What I Read in May 2012

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Two teen-age boys are sent to the remote countryside during Mao’s cultural revolution. Their “re-education” there comes not from the hard work in field and mine, but from secretly reading the French classics which have been translated into Chinese. They also educate the little seamstress, but what she learns is not what they expect.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black. The classic French novel from 1830, read by me in translation. The story begins as a tale of poor but ambitious young man on the make, moves into high-flown romance and ends as melodrama.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Translated into Modern English by Nevill Coghill. I started this in a four-session class, where we only read selections, and then finished it on my own. It was a long slog, seemed like. I found many delightful patches, but as a whole it wearied me. I am not the person who can fully appreciate literature from this period.

Alison Lurie, Love and Friendship. After the heavy going in Stendahl and Chaucer, this light-weight academic social comedy was just the ticket. All is not well on the idyllic but isolated campus of Convers College, but then, why should it be?

Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. The long subtitle accurately describes this affectionate but honest account of John Cheever’s life. After reading Cheever’s published Journals and Blake Bailey’s detailed biography, I thought I knew all I needed — or wanted — to know of this teller of suburban tales. I knew too much. Susan Cheever does it better in this sympathetic telling of her father’s story.

The Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer), adapted by Seymour Chwast.  The whole thing is too long to read? You want a version more entertaining than Cliffs Notes? This graphic interpretation is probably right for you. It’s complete — all the tales and the prologues and the epilogues — but just the good parts, happily interpreted.

Patricia O’Brien, The Glory Cloak. In this historical novel, we meet and mingle real-life figures like Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton with fictional characters. The time is the Civil War, when Alcott served briefly as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Washington.

Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. It was not a quick trip from the Galapagos Islands to The Origin of Species and Darwin did not make the trip alone. He followed along behind Smith and Lamarck and Lyell and all the others who were trying to make sense of the discoveries of science.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low

That’s not my choice of a title, but the translator’s rendering of the French Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. I would have preferred the more literal Splendors and Miseries (misfortunes?) of Courtesans. “High and Low” implies a social or moral dimension the book has not shown so far. Reading this Balzac for my book group, I have finished parts 1 and 2 and am honor-bound not to read — or reveal — further until after our group discussion.

This novel is a continuation of the story of young Lucien from the provinces, the poet and sometime journalist of Lost Illusions. That said, where is Lucien? He has disappeared into a world of found illusions where every character seems to have at least three names and two identities. The “splendors” of the title amount to conspicuous consumption based on sex. A bored aristocrat with enough money or a member of the nouveau riche, who by definition has plenty of money, displays it by keeping a courtesan in elegant and expensive circumstances. Her prestige in turn depends on the level of expenditure she can evoke. She also indirectly supports a band of jewelers, dressmakers, florists, servants, carriage horses and even a stray lover or two.

Love is dangerous in a profession where artifice is all. According to Lucien’s mentor, as he contemplates courtesan Esther’s love for Lucien:

All these angels turn into women again, sooner or later; and at moments all women are at once ape and child! two forms of life in which we encourage laughter at our cost, if only in boredom….”

All society, the legitimate as well as the marginal, is based on artifice and simulated emotions. In the marquis’ drawing room, participants react to the news of a dangerously ill family member:

A group of women was remarkable for the diverse attitudes each took from her manner of playing mock grief. In society, nobody is interested in suffering or misfortune, everything is talk.

Balzac doesn’t view women as adult human beings (whereas men apparently are), but still he thinks he can tell the difference between false love and real love.

When they [women] are all they say they are, when truly they are in love, they behave as Esther did, as children do, as true love does; Esther didn’t say a word, she lay with her face in the cushions and wept hot tears.

This sort of thing becomes wearisome. The love story is lightened however by Balzac’s evident delight in financial wheeling and dealing. Esther’s patron is a successful banker who does what bankers do.

Forcing the states of Europe to borrow at twenty or ten per cent, making up this ten or  twenty per cent from public funds, holding whole industries to ransom by monopolizing raw materials, throwing a line to some large speculator to pull him out of the water while one recovers his drowned enterprise, such pecuniary warfare constitutes the high politics of money.

