Books Do Furnish A Room

Strangers and Brothers: The Sleep of Reason

After the reality of the Second World War, and the struggle of nuclear weapons, as well as the more personal tragedies of Roy Calvert and Lewis Eliot’s first wife, Sheila, it’s perhaps hard to imagine that there are darker moods to come in Eliot’s journey through life.  But C P Snow’s penultimate Strangers and Brothers novel, The Sleep of Reason, is dark indeed: dark in fact – he is threatened with blindness – and dark in metaphor – as he is drawn into a horrific child killing.  But, as always, one of the great messages is that life goes on, creating warmth and joy with the same indiscriminate abandon as the horror, and often at the same time.  (The title of the book comes from the Goya etching, "The Sleep of reason Produces Monsters").

Eliot is retired and happy (“call no man happy until he is dead”), but embroiled in the myriad complexities of a full life – worrying over how will his children manage as they move from school to university, the death of his saint-like father, and dealing with his ill and acerbic father in law, observing the emotional affairs of the generation (or two) behind him, and trying to steer a reactionary colleague away from some disciplinary stupidities at the university in his home town in the Midlands.  There are many, many strands to this book, as to all the others, but two stand out.

First, he wakes one morning to find a dark curtain over one of his eyes, a physical threat and an clear allegory for the difficulties in understanding the motivations of others.  He has an operation for detached retina, and is confined to the dark while he recovers – a physical stillness and a sensory deprivation which he finds frightening, intolerable, and which proves useless, as the operation fails. He is fortunate, and gets some valuable sight back, but the threat of being cut off, and the warning of old age and death is upon him.  But the real darkness is one of understanding – he has the reputation, and the pride, of being able to see further through a millstone than most – and he is then precipitated into a ghastly story.

Two women, lesbians clearly, and one of them his teenage friend George Passant’s niece Cora, are suspected of carefully plotting to abduct, torture and then kill a young schoolboy.  This is a modern theme, perhaps, but the novel was published in 1968 and was set in 1963 – and Hindley committed her crimes in 1963-65 (though her lover, also guilty of complicity in her crimes, was a man).  (As with Powell, the gap between setting and writing has necessarily to diminish as each seeks a complete chronicle of his times).  He can do nothing, he has no role in the events, but he agrees to meet Cora before and after the trial, and to attend the trial itself to accompany and support Passant.  In the end, Passant cannot take it, and absents himself, and Lewis bears the burden almost alone, although various family members and friends ensure he is never completely by himself. 

In spite of the horror, the horror, the book contrives to move with an easy and assured grace, and finds ways of going on and going forward even in the darkest moments.  Throughout, the teasing and sceptical love of his wife and son Charles keep open another vision of the world – a world which is seriously flawed, and in which one must play a remedial and possibly radical role – but also a world in which no one man has to shoulder the burdens of all mankind.  Reason sleeps, but will wake again.

Police and the fishermen

Rex Warner, another poet of the same generation as Laurie Lee, who we had last week, and a vivid colourful poem of a band of cheerful fishermen on the Nile, fishing for their dinner, but broken up by the police, prompting a sudden change in mood and picture.  This is Rex Warner's Nile Fishermen:

A Russian Faust

For years, the name Mikhail Bulgakov has floated around the edge of my reading; curiously, for someone who loved Russian literature in my youth, I had never made the attempt to read him.  But last week, to grips with The Master and Margarita, and a chthonic struggle it was too.  There was the normal difficulty with names – I often find names difficult to remember in complex plots, but in Russian novels, with the changes between the surname and the personal and patronymic, the challenge is greater – and Bulgakov piles it on with an enormous cast of characters, flying hither and yon at great speed.

The setting is theatrical, dramatic, and fast moving, but the opening gives little warning of this.  Two literary characters are conducting a desultory and rather pretentious conversation, when they are joined by an odd man, who seems to know almost everything, including the existence of the devil, and the impending  - and totally unexpected – death of one of them.  His death, and the antics of the stranger and his companions, set off a manic chain of events across Moscow and beyond, including black magic, a witches’ sabbath, several personal disasters and embarrassments, all within a breakneck narrative which can hardly contain them.

