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Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady
I was once on an eight hour flight where the TV was broken and the only book I had with me was The Portrait of a Lady, and I still thought it was so god-awful boring that I didn’t want to read it. But this is one of the Husband’s all time, top three, favourite books, so I thought I must be missing something. Plus I have this ongoing, one-sided battle with Henry James. He doesn’t know it, of course, but he’s on The List of Authors Who Are Not Going to Beat Me (along with Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy).
It was not THAT boring this time around. But that’s only like saying, a year isn’t THAT long, or I’m not THAT hungry when really you mean, Christmas is ages away and please make me a sandwich.
Isabel Archer, who we are constantly told is captivating and intelligent and beauty, is swept over from Albany to England so that she can see Life. Life turns out to be mostly comprised of a series of men who are bewitched by her captivating intelligence and beauty and beg her without dignity to marry them. Her cousin Ralph enjoys watching the show very much and does some financial sleight of hand so that Isabel has enough money to live independently and free. Unfortunately, this just makes her even more of a honeypot for man-bees. About half the book is her choosing who to marry; the rest is whoops, wrong choice. Isabel gets caught up with Mrs Manipulation, Madame Merle and her threatening, creepy friend Mr Osmond, and his dead-eyed, stepford-obedient daughter Pansy. The villains are very villainous in the Portrait of a Lady – extremely ominous and blank. Implicit, unspoken scariness is always more horrifying than explicit scariness, I think.
Almost nothing happens for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Perhaps that would not matter so much if you actually did end up with a Portrait of a Lady. But weirdly, despite the endless millions of words, you never really get to KNOW Isabel. We’re TOLD over and over again about her many attributes and how all-round-super she is, but she’s never the sparkly heroine that I think you need to carry off all these proposals of undying love convincingly, much less hold up this enormous story by itself.
It’s also quite frustrating that James lays his symbolism on so thick. Caspar is BUSINESS and Warburton is ARISTOCRACY and Ralph is BEAUTY and Henrietta is MODERNITY but also VULGAR (though also, LOYALTY). All of them say they want what is best for Isabel, but none of them trust her to work it out for herself. They want her to be a pawn in their game instead of letting her play by herself. But then it turns out she is not actually very good at playing by herself and almost any other choice would have been better than the one she makes. So what is your point, Mr James? Women should be independent no matter what a mess they make of it? How depressing.
So it was fine, but a masterpiece? One of the best novels in the English language? Really? The English language had better pull its socks up.
Gretchen Gerzina – Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the author of The Secret Garden
The MA I am a’studyin’ for is in Life Writing, which means next year I will be writing une dissertation originale et enorme on someone who may or may not be famous but certainly must be incredible and inspiring. If you are going to spend months and months obsessing about a person and stalking their dead bones in letters and libraries across the land, then you’d better be mind-boggled by their interestingness to start out with. Inevitably by the end, you’ll probably hate both them and yourself. This is how learning works.
So I am constantly on the lookout for potential people to be writing on, and when I read The Heroine’s Bookshelf earlier this year, I had a ding! ding! ding! moment of FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. She is the author of The Secret Garden, a book which I mostly love for its Yorkshire dialect. (I believe, though I cannot check this because my books are still in boxes, that the expression ‘aye, that they mun, and they munnot lose no time about it’ appears. This is brilliant and I am hoping it is not a false memory). Also, A Little Princess! Ah, the heart-wrenchingness. And the happy ending. This is a lady I could spend some time with.
Unfortunately, as is now clear, this book has already been written and does not need me to be writing it. However, at least I get to read it. And blimey.
It SEEMS like FHB would be all straitlaced petticoats and sentimental cheese and drawing rooms and other buttoned up Victorian stereotypes. In fact, she is everything you would not expect. She’s not even English! Or rather, she was, but emigrated as a teenager to Knoxville, Tennessee, of all places. She is not even a children’s author! Or not really. She was famous as a grown up writer in the sort of Elizabeth Gaskell mould before she even started on Little Lord Fauntleroy which was the Harry Potter of its day, except with lacy collars instead of wands. And while she seems like Mrs Victorian Middle-Class, her life in Knoxville was poor to the point of almost starving; and she never forgot it.
