The World according to Josephine Lawrence

Long ago — in the late 1940s — I read a couple of novels by Josephine Lawrence, If I Have Four Apples and The Years Are So Long. The second of these became a play called Make Way for Tomorrow and then a movie starring Victor Moore. These books came back to my attention with the recent release, with favorable reviews, of Make Way for Tomorrow on DVD. The movie, seen now when I am in my 70s, put me back in the world of the 1930s and 1940s. When I read the books I was a teenager trying to figure out how the grownups lived. Lawrence depicted a world of middle-class pious certainties, overlaid with anxiety and not a particularly good place to be. Should I emulate or rebel? Like most people, I did some of both.

It was time to revisit the Josephine Lawrence I sort of remember. Whereas The Years Are So Long (1934) is a Depression story, My Heart Shall Not Fear (1949), is set in 1948, four years after the end of World War II, the year of my senior year in high school. What would I have learned if I had read the book then?

• A young woman who has given birth to her first child is still in bed in the hospital on the 10th day after the birth. She is, however, now allowed to have visitors.
• A middle-aged couple who should be saving for their retirement take in their three married sons because of the housing shortage. The wife apparently does all the cooking. Sometimes the daughters-in-law wash the dishes.
• Women are noble. A young wife whose husband is leaving her because “he must not be bound in any way” goes shopping to get him more socks. She also lets him take the car, which she paid for.
• Men can be noble too. A wife, dying of cancel conceals her knowledge from her husband but he, meantime, is concealing his knowledge from her.
• More male nobility. A grown son takes out a loan so that he can bail his father out of an embezzlement situation. It’s not the first time his father has done it. Previously the second wife did the bailing out but the son is afraid that, if she learns about this one, she will leave and then who will take care of the old man?

By now you don’t want me to give any more examples, although I could, I could. The novel has a host of interrelated characters and Lawrence tells the story of each major character in turn. They all perceive strong social constraints which they do their best to honor. Although the young husband who abandons his marriage is a disappointment to his family — who also dread the the shame of a divorce — they respect the wife’s doormat-like behavior. It’s a puzzlement. Everyone knows how people should behave,from supporting one’s wife to wearing gloves and hats, and everyone knows that standards are breaking down. It was the Depression, it was the War, it is the housing shortage. We are not comfortable, but we carry on.

Josephine Lawrence was a prolific (over 30 novels) and popular author. She solved the discomfort of her characters as writers of popular fiction did. The central character — Patience, the new mother — has a realization or understanding that eluded her before. Italicized, so that you won’t miss the point:

For life is a gift. There have been times when I doubted it, now I know and my son will one day know, too….

And suddenly she perceived that all her fumbling questions has been answered — she had only to open her heart to understand.

There is a way out — the brave will always find it.

This was the formula in the stories I used to read in Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Home Companion. The formula wasn’t boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. It was woman meets problem, woman suffers, woman solves problem.

Fast forward to 1972, the publication date of All the Years of Her Life, to find a different formula. This is a “problem novel” (or novella, it’s short) and the problem is what to do with our old folks. Sons are indifferent and daughters feel guilty. Elderly fathers are detached putterers, elderly mothers are whining mutterers,  and all are hanging themselves around the necks of the middle aged, daughters especially.

Clover eyed her assistant speculatively. “What did  you want to know about boys?” she asked.

“Well, mostly it was about whether they owe their fathers and mothers a debt,” Polly explained. “I thought maybe it is only girls. Daddy doesn’t help Granny when he comes to see her, but you do. He doesn’t dry dishes. Granny says that girls can do things that boys can’t, but what I can’t see is why boys do all the exciting things and girls just work.”

Polly my dear, you are experiencing a biased sample, as each set of characters in your life expects that the daughter — not the sons — will take on responsibility for aging parents.

Since this is a formula book with cardboard characters who are used to play out a particular social drama, why bother to read it, when I could be enjoying Charles Dickens or Willa Cather? I found myself fascinated by the clarity with which Lawrence lays out the unrecognized assumptions most of us still carry.

For a moment the idea of burdening Dell, that bright, impatient spirit, with two helpless old people possessed Stacy’s mind. That it would be Dell to whom she and Lee turned, she was absolutely sure. The boys would have their wives and Dell, she hoped, would be married too. But it would be Dell, her daughter Dell, in whose heart compassion and love would blend with understanding–the special knowledge in a woman’s heart, her blessing and her betrayal.

The “special knowledge in a woman’s heart” is that men have skill and power, but women have love and understanding.

