John Henry Patterson, “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo”

It’s about lions, folks, not wicked women. In fact no woman has a speaking part in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo; this is a strictly masculine adventure, and so securely rooted in its period that I wondered briefly whether it might not be parody. (It was when John Henry Patterson quoted W.S. Gilbert without attribution — can you imagine the kind of writer for whom Gilbert’s elaborately phrased humor was a natural form of expression?)

Kenya Railways today, courtesy The Daily Nation (Kenya’s national newspaper)

Here’s the premise. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson was an Army officer on loan to the British East Africa Company, sent out to monitor the construction of a railroad bridge across the Tsavo River in what is now Kenya. Read his Wikipedia bio: this guy did a little bit of everything, though it made me queasy to think of him as a game warden. More on that in a jiffy. This book, published in 1907, is his somewhat discursive account of adventures with a pair of lions during the erection of the bridge. The railway line was built by the British in 1896-1901, running inland from the port of Mombasa all the way to Lake Victoria, using largely Indian laborers (“coolies”). The lions of the title disrupted the progress of the rail line by devouring dozens of members of the railway crew. It was Patterson who ultimately killed both lions, and the narrative backbone of this book is the man/beast struggle. But as in many travelogues, the structure is quite loose, with little pen portraits of various “characters” and descriptions of the several tribes Patterson came into contact with, as well as a lot of big-game bragging. Which is hard to read now, even if you try to think of it as quaint. Patterson killed a great many animals and writes about the process in detail, including tips on how to get your trophies back to England and where to have them stuffed. The skins of the titular lions were ultimately sold to the Field Museum in Chicago for $5,000.

Yet overall this is an entertaining, even a jolly read, probably owing to Patterson’s enthusiasm for his job and for Africa itself. It’s hard not to patronize him as an author, reading from our more anxious vantage point. But it’s equally hard not to be charmed by his perception of Africa as some kind of Eden. What makes this interesting is that he is Adam before the fall — this is the rare Africa narrative that’s almost free of nostalgia. Even Winston Churchill’s My African Journey (published six years earlier) focuses more clearly and more accurately on the sometimes disastrous impact that British colonial policy is going to have on eastern Africa.

Oh, and here’s a progress update: it is now illegal to kill game in Kenya. The railroad tracks Patterson worked on now divide the  the massive Kenyan national parks known as Tsavo East and Tsavo West. And trains still run on the meter-wide track, between Mombasa and Nairobi. Maximum speed is 30 m.p.h.

John Galsworthy, “The Forsyte Saga, Vol. 2″

Soames is dead! Oh, dear, oh, dear. I didn’t see that coming. Nor did I anticipate the sense of regret I feel. John Galsworthy created Soames as the embodiment of Victorian bourgeois values. He was going to die sometime. What startles me is my affection for him. He behaved like a terrible jerk way back in The Man of Property. But over the succeeding thousand-some pages, he’s managed to redeem himself.

Goya’s “Vendimia” — Soames owns a copy and thinks the girl resembles Fleur

Are you confused about what I just read? I’m confused and I’ve got the book on my desk. The cover says The Forsyte Saga Volume 2. The three novels in it are The White Monkey; The Silver Spoon; and Swan Song.  I think some of my confusion stems from the fact that the individual novels of the original trilogy are better known; people have heard of The Man of Property. But by the time you get around to The White Monkey, you’re not reading a stand-alone volume. You’re in it for the long haul. And the long haul is deeply, deeply satisfying.

For one thing, it’s got more narrative tension than the original trilogy. Soames is still the central character but the defining relationship is really between him and his headstrong daughter Fleur whom he loves with all his heart. As Soames personifies the nineteenth century, Fleur personifies the twentieth. She is the pretty, capricious, quicksilver woman who cannot find contentment. As Soames says toward the end of the novel — speaking about his other passion, painting –

‘I remember the first shows in London of those post-impressionists and early Cubist chaps. But they ran riot with the war, catching at things they couldn’t get.’

He stopped. It was exactly what she — !”

What Fleur wanted that she couldn’t get was her cousin Jon, who is also the son of Soames’ first wife Irene. My, that is complicated. It’s not incest, really, but given the intense bad feeling between Soames and Irene and consequently the rest of the Forsyte family, the Fleur/Jon romance is doomed. Which is of course a lovely plot for a novelist and Galsworthy spins this out over his three volumes, allowing plenty of time for the ramifications to develop. On the rebound from her first romantic episodes with Jon, Fleur marries Michael Mont, an appealing  young politician who knows that he is her second choice. Michael’s age, aristocratic connections, and parliamentary career give the novelist scope to dramatize many of the cultural questions of the day, from World War I to the General Strike to slum clearance.

