What I Read in March 2011

Started in February, finished in March:

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris

Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

New this month:

Jane Gardam, Old Filth
Filth, as in Old Filth, means Failed In London Try Hong Kong. Try Filth.

Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief. The age of grief is the end of youth and the progress into early middle age, when you realize that you cannot escape the grief that life imposes on us. This early novella by Jane Smiley is accompanied by in the book by several short stories. I enjoy Smiley’s characters, especially their normality in an uncertain world.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. A memoir of public school life in England before World War I, followed by four years as an officer in the trenches in France.

Pat Barker, Regeneration. The first of three historical novels set during and after World War I.

Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs. The original Bridge of Sighs is in Venice, but they are also sighing in upstate New York, the setting for this novel in which people experience and consider complex relationships within apparently simple lives.

Katharine Greider, The Archaeology of Home; An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side. My niece had a new book out: the story of a particular house on a particular street on the Lower East Side.

Kelly O’Connor McNees, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott. This historical novel imagines the love affair the author of Little Women might have had one summer long ago, before she was famous.

The Archaeology of Home

Immediate Disclaimer: Katharine Greider, the author of this book, is my niece. She is the daughter of journalist William Greider, and William Greider is my brother. I don’t think I can be detached about this book.

The subtitle of The Archaeology of Home is An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side. An epic, maybe, with lots of characters and some important themes related to an actual but not completely knowable history. I prefer, however, to see it as a tapestry of three different threads: the history of the house at 239 7th Street in the East Village; Katherine’s experiences before, during and after living in the house; reflections on the meaning of home. My tapestry is not exactly a wall hanging, but has more the shape of a scarf, as the threads weave in and out but also move forward in time.

Katherine and David, expecting their first child, bought portions of an 1840-era town house and lived there for five years until a nighttime call:

The situation, he told me, was more serious than we had supposed. Indeed, the foundation of the building in which my children and I were even now settling down for another night’s rest was in what professionals call a failed condition, its crushed and rotted wooden beams propped up by crumbling brick piles and …. Ralph said he would wait until Monday morning before reporting this hazard to the City of New York, at which time city officials would almost certainly seal the building. And he left no doubt as to what we should do over the weekend: Get the hell out.

They got out, and spent the next two years trying to clean up the mess. But mostly this is not a story about the mess. It is the story — going back to the Lenape Indians — of those who used the land, owned the land, built on the land, and lived in the house they built. It is a history of this particular slice of the lower east side, and it’s not an architectural history: it’s a history of the people. In the true spirit of archaeology, Greider digs down through the layers of occupation, dusting off and examining and marveling as she goes.

As a family member I was interested in her account of their attempts to deal with the financial problems resulting from the buildings almost-collapse. In Chapter Eight she documents the swings in their personal fortunes, sometimes accompanying the ups and downs of the value of 239 7th St. I’ve been there myself and discovered, as she did, that you do what you have to do. What you have to do only includes what can be done. And, as she said to herself at the time in a list of precepts:

7. Don’t give up on your own happiness.

Sounds corny, but it worked. So, although they admitted to self pity at times, they came out about even at the end, plus, of course, the experience.

Several times Greider looks at the question of what is home. Is is any place where you can take your shoes off and rummage in the refrigerator? Or is it a particular place, to which one is attached by strong associations? Both, apparently, and when the attachments have to go, you start over and build new ones. When David blew his nose at the closing on the new apartment, purchased with the proceeds from the sale of 239, Katharine saw it as

…the mystical sequel to that moment when he stomped the crystal glass at our wedding, acknowledging in our joy the destruction of the Temple, etc., etc.

The “etc., etc.” is telling because Katharine has not previously used that expression, generally preferring to give us specifics. Yes the Temple was destroyed and, while we can’t forget that, we recognize the joy possible in all the et ceteras.

And here is a quibble. Please. More maps, and bigger maps with color; more pictures; maybe some family trees of those multi-generational families like the DeLanceys and the Weiders. You could link to them at your Facebook page.

Pat Barker, Regeneration

What happens when a nerve is severed? It may regenerate, grow back, slowly and imperfectly but somewhat functional. Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration is based on the experiences of solders suffering what was then called Shell Shock in the trenches of World War I.

