What I Read in April 2012

Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander. I have long been a fan of Renault’s historical novels set in ancient Greece — The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, Fire from Heaven among others — but this is the first biography I have read. It is a measured account of an extraordinary life, with careful attention to the contemporary accounts.

Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen. This novel is the middle book of Waugh’s trilogy about the adventures of Guy Crouchback during World War II. I read the first book, Men at Arms, but too long ago, so I had trouble keeping the many characters straight. Vintage Waugh, in which the capers of the officers come up against the realities of the evacuation of Crete.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. Their voices rise in a chorus together, yet each separate voice can also be distinguished. The speakers are the “picture brides”, the women who came to the United States from Japan to marry men they had seen only in pictures.

Susan Cheever, Treetops: A Family Memoir. The daughter of writer John Cheever tells the story of three talented and complicated families. Treetops is the summer place in New Hampshire where they gathered to love and to fight and to remember.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. A short, sweet novel about the relationship between a mathematics professor, his housekeeper and her young son. Due to a brain injury, the professor’s memory is limited to 80 minutes and all new experiences must fall within that time frame.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. This is my first complete reread of the 1868 classic after many years. I am preparing a course on Louisa May Alcott and will be posting extensively on this, her most popular book in July, as I participate in A Year of Feminist Classics.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick. I finished rereading Melville’s great classic about the struggle between mad Captain Ahab and the White Whale. This time around, my sympathies are with the whale and all of his persecuted companions. Some read the novel as the struggle between good and evil. I read it as the insanity of man, abusing this world which provide so much if we take its gifts in moderation.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men. This is the sequel to Little Women, written three years after it. It continues the story of Jo March, no Josephine Bhaer. With her husband she runs Plumfield, a school for boys. It continues the spirit of fun of Little Women, but we now find Jo in a warm maturity, reminiscent of Marmee.

Caroline Stoessinger, A Century of Wisdom. Subtitle: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor. A pianist, Alice Herz-Sommer survived Theresienstadt to create a new life for herself and her son in Israel and England. This book is a tribute to survival, but also to a cheerful old age and, most of all, to the power of music.

Fast Fish, Loose Fish

Yes, I know that a whale is not a fish. Fish are cold blooded and breathe through gills. Whales are warm blooded and breathe through lungs — they are mammals like us. Yet Herman Melville in Moby Dick calls them fish because the sea is the only environment in which they can live. Old English law also called them fish. It is concerned with who owns the fish or whale. Melville quotes it:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

Most of Moby Dick is a commentary on a simple commandment: go and hunt and the kill the whale. But who owns that whale? In these laws the Fast-Fish is not the one who is fast (quick) to get away, but who is fast to some human boat or device. Then he belongs to his captor. Does he own himself if he is a Loose-Fish? Only while he can avoid your harpoon. The harpoon continues to belong to the harpooner, but if that harpooned fish gets away — Loose again — and is then made fast by someone else, that person gets the fish and the original harpooner is only entitled to the return of his harpoon. These niceties of property law are helpful to the pursuers, but not to the pursued whale.

The structure of Moby Dick is frustrating to the reader who is a Loose-Fish made Fast in its many pages. After we leave on the Pequot, meet the many characters aboard, learn that Captain Ahab is almost certainly mad, and butcher a few whales, the action slows to a stop while Melville contemplates the whale. We learn of the size of the whale, the variety of whales, the face of the whale, the brain and spinal chord of the whale, the ancient beliefs about the whale, the tail of the whale and more categories and subcategories than I can recite here. We read all this while waiting for Ahab to get on with it, to meet his destiny.

Perhaps we need this pause for reflection, with all its sometimes tedious detail, so that we can understand what it means to kill such a magnificent creature. Ahab tells us Moby Dick is evil, but I don’t see him that way. Moby Dick is asserting his right to be a Loose Fish, now and forever, not to be Fast to Ahab or anyone else. Ahab knows no moderation when taking what nature provides; he sees it as a struggle is which only he has the right to prevail. Melville’s narrator asks:

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish!

And what rights do that great globe and all the fish within it have to be free of being Fast to us?

The Housekeeper and the Professor

In Japan, a woman who works as a housekeeper to support her young son takes an assignment with a mathematics professor. The professor himself no longer works. Due to a head injury his short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes. Then it is erased and he starts over. He has retained nothing permanently since 1975.

“What’s your shoe size?”

This was the Professor’s first question, once I had announced myself as the new housekeeper. No bow, no greeting. If there is one ironclad rule in my profession, it’s that you always give the employer what he wants; and so I told him.

“Twenty-four centimeters.”

The professor likes shoe sizes, birth dates and the serial number on the refrigerator. These are numbers — and numbers are what he remembers and understands. Yoko Ogawa’s enchanting short novel is about memory, relationships, numbers, and the relations between people and numbers. The Professor loves numbers:

“There were numbers before human beings — before the world itself was formed.”

If this makes the professor sound cold, he was not. Gruff maybe, absorbed in his contemplation of the numbers in God’s notebook, but very concerned about the housekeeper’s son.

“So he’s at home all alone? He sits and waits for his mother in a dark house while you’re here making dinner for a stranger? Making my dinner!”