As you can tell by all these ‘or rathers’ and ‘not reallys,’ FHB is a lady of many layers. She is both adventuresome and obsessed with respectability. Her first marriage is not so much unhappy as semi-detached and oddly enough, gives her a sort of freedom she wouldn’t be able to have as a single girl. She can hang out with all kinds of men without her reputation being sullied. She loses a son to TB and battles with depression. And all the time she writes and writes and writes like a woman possessed. The stories literally pour out of her, and when there aren’t stories, there are plays and adaptations and articles.
Perhaps what is most interesting though is the sense that THERE IS MUCH MORE GOING ON THAN MEETS THE EYE. Her second marriage is utterly bizarre. There are strong hints that she only married this crazy emotional bully because he was threatening to expose some scandalous past misbehaviour. (Note to readers. Marrying your blackmailer: never going to work). Despite all the lovely morality of books like The Secret Garden, later generations of her family went from being vaguely embarrassed about her to positively scandalised, referring to her as That Woman. (Ungrateful beasts. It was her money that put you in the upper classes and gave you the position from which you can be snobby). But what was it all about? We’ll never know.
Because of the not-knowing, this book ends up being quite frustrating, though you can’t blame Gerzina for lack of evidence. It can be a confusing read though: Frances is constantly travelling across the Atlantic so you are never quite sure where she is or what year it is. And the extended family is a spiderweb of hangers on, half of whom are called Edith. For me, the story was better than the book.
But I definitely want to read The Secret Garden again, complete with terrible Yorkshire accent.
And should any of you have any good ideas for biographies you would like to read that have not yet been written, please let me know.
Tina Fey – Bossypants
I am not so much with the audiobooks because of my poor attention span and tendency to drift off in the middle……what? It’s too easy to start thinking about something else and wake up with a start three minutes later realising that crucial plot things have happened without you having noticed. But as I get more and more pregnant, I seem to have fewer and fewer thoughts, and less and less ability to look at words on the page. Both are too big a hindrance to my mindless staring out of the window. So, thought I would try audiobooks again. If nothing else, maybe dull narrators would help combat the ridiculous insomnia.
No danger of falling asleep when Tina Fey is around though. The only danger is falling off the ladder while you are trying to paint the walls while listening to Tina talking about her experiences of theatre camp because you are laughing too much.
My only experience of Saturday Night Live was during my student year in the US, and so my memories of Fey reading the Weekend Update are recalled through a haze of Mike’s Hard Lemonade (I have never been a cool drinker). I’m much more of a fan through 30 Rock and Mean Girls and Date Night. But I know enough to know that she is a goddess. Socially awkward, self-deprecating, a massive geek – she is like ALL OF US if only everything we said was a minature comedy masterpiece. And she proves, should proof be needed, that feminism does not mean being angst-ridden and hand-wringing and academic-humourless. (Why should it be? Not sure, but that’s certainly one of the easy stereotypes.) So on the infamous Sarah Palin sketch, “you all watched a sketch show about feminism and you didn’t even realise it because of all the jokes. It’s like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids’ brownies. Suckers!”
I have read several traditional reviews complaining that there aren’t any shockers or revelations in this book. This is silly. Memoir does not HAVE to mean maximum bean-spillage. What if there actually AREN’T any skeletons in the cupboard? What if, god forbid, she chooses not to go into every detail of her husband’s and daughter’s lives out of respect for their privacy? What if, shock horror, she realises that telling comedy anecdotes about the rich and famous might be good for a laugh but probably isn’t going to do much for the old career if she’s got to continue working with these people for the next forty years?
Get the audiobook and have happy times with Tina, that’s all I have to say.
Big Enormous Giant Literary Giveaway
This post is made of sticky back plastic and will be sat at the top of the heap for a couple of days.
Thank you Judith for putting together this mega literary giveaway – these things are so much effort to organise and it is very much appreciated.
