Books Do Furnish A Room

Kipling lucky dip

Delayed on a train last week, I reached for my Kindle, and decided to read some Kipling short stories.  I have long thought him the best, most skilled and versatile, and most psychologically perceptive short story writer in English – and three stories, chosen almost at random, did nothing to change that view: The Bridge Builders, The Walking Delegate, and The Ship That Found Herself.  Each of these is 20 or 30 pages at most, yet each encompasses a whole world with conviction, passion, humour and the ability (to use a Kipling phrase) “to see further through a millstone than most”.

In The Bridge Builders, an engineer sees his new bridge, not quite complete, threatened by the violent and unseasonal floods of “Mother Ganga”, after a heart-breaking struggle with the bureaucrats to turn drawings into reality.  Finlayson knows the

violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things ... and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case.

The floods come, and his bridge is saved, not before he has worked all night – honest work is Kipling’s God – and his native overseer has urged his men on with abuse:

“O sons of unthinkable begetting - children of unspeakable shame - are we here for the look of the thing?"

And in the night, Finlayson, half dead with fatigue, hunger and opium, sees the Hindu gods argue about the bridge, and the end of the world, and the love of the common man.  And every word of it, oh best beloved, is true!

In The Walking Delegate, a group of horses on a farm – every one a wonderfully drawn individual - see off a visiting horse preaching rebellion, because they know that the Utopia of now work he promises is illusory.  You learn how they all work, and one of them, who used to pull trams in New York, prides himself on his strength and quickness: “an' time's what dey hunt in N' York."

And The Ship That Found Herself is a warm tale of a new ship which, in an Atlantic storm, ceases to be a collection of parts, and becomes a whole.  The description of the storm is masterly, as is the description of the ship working; but the genius is in the understanding of the individuals becoming first a team and then a unity.

Brilliant, quite, quite brilliant!

On Chesil Beach

No, not Ian McEwan's novel of erotic failure, published a few years ago and reviewed by me here, marvellous though that was.  Rather, an old favourite from school, J Meade Falkner's Moonfleet.  This is set largely in Dorset, although it goes briefly abroad, as it must have seemed then, to the Isle of Wight and then to Amsterdam.  Written in 1898, it is actually set over a century before, covering about 15 years, with the action starting when John Trenchard was a boy, growing up in a Dorset village in 1757.

He lives in Moonfleet, a village on the Fleet, the long thin brackish lake which is trapped between the land and the twenty miles of heavy shingle which is Chesil beach.  He is entranced by tales of pirates and smugglers and ghosts, and these all link up in a surprising way when he is a little too impetuous in his exploring.  He is drawn into smuggling, and after the accidental death of the squire is hunted as an accomplice to murder, though he is innocent enough.  There is much excitement, much good clean fun and a jolly yarn, before he comes home again, pirate treasure found and ready to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart - though Falkner (there really is no "u") is very imaginative in the way he returns his hero to his beloved Dorset coast.  There is much more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil the plot.

This is a novel which my father - born in 1912 - recalled fondly from school.  It is well written, though with plenty of improbability, and is one of those virtuous novels in which the good in heart win out, and there are reasonbly realistic pictures of people and places, including the difficult and unhappy.  It is not, some say, Falkner's best novel (The Nebuly Coat, apparently, claims that prize), but it is certainly his best known.  It paints a fine picture of south coast smuggling in the 1760s, and is a lively thriller as well: you might want to try it, particularly if you are, at heart, a boy between 12 and 15!

The Fleet is still there of course, a fine bird sanctuary, and there is Moonfleet Hotel, set in this staggering and rather unlikely scenery.  Even if you don't read Falkner's book - or the McEwan - you should walk the beach, on a sunny gusty day with the salt on the wind and the sun in your eyes.

I am the Lord of the Dance

After a break last year, when I read C P Snow, I have returned to my traditional New Year reading (a little late, becasue I have been away), and will be reading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time again this year.  I will not bore you all by reviewing each volume again, just giving a link to my previous version - but I will allow myself the odd illustrative quotation.

The first volume, of course, is A Question of Upbringing.

"Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.  At that period love's manifestations are less easily explicable than they become later: often they do not bear that complexion of being a kind of game, or contest, which, at a later stage, they may assume.  Accordingly, when I used to consider the case of Jean Templer, with whom I had decided I was in love, analysis of the situation brought no relief from the uneasy, almost obsessive thoughts that filled my mind ..."

...

Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused.  Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.

The way of three hundred and sixty and one

I read Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go for the first time in 1987 – and as far as I recall, have not read it again until last week.  It is a slight novel in terms of pages, just 140 or so, but is a compelling and delightful study of glory and mortality.  Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, was a journalist by profession, but wrote novels and essays all his life; he was born in 1899, and started writing in 1925, with Izu Dancer.  Other books of his available in English are Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, both well worth reading. 

The Master of Go was published in 1954, but only appeared in the West in translation in the 1970s; it is not really a work of fiction, but a shosetsu, a piece written as fiction which is broadly non-fictional in material.  This book is an account of a real championship game of Go in 1938, when “the invincible Master” was defeated.  So one or two details are changed – names, for example, and the treatment is entirely fictional in the sense that there is no adducing or weighing of evidence, merely the viewpoint (often ambiguous and questioning) of the author himself. 

Kawabata regretted the passing of the old Japan, with its courtesies and etiquette, its elevation of graceful and noble pastimes and arts to philosophies and indeed he way of life of a gracious, dedicated group of connoisseurs; that regret is encapsulated in the figure of the old Master, invincible, remote, of the old order, as he is weakened by ill-health, rules and usages which he does not understand or approve of, and the energy and directness of a young challenger, the ruthless yet reverential Otaké of the Seventh Rank.  Kawabata charts the match carefully, illuminating it with dry comments about the game, the garden outside, the moods and appearances of the contestants, the conflicts and struggles that lie beneath the obvious conflict on the Go board. The Master’s defeat is inevitable - the old order yieldeth place to the new – yet it does not seem that way; but in the end autumn passes, the snows arrive.  The Master died a year or so after the match; Kawabata died in 1972, by his own hand.

A parallel event in our lifetimes might be the Fischer-Spassky chess match in Reykjavik in 1972, though I have seen no account of it that comes anywhere near the breathtaking beauty of this book.  The match becomes compellingly interesting to millions who do not normally have any interest in the game, cultures are in flux, philosophy challenges philosophy, personal disagreements become symbols of greater changes in the wider world.  But in The Master of Go, you definitely do not need to understand the game itself, a strategic game based on placing white and black stones on a squared board in extraordinarily complex and subtle ways (my title refers to the 361 points (19 squared) on which the stones can be placed).  What you need to know, Kawabata tells you – and he covered the original match for his paper, so is well used to conveying the drama and tension to an audience which does not know the details of the game.

It is hard to convey the nature of this book; it is very beautiful and very moving; it is intensely elegiac and yet celebratory of the beauty of the game, the culture of Japan, and the intensity of the great Master.  It is a wonderful read, and makes me want to go to Japan at once and learn the game, to realise myself beyond the body and the mind.

The tangerine groves were beautiful in the hills, and down at the coast the bitter oranges were turning gold.

More of Paddington's essential reading

 My good friend Paddington bear has been recommending books about Peru, and here are a couple more, this time by Peruvians. 

Maria Vargos Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero?  Vargos Llosa is a prolific writer in several genres, and I have read very little -  though I do remember a few years ago not really enjoying Captain Pantoja and the Special Service very much.  So, drawing a bow at a venture, I took this slim novel cum murder investigation out of the library.  It’s quite a raw affair, starting with a young boy, in the Peruvian Air Force, being murdered and indeed tortured in a pretty brutal way, and abandoned in the country in a scene reminiscent of Calvary.  The local police are put off investigating by the local Air Force big wigs, but there are powerful, more popular forces at work.  This may be a murder story, but it’s a political novel as well, and the local police are successful – though hardly politically correct in any sense – in finding both the guilty parties and the underlying causes.  Their reward is not to be believed by the general populace, which scents corruption in high places, and to be posted to remote and unattractive stations by their superiors.  Along the way, there is some pretty cutting satire on the state of politics and the economy in Peru at the time, and some fine, if fairly robust, writing about social relationships and the breakdown of many normal human relationships under extreme stress.

Vargoa Llosa also wrote a great deal of fine non-fiction, mainly criticism and philosophical, literary or political essays; some of the best are gathered together in Touchstones.  Displaying the erudition, Europhilia and breadth of many South Americans - Borges par excellence - he writes on Balzac, Woolf, Conrad, Grass, Mann with equal ease, as well as varied essays on art and on politics and culture, especially in South America.  An impressive man and writer.

