. Fortunately, women no longer have an expiration date.

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The Way We Live Now

Last week we reorganized our books. We have over 1,000 books, distributed in bookcases throughout the house. Most of them are in alphabetical order, but we now have a Jane Austen section, a Bronte section, a Conrad section, and a Dickens section.  Most of these books have introductions, but not all have footnotes. (That’s why I often opt for Penguins.)  I used to skip the footnotes, but now enjoy the odd mix of trivia and essential information. I feel affection for the footnote writers who educate us about barouches, carriages, and 19th-century dialect.  

When I was getting used to the city, I bicycled daily to the public library to “rescue” discarded books. The main library was divesting itself of classics and out-of-print 20th-century books. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Sir Walter Scott abounded.  I also found D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim books and the Dutch mystery writer Willem Van de Wetering’s autobiographical books about Zen.

By the way, none of these were rare books.  Most were stained, smudged, dog-eared, you name it.  If they’d ever had value, they had none now.  All I could do was save them from the dumpster.

When you have opted out of the work force, you read more than normal people do. You don’t read all the time – I don’t mean to imply that – but at least three or four hours a day.  The complete works of Horace? Yes.  The complete works of Edith Wharton?  Of course.  Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands and E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady books? Affirmative.  And there was time for David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Caroline Gordon’s short stories, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

I was living, more or less, in a world of old-ish and ancient literature.  “Has school started?” a man quipped one summer day when I had spread out my notebooks and reference books on a table at a coffeehouse. 

But most people are oblivious of what you’re reading in public. Conducting a business on your laptop?  Boring, at worst.   Reading in a foreign language?  A nutcase, but no one comments on it.  Delving into reference books and taking notes?  Possibly a teacher or lawyer.  And then there are the conversationalists who talk about their intimate lives.  We listen, because the acoustics make it impossible not to.

That’s where I learned that the plans for a summer bluegrass festival had gone awry.  The young woman, the assistant director, had been fired for an “indiscretion,” as she called it.  She Had Had An  Affair with the Married Director.  More than an indiscretion, I thought.  People were fired all the time for less.  One of my friends, a popular teacher at a private school, was fired for giving C’s to students who had rich, influential parents.  But for the grace of gods… fortunately, the better and the best students signed up for my classes, so I didn’t have that dilemma. 

At one time I was a loudmouth like that fired assistant director.  Not only did I talk freely about my opinions of everything under the sun, I often referred to people by first and last names.  “Jane Bowers said…”  as if it were necessary to distinguish her from all the other Janes.

One day I was reading a Russian novel when a “frenemy” rushed over and confronted me because she and I had applied for the same job. “You ruined my chances!” she shrieked.  Wait, what, why… And what business was it of hers? Neither of us got the job. But “I’m glad you didn’t get it,” a friend who worked there said.  “You’re too nice.”  And one of the supervisors told me privately, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, Kat.” 

All I can say is, it is a good thing I am bookish.  Books have gotten me through every crisis in my life.  After a hospitalization, I binge-read Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles and Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool.  I took notes on what people read on the bus.  Mostly it was the newspapers, but there were also The Cat Who... mysteries, the latest Oprah book, and a book about Andy Warhol.

A friend who died in her early 40s asked me:  Do you think it’s enough to have been a reader in life? 

Yes, I do.  I adamantly do.  No one at her memorial service mentioned her love of books, and come to think of it, I have never heard anyone at a memorial service mention the love of reading.

But, believe me, she was bookish, and if she had lived, I would have found out about twice as many books.

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What the Freaks Gave Us: Classics, Criticism & Ecology

Here’s what you do not know about the 1960s:  no one used the word “hippie.”

It was meaningless, it was very TV. This media-generated term first appeared in The San Francisco Examiner in 1965 and should have evaporated.  Never in conversation did anyone say “hippie.”  Never did anyone identify herself as a “hippie.” Some called themselves “freaks” to denote their status in “alternative culture.”

Some freaks were philosophical, others full-fledged radicals.  They gardened, read, listened to music, protested against the war, discussed politics.  And what culture did they pass on to our generation?

BOOKS I READ ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF FREAKS

The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan.  This landmark book made me realize, “Oh!  I don’t have to be a housewife.”

Dune, by Frank Herbert.  This ecological science fiction classic was a perfect match for The Environmental Handbook and The Population Bomb, two best-selling books about the environment. Dune is brilliant, entertaining, and still relevant today, though the others may be a bit dated.

Version 1.0.0

Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I am awed by Gandhi and read this on the recommendation of a woman who read autobiographies instead of self-help books.