The mysterious stranger, of course, is the Devil, and his companions include a black cat and a naked redheaded witch.  One of their victims ends up in  a madhouse, where he meets a man who calls himself the Master.  The Master had written a novel, but had fallen into madness and despair when it could not be published (it is clearly full, like The Master and Margarita itself, of anti-Soviet satire).  The Master doesn’t seem especially saintly, but his love for young woman called Margarita is the central theme of the book: through routes devious and chaotic, they earn their freedom (and happiness?) through serving the Devil – Margarita acts as the Devil’s hostess at a witches’ ball, and they are granted a long and peaceful life in a secluded cottage somewhere off inter-galactic highway 7 (Moscow to Gehenna) right at the end of the book.

So the traditional Faust story is turned on its head rather, and the chaos surrounding the Devil often doesn’t seem evil, just a case of tricks and stratagems which often punish the hypocrites and minor criminals that abounded in the fabric of everyday Soviet life.  I found it very compelling, mainly through a pressing desire to know what happened next, but I did not find it either coherent or easy to follow.  Nor did I find it hilarious, another common reaction: yes it was certainly often amusing, but it was for me a thing of shreds and patches, wonderful and bizarre, brilliantly satiric and bumbling slapstick, by turns.  I suspect that this is a novel much better read in the original: certainly the language, as well as the plot, was sometimes tortured and difficult.

Tigers edge Irish

To Twickenham last weekend to see the (rugby union) cup final between Leicester Tigers and London Irish.  My sympathies were not really engaged, though I had a sneaking sympathy for Irish as the underdogs.  It was a chilly, windy evening, though largely sunny, and the match was much more exciting than the 10 - 9 scoreline (in Leicester's favour) would suggest.

Below:  the Leicester mascot struts his stuff before the match; Delon Armitage misses one of several kicks, any of which would have been enough to secure the match; and an easy line-out win for the Tigers.

 

Summer's here

I don't think of Laurie Lee as a poet, but as the author of Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a wonderful memoir of Spain during the Civil War.  But here is something I find rather special - set in April, but really a poem of the burgeoning growth in the garden and the woods, something I am enjoying watching in a headlong rush in Dorset.  Here is Laurie Lee's April Rise:

 

If ever I saw blessing in the air
I see it now in this still early day
Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips
Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round
Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod
Splutters with soapy green, and all the world
Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

If ever I heard blessing it is there
Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are
Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound
Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,
The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,
While white as water by the lake a girl
Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,
Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;
Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,
If ever world were blessed, now it is.

Peace on earth - war in the mind

The final novel in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is The Ghost Road, which I bought for 20 pence from a stall in a Dorset town square.  You may recall that I enjoyed the first one – Regeneration – a great deal, the second – The Eye In The Door – much less, though always impressed by the skill with which she capture Rivers’ relationships with his psychiatric patients, and the superb dialogue.  Well, The Ghost Road is another fine novel, closer to the first in feeling and style (with one key exception), and I was very pleased to read it.

Rivers is still practising at a hospital in London, but much of the action takes place on the Western front, where Billy Prior has returned, in spite of his poor physical and mental health, and where his self awareness – aroused through his consultations with Rivers - is illuminating and despairing.  He is joined by keen young greenhorns, and by Wilfred Owen, whose death, very shortly before the armistice is one of the fading notes of the trilogy.  Rivers himself has a succession of difficult and unhappy patients, riven by shell shock and deeper neuroses, and always finds a way to assert their and his humanity in a way which sheds a little light, even a little humour, into the darkest corners of their selves.

But the astonishing part of this novel, and a new departure, is the extended reference, through flashbacks and dream like memory sequences, to Rivers’ ethnological explorations as a young man in the Pacific islands of Eddystone and Simba in the western Solomons, which gave me a strong and reverberant connection to my own trip to Vanuatu last year, and my reading of the books of Tom Harrisson.  These islands, and Rivers' interest in the dangerous, the tabu, and the sacrificial, form a powerful of echo of both the physical events in the mire of France, but also to the shadowy but resilient forces in his patients’ minds – and in all our minds, too.  Here, Rivers is led into understanding by the witch doctor Njiru, just as he leads others into understanding in his clinic years later.  For example, he is privy to the death of the chief Ngea, the temporary immural of his wife, the way the society reclaims her - though without the traditional capture of a skull, now outlawed by the British - and the placing of the Ngea's skull in the newly built skull house. Finally, he and Njiru together hold the skull of Homu, the greatest of the skull hunters, "the most precious object in the world".  He learns how a man's fears and beliefs position him in the world, often in a way the world and he find uncomfortable, dangerous, miserable  but how they can also do the opposite.