I wanted to read some Cesar Vallejo, but found it a bit hard to get a small, accessible collection.  I ended up with the depressingly entitled Complete Posthumous Poetry (an ambiguous title), and I found this hard.  A lot of it seems very dense in this translation, and occasionally jejune:

Until a day without two, / wife Tomb, / my ultimate iron makes the sound / of a sleeping viper, / father body mine....!

What on earth is that about?

Finally, I looked at Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, subtitled Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.  These are ramblings, reflections, not quite a sustained journal, of his filming in 1979.  Some of the descriptions are very evocative, and he has a rare turn for an anecdote, and the language - this is translated from the German by Krishna Winston - is often dreamlike and lyrical.  But I found it a book to browse in, not to read - to get lost in, rather than navigate confidently through.  But if you're interested in the film, I should think it very intriguing.

In addition, of course, I have maps, guides, a specialist and very heavy bird book, and a more general wildlife book.  A whole library, too, on my new Kindle!  More from Peru, and on my Peruvian reading, a little later.

802,701 AD

I went to bed the other evening without enough to read, and lazily restricted my choice of extra material to those books which were within reach while remaining under the duvet.  This limited my choice to a small group of science books and novels from U – Z.  I chose, on a whim, H G Wells' The Time Machine, which in my ancient Penguin edition is collected together with a number of other shorter stories.  The Time Machine is by far the longest, and the other stories are very short by comparison – the most well-known being The Man Who Could Work Miracles. 

In his day, and even in my youth, H G Wells was a great figure and a great favourite with the boys in my school, though I suspect the girls found him much less interesting.  So, on this return, I was a little disappointed.  Like The War of the Worlds, which I read a few months ago, the imagination is tremendous, and the story is powerfully told and carried through with great force; but the language now seems very old fashioned, and the science, so powerfully imagined, now seems childish and vague, with lots of rather robotic social relations and rather clunky and didactic dialogue.

The hero of The Time Machine leaps forward thousands of years, to the date in the title of the post, where lots of rather sad eugenically inspired evolution stuff explains the physical and mental deterioration of the human race(s) – I would have been more interested if Wells had had a shot at what might have been 200 or 500 years into the future, although that would not have been so impressive a leap of the imagination, but it might have been more involving.  A great classic, but a little past its read-by date.

Some of the shorter stories are rather more fun – the story of The Man who could do Miracles, for example, is amusing and cleverly constructed, and The Hammerpond Park Burglary and The Stolen Bacillus are pithy, well constructed and amusing - and they remind us of Wells' range of voices and material, which was huge.

 

The delicate masterpiece of the Abbé Prévost

Manon Lescaut is hardly a novel, more a long short story, although still almost picaresque. It is a classic I have heard of again and again in my reading – and the title of the post is from Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, when the book holds the key to the crime Wimsey is solving -and gives his friend the book to read while he brings the case (of course) to a triumphant conclusion.  I have had a copy for a couple of years, but something about this book discouraged me, made me feel it would be worthy but dull.  Well, apologies to French friends and fans of Abbé Prévost, but how right I was!  I really struggled with Manon Lescaut.

It’s only about 140 pages, but I grounded after 60 pages, and had to really force myself back to duty.  I then finished it in a concerted effort, but it felt like taking enemy ground under fire, and the relief as I turned over the last page was something indescribable.  I really don’t know what the fuss is about, I found it shallow, contrived, unconvincing, and just plain boring.

Chevalier Des Grieux is a young man intending to study to become a Knight of St John (or a Knight of Malta, same thing), with a marked tendency to priggishness – boringly good, moralising left, right and centre, and tempted by a career in the Church.  He meets, by chance, a beautiful young woman – Manon – who turns his head in spite of an appalling series of accidents, betrayals and disasters.  All ends in the worst possible disaster, with Des Grieux weeping on Manon’s grave in New Orleans, and then coming back to become a reformed character (yawn, yawn).

I found the moralising insipid and tedious, but the real weakness of the whole thing was its plot.  Action comes thick and fast, but the causes of action are either obscure or laughable.  Tremendous escapes are made from secure prisons by just walking out; an Abbé decides not to mention a murder he has witnessed, and so saves Des Grieux; a man decides to risk his life and his reputation after half an hour’s conversation with Des Grieux to whom he feels a lifelong friendship; an enemy duels with Des Grieux – is left for dead, recovers immediately, and saves Des Grieux from a terrible fate through his great good nature! The plot is more farce – more Boccaccio or Chaucer – than novel or uplifting moral treatise, and in the end, I could no more believe in Manon’s unfading attraction and virtue than I could in the choking, suffocating, disabling love he feels for her.

Secrecy and sickness

You may recall my irritation with the BBC’s Emma, a reaction that seems widely shared to judge by television critics in the paper.  I felt the need to cleanse my palate, and indeed have picked up Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with both relief and joy.  Yes, there are lingering elements of the gothick in Marianne’s passionate ideas, her love and despair; and the confusion over Edward Ferrars’ engagement is perhaps too drawn out for credibility.  Yet the overall is charming, witty and engaging, and the quietly barbed comments about the boorishness, selfishness, or mere stupidity of people have lost nothing in two hundred years.

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Toby Tanner remarks that “Sense and Sensibility is, of course, about sense and sensibility, but it is also about secrecy and sickness”.  I find that an illuminating comment, and an immediate balance to the modern tendency to portray Jane Austen as a kind of up-market rom-com, a mere comedy of manners and young love – though her novels are all of that, as well.  And “balance” itself is an interesting word, because Tanner draws attention to Jane Austen’s belief that balance is a prime virtue in her characters’ behaviour, or should be at least an aspiration, or a development of age and experience; he also draws attention to the way her prose directly achieves that balance in metrical and syntactical form: “The prose, like the plot, tends towards, and even acts out, those steady symmetries which Jane Austen regarded as indispensable for a truly civilised existence”.

This is an engaging book, and the characters of the two main female characters – Eleanor and Marianne – are contrasted without being stereotypes, and the three men providing the emotional interest are also all interesting – Edward, shy but upright, perhaps a more impressive figure in truth than Hugh Grant made him out to be, but certainly not full of address and élan; Willoughby, a weak scoundrel whose romanticism is offset by his mercenary flaws, although he comes to harbour at last, not happy, but at least knowing why he has missed happiness; and Colonel Brandon, whose virtues are sub-fusc but extremely well laid.  Each of them is flawed, each has redeeming characteristics, and each, probably, gets his just deserts,  Nor are minor characters any less interesting, Mrs Jennings with her inconsequential chatter and her gossip is a particular favourite of mine, from the same stable that produced Mrs Bates, but there are many others, demonstrating narrowness, boredom, goodwill, cupidity and selfishness, generosity and every other vice or virtue Jane’s readers could conceive.

I enjoyed Sense and Sensibility all the more because I was comparing it to the BBC’s insensitive Emma, and revelling in the language, the observational acuity, and the wit.  But honesty compels me to say that even this, refreshing and cleansing as it was, is not the very best Miss Austen has offered us – it must play second fiddle to Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.  But what a fantastic novel to have written when not at the top of your form!

I cannot see you acting wrong without a remonstrance

The words of my title are, of course, those of Mr Knightley to Emma, but I address them to the BBC.  Bored and slightly shocked by the latest television Emma, I gave it up after half an hour, and picked up the book itself.  It’s not, to be fair, Jane Austen’s finest – for me, it is clearly the weakest of the big five (not including Northanger Abbey, the runt of the litter).  But Austen in a weaker strain is still extremely fine, and there is no need to eviscerate it so completely as the BBC seemed intent on doing.  And do they think Mr Woodhouse is Emma’s grandfather, not her father – he looks about a hundred?

Emma is now a novel I pick up thinking that I ought to like it, and hoping to like it.  I used to feel this way about other Austens, but I have gradually grown into them all, and feel nothing but excitement and delight as I pick up Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion.  I don’t think this is because Emma herself is such a dolt – she’s irritating and trivial beyond belief, and her judgement of other people is quite extraordinarily bad – and her judgement of her own feelings.  I wouldn’t want her in my life (though Gwyneth Paltrow, in a previous version, was quite lovely), but then that’s true of others – Jane Bennett is sickly sweet good, and Fanny Price is so wet you need wellies to walk all over her, but both these books are on my “most loved” list.  I think it’s because there are so many odd characters, and because the novel really has remarkably little shape or direction.