So what else is new! Balzac’s grasp of the psychology of financial speculation is far more credible that his understanding of women in love.

Jane Eyre: Choices

Jane Eyre is the one with her eyes open.

Initially Jane Eyre had no choices at all. Orphaned, she was left to an aunt by marriage who did not care for her at all. The opinion in the house: “If she were a nice, pretty child, one might compasionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.”

Even with that unpromising beginning, she asserts her own opinion, when she meets with the domineering Mr. Brocklehurst who threatens her with hell:

“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”

“A pit full of fire.”

“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”

“No, sir.”

“What must you do to avoid it?”

I deliberated for a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health and not die.”

Again and again, Jane exercises her power to judge and to choose based on her own views of herself and others. She does not shirk her obligations, but she understands their limits. When her hateful aunt dies, she goes to assist her and her cousins.

It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I thought to myself, “If you and I were destined to live always together, cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing, I would not settle tamely down into being the forbearing party; I should assign you your share of labour and compel you to accomplish it, or else it should be left undone….”

After the marriage with Rochester is broken off, she flees. St. John Rivers — another domineering but more tactful clergyman — offers her marriage along with the opportunity to serve in the East. She tries to negotiate with him for service without the marriage. The pressures are great, but she turns him down.

Every reader remembers the proud declaration at the end of the book: “Reader, I married him.” She wasn’t pressured, she wasn’t swept up, she chose to be Rochester’s wife and support.

At A Year of Feminist Classics, we are discussing Jane Eyre this month. Some readers find in Charlotte Bronte’s novel only a thrilling romance, but few romances  persist in our imaginations for over 150 years. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, thought Jane  was too angry and it did not become her. Woolf herself admits to considerable annoyance with the male establishment, so it is strange that she begrudges it to Bronte who wrote in  an even more restricted time.

I don’t think the strength of the book is in the romance or in the anger, but in the Jame’s clear-headed knowledge that she had the right to have her own opinions and to act upon them, to make the choices that matter.

How I Set the Community Table

For those interested in the history of the American silver industry, I have added a new page: How I Set the Community Table.

The gentleman with the beard is John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the utopian Oneida Community. The members of the Community made and sold many items to support themselves, including silverplated flatware. Pierrepont Noyes, one of the sons of the founder, led Oneida into design and production of the high-quality Community line of silverplate.

I have been a collector of Community artifacts and a student of its history for many years. Last year I donated much of my collection to the Mansion House and they asked me to explain, in their Journal, how I had come to set the Community table. Click here for the page and the story.

Patricia O’Brien, The Glory Cloak

A historical novel mingles known historical or mythological figures with the characters invented by the novelist. In David Malouf’s Ransom, we meet the King Priam we thought we knew from The Iliad interacting with a local wagon driver. Or, in the novels of Anatoli Rybakov, a very real and terrible Stalin pursues his obsessions, while the novel’s invented characters — who seem just as real — live out the consequences of his crime. The problem for the novelist is not so much the invented characters, for those she can control, but to portray known persons just as believably.

In The Glory Cloak, Patricia O’Brien succeeds, partially. As admirers of Louisa May Alcott already know, during the Civil War she volunteered as a nurse in Union Hospital in Washington and served there until typhoid fever took her down. Patricia O’Brien imagines the hospital and the wounded men there, as well as an acquaintance with Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross) and an invented cousin/sister, Susan Gray. Mostly it works. The opening Concord sections are a little stiff, perhaps too respectful, but the hospital environment is credibly menacing, making clear the courage of the women who served there. Those who have read Alcott’s Hospital Sketches cannot forget the noble blacksmith who died of his wounds. O’Brien takes that character and builds a story of intrigue and romance.

When Susan, the invented character, reads her friend’s Little Women, her immediate reaction is “she left me out!” Alcott the author understands her disappointment; she also understands the danger of making herself a character in fiction.

“I want to make one thing clear, first. Father isn’t in my book either,” she said.

“I did see that.” I shifted my feet.

And then she said something curious. “I was Jo, wasn’t I?”

“Of course you were,” I said, surprised.

“I am no longer.”

The Glory Cloak is a much better recreation of the Alcott story than other novels which have attempted the same thing. It succeeds, however, because the best parts of the story are turned over to the novelist’s own characters, Susan Gray and the noble blacksmith.

