Friday, January 25, 2019

2018's Reading III


My reading for 2018 included the six volumes of the Hogarth Press/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, the first four volumes edited by Andrew McNeillie (1986, 1987, 1988, 1994) and the last two by Stuart N. Clarke (2009, 2011). Of these several million words, most are reviews. Before she achieved fame for her novels in the late twenties, reviewing was the journeyman work she and eventually Leonard did that kept them, if not in bread and cheese (she had a small inheritance), at least able eventually to keep several houses and to start the Hogarth Press.
            She started reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and other London magazines in her early twenties, in 1904, and TLS was always her main platform, though when she became well known, American magazines paid her much more for her pieces. At the time of his retirement, she wrote in her diary that TLS editor Bruce Richmond had taught her “a lot of her craft” including “how to compress; how to enliven; & also…to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.”
            Over the years, Woolf reviewed many memoirs and letters by women, and she was drawn to those of strong and smart women, not only the famous ones such as Elizabeth I and Lady Elizabeth Holland, who kept the famous guests in her salon, including Macaulay, under her control with raps of her fan, but also women of obscure or straitened circumstances, such as Charlotte Bury, lady-in-waiting to George IV’s Queen Caroline, forced to make her living by serving a woman who often made Bury feel she was humoring a madwoman. Many of these books were assigned rather chosen by her, but in reviewing them she had an advantage. “I almost always like memoirs,” she told an editor late in her career. And in reading over the lives and letters of such women, Woolf formed her own ideas about women’s writing. Reviewing Dorothy Osborne’s letters to William Temple, she writes “the women letter writers were the true forerunners of the women novelists.” She saw great letter writers—men and women—as not only suppressed novelists but also frustrated essayists. Madam de Sévigné “would probably have been one of the great novelists” and writes with “unconscious naturalness.”
            Eventually her ideas began to be theorized in free-standing essays. Women’s socialization has always involved observation and analysis of character, she argues in “Women and Fiction.” Gradually she brings together the ideas about space, solitude, and freedom from grinding poverty that underlie A Room of One’s Own as well as Three Guineas, ideas which can be found first in reviews and then in essays and speeches. In one talk she says, ”The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.” The line might have gotten a startled laugh from her audience; I expect she anticipated such a reaction, but she was only slightly exaggerating. And in any case she was not averse to the startling and sweeping: “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” she writes in “Mr. Bennett [Arnold Bennett the novelist] and Mrs. Brown” [a woman she sits across from in a train, names, and invents a narrative about]. “Is it easy, is it possible, for a good man to be an Archbishop?” she asks, archly. Or, again, “How are we to account for the fact that we remember him [Shelley] as a great poet and find him on opening his pages a bad one?” And she pronounces: “One always lies when one speaks in public.” Her prejudices are often on display, as well as the desire to shock. She had a powerful contempt for the academic treatment of literature, and a perennial condescension toward Americans, just to pick a pair.
            She reviewed a lot of fiction, most of it bad and written by authors now forgotten. “Of course Mr. [Joseph] Hergesheimer gives us pleasure,” she writes, “but so do bright fires, oysters, and clean sheets.” But she acknowledges the educative power of bad books in the slow process of developing a mature taste (“How Should One Read a Book?”). Her touchstones among modern English novelists were Hardy, James, Meredith, and Conrad. She was reading the Russians during the first decades of her reviewing, and took Russian language lessons, and she adds Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev to the list of writers against whom she measures new fiction. Eventually she writes essays about fiction and what seems to be lacking there; namely, some attempt to capture fleeting life and “a myriad impressions…an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that form it.
            Her own essays take some time to acquire the extraordinary freedom of her fiction. But when they do, no subject daunts her. She tackles the description of delirium, from the inside, in “On Being Ill.” Later she writes a review of two biographical works at a time when she is ill with influenza again, and she incorporates her delirium. In “Gas,” she essays a description of being anesthetized at the dentist’s. She cheerfully accepts a thousand dollars from an American magazine to write a fantasy about an America imagined by someone who’s never been there. When she was twice frustrated by mechanical problems in the DeHavilland Moth that was supposed to take her flying, she imagined “Flying Over London.” “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” which begins with her regret at her inability to do justice to the beauty of the moment, immediately shifts from the transience of its beauty to the transience of the observers, who have gone over the road in a moment “and are already forgotten….Others come behind us.”
            She begins with only a mixed respect for the essay form. She thinks that, despite Montaigne, the English may be said to own the essay because of its peculiar popularity among them. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other” about “the immortality of the soul, or the rheumatism in your left shoulder.” But she comes to see that that the essay has its own “particular perfections,” and she echoes Johnson in pronouncing the essays of Addison “perfect.” She granted that the writing of an essay was a literary effort, while writing reviews she more than once compared to carpentry and cabinetmaking. Her practice makes moot any reservation she may have had about the form. Just to pick one example, I believe that in “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” she far surpasses the great flâneurs Baudelaire and Poe, those men of the crowd, “irresponsible…anonymous trampers” who write about roaming the city. On the winter streets of London she gathers the odd—a dwarf with beautiful feet in a shoe shop, two blind men with one boy between them as guide—and she speculates that her true talent may be in letting go of inhibition and being carried by the crowd, an observer without a will. Looking in at windows, she gets in a deadly blow at the mystique of “shopping”: “Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed.”