Mr Knightley is splendid in all sorts of ways, but is a tedious prig at times – and it’s hard to believe in either his or Emma’s passion; Mr Woodhouse needs a good shaking and a reality check; the Eltons are a fearful couple.  And the plot is a cloud of unknowing in which events occur, rather than a journey through Emma’s development – as Pride and Prejudice is a journey through Elizabeth’s (and many other things); and all that nonsense with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax – that’s all of a piece with the Gothick I wish she had left in Northanger Abbey.  I am in a severe mood with my goddess today, but I still love it – the Miss Bates monologues for example, are quite wonderful, and the Westons are drawn well, and the picture of small town social life is wonderfully conceived and executed.  Perhaps I just need a draft of the true, the blissful Hippocrene, perhaps Sense and Sensibility, the longest unread, and I’ll return to Emma another time.  In the meantime, I shall steadfastly ignore the BBC!

The Path of the King

An unusual John Buchan over the weekend, The Path of the King, which is not a novel, but is certainly an extended piece of fiction.  The idea is that a kingly characteristic is carried in the blood (or, as we would say nowadays, the genes) of men, though they know it not – and is expressed by the individual rising to the challenge of leadership at a moment of crisis.  The original king in this book is a Norse chieftain, who goes on a raid into France, and is slain – and his young son Biorn is captured, wearing a gold armlet given him on the eve of the journey, his first essay into manhood.

What follows is a series of some 14 historical vignettes, in chronological order but not continuous, which trace his line through various historical dramas in Europe, England, back to Holland and France, then to England once more and finally the infant United States.  His name changes, but can always be followed, and the armlet – quickly succeeded by a ring made from it – is always present; sometimes he is noble, sometimes humble, never a king, but always moving history along by his skill, or prowess, or cunning.  Among other things, he is a French knight on Crusade – he is present at the slaughter of St Bartholomew in Paris – he advises Cromwell on whether to kill or spare King Charles – an Elizabethan adventurer in Spanish South America – and a tracker in the virgin lands of America.

There is little to this book, but it is always interesting and lightly written.  I cannot imagine ever reading it again, but I enjoyed it, in the way I might enjoy a history book written for a lively thirteen year old – which might, I suppose, have been Buchan’s target.

Flying saucers and talking horses

I wrote recently about Lilliput and Brobdignag and later returned to read the rest of Gulliver’s Travels, two wilder voyages to Laputa, the flying island – and also to the land of intelligent, philosophical horses, Houhynms, and the brutish and violent Yahoos, who Gulliver recognises as humans, degraded and bestial.

 

These are not the most popular of the Gulliver stories, and it easy to see why – there is no one simple, transfiguring idea so simple as being very large or very small – but there is much to marvel at.  Some of his fiercest political satire was hidden in these voyages, and satire at the expense of other groups, too, such as the scientists of the Royal Society and their friends – in establishments which are dedicated to the improvement of life through all sorts of ridiculous processes, but which in fact make everything much worse – and revile traditionalists in agriculture, for example, as hopelessly unprogressive and even disloyal.  Perhaps the best way of representing them is to quote a passage or two.  Here, Gulliver is visiting the Academy in Lagado, a skit on the Royal Academy, to which Swift had a violent and irrational aversion:

 

The first Man I saw was of a meager Aspect, with sooty Hands and Face, his Hair and Beard long, ragged and singed in several Places. His Cloathes, Shirt, and Skin were all of the same Colour. He had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers. He told me he did not doubt in Eight Years more he should be able to supply the Governors Gardens with Sun-shine at a reasonable Rate;

 

We next went to the School of Languages, where three Professors sate in Consultation upon improving that of their own country … The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.   The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.

 

And here is a description of the Yahoo - a bestial human, which the horses keep in subjection:

 

They are prodigiously nimble from their infancy. However, I once caught a young male of three years old, and endeavoured, by all marks of tenderness, to make it quiet; but the little imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting with such violence, that I was forced to let it go; and it was high time, for a whole troop of old ones came about us at the noise, but finding the cub was safe (for away it ran), and my sorrel nag being by, they durst not venture near us. I observed the young animal's flesh to smell very rank, and the stink was somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but much more disagreeable.

By what I could discover, the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all animals: their capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel. It is observed, that the red haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity.

 

 

Fishing for men

Is Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous a short novel or “just” a short story?  Well, who on earth cares, it’s a story of genius written with power and agony and emotion, yes, and humour too, which utterly transcend the clichés of the plot – rich boy lost, adopted, found again (and this time, he’s a man) – and show Kipling as an author who understood man and men, yea, even to the uttermost ends of the earth.

Harvey Cheyne is a spoilt brat, 15 years old, the much loved and neglected only son of a multi-millionaire, when he falls overboard – seasick and tobacco sick – from an Atlantic liner.  By enormous good fortune, he is picked up by one of the dories from the We’re Here, a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The Captain, Disko Troop, refuses to believe that his father is wealthy, and is stung by an ill-advised accusation of theft.  In addition, he had previously lost one of the ship’s boys overboard, so he stays out on the Grand Banks for the next two or three months, putting Harvey to work alongside his son Dan.  In the process, Harvey grows up, learns the value of hard work and realises that other men have different, more painful values – and learns how America’s riches are created.  It’s difficult and dangerous, and Harvey is frightened sometimes, and sees men drowned – but he learns to work on the boat, he learns a little respect for the men who earn their living this way, and he becomes, in short a man.  You can sneer at this construct if you like – and it’s true Kipling believed greatly in the virtues of hard work (and this was written in 1897) – but read these 130 pages and you’ll change your mind:

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and,since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flag-pole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the [tobacco] joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.

This is a wonderful story at numerous levels: it’s a great adventure, with wonderful descriptions of fishing on the Grand Banks; it’s a rite of passage novel; and it’s meditation on working men’s values.  It is wonderfully made, too – all the characters are full of life and individuality, and there are a hundred single paragraph stories of life, death and everything in between.  And the  language is superb, too.

When the We’re Here gets home, Harvey sends a telegram to his father in San Diego – and all hell breaks loose.  Because Cheyne senior is a railroad king, and he orders all the railroad companies in America to get him across to the east coast in a hurry, a very big hurry.  The few pages that describe the arranging of this journey, and the journey itself, are written in a father’s sweat and a mother’s love.

When the reunion takes place, the parents see the change in Harvey, and spend some time with the fishermen and their community; Kipling understands men, and he makes it clear the Cheyne senior’s success is because he understands men too, and these are illuminating, warming pages.  But if you can read the account of Memorial Day, when they remember all those who have died in the fleet this year, without a tear, you must be colder than the grey devouring sea: “My father – my own eldest brother – two nephews – an’ my second sister’s man.  Would you care for anyone that took all these?”, as Disko’s wife says.  Here’s some Kipling - they're reading the list of the fisherman lost that year: 

"September 27th. Orvin Dollard, 30, married, drowned in dory off Eastern Point." That shot went home, for one of the widows flinched where she sat, clasping and unclasping her hands. Mrs. Cheyne, who had been listening with wide-opened eyes, threw up her head and choked. Dan's mother, a few seats to the right, saw and heard and quickly moved to her side. The reading went on. By the time they reached the January and February wrecks the shots were falling thick and fast, and the widows drew breath between their teeth.

"February 14th. Schooner Harry Randolph dismasted on the way home from Newfoundland; Asa Musie, married, 32, Main Street, City, lost overboard.

"February 23d. Schooner Gilbert Hope; went astray in dory, Robert Beavon, 29, married, native of Pubnico, Nova Scotia." But his wife was in the hall. They heard a low cry, as though a little animal had been hit. It was stifled at once, and a girl staggered out of the hall. She had been hoping against hope for months, because some who have gone adrift in dories have been miraculously picked up by deep-sea sailing-ships. Now she had her certainty, and Harvey could see the policeman on the sidewalk hailing a hack for her. "It's fifty cents to the depot" the driver began, but the policeman held up his hand - "but I'm goin' there anyway. Jump right in. Look at here, Al; you don't pull me next time my lamps ain't lit. See?"

A View of One's Own

While in Florence, I resolved to re-read E M Forster’s A Room with a View, and in the week the papers were full Virginia Woolf, this mongrel title seemed apt.  Forster’s novel is about independence and freedom of choice, from the moment Lucy doesn’t know what to admire in the Church of Santa Croce without Ruskin to guide her, to the moment she realises she cannot marry the effete and irritating Cecil.  There is actually very little of Florence in this book, but it serves throughout as a metaphor for the interests and aspirations of the sensibly adventurous middle classes – going further to Greece and Constantinople is foolhardy and takes one beyond the Christian pale (even if the pale is already dangerously Roman Catholic in Florence), and staying at home is too narrow minded and insular.

