A Book Blog 2020 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge

There is a quote from an interview with Colson Whitehead which is somewhat apposite here:

“Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”

The answer to an extent sums this novel up, but I am being slightly unfair because it is well written and an interesting study of character, set in 1950s London. It is told from several points of view, but the centre of it is 45 year old Penelope Hinton whose artist husband Jamie dies very suddenly in a traffic accident. Berridge analyses the course of her grief and bereavement and how familiar things and places seem to change:

“They related to nothing, so, terrifyingly, she felt nothing.  Nothing revived her.  Staring at the stone emperors, she thought, “We are two stone people, face to face.”  In the past, she had loved the ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the tiny miracles of the jewelled watches and snuffboxes.  Now they shone up at her dully, dead in their glass coffins.  Neither did the compassion and depth of Rembrandt’s paintings at the Wallace Collection, revive her, although the spaciousness and cold elegance of the house itself eased her by enclosing her in its own mood of petrifaction.”

Added to the mix is Pye Rumplelow who strikes up a friendship with Penelope. He owns a few laundrettes and strategically opens coffee shops next to them. Then there is married couple Spencer and Nika who move from Wales to London so Spencer can move into publishing. Finally there is Stefan and his girlfriend Bonny; Stefan being Spencer’s partner as they purchase a small publishing house along with money from Pye. There you have it. There isn’t much plot and it drifts along. Berridge resists the temptation to tie up loose ends at the end of the novel and it sort of drifts to a close.

The title comes from a sentence in the book relating to Penelope’s feelings:

“She continued to be enclosed in this hard shell of unspoken feelings and undelivered comment like a rose drowned horribly in an inverted glass globe.”

The characters in the novel are well portrayed and worked out but the whole is rather forgettable.

6 out of 10

Starting Frida by Hayden Herrera

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A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

This is a follow up to Matar’s search for his father in The Return. The title absolutely sums up the book. It is a description of Matar taking time to do something he has wanted to do for some time, spend a month alone in Siena looking at art. Absolutely nothing happens and the danger is that it becomes a description of “What I did on my holidays”, an essay I used to dread writing at the beginning of an autumn term at school. Matar had been interested in Sienese art (dating from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) for some time. There are a fair number of colour reproductions of the art he spent time with. It is a short memoir, some fifteen chapters.

Matar describes the month and contrasts it with his usual life where he is normally wishing to be somewhere else:

“The strange thing was that I never suffered this in Siena. Every day and for the entire month I spent there I felt myself to be in time ...Everything I experienced was happening at the pace at which it ought to happen.”

Of course there is a link to his recent search for his father:

“I had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. I had also come to grieve alone, to consider the new terrain and to consider how I might continue from here. “

Matar describes his wanderings in Siena and of course, the art. He talks a little about some of the people he meets and a few friendships he strikes up. There is a bit about the art, its context and history, especially Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegories of good and bad government which adorn the Palazzo Pubblico. There are plenty of personal, moral and aesthetic perspectives and reflections. It’s about art love and loss.

As I said nothing really happens and some people will love this, others will find it pointless. This year I would have welcomed time like this to spend alone and reflecting but for most of us that will not be because of lack of time and resources (and at the moment the ability to travel).

7 out of 10

Starting One of Ours by Willa Cather

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The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

This is West’s first novel, published in 1918. It concerns a soldier, Chris Baldry, who is 36. He goes to war in France and as a result he is suffering from shellshock. This shellshock affects his memory and he believes he is twenty-one. This clearly has an impact on his family. He has a wife, Kitty, who he does not remember at all. His cousin Jenny, who narrates and who lives with the couple (in their rather large house, no working class slumming it here), he remembers. He returns believing he still loves Margaret, with whom he had a summer fling when he was twenty-one. She is a publican’s daughter and so is of a different class and is married to someone else. Chris does not even remember his son Oliver who died aged six. This is a novella and it’s a pretty quick read. The whole point is the working out of the problem whilst West makes a series of points and raises issues for the reader to ponder. Reviews were generally good at the time. It is obviously allegorical with Chris representing the establishment, Kitty and Jenny represent tradition and Margaret innocence lost.

There were roughly about eighty thousand cases of “shell shock” by the end of the war. This pushed mental health concerns high up the public agenda, probably for the first time. West’s critique of gender and class norms are well documented and the main reasons why the book is so revered and I would agree with that analysis. However I want to focus on another aspect of the novel, its approach to mental health and the then new science of psychoanalysis. West does provoke thought:

“If madness means liability to wild error about the world, Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships…. I was even willing to admit that this choice of what was to him reality…, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him.”  