Nothing could be more literary than a Booker Prize winner, so my contribution to this jubilee is last year’s winner, The Finkler Question, described by Andrew Motion as ‘laughter in the dark’. Who doesn’t want some of that?
I am a very simple person, so all you need to do is leave me a comment to say hi and tell me what book I should get for my birthday (which is on Monday. See what I did there?). Will send anywhere in the world. This isn’t new, but it is very lightly read. FREE is more important than SHINY, I say.
Best of luck! 72 more chances to win here. Have a great weekend and cheer for Murray in the tennis, won’t you? He needs it.
Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out
I do not know much about mothering a newborn, but I am fairly certain that tiny people + Virginia Woolf do not mix. Virginia needs silence and contemplation and time to think deep thoughts. Tiny people need feeding. I hear they are not much with the silence either. So. If I want my yearly Virginia fix, I’d better get it now.
What I wanted to read was Mrs Dalloway, but the library did not have it. So I chose The Voyage Out, because Mrs Dalloway appears in it. This was not a success. It was a bit like finding The Empire Strikes Back is out of stock at the video shop and so renting The Phantom Menance instead, just because Anakin Skywalker is in it.
Ok, it is not really like that. But if you and I were characters in a Virginia Woolf novel, that is probably the sort of non-sequiter I would come out with. We would be having tea, and talking about the nature of truth and I would say something completely random, and you would be like, that is absolutely not what we were discussing, but ok, because we are characters layered with meaning and through this disconnected conversation we will convey to the reader how people constantly fail to understand one another.
Though perhaps we Woolf people would find it easier to understand one another if we made an effort to actually listen to what the other person is saying, instead of just coming out with whatever is in our heads? Example. Mrs Thornbury says to Mr Hirst “I’m sure you read everything” and he says “The worst of coming from the upper classes is that one’s friends are never killed in railway accidents.” Or Mr Hewett asks Rachel if the vote will do her any good – and she replies, “Not to me – but I play the piano”. Rachel, what? These are not mutually exclusive things. You can put an x in the box and still tinkle away to your heart’s content.
Right, so the story. Rachel Vinrace has been raised in almost total ignorance, reaching the age of 24 without knowing how babies are born. On The Voyage Out to South America, she becomes enchanted with Mr and Mrs Dalloway; even though Mr Dalloway is the King of Smug. He gives her a massive snog and she is all, MEN KISS WOMEN, what? Her Aunt Helen decides to rescue her from this ridiculous innocence by showing her some Real Life. Real Life means living in a very nice villa in Unidentified South American country, where they hang out with the Brits from the local hotel. Every man that Rachel meets also wants to rescue her from the ridiculous innocence, though their idea of doing so is to force-feed her their favourite books. Rachel spends most of her time wondering what love is. She may or may not find it. She cannot decide because it does not feel like Wuthering Heights or Man and Superman. So they go on another voyage instead.
There are obviously Woolfy type ideas in early form here – especially the differences between men and women, and the tensions between art and life. ‘Think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves’ says the rather clunky Evelyn. But they are not as subtle or as well-expressed as in other Woolfs. The men were so overbearing and self-important as to be caricatures, and say patronising things like ‘It’s awfully difficult to tell about women, how much, I mean, is due to lack of training and how much is native incapacity’. Which I suppose is the sort of thing that they might have said in Edwardian days, but I found it surprising that none of the women offer so much as a squeak in response.
Mostly, though, I didn’t like The Voyage Out because Rachel is so unbelievably blank. The men find this exciting; they see her as full of possibilities, just waiting to be uncovered. I just find her baffling. Mr Hirst asks ‘Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind of footstool?’ I say, footstool. Her Aunt Helen is far more interesting. In her own way, she is just as vague as Rachel, but Helen’s vagueness is borne out of the confidence of not caring what people think and sailing on serenely through life. Rachel’s vagueness is plain vagueness.
Also, you should not take advice on child-rearing from Rachel. ‘Their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard, painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical’. Again, what?
Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
I read Siri Hustvedt’s earlier book, What I Loved, on my first holiday with the Husband and so I have fond and fuzzy memories of it even though it’s not a fond and fuzzy sort of book – featuring lots of arty symbolism, a vaguely threatening teenager, and creepy puppets (puppets in books are always creepy, it’s book law). I was very much looking forward to The Summer Without Men and I was not disappointed.
The premise of the book is a routine tragedy – husband leaves wife for younger, more attractive model – which sparks Mia’s nervous breakdown. The story starts when Mia is putting her life back together by spending the summer with her ageing mother and teaching poetry to a bunch of witchy thirteen year olds.
The abbreviated version of the book would read something like this: teenage girls are cruel and spiteful, twentysomethings are harrassed and overworked, middle aged women are abandoned and underappreciated, elderly women are neglected and lonely. But The Summer Without Men is not bleak at all. There may be no men, but there is irony and spikiness and self-discovery and unexpected friendship.
Mia herself is a pickle of contradictions. At the start she is stable but very tentative, with a very lyrical voice. As time goes on, she both gains in confidence and seems more rocky. She has odd conversations with an internet stalker, directly addresses the reader in a very disconcerting way, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with an old lady who puts her crafty powers to subversive arty uses.
This is a lot of things in not a lot of pages. There are also little pictures of angels which I do not understand but I guess it would not be a Siri Hustvedt novel if I didn’t understand several layers of it.
I’ve made this book sound dark and weird. And it is, but that’s the undercurrent. The surface is simply a fine read and I seriously recommend it for an afternoon.
Daphne Du Maurier – Jamaica Inn
Dear Daphne,
I feel like we should be better friends than we are. You are definitely a sister, and you enjoy the wry asides, and you frequently use the word ‘mizzling’. It’s mizzling here today, and I know exactly what you mean.
But you are constantly beating me with the macabre sledgehammer and to be honest, it is a bit tiring. I like my suspense in increments, with pauses for tea and to give the old nerves a break. Jamaica Inn was too relentless for me. You started off emotionally fraught and got more and more and more feverish until I WAS BEING SHRIEKED AT IN CAPITAL LETTERS WITH ALL THE HYSTERIA FOR A HUNDRED PAGES.
I liked Mary Yelland, your main character, very much. She was resourceful and calculating and practical, and never stuck for an idea. I felt you didn’t give her enough credit. Surely she would have noticed that the Reverend was Not All He Seemed? You laid on the clues thick enough. I also didn’t believe that she would have got so mixed up with Jem so quickly, even though you did go on about his graceful hands. Why make her into an independent heroine only to have her magnetised and hypnotised by a rugged horse thief?
Still, I liked the way that you were not afraid to write about general creepiness and the most horrible things you can imagine. I imagine that you raised some eyebrows in 1934. You are a little bit Wuthering Height-y, and a little bit Lord of the Flies-y but you are also scarily original.
Also, I have learned that the song ‘Jamaica Inn’ by Tori Amos is nothing to do with your book. Her song is all twinkly and gentle and even though she wakes up to find the pirates have come, they are no way as bloodthirsty and drunken as your characters.
Lets hang out again soon and see if we get on better.
Lyndsey
In Which I Meet Some Heroes and Make an Idiot Out of Myself
So I was going to write a post called ‘How I Live Now’ and then I realised that it would not be fair to rip off Meg Rosoff without telling you about that time when I met her and acted like a moron.
First, who is surprised by that? No one? That’s what I thought.
Second, this was actually just one in a serious of embarrassing author related encounters I had at the Hay Festival.
There was Michelle Magorian – and we were the last people in the queue, so I’m sure she could really have done without three awkward twenty somethings, having just signed approximately four million Goodnight Mr Tom’s for kids. I offered to buy her an ice cream. (It was hot). She politely declined.
Then there was Meg Rosoff. She said ‘but you aren’t a child!’ – which threw me a bit, because that is self-evident. Also, isn’t hello a generally accepted beginning? So I replied in confusion ‘no, but I am growing a child’ – which was also self-evident. And graphic. And WEIRD. She was gracious.