In fact, narrow mindedness and insularity is exactly what Lucy finds, often while visiting Florence, and even more so back at home at Windy Corner. But in to the stultifying convention come George Emerson and his father, who Lucy and her companion-cousin Charlotte had met in Florence; indeed these were the vulgar and embarrassing people who had given up their rooms in the pension for Charlotte and Lucy, and who had tried to befriend them, riding snubs subtle and unintended as well as the direct and brutal ones.  George, of course, has fallen in love with Lucy, and has actually stolen a kiss on a hillside outside the town.  How she realises that George is not only the most genuine of all the men she has met – possibly only excepting her rather dense brother Freddie – but also one she passionately loves, is beautifully explored in Forster’s gentle and precise prose.

This is not a novel that Forster found it easy to write, nor was he particularly fond of it.  But, while perhaps lacking the weight and passion of Where Angels Fear To Tread or Howards End, A Room With A View is amusing and yet perturbing; it is a love story in two lovely settings, with some beautiful character observation and some sharp and compelling dialogue.  It is the most delightful of his novels, and with  Helena Bonham Carter in the main role, made a film which is both very beautifully shot and remarkably emotionally true to the text.  Both are recommended warmly.

Coetzee and Dostoevsky, Masters of St Petersburg

Before my recent trip to St Petersburg, I found several interesting books to read – but one of them didn’t get read, either before or during my visit.  This is J M Coetzee’s The Master of St Petersburg (1994), which I read – wildly inappropriately – in Florence, city of angels.

The story opens with a man called Isaev visiting St Petersburg to clear up the affairs of his son, Pavel Alexandrovich.  There is something odd, something strained and un-natural about the relationship with the young man for whom he grieves so bitterly and so passionately, and gradually we learn that Pavel is not his son, but his stepson, and that he may have been involved in a revolutionary organisation.  Did he commit suicide?  Have an accident?  Was he killed by the police?  Further complexity develops as it emerges that the man is not Isaev at all, but Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, a writer living in Germany, already with Crime and Punishment (1866) behind him, although Coetzee develops Dostoevsky slightly unhistorically in places.

Fyodor Mikhailovich seems to believe that his son will speak to him, but that to hear his voice – which may not come from at all an expected source – he must open himself to others, finding sexual solace with his son’s landlady, freeing a trapped dog, giving a beggar a bed for the night.  He justifies this by remembering that Pascal said we should embrace everyone, only then can we be sure that the One for whom we are waiting will not slip by unnoticed. 

He puts off return to Dresden and his wife, and gradually becomes more and more embroiled with his landlady and her daughter, with the revolutionary Nechaev and his acolytes, and with the forces – strong but not always admirable – of law and order in the shape of the thoughtful and courteous Maximov.  All this time – several weeks – he has not written anything.  We understand he is too diminished, too anguished, by Pavel’s death.  Then he reads his son’s papers, and finds there pain and truth, but also an unfinished short story, jejeune but with promise.  Then, Fyodor Mikhailovich starts to write again, fluently, powerfully, and uncompromisingly, about the apartment he is living in and the people he is meeting – we hear of The Apartment and The Child, (which I cannot find that the real Dostoevsky wrote) - written without compromise, without hesitation or change, and without remorse.

“They pay him lots of money for writing books”, said the child, repeating the dead child.  What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

This is a fine novel by Coetzee, one I enjoyed all the more from recognising some of the places from my recent visit.  But it is well worth reading without that, and makes me remember that I must read more Coetzee than I have – only [check] The Life and Times of Michael K, Booker prize winner in 1983.  It is a very different narrative from Mann’s Dr Faustus, with which it shares one central idea, that genius is paid for very terribly, as it focuses on one set of events, not a whole biography, but the two books are also alike in their reflecting the personal drama with violent public events.

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.

Swift on politics

I have been reading a cheap (and therefore, abandonable) copy of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for my trip to Jordan.  It’s a long time since I read it properly, probably at school, and I therefore only remember a few highlights, mainly from his visit to the Lilliputians.  It’s frightfully political, and indeed the first editions were not complete, no publisher daring to produce the whole work, with its criticism of the king (George II) and his ministers.  But for me, all the political references are so much weed on the hull, slowing down the craft; if you get them immediately (and I only get a few), all well and good – if you don’t, just enjoy it for the story, the sense of humour, and the lessons about human behaviour which are perfectly generalisable and need no special knowledge of early eighteenth century England.

For example, in Lilliput, Gulliver hears that the long war with its neighbour is caused by a dispute over which end of the egg should be opened – the little or pointed end, or the big end.  That’s quite silly enough, without references to possible parallels in England or Europe at the time.  Indeed, the whole of the Lilliput adventure is tremendously engaging, partly because it is written with such geniality, and he and his unwilling hosts are (at least at first) immensely cordial and good natured to each other; and perhaps, too, because the joke has had no chance to wear thin!

By the time you come to Brobdingnag, where all the creatures are twelve times Gulliver’s size, rather than one-twelfth, some of the humour is relatively obvious, in that it is the opposite of Lilliput; but it is still interesting to see how he deals with exploitation, and how Glumdalclitch, the daughter of his original finder, takes care of him with genuine affection – though it is the sort of affection you might lavish on a pet, we feel.  But some of his acutest and most penetrating political observations are from this voyage:

The king tells him: “You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator ... that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.

“And, he gave it for his opinion; that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.”

And Gulliver refuses to publish his story (though he obviously changes his mind later!): “My answer was, that I thought we were already overstocked with books of travels”.

Sheer joy!  I think I will leave any comments on Laputa and the Houhonyms until a later date, although those are the passages which have traditionally been almost forgotten by modern audiences, in spite of some critical opinion which ranks their political satire as the best of all.

Death on the Floss

I have already more than hinted (Life on the Floss) at criticism for the ending of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.  Some fine critics have taken a hard stance, and John Sutherland in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, in the essay called How good an oarswoman is Maggie Tulliver?, says “it is difficult to find a critic of weight prepared to commend the last chapter of The Mill on the Floss”.  Here, for example, is Henry James:

"The story is told as if it were destined to have ... [an ending] ... within ordinary probabilities.  As it stands, the denouement shocks the reader most painfully.  Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it. ... I would in this particular case have infinitely preferred that Maggie should have been left to her own devices."

Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) wished that the third volume had been suppressed.  And the fierce F R Leavis felt:

The flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical value.  It is only [an] accident which gives us the opportunity for the dreamed-of heroic act ... and provide a gloriously tragic curtain.  Not that the sentimental in it is embarrassingly gross, but the finality is not that of great art – and [its] significance is ... a revealed immaturity.

All this is true, and I agree with it; Tom's sudden rise to prosperity, for example, where within a short apprecticeship he earns enough to pay off his father's debts through the unlikely chances of successive successful trading ventures and the early knowledge of a collapsing bank, marks a romantic determination that all will be well in the end.  His success is as as sudden and as unexplained as his father's failure; it seems to set the scene for an ending which might not be happy, but is not utterly tragic: perhaps Tom back at the mill (another fine coincidence to get rid of the incumbent manager), with Maggie in service, pulling herself up again.  And then, Maggie becomes a friend of Lucy's, beautiful and courted .. perhaps she will eventually be happy with Philip?  No, Eliot throws all this away, and suddenly and irrationally, sweeps all away in a tragedy which is unpremeditated and which has no fitness with what has gone before. I don't, you understand, insist on a happy ending, but I do like emotional coherence!

But John Sutherland has more practical criticisms, of the sort that some people find tediously irrelevant, but others think are fatally intrusive to any enjoyment of a book.  He just thinks it couldn’t happen the way it’s described.  First, there is the simple question of the flood.  It seems to come from nowhere and rises with terrifying speed - first into the house where Maggie is living, then an hour or so later, up to the second storey of the mill.  All this is remarkably unlikely in the wide, flat lands of the landscape here described, where the flood would spread out over great extent, but would actually rise slowly without a steep valley to contain it.

  

And what is this machinery which bears down on their boat and sinks them?  Why is it going so fast when they are not?  And why does it float at all, if it is machinery - well, because Eliot in the second edition makes it "wooden", an unlikely concept in itself.  And where does Maggie learn to row and scull so well?  And in such a raging flood, how does she get the frail boat into the mill?  The questions go on and on, and Sutherland is merciless, and the final book becomes more and more fantastical.  This spoils the book dreadfully for some; for me, though, the greater problem is the discontinuity between the bulk of the book and its dramatic ending.  I shall go back to Scenes From Clerical Life or Felix Holt when I next want to read George Eliot!

Life on the Floss

I have just read George Eliot’s  The Mill on the Floss for the first time, though I read and enjoyed both Felix Holt and (less so) Middlemarch a long time ago, and read, though I did not particularly enjoy, Daniel Deronda.  But I took Mill on holiday with me in October and did not open it, so it was time to read it.