Our Bodies, Ourselves.  A guide to women’s health, birth control, abortion, and taking control of our bodies, published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970 and since revised.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray.  A brilliant Victorian novel centered on the exploits of the rogue, Becky Sharp.  Scarlett in Gone with the Wind is obviously based on Becky.

The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Hawthorne lived briefly in a commune in Massachusetts.  In his charming novel,  The Blithedale Romance, the narrator Miles Coverdale charts the rise and inevitable fall of the commune at Blithedale Farm.

I also read other people’s coffee table books on Renoir, Dali, and Alex Katz

BOOKS I CHOSE FOR THEIR HIP COVERS IN FREAKDOM

Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse.  This psychedelic novel impressed me at the time, but on a recent rereading I was horrified by the misogynistic final scene. There is also a movie with Max Von Sydow.

Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann.  I saw the German movie, then read the book in translation.

Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong.  Influenced by the renegade Henry Miller, Jong was an overnight sensation and her sexy autobiographical novel was considered groundbreaking. 

Sexual Politics, by Kate Millet. Millet’s best-selling book of literary criticism temporarily destroyed my confidence in my taste. She attacked male writers on the basis of their sexism, including D. H. Lawrence. Ultimately, I rejected this book because her radicalism did not serve literature well. Long live Lawrence’s novels and poetry!

In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden.  I went to church after reading this novel but decided I had no vocation to be a nun, thank God!  Godden wrote three fascinating nun novels, the most famous of which is Black Narcissus. In This House of Brede is the best.

ARE MOVIES TOO COMMERCIAL?

None of the “freaks” I knew attended movies. “Beautiful women and handsome men,” one friend mocked as I got ready to go to a Hardy adaptation.

She was right, but I enjoyed the film.

Since the pandemic I have adopted and adapted her philosophy. “Beautiful women, handsome men… and monsters.”

What happened to the movies?

Three Books I’ll (Probably) Never Read

Some books never make the  TBR, though I have owned them for years. I shiver with apprehension every time I look at them, and yet I cannot give them away because they might make me wittier or thinner, or provide escape reading in February, the month devoted to The Green Hat and Terry Pratchett.   

Kathy Acker’s Don  Quixote was published in 1986. Neither my spouse nor I remember buying it. It’s as though it grew from the shelf like one of the pods in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Though I have tried to read it several times, I am repulsed by her profane, potty-mouthed, post-modern  prose. And yet reading it would make me  hip and fabulous, because Acker is the Patti Smith, or is it the William Burroughs? of “punk” literature. 

Acker was relentlessly hip, and her writing relentlessly dull.  In this boisterous little novel, a female Don Quixote has an abortion and then travels with dogs across America and London, meditating on the insane cultures.  There is  one amusing bit:  Quixote believes that Prince should be the president of the United States, because “all the presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway.”  He would have been better at show biz than Reagan, an actor.

Acker’s prose is awkward.  “Don Quixote decided the only thing was to be happy.  Since the only reason she went out of the house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy’s to fuck.”

But isn’t that clumsy writing? 

Edna Ferber is an underrated, once popular, writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, So Big, a page-turner about the struggles of a successful woman farmer and her worthless son.  Not surprisingly, Ferber never attained the kudos of comparable male Pulitzer winners, like Sinclair Lewis and  Booth Tarkington. 

I discovered Ferber’s historical novels when I found a Ferber omnibus at a sale.  She reminds me slightly of Willa Cather, and I’m surprised Ferber is not in the women’s sub-canon, if not the traditional academic canon.  I enjoyed her novel Showboat, which was made into a Broadway musical and movie. And her melodramatic, fascinating novel, Giant, which was adapted as movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, traces the drama and dysfunction of an unhappy, rich oil family in Texas. 

But there is one Ferber’s novel I cannot read, Cimmaron.

Cimmaron is, in a way, a Western, set during the Oklahoma Gold Rush. I read 125 pages, but the dreary landscape undid me In every scene, Oklahoma is dry and dusty, or muddy and dirty, and if I remember correctly, there are boards instead of sidewalks. 

It is culture shock for Sabra, a young woman from a Southern family, who follows her husband, Yancey, a lawyer, into the wilds, because he wants the free land: there is “a land rush.”  Sabra has the impossible task of turning of shack into a home, while Yancey, a lawyer, has to prove himself to their rough neighbors.  And everybody has a gun. Nobody in Oklahoma in Cimmaron ever thought of gun control. 

Depressing, yes? But will I finish Cimmaron in 2024?

It does feel like the time of year when I should read a historical novel.