Barker’s book is the first of a trilogy which also includes The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. Having come to Regeneration directly from Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, I need to commit myself to finishing the series.

These books are wonderful and terrible, in the original senses of inciting wonder and terror. You think your life is under control. In August you enlist in a war which the professionals say will be over by Christmas — and spend four years in the trenches watching your men be blown apart. They are your men because you are an officer (and perhaps a gentleman) and responsible for their welfare.

When personal collapse comes, they send you home for rehabilitation. The officers receive rest and a 1916 version of the talking cure at a mental hospital like the one at Craiglockhart where Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred met when both were invalided home. The other ranks get much less benign treatment; their psychosomatic symptoms are typically treated with electric shock.

There are many important themes in the book including class distinctions and the importance of poetry, but the most important one is a moral issue: for what are these men being regenerated? The answer is clear: to go back to France and fight again.

….’I'd’ve thought there was a case for letting him be.’

‘No, there’s no case,’ Rivers said. ‘He’s a mentally and physically healthy man. It’s his duty to go back, and it’s my duty to see he does.’

The means may vary, but the end is always the same, and this despite the fact that all of them — the doctor Rivers and the officers Graves and Owen and Sassoon — know that the war is a mistake for which a generation is being sacrificed. In their code, it would just not do to quit. Graves says to Sassoon,

I believe in keeping my word. You agreed to serve, Siegfried. Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the response of the kind of people you’re trying to influence — the Bobbies and the Tommies — you’ve got to be seen to keep your word. They won’t understand if you turn around in the middle of the war and say “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” To them, that’s just bad form. They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman — and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.’

I take it that it is more important to avoid bad form than to go out to kill and be killed. We had hot words about this issue in our Ex Libris discussion, with my opponent pointing out the obligations of citizenship: you benefit from the country so you must be willing to serve the country. Sounds like Viet Nam to me. When is it your obligation as a citizen to refuse to participate in wrong actions? Graves and Sassoon come down on different sides of that question and even Rivers, who was so sure at first what was right to do, comes to have doubts.

Goodbye to All That

Goodbye to all what? Not just to the trenches of World War I, but to all his life in England up to 1929, the year when poet Robert Graves wrote this memoir of his early years. I read it as an accompaniment to Pat Barker’s Regeneration, on which I will be commenting in a few days.

The same characters and the same war appear in both books — Graves himself, Sigfried Sassoon, the trenches, the mutilated bodies. While Regeneration is a novel, Goodbye to All That is a firsthand account of the horrors. Graves tells us how, as a boy of 19, he casually made the decision to fight.

I had just finished with Charterhouse and gone up to Harlech, when England declared war on Germany. A day or two later I decided to enlist. In the first place, though the papers predicted only a very short war – over by Christmas at the outside – I hoped that it might last long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded. Nor did I work out the possibilities of getting actively engaged in the fighting, expecting garrison service at home, while the regular forces were away.

And so it goes! Four years later,

…I was still mentally and nervously organized for war. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed.

Although my edition had a brief Epilogue from 1957, in the memoir itself Graves captures the mood of England’s middle and intellectual classes during the years before and after The Great War. As a new officer, Graves learned of his responsibilities as gentleman:

First of all – I had not only gone to an inefficient tailor, but also had a soldier-servant who neglected to polish my buttons and shine my belt and boots as he should have done. Never having owned a valet before, I did not know what to expect of him. Crawshaw finally summoned me to the Orderly Room. He would not send me to France, he said, until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked more like a soldier….

Once in France, Graves found more serious responsibilities than the polish of his belt. His report of those years is almost unemotional. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself, there is no “poor me” to get between us and his account of his experiences. After the war Graves was disabled by shell shock. Nervous and twitching and unable to settle comfortably into a new life, he continued as a writer. I am glad he survived to tell this story and all the others he gave us during a long career.

For comments on a very different book by Graves, see Wife to Mr. Milton.

Jane Gardam, Old Filth

Filth, as every reviewer of this book has explained, is an acronym: Failed In London Try Hong Kong. And he does, and succeeds, and becomes wealthy, and returns to England and becomes a judge. The “he” is Edward Feathers, born in Malaya before World War II and sent to England to be educated.

