Anywhere But Here….

No, I did not read Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, though I’m sure that some time I should. (It sounds kind of harrowing but maybe that’s just me.)

I just hit a little rough patch. Does this ever happen to you? Distress piles up and all you want to do is Get Away to some place where someone else has problems you don’t really believe in, and anyway they’re going to get solved in a couple of hundred pages. For me that place is always a book. Always a book I’ve read before: this is no time for experimentation. It’s more of an emergency; you might say I was reading frantically. The way I justify this is thinking that I am keeping my conscious mind busy and out of trouble with these comforting plots while some heavy lifting occurs in the unconscious part of my mind.

So in the last week and change I read:

Catherine Gaskin, The Property of a Gentleman

Dick Francis, Enquiry

Dick Francis, Comeback

Michael Gilbert, The Country House Burglar

Jane Aiken Hodge, Watch the Wall, My Darling

Old friends all (in several cases, I had to tape the covers back onto the crumbling pages). And I’m feeling much better, now, thank you.

Meg Rosoff, “The Bride’s Farewell”

Every now and then Amazon’s recommendation system really gets it right and tosses me something like The Bride’s Farewell, a quirky and wonderful historical novel. We meet Pell Ridley on the dawn of her marriage to blacksmith Birdie Finch, as she sneaks out of her house taking little with her but a white horse, an apron, and her youngest brother, Bean. It’s panic that has set Pell off — Birdie is kind and steady but she feels her horizons closing in, and she bolts. It’s August 12, 1850– something. And that very combination of precision and opacity sets the tone for Meg Rosoff’s story-telling. We’re in deeply rural England, near the New Forest, and most of the scenes could have taken place just as easily in 1650 or 1750. Pell, as a girl on her own off to seek her fortune, is suspect. Her skills — blacksmithing and horse-coping — are men’s skills. She is, right from the start, plucky and resourceful and generous, so we root for her. But the path she’s taken is fraught is difficulty, so drama results. And right from the start, you’re sucked into the story.

Ancient white-chalk carving of a horse; did you know they're all over England? Pell sees one in her wanderings.

Pell heads for Salisbury, hoping to get work, but before long she’s lost both the horse and the brother. Her drive to find them is the motor for the rest of the book, which takes a circuitous route to find a conditional kind of closure. Along the way Pell meets a family of Gypsies, a sexy poacher we know only as “Dogman,” and many horses. I love horse books so that part was very satisfying: Rosoff makes the animals as interesting as the humans.

The unusual timeless quality of the book points to its most remarkable feature, though, which is that it’s almost a fairy tale. It seems to take place in an illustration rather than in the actual world. Rosoff doesn’t engage in the showy detail so important to some historical novels. The Bride’s Farewell almost seems Jungian; there’s some strange doubling (Pell’s family, the gypsy family; the dark, handsome, rakish poacher, her dark handsome, rakish father) and a dreamy tone throughout.

Incessantly, it seemed, life plagued her with responsibilities, made her fall in love, ripped away any consolation she might find. Sisters and parents, brothers and horses, Dicken and John Kirby, Birdie and Dogman. Even Pa’s awful house with the tilting floor. All staked their claim on her, each conspiring to weigh down her soul. As soon as she accepted one set of circumstances, another leaped up to mock her. Nothing stayed the same. Every day brought unwanted connections, losses and complications that broke her heart.

Well, yes. For most of us, that’s the way life works, though on a lesser scale. And we’d all do well to imitate Pell, taking a deep breath and simply making the best of it.

Elizabeth Letts, “The Eighty-Dollar Champion”

I don’t touch a horse from one year to the next but I did go through an intense pre-adolescent equine phase. Naturally that included, in addition to riding every moment I could (and scheming to convert our garage back into the stable it had once been), reading every book about horses I could find. So when The Eighty-Dollar Champion found me, I knew just who Snowman was. I recognized the black and white photographs of his owner Harry de Leyer riding him over immense jumps, with a trademark loose rein. I didn’t know the pair’s background, though. What a tale.

Harry de Leyer, an appealing young Dutch immigrant to the US, bought Snowman off a knacker’s truck for $80. In other words, without Harry, Snowman would have been glue. Harry originally intended Snowy to be a lesson horse at the Knox School on Long Island. He brought the horse back to health, trained him to the saddle, used him to teach schoolgirls to ride, and then, regretfully, sold him. But Snowman — whom Harry had not been able to coax into jumping — kept coming home. The horse, it turned out, was a natural jumper, and so fond of Harry de Leyer that he would jump a series of paddock fences to come back to his Dutch buddy.

Snowman swimming with the De Leyer children. Photo Bill Ray, from the book.