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

2018's Reading II


            Another enormously entertaining read for me during 2018 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in 2000. It’s set where she grew up, in Willesden, London NW2, where fragments of the crumbled British Empire have found their way home. Two war buddies, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, are raising their children there. Archie and his Jamaican wife Clara have one daughter, Irie. Samad and Alsana Iqbal have twin boys, Magid and Millat, both loved by Irie for as long as she can remember. To try to save Magid from all the secular and materialist influences of modern London, Samad sends him back to Bangladesh—a kidnap, really, that not only alienates Samad from his wife but also backfires: Magid grows up to be a “pukka” Englishman and godless, while Millat goes through various stages of juvenile delinquency and is then brainwashed by a radical Islamist group called KEVIN—Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. Smith has managed to capture the sullenness of the teens, who feel themselves neither here nor there, but she also has watched the parents who can’t be sure that the “good life” has really been all that good for them or their children. And her grasp of the accents of her varied neighborhood, as well as a pretty good sense of the absurd, means that all of this is kept funny.
            In their teens Millat and Irie are caught smoking pot with a boy named Joshua Chalfen, and the school orders compulsory study sessions at Joshua’s parents’ house (a very upper middle class, intellectual, clever, and self-satisfied Brit household that Smith dissects hilariously), where both Millat and Irie are so welcomed that it alienates Joshua, who joins his own group, a militant animal rights group called FATE—Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation. For different reasons, both KEVIN and FATE decide to disrupt Joshua’s father’s public unveiling of his big project, a genetically-engineered mouse. All of the dramatis personae show up for this climactic scene.
            Smith has disparaged this first novel of hers as juvenile work. All I can say is, some juvenile, and some work.

Monday, January 7, 2019

2018's Reading I


            My most enjoyable read during the year was Amor Towle’s A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2016. Count Alexander Rostov is not shot by the Bolsheviks because his 1913 poem, “Where Is It Now?” was considered by them as a call to arms against the Czarists. We later discover that the poem was in fact written by a friend who would have been in danger from the Czarists for having written it, so he and the Count agreed to let it be known that Rostov was is its author. Instead of being shot, Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to a lifetime house arrest in the Hotel Metropol, where he contrives to turn a sentence into a favor. Though he is moved to a ten-by-ten room on an upper floor, the Count, allowed to take whatever furniture will fit, takes his desk, whose legs are stacked inside with pieces of gold. The Count determines to master his circumstances rather than be mastered by them (his father’s constant advice) by committing to the business of practicalities. His little society includes Andrey Duras, the maître d’hotel of the hotel’s best restaurant, the Boyarsky; Emil the cook; Audrios the bartender at the bar the Count called the Shalyapin, for the opera star who once frequented it; Marina, the seamstress of the hotel; Arkady, who mans the front desk; Nina Kulikova, the nine-year-old who shows the Count the secrets of the hotel and then gives him her passkey as a parting gift; and Drosselmeyer, also known as Marshall Kutuzov, the one-eyed cat who takes milk and company from the Count in earlier years and in later ones inhabits the hotel as a ghost.
            Awaiting the Count during his years at the Metropol, besides an implacable enemy nicknamed the Bishop, are romance, adoptive fatherhood, and a perfect bouillabaisse, assembled despite the worst the Bishop and rationing can do to prevent it.