It’s a trade-off. When any group dominates with power, the subordinated group is free to develop love. When I was growing up in the middle-class culture of southwestern Ohio in the  1930s and 40s, the social goal was the well-adjusted child. If a girl complained about her assignment of love without power, she learned that she  needed to improve her attitude. Whether she intended to or not, Josephine Lawrence has reminded me of how it was.

Note: The large picture at the top of the post is part of the end paper design of My Heart Shall Not Fear. It is somewhat peripheral to the plot, but conveys the mood of the late 1940s.

What I Read in June 2010

Those books on which I have not posted separately are briefly described below.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children – see post.

Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There – A little light relief after some serious reading. Bryson relates episodes from a trip he made almost 20 years ago, while remembering a trip 20 years before that. Plenty of layers and some humor. Best was reading bout places I had been myself, plus Bulgaria which seemed quite strange.

Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner – see post.

Andrew J. Clark, Maya Elston and Mary Louise Hart, Understanding Greek Vases: A Guide to Terms, Styles and Technologies. I am developing a second set of presentations to go with my Glimpses of Greece. This one will be Ancient Arts: storytelling, painted pots, sculpture and theater. This little book is valuable for understanding the beautiful painted vases of Classical Greece, providing descriptions, definitions, history and plenty of examples.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince – see post.

P. D. James, The Lighthouse. This must be the only P.D. James mystery novel featuring Adam Dalgleish that I had previously missed. (I’m not reading them in order, but that doesn’t bother me.) It has the virtues and failings of the others: a variety of sympathetic characters (Dalgleish and his team, some of the suspects), a limited setting (a hospital, a school, an island), a complex plot with intricate relationships of times, places and alibis, some unfinished business from the past. This one opens slowly and gets underway rather deliberately, but hold on. It gets stronger as James develops the situation.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex – see post.

Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge; Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. No time to write a proper post, but this book certainly deserves one. Brinkley is a man with heart as he tells many individual stories of the victims of Katrina and those who did or did not respond to their plight. Among those who did not respond effective: New Orleanrs Mayor Nagin, FEMA Director Brown, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff and President Bush.

Josephine Lawrence, My Heart Shall Not Fear (1948) and All the Years of Her Life (1972) - see post: The World according to Josephine Lawrence.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

I did not want to read a book about a hermaphrodite, but I read this one. Calliope (“Callie”) tells of growing up Greek-American in Detroit and her discovery at age 14 that, although she looked like a girl, she was genetically — and emotionally, mostly — a boy. I’ll spare you the developmental details, but they square with what I learned in zoology. We begin with a set of parts which, depending on our genes, our prenatal hormone exposure, our own hormones after birth and cultural influence, can develop into a recognizably male or female body. Or, sometimes, a body which is a bit of both.

Callie’s story is about identity. While her grandparents and parents struggled to align their Greek and American identities, Callie had to decide which gender she/he was. Maybe he/she should be pushed more firmly one way or the other with hormone injections and surgery. In her encounter with the expert, she learned,

I thought that after talking to me he would decide that I was normal and leave me alone. But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people — and especially doctors — had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Eugenides writes movingly of self recognition and acceptance, within Callie’s body and within Callie’s world. I was reminded of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin, another novel which explores the meaning of gender. In a science fiction format, she takes us to a world where people have no settled gender, but could be one or the other, depending on circumstances and, to a certain extent, choice. Callie also feels she has a choice.

And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

This is not primarily a novel about sex. It is about family and adapting to a new culture and Detroit. I spent most of the 1950′s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so the Detroit I knew then was an arrogant city of wheels, about to see those wheels go rolling away. I enjoyed catching up on the news from there, as Callie’s story takes us into the 70′s. It’s not good news as Detroit, like any hermaphrodite, contends with an uncertain identity.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Does anyone ever actually read this book? It’s very good, and not as “Machiavellian” as I expected.

Get past Machiavelli’s somewhat obsolete terminology and consider his ideas. He speaks of a Prince taking over as ruler. As I was reading, this I considered Afghanistan. (We claim not to be the Prince in that country, but we are there and sometimes try to be in charge.)  Machiavelli tells us that if we are going to act, we must act boldly and decisively and to colonize, not invade.

And here it has to be noted that men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of such a kind that there is no fear of revenge. If, however, instead of establishing settlements the prince sends in troops, expenses are far higher, as all the revenues have to be devoted to defence and the gain becomes a loss. The prince does far more injury, because he harms the whole state by billeting his army in different parts of the country, everyone suffers from this annoyance, and everybody is turned into an enemy. And those who grow hostile can do him harm, because they remain, defeated, in their own homes.

Substitute today’s treaties and trade for Machiavelli’s colonies and “settlements” and nothing much has changed.