But the question of whether he is faking it also occurs:

 "Either it means he's mad, our Chris, our splendid sane Chris, all broken and queer, not knowing us…I can't bear to think of that. It can't be true. But if he isn't…" 

There is a period during the novel where West seems to embrace disability and madness and accepts human imperfection. However, and there are spoilers ahead, Chris must be cured.

"Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draught we must drink or not be fully human?"

This, of course, is the essence of ableism. Full humanity is not compatible with disability. West then brings in an almost religious sense:

“I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white hands held to him, and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory. And helped by me she had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him the trivial toy of happiness.”

Obviously by this point Chris does know he has lost a part of his memory, but the above passage infantilizes him by suggesting be is not in full communion with humanity. Of course if they did not cure him “he would not be quite a man”. A real man of course has to be able and sane and no doubt dominant. West seems to change direction at the end of the novel and decides Chris must be cured. She says so herself in a later essay:

“Now, there are drawbacks about following this course. It means that [Margaret] loses him: and it means that he has to go back to his wife Kitty, whom he does not like, and to the war. On the other hand, one does not want one's loved one to live in a land of illusion and infirmity. Nobody realises all this but Margaret. Now she might have turned this over and over in her heart, and suddenly been conquered by the latter and graver consideration. But I had been obliged to tell the story in the first person, in the character of Chris's cousin Jenny.”

I have a problem with this and am reminded of Szasz’s comments on the right to be ill. Someone with cancer has the right to refuse treatment, but the right to reject psychiatric treatment is much more limited. Chris is repeatedly described as ill and a cure must be imposed on him: a neat solution is required that will not upset tradition. I have focussed on this aspect of the novel rather than gender or class. Because this is an aspect less focussed on. The way of the cure is over simplistic and seems to be a plot device to bring the tale to an end and it’s rather cruel.

5 and a half out of 10

Starting Venus and Aphrodite by Rebecca West

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Down in the Valley by Laurie Lee

This is an older Laurie Lee looking back. Back as well in Slad in the Cotswolds where he began and reflecting on his life. The book is based on a series of conversations and recordings in 1994 which went to make up a TV documentary. The documentary was made by David Parker and he stored the notes and recordings and forgot about them. He found them again in 2017 and decided to make a brief book from them and here we are. The writing comes across as a little strained at times, and that is explained by the fact that they were originally recordings. This is certainly not Cider with Rosie, but it is not meant to be. It is the thoughts of an older man:

“Before I left the valley I thought everywhere was like this. Then I went away for 40 years and when I came back I realized that nowhere was like this.”

The writing covers some of the same themes as Cider With Rosie and the geography is the same. Lee talks about the old pub, the village pond where he played as a child and some of the characters he remembers. A few of his schoolmates are still alive. Lee also throws in some of his poetry, this is Apples:

Behold the apples’ rounded world

juice green of July rain,

the polestar of flowers, the rind

mapped with its crimson stain

 

The russet, crab and cottage red

burn to the sun’s hot brass

then drop like sweat from every branch

and bubble in the grass.

 

They lie as wanton as they fall

and where they fall and break

the stallion clamps his crunching jaws

the starling stabs his beak

 

In each blunt gourd the cidery bite

of boys’ teeth tears the skin

the waltzing wasp consumes his share

the bent worm enters in.

 

And I, with easy hunger, take

entire, my season’s dole:

and welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour

the hollow and the whole

 

There is a sense of the history of the area back to the Stone Age. There are snippets of the Civil War where Charles II is supposed to have hidden in an oak tree and strains of Elgar. This is a rehash and is not as good as the original and there are several recycled stories, possibly having grown a few details over the years. It may seem like a rural idyll. It certainly wasn’t, there was great poverty and many children died young of now curable diseases. The original had more of that feel of rural poverty, there is more rose-tinted reminiscence here.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting Black Car Burning by Helen Mort

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This book was published in October 2019 and focuses on the effect of the 1918-1919 pandemic on literature. It notes on the blurb on the back that despite the deaths of fifty to a hundred million people worldwide it has more or less disappeared for the historical and cultural memory, but it is very much present (though hidden) in the literature of the 1920s/1930s. Outka asks the question:

“Why did the flu, which produced so much death and suffering, largely disappear from American and British history and much of its literature? And given its historic position in 1918–1919, why is it not investigated as a central trauma within modernist studies?”