Richard Garnett’s biography, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, is, in many ways, an appealing book. Fans of Russian literature will be curious about Constance Garnett, the famous early translator of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

Her grandson, Richard Garnett, has written a thorough, if plodding, biography, with fascinating source material, including letters from Chekhov and Tolstoy.

It’s the size of the pages I don’t like,  This attractive paperback has oversized pages crammed with print.  Mjnd you, it’s not the size of the print so much as the size of the pages. But I might finish this in the summer, when the natural light is brighter, and it will seem more readable..

Do you hang on to books you positively dislike or will never read? Do tell.

Head-in-a-Book Shopping Guide: Why Don’t Book Nerds Want a Sweater like Normal People?

We are casual about the holidays. We put up the tree, eat a turkey dinner, take a long walk, and read aloud from American Christmas Stories (Library of America).

But this happens after the hassle of shopping for book nerds. And it is a hassle even if you’re a bibliophile. You moan, “She has read everything!” “Which P. G. Wodehouse books hasn’t he read?”or “Oh my God, are all the copies of The Bee Sting sold out?” At that t point you reach for Haagen-Daz or the expired Advil you are saving for the apocalypse.

We can help. Really, we can.

It’s all about creative pairing and tying everything up with ribbons. Read on!

Academic Satires for Scholars & Dilettantes

Everyone is nostalgic for university days, but nothing is funnier than an academic satire. I recommend Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, Don Delillo’s White Noise, and David Lodge’s Small World. You can buy them new or used, wrap up a pair, or make an entire set. Don’t bother with wrapping paper: just tie them up with a ribbon.

A Booker Prize Finalist and the Maugham Stories That Inspired It

Tan Twan Eng’s Booker-longlisted novel, The House of Doors, set in Penang in Malaysia, is beautifully-written and absorbing. W. Somerset Maugham is one of the main characters, and two of his short stories, “Rain” and “The Letter,” are inspired by events related by his fictional hostess, Lesley. I recommend pairing Maugham’s Collected Stories (Everyman’s Library) with Eng’s novel. A lovely gift of two great books !

A Starter Thomas Hardy Set

Wordsworth Editions publishes affordable classics (usually between $4 and $10). You can buy an attractive six-volume Best of Thomas Hardy collection, tied up with a red ribbon. The Best of Hardy includes Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and The Well-beloved. Wordsworth also sells many other other Best of collections.

Dystopia Now!

We are living in Dystopia, what with climate change, water shortages, wild fires, and pandemics. The following books give us a sense of what is happening now and what may lie ahead: I was fascinated by Emily Mandel St. John’s Sea of Tranquillity, T. C. Boyles’s Blue Skies, John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, and  a nonfiction book, Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

Library of America Classic Crime

In recent years Library of America has published a number of anthologies of classic crime and noir. Here are two of my favorites.

Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s

Laura, Vera Caspary | The Horizontal Man, Helen Eustis | In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes | The Blank Wall, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s

Mischief, Charlotte Armstrong | The Blunderer, Patricia Highsmith | Beast in View, Margaret Millar | Fools’ Gold, Dolores Hitchens

Both volumes are edited by Sarah Weinman.

The Library of America has an eclectic collection these days, and also features many women writers.

And so… Happy Christmas shopping! Any recommendations for discouraged shoppers?

Fireworks, Gardening, and Gardening Books

The supermarket shut down the garden center to open a fireworks tent. Imagine my surprise to discover flowers had been replaced by firecrackers. I’d hoped to buy begonias, snapdragons, pansies, and marigolds at deep discount prices (75% off).

Fireworks used to be illegal in this state, except for public firework displays at parks, and that is the law in my city, too.  But anyone can buy fireworks in the suburbs.  The BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! has already begun. Naturally, some of my fellow citizens will put on a noisy, unwanted show, too.  I will turn on the AC to drown out the noise of the errant combustibles. 

I’m so disappointed that the garden center closed early. But on a philosophical note, the plants were getting pretty wilted. The cashier took one look at the dried-up snapdragons last week  and told me to take another four-pack free. 

Most of the discount plants are fine, but something weird is going on with the new geraniums: the petals in the middle of each flower crumple and turn brown while the outside petals blossom.   Some  gross wormy things live under the pot of marigolds, so I isolated it.  Should I throw it out?   And don’t get me started on the seeds:  I planted  sunflower seeds and coneflower seeds, but the plants are only 6 inches tall. That is, if they are indeed sunflowers and coneflowers.  Nothing has bloomed yet.  Everything is“deer-proof” and “drought-proof,” but how about “rabbit-proof”?

I ask, “Do you know which are the flowers and which are the weeds?” 

“Wait and see,” one  non-gardener suggests.