Machiavelli explains that it is much easier for the prince to come to power legitimately in an existing system, even a bad one, than to to take over as an outsider. It is easier to establish control in an already-centralized government than in one where the nobles have their own power and authority. When people are accustomed to a single authority, a substitution is not necessarily offensive to them. The nobles (tribal chiefs? warlords?), however, continue to look after their own interests.

They have their prerogatives; the King cannot take these away from them except at his own peril. So, to make a comparison between these two kinds of state, it is difficult to win control of the Turkish empire [with its single sultan] but, once it has been conquered, it can be held with ease.

When, Machiavelli surveys the historical record for examples of success and failure in taking over other countries, he concludes that the differences do not depend “on whether the conquerors are more or less capable but on the kind of state they conquer.” He develops this idea further as he describes the difficulties of changing established laws and customs.

It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult  to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state’s constitution. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old older, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Their support is lukewarm partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the existing laws on their side, and partly because men are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience.

Afghanistan again. Why should they trust the new arrangements when much of the older powers are still around to dispute them? Why should they trust us to stay, and to stay interested? The Afghans aren’t crazy — they will continue to live there, and we won’t. So maybe we should consider settlements, as Machiavelli suggests, instead of troops. I have heard the counter-argument that we succeeded in completely remaking Japan, new constitution and all, after World War II. That may have been successful because of Machiavelli’s first point. We had done them such grievous injury by that time, that they retained no ability to resist or to get revenge.

Machiavelli shocks and delights because he has a rare ability to analyze what he sees, not what he would like to see.

Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner

The piano tuner is Edgar Drake of London, expert tuner of Erard grand pianos, and the year is 1887. Drake is summoned to an unpacified area of Burma at the height of British imperialism in the Far East. This is new territory for me — as it certainly was for Edgar Drake. I have read a number of books set in India during the Raj, but the British were long in that setting as traders before they became governors. In Burma they were still establishing the basics of control. In the Shan States, in the eastern border area near Thailand and China, an eccentric army doctor demanded first a piano, then a tuner for the piano.

The novel makes a slow start, with Drake in London considering the assignment and negotiating with his wife. The wife, worthy as she is, never achieves the reality of the women Drake later meets in Burma. Drake is an upright individual who is committed to music, “the song in the piano.” In Burma, he hears new songs although he may not understand them. Hi similarly struggles to understand Dr. Carroll, who is so devoted to his piano and his own vision of the Shan people.

Near the end of the story Carroll dedicates a passage about the Lotus-Eaters in the Odyssey to Drake, “who has tasted.” The taste does change Drake, but in believable ways, given his character. The rather abrupt ending of the book is less believable, but that does not take away from Mason’s achievement in bringing us these peoples and their music.

Salman Rushie, Midnight’s Children

Reading Rushdie is a lot of fun until there comes a time when you have had enough and you want him to stop, but he does not, and he goes on and on and on, like the opera where you have heard it all from the soprano and are ready to applaud but then she opens her mouth again and exposes you to another 20 minutes of melodic emotion.

Midnight’s Children is told by Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight in 1947 as India gained its independence. He, and the other children born at that time, knew only an India free to choose its own destiny. I read the book several years ago and was impressed at that time, but thought that Rushdie went on too long.  Now, rereading it for my Ex Libris group, I say “double that!”  I’m still impressed and he still goes on too long.

The fun is real enough. Here is Saleem describing how the world seems after he recovers his sense of smell:

Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color — boiling underwear and the printer’s ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness, while old tea and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-card and graveyards I jointly classified as grey…there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odours (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the -night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells, and also ovals and squares…a lexicographer of the nose.

There is more, but this sample will have to do.

Readers acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan in the 20th century will derive more from this book than the less well informed; many references are not explained. In his novel, Rushdie rehearses the ups and downs on the subcontinent. Spoiler: he particularly dislikes leaders of Pakistan coups and Indira Gandhi.  It is not too difficult to see how he could have mightily irritated issuers of fatwas with his mocking comments on the Land of the Pure.

So what is the point? I think there are two midnights for Saleem and Rushdie. The first is hope and a new generation with great powers. That generation includes Saleem and his intense nose and Parvati-the-witch who can make you invisible and Narada with his/her ability to change sex. During the period of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, “the widow,” the children found themselves united again in a midnight of torment and despair as she imposed her will on the country.

But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight were hated feared destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the shakti of the goods, a multi-limbed divinity with a center-parting of schizophrenic hair….

His point is a good one, but he takes over 500 pages to get to it. Our group asked: Is this book a future classic? We doubt it. The events are too obscure for most western readers and, worse, the emotions and interactions are not driven so much by the internal logic of the characters, but by Rushdie’s need to make a point and a point and a point.