Henry Green, “Loving”

Henry Green’s Loving is the first of the short novels in the handsome Penguin volume that recently turned up at my door. I’m referring you again to the useful Sebastian Faulks piece from 2005 for background; this is where I found that Loving was written in 1945 which makes it a later work than Living. (Green was rather fond of short titles.) It’s sneakier, subtler, and in a way both more peculiar and more seductive than the earlier novel.

The setting is an immense country house in Ireland during WWII. Mrs. Tennant, her daughter-in-law Mrs. Jack and the latter’s two daughters are waited on by nine (or is it ten?) servants. The novel opens thus: “Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid Miss Agatha Burch… One name he uttered over and over, ‘Ellen.’” This, readers, is misdirection. Eldon dies and we never find out who Ellen was. Charley Raunce, the first footman, is promoted to butler and indeed, a principal character. Description of Raunce is very limited: “a pale individual, paler now.” Some of the material in these first few pages will turn out to be useful and some will not. Only gradually does the reader make out who or what the novel is really about.

This might have been annoying but it felt… legitimate. Authentic. If you entered the Castle through the servants’ entrance, it would take you time to suss out the identities and alliances of the characters, and you would waste time on the unimportant ones. You would misunderstand what you had witnessed. I frequently had to  re-read paragraphs or pages to set myself straight. Mysteries remain: do all those peacocks matter? (Green has quite a thing about birds, here and in Living.) What about the foreshadowing, when Green intimates that the house will eventually burn? That lost sapphire ring, is that, heaven help me, a symbol?

The story mattered less than the telling. Green is a tremendous eavesdropper and transcriber of informal speech. “I got those sheets from the Gold Bedroom to mend. I wish the people they have to stay would cut their toenails or lie quiet one or the other.” He captures the wandering, inconsequential nature of dialogue and the foggy way we perceive human relations. At the heart of the novel is the simplest thing, a love story, but we feel its halting progress almost in real time. Even the narrator doesn’t claim to be an expert: “This answer probably made Mrs. Tennant obstinate.” Probably?

But the deliberate obfuscation isn’t malicious. Green offers gifts with his indirection. For instance, there are two characters name Albert. Who gives two characters the same name? Well, life does. And it’s funny. Further, when it comes down to direct perception, the narrator takes charge. Here’s Edith, the beautiful housemaid in her purple uniform dress, feeding the peacocks: “They came forward until they had her surrounded. Then a company of doves flew down… to be fed. They settled all over her. And their fluttering disturbed Raunce who re-opened his eyes… he saw with great delight. For what with the peacocks bowing at her purple skirts, the white doves nodding on her shoulders round her brilliant cheeks and her great eyes that blinked tears of happiness, it made a picture.” Sometimes what you get from a novel is pictures. And sometimes that’s enough.

Daisy Goodwin, “The American Heiress”/”My Last Duchess”

The late-19th-century cultural phenomenon of American heiresses marrying into the English aristocracy has attracted literary attention from the moment it began: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady was published in 1880, a mere six years after the foundational match between Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill. James worked this seam thoroughly, followed by Edith Wharton, most notably in her final, unfinished novel The Buccaneers. James and Wharton concentrated on the tension — both emotional and social — generated by these matches, but several of their contemporaries wrote escapist fiction on the same theme that focused more on the voyeuristic aspects of the situation. (Look for Gertrude Atherton’s 1898 American Wives and English Husbands, Constance Cary Harrison’s 1890 Anglomaniacs, or Mary E. Sherwood’s 1882 A Transplanted Rose.) The men’s castles, the women’s jewelry, the parties, the scandals, the love matches and the divorces — this was social climbing taken to the extreme and it entertained many people for a long time.