But we always come back to Soames and Fleur. He knows — as does the reader — that she’s spoiled. He knows he’s partly at fault. Inarticulate as always, he does his best to protect her from her mistakes, as any parent would, and as no parent actually can. Fittingly, Soames dies protecting Fleur from yet another of her destructive impulses. And though it’s a perfectly appropriate ending to this volume, I still want more Forsytes. Maybe the best story-telling is always addictive?

Beryl Markham, “West with the Night”

How you read affects what you read. So the fact that I began West with the Night in bed in a tent in Kenya both gave it great relevance, and made my reading distracted and scattered. Because of course you don’t go to Kenya to loll around in your tent with a book. So my memory of Beryl Markham’s memoir is limited to impressions and to the bits I highlighted, which I did more for her elegant acid humor than anything else. For instance, “The essence of elephant hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.” She takes a patrician view of the world: “Possibly I do the Babus [Indian telegraph operators] an injustice, but I think at best they used to read the novels of Anthony Trollope to each other over the wire.” So much for the Babus.

Beryl Markham in 1936

And evidently West with the Night only scratches the surface of Beryl Markham’s life, which was by any standards remarkable. As the memoir tells it, she was raised by her father on a farm in what was then British East Africa. The book is eloquent and elegiac about these unfettered days spent in the wild and among native friends. When her father’s farm failed, she struck out on her own as a trainer of race horses. Flying only occurred later as a career. The book’s title refers to her 1936 attempt to fly solo from England to New York. It was originally published in the 1940s and re-issued in the 1980s, becoming a surprise best seller and turning Markham into an octogenarian celebrity. Evidently there has been much speculation about the true authorship of the book, based on the fact that Markham had limited formal education and wrote very little else. Certainly the lyrical style is a big draw, though from time to time I found it self-conscious and grandiose.

I heard a story about Markham as a grande dame of Nairobi, stalking around with thick white hair like a dandelion in seed. During the 1982 attempted coup she drove through an armed road block on her way to dinner at the Muthaiga Club. She arrived unharmed though her car picked up a few bullet holes. “She ordered her pink gin and curry, and the bartender had to take away her keys so she wouldn’t drive home and get herself killed.”  The anecdote didn’t surprise me at all.

John Galsworthy, “The Forsyte Saga”

“But wait!” I can hear you protesting. “The Forsyte Saga is the name of that TV miniseries. John Galsworthy wrote individual novels, didn’t he? Surely you read individual books?” I did: they were The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let, packaged as The Forsyte Saga  bundled together along with two “interludes” that bridge the gaps between them. Adding confusion are the multiple adaptations of this literary property. A 26-episode TV series began airing in the UK in 1967 (18 million Americans saw its finale in 1969, thank you Wikipedia). A more recent and succinct version starred Damian Lewis of the US TV series “Homeland” as Soames Forsyte.

This is a lot of context, but I couldn’t seem to shake free of it. Nor of the fact that John Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in  1932. That seems like a preposterous honor for a body of work that I’ve always thought of as solidly middlebrow. Finally, I was sort of obsessed by the fact that The Man of Property, set in 1886, was actually completed in 1906, just 20 years after the events it was describing. It looks so clinically at the mores of the time, at such a short distance!

Box Hill in Surrey: Maybe the view from the Forsyte house at Robin Hill was something like this?

So — was I not really concentrating on the work itself? I have to say I was often guilty of that. John Galsworthy is not exactly a lively writer, and his intent is to reveal the single-minded possessiveness of the English upper middle class at the turn of the century. (Hence, of course, the title of the first book.) Everything that happens — and it’s actually quite a bit — takes place politely. The central character of the trilogy is lawyer Soames Forsyte, who marries the beautiful and poor Irene Herron. But he can’t see Irene as more than a piece of property — he has no inkling of her emotional makeup. Not surprisingly, Irene’s affections stray and all kinds of havoc ensue, even unto the next generation. The Forsyte family is a large one, so that alliances and enmities among cousins can provide counterpoint to the central Soames/Irene drama. I’ve probably made it sound dull, and it would be except that Soames is a terrific character. Galsworthy equips him with just enough vulnerability so that you pity his denseness. Time and again, he approaches Irene, motivated by longing but expressing only his obstinate sense of possession. The sociocultural details are also wonderful; Galsworthy is describing his own world with a dextrous blend of objectivity and sympathy.

