Books Do Furnish A Room

Werewolves and other human beings

Just read A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin.  Published in 1998, this is a collection of short stories by an author of whom I was completely ignorant – but whom I think I shall read again if opportunity offers.

 

Initial impressions are – in the title story – of a dark and brooding Russianness, based in a forbidding landscape and a sense of alienation, but this rapidly gives way to a quite different mood.  To say that a group of werewolves create a lighthearted or joyful atmosphere would be to exaggerate, but there is a certain moody levity which I found appealing.  And the second story, Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream has an opening line to die for:  “Perestroika erupted into the public lavatory on Tverskoy Boulevard from several directions at once.”  This is the amusing and confusing story – part political parody, part fantasy – of a toilet attendant who is a serious philosopher, although sadly attracted to solipsism – and she discusses her thoughts with the similarly talented attendant in the men’s toilet next door.  Her neighbour tells, when asked, “the mystery of life” (sorry, she whispered it, so I can’t tell you) – to which her response was, while laughing, “What, is that all”.

 

Or, another wonderful opening line, this time from the story Tai Shou Chuan USSSR: “As everyone knows, our universe is located in the teapot of a certain Lui Dunbin, who sells trinkets at the bazaar in Chanyan.”  As you can imagine, these are whimsical, philosophical tales, making mock of the Soviet tyranny and bureaucracy (and all others), and gently – and sometimes not so gently – affirming the strength and humour of the individual survivor.

St Petersburg books

My first ever trip to Russia soon – a few days in St Petersburg - so I have been looking out a few relevant books.  They include J M Coetzee’s Master of St Petersburg,  the short story collection A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin, You Will Hear Thunder, a collection of poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich (a real trip back into my teenage past), and mafia thriller Dead Meat by Philip Kerr.  I should of course read some Dostoevsky, but I was attracted by the virtues of brevity and novelty, so I have left even Crime and Punishment at home.  Another option would be Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, an autobiographical work covering his St Petersburg childhood. 

Dead Meat left me completely unstirred and slightly revolted, so I abandoned the violence and the mafia after 50 pages.  Of the others, you'll hear more!

 

Any other ideas?

More work?

Last week, Larkin's Toads (1954) in a very negative, oppressive view of work; today, another poem by the same man, explicitly revisiting the earlier work almost a decade later, and presenting a much more harmonious, fulfilling view of work - but one from the empty spaces of life after work, with a killing final line.  This is Philip Larkin's Toads Revisited:

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me,

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs -

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.

W H R R

W H R Rivers (or Captain Rivers during his Army experience) will be a familiar figure to readers of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye In the Door, and The Ghost Road.  As Barker makes clear throughout, Rivers is a real character, a psychologist and clinician of distinction; in the third novel, it becomes clear that he is first and foremost an ethnologist, specialising in the tribal societies of the Solomon Islands.  I thoughtthe Rivers passages by far the most interesting parts of the three novels, with brilliant dialogue between him and his patients, and compelling and intense descriptions of his Solomon Islands experience illuminating the savagery and psychological disturbances of the First War, so I borrowed Richard Slobodin’s 1978 biography of him (simply called W. H. R. Rivers), which is fascinating reading (though, as a contribution to the Columbia University Press’s Leaders of Modern Anthropology Series, it clearly focuses more on that part of his life than on others).

Frankly, in itself, it's not an exciting read, but Rivers is quite a man and the book (just republished) is well worth a look.  He's older than I thought from the novels, he was born in 1864, so was already 50 when the First World War started, and he began to treat nervous patients - which, no doubt, accounts for the wisdom, tolerance and humanity that comes across so well in the Barker novels.  He died in 1922, at St John's College, Cambridge, an extremely popular man, but one who never married, and indeed, as far as Slobodin can find out, never had much of an emotional life of any sort.  He was a pioneering medic, interested in psychology and psychiatry, but also becoming a major figure in ethnology and social studies.  One of his great interests was in the nature of perception of feeling  how you feel pain - such as a pinprick - and how accurately if you can't see it being applied - very relevant to an extended scene in The Ghost Road.