Sargent's portrait of the 9th Duke of Marlborough and his Duchess, formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt, plus the heir and the spare

Apparently it still does. Daisy Goodwin’s The American Heiress (which was published in the UK as My Last Duchess) revisits the heiress/aristocrat marriage. I have to say, I am not the right audience for this book, because I have previously written about it myself. So by page 10, I could identify not only the models of the characters and settings, but also the author’s sources. That’s my problem, not Goodwin’s. I finished the book because I was curious to see what she would make of it. Her heiress is the usual headstrong beauty, here named Cora Cash. (The elbow-in-the-side name is an unusually blatant touch.) The tale opens with a set-piece of a Newport ball before Cora is whisked over to England where she and her dollars will be trailed before impecunious English suitors. She and the handsome enigmatic Duke of Wareham meet cute in Paradise Wood on his estate — so far, so Georgette Heyer.

The interesting part of the book is not the courtship but what happens afterward, as Duchess Cora and her aristocratic Ivo begin to negotiate a relationship.  Goodwin is at her best imagining the obstacles presented by the Duke’s pride, Cora’s expectations, and their mutual misunderstanding. There were flickers of Wharton here: that sense you get in some of Wharton’s novels of appealing characters who can’t get out of their own way. Cora’s impetuous efforts to please her husband misfire repeatedly, understandably. (She’s slow on the uptake about how little he likes a surprise.)  Her money is almost a character in its own right, and looms large in the marriage.

Ultimately, though, The American Heiress is not interested in exploring the finer emotional shades. Ivo’s habit of running hot and cold with Cora turns out to have a more mundane cause and we’re back in Georgette Heyer-land. Without, sadly, Heyer’s light touch.

Henry Green, “Living”

Two days ago a mysterious unbidden package from Amazon arrived at my apartment, containing Penguin’s extremely handsome edition of three short Henry Green novels, Loving, Living, and Party Going. The giver had sent it to me on the strength of the cover alone and oh, goodness, he was right: what a fabulous image! 

So then, having finished How to Live, of course I had to begin this trio in the middle by reading Living. And titles aside, the two works have very little in common. In fact one salient point about the characters in Living is that they get very little time to ask philosophical questions at all. But first, Henry Green: this Sebastian Faulks piece on him pretty much covers what you’d want to know. Living is set in Birmingham in the late 1920s and the characters are all involved in the Dupret iron works. Most of them work there, and Living pulses with English industry: the sirens, the floods of workmen on the street, the blackened landscape. The proprietor’s family are involved in the story, sardonically. Green does not idealize the workers either, though. In fact he focuses closely on the shifting layers of alliance and animosity all up and down the chain of command. Green makes quite a point of the various linguistic quirks which range from broad country to upper-class twit.

Of more concern to me, though, was what Green did to his own narrative voice: “Standing in foundry shop son of Mr. Dupret thought in mind and it seemed to him that these iron castings were beautiful and he reached out fingers to them, he touched them: he thought and only in machinery it seemd to him was savagery left now …” Often the definite article is left out, I suppose to emulate the flavor of north country speech. And I have to say, I was not thrilled by this quirk. It served its purpose, I suppose, but I was always reading in spite of Green’s diction rather than admiring it.

Yet the central household is very sympathetic. Grandfather Mr. Craigan (who apparently has no first name), father Joe Gates, lodger Jim Dale, and daughter Lily Gates make a completely believable little emotional ecosystem. Green demonstrates the pressures they are under in the Dupret works, for Craigan though skilled is old, Gates is uppity, Dale one of those men who cannot do themselves justice. What is the best that Lily can hope for — more of the same? A husband who will bring home his paycheck rather than drinking it? How to live is hardly the point for these characters. They can’t step away from the process long enough to give it any thought. They just have to get on with it – living.

Sarah Bakewell, “How to Live”

With Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, I have strayed pretty far from my comfort zone. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction and I rarely wander beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But I was attracted by a friend’s recommendation, at least enough to read a chapter of How to Live. And after that, I was hooked.

Here’s what I knew about Michel de Montaigne before I began the book:  that he wrote a set of immensely influential essays in France… ummm. Now, I not only know about Montaigne’s Essays, I know also about the Greek philosophies that underpin them. I have finally, finally gained a grasp of the French religious wars in the sixteenth century. (Montaigne’s dates: 1533-1592.) I know why Henri IV thought “Paris is worth a Mass.” I know whose mother was Catherine de Medici. To my amazement I expect to retain this information but to my greater amazement I appear to have absorbed an understanding of Montaigne’s influence on European thought. (Rousseau! Nietzsche! Stefan Zweig!)