And after a while, the length and stately pace of these books work in his favor. You sit down to read, and, oh, yes, there you are at Robin Hill, the country house designed for Soames and now inhabited by his cousin Jolyon. The bluebells are blooming, tea will soon be served, and what will become of young Fleur and her unloved husband Michael Mont? I’ll let you know. That’s the next trilogy, A Modern Comedy. 

Stella Gibbons, “Cold Comfort Farm”

I have never lived in a dwelling without a copy of Stella Gibbons‘ Cold Comfort Farm. It’s basic equipment, like a tea kettle. You re-read it periodically to experience, once again, the brisk pleasures of Our Heroine Flora Poste’s effect on the surly, poorly groomed denizens of this agricultural establishment in Sussex. As the years go by, you accumulate your favorite moments:  the names of the cows (Aimless, Pointless, Feckless and Graceless); Adam Lambsbreath’s “liddle mop;” the magnificence of Seth Starkadder who is forever “lounging” into rooms and more or less popping out of his scanty garments.

The novel was written as satire, but it functions as humor even if you’re ignorant of the source material, which I guess is heavy-breathing fiction in the style of, say, D.H. Lawrence. There’s a lot of mud and resentment, and Gibbons has helpfully highlighted her favorite passages to make it easier for reviewers to find and quote them. These would be the bits where the farm crouches on the hillside like an angry animal, etc. etc. The “plot” of the novel is the old genteel-orphan-throws-herself-on-the-mercy-of-unknown-relatives situation, but Flora is a clear-eyed modern girl and her refusal to behave like Jane Eyre provides some of the fun. (The crazy woman in a closed room upstairs is no match for Flora’s cool common sense.)

Pure, reliable pleasure every time.

John Galsworthy, “The Man of Property”

I spent almost as much time with The Man of Property as I did with Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants, which is three times as long, and the reading experience was strangely inverse in nature. Follett’s book spans over 20 years of Euro-American history, hitting the high spots and aiming to keep the pages turning. John Galsworthy isn’t at all interested in plot and The Man of Property moves very slowly over the course of a few months in 1886. It’s set in a narrow slice of society, the upper middle class of London. But the most important difference is that while Follett places his invented characters into historical episodes, Galsworthy focuses his microscope so closely on the members of the Forsyte family that they take on universality. I must say, this novel was very slow going, especially at first, as Galsworthy lumbers through the family relationships, gradually exposing the sources of dramatic tension. Yet in the end, it was hugely satisfying because the main characters really come to life. I won’t be reading the next Follett book in this trilogy, but I moved on right away to the next novel in what’s now known as “The Forsyte Saga.” (Yes, as in the TV series that introduced us to Damian Lewis.)

John Galsworthy, a Forsyte by upbringing but not by temperament.

Galsworthy’s drama arises stems from his characters’ collisions with the values and practices of their class. The Forsytes are a large clan — nine elderly siblings survive at the book’s opening. Most of them are rich, and intend to hang onto their money, while still spending enough to be “respectable.” But human nature erupts through the controlled, predictable behaviors expected of the Forsytes, most notably in Soames Forsyte’s marriage. Soames is that complex creation, an unsympathetic character who nevertheless excites the reader’s compassion. He is a lawyer, cautious and analytical, but rashly married the beautiful and poor Irene Heron — who doesn’t love him. Has never loved him, has never made any pretense of loving him. In an impetuous moment, Soames commissions a country house from his cousin June’s fiancé Philip Bosinney. Bosinney, aside from being handsome enough for the family to nickname him “The Buccaneer,” is somewhat Bohemian, more motivated by his artistic judgments than by money. Irene and Bosinney fall in love.

It doesn’t end well. It couldn’t, really. Galsworthy is setting up the Forsyte family to stand in for the bourgeoisie of the English empire, and he intends to demonstrate how their obsession with property interferes with human relations. He makes this very clear, using “Forsyte” as a general term for the upper middle class. His achievement is making these archetypes into believable, compelling characters whom we are willing to follow through a suspense-free narrative.

Galsworthy’s biography adds a few interesting details to the reading. First, that he had an affair with (and later married) his cousin’s wife and that her middle name was Nemesis. The relationship seems to have inspired the Soames/Irene/Bosinney triangle. Second, if I read the bio correctly, The Man of Property was initially a play, which explains its structure as a series of conversations or dialogues in different, largely domestic settings. And finally, Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

Margaret Mitchell, “Gone with the Wind”

Yes. It is still fabulous.