He was particularly noted for his accounts of the Solomon Islanders - his The Funeral of Sinerani, an account for a Cambridge University magazine is reprinted in full in Slobodin, and is a marvellous account of the funeral of a very young girl, who had to be "married" to a three year old boy before she could be cremated - and shows the practical nature of these people, adapting and forcing the ritual as they went along.  It is briefly described, too, in his most famous ethnological work, The Todas, and here's a flavour:

The child was about two years old and had not yet been betrothed, but as soon as she was dead it was arranged that she should marry her a little boy about four years of age, the son of her mother's brother, and this boy occupied a prominent position among those taking part in the funeral rites. Owing to the marriage of the dead child to this boy, the dead child would come to be one of his clan, the Keadrol, and there seemed to be no doubt that, according to strict custom, the

funeral should have been held at the funeral place of this clan.

Kuriolv, however, arranged that the funeral should take place

at Kurkalmut, the funeral place for women of the Kuudrol,

but as the girl did not properly belong to this clan the funeral

hut was not erected within the circle of stones at this place,

but outside it.

… the buffalo which had been caught by the Taradr men was

being taken to the place appointed for its slaughter by the

side of the funeral hut. The people had great difficulty in

making the buffalo move, and at last it lay down on a boggy

piece of ground, and the efforts of all failed to make it go

further. The diviners, Midjkudr and Mongudrvan, were then

called upon to ascertain the cause of the obstinacy of the

buffalo … the buffalo was thus family property, it should go to the sons, and ought not to be killed for a daughter.

Then after being swung over the flames as usual, the body was placed

on the pyre. [There then should be a “dry funeral” a couple of weeks later. But …] Less than half an hour later, and long before the body could have been consumed, the tnarvainolkedr began, and passed

off without any special incident. Another buffalo was caught

and killed and laid by the side of a mantle containing hair

which had been cut from the head of the dead child by

Keinba. The mantle should also have contained a piece of

skull, but the body had not been sufficiently consumed to

procure this, and so the hair alone was held to be sufficient.

By the way, his full name was William Halse Rivers Rivers.  Why the double Rivers -no one knows, maybe just an error by the registrar!

 

Work

A very busy period at work recently, with early starts and late finishes and lots of odd hours at the weekends and in the evenings - and it brought this Larkin poem to mind. Actually, this is not my attitude to work at all, which I find very stimulating and (largely) enjoyable - and idleness is but a transient joy.  And actually, toads are much maligned, too!  But still, this is a fine poem:  Philip Larkin's Toads:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Diffugere nives

A terrible pun to start off – “the snows are all fled away” from Horace’s famous ode, merely to mark the end of my reading of C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, eleven full length novels spanning British life and politics from just before the 1914-18 war  until the 1970s.  I have written about all the individual novels over the past few months – see the C P Snow tab under “categories” – and I do not propose to reprise them now.

 

But I did want to attempt some overall evaluation.  The first point is that re-reading these novels – for perhaps the third or fourth time – was in no sense drudgery or a burden, even though there must be over 3,500 pages or so.  This may have been because I spread them out over several months, always allowing a fortnight or so to elapse between novels, which gave me a chance to read something else, and to tune into a different locale and a different chronology.  They were a delight, and I recommend them warmly; they can easily be read as independent novels (especially, I judge, The Masters and The New Men), but they gain immeasurably in richness by being read as a sequence.

 

They are warm, disconcertingly honest, and very knowledgeable and wise; they occupy a different social milieu to Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time, a more robustly workaday one, more concerned with the tasks and enterprise of power and the struggle to form and manage relationships, and less with Powell’s interest in the emotional and psychological drama of power and love.  Both are acute social and personal observers, though Powell is clearly the finer writer and the more easily applicable to different periods and different personalities – though Snow has his strengths here too.  Powell’s style is quite different, as well – more light and allusive, while Snow is normally a more “straightforward” writer, both in terms of plot construction and prose, though anyone who thinks this is an easy matter of “writing down what happens” has clearly not tried it!