I love gardening books, especially memoirs and comical chronicles.  Among my favorites is Beverly Nichols’s Merry Hall trilogy, Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and  Sunlight on the Lawn.  Not only is he a great gardener, he is a charming and often funny writer.  He writes, “ I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.”

I love geraniums.  They last for years if you bring them inside  for the winter.  My mother and grandmother used to compete to see who could grow the best geraniums.  Mother always won.  “And I don’t do anything except water them.”

Perhaps I am also fond of geraniums because of my love of Elizabeth Goudge’s books.  I vaguely recall, perhaps in her novel, A Little White Horse, that Maria comes across a small hidden house with geraniums in the window. (This detail may be wrong, as I haven’t read this book in eons.)   Gardens are always important in Elizabeth Goudge’s novels.  In The White Witch, Froniga, who is half gypsy and reputed to be a witch, has a quasi-magical touch with her garden.  There are flowers, trees, shrubs, and medicinal herbs. She is a healer.

In E. Nesbit’s The Lark, her best adult novel, flowers are the bread and butter of Jane and Lucilla, whose guardian has gambled away their money.  All they have left is a tiny cottage with a pretty garden.  They sell the the flowers – until all the flowers are gone. 

Then they don’t know what to do.  Buy another house?  Plant another garden?  But it takes time for a garden to grow.

…they bought a gardening book – and spent the evening over it.  You tend to sit in the kitchen when it is very light and clean, bright with gay-coloured crockery and sparkling with tinsmith’s work; and when you have it to yourselves; and when, anyhow, you have to get your own supper, and you may as well eat it where you cook it…  Especially when the kitchen window looks out on the back garden, where the fruit trees are near blossom, and the parlours both look out on the front garden, the whole of whose floral splendour was just sold for fifteen shillings and ninepence. 

 What are your favorite garden books, novels, or poems?

Tacky Covers: Books from Our Shelves

I was discouraged when I searched our shelves for books with tacky covers to find mostly Penguins, Viragos, and other beautifully-designed books. We have great taste.
 

That was not always the case: there used to be cheap mass market paperbacks. For instance, my dad’s copy of John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 featured a scantily-clad woman on the cover, probably modeled after Elizabeth Taylor, who stars in the film.  (We have a Modern Library hardback of O’Hara’s short novels!)  And a green-haired woman adorned the cover of my first copy of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

I did find a few books with ridiculous covers, though. Tacky, tacky!

These quasi-pornographic covers bear no relation to the content of Jane Gaskell’s books.  In 1979, Ms. magazine praised the English fantasy writer’s five-book Atlan saga.   I have read these whimsical feminist novels twice:  the narrator, Cija, a cranky princess raised in a tower, has been told erroneously that men are extinct.  When she is taken  hostage by the Dragon-General Zerd, her nurse exhorts her to seduce and assassinate him.  Well, Cija is just out of the tower! She is not an assassin. Throughout the saga, Cija remains his enemy, though, and later tries to protect an Edenic continent, Atlan, from Zerd’s invasion.

Gaskell is a compelling, entertaining writer, with an eye for detail and a talent for witty dialogue.  The hardcovers have perfectly tasteful covers, by the way. 
          

Julian Barnes once wrote in the  London Review of Books that we don’t need more translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.  He suggested that publishers commission new translations of Balzac’s lesser-known works, including the neglected novel, Seraphita. 

I  tracked down a Dedalus European Classic paperback of Seraphita with a hideous cover and an awkward 1901 translation by Clara Bell. The book jacket avers that it is the story of “the angelic and mysterious hermaphrodite Seraphita, who seems to inspire love in all she meets.” 
I did not enjoy it.  Was it the translation?
          

The cover illustration of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Rigadoon, “Wounded Soldier,”by Otto Dix, horrifies me. According to the jacket copy, the novel “re-creates a nightmarish trek through Germany in the last days of World War II.” I would be more likely to read this if the cover were less repulsive, but I would have to be in a dark mood. 

The award-winning Clifford D. Simak is one of my favorite science fiction writers.  I loved his novel, City, a charming story of talking dogs, left behind on Earth by humans as archivists of the human experience.  His later books are uneven:  he has gone astray in Shakespeare’s Planet (1979). And what a cover!            

In the 1980s, Frederick Barthelme was a critically- acclaimed novelist, but most of his books are out-of-print. The Baltimore Sun said of his novel, Tracer:  “He does for 7-Eleven what Edward Hopper did for the all-night diner.”  

Nonetheless, this cover is completely off:  what is that yellow thing with the pink crest?   

I love Frederick Barthelme’s books, though.