This is all happening in the late 1950s, at a time when horse shows were a big deal in the U.S. So Harry de Leyer trained Snowman over jumps and then campaigned him as a show horse. As the book’s title tells you, they won and won big. But the boon for Elizabeth Letts is that Snowman was a real character. In a world of highstrung Thoroughbreds, Snowman was a big goofy lug whose first job had been pulling a plow. He loved children, and even as the country’s champion open jumper, continued to be a safe, reassuring lesson horse.  And as the photographs illustrating this book make plain, Snowman and Harry had a remarkable bond of affection and trust.

Of course the shadow of Laura Hillenbrand looms over this book. Letts works hard to spell out the context of the story, which she sees primarily as a triumph of the little guy. Again and again we get passages like this one describing the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden:  ”The working folk sat up in the bleachers; the fine folk came and went in chauffeured Bentleys and clustered in the boxes along the promenade. … Ring stewards dressed in red waistcoats and gray top hats bowed to the winners with a precise degree of shading that indicated the social standing of the competitor.” There’s a lot of repetition, and Letts‘ writing is pretty ordinary.

But the horse, with his floppy ears and his big heart, you have to love.

(Update, irresistible to me: just found online coverage of a German Rabbit-Hopping competition, which imitates show-jumping, “fences” and all. No riders on the bunnies, though.)

Margot Asquith, “Octavia”

I am so happy that I live in a place where the communal book shelf in the laundry room (recent source of that Simenon novel) also yielded Margot Asquith’s Octavia. I read her autobiography years ago, while researching the heiresses book, and remember quite liking it though not thinking too highly of the author. That impression has not changed.

Lady Asquith's glamour shot

Octavia, our heroine, is clearly a cleaned-up version of Asquith herself, who was no beauty. The photo to the right, taken when she was 35, is the most flattering one I could find. (I seem to remember a story about Nancy Astor bringing false teeth to a dinner table and cracking Winston Churchill up by putting them in and imitating Lady A….) Octavia, naturally, is gorgeous and men fall for her madly.  That’s pretty much the plot. The settings change, from the rambling Scottish estate, probably based on Glen, where Margot grew up, to various grand houses in hunting country, to the Riviera. Octavia/Margot is a brilliant horsewoman, too, and the hunting passages are nice, shades of Siegfried Sassoon.

There chief narrative device is that Octavia, while not on horseback or conquering all in black velvet on a dance floor, talks about herself to a wide variety of fascinated men. The only tension concerns which of the men will finally win her hand: the lounge lizard Robin Compton, the handsome buffoon Lord Tilbury, or the reform-mad Greville Pelham. I’ll put you out of your misery, she marries Pelham, but they don’t get along. Owing to her “high spirits” (I always think this is code for being really spoiled) they spend their honeymoon miscommunicating and I think, though I can’t be sure, that the rest of the novel is about when they finally manage to have sex. That they do, finally, is certain, because in the last chapter Octavia has a baby which dies. I couldn’t discern why the author deemed this necessary.

The most substantial pleasure provided by the book is voyeurism: what the characters  say to servants, which “ball-dresses” Octavia chooses to wear for which parties. But strangely enough, even though Margot Asquith must have been nearly unbearable in real life, a kind of good nature shines through her writing. She obviously thought very highly of herself but she’s so ingenuous in her enthusiasm that you almost forgive her.

Sara Gruen, “Flying Changes”

Flying Changes follows Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons, picking up with the same characters just a few months later. It exhibits pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses as the earlier book: the heroine is occasionally unbearable, the animal characters come close to upstaging the humans, and there’s really too much going on. But the big thing is, Sara Gruen’s prose is incredibly readable. I knew from the get-go that eventually I was going to collapse on the couch and churn through this book until the end. Never mind that the narrative was predictable from the beginning, in outline if not in detail. I couldn’t have cared less. So, there’s a subplot that peters out into nothing. So, the romantic interest is not much more than a warm body (a horse called Joe has a much more carefully thought-out personality). As if to amp up the emotional hold on the reader, this time Gruen introduces a baby.  And a cat — oh, gosh, kittens, too! It’s OK, I’m putty in her hands.

And this is because of the quality of her prose.  It’s not so much that she’s a good writer, which she is.  Descriptive, so vivid, lively, clever, funny.  Good ear for dialogue, her characters talk like people you know, in sentence fragments and with circular logic. The pacing is good: she spends the right amount of time dwelling on the important scenes and gets in and out of them gracefully. More than that, though, she has the magic quality and try as I might through this reading, I can’t quite define it.