It opens dreamily, with a memory, apparently a long one, of Dorlcote Mill.  We are introduced to Maggie and Tom, children of the mill owner, Mr Tulliver, and the description of their relationship and of their individual characters – very loving though always at war – is quite masterly.  Also finely observed and enjoyable are domestic scenes – the lunch where the sisters make snide remarks about each other and sink into a quarrel none of them want, the disastrous visit to Aunt Pullet, and Maggie’s running away and subsequent return by the gypsies.  Mrs Tulliver is a weak, indecisive woman who wants the best, but although hard working and well willed, has little idea how to manage either her husband or her children.  She is easily distracted, and in a ,marvellous early passage, is reassuring her husband that the beds are ready for her son returning from school:

They aren’t the best sheets, but they’re good enough for anybody to sleep in, be he who he will; for as for them best Holland sheets, I should repent buying ’em, only they’ll do to lay us out in.  An’ if you was to die tomorrow, Mr Tulliver, they’re mangled beautiful, an’ all ready, an’ smell o’ lavender as it ’ud be a pleasure to lay ’em out ...

The novel is a monument to nineteenth century narrative genius, and the obsession with respectability and the repression of the emotions; and George Eliot could really write and observe beautifully, so it is a shame that in places this book is also a monument to the tedious extension of moralistic musings – and, as John Sutherland makes clear in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, comes to a staggeringly unlikely climax.  To be fair, some of this just comes with the territory of the high Victorian novel, but it is frustrating nevertheless.  At the time I was getting really interested in how Maggie and Tom would develop in the light of their father’s disgrace, I find myself treated to pages of an unlikely conversion to selflessness and denial on the part of a thirteen year old girl, brought about by some random passages from Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation Of Christ.  But let’s concentrate for now on her wonderful writing.

So, how about this brilliant piece of social observation, distilled into a single knock out sentence, on Mrs Glegg, the starchy, proud, husband-bullying, moralistic and un-helpful sister of Mrs Tulliver:

Mrs Glegg had both a front and a back parlour in her excellent house at St Ogg’s, so that she had two points of view from which she could observe the weaknesses of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be married to her, especially as she is also fully ...

... alive to the responsibilities of a wife as a constituted check on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.

Perceptions of this kind, so epigrammatically expressed, are fine compensation for the sometimes slow pace and wordiness of the novel, and its opium habit of convenient coincidence.  But it is with the sentimentality and unlikelihood of the ending that I must take issue – in another post in a few days’ time.

 

Tristram

I have been reading – on Harriet’s and others’ strong recommendations – Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.  Previously, I had only read his Sentimental Journey, and although I had greatly enjoyed it, it had not prompted me to tackle the longer work, whch I "knew" to be overlong and ramshackle.

Well, the early impressions were good - the style is very complex, but it is clear that it is carefully planned and not chaotic - although he does his best to give that impression.  The voice is the first person, that of Tristram himself, although a great whack of the start of the book deals with events before and at his birth, all described as if he were there.  I did not feel completely enraptured by the early passages, but I enjoyed them enough to keep reading, and there are wonderful pieces of writing on every page - including the recovery of his Uncle Toby from his wound, and this lovely passage on digression:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading! - and take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them; - one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; - he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

This is a very true impression of this book - and you will also notice his characteristic punctuation! 

Sadly, three or four weeks later, Tristram Shandy lies neglected on my dining table, and I keep looking at it guiltily.  It's very exciting for a half hour or so, full of vivid characterisation and tremendous verbal blows - but I confess to finding this wearing over a longer run.  Perhaps I am just not in the mood, and perhaps I will return.  But right now, I'm afraid I've had enough of the opinions of this irascible group of eighteenth century crackpots!

Hard Times - or, Is Dickens a Novelist? Sunday Salon

Dickens is a bit like Hardy for me (yes, that’s ridiculous, I know, but .. ): I don’t really like either of them, but when I do read them, I admire their mastery of their chosen form, and the skill with which they pander to their respective audiences.  Dickens is clearly the greater master, more dramatic, more inventive, more real and urgent, and he had – which is not evident in Hardy – a pressing sense of being driven to write, which I always admire.  But reading one book made me wonder if he is not a novelist at all, but a satirical cartoonist?

This drive to write was most often expressed in the desire for social reform, and Hard Times, which I read en route to the South Pacific, is a prime example.  The work is in some senses ridiculous – you cannot believe in several of the main characters, and the plot is a mesh of the unlikely, the unbelievable, and the hard to take – and yet, the caricatures represent real flesh and blood you cannot help recognising.  You do not – never could – know anyone like Bounderby, but by gum, you know people with that dishonest, limited vision, and the harshness that proceeds from imperfect understanding allied to the mistaken belief that strength of character is always best demonstrated by putting people down, as thoroughly as possible, in word and deed.

Dickens’ picture shows us two friends – Bounderby and Gradgrind – Bounderby was “as near being Mr Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment”! – united in a belief in facts, in numbers, and in the superiority of rational analysis to all other modes of thinking or feeling, including, pity, mercy, humour, affection, and play.  But, just briefly at the beginning and more completely at the end, we see that these are Bounderby’s true colours, but that Gradgrind is at least capable of pity and then remorse.  Gradgrind is not an attractive man, but he comes to the knowledge that he can be wrong, and he says so to the person most affected by his poverty of imagination.

In charting this gradual awakening, Dickens shows us a polluted northern town where profits are worth more than the fish in the river, or the sight of the sun in a workman’s window.  He shows us greed and horror, and he introduces us to the sad and yet touching figure of Stephen Blackpool.  Stephen is a virtuous man, who is a good worker, but has a marriage from hell with a drunkard, thieving wife, a pure and unrealised love, and who goes through being sent to Coventry by his fellows, false accusations of robbery, and an accidental death when hurrying to clear his name.  He is too good to be true, and his end too fitting, but Dickens has written an almost predestination into parts of this book: not for nothing is the third volume called Garnering – as you sow, so shall you reap.

The other characters are rich and bloody, including the fawning Mrs Sparsit who lives for revenge against Louisa who married her master, the dreaded Bounderby, and who makes herself ridiculous and is spurned by her hero through too officious an enquiry into Louisa life and the mystery of the bank robbery.  There is the unctuous and fawning Bitser, the junior bank clerk who is introduced to us with the novel’s most famous phrase, when he puts down “Girl number twenty” (the affectionate Cissy Jupe, whose circus father has abandoned her, something she always refuses to believe) by successfully defining a horse when she is unable to: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth .. (etc)”.  This sums up the whole of the philosophy Dickens is attacking, because it has the merit of being completely true and completely useless, like the Parliamentary Blue Books he mocks when Gradgrind becomes an M P.

As far as justice and common humanity is concerned, this is a depressing novel.  As a true picture of human life, it is not at all convincing.  And as a thriller, it has weaknesses beyond number.  But as a whole, it takes some important themes, and hammers away at them, and drives unwilling horses through to a desperate conclusion in which few are happy or even justly treated.  But, by opening Gradgrind’s eyes, it offers hope – hope which for the social reformer Dickens, was probably much more important than the artistic integrity of his novel.  He should be considered, not with Austen or George Eliot, but with Rowlandson, Hogarth and Cruickshank, or with Doonesbury.

Three men disappoint

Some books you should not read again, and for me Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat was one of them, though sadly I didn’t realise that before I read it a week or so ago.  Three Men in a Boat and the less well known Three Men on the Bummel have iconic status in humorous English literature, and I remember enjoying reading them when I was quite young – perhaps in the my last years at school.  I found them amusing then, and while I didn’t really remember much of them, thought that I was bound to find renewed delight in another look. 

Sadly not, for the laughter of yesteryear is, if not ashes, certainly dry fruit.  The style is odd – repetitive and picaresque in a rather annoying way, and the plot is non-existent.  The three men are rather undifferentiated, they are young and heedless, the sayings of any of them could  be transposed into the mouth of one of the others, and their relationships are trivial and irrelevant.  The book is not even really much about the three men and their journey, as the interruptions  - stories told by one of them, discursions of the most banal and romantic kind into English history, and reminiscences of earlier adventures – outweigh the main narrative and become, frankly tedious.  It was utterly of its time – but socially and in literary terms, it is now well out of fashion.

And yet, and yet, there is something there.  He writes with a whimsy and a sense of humour which is sometimes delicate and sometimes slapstick, somewhat reminiscent of Wodehouse, though without PG’s sprightliness or his comic genius.  His jokes are oft repeated, in different forms – “I love work, I can stand and look at it all day long”; turning back on one member of the party the criticism he has suffered himself; and portraying a single event in two diametric ways – as for example, when he anathematises steamers for not giving way to sculls and explains that he often sculls across their paths to infuriate them – and then, in a steamer, saying that running them down would be justifiable and even praiseworthy.  Some episodes, such as the fight between Montmorency (he’s the dog that accompanies them on their travels) and the kettle, are quite marvellous – the kettle hisses and snorts at him, but before it ever starts getting aggressive, some human takes it away – until Montmorency gets impatient and charges in just before it boils, with predictable results!