Then there was Melvyn Bragg, which was the worst one of all. There is something about meeting seriously clever and admirable people which just makes me turn into a blithering blatherer. (See also, that time I met Peter Mandelson and didn’t realise he was talking to me).
I don’t even KNOW what I said to him, but now when I think about it, I get hot round the neck, which is a bad sign of repressed embarrassment. Though the guy in front of me said to him, ‘your programme is the highlight of my week’ which is both stalkerish and a sign of needing to get out more, so I probably seemed relatively normal in comparison. I do at least appear sane when encountered after the more blatant lunatics. Um, hooray?
Oh good, I’ve just looked up my review of the event and this was when I forgot how to spell my own name. I need to re-block that out. See how he’s written HAY in big capital letters because I probably can’t read joined-up handwriting? Seems like a fair assumption.
Right, so you’ve got to tell me either the most ridiculous thing you’ve said to an author, or how you manage to remain cool/original when you’ve stood in a queue for an hour.
Alison Weir – Elizabeth the Queen
When you are madly pregnant and on an epic painting spree, it is natural to fall back on old favourites, which means Ye Olde Tudor Tymes. But it was a mistake to think that Any Tudor Will Do, like some medieval Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Instead of bodices and feasting and jousting, instead I have been reading Proper Historical Information, and more often than not, falling asleep and then waking up with the Spanish Armada stuck to my face. Elizabeth the Queen is pretty good, but timing is everything.
PREVIOUSLY ON YE OLDE TUDOR TIMES: after Henry was done with his wife-massacring, Prince Edward reigned for all of five minutes before going to the great Tudor palace in the sky. Then Queen Mary was all, hurrah, now I can restore Catholicism by burning lots of people and marrying a hugely unpopular Spanish dude who doesn’t love me. And then promptly dies as well.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth has been shipped off to the countryside where she may or may not have been endlessly plotting against Mary and may or may not have been entertaining herself by flirting with her stepmother’s husband (keep up, won’t you?).
When Mary dies, the people are all, ick, another woman, it’s not natural, we like wife-murderers better. So Elizabeth has a tough job on her hands to win them over. Luckily, she is as clever as a clog, and blessed with perhaps the greatest rhetorical ability in English history. When told Mary is dead, for example, she doesn’t just sob or even say ‘about bloody time’ but comes out with ‘this is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes.’ Never stuck for a nice turn of phrase, our Liz.
So, Alison Weir didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know, because my Tudor obsession is deep and long lasting. But it’s all covered comprehensively and nicely here. The endless ‘will they, won’t they’ of her relationship with Robert Dudley. Every man and his dog constantly nagging her to marry, until it looks like she might actually do so, and then they are like, woah, we didn’t mean him. Mary, Queen of Scots, lurking ominously in the background, flattering with one hand and plotting with the other. The bad Spanish King Philip on his high horse and moral crusade against the harlot/Queen.
What I found most interesting was Elizabeth’s relationship with the men she liked. She is all YOU MUST LOVE ME AND ONLY ME and they are all – OF COURSE YOUR MAJESTY. Then they immediately run off and get mistresses and heirs and there is weeping and throwing in the Tower, and this happens fifty million times. Seriously, guys, you need to learn from other people’s mistakes.
I could have done with a bit less non-Elizabeth background detail, as I’m more interested in individuals rather than facts about palaces and diet and population changes, but some people like all that. Also, I do not need to be told several times in a chapter that the people saw Elizabeth as a second Deborah or Judith. I heard you the first time, thanks. And a bit more editing wouldn’t have gone amiss. I understand that Elizabeth lived her entire life between a rock and a hard place, but there are other ways of conveying that than with poor sentence structure: ‘Yet Elizabeth had yet to sign the death warrant’. Other words exist.
It took me a month to read 484 pages which is unprecedented, but that is a sign of my current mental state and not a sign of how enjoyable and informative the book is.