Which Way to Canterbury?

I have recently been to Canterbury and back, in company with Geoffrey Chaucer (England, c. 1400). I made a round trip. On the way out I traveled by horse with Nevill Coghill in his modern English translation of the middle English original. The Canterbury Tales is a collection, so the mood of each tale changes to fit the story. The travelers themselves tell us how it is. An aging Reeve says

…the strength to play that game
Is gone, though we love fooishness the same.
What we can’t do no more we talk about
And rake the ashes when the fire is out.

The ashes are the ashes of love and deception, a common theme in many of the stories, and I was not surprised by them. I was surprised by the anti-clericalism of many of the tales, although Chaucer is careful to condemn individual churchmen and not the doctrines of the church.

Since you have heard this filthy friar lie,
Let me refute him. I’ve a tale to tell!
This friar boasts his knowledge about Hell,
And if he does, God knows it’s little wonder;
Friars and fields are seldom far asunder.

I also found some bathroom humor; the kind of thing that 10-year-olds think is funny.

The return trip from Canterbury was faster. I came back by motorcycle with the Host from the tavern driving and Chaucer in the sidecar.

This trip was made possible by Seymour Chwast, with his graphic interpretation of that long-ago pilgrimage. Nothing is left out — all the tales, prologues and epilogues are there. I enjoyed this version. The irreverent spirit seems very true to the spirit of the original.

There is still another way to Canterbury: the original route through the thickets of Middle English. I’m not the person for that trip — too old, too little time — but if you want a preview of the journey, here is a reading of the Prologue to get you started.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black

Under the pen name Stendahl, Marie Henri Beyle published The Red and the Black in 1830, just as the July revolution was overthrowing one monarch to replace him with another. In literature it was a romantic time, and this is a romantic novel, although it does not start out that way. It begins with Julien Sorel, a striver with ability and ambition, who pursues his own interests in a society which has re-ossified into conservatism after the excesses of the Revolution and the imperial ambitions of Napoleon. Hypocrisy is his necessary technique.

“Imagine,” he said to himself, shaking his head, “Napoleon’s portrait found hidden in the room of a man who professes nothing but hatred for the usurper!… And — the height of recklessness — …lines written in my own hand which can leave no doubt about the warmth of my admiration.”

Sorel is sincere in his ambitions, and Stendahl’s mocking of the social pretensions of the day make for effective comedy. A successful businessman who considers the evidence that his wife is unfaithful knows what is important when he makes his judgement.

“I am used to Louise,” he said to himself; “she knows all about my business affairs. If I were free to marry tomorrow, I couldn’t replace her.” Then he flattered himself with the idea that his wife was innocent; this way of seeing things spared him from showing firmness of character and suited him much better.

This was all very well, but events and the tone of the book changed. The trajectory of my reading pleasure looks like this: all down hill after a strong beginning.

At first, Sorel’s love affairs, like his studies in the seminary, are under the control of his desire to get ahead in a world that has little use for him. This restraint doesn’t last. Sometimes he loves her, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes she loves him, sometimes she doesn’t. We are in such a whirl of romantic intoxication that very little makes sense. What does make sense is the gift for comedy Stendahl maintains until just before the end. For example, Sorel’s diligently copies out a series of love letters from a book provided by a worldly acquaintance, addressing them not to his lady love but to a rival, thus provoking a useful jealousy. The tactic works, but then everything dissolves in violence, as Sorel turns away from everything: love, ambition, life itself. The ending is pure melodrama. It would be funny too, if if were not so unbelievable.

Alison Lurie, Love and Friendship

When an Alison Lurie novel turns up, I read it, for the pleasure of her acute social observations and her believable characters. Love and Friendship is her first published novel, before the better-known The War between the Tates and Foreign Affairs.