All very droll, but funnier in a short sketch of a few hundred words than in an extended novel.  Indeed, that’s what this book is, several dozen amusing stories stitched very loosely together into a single whole.  Perhaps the right way to read it is have it by the bedside, and just read a few pages at random every now and then.  But I did not do that, and for me, a hero has been shown to have feet of clay.

Of men - and a woman

Some books are just there, demanding to be read as Everest clamoured to be climbed; bigger and more imposing than others – daunting in prospect like some big mountain or steep rock face, but exhilarating and full of meaning when tackled.  I have read two massive books recently, and one was like this – Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; the other, Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve, was subtler, gentler, and more welcoming – but both in few pages affirmed life (in the midst of death and tragedy), and both make you wonder if you are man enough to read them -  are you worthy, are you fit to get in the ring with this champion?

I have dealt with the Levi elsewhere, but here with the Steinbeck.  This was the book Penguin sent me for the Blog a Penguin scheme, although I was first sent Travels with Charley, which I thoroughly enjoyed but which could not be more different; strong, yes, but charming, whimsical, much more reflective and forgiving, though with real anger smouldering beneath the surface. (I’ve not posted reviews on either, because I can’t get the Penguin site to accept them!).

The story is simple enough: two travelling labourers find work at a farm in California.  One of them, George, is a sharp cookie, wise in the ways of the world, and well able to look after himself.  Fortunately, he is also well able to look after his companion, the monstrously strong but simple minded Lennie Small, who has very simple aims in life, a very limited understanding, and a tendency to get into trouble through no fault of his except his weak understanding.  They end up on a farm where the owner’s son (Curley) has just married a cheap, fast girl who is already dissatisfied with her lot and is intent on stirring up trouble with the hands.  And there is one black guy, who works with them, but is apart.

The two of them have a dream – to save enough money to buy a small place of their own, and to settle there -  a dream which comes to be shared with a third member of the crew.  But boredom leads to carelessness, to wickedness, and to tragedy, a tragedy as black and intense as hell, and as predictable and as pitiless as a train. 

What is extraordinary about this book is it’s density; several strands are woven together in an extraordinarily economical story: this is a very short book, but every word counts.  And every word has been cut out of the rock and sweated over and polished, and made into a weapon. 

At the end, when the depth of the tragedy has burst upon you, and two men – Slim, “the jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch” and George are finding an almost wordless sympathy with each other about the terrible things that have happened and which they have done; Curley, a shallow despicable man who has respect for anything except for his own vanity, and who has all the time stood outside the current of understanding and hope asks, (I don’t have the text to hand, so I paraphrase)  - what’s bugging those two?

If you read this book and still don’t know the answer, then there’s little hope for you – or the rest of us, I’m afraid.

Austen revisited

I don't really approve of Jane Austen sequels, although I often get frustrated by the cavalier despatch of some major story line at the ends of her novels - what really happened to Aunt Norris, for example;  I'd like to be sure she was thoroughly unhappy and regretted her former snobby, petty minded bossiness - but I doubt it. 

But I have recently read Joan Aiken's Mansfield Revisited; and really, this is a very odd book for me to read.  For a start, I think Mansfield Park is probably my favourite Austen (though not the best), so I was reluctant to read anything which might spoil it.  And secondly - my caveat about Aunt Norris apart - it is a very satisfactory ending to the novel.  You don't have any doubt that Fanny and Edmund will be happy, and other characters like Susan are not developed enough to really engage your interest.

But I enjoyed it, and one fear was instantly dispelled.  Although Aiken is an accomplished writer, she (like almost everybody else who has picked up pen or played with a keyboard) is so far short of Austen that you could never get confused as to which is Austen and which is modern imitation - no danger of thinking that Susan's marriage (because this is the main focus of Aiken's book) actually happens in Mansfield Park.  In truth, this is mainly due to the plot, and the uneven pace and texture of the novel, which is already causing the novel to slip from my memory after a few days; on the other hand, some of the language is very good indeed.

For example, the opening paragraph, which annouces Sir Thomas's death while abroad might almost pass for the work of the Mistress; and Susan's comment that Lady Bertram bears her husband's death with insensibilty is quite as wicked as Jane herself. But Susan is too brash, and the plot too sudden to be more than a casual caprice, albeit an enjoyable one.  I set out on the book, thinking that such sequels ran the danger of diminishing Austen - I now realise that Austen is far too noble a work to suffer, and that these fanciful continuations are harmless, even if they will not find a significant place in my library!

They order this matter better in France

My eye was caught, while scanning the new acquisitions shelves in the London Library by Lana Asfour’s Laurence Sterne in France.  I was immediately entranced – whilst I have never read Tristram Shandy, I read and loved A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1978, just after leaving university.  It is a slight, but utterly delightful book, the first sentence of which I often quote – but it had never occurred to me to wonder what the French made of it.  I suppose I had thought Sterne too English, too eccentric, too parochial even, for the French to be interested – but Asfour tells me how wrong I am.

Sentimental Journey was published at the very end of Sterne’s life, in 1768, dying just a few weeks afterwards.  It purported to be by Mr Yorick – so no heavy associations there, then – and was an immediate success, and spawned both imitators and, perhaps, a whole new way of looking at the world, in a sentimental way – though that word does not quite mean what we use it for now, meaning more a concentration on the feelings and motivations of individuals.  The work of Sterne did not, perhaps, set the pattern for the English novel on its long journey of greatness, but it may have enriched the mixture greatly.  But back to that famous first sentence, and its consequences:

“They order”, said I, “this matter better in France.”

“You have been in France?” said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.  “Strange!”, quoth I, debating the matter with myself, “That one and twenty miles sailing, for ‘tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights – I’ll look into them” : so giving up the argument  - I went straight back to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk breeches – “the coat I have on”, said I, looking at the sleeve, “will do” – took a place in the Dover stage ; and the packet sailing at nine the next morning  - by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricaseed chicken, so incontestably in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world could not have suspended the effects of droits d’aubaine[i].

Now that is how to travel – a dozen shirts and no planning.  And he has lots of fun adventures, many of a slightly hilarious and farcical sort, with occasional Pickwickian overtones (Dickens must, surely, have known and loved this book?), but often with a very serious discussion under the élan and the laughter.  The whole is written in a light, easy style, in the first person and with much dialogue and soliloquy, and being (unlike Tristram Shandy) a notably slight work of only 120 pages or so, is well worth anyone’s attention. 

I would draw to your attention his classification of travellers – the idle, the inquisitive, the lying, the proud, the vain, and the splenetic – and the idle travellers (are we not all idle travellers?) he says travel from inevitable necessity, infirmity of body, or imbecility of mind.  Take your choice!  And before I leave Sterne himself,  let me quote his reaction on meeting a fellow countryman in an inn:

As an Englishman does not travel to see Englishmen, I retired to my room.

So what did the French make of Sterne?  Well, after a difficult start – Tristram Shandy was harshly criticised by French intellectuals – they seem to have taken him to their hearts, in both a literary and a personal sense.  Sentimental Journey was praised for its cultural sympathy – and (my free translation of some eighteenth century French):

Sterne’s humour does not affect his ability to consider all that wounds humanity, and to show the most tender sensibilities.

Asfour claims that the word sentimental did not previously exist in French, but was introduced in an early translation by Frénais, and the word and the attribute provided to at least one French critic “the moral structure of the work, holding together an otherwise disordered narrative and compensating for its irregularities”.  Sterne was well known in France, and his many idiosyncrasies much loved, but perhaps the greatest compliments paid were the many other ‘sentimental journeys’ that appeared in French, including a false posthumous continuation, an equally spurious volume by his nephew, Yorick, and even a musical comedy, Sterne à Paris in 1799!  I wonder if there has been an example of a French author so taken into English literary life?

---

[i] The law provided for all the effects of foreigners who died in France – save the Swiss and the Scotch – to pass to the King of France.

Whatever happened to Marty? Sunday Salon

Prompted, as so often, by  Harriet Devine, I have joined The Sunday Salon, and this is my first post for this new venture.  It might not be a good week to join, because the last fortnight has been a bit weak on the reading front.  After a week's delightful holiday in Dorset, where I read little except books for the course I was on, about woodlands and local history - and not much of that, as our days were very full.  Then, coming back, a lot of work had built up, with a lot of evening engagements too.  So regular readers of my blog will have noticed a bit of a falling off in posting frequency - I promise to do better this coming week!  But Dorset fed another passion of mine, for wonderful words - how about clunch, for hard chalk cut in blocks and used as a building stone.