Rivers is an astonishing character, but not at all an unbelievable one, and his strength of mind and his insight is seen in the smallest ways as well as the largest.  For example, he cures a military officer of hysterical paralysis through an extraordinary ritual of drawing on his legs, moving the ‘tidemark’ each day, forcing the paralysis to retreat then abandon the leg altogether, in spite of the patients extreme scepticism.  “I suppose I’m meant to be grateful”.  “No”.  In that “no” is all his understanding, all his humanity, all his generosity.  In France, his patient Prior follows his own reactions, both mental and physical (he has stress induced asthma), and concludes, in a letter to Rivers, that:

My nerves are in perfect working order.  By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it. Test Passed?

I was not convinced by all of these three novels, particularly The Eye in the Door, and I found the gluttonous and wanton sexuality of some of the characters a messy and distasteful distraction from the real story.  But they are all worth reading, this one most of all, for Rivers alone.

Still waiting after all these years

To see Waiting for Godot the other evening, at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the two main roles, the forgetting, vulnerable Estragon and the energetic, dominant Vladimir.  This is an iconic play, which I like everyone else, knew of, but had never seen.  Famously, nothing happens – twice – but it’s still utterly compelling.  This production is full of life; the two main characters talk, dance, argue with each other, and their gestures and moods, as well as their words, communicate overflowingly.

Frankly, this is such an odd play – so empty of detail and so full of meaning – that I am not sure I have anything interesting or useful to say.  The set was bare, but not so bare as is traditional – an apparently dead tree, a few feet of broken down wall, some shattered floorboards – and the play starts and ends with two characters only.  So strong is this image that I had hardly realised that are in fact two other major characters, Pozzo and his servant, who appear twice, injecting a note of energy and passion (the first time at least – they have become blind and mute the second time around, a heavy metaphor indeed).  But the continuously travelling men are no happier, have no more purpose than the waiting Vladimir and Estragon, who believe that Godot will save them (when they can remember that he is coming).

ESTRAGON:  Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let's go.

VLADIMIR:  We can't.

ESTRAGON:  Why not?

VLADIMIR:  We're waiting for Godot.

ESTRAGON:  (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here?

VLADIMIR:  What?

ESTRAGON:  That we were to wait.

VLADIMIR:  He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others? ESTRAGON:  What is it?

VLADIMIR:  I don't know. A willow.

ESTRAGON:  Where are the leaves?

VLADIMIR:   It must be dead.

ESTRAGON:   No more weeping.

VLADIMIR:   Or perhaps it's not the season.

ESTRAGON:  Looks to me more like a bush.

VLADIMIR:  A shrub.

ESTRAGON:  A bush.

VLADIMIR:  A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place? ESTRAGON:  He should be here.

VLADIMIR:  He didn't say for sure he'd come.

ESTRAGON:  And if he doesn't come?

VLADIMIR:  We'll come back tomorrow.

ESTRAGON:  And then the day after tomorrow.

VLADIMIR:  Possibly.

ESTRAGON:  And so on.

The action takes place on two successive days, on each of which Godot fails to appear, but sends a message that he will certainly come the next day – to judge by the reactions, a regular message.  But “today” and “yesterday” are concepts which only mean something to Vladimir; to the others, there is the past, which is distant and half or completely forgotten.  Godot, of course, never turns up.  We never know who he is, or why he might save us.  Perhaps Godot is different for all of us, perhaps the news that he’s not coming today is a final reminder that we are here alone, that just as we are born and die alone, we must live, struggle and achieve alone too.

Arthur

More Tennyson this week;  a wonderful, wonderful poem, a small piece of which I had to learn by heart at school.  Morte d'Arthur is huge in every way - treating of one of the great English myths, dealing of loyalty and leadership and betrayal, and of tomorrow's redemption and glory.  The phrase "authority forgets a dying king" is surely vaut le voyage by itself, and there is masses of superb poetry here.  But it's massive in another way - it's far too long to set out here, but you can read the complete text here.  But, to tempt you, here are three extracts from Alfred Lord Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur (and a near contemporary illustration by Beardsley).

At the very start of the poem - the end of the great, final battle, and Arthur leaving the field:

So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Arthur sends Bedivere to throw his sword Excalibur into the lake, and twice he fails, annoying Arthur.  When he comes back a second time, saying that he had seen nothing, and so alerting Arthur to his betrayal, the king's anger is very fierce:

To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath:
‘Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue,
Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me!
Authority forgets a dying king,
Laid widow’d of the power in his eye
That bow’d the will. I see thee what thou art,
For thou, the latest-left of all my knights,
In whom should meet the offices of all,
Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt;
Either from lust of gold, or like a girl
Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes.
Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice,
And the third time may prosper, get thee hence:
But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur,
I will arise and slay thee with my hands.’

