What I Read in April 2011

Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open. A novel of life in pre-World War I Vienna. In this capital of an uneasy empire, indecision and antisemitism are the themes.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland. This feminist utopian novel is being read as part of the year-long project to read Feminist Classics.

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury.  Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthrone, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work.

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door. This is the second novel of the trilogy set during World War I which began with Regeneration. We learn of the continued activities of Billy Prior, Siegfried Sassoon, and Dr. Rivers.

Cathleen Schine, Rameau’s Niece.

Apparently influenced by translating a mildly-pornographic philosophical work, a writer with lots of words but little memory gives her perfectly satisfactory husband a hard time.

Cathleen Schine, The Three Weissmanns of Westport. This one is more like it. A mother and two daughters try to figure out the changes in their lives while inhabiting a cottage at Compo Beach in Westport, CT, just up the road from where I live now.An interesting set of people despite some improbabilities, but a good read.

Cathleen Schine, Rameau’s Niece

This is the third Cathleen Schine book I have read. The others were The Love Letter and The Evolution of Jane, and I did not post a separate comment on either of them. It seems unfair somehow to read so many of Schine’s books and not comment, so let’s try to be fair here.

Margaret Nathan, in Rameau’s Niece, reads much and remembers little.

Margaret was an authority on many things, with this one qualification — she had forgotten those many things as thoroughly as if she swilled daily from the river Lethe, morning, noon, and light, gulping, gargling, brushing her teeth with the waters of oblivion. Margaret suffered short-lived but all-consuming intellectual passions to which she gave herself over completely, becoming expert enough to be thoughtful.

Margaret does manage to remember, from time to time, that she is married to Edward, to me the much more attractive character of the two. Translating the genteel pornography of the Rameau’s Niece manuscript, Margaret learns that the desire to know is desire. Since she desires to know, then she must feel desire and so she looks for an object, not in Edward but in her dentist, the stranger on the plane, her friend Lily. Invited to Prague alone — Edward has teaching commitments — she blames him and his unavoidable absence for all these attractions. I really wanted to shake her sometimes.

Schine is using the same narrative technique she followed in The Love Letter, where all the puzzlements in the plot flowed from an accidentally discovered love letter. Here, Margaret is undone by a pseudo-philosophical treatise with lines like this:

I walked on, thinking of how, after a night of the give and take of rigorous philosophical discussion, of delving unrelentingly for knowledge and for truth, my pupil would wrap her figure, which was of perfect proportions, in a muslin nightgown and leave my room, turning back to the door, running back to me to to thank me for my efforts on her behalf, throwing her arms around my neck and covering me with kisses of gratitude. Truly, there is nothing so rewarding as the instruction of the young.

All this cutesy philosophy is the hook for Margaret’s instruction among the various kinds of desire. The joke, like the nightgown, wears a little thin.

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door

In The Eye in the Door Pat Barker continues the story of Billy Prior, Siegfried Sassoon, Dr. Rivers and others, the story she began in Regeneration. Prior is a fictional character in this novel; Sassoon and Rivers were real in their time, as well as being characters here.

And what is the “eye in the door”? It is the eye which watches the conscientious objector lying naked in his prison cell or the more friendly eye of the neurologist observing his shell-shocked patient. That friendly eye can also become the eye of the detached observer.

He watched Head’s expression as he looked at Lucas’s shaved scalp, and realized it differed hardly at all from his expression that morning as he’d bent over the cadaver. For the moment, Lucas had become simply a technical problem. Then Lucas looked up from his task, and instantly Head’s face flashed open in his transforming smile.

For Rivers to hear of so much pain without collapse, he must separate himself from it, just as the men in the trenches much separate themselves emotionally from the reality of killing and being killed. He is not always successful. Rivers considers Siegfired Sassoon’s return to France.

He had gone back hating the war, turning his face away from the reality of killing and maiming, and as soon as that reality was borne in upon him, he found the situation unbearable. All of which might have been foreseen. Had been foreseen…. If Siegfried’s attept as dissociation had failed, so had his own. He was finding it difficult to be both involved and objective, to turn steadily on Siegfried both sides of medicine’s split face.

They are all split by the war, both those who fight and those who stay at home. They are separated from who they were. As Prior says,  “I was born two years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no father.”

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury

During the years before the Civil War, the following people lived and worked in Concord, Massachusetts:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Margaret Fuller
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Louisa May Alcott

Of course they were not the entire population of that charming village. You can add Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s impossible father, as well as many others.

In American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever gives us a joint biography of the five, set within the times and the place. A bit confusingly, she weaves together their five stories. And yes, they did all know each other. For example, Louisa May Alcott walked in the woods with Thoreau and borrowed books from Emerson’s library. Margaret Fuller flirted with Nathaniel Hawthorne — and with Emerson, too. Cheever places Emerson at the center of her story. Without him she says.