 

Finally, a word about Snow’s other books.  There are other novels, few of which I have read – but there are two crime novels, too, both well worth reading.  Early in manner – a writing finding his feet – is Death Under Sail, an enjoyable mystery on a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads; it is slightly old fashioned, and has a few lively characters who perhaps veer too close to caricature.  But A Coat of Varnish is much more assured, a formidable novel about a brutal murder in an affluent but declining square in west London; the violence breaks through the thin coat of varnish which is all that civilisation is, covering and hiding our animal natures.  Soon, you know who the murderer is – but can the police prove it?  And what does this sudden irruption of violence mean for the serenity and security of the people who live in the square? – a fine murder thriller, worthy of the top shelf.

Chandler is not a Household word

Recently I have read Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business, a handful of powerful short stories featuring Philip Marlowe, hero of The Big Sleep and other classics.  This is feisty writing, tough and wise-cracking, and it portrays a Los Angeles which is – at least in parts – dirty, crooked, and rotten,  These stories are well worth a read, and Chandler fans, if they don’t already know them, will not be disappointed.  They date from 1934, and although many of the practical things date very rapidly (just imagine, they have to stop driving and go into a drugstore to make a phone call!), these are stories determinedly modern in tone.

Two decades later, another English writer (yes Chandler was English, educated at Dulwich College), was writing altogether more wholesome stuff, about the defence of the realm and a more straightforward world of good and evil – Geoffrey Household, in A Time To Kill.  I have not yet managed to find his famous novel of danger and escape, Rogue Male, but I imagine this gives off much the same powerful smell of derring-do, honest sweat, and fiendish foreigners.  Set largely in Dorset, this is a fun, fast moving story, rather in the mould of Buchan, but slightly more up to date.  I would recommend it to those who like their adventures hot and strong, but with the assurance that right will be done in the end, and that the women and children will be unharmed.

Awake, and in love

Another love poem this week, The Sunne Rising by John Donne.  I think of this sometimes in the summer, when the sun wakes me at four in the morning; in Dorset, with all creation green and gold at the window, I do not resent it; but in London, with a view of terraced houses and the prospect of a hot Tube journey and a long day at work, it thrills me not.  But Donne had a quite different issue - how dare the sun interrupt his adoration of his paramour?  Indeed, such solar arrogance was futile - Donne can eclipse it with a wink, and fears his love's eyes will have blinded the sun!  And then, he turns astronomy around, and makes his bed and his lover the centre of the universe.  There is something of Donne is last week's poet, e e cummings, seeing the world in small, precious things, and playing with words and meaning with such virtuosity and wit.  I wish you this problem.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
        Late school-boys and sour prentices,
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

        Thy beams so reverend, and strong
        Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
        If her eyes have not blinded thine,
        Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
    Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

        She's all states, and all princes I ;
        Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
        In that the world's contracted thus ;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Strangers and Brothers: Last Things

The final Strangers and Brothers novel, the eleventh, is Last Things.  It does not represent an end, except the gradually slowing down and relaxing of Eliot’s active life – though he is still happy and amused, and very active, right at the very end – but a whole series of new beginnings, as later generations take over, and his and his wife’s sons leave home, both in ways which challenge their parents’ love and understanding.  But Last Things does deal with the eponymous eschatologies (illustrated in the four corner roundels in Bosch's wonderful picture) - for example, Lewis loses friends to death, and comes very close himself when his heart stops under anaesthetic, an event which leads to a conversation between Eliot, a robust unbeliever, and Wilfred, a local priest.  After they have been discussing death for some time, Eliot steadily saying he remembers nothing of his ‘death’, he asks Wilfred about the other three items in the list of four last things;  the priest replies:

Lewis.  I expect you'd prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn't you?  I'm not sure that would be an improvement, you know.  But if you like I'll say that you've made your own heaven and hell in your life.  And as for judgement, well, you're capable of delivering that upon yourself.  I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.