 

And then Bedivere does throw the sword in, and sees a hand rise from the lake, "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful" and catch the sword.  A barge comes to collect the dying king, and he says his good-byes (though we all know he will come again in time of England's need):

But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst - if indeed I go –
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’

   So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

Warm hearts and cold seas

MacDonald Harris’ The Balloonist has been on my list of books to find and read for some time, ever since I read the high praise given to it by Philip Pullman - he says "it's leisurely, it's subtle and reflective, it's funny, it's accurate and fascinating about the technical business of flying balloons and meteorology and the mysteries of early radio; there's a love story that is tender, sexy and ridiculous all at once".  While I enjoyed Harris’ Screenplay , I wasn’t completely bowled over – but this one was meant to be his masterpiece.  So I was very pleased by a kind friend tracked it down and gave it to me as a very undeserved present, and I read with enormous interest, and growing involvement.

It’s about a balloonist (no!) who is clearly part of the inspiration for Lee Scoresby in Pullman’s own Northern Lights, but who is very different in all sorts of ways.  The book opens in America, but much of the action is in Paris, with brief scenes in Italy and Sweden, but the heart of it is over the Arctic ice.  It is a tremendous novel of much ingenuity, passion for unattainable goals, love and humour – and a very final double tragedy: an outrageous but unknown and uncelebrated success, and death.

In America, the Swedish balloonist, Gustav Crispin, is experimenting with methods of being able to steer a balloon.  Short of giving it a power source and propellers and rudders, the only real way of doing this is to seek out air currents moving at different directions at different heights – which can be effective, but only in a limited way – gentle adjustments, in my two flights’ experience, rather than total steering control.  But at the time, they were not dealing with hot air balloons, in which altitude control is very easy, but with hydrogen or helium balloons, where altitude could only be lost by releasing gas, or gained by abandoning ballast – both of which were very finite options!  In spite of these limitations, Gustav thinks on the grand scale – he wants to go to the North Pole in a balloon, and when he eventually does set out on this expedition, the amount of luggage he takes – as well as two companions – is quite extraordinary, much of it made of heavy wood, glass or brass.

But before he embarks on his final trip, he studies in Paris, where he meets the elusive and demanding Luisa, who insists on learning his trade.  In fact, she distracts him terribly, and he embarks on a serious emotional bad trip, which is charged with illicit sexuality and la vie bohème.  He also meets her brother Theodor, who eventually becomes a key, if enigmatic, part of the plans for the final heroic flight.  Passionate relationships, deeply regretted but unswervingly indulged, do not prevent the great day dawning, and he sets off to the North Pole, managing to steer a little but trusting greatly in God and the winds.

The tumultuous heat of the Empire bed in the yellow room is replaced by the unforgiving white and cold of the Arctic, and if you believe his own calculations – Harris, it seems to me, leaves us in genuine doubt – they do make it to the North Pole.  But there is no evidence of their success, and they are eventually forced to face a fierce battle for survival rather than a triumphant return to civilisation.  A fine, compelling book, full of many different emotions and challenges.  "If we are betrayed, it is only by ourselves".

Strangers and Brothers: Corridors of Power

C P Snow, in his preface to this book, somewhat ruefully presumes he has the right to use his own cliche, since the phrase "corridors of power" is undoubtedly his invention.  It's a happy one, too, with its suggestion of power directed and yet trammelled, and an undeniably appropriate one for those of us who work in Whitehall or in Washington, since a feature of all bureaucratic buildings of any age seems to be the corridor.  It takes you in a direction over which you have little control, it suggests secrets off to the right and the left, it imposes itself on you, it un-mans you.

This is a particularly compelling volume.  Lewis Eliot is now a senior mandarin, and becomes closely connected with Roger Quaife, a young minister determined to break the orthodoxy of British great power thinking and (eventually) get rid of the nuclear deterrent.  It is a fascinating point in British political history - the Suez adventure splits British society, not absolutely on the expected lines, and Britain is painfully coming to terms with the notion that it is no longer a great power - an adjustment that many would say is not yet complete.  An American academic is forced, reluctantly, to point out that against American power, nothing Britain can do matters a hill of beans.  And it is clear, "among all sensible men", that if if the deterrent is not abandoned now (1956), it will be soon, a view which has proved astonishingly deceptive.