 Outka points out it is a matter of adjusting the way we look at the works she examines. What Elizabeth Outka cannot have known is that many of the early readers of her work would be doing so in the midst of a pandemic. I must admit I have taken my time with this one, partly because it is interesting and partly because it has been a sort of companion during what has been a very difficult year. There is a remarkable quote at the end of the book which I will reproduce here because it is remarkably prescient:

 “As scientists and researchers continually remind us, we are not ready for the next severe global pandemic, which—as they also remind us—is most assuredly coming. On the one hand, the last one hundred years have seen dramatic advances in disease treatments, and efforts are made every day to monitor and prevent outbreaks and to develop new vaccines. On the other hand, as I write this coda, dramatic cuts are proposed in the United States to some of the very programs that might prevent or respond to future global pandemics. Public support for such programs tends to peak during outbreaks, like the swine flu in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, but then wanes in their aftermath. And in the United States, as budgets for health care programs are reduced, funds for military spending has increased. The willingness to tolerate this discrepancy echoes the difference I have traced throughout this study between the attention the war received and the attention the pandemic received. For all the reasons I have analyzed, military threats, political conflict, and human-based violence are typically treated, represented, and seen far more clearly than threats posed by disease; the pandemic killed more people, but it’s the war we remember. It would be more than possible to build and augment effective global response systems that would greatly reduce the impact of a deadly pandemic—but first far more people have to see the threat and be willing to act. The works I investigate remind us that even a modern catastrophic pandemic that has already happened can be hidden, unless we learn to read for its presence.”

Outka focuses on a number of works in particular. In part one, entitled Pandemic Realism, Outka looks at:

One of Ours by Willa Cather

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Anne Porter

This section looks at how the war and memories of war tends to overshadow the pandemic in memory. Interestingly with the Cather novel, this is remembered as her “war novel”, whereas it is more than that and is as much a pandemic novel and indeed a novel about the end of the pioneer days. The novels address survivor guilt and the threat of contagion amongst other themes.

The second part looks at three particular and well known modernist texts:

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (also looking at her essay On Being Ill)

The Wasteland by T S Eliot

The Second Coming by W B Yeats

The last part looks at early horror films and zombie stories, looking especially at Lovecraft and linking them to the pandemic. There is a Coda at the end which looks at To The Lighthouse by Woolf and specifically the Time Passes section.

All of the authors here were touched by the pandemic. Eliot and Woolf had influenza. Eliot’s wife almost died from it. Yeats’s pregnant wife was seriously ill with it just two weeks before he started the Second Coming. The sections on Woolf are particularly interesting and Outka quotes Woolf from On Being Ill:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels … when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

Outka says specifically about Mrs Dalloway:

“Of all the pandemic literature I investigate, Woolf’s novel grants the most extensive mapping of the virus’s long-term after effects on bodies, teasing out the hard-to-see interchanges between physical health and perception. The novel not only tracks the virus across time; it investigates the cumulative, composite blows the war and pandemic together have on the societal and individual body.”

Outka, along the way pulls in a number of other authors and artists, including a reproduction of Munch’s striking “Self-portrait with the Spanish flu”.

It was striking and surprising to look at these works through a different lens and it makes me want to go back to some of them again, especially Mrs Dalloway. I have added the Cather novel into my Reading Women challenge for this year and I have a copy of the Maxwell novel. This is a thought provoking and scholarly work and maybe someone in a hundred years’ time will write something similar about the literature of the 2020s and 2030s.

9 and a half out of 10

Starting Dead Epidemiologists: On the origins of Covid 19 by Rob Wallace

 

[Hayley]

On 29/12/2020 at 7:00 PM, Books do furnish a room said:

This book was published in October 2019 and focuses on the effect of the 1918-1919 pandemic on literature.

Wow, that was timely!

 

What an interesting topic though, especially now! I have to admit, the pandemic didn’t even cross my mind when I read Mrs Dalloway. I’d definitely be interested to read it again with that in mind. 
I read an article a few days ago (I can’t remember which paper it was in now, it just popped up as a recommended article on my phone) where someone was explaining that they’d expect another ‘roaring twenties’ in the coming years because that is the trend after every pandemic. By the same theory I suppose our literature should follow similar trends!? 

[Books do furnish a room]

I think it's all going to be rather interesting, when all the hell is over. I do intend to reread Mrs Dalloway in the light of this.