But as I was in Dorset (whence these bluebells and mighty oak) for a week's tree and woodland study, it was natural to read Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.  I haven't read any Hardy prose since my early 20s (though I read his poetry from time time), and I slightly dreaded this.  And I was a bit right and a bit wrong.

It is horribly over-written and sentimental, and distinctly mawkish at times.  But the fact that I now recognise the places whereof he speaks is fascinating in a slightly touristy, slightly self-important way - but I don't deny these failings in myself!  Hardy has a fine feel for the landscape, though writing in the very late nineteenth century, about the early decades of the same century, he is already witness to a dying not a thriving world.  I need not tell you the plot - as a very good friend said to me recently, they're all the same!  But the novel opens with the sale of Marty's hair, a violation and a ravishing, when she hears of the loss of her love.  There is then much worrying, a lot of distress and some vulgar glee, all washed down with a healthy sprinkling of dialect words.  The story is compelling enough - though I was confident of much of the outcome from the very beginning - but it's absurd to consider Hardy a great novelist in the tradition of Dickens or George Eliot.  Personally, I also find him much less accessible and pleasing than someone like Trollope, who for all his occasional shallowness and even sentimentality, is a fine teller of a story and a clean, easy writer to read.

Let me find a couple of sentences to demonstrate the frustrations and pleasures of Hardy for me.  First, this paragraph is on the first page:

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.

Well!  I'm wondering what this book I've just picked up is about, and I get dumped on with that!  The physiognomy of a highway, incubus of the forlorn - these are heavy, artificial, pompous constructs, which really weigh down the page and make me gloomy, for sure, but with the thought of another three hundred pages of this, rather than anything else. And that sad little sentence in the middle, the contrast ... accounts for this, like some school textbook.  But he can do better, either on landscape or with people, though description - fine and personal - often gives way to ponderous pessimistic theology, as here:

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves, elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.

He sees well, he loves the Dorset woods, and he can describe them beautifully - but then he has to impose that empurpled gloominess on us.  I find it all too much!

That being said, I did manage to enjoy The Woodlanders, mainly for the pleasure of being in the same place as the story, and for the story itself.  Giles Winterbourne is in love with one woman, and loved by another - and needless to say, he doesn't get either of them, and they both end up unhappy, and he ends up dead.  Right at the beginning of the book, we are introduced to Marty, the girl that loves him, and she plays several important roles n the book - but coming in, as it were, from outside the narrative to move it along - the graffiti, the meeting with Mrs Charmond in the woods, the letter about her hair -but without being central to the story.  I regretted that; I thought she was an interesting character, and I wanted to know more of her, and to follow her story a bit more closely.  She starts by giving up her hair and her lover, and losing her father, and she ends by strewing flowers on Giles' grave: but in the meantime, we know little of her.  She must have had other suitors, a living to earn; she is pretty, lively, intelligent - and I feel Hardy has deprived me of her company!

Wide Sargasso Sea

Months ago, I bought Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea in Liverpool railway station, but didn’t read it until last week.  It’s a short book, but one heavily loaded with meaning and burdened with images; sometimes, I felt it was too frail a craft to be so heavily loaded.  But it is based on – more accurately motivated by - Jane Eyre, and maybe this inspires readers to see more in it, and may have inspired Rhys to attempt too much.  The title, too, is laden with mystery – a open sea full of weed, where mariners belieced their ships could become trapped, and now known as the spawning ground of the common eel.

It is an imagining of the Jane Eyre story from a different perspective in time, space and person.  It concentrates on the first Mrs Rochester, her childhood and the early weeks of her marriage, and is set largely in Jamaica and Dominica in the mid 1830s (a couple of decades after the original events of Jane Eyre would have taken place).  It is a brief novel, no more than 120 pages, and this is possible because Rhys paints in strong colours with a wide brush, but also because your knowledge of Jane Eyre creates a scaffold of understanding for much which is unexplained.  It would be hard reading if you didn’t know the earlier novel!  The cover of my Penguin Modern Classics edition has a John Minton painting, bold colourful, dark, and this captures the book very well.

There are a number of mixed themes in the novel: slavery and the treatment of blacks by whites; marriage and property ownership in marriage; and voodoo and hatred.  This are mixed boldly, almost recklessly, in a cocktail of despair and fatigue, of horror at the ownership of one human being by another, whether through a commercial contract or a religious sacrament.  For me, it was a box of fireworks which never quite caught fire – instead of a riot of colour and display, there was only the occasional bright squib, although I remained in my lady’s danger all the time.

Because this is based on another, much more famous novel, there is no need for me to avoid talking about the ending, which is the finest part of the book - and the most familiar – Mrs Rochester’s account of her imprisonment in England, looked after by Grace Poole, and the subsequent fire (and her death) through the medium of  musings and a dream, as well as a direct account by Grace herself.  It’s a nice conceit, well executed, and worth reading in its own right.

I read another book based on Jane Eyre not long ago, the comedic fantasy, The Eyre Affair.  That was a lot of fun, this is a serious novel.  But to be honest, I enjoyed the lighter, frivolous treatment more – perhaps a reflection of the fact that I’m not really a lover of the original masterpiece, with its Gothic halftones and violent intensity.

View from a stage coach

Reading Deakin recently, about laying his hedges in Suffolk, suddenly reminded me of that sublime "Author's Introduction" to George Eliot's Felix Holt.  I have always thought this novel oddly under-rated; it's more accessible and captivating than Middlemarch (as well as being shorter!), and is my favourite amongst all her works.  In her introduction, George Eliot hearkens back to the days of 1831 (she is writing in about 1865), and paints a compelling if romantic picture of England before political reform and industrialisation.  She does this by imagining the view from the roof of a stage coach travelling through England, and in a few magical pages captures a wonderful image of the land and its people.  And in there is this magnificent description of English hedges, riotous, untamed, glorious:

… everywhere the bushy hedgerows wasted the land with their straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures with catkined hazels, and tossed their long blackberry branches on the cornfields. Perhaps they were white with May, or starred with pale pink dog roses; perhaps the urchins were already nutting amongst them, or gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the journey only to see those hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beauty - of the purple blossomed ruby-berried nightshade, of the wild convolvulus climbing and spreading in tendrilled strength till it  made a great curtain of pale-green hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed honeysuckle which, in its most delicate fragrance, hid a charm more subtle and penetrating than beauty. Even if it were winter the hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, the deep-crimson hips, with lingering brown leaves to make a resting-place for the jewels of the hoar-frost.

Radetsky March

Books are like hills: those that look most daunting can be easy of ascent, and vice versa; and the hardest work does not always produce the finest views.  With Joseph Roth's family novel, Radetsky March, I was cautious.  It looked formidable - not too big, to be sure, but dense and very, very serious, perhaps gloomy and pessimistic.  But I gathered my courage, stepped out boldly and soon found myself surging up the slopes to a mighty summit.  This is not a fine novel, it is a great one, and the inevitable comparison is with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

It deals with four generations of the Trotta family, although the most recent two are the main theme of the novel.  The eldest Trotta is a humble man, but his son manages to become a junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and is fortunate enough to save the life of the Kaiser Franz-Joseph at the battle of Solferino (1859, when the Austrians were defeated).  This leads to promotion, nobility and - quixotically - his resignation from the army.  This second Trotta (the first Baron) is not in the book for very long, but he and his portrait  pervade every page, and he is one of the two standards by which his son and grandson judge themselves, and are found wanting.  The other is the Kaiser, who reigned from 1848, year of revolutions, to 1916.  His portrait, too, is omnipresent - and around these two men and their two portraits, and the march of the title, Roth weaves a magical carpet of aspiration and failure, grandeur and decay.  But don't let these fine words mislead you, there is nothing of the heroic or the epic about this book: it truly is a study in the failure of a class and an Empire to notice and adapt to the changing world of the turbulent nineteenth century.

The writing is superb.  There is an extended passage, late in the book, inside the mind of the Kaiser, which is amongst the finest chapters of any nineteenth century novel I have ever read:  he is wise but timid; he knows that his Empire and the whole social order is in irreversible decay - he has lost Italy, he has seen the rise of Prussia and of democratic and nationalist movements in his own territories.  But his staff think they are protecting him from rude reality: and all he wants is to see the military manoevers, with the uniforms and the music, a childlike glee in pageant and an old man's wisdom. 

