What I Read in May 2011

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s well-known 1929 essay about women and fiction. This is the May book for discussion at Feminist Classics. You are invited to join the discussion there.

Pat Barker, The Ghost Road. This is the third of the trilogy of novels set during World War I. The other two are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.

P. J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations. P.J.’s take on Adam Smith’s great work. You receive a good summary of the basics of Smith’s book and of classic economy if you don’t let O’Rourke’s snide comments get in the way. I read this book, along with the Karl Marx book listed below for a course, Smith Vs. Marx, where we looked at what these two giants of economic analysis actually said, versus what people think they said.

Albert Camus, The Stranger. Translation by Matthew Ward. Meursault is a murderer; he also tells the truth.

Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life. A well-written biography of the author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth. Short stories by the Canadian writer.

Jane Gardam, The Flight of the Maidens. An earlier novel by the author of Old Filth. Three provincial English girls win scholarships to prestigious universities. Their flight is both a flight from — leaving a life that could not

be sufficient for them — and a flight up — a reaching for something higher, and perhaps better, but certainly different.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth

I read books by Alice Munro in no particular order, whenever one comes to hand. I usually comment, most recently on The View from Castle Rock.

The short stories in Friend of My Youth are set in Canada, many in the town of Wally, where of course everyone knows everyone else — even after many years. The themes here are of return, return to a place and time one knew at an earlier stage of life; confidences, women tell each other how it was or how it might be; betrayal, betrayal of friends,  sisters, lovers. People have secret lives and aspirations and sometimes they share them with others, but not always.

In the story “Wigtime” Anita returns to the town where she grew up and encounters Margot. The used to walk home from school together.

They spun the day out a little longer, talking. Any subject would do…. They talked so easily and endlessly that it seemed they talked about everything. But there were things they held back.

Anita held back two ambitions of hers, which she did not reveal to anybody. One of them — to be an archeologist — was too odd, and the other — to be a fashion model — was too conceited. Margot told her ambition, which was to be a nurse. You didn’t need any money to get into it — not like university — and once you graduated you could go anywhere and get a job. New York, City, Hawaii — you could get as far away as you liked.

Two teen age girls talk. Some things are said and some are not. It’s real life, so Margot gets married and never gets away, while it is Anita who becomes a nurse. Confidences return, as they tell each other how it happened, betrayals and all.

Karl Marx: A Life

It’s a good idea to read a book about someone you have heard about but never encountered directly. Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx gave me that opportunity. Marx was a revolutionary firebrand in his youth, expelled from Germany, France and Belgium not once, but several times. He ended his life as a father and grandfather in suburban London, his basic ideas unchanged but his expression of them somewhat subdued. And in between these two points in this life we find The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital and Frederick Engels.

Marx devoted his university studies to philosophy and, when he took up the study of economics he continued to see the big picture:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Wheen presents Marx as a philosopher who drew on a variety of sources:

In the British Museum, Marx had discovered a reservoir of data about capitalist practice — government Blue Books, statistical tables, reports from factory inspectors and public health officers…. But his other main source, less often noticed, is literary fiction…. How can capitalists shrug off their responsibility for the human casualties of technological progress? Putting aside his census figures, Marx turns to a speech from the dock by Bill Sykes on Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

Although Marx dabbled from time to time in revolutionary politics during his years in England, his heart seems to have been in his writing. After years of labor he brought out the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. The remaining two volumes were edited by Engels after Marx’s death. Intended as a scientific analyses of the structure of capitalism and the inevitability of crises within that structure, the emotional drive which led Marx to write it came from his concern for the situation of the workers in an industrializing economy.

Marx himself was not a worker. Born into a middle class family, his lawyer father could afford to send him to the university. He experienced enough poverty in his early days in England so as not to romanticize the proletarian life. Quite the contrary, he wanted his daughters to be educated as ladies. Engels was not a poor boy either — his father was a partner in a textile concern — and worked for years in the business to support Marx and his family. In this biography one sees a portrait of a brilliant but difficult man — his wife called him “my wild boar” — who struggled to describe the world he wanted to change.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

What is it about Meursault that makes him “the stranger”? It is not that he is a murderer, but that he tells the truth. He tells you when something doesn’t mean anything and he tells you that he is  hot. When his mother dies he is unsure when it happened, but says that doesn’t mean anything. He says the same thing to his girl friend.

That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything, but that I probably didn’t love her.

Meursault is not seeking for a meaning. He accepts the way things are.

Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.

Meursault is a man who lives in his skin, but he is not always comfortable there. In the water, swimming, he feels something close to joy but, usually, he is too hot. In his room he is hot, walking to his mother’s funeral he is too hot, and when he kills the Arab on the beach he is very hot. At his trial he disastrously speaks the truth about his feelings.