Montaigne's chateau. Photo by Henry Salome

And do I know how to live? Well, I know how Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne said to live. More than that I will not venture, for that is part of the answer: “Philosophise only by accident” and “Let life be its own answer.” In fact, the book is something of a fun-house of mirrors. Bakewell asks the question twenty times: “How to live?” In twenty chapter/responses, she narrates the course of Montaigne’s life and traces the reception of the Essays, while quoting liberally from them. One of the points she makes most strongly is that Montaigne himself was a temperate skeptic, intent on seeing every side of a question, anti-polemical, endlessly curious, insatiably personal: the last man, in short, to pronounce dogma. And as Bakewell makes clear, the Essays have endured because they are capacious. Montaigne contradicted himself constantly, proposed one opinion then another, failed to stick to his subject. Isn’t this fractured point of view exactly appropriate to our era? Gosh, maybe Michel de Montaigne was a one-man crowd-source — sometimes Bakewell suggests he reads that way.

Which brings me to a larger question. Toward the end of the book Bakewell engages in some hard-core historiography, recounting the battles between two variant texts of the essays. (She does this with irreverence, making the saga quite entertaining.) I was reminded of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, and the way Schiff also exposes her sources and her process. Is this, in our skeptical era, how biography has to be written? We are so far, here, from the seamless authoritative narration of the expert. I suspect Bakewell might agree that this, too, is a fashion. The flaw is the loss of the continuous narrative and I must say, I miss it. But I have to admit that I have not hitherto read a (narrative, authoritative) life of Montaigne. And this one I not only read, but enjoyed. I credit much of that enjoyment to Bakewell’s intense — and thus contagious — affection for her subject.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, “I Shall Not Want”

Uh-oh. I’m getting to the end of the series.

You know the feeling: There’s only one left?  And it’s not coming out for a month? That’s where I am with Julia Spencer-Fleming. I read faster than she writes.

On the other hand, if she didn’t take so much care writing her books they wouldn’t be so good. That’s just the deal. The balance between mystery/puzzle and character would not be so well-calibrated. The introduction of new characters not so interesting. The exploration of the setting not so rich.

It’s the latter quality that particularly struck me in I Shall Not Want. Mysteries must take place in a small community in order to limit the pool of suspects. Hence nun mysteries, country house murders, small-town crime series. If you’re lucky, as a writer you get to produce a series of these works and then your challenge is inventing your bad guy. Is he a home-grown case? Or does he come from Outside? This time around, the threat is external.

It turns out that there are Mexican farm workers in upstate New York. We are introduced to this notion by Rev. Clare Fergusson’s discussion with a feisty nun. Naturally our hotheaded rector drags St. Alban’s into a ministry to the migrants, annoying some of her vestry members. And naturally a dead body is found and the investigative spotlight turns on the aliens, legal and illegal. Naturally also Russ van Alstyne, as chief of police, spearheads the investigation and it all seems perfectly plausible. If there’s a whiff of the “issue novel” it’s minor. Spencer-Fleming is comfortable with letting awkward truths hang before us. (In fact the upcoming novel, One Was a Soldier, centers on Iraq war veterans.) Spencer-Fleming is also, it turns out, comfortable writing sex scenes. She must have decided she’d spun out the tension long enough, and her protagonists Clare and Russ finally get some satisfaction. If that weren’t enough, she introduces a new female recruit to the Millers Kill Police Department and sparks fly there, as well. It’s a smart move. Keeping things interesting among the secondary characters is an essential element of retaining readers’ interest over the span of a series. I know I’m not alone in waiting for more.

Kate O’Brien, “The Land of Spices”

This is where the world of book bloggers is so satisfying. You read, say, Antonia White’s Frost in May and allude to the sub-genre of nun fiction. Your delightful bookish friends follow up by recommending other nun novels, including Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices. Eventually you read it and hope that your bookish friends will chime in with their opinions — and you have never laid eyes on these people! The whole phenomenon makes me very grateful.