The professor insists that the boy come to his house from school and spend the rest of the day, eating dinner together. Each day the boy arrives he must be identified and explained all over again. He is invariably greeted with a hug. The bond between them grows, based on the professor’s love of numbers, which he teaches to the boy, and baseball. Since the baseball season and players are frozen in 1975 in the professor’s mind, discussions must be censored for later references. They do it, becoming an assembled family in which the elderly man is the grandfather, joining with the mother and son. No spoilers here. Read this book for the story of a rare confluence of three otherwise rather ordinary human beings.

Treetops: A Family Memoir

I can’t seem to leave the Cheever family alone. After John Cheever’s Journals and, more recently, Blake Bailey’s biography, I have moved on to daughter Susan Cheever’s memoir, Treetops.

When John Cheever speaks, I feel his turbulent spirit directly, but experience the rest of the family dimly. In Treetops, Susan Cheever  illuminates the other players in the drama. Treetops was the family summer place in New Hampshire, acquired by her grandfather Milton Charles Winternitz and enjoyed by his and subsequent generations of Winternitzes, as well as the Whitney stepchildren of his second marriage. The two groups shared and contested their experiences at Treetops.

Each summer there has a name: 1982 was the summer the chicken coops burned down, 1971 was the summer I had my last birthday there, 1969 was the summer the flood washed out the road, 1959 was Winter’s last summer, 1948 was the summer the pig fell into the well. They all form a continuum of family ties and feuds and swimming in the transparent green water of the lake and sleeping under the fragrant pinewood roofs of the cottages, and remembering the past.

Against this background the person of Mary Winternitz Cheever, John Cheever’s wife and Susan’s mother, stands out. If the short stories and the Journals are John’s books, this is Mary’s book. Surely, I had thought, this dreadful and uncaring woman against whom John is protesting in his journals cannot be real. She was certainly real to him, at times, and it could make a good story, but others found in her a different reality.

My mother kept her private life private; my father’s private life was as embarrassingly public as he could make it. He was covering his tracks, of course. What he was keeping private were his affairs with men. Maybe it was just a matter of style. My mother was obviously caught in the ancient feminine struggle between self and family. My father was just telling stories.

Her necessary efforts to develop her own interests, her separate existence, were interpreted as cruelty, abandonment and rejection. Susan sees this but is inclined to forgive him because the resulting stories are so great. Her brothers are not so sure.

The Buddha in the Attic

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.

They said that our short stature made us ideally suited for work that required stopping low to the ground. Whereever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese — we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite–but none of their vices — we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat.

They couldn’t go home again, back to Japan, those “picture brides.” They had sought husbands and lives outside the restrictions of Japanese culture, so they married men they had only seen in pictures. The pictures, it turned out, were often of someone else more attractive or had been taken 20 years before. When the women arrived, they went to work, they bore children, they endured.

In this magical book, Julie Otsuka gives us their voices, a chorus of voices, yet within their song we can hear the individual singers.

We gave birth during the Year of the Dog and the Dragon and the Rat. We gave birth, like Urako, on the day of the full moon. We gave birth on a Sunday, in a shed in Encinitas, and the next day we tied the baby onto our back and went out to pick berries in the fields. We gave birth to so many children we quickly lost track of the years.

We hear these women speak from the boat on which they traveled from Japan, during their first experience of their new husbands, of their work, of their babies, of their children and, finally, their fate as they were exiled again from the place they had learned to call home. In the last chapter, we no longer hear the picture brides, we hear those they left behind.

A year on and almost all traces of the Japanese have disappeared from our town. Gold stars glimmer in our front windows…. Harada Grocery has been taken over by a Chinese man named Wong but otherwise looks exactly the same, and whenever we walk past his window it is easy to imagine that everything is as it was before. But Mr. Harada is no longer with us, and the rest of the Japanese are gone… All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world.

True, the Japanese you will meet when they are released from the camps will be different people, changed by their experiences, just as the picture brides were changed by theirs.

The Nature of Alexander

Mary Renault wrote a series of historical novels based on the legends and history of ancient Greece. They include The King Must Die, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and The Last of the Wine, set in the era of Socrates. Her novels devoted to Alexander the Great — Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy — take us into the life (lives, really) of an extraordinary man. What was fact and what was fiction? In her biography, The Nature of Alexander, Mary Renault sorts out the known history and the legends.

Her biography lacks the drama of the novels, but it is compelling just the same. Renault tells us what sources we have in the ancient writers and, when the stories conflict or seem unlikely, she tries to see her way into the probabilities of Alexander’s world. That world was one with tribal customs, many of which Alexander tried to surmount as he built his empire. The book is well titled The Nature of Alexander, because it is that nature she is concerned to understand. Again and again, she shows us his actions in the context of his time. After a great victory over the Persians,

He buried the Persian generals with the honours of war, and gave the dead Greek mercenaries [who fought for the Persians] a proper Greek funeral. To fourth-century men there was much more in this than a gesture; it was the rite of peaceful passage to the land of shades. What to modern man may seem synical seemed to contemporaries generous and unusual; his effect on them will be better understood if this is borne in mind.