The novel has plenty of points of interest: there is much grey politics, the careful manoeuverings of politicians and civil servants; there is a clash of loyalties, across family and patriotism; there is the old, grand tradition of politics in fierce contact with the new, raw mood of modern times; there is the shock of hearing that Quaife is risking his political career, his chance of delivering the policy in which he passionately believes, and his adored wife, all for "a young woman" who loves him - a woman without a political instinct in her body, but who loves him; there is the play of scientist and civil servant.  And there is Lewis Eliot himself, moving easily between the politicians and the scientists, between the new men and the old guard, making friends with whom he disagrees and respecting though not liking some of those with whom he works most closely.

This is a novel - I give nothing away, since Snow is always very realistic and we all know the history of the anti-deterrent movement - about failure.  But it is a failure touched with nobility, and with greatness - and, as always, it is a failure not of policies or institutions, but of people.  "We talked as though the future was easy and secure, and as though [our children's] lives would bring us joy".  But you cannot help feeling richer for it; you cannot help feeling that Snow has taken the back off the Whitehall clock and - for just one minute on one issue - you really understood how it all worked.  A wonderfully convincing and compelling read. 

Lullaby

A very different poem this week, the deceptively simple work of Rudyard Kipling again.  Here, in a lullaby, he explores some of his favourite themes of reaping what you sow, the gods of the copybook headings, et cetera - and weaves together a biography of Napoleon, inexorably heading for defeat and exile, with all the glory on the way.  But there is a light at the end, the possibility of heaven's grace; here is Rudyard Kipling's A St Helena Lullaby:

 

"How far is St. Helena from a little child at play?"
What makes you want to wander there with all the world
between?
Oh, Mother, call your son again or else he'll run away.
(No one thinks of winter when the grass is green!)

"How far is St. Helena from a fight in Paris street?"
I haven't time to answer now - the men are falling fast.
The guns begin to thunder, and the drums begin to beat.
(If you take the first step, you will take the last!)

"How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz?"
You couldn't hear me if I told - so loud the cannons roar.
But not so far for people who are living by their wits.
("Gay go up" means "Gay go down" the wide world o'er!)

"How far is St. Helena from the Emperor of France?"
I cannot see -  I cannot tell - the Crowns they dazzle so.
The Kings sit down to dinner, and the Queens stand up to
dance.
(After open weather you may look for snow!)

"How far is St. Helena from the Capes of Trafalgar?"
A longish way  - a longish way - with ten year more to run.
It's South across the water underneath a falling star.
(What you cannot finish you must leave undone!)

"How far is St. Helena from the Beresina ice?"
An ill way - a chill way - the ice begins to crack.
But not so far for gentlemen who never took advice.
(When you can't go forward you must e'en come back!)

"How far is St. Helena from the field of Waterloo?"
A near way - a clear way - the ship will take you soon.
A pleasant place for gentlemen with little left to do.
(Morning never tries you till the afternoon!)

"How far from St. Helena to the Gate of Heaven's Grace?"
That no one knows - that no one knows - and no one ever will.
But fold your hands across your heart and cover up your face,
And after all your trapesings, child, lie still!

Jordan: birds in the bush

On my recent trip to Jordan, I saw very few birds, mainly due to the fact that the trip was focused on other things.  Nevertheless, I did see a number of interesting species, and with apologies to those of my readers who dislike birds, here are illustrations of a few of them – yellow-vented bulbul, Sinai rose-finch, chukar, Sardinian warbler, scrub warbler, mourning wheatear and white stork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where I write

The crowded and untidy space where I do my blogging - or at least most of it - is on show today at Cathy's blogspot.  If you go and have a look, you might be shocked at my untidiness, but you'll find something interesting on this varied, gossipy book blog.

Jane's heroines

On my recent travels, I took Austen’s Persuasion, and the reading light failing on one of my flights, listened to much of Pride and Prejudice on my iPod.  I do not intend to review either of these wonderful books, but I did fall to musing about Jane Austen’s heroines, no doubt from a typically narrow and masculine point of view (perhaps the two adjectives were tautologous).