There would have been no Alcotts in Orchard House of Hawthornes at the Old Manse; there would have been no Thoreau at Walden, and no Walden, no The Scarlet Letter, or Little Women. There would have been no expression of the ideas that are still the credo of the environmental movement or the ideas that sparked feminism. Emerson’s essays are small jewels that still gleam for the discerning reader, but his greatest contribution was in his life and the way he brought together, supported, and encouraged the community that became Concord, Massachusetts.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland

Herland is what they call a utopian novel. Somewhere — it may be on another planet as in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossesed, or hidden in the mountains like Shangri La — a society exists which is very different from ours. An outsider (one of us) arrives who experiences the culture, but never really understands it. Or perhaps the outsider comes to us, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria. It never works. The outsider rejects the culture or the culture rejects the outsider. That’s why “utopia” is literally “no where”. You can’t go there; nevertheless, novelists keep trying to make the trip. I traveled to Herland with Charlotte Perkins Gilman as part of the Feminist Classics project.

This is a trip into a world where gender is not an issue because there are only women. They do everything because there is no other gender to take charge and tell them what they can and can’t do. Other posts will be exploring the implications of a single-gender society. I was struck by something else: Herland has one gender, but many ages. After an initial encounter with three young and attractive women, the three male travelers meet a contingent of a very different type:

They were not young. They were not old. They were not, in the girl sense, beautiful. They were not in the least ferocious. And yet, as I looked from face to face, calm, grave, wise, wholly unafraid, evidently assured and determined, I had the funniest feeling –a very early feeling–a feeling that I traced back and back in memory until I caught up with it at last. It was that sense of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had so often felt in early youth when my short legs’ utmost effort failed to overcome the fact that I was late to school.

These women of a certain age are managing Herland’s affairs, and the travelers are puzzled:

“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

Let’s hear it for grandmothers! A woman can easily be a grandmother at 45 or 50, ages at which men consider themselves at the height of political and economic power. By my calculations Gilman was 55 when she wrote Herland, so she had experience with assumptions about middle-aged women, and grandmothers too. These grandmothers are “very much on the stage, “  demonstrating that our assumptions about age are closely linked to our assumptions about gender differences.

The mentors chosen to teach the outsiders the language, as well as to document what knowledge they have, are clearly in middle life. The wise women in the temples who counsel the young are middle aged or elderly. It is apparently the young who need help; the older ones have worked it out. The very young, the children, are of course protected by all ages and are seen as the future, the form which immortality takes. The young man protests to the Herland woman he has come to love:

“Do you want to go out like a candle? Don’t you want to go on and on — growing and–and–being happy forever?”

“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child–and my child’s child–to go on–and they will. Why should I want to?”

Herland offers women of all ages a smooth path, from protected child, to contributing youth, to mother, to wise women, to the eternity of future generations. It is a beautiful vision, parallel to the one the male sex has always assigned to itself.

The Road into the Open by Arthur Schnitzler

We are in Vienna and the year is 1908. It is bitter sweet. World War I is going to happen and sweep this life away, but neither the author nor his characters know that. What do they do? They meet at each other’s houses, walk in the park, bicycle in the countryside, stop at inns, talk, compose music, sing, talk, have love affairs and talk some more.

Athur Schnitzler was a medical doctor and a Jew, the son of a medical doctor and a Jew. Father and son experienced the freedom of the liberal years in the Austro Hungarian Empire and the antisemitism which increased after the Dreyfus Affair. It was the Vienna of Freud and Herzl. Schnitzler’s interest was not in medicine but in literature, and he became a successful writer of stories and plays, best known today for his story which became the basis for the movie  LaRonde. He was interested in sex and in ideas, in love and in death.

His central character Georg, the Baron, is of the minor nobility, living off the remnants of family wealth and avoiding the need to get to work and develop his musical talents. Georg’s interest in love and death is without emotional force. He tells his friend,

“I even feel that I have a certain inclination to sentimentality, which I have to resist.”

“Yes, that’s it. Sentimentality is something that stands in direct opposition to feeling, something with which one compensates for one’s lack of feeling, one’s inner coldness. Sentimentality is feeling that one has bought, so to speak, for the purchase price. I hate sentimentality.”

“Hm, and yet I think you’re not entirely free of it yourself.”

“I’m Jewish. It’s a national illness with us. Decent people try to turn it into anger or rage.”

While he looks for his road into the future, “the open,” Georg has love affairs, one of which results in a pregnancy. That is the story, but the plot is not the point. The many characters, drawn to represent different attitudes toward their changing world, — they are the point. Georg is at the center as a young man who doesn’t know who he is and knows even less who he wants to become. Antisemitism is not his problem, but it is real in the life of his many Jewish friends. Some shrug and get on with their loves, some contemplate emigrating to the Holy Land, some consider converting. Some get angry and some cultivate indifference. Written after the first Zionist Congresses, the author doesn’t know the outcome waiting only 30 years in the future, but he understands this is a problem that is not going away. A road into the open should serve Vienna as well as Georg. Where is it? Georg doesn’t know and Schnitzler doesn’t know and we don’t know either. but we know how much they need to find it.