What I Read in June 2012

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women. This biography for young people, written in the 1930s, is accurate and insightful, if somewhat incomplete. No romance here, but a solid sense of Alcott’s accomplishment.

Sara Paretsky, Total Recall: A V. I. Warshawski Novel. The Chicago female private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Washshawski, meets schemers and crazies in this suspenseful novel of Holocaust victims, survivors, and the immoral insurance companies who rip them off.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low. Free at last, after 554 pages. Click here for my comment on the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with the structure of the French criminal justice system; the layout of the prisons and the courts (no corridor or staircase is omitted); the lawyers, magistrates, procurators, chaplains, turnkeys, police, detectives, detectives in disguise, spies, criminals — major, petty and demented. He puts forward some interesting theories about criminals. Instead of marijuana as an entry-level drug, we have the sex-obsessed man who steals a shawl for his girlfriend and goes on to a life of crime. It will be a long time before I persist to the end of another Balzac.

Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Housekeep Book. Peg understands. It’s not so much that I hate housekeeping. It’s not like war or mosquitoes — I do admit its necessity. It’s just that I have better things to think about, much less do. Written in 1962, the technology has changed somewhat, but the principles are as true as they ever were.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool. The risk pool is where you have to get your insurance when you have had so many accidents no insurance company will have you as a customer. In this early novel, Russo tells the story of Sam Hall — energetic and smart, but also uneducated, sometimes alcoholic and always a risk taker.

Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves. By five pages in I knew that I had read this one before, but it was all so pleasant that I just kept going. No surprises in this tale of a young woman who settles — temporarily? she is not sure — in an English village, but a lot of worthy characters and amusing incidents.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life. To tell of the life of Cleopatra, Schiff must also tell of Caesar and Pompey and Octavia and Mark Antony, especially Mark Mark Antony. The life is skillfully told in a book dense with history and rich with the images of ancient Egypt.

Peg Bracken, I Didn’t Come Here to Argue. The switch from Cleopatra to Peg Bracken is to go from queenly edicts in ancient Egypt to American middle class commentary. These diverse essays are a follow on to The I Hate To Housekeep Book (see above). A little dated, but a welcome diversion after Ptolemaic troubles.

Susan Cheever, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. Just the facts about Alcott’s life with personal commentary by the author of American Bloomsbury. Cheever sees Alcott within her world, not ours. I hope to have more comments on the book in July.

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.

Cheever: A Life

I read a lot of New Yorker fiction during my high school years but, if I read John Cheever’s stories, I don’t remember any of them, probably because I didn’t understand them. His accounts of life in Westchester County were too far removed from the southern Ohio suburb that I knew. When, a few years ago, I started in on the 1978 collection of his short stories I was hooked.

I followed up with The Wapshot Chronicle and, recently, The Journals of John Cheever. Here I encountered a complicated and unhappy man, constantly complaining about his wife and his children — when he wasn’t declaring how much he loved them . He was constantly looking for the gin bottle in the pantry and reporting on the state of his penis, excuse me, “cock.” It was tedious and offputting, leaving me disappointed in a writer I had admired until then.

Let’s be fair. Blake Bailey’s full-scale biography, Cheever: A Life, goes far to reconcile me to Cheever the man, as well as Cheever the writer. “You are a Cheever!” he would say to his sons to remind them to shape up. John Cheever spent his life trying to be a certain Cheever, spending a great deal of emotional energy denying those parts of his own nature which did not fit. Did this make him the writer that he was — observant, able to wonder at the peculiarities of life, ironic about the good and bad in all our natures? Bailey takes us into Cheever’s world and lets us see not only what he made of it in his years of journal writing, but also what others made of him. Most of them admired them, knowing little of his inner life. Yet, as Bailey makes clear in his astute critical comments, that inner life is there, in the stories. He takes us through the life, year by year and detail by detail. That could be boring, but it’s not because there really is someone alive in there, and we get to know him.

This lengthy account of one writer’s life cannot be undertaken lightly but, the end reached, it seems well worth the journey. His younger son, Frederico, expressed his reconciliation with a difficult father at his funeral:

When I would return home from school after some athletic fiasco or other he would tell me ‘Fred, remember you are a Cheever.’ I would ask what that meant and he would say ‘It means knowing who you are’ … What I have discovered is that part of what I am is John Cheever.

The Journals of John Cheever

John Updike says it well in his review of John Cheever’s book in The New Republic:

To speak personally, this old acquaintance and longtime admirer of Cheever’s had to battle, while reading these Journals, with the impulse to close his eyes…. His confessions posthumously administer a Christian lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition; they present, with an almost unbearable fullness, a post-Adamic man, an unreconciled bundle of cravings and complaints, whose consolations — the glory of the sky, the company of his young sons — have the ring of hollow cheer in the vastness of his dissatisfaction.

A few years ago, I greatly enjoyed the 1978 collection of Cheever short stories. Those were just snippets of the dissatisfaction Updike observed. Taken through year after year of loneliness and discontent in the published journals, the vastness and repetition of the unhappiness moves out of art and into pathology. Constantly involved with reporting his own thoughts and surveying his own skin, Cheever shows little sense of a similar set of concerns within other human beings. After years of conflict, John and Mary consult a psychiatrist:

The gaze of his golden eye is vast and steady. His face might be described as soft. The picture, as I saw it, was that I, an innocent and fortunate creature, had married a woman who suffered from deep psychic disturbances. The picture, as it was presented to me, was of a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife.

Cheever rejects this analysis and the psychiatric consultations are discontinued.

Cheever came to understand and to acknowledge that he was bi-sexual. He was attracted to men, but he he also dreams of beautiful and loving young women. If a woman is not up to his standards of beauty, he questions why would anyone reward her with sex. In MacDonald’s:

There is a couple–a mother and son, I think. She is one of those women of such exhaustive plainness that you wonder about the moment of conception. What could have compelled anyone to penetrate her?

Women must be unmistakably female, or as he says elsewhere “wifely”:

There was a genre of imperious women in the twenties whose hell-for -leather manner made them seem slightly mannish. They were sometimes beautiful, but their airs were predatory and their voices were sometimes quite guttural.

But no real wife can be wifely enough. The marriage fluctuates between good, bad and merely tolerable. Even during a good period, Cheever is confused about cause and effect.

So on my knees in church I am grateful for the present turn of events in my marriage, and I pray it may continue, although I do see that some of the difficulties seem to be part of my immortal soul and that these difficulties were at times made tolerable by my drunkenness.

Tolerable? For whom?

The Stories of John Cheever

After reading the review of the new biography of John Cheever, I decided to sample his short stories. Did I remember any of them from New Yorker days? I wasn’t sure. I certainly did not expect to plow (crawl? amble? swim?) through the entire length of a 693-page book, but I could not disengage. Every day I treated myself to a a half dozen stories and looked forward to another day.

Cheever develops more than one type of story. There is the incident, brief and well told, in which character is all. There is the span of years story – I saw him as a boy and then 20 years later and then last week – and these are not always successful in suggesting the flow of time. There is the story in another voice, the Italian maid telling us of her adventures in the new world.

Best of all, there are the stories where it all comes together: the time, the place, the people. The enormous radio communicates with those who are not worthy to understand its revelations. A man, full of contempt for the weakness of others, develops a fear of crossing bridges until his fear is sung away by an angel. Another man oppressed by an angry wife uses Euclid to escape.