Not, mind you, that The Land of Spices was a home run for me. On the plus side: lots of circumstantial detail about life in a convent school in 1910s Ireland. The Compagnie de la Sainte Famille is a French foundation, somewhat aristocratic and international in character, proposing to teach its students la pudeur et la politesse. Modesty and good manners are obviously, in O’Brien’s estimation, values of an earlier age but she’s even-handed enough to let us see their attractive qualities.

The novel is seen largely through the eyes of Helen Archer, otherwise known as Reverend Mother Marie-Hélène. An intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman, she is out of place in the increasingly nationalistic Ireland of the era. Owing to a childhood trauma and her own nature, she is reserved, even cold. Her much-loved father calls her “merciless.” One of the essential conflicts of the novel is Reverend Mother’s struggle with her flaws which (this being a nun novel) divide her from God.

the convent is in Limerick, according to Clare Boylan's 1999 introduction

Little Anna Murphy is Reverend Mother’s antithesis — or rather, a childish version of Reverend Mother, brought to the convent at the age of six to escape troubles at home. Brilliant, observant, an obsessive reader, she felt to me like a possible stand-in for O’Brien herself. Anna “developed a need, a love of reading, which made her unsociable and absent-minded towards other children as it grew. She was, for many of her early years, the kind of reader who will gratefully read anything rather than not read. Words, their shapes and lengths, their possibilities of breaking into other words, or into pairs and groups of letters, became her constant amusement…” That is surely the voice of experience describing Anna’s development? (Which is no doubt familiar to some of you book worms.)

There is, however, something slightly charmless about O’Brien’s writing. Where it can be sensual — she is keenly sensitive to visual beauty and deft at describing it — it is also didactic and insistent. Saying something once is not enough. O’Brien is sometimes affecting but always earnest.

Maybe nun novels always are earnest. Maybe this is because they are often a way to think about feminine authority, especially in the mid-twentieth century. The Land of Spices in some respects explores the themes of Rumer Godden’s more middle-brow In This House of Brede: how can an intellectually capable woman lead other women who are not her peers? Does authority cancel warmth? Can religious humility coexist with leadership? Is it possible to lead without emotion? Is it possible to lead with it?

The title, by the way, comes from George Herbert’s sonnet, “Prayer.” It is characteristic of O’Brien to allude to this fact without spelling it out.

Elizabeth Taylor, “A Game of Hide and Seek”

I read Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian back in January as part of the highly enjoyable Virago Reading Week. As if it weren’t enough fun to read splendid books and read other people’s reviews of them, Rachel of Book Snob and Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books had prizes to distribute and I was lucky enough to receive A Game of Hide and Seek. I was thrilled — and that was before I read it.

Palladian plays with the Jane Eyre tradition, with a mousy governess and handsome widower in a decaying country house. A Game of Hide and Seek alludes to Madame Bovary, and there is a moment when poor Emma is mentioned explicitly. Harriet is the restless wife, married to dull solicitor Charles (Charles!) Jephcott in a nameless English provincial town in the 1950s. Her Léon/Rodolphe is Vesey, a childhood friend, but here the Bovary resemblance is reversed. It is Vesey rather than Harriet who has learned about life from unsavory books (“Wells and Tchekov, Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe”). Briefly, Vesey and Harriet flirt as teenagers, and when they meet again as adults, the sexual spark re-awakens. Vesey can’t resist twitching the thread of attraction and Harriet can’t resist… well, him. For Vesey is a bad boy, skinny and dark-haired — think the young Bryan Ferry, perhaps. He is neglected by his parents and prone to drama: “In his mother’s room one day he put on her jewellery, sniffed at her scent, varnished his nails, read a book on birth control, took six aspirins, then lay down like Chatterton on the window-seat, his hands drooping to the floor.  When the housekeeper returned, he had half-opened his eyes. ‘I am doing away with myself,’ he had said. ‘I have supped my full of horrors.’”