Curtis Sittenfeld has it.  I didn’t really enjoy American Wife but I couldn’t have put it down. Rosamund Pilcher and Maeve Binchy have it — but a lot of writers of that kind of pleasant house-and-home fiction don’t. I think it’s something about one sentence leading into the next, a kind of rhythm? Maybe it’s the way the writing involves all of the senses? Here’s Annemarie relaxing on the back of her horse Hurrah, while he’s resting in his stall.  ”I lie back, my legs slack and my head resting on his rump. His spine is padded and warm and slightly indented. I love the feel of my vertebrae stretched out along his. We fit like a zipper.”  Pretty indelible.

Sara Gruen, “Riding Lessons”

Two points to think about here: aspirations and authority.

1/ Not everybody is writing Moby Dick. Some books have smaller ambitions, and what matters is whether or not the author meets the goals she’s set. Sara Gruen’s Riding Lessons might be termed a “domestic drama.”  If it were English, Joanna Trollope might have written it. As such, it’s pretty good. Annemarie Zimmer has made a mess of her marriage, alienated her daughter, and lost her job…. etc. Gruen’s misjudgment, I think, is that she makes Annemarie a little tough to take. Lots of self-pity, emotional thrashing around, poor judgment, self-absorption. There’s one scene where Gruen puts her protagonist in the kitchen to cook a show-off meal that I actually had to skip, it was just too painful to read. This is a tough thing to pull off:  we need conflict to keep the story going, and Annemarie causes most of the conflict herself.

The saving grace is the horse stuff: this is where the authority comes in. Or maybe I mean authenticity. Once Annemarie gets out of the house and into the barn, the book is golden. From the way Annemarie feels after unloading a truckload of hay (it gets in your bra) to the mysterious atmosphere of a barn at night, it’s all deeply observed and nicely written. The animal characters are very appealing.

Molly Gloss, “The Jump-Off Creek”

I was glad to see that there’s a new edition of The Jump-Off Creek, because I read a 1989 hardcover that looked as if it had come off a dude ranch’s shelf of books left by guests.  I wouldn’t have found it if Meg hadn’t loaned me Gloss’s later The Hearts of Horses, which I adored. This is similar: smaller, with a tighter radius but similar characters.  Lydia Sanderson arrives on the Jump-Off Creek to take up a claim.  She possesses two mules, two goats, and a trunk, but the woman is one long drink of true grit. Nothing surprising here. It’s Lydia against the weather and the loneliness, with subplots about the other hard-scrabble characters who share her little valley.  But it’s vivid and generous. Gloss intersperses her narrative with excerpts from a journal in Lydia’s name, and she acknowledges the pioneer women whose journals she used as sources.  That may account for the similarity of her tale to the Western segment of Amy Bloom’s Away. Everyone’s drinking from the same well here.  And if you find a great detail like Pioneer Woman heading out in an ice storm to save her mule, and having to lead the mule home while picking ice out of her eyelashes every few minutes… heck, you go with it, right?  It just convinces me further that the true winners in history are the ones who put pencil to paper early and often because they get to frame the narrative. Maybe the finest ambition in life is really to become a Primary Source, right?  Just like Edmond de Goncourt.

Siegfried Sassoon, “Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man”

This book has been on my radar for decades, ever since my teenage horsey phase. I vaguely remember trying to read it, but grasping that it wasn’t really about horses. Then of course when I read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and embarked on a little WWI obsession, Sassoon came back in his role as a poet. Finally, he’s one of the models for Pat Barker’s Regeneration.

Then this lovely edition (with beautiful William Nicholson illustrations and, oh joy! uncut pages!) entered the household at Christmas. I began to read. Lovely stuff but a bit puzzling. Disingenuous, it seemed. More literary than I’d expected. Amid the jolly old England and frosty mornings on horseback, there were haunting touches about mirrors gone blind with age and casual remarks from the narrator about his own thinly-constructed identity.  As “a fox-hunting man,” of course. Wikipedia told me the book had been written in 1928, long after Sassoon’s horrendous war service and searing poetry and spell in a mental hospital. Yet where was the rage?

Oh, it’s so well done. It is lovely, lyrical, gently humorous, as the thinly disguised “George Sherston” advances from his first pony to his first race over fences. Very little foreshadowing but of course in retrospect you see how the structures and implements of fox-hunting prefigure those of battle. Even the final chapter, with a Nicholson sketch of a gun heading the page, moves gently into the now-familiar territory of mud and explosions. The one jarring factor is his invention of “Dick Tiltwood” (if the reminiscence of the knightly joust weren’t enough, he refers to him later as a Galahad figure) who stands for all that is beautiful, straightforward and lovely about British manhood.  Naturally Tiltwood takes a bullet near the end. For the rest, Sassoon’s savagery is compressed by his control until the final pages which bring together a memory of rural England with the reality of Belgian trenches in the spring of 1917. Incredibly effective.