Often in Strangers and Brothers, the action has been centred on other people than Eliot; like Nick in A Dance To The Music of Time, he is an observer and commentator.  But unlike Nick, he is always somewhere in the action, and often at the very centre.  But in The Sleep of Reason, he becomes largely an observer, and in Last Things, he is almost completely passive, watching the efforts of the younger generations (in the mid 1960s) to break free of their parents’ legacy and enter political debate on meaningful, sometimes violent terms, and suffering his own medical problems.  He and Margaret, his wife, are caught up in the matrimonial and employment difficulties of their children and their friends’ children, they lose their own friends to death – out of reach abroad in two cases – and can do nothing except love and support each other with a wry commentary on events and personalities.

The race has been run, the baton passed, and a wonderful series of under-regarded novels has come to an end.  These eleven novels are not the most sophisticated or modern novels you can find in English, but they are real, honest, and unflinching in dealing with some of the major issues that worried man and women over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and the other issues which – quondam and futurus – will never go away as long as men and women draw breath.  Read them if you can, they are well worth the effort, and as a bonus you see into the mind of one of the unsung heroes of Britain in the last century.

Georgette's Georgian civilities

Cornflower’s book group read Georgette Heyer’s A  Civil Contract recently.  I read it too, but rather late, and felt a brief post of my own would be more sensible than a comment on hers, three weeks or more after the deadline.  Normally, I wouldn’t have read a book of this sort, but my mother was an enthusiast and I consumed many of the Heyer Regency novels in my early adolescence, enjoying the drama, the period detail, and the emotional chiaroscuro.  Later, I read some of her murder mysteries, which are workmanlike though a little affected and very mannered, not up to the standard of the Golden Age – Sayers, Allingham, Tey at her best, or even Marsh.

So I read this (for the first time, I suppose, as I did not remember it) with the expectation of not really enjoying it, but with some curiosity as to my taste in books at 12 or 13.  Well, it’s a very adolescent sort of book, convincing only at a superficial level, but with an easy charm and a fast moving plot which carries the hapless reader along.  I found it an incredible story, though, even for those dark ages, and found the wealth of apparently authentic detail stultifying not convincing.  But it doesn’t pretend to be a serious piece of fiction, so its cappuccino approach to love and history is entirely appropriate.

What I did feel odd was the language.  It does, certainly, have the feel of the Regency period, and is very convincing – the news of Waterloo arrives in this book which places it very definitely in 1814-15 – but is the language really realistic?  First, how would I know?  Am I just being taken in by charming but completely over the top pastiche, rather as if future generations were convinced that we all spoke like characters from EastEnders, only more so?  Two things convinced me that this was likely.  First, her detective stories (see, for example, Duplicate Death) produced an extremely mannered and indeed impossible language for the inter-war years, including a Scottish detective who talks Gaelic in a way which reminds you irresistibly of Inspector Closeau: perhaps she suffered the same fault in her Regency writing, but we are less attuned?  The second point is even more convincing for me – this is exactly the period of Jane Austen, who wrote of her own time, but she has none of this absurdity and extremity of language or behaviour – not even in the Bath passages of her novels – when the Quality were most in evidence – or Northanger Abbey, a clear parody and mockery of current tastes and mores.  No, I think Heyer has been seduced by – and seduced us with – a caricature of the slang of a tiny modish group which she has drawn as a template for a whole society.

Feeling, not thinking

No, not a description of your faithful blogger, but a quick approximation to the love poem of the day, e e cumming's since feeling is first.  This is nothing like as simple and easy as it looks, and I am thrilled by cummings' skill.  And see the Donne (next week) in "I swear by all the flowers", and the cosmic importance of "your eyelids' flutter"!