You’ll notice I’m assuming that you have read Gone with the Wind at some point, which may be a generational thing, but everyone has seen the movie, right? Sure, both book and movie are long, but with Hilary Mantel tearing up the best seller lists, I don’t see that length is a big objection. And, yes, Margaret Mitchell takes a patronizing view of blacks and her perspective on some aspects of post-Civil War Georgia politics is repugnant. But the plus side is that Gone with the Wind is a thrilling read, for all 1025 pages. You could look far and wide to find a better summer beach book, even if you think it’s old hat. From “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, though men seldom realized it…”  to “‘After all, tomorrow is another day,’” I was captivated.

Just in case you need a refresher: Scarlett is a headstrong Georgia belle whom we meet in April of 1861, as tiresome male war-mongering begins to interfere with her incessant flirtations. She is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes, a classic Southern gentleman of the bookish variety, fond of poetry and music, but the best horseman in the County. As war bears down on the South, Scarlett sees only her own tragedy when Ashley announces his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. In a private moment she declares her love for Ashley, who admits that he “cares” for her, but will marry Melanie nonetheless. This tender scene is unwillingly overheard by Rhett Butler, the bounder from Charleston, who is amused. In the first ten percent of the book, Mitchell has set up the conflicts that keep us turning the next 900 pages.

Of course Scarlett is the key to the whole thing. My goodness, what a piece of work she is — a monster-character along the lines of Angelica Deverell in Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. Mitchell is very clear about Scarlett’s selfishness, obstinacy, limited intellectual gifts and poor judgment, but we remain fascinated. And not in a train-wreck way; somehow at the end of the book, when she meets a real defeat, we’re still rooting for her. I don’t remember where I read this but some writer recently pointed out that the great power of fiction is to make readers identify with the characters’ desires. We just can’t help it. So with a character like Scarlett who is all desire, we’re completely hooked.

Mitchell also does a great job managing the various levels of conflict in the novel. The Scarlett/Ashley/Rhett triangle separates and re-forms repeatedly as Scarlett marries, first out of pique, and second out of practicality. The war, of course, keeps the tension high, especially as Union troops approach Atlanta. But there’s also consistent confrontation between the Old South and the New, which Mitchell sees in rueful, elegiac terms. The cultivation and aesthetic charms of the old South, along with its essential values of hospitality, loyalty and gentility, are embodied in Ashley’s wife Melanie, who shows courage under pressure and kindness to all. She dies, of course, leaving the world to Scarlett, with her relentless energy and drive. Rhett has just delivered his deathless line — “‘My dear, I don’t give a damn” — but Scarlett is indomitable, and maybe that’s why we follow her through the book with fascination and a tinge of envy.

Henry James, “The Awkward Age”

The problem with Henry James is, sometimes I do not understand what he is saying. Usually, eventually, I can puzzle it out, and it’s worth the effort. But on this reading of The Awkward Age, I was repeatedly frustrated by the allusive, circular dialogue, which is supposed to carry the weight of the novel. (More on that in an instant.) The story itself — about a young English girl who is brought up in a racy social set and whose reputation is damaged by her mother’s shenanigans — is quite fascinating. The characters are, too: young Nanda Brookenham, whose rectitude remains unspoiled despite her milieu, her lazy fascinating mother, and the hovering deus ex machine Mr. Longdon, who pretty clearly stands in for James himself. This isn’t one of the great, late, longer books (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl) that you expect to have to crack your head over. So I expected an easier read than it actually turned out to be.

Sargent’s “Miss Elsie Palmer,” currently at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Like Nanda Brookenham, Elsie is not a conventional beauty.

The foreword to my elderly Penguin provided some illumination after I’d battled my way through the novel itself. (That persistence, by the way, sprang largely from affection for Nanda, combined with curiosity about late 19th century London social mores.) Ronald Blythe made two important points about The Awkward Age. First, it was James’ first novel to be written after his disastrous attempt at playwriting. Hence the almost-complete reliance on dialogue to move the story along. Hence also the novel’s structure, which is basically a series of conversations taking place in various settings among various combinations of the characters. If you’re aware of James‘ recent theatrical experience you see how, well, stagey the novel is, with recurring props (a book, a five-pound note) and “business” like constant drinking of tea to provide something for the characters to do while they chat.

The other point Blythe makes is that this is the first novel James dictated rather than writing, and it introduces us to that inimitable serpentine style that has been the bane of many an English major. For instance, to take a random sentence, “There was therefore something in Vanderbank’s present study of the signs that showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick.” (Blythe points out that often James‘ own friends didn’t follow his conversation either, which makes me feel better.)