Alison Lurie taught for many years at Cornell; she knows academic life and academic people. In small and prestigious — but isolated — Convers College, a new young instructor struggles to establish himself. His wife struggles with the weather and, mostly, her boredom. She has not yet read Betty Friedan but she knows what is right, based on her privileged education in a well-off family. Despite this knowledge, she has an engrossing and — shall we say — satisfying affair. When, however, she reflected on the consequences of breaking up her marriage, this reader had serious doubts she could go through with it:

The truth was, no time would be good for such news. It was utterly impossible that it should be be well received. Previously it had not occurred to Emmy to wonder what her parents would say. She did not have to wonder now; she knew. Dada had not liked Holman in the beginning, but now it he was used to him. He was accustomed to the idea that his daughter was Mrs. Holman Turner, and he disliked altering his ideas. When he heard that Will had been married before and had not made a go of it, he would consider him a bad risk, like a corporation which had once already been liquidated, and he would look upon him with suspicion and scorn….

The book is a well-paced picture of a marriage gone wrong between two well-meaning but naive practitioners of that compromising art. In this first novel, Lurie already has a firm grasp of character development, but the structure of her book is somewhat scattered, with too many points of view and a chorus of comments by another outsider who does not participate in the action and whom we never meet.

Concord Weekend

Before I could get out the door for our long-planned Concord weekend, Susan Bailey at Louisa May Alcott Is My Passion posted a similar report. Great minds think alike.

After our arrival Thursday afternoon we enjoyed just walking through this lovely town, enjoying the spring flowers and the well-preserved churches and buildings.

Friday morning we toured Louisa May Alcott’s home at Orchard House.

Then it was on to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the North Bridge where the first engagement of the American Revolution was fought.

After lunch we visited Walden Pond, to walk on its lovely shore and study the reconstruction of Thoreau’s cabin.

Saturday morning we went to the Wayside — one of the homes of the Alcotts and, later, of Nathaniel Hawthorne — but we found it closed. We visited another revolutionary war site, Merriam’s Corner, as well as the Concord Free Library. Among other attractions it has paintings and sculptures of Concord authors, including a Daniel Chester French statue of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The highlight of the day was a performance of Little Women by The Concord Players. This community theater group was founded by Louisa May Alcott and her sister Anna and has been in continuous existence ever since. Every 10 years they present Little Women in Louisa May Alcott’s honor. Blogger Susan Bailey (see above) joined us. We laughed (mostly) and cried (a little).

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I love this novel by Dai Sijie. Set in China, written in French and read by me in English translation, it is a story outside of place and language. Yet it takes its beauty and emotional impact from the specifics of place and the power of stories in our lives.

It is the cultural revolution in Mao’s China. The parents of two teen-age boys, once respected professionals, are now enemies of the people and so their sons are sent to the countryside for re-education through labor. The village on Phoenix Mountain is beyond the back of beyond. They are not abused there, but their life is hard. They are under surveillance, performing crude manual labor. The seamstress is the daughter of the local tailor, who serves several villages, traveling with his sewing machine. To obtain new clothes requires two days walk down the mountain to the market town to buy cloth, two days walk to return, and finally a date with the itinerant tailor. New clothes are a community event, as everyone gathers around to see the process and the product — what other entertainment do they have!

Much better entertainment is provided by stories. The boys recount the plots of movies they have seen.

I was overcome by stage freight and was reduced to a mechanical recitation of the setting of each scene. But here Luo’s genius for storytelling came into its own. He was sparing with his descriptions, but acted the part of each character in turn, adjusting his tone of voice and gestures accordingly. He took complete control of the narrative, keeping up the suspense, asking the listeners questions, making them respond and correcting their answers. By the time we, or rather he, reached the end of the story, in the allotted time, our audience was ecstatic.

How wonderful are these dramatic plots from Communist Chinese, North Korean or Albanian films!  But better yet, and enjoyed exclusively by these boys are the novels they find and steal. Translated from French to Chinese, the authors include Balzac, Dumas and Rolland, with a little Gogol and Melville thrown in. The narrator reads his first western novel, by Balzac.

Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all this life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.

The boys befriend — and are befriended by — the little seamstress. She had youth, beauty and spirit, but minimal education and no experience of other places. Through the boys, she meets Balzac also, and the consequences I leave for you to discover so that you can enjoy the book as much as I did. Short (only 184 pages and I wanted more), this novel does what the best-written novels do in any language. We are in a particular place, which we experience, meeting particular people, who are real, and learning some universal truths of human life.