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Italian jobs (and an extra)

A kind friend recently gave me Michele Giuttari’s A Florentine Death, which he thoroughly recommended, though this opinion is caveated by the fact that he read it in the original (his Italian is native), and that he loves Florence.  I was intrigued, because it’s written by a retired senior Florentine policeman, and it opened promisingly well.  Well, it turns out that it’s not really a detective story, more a thriller with strong political strands and a fair amount of mild sexual frisson and serial horror – and throw in a vague Mafia connection and a bit of Catholic church politics, and you have a heady if slightly predictable mix for the Italian murder-thriller.  There are two main strands, which begin separately, and only come together late in the book, though the alert reader (that means you!) will soon realise roughly how they will mesh. 

First, there is a series of murders being investigated by “il gatto” (the cat), his subordinates' name for the near legendary chief of the murder squad, Michele Ferrara.  There is little real evidence, and as success eludes him, Ferrara becomes the focus of administrative and political pressure; it is fascinating – this is Italy, after all – that he solves one of his pressing political problems by inviting her out to a three hour lunch, in the middle of a serial murder crisis!  By chance, the murderer lunches there too, though he never knows that.  The other strand is the relationship between an American journalist and an Italian girl struggling free of an adolescent lesbian relationship, seeking who knows what.  Certainly, she found was much more than she bargained for.  There is a fair amount of irrelevant atmosphere which seems to me to have put in by rote – but that may be the effect of translation – and quite a lot of unattractive sexual behaviour  - but still a lot of the excitement of the chase.  In the end, they get a lucky break, and after a couple of false starts, everything builds to a thrilling – if slightly unlikely -conclusion in a monastery inhabited by a silent order.  The explanation of why this series of otherwise unconnected men have died is unconvincing, not in the sense that the events that create an overpowering need for revenge do not come up to scratch, but in the sense that the police struggled for months to find a connection between the several victims, and failed – and all the time, it was that they went to school together!

I was a bit disappointed, and to mask this, I turned to a much better Italian thriller, The Etruscan Net by Michael Gilbert, set in the same city.  This is slightly older fashioned, set perhaps three decades earlier, but just as dependent on the political context of both the police and the judiciary.  There are many splendid characters,  including the hero himself, Robert Broke, and various members of the retired English community in Florence.  But most impressive, perhaps, are the Italian politicos and the lawyer - Avvocato Riccasoli - who defends Broke with tenacity and courage in the face of a Mafia-political fix.  This is gripping, almost believable, and well written – I certainly recommend the English account of Florentine death over the Italian one!

Finally, to keep a slight Italian theme going, I recently read Michael Innes’ Appleby’s Other Story, set in England, with a Spanish painting at its heart (a Velasquez, whose work also features significantly in A Florentine Death), but the resolution of which depends in a surprising fashion on the evidence of the Italian maids.  I won’t spoil the plot, except to tell you that this is a delightful read, elegant and sophisticated murder, and that if you remember that ‘story’ could have been spelled ‘storey’, you might beat the great Appleby to the solution!

Women reading: June

 

The June painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Thomas Pole's In The Library, St James' Square.  Pole lived 1753-1829, and this was painted about 1805-6.  I think it's absolutely splendid, and utterly charming, although it looks nothing like St James' Square today (assuming this is the London square just off Piccadilly, of course).  Perhaps the lady is a forerunner of the librarians and readers of the great London Library which is one of the most respected occupants of the square today?

Later:  Thanks to Cornflower's comment, I now know this is not London, but Bristol.  There are several other pictures of the square, also by Pole, in the Bridgeman Art Library for those interested - looks very fine.

 

Of course, she is writing as well as reading - indeed, she has at least two books on the go, with others to hand for reference.  I suspect that she is writing a dutiful letter to a friend or family member, and is writing out a passage from the Bible (and that looks like a prayer book just to her right), probably with admiring quotations from the morning sermon.  But she probably has pleasure in mind as well, and when she goes out into the sunny garden, I suspect she will take one of the other books with her - including, perhaps, the tragedy Edwy and Elvina by Fanney Burney.  If she was feeling more serious, she could have dipped into Coleridge's Lectures on Politics and Religion or some travel writing by the Gothick author, Ann Radcliffe - A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794.  (It's just a few years too early for Jane Austen, sadly).