The portrayals of the third Trotta, a civilian offical utterly dedicated to maintaining the family and Imperial dignity, and of the last member of the family, are exceptionally fine.  The last Trotta is in the army but without vocation - and, too, unaware that it is an army utterly unfit for the storm which is brewing fiercely, but which he has no idea is brewing.  He fails to match his father and grandfather, and eventually, after a serious of scandals, leaves the army.  The two scandals lead to desperate, poignant passages of wonderful imagination - a pointless duel, and an audience with the Kaiser.  But the real heartbreak is still to come: the youngest Trotta has to rejoin in 1914, and is killed in trivial, even ignominious circumstances.  His father and the Kaiser both die a little later, each unable to outlive the other.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

This is an astonishing and very beautiful, though very sad, book:  I revelled in it, and was carried up a huge mountain in splendour and tragedy.

Oliver and Prejudice

My other two big novels in the past week have been Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Although they have little in common, I am treating them together as my reactions to them, and my attitude before reading, were so very different. 

The Austen I have known well, almost intimately, for years - I cannot remember a time when I did not like Austen, and although P&P has often not been my favourite, I have always loved it - especially for Mr Bennet, and Elizabeth herself, who is the Austen heroine we all want to fall in love with us - Jane Bennet is lovely but tame, and Fanny Price is insipid.  Emma is an interfering, petulant spoiled princess - though the heroine of Persuasion might be fun to know too.

But while early introduction to Austen worked wonders, it had the opposite effect with Dickens.  I had enjoyed Christmas Carol and a compendium of my mother's called The Humour of Dickens, so tackled him with gusto at too young an age - and my more maturer (though no less judgemental) years found him vulgar, melodramatic, chaotic and overblown.  All this is true of course, but maybe it's besides the point?  Anyway, I decided to revisit him through Oliver Twist, which, I am ashamed to say, I had never opened!

Well, on these most recent readings, I had great pleasure, and not a few surprises, in both novels.  I started the Austen with pride in my own knowledge of the book, and a strong prejudice that I would enjoy every word.  In fact, I was rather impatient with it for fifty pages or so, though the comfort blanket surrounded me soon enough, and I thoroughly enjoyed all the later passages.   But I think I read the novel differently than ever before, being more sensitive to Darcy's change of feelings about Elizabeth, which are actually signalled very early.  I still have little sympathy for Charlotte's decision to marry Mr Collins, but I understand her skilful management of him more and more!

And I approached the Dickens with exactly opposite feelings - thinking I knew nothing and almost expecting to not enjoy it.  In fact, like Hamlet it is "full of quotations", and I recognised a lot of characters and incidents.  It was a little hard to get into for me, but its a rollicking good story anf I soon got absorbed and enjoyed the middle passages much more than I expected - and it is very funny, in lots of ways on lots of levels.  However, I got bored with the mass of necessary coincidences necessary to work the plot to its sentimental and melodramatic conclusion, which seemed rushed.  Is it more than Jeffrey Archer with a conscience?  Yes, of course, it's magnificently written, but it's too sickly a mixture for my (sometimes) austere palate.

Balzac: Sarrasine and the Sahara

Not very long ago, Harriet Devine reviewed a short story by Balzac, Sarrasine.  It was a stimulating piece, although it admitted to initial doubts as to whether she'd liked it or not.  Being a more professional reader than me, she resolved this doubt by reading it again!

I was inspired to read it too, partly because I haven't read any Balzac since a schoolboy infatuation and I hadn't realised that he ever wrote anything shorter than a four hundred pager.  So I bought this, which includes A Passion in the Desert, which is even briefer - the two stories total about 60 pages.  I was not taken with them, but somehow felt their intensity.  They both, to revert to an earlier discussion, suffer from what seem to me to be wooden translations - although they are so formal, and the dialogue so stilted, that I suspect there is a real reflection of the original.  They both take the form of a story narrated at some distance from the events - in Sarrasine by an onlooker whose involvement we never really understand, and in A Passion in the Desert by the only (human) protagonist, but many years later.  This artificiality creates tensions and dramas, which Harriet has caught well in her piece, but which means there is little fire in the stories. But there is a density and a dark ambiguity about them which is very thought provoking.

Balzac always makes me think of the Trollope loving General Liddament in Powell's The Soldier's Art: Liddament asks Jenkins if he likes Trollope; he says he's never found him easy to read and gives nervous reasons "..."Rubbish" said General Liddament.  He sounded very angry indeed.  All good humour brought about by the defeat of the Blue Force had been dissipated by a thoughtless expression of literary prejudice on my part ...  Possibly I should be put under arrest for holding such mutinous views."  The General asks who Jenkins does like, and he, after a pause for thought, essays Balzac.  "..."Balzac!"  General Liddament roared the name.  It was impossible to know whether Balzac had been a very good answer or a very bad one.  Nothing was left to be considered between." And we never know, because the conversation veers away, and is then interrupted by a renewed attack on the their headquarters.

Persuasion

After a particularly unpleasant day at the dentist recently, I wanted comfort reading - but something of very high quality.  What could be better than Persuasion, particularly appropriate as I was just about to visit Bath.  I spent a couple of hours there, just walking round many of the main areas mentioned in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, in pleasant evening sunshine.  While I'm not someone who gets a big buzz out of seeing the desk on which a famous book was written, or the sterile remains of the room the author used to read in, I do find it interesting sometimes to look at the locale of the fiction.  There are no great topographical puzzles to solve here (as there are, for example, in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) but there is pleasure in turning left from my hotel to Lady Russell's lodgings in River's Street (with no apostrophe in the book, but see picture below), right and go down Gay Street, where the Crofts lodged, or across the river by Pulteney Bridge to Laura Place, where Jane Austen herself lived for a while.  And Milsom Street is still the main shopping street in the Georgian area, with a lot of the same feel to it as two centuries ago.

I had not always appreciated her skill in such matters; Mrs Smith lives in Westgate Buildings, down at the bottom of the town near the Abbey and the Theatre, because she is not well off and these are unfashionable areas for smart people - all that is clear enough; but Sir Walter chooses Camden Place, already known as a smart address, but apparently one where speculation had outrun practical sense, and some of the extensive plans were unbuilt, and some collapsed - the parallels with the vain baronet's empty glory are precise and delightful.

Persuasion is not my favourite Austen novel, but it is exceedingly fine; in The Janeites (in Debits and Credits), a Kipling character says it is the best: "There was one called Persuasion, first; an’ the rest in a bunch, except another about some Abbey or other—last by three lengths".  The general modern view would probably give the palm to Pride and Prejudice, while agreeing that Northanger Abbey was the weakest of the big six.  Persuasion is wonderful in many ways, but the ending betrays her unease; a better solution might have been found had she strength and time, and the current ending is already a rewrite of the original final chapter.  But there is still much unnecessary stress on the delay in telling everyone of Mr Elliot's iniquity, so we guess another twist in the plot was envisaged once; and Mrs Clay's final abandonment of the Elliots does not ring true.  But what remains is magnificent, wonderful writing, sharp observation and wry humour, and some very creditable drama at Lyme as well.

One of Austen's most endearing skills is the one or two sentence encapsulation of a character, and there is a cracking example in the early pages of Persuasion: "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and situation...he considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion" (what a sharp little definition of the man and the vice!).

Garden of the Finzi-Continis

I (and Rhys, as I know from a comment on Harriet's recent post on translation) have been reading Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Bassani is famous for this novel, and also for discovering and publishing Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo - which I've named in Italian, rather than calling it The Leopard, because I like the word so much!  I don't know why it should be, but I enjoy a number of Italian writers - Primo Levi, Italo Calvino among them - rather more than I do, say, French.  No doubt this is my loss! The book came up in Rhys' comment because the translation was 'clunky', a criticism I certainly wouldn't make about mine.  Own up, Rhys, are we reading the same one!? 

I'm reading it in the new Penguin Classics edition, very smart in their silver livery, translated by Jamie McKendrick: this elegant book is complemented by a cover photograph of a girl in summer, drink and racquet in hand, oozing the restrained and demure eroticism which pervades the early chapters.

It's a beautifully written novel about Jews in Ferrara during the Mussolini years, the young boy growing up concious of the Finzi-Continis as slightly apart due to their wealth, but also to an ironic detachment of the soul.  But he grows close to Micol, the young girl, at tennis parties in the garden when the racial laws were beginning to make it difficult for Jews to participate fully elsewhere in society.  But before he declares his burgeoning love, Micol goes away.

She returns, but in his passion, he is uncertain, clumsy, and makes all the mistakes of adolescence - and enjoys the tortures of rejection and betrayal - under the lengthening shadows of political chaos.  He is banished by Micol, who is banished eternally by being transported to Germany with her family, and "no one knows if they have any grave at all".  We learned this right at the beginning, so the sunshine and the laughter is always guilty, always dark and nervous.  Beautifully written, but too wistfully gloomy for me, though I loved the early chapters.