In some ways, they are quite homogeneous – young and single, with views and personalities very much their own – and their fates, too, are similar, as they all end up married – and married happily, too.  Yet for all that, they are very different characters, and Austen’s genius is to deal with such similar material in such a way as to illuminate so wide a range of material in her society and in all societies.  There is meek Fanny Price in Mansfield Park; beautiful Jane and boisterous Elizabeth, the Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice; intelligent Anne Elliot in Persuasion; the romantic and the pragmatic sisters,  Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility; the innocent and impressionable Catherine in Northanger Abbey; and finally the interfering and eponymous Emma.  I do not mean to imply, by the choice of one adjective, that any of these women did not have other attributes, or even that these are their most important characteristics.  I only say that these are the attributes which have burned themselves on my mind, and which demonstrates the true range of Austen’s young ladies - all the vulgar, stupid and disagreeable women (of which there are plenty in Austen) are junior sisters, aunts, acquaintances merely.

They all get married, and married pretty well.  How likely is that in fact, in the society of the day?  Well, given the slight surplus of young ladies, natural and generated by war, the odds might be against them, but each has something specific to commend her.  In material terms, several of them are not at all well off, but all are brought up to gentility and accomplishment, and some – like Fanny and Emma – are brought up really quite grandly, whether that is their natural family metier or not, and the Dashwoods lived very well before they were forced to move.  But several have a liveliness and ready wit (Lizzie and Anne W) which seems to have been attractive in every age, and others have a good sense, rectitude and reasonableness which apparently attracts the moralists and prigs like Edmund (Fanny, eventually) and Emma’s suitor, Knightley.

The arch-heroine, of course, is Elizabeth Bennett, and while Darcy (initially) and some of his companions find her too hoydenish and forward, all the others suffer desperately by comparison.  She has good looks, wit, self confidence, intelligence, and a lively understanding of herself and others, even if she badly misjudges Wickham.  The modern reader cannot but feel he would marry her himself, given half a chance.  But her sister Jane, and Fanny Price, seem just too self-effacing.  Jane is incomparably the more mature, of course, and some of Fanny’s weaknesses come from lack of love and understanding when she first appears at Mansfield Park; but Jane just seems a nice girl, pretty and complaisant, and there seems little real depth of character there.  Fanny – though she increasingly has views of her own – is a mouse, and seems born to play an adoring second fiddle to a stronger personality – first Lady Bertram, then Edmund.  The only sequel to an Austen novel I’ve ever read felt the need to develop her quite a lot, not altogether convincingly!

At the other end of the scale is Emma, who wants to manage everyone else in a way which is most unattractive, mainly because she is so blind to their real needs, and to her own motivations.  Marianne is a full hearted Romantic with a capital R, until her rejection and illness, but Elinor falls into the category of accomplished young ladies somewhere between Elizabeth and Jane in energy, character and appeal, rather like Anne Elliot, though perhaps without her exceptional intelligence and understanding.  Catherine is a nice enough girl, with good instincts, but is very gullible and rather silly at times.  That she is Jane Austen's first heroine may be part of the reason for this, her subtlety not being full grown - and of course, the Gothick mood demands exaggeration and suggestibility.

To a modern taste, Anne, Elizabeth and Elinor would be welcomed onto the books of any dating agency (though they would be unlikely to need such a thing), while I fear Fanny might struggle (to find the confidence to sign up, and to go on blind dates, for a start).  Emma would do well if she could curb her bossy interferingness, but might put a few men off on a first date (unless Gwyneth Paltrow turned up, of course)! 

How real a picture is this of early nineteenth century genteel womanhood, I wonder?  I suspect the marriage market was pretty pragmatic for a lot of people, although wealth was not essential for marriage or even happy marriage.  But it could also be pretty brutal, and it may be that Charlotte Lucas, in taking the ridiculous Collins for the sake of a home of her own, presents the most honest picture of the fate of many.

Women reading: May

The May painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Edward Killingworth Johnson's Summertime: Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Hannah.  His dates are 1825-1896; the painting is undated, but as he seems to have been active in the second half of the 1800s in England, this gives us a wide range of things she could be reading. But it's a truly dreadful painting, soppy and vapid, and her head is at a very odd angle with a carved soap expression.  I am sure, therefore, that she is a an empty headed young frivol, caught in the country, dreaming of parties and balls in Town - but after such harshness, I have (entirely on a whim) decided that she is reading Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), a fine novel but one that will not unduly tax her all too evidently fragile concentration!

If you want to see a much more visually exciting picture on the same subject, visit Harriet Devine!

Old men know

Two pieces about the knowledge of old men this week.  First, two short extracts from the long and masterful T S Eliot's East Coker:

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

...

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.

 

And, by contrast, Ogden Nash's Old Men - short, cynical, witty, and searing:

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes...
But the old men know when an old man dies.