In his story “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” Rudyard Kipling has written of Raj orphans, those children born in the Orient, their first years spent in pampered circumstances, only to be sent to England at astonishingly young ages to be educated by strangers. Kipling suffered greatly from the experience.

The official reason was fear of disease.

“He seems well and happy,” he said. “I have never seen the need for him to go Home. It’s not the law.”

“You know perfectly well that it is the custom. Because of the risk of childhood illnesses out here. You went Home yourself.”

“I did,” said Alistair. “So help me God.”

Fear of oriental illnesses was only part of it; greater was the fear of the oriental culture and the oriental mind. Sent to England so young, the children became anglicized, English in thought and deed — at the cost of being detached from their families. Old Filth is Kipling updated: hard working, ambitious, his emotions under tight control, always a suvivor.

I read this book because it was highly recommended and because the Kipling story still resonates for me with remembered pain. This one is gentler, the experiences more mixed. It resonates with remembered pain but also of a life forcibly shifted to a different path.

The Belly of Paris

The Belly of Paris is Les Halles, the great food market celebrated by Emile Zola in this 1873 novel. The only previous book I have read by Zola is the more famous Nana. I liked this one better because — I was about to say –of the more realistic people and situations. That’s not quite it. Zola is called a realist, but he uses his very sensual descriptions to make emotional points. For example, when the old gossips get together to tittle tattle with each other they meet in the cheese market.

All around them the cheeses were stinking…. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others…. Then came the strong-smelling cheeses…. and, finally, stronger than all the others, the olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves, like the carcasses of animals which peasants cover with branches as they lie rotting in the hedgerow under the blazing sun.

Florent, an idealistic revolutionary, has escaped from his unjust imprisonment on Cayenne (Devils Island) and returned to Paris where he works in Les Halles and plans the downfall of the very Bourgeois government. He knows the sumptuous market is not the place for him. In his very difficult life he has become thin and he identifies with the thin people. Les Halles is the place of supply for the fat people, and the fat people include his half brother, his sister-in-law and all the people who mock his ideals. Florent is not eloquent but his artist friend is.

Claude shook his fist at them. He was exasperated by all this joyousness in the streets and on the rooftops. He cursed the Fat people, for they had won. All around he could see nothing but Fat people, increasing ins size, bursting with health, greeting another day of eating and digesting.

The sadness of the ending is not just that Florent’s impractical schemes have failed. The sadness is that the fat people prefer eating and drinking to the pursuit of justice.

Mary Wollstonecraft, proto-feminist

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin.

Why does a woman have to be conventionally virtuous to have her unconventional ideas accepted? It helps to be pretty also. No one ever says of a man, “Don’t listen to him — he’s really ugly and, anyway, he sleeps around.” For women it’s a special trap. The conventional woman, the one to be take seriously, rarely has anything unconventional to say. Why should she?

And then we have Mary Wollstonecraft. I was inspired to read Claire Tomalin’s biography by the discussion of A Vindication of the Rights of Women — and other feminist books — at Feminist Classics. One of the participants said that, despite reading this biography, she found it impossible to like Wollstonecraft. I’m not sure I like her either, but I don’t think that is important. If we liked her she would probably be a different person. I certainly don’t like Rousseau, who persuaded his mistress to give their infants to the foundling hospital, but everyone pays attention to him.

Wollstonecraft was a woman of her time. Because she was of the time she could write of the position and limitations of women from the inside. She had strong emotions and wrote of the power of reason in a tone of great indignation.

But Mary’s temperament was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle: when she was angry with Mrs. Cockburn it was (temporarily) a boiling hatred; when she defended George from attack it was without reservation. She had no capacity for nuance or irony….

She struggled, both in her personal life and in her writings. She had an illegitimate child so of course people said: see what happens when you press for equal opportunities. And why was the illegitimacy so bad? When I was a girl I could imagine no greater disgrace than an illegitimate baby. Today we have a different view, and some of my best friends have illegitimate grandchildren. With that out of the way, we can go back to A Vindication with respect for Wollstonecraft’s ideas and her expression of them — and pity for her life.