Francine du Plessix Gray, “Madame de Stael”

This is a physically adorable book: pink, with brown lettering and ornament; modestly sized, discreetly charming…. and apparently the exact opposite of its subject, who was loud, large, and anything but discreet. Still — Germaine de Staël cut a swathe in early nineteenth-century Europe, and this concise biography tells us why. And who better to introduce me to this French woman of letters than Francine du Plessix Gray, who knows a thing or two about France and about brilliant women?

Madame de Stael: no oil painting

Gray’s greatest difficulty with her subject is a substantial one. Madame de Staël’s great art form (despite her copious writings) was apparently conversation, and not the kind we experience even at the best dinner tables. It was, or so we’re told, sparkling, allusive, witty, learned…. you see the problem. We have no way of imagining this.

On the other hand, de Staël knew lots of writers. Who wrote letters, many of which survive, and which are excellent sources here. So that’s the consolation. And Gray is a lucid writer who presides over this tempestuous era with a kind of magisterial calm. De Staël was born in 1766, daughter of Lous XVI’s finance minister Necker, and was educated like… well, a boy. Languages, classics, political theory. At the age of twenty she married a handsome Swede, with whom she had one, at most two children. (We’ll come back to this question.) Do the math — by the fourth year of her marriage, the young matron was deeply implicated in revolutionary politics, but not in any systematic way. To be honest, I don’t remember every step of her ardent political attachments any more than I remember the names of all of her lovers. Gray helpfully points out that most of Germaine’s opinions were oppositional in nature. None was more so than her hatred of Napoleon, which caused her to be exiled from her beloved France for most of the Emperor’s tenure.

Her exile took her to Germany, among other locations, where she met, naturally, Goethe and Schiller, and attracted the scholar Schlegel to her elastic household as tutor to her children, and her own lover. This despite the fact that the French author Benjamin Constant was already ensconced. I tell you, it’s incredibly complicated. And volatile. Gray suggests that de Staël was bipolar, which may be true but is somehow disappointing: I would so much have preferred to think of her as the embodiment of a romantic temperament. But the scenes –screaming, fainting, suicide attempts, tantrums — she engaged in, her fierce energy, her narcissism and generosity, her delusions… well, Gray makes a good case.

In a book this short, you don’t get a lot of anecdote or incident, which is why I cherished one story about de Staël and Madame de Récamier (devoted friends), attempting to climb Mont Blanc and having to turn back because of sunburns on their chests (oh, those Empire dresses!).

On the other hand, Gray is generous with the epigrams: Constant, enmeshed in de Staël’s life for many years, summed her up by saying, “She exerts over everything around her a kind of inexplicable but very real power. If she could govern herself, she might have governed the world.”

Elif Batuman: “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”

Whooosh! That sound I hear is the flames taking hold as Elif Batuman burns her bridges, leaving academia behind — or so I thought. After writing The Possessed, with its hilarious accounts of graduate student cliques and academic conferences, how could she ever go back? I was certain, after snorting and giggling my way through this book, that it was a not-so-fond farewell. Yet I have to admit that I began to doubt this interpretation. For funny as some of it is, The Possessed is animated by a deep love of literature, and of Russian literature in particular. I am no great connoisseur of the Russian novel but even I can tell that Batuman has thought hard about those great old guys, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Isaac Babel and Arthur Conan Doyle. (Yep. That’s what’s fun here.) And she cares about what they have to say. More, she believes firmly that literature can help us make sense of life, and she demonstrates how it has done so for her. The moment when she won me over completely was when she wrote, “I was at that time greatly under the sway of The Portrait of a Lady, a book in which one finds the following line :’ Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error.’ As a result I was constantly rethinking all my conservative decisions and amending them in favor of ‘generous errors,’ a category which surely included going to Samarkand to learn the great Uzbek language.”

Okay, that’s complicated. Let me back up. Elif Batuman is a very smart girl of Turkish descent who grew up in New Jersey. She learned Turkish at home, and Russian as a linguistics undergraduate. Somehow — she hardly seems to know how herself — she got sucked into Russian literature, and became a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford. The Possessed tells this tale, along with analyzing some of the books she read most attentively. The comic set-pieces are a conference on Babel (this is the one that had me laughing out loud on the subway and attracting way too much attention), another conference on Tolstoy at his home in Russia, and Batuman’s summer learning Uzbek in Samarkand. Her life intersects with literature, which in turn informs her decisions and the way she perceives the world, never more clearly than in the final section when she analyzes Dostoyevsky’s Demons (which used to be called The Possessed). It occurred to me, reading the last segment, that perhaps each narrative section of the book, which more or less tracks one literary work, mirrors that work,  but I’m too lazy to go back and check this theory. But I wouldn’t put that kind of tricky structure past Batuman, who in fact now teaches at Stanford.

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.

Deborah Devonshire & Patrick Leigh-Fermor, “In Tearing Haste”

I love that the Duchess of Devonshire is reduced to “Deborah Devonshire” in her capacity as an author.  It’s a kind of leveling perhaps — only not really.  One of the many, many pleasures in this volume is the grandeur of the lives depicted.  Deborah, of course, is the youngest and only surviving Mitford sister, widely known as “Debo.” Leigh-Fermor is a much-decorated travel writer. The two became friends in the 1950s and are still, at the respective ages of 93 and 96, volleying back and forth these sparkly entertaining missives.

Debo always posed as illiterate and pretended that she’d never read a book but her letters are pithy and vivid. Self-deprecation (probably a useful strategy among those Mitfords) is a constant as is her keen sense of fun. Which she shared with “Paddy,” who had more tools in his writerly paintbox. He wields them sometimes self-consciously but writers will do that.

And, oh! the people and the places! The Chatsworth trajectory is fascinating, from the massive white elephant the Devonshires take on in the 1950s to the formidably grand (that word again) enterprise it is by the end of the book. Yet throughout Debo is opening drawers and finding, for example “Andrew’s grandfather’s garter thing, been there ever since I suppose…” Translation: Order of the Garter awarded to the 9th Duke probably early in the 20th century.  Wouldn’t you have thought they would have missed it?

The arc of their lives is poignant. Lots of brave chatter in late letters about “Dr. Oblivion” who removes all one’s memories, and rueful reminiscence about friends and spouses as they die off.

Still, it’s the energy and sense of humor that kept me turning the pages. In 2005 Debo was in the hospital in Bakewell and, after praising the hospital, added: “But the lunch was yak, I think, certainly no known meat. Perhaps the patients are all from Nepal.” As Debo says, “Do admit…” Do admit it’s a great read.