Harriet’s appeal is more muted. She is loyal, shy, not obviously talented, the kind of girl for whom Something must be Found until she marries. When life separates her from Vesey, domesticity is her only option. And she tries, she really does: “When she married Charles, she had seemed to wed also a social order. A convert to it, and to provincial life, and keeping house, she had pursued it fanatically… No one had entertained more methodically, or better bolstered up social interplay.”

Among Vesey's transgressions: gray suede shoes

The tension in the novel twines around this mismatched pair, naturally. But in retrospect I also find fascinating Taylor’s focus on the various mothers, the good, the bad, the indifferent, and the fates of their children. Something in the air at the time (1951) when the book was first published? In any event I greatly enjoyed Harriet’s mother-in-law Julia Jephcott. An aging actress, she exists to needle her awkward son Charles and to entertain the readers: “Mad, raffish, unselfconscious, she had the beautiful and calm air of one who has all her life acknowledged compliments… She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.” Well, with a mother like that, no wonder he yearns after serious little Harriet.

Despite the simplicity of her premise, Taylor keeps us guessing, both with the stop-and-go pacing and with the unexpected but deeply-felt emotional development of her characters. Some of the book is very funny — in particular a scene involving an arcane beauty ritual carried out by novices. Yet the scene that stays with me is Harriet and Vesey walking through a damp park at twilight, holding hands and yearning.

Colette, “The Last of Cheri”

For a francophile I’ve come quite late to Colette, but, yes, that is the fervor of the convert you glimpse in my enthusiasm. When she is good, she is so wonderful, and when she is lazy she’s still pretty entertaining. The Last of Chéri is emphatically good. It’s probably best read after Chéri, the novel about a beautiful, spoiled  young man whose mother is a retired cocotte. In a perversion of nature (ah, Colette!), Chéri is the lover of his mother’s friend/rival/colleague, Léa. (The 2009 film of Chéri is respectable but not fabulous: I could not accept Michelle Pfeiffer as an aging, overripe courtesan. Costumes were glorious, though, especially Rupert Friend/Chéri’s.) Naturally this situation cannot last — Léa is far too old for him and Chéri must be placed in the world, i.e. married off. The novel ends. The years pass. World War I intervenes. Chéri is now thirty! Oh, impossible! He is a decorated veteran — hard to imagine that dandy in the trenches. His wife Edmée is beautiful, serious, and irritating.

Rupert Friend as Cheri. Photo credit: Bruno Calvo

Here’s what has me awe-struck: in the character Chéri, Colette initially created something of a monster, exotic and artificial. He was basically brought up as a toy for his mother and her friends. Yet in The Last of Cheri, his creator shows what must become of him. On a hospital visit with his wife, who does Good Works, he talks to “a former comrade among those suffering with trench feet…. he knew perfectly well that a whole man who had escaped from the war was not in the least like these mutilated fellows… he had nothing in common with them and could find no peers among them.” Well — there are no peers for Chéri, anywhere.

But then he rediscovers his old love Léa, living quietly in Passy. And she is fat! “She was not monstrous, but she was huge; everything about her had grown enormous. Her arms stood out, away from her body, like rounded thighs; they were too fat to touch her body at any point. Her clothes implied a renunciation of feminine allurement, the long, plain skirt, the severe coat, half open over her linen blouse, gave her a sort of sexless dignity.” Léa may also stand for the ruin of the world that created Chéri. Or, wait, is that ruin Chéri himself? Lost, lonely, unoccupied, unappreciated — even his looks are fading. (“‘…if you can remember Chéri as he was only six or seven years ago–’” says Léa to a visitor.) Worst, he finally grasps the elementary fact that Léa, the light of his life, was in fact — a professional. Cheri’s cynicism about his mother and her friends, his ease in their world, turns out to have masked a kind of innocence. He was aware of what they did, but he didn’t really know where the houses and the pearls and the carriages and the silks and the champagne came from. The truth, on top of the dislocation from the war and his fundamentally ruined character, does him in.

Oh, and his real name is Fred.