So we’ve got this somewhat hybrid structure and this leap into James‘ late style, which, I know, I know, is proto-modern and pre-Proustian, etc. Maybe I was in the mood for a more immersive reading experience, without having to consider where twentieth-century fiction was headed. I’ll leave you with a bit of dialogue. Here, Mr. Vanderbank, the handsome man-about-town whom Nanda is in love with, discusses Nanda with her mother — who is his lover. The “blessed man” is Mr. Longdon, who has offered to give Nanda a dowry if Vanderbank will propose to her.

And what did you say about a “basis?” The blessed man offers to settle–?’

“‘You’re a wonderful woman,’ her visitor returned, ‘and your imagination takes its fences in a way that, when I’m out with you, quite puts mine to shame. When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised.’

“And I,’ Mrs. Brook asked, ‘am not surprised a bit? Isn’t it only,’ she modestly suggested, ‘because I’ve taken him in more than you? Didn’t you know he would?’ she quavered.

“Vanderbank thought or at least pretended to. ‘Make me the condition? How could I be sure of it?’

“But the point of his question was lost for her in the growing light. ‘Oh then the condition’s you only–?’

“‘That, at any rate, is all I have to do with. He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.’”

You see the problem.

P.G. Wodehouse, “Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves”

It was startling to finish Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, and find that it was copyrighted in 1962. P.G. Wodehouse hit his stride — well, you could say in 1919, with the publication of four stories as My Man, Jeeves. (Something tells me there are clubs and associations that take all this dating business quite seriously.) The first full-length novel is Right Ho, Jeeves, published in 1934. By the time Wodehouse got around to writing Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, very little had changed, including the menace posed to Bertie’s equanimity by the prospect of marrying Madeline Bassett. She’s attractive enough, except for “that squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking baby talk. She was the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a  morning head, and says, ‘Guess who?’” Newt-loving Gussie Fink-Nottle appears, sober; Aunt Agatha stays away. Bertie is in fine form as ever: confronting a menacing fellow-house guest he says, “I think if Spode had been about three feet shorter and not so wide across the shoulders, I would have laughed a mocking laugh and quite possibly have flicked my cambric handkerchief in his face.” Sometimes you do want a writer to produce the same book again and again.

Edith Wharton, “The Custom of the Country”

It took Jonathan Franzen to draw my attention to the symmetry among the titles of Edith Wharton’s three big New York society novels: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.  Franzen also tries to persuade his readers, in a New Yorker piece celebrating  the sesquicentennial of Wharton’s birth, that The Custom of the Country is the strongest of the three books. I disagree. It may be one of Wharton’s most entertaining novels — she didn’t often exercise her sardonic sense of humor in print — but it can’t touch the penetrating melancholy of her best work.

As Franzen points out, Wharton gave Undine Spragg the beauty she did not herself possess.

That being said, it’s a heck of a lot of fun. The opening line has lingered in my head for years: “‘Undine Spragg — how can you?’” Undine — named, thank you, for a hair-waving tonic — goes on for the next three hundred pages riding rough-shod over every obstacle that stands in her way. Perfectly solipsistic, she is the perfect woman for her age. All Undine wants is a steady diet of admiration and publicity. Gosh, she’s the perfect woman for our age, too. I’m pretty sure if she lived now she would have her own reality TV show. The genius of the book, though, is that Undine can’t go out and design a line of tea gowns or endorse a particular brand of corset. She has to not only marry, but marry a man who can provide her with a never-ending stream of cash and social clout. Unfortunately, she’s both unsophisticated and slightly dim, so she makes a series of errors.

If there’s a twinge of pain in the book, it’s the spectacle of the collateral damage. There’s over-bred Ralph Marvell, the scion of Old New York, a refined intellectual who is incapable of earning a living. Beautiful brassy Undine dazzles him and he makes the mistake of seeing in her a sensibility that meets his own. The match ends, of course, in tears, and Undine uses their son Paul as leverage to get a divorce so that she can marry up — into the French aristocracy.

It was interesting to note on this reading that while Wharton gives us liberal doses of Ralph’s disillusionment and desperation, the Marquis Raymond de Chelles remains a cipher. No, a type: a French aristocrat, deeply enmeshed in family and church, absolutely beyond Undine’s comprehension. He’s as elusive to us as he is to Undine.

The third man in the trio — Undine’s beaten-down stock speculator papa doesn’t count except as a cash machine — is Elmer Moffatt, the bumptious nouveau riche, with his red face and shiny pate and slightly-too-tight clothes. Energetic, competitive, aggressive, loud, Elmer is the guy who appears over and over again in anglophone literature of the turn of the century. He is Undine’s true counterpart.

Wharton has the last laugh. She finds something Undine wants, but cannot have. Better yet, her own actions have put the prize out of reach. It’s the perfect revenge of writer on character, not savage but stinging.