I stood up, and since I did wish to speak, I said, almost at random, in fact, that I never intended to kill the Arab. The judge replied by saying that at least that was an assertion, that until then he hadn’t quite grasped the nature of my defense, and that before hearing from my lawyer he would be happy to have me state precisely the motives for my act. Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun. People laughed.

Meursault is sometimes spoken of as an ordinary man. He may be ordinary in the details of his life, but he is a stranger to the deceptions and self deceptions that make living such a life possible.

A Room of One’s Own: Educating Virginia

First, enjoy the beautiful portrait of Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. Then, contemplate A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Woolf, subject of the May Discussion on Feminist Classics.

I have read A Room of One’s Own several times over the years and each time I react differently, relating her comments to the ages and stages of my own life. This time, I reflect on education, its effect on her and its effect on me. Woolf feels shut out of the official high-level English education system. The women’s college at “Oxbridge” is grudgingly financed with the equivalent of bake sales, and the female scholars eat prunes instead of pudding. Woolf is directed away from walking on the grass and forbidden to enter the library. This matters to her.

One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

She minds being shut out and sees how it affects a woman writer’s mind and attitudes. At times she confuses the effects of the denial of education and the effects of the content of that education. She speaks of the best of the English poets and then says, “Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men….” But she admires Shakespeare and he did not go to college. If he had, perhaps he would not have developed what Woolf calls an “androgynous mind,” that is, the ability to write free of sexual bias. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in….”

Woolf also wanders into a rather confusing discussion of the man mind and the woman mind and wonders if male-dominated education is what women need. This reminds me of my introduction to higher education at the University of Michigan in 1949. This was the post-World War II period when the campus was still crowded with male students under the G.I. Bill. At freshman Orientation, a serious male dean told the women that perhaps we should not be there. True, we occupied places which might have been reserved for men but, worse, we ourselves would not be well served by education beyond reasonable expectations for us. It would unsettle us for being contented wives and mothers. Then an even more serious female dean reassured us; our liberal educations would fit us to be better wives and mothers.

Woolf wants women to have opportunities, but is not sure how they should be applied:

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

Yes, Virginia, but beware of prescribing differences based on gender. While you want female fiction writers, those deans wanted happy wives and mothers.

At one point in her essay, Woolf quotes a long passage from Bronte’s Jane Eyre, where Jane reflects of women’s lives that

…it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knifing stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Woolf does not like this open discontent, saying “She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.” For heaven’s sake, why should she be calm! The very strength of her indignation is what gives Jane her power for female readers. And here, I think, is the flaw at the center of A Room of One’s Own. Yes, the writer needs financial support – whether inherited or earned—and she needs a place of quiet, the room of her own. That this place is “her own” also implies a control of at least some of the circumstances of her life. Woolf knows that, but at the same time she cannot rise above certain notions of female gentility, and English gentility at that, since she uses no American examples.

Enough of Melville

This cover of the Melville collection in which I have been reading misleads. I did not get as far as Billy Budd, but dropped out after Bartleby the Scrivener and The Encantadas and The Bell-Tower. With some pride I assert that I can read almost anything, but doesn’t mean that I have to persist. Poor Herman Melville, I just got tired of his company and dropped out.

Some readers complain about Moby Dick. Too long, they say, and too much about whaling. I liked Moby Dick, harpoons and reflections on the nature of reality and all. I was not in a hurry and enjoyed the trip.

I did not enjoy Bartleby. I think I started this one in the past, or at least sniffed at the opening pages. This time I stayed until the end, but did not feel rewarded by the experience. It felt to me that Melville was straining to give some deeper meaning to a very dull character.

The Encantadas were more of the same. These are “the enchanted isles,” also better know to us as the Galapagos. Where Darwin found instruction, Melville found clinkers and tortoises and eccentric characters. These were apparently magazine sketches, perhaps more interesting in their day. Harold Beaver, the editor of this collection, finds more. As he says in his introduction,

Melville had not only been reading Spenser and Darwin, or Milton for that matter, but also Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He is both guide (Prospero, the Enchanter himself) and innocent wonder (Miranda) to whose dreamy sailor’s mind ‘all things of the land wear a fabulous hue’, even Sycorax’s son sharing ‘the dim investiture of wonder”.

Melville’s sketches stumble under the weight of all this literary interpretation.

My final discouragement was The Bell-Tower which I found to be imitative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with an additional touch of Hawthorne. According to Beaver’s introduction, Melville spent his last years perfecting his art and these stories. I think the stories say something sad about this effort: he tried too hard.