 

Jane Haddam, “Cheating at Solitaire”

I just put this book down and I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s called Cheating at Solitaire. I don’t remember a single character so much as picking up a deck of cards. Possibly the title refers to Jane Haddam’s real subject here — aside from the mystery — which is the horrifying aspect of celebrity culture. Only I can’t quite figure out how.

Snow in a summer resort: always disorienting

Never mind. The New England island of Margaret’s Harbor has been overtaken by a film crew, and since the cast of the movie includes celebrity starlets Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret, the paparazzi have invaded as well. The young starlets are perpetually drunk or otherwise befuddled (native stupidity accounts for a lot of it) and when a young man is found dead in a truck in a snow storm, one of the girls ends up in jail. But possibly the puppet-mistress is Kendra Rhode, a girl from an immensely wealthy family who has summered on the island forever. Parallel intrigues involve the year-round residents of the island — here’s where Haddam’s customary finesse with social class shines.

You might wonder, if you’ve been paying close attention, how Philadelphia resident Gregor Demarkian ends up on the island — this is Haddam’s customary mystery-solver, the former FBI profiler gone independent. Turns out the Scottish movie star Stewart Gordon is an old friend of Gregor’s. Gordon is a nice character, an intelligent, upright Scot who has turned stardom in a sci-fi film into a useful career. Haddam gives him a perfectly charming romance.

In other news, Gregor stumbles toward his own wedding. Sometimes these series mysteries falter when their protagonists leave their own turf but this foray onto a snow-covered island was, well, bracing.

Theodor Fontane, “Irretrievable”

Isn’t that a terrific title for a novel about a marriage going bad? Especially, I think, for a novel published in 1891, when I would have expected something wordier. The German is Unwiederbringlich which, if you break down the German phonemes, is literally “un-back-bring-able.” What a great language!

Sadly for me my German isn’t good enough to read Theodor Fontane’s novels in the original so the publication of this NYRB edition of Irretrievable is a big thrill. As was the article about Fontane in the March 7 issue of The New Yorker (you may not be able to see it without being a subscriber to the magazine).

Frederiksborg Castle, an important setting for "Irretrievable"

Of course, this being a Fontane novel, the “thrill” is muted. This writer is all about the finer shades of behavior and psychology. As Daniel Mendelson pointed out in that New Yorker piece, much of the story is simply told in dialogue. It does feel somewhat  stiff, I have to say. The novel is set in 1859, among German aristocrats, and some of it takes place at the Danish court, which may explain a certain ponderousness. And a lot of 19th century fiction is talky. If Trollope, for instance, moves too slowly for you, Fontane will not do the trick. On the other hand if you relish Trollope’s comprehensive sympathy with human frailty, Irretrievable will wring your heart.

The story opens in a castle by the sea. Count Helmut Holk, not content to live in his family’s medieval castle, has built a classical temple on the sand dunes. Fontane tells us squarely that the beautiful countess Christine has never liked the new castle or been happy there. But when Holk quotes a poem about such a castle, she replies, “Where did you unearth that quotation, Helmut?” Then she tells him where it comes from, who wrote it, and that it has a sad ending.

Not a good way to begin. Don’t we all know couples like this, who can’t resist chipping away at each other? Christine is smarter than Helmut, and motivated by a strict piety. Helmut is easy-going, not perhaps terribly bright, handsome, appealing. They are fond of each other, and Christine has the grace, early in the book, to apologize to Helmut for her earnestness: “‘You’ve been unlucky in your choice, you need a wife who is better able to laugh. I try now and then… but I’m never quite successful.’” How can you not feel for a woman whose self-knowledge is so unsparing?

Once Fontane has established the tension in the relationship he sends Helmut to Copenhagen where he is a courtier to a Danish princess. Helmut is intrigued by three different women: his landlady, her beautiful daughter, and the dashing lady-in-waiting Ebba von Rosenberg, who toys with him like a bored child with a large dim dog. Letters home to Christine are curt, then dwindle in frequency and finally Helmut comes to think of his wife’s virtue as oppressive.  The title tells us where the novel is going but its inevitability is leavened by a special poignancy at the end.