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Archive for the ‘A Century of Books’ Category

George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book – edited by James Ramsden

Posted in A Century of Books, George Lyttelton on April 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I think we can all agree that it’s fairly futile to “review” someone else’s commonplace book.  At best, you can say the compiler has flawless taste that exactly matches your own and that you copied down every passage for your future entertainment.  I’ve yet to have that happen but I do always find some gems and there were a more-than-usual number of them in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book edited by James Ramsden.

Lyttelton, the Eton schoolmaster whose correspondence with former pupil Rupert Hart-Davis has been entertaining readers since the 1970s (see my reviews of Volume One, Volume Two, and, after a lamentable lapse as a reviewer, Volume Five), was born in 1888 into a family line rich with aristocratic politicians and had been dead for 40 years by the time this was published in 2002.  He spent his entire career at Eton, sharing his love of literature with generations of boys, and the depth of that love and knowledge is on display here.  Lyttelton is not limited by eras or tongues, happily reaching out across centuries and the Western world (with some suspect Chinese sayings thrown in) for his tidbits.  French quotes remain in French, on the assumption that readers need no translation.  Oh for the optimism of 2002.  I suspect today publishers would add translations for more accessibility.

The book ends with an affectionate essay about one of Lyttelton’s friends and early letters between him and Hart-Davis that predate the published correspondence.  But they are beside the point for anyone but completists; the rest of us want to see what delightful quotes Lyttelton pulled from his varied readings.  And he does not disappoint.  Here are my favourites:

Aphorisms

He that leaves nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
– Halifax (the Trimmer)

The Arts

The civilised are those who get more out of life than the uncivilised, and for this the uncivilised have not forgiven them.
– Palinurus [Cyril Connolly]

Eccentrics – possibly the greatest of all the sections

The Rev. G. Harvest of Thames Ditton, a keen fisherman, missed his own wedding to go gudgeon-fishing.  The lady broke off the match.  He often forgot it was Sunday, and went into church with his gun to find out why so many people were there.
– G. H. Wilson

McTaggart, the celebrated philosopher, always wore a string round one of his waistcoat buttons.  Gilbert Murray asked him why and he answered ‘I keep it handy in case I should meet a kitten.’

History

The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well – because it ended with the Victorians.
– G. K. Chesterton

Letterwriting

Have the love and fear of God ever before thine eyes, God confirm your faith in Christ.  Je vous recommande à Dieu.  If you meet with any pretty insects of any kind, keep them in a box.
– Sir Thomas Browne to his son, 1661

Nations

When sanctions were imposed on Italy, an Italian journalist called on his countrymen to desist ‘from such pernicious British habits as tea-drinking, snobbery, golf-playing, Puritanism, clean-shaving, pipe-smoking, bridge-playing, and inexplicable apathy towards women.’

Reading

Every book worth reading ought to be read three times through; once to see what it is all about, once to observe how it is done, and once to argue with the author.
– G. M. Young

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Goodness, How Sad! – Robert Morley

Posted in A Century of Books, Play, Robert Morley, The 1937 Club on April 21, 2024| 4 Comments »

Only one brief entry for me in this week’s 1937 Club: Goodness, How Sad! by Robert Morley.  It’s described as “a comedy in three acts” and while it certainly has three acts, the comedic angle is more suspect.

Dealing with a struggling theatre company currently encamped in an unnamed Midlands town, the entirely of the play takes place in the sitting room of Mrs Priskin’s theatrical lodging house.  It is here that Carol and Christine, two young women in the company, are currently residing and where their colleague Peter frequently (especially around mealtimes) visits, much to the annoyance of Mrs Priskin.  Carol, the younger of the two women, has just about made up her mind to have an affair with Peter, less out of any passion for the likeable Peter than out of a desire for the experience which she thinks may also improve her acting (“so original”, the more world-weary Christine remarks).

Also about the house are “Mother and Father”, an older married couple who travel the country with performing animals – currently, they have trained seals though Father, properly Captain Otto Angst, still thinks with longing of the beautifully-trained elephants he toured with before the First World War.  More mysteriously, there is another lodger who takes great care to stay out of sight.  What nefarious past, the girls wonder, is he hiding?  Mrs Priskin seems remarkably unperturbed that she is almost certainly (they conclude) harbouring a murder or a sex maniac.

But the real, absorbing interest of the three young people is the failure of their current show and the fate of the upcoming performance of The Constant Nymph.  Closure seems imminent and, with it, the loss of a paycheque.  It’s not that it’s a bad play or cast, just that it has nothing to capture the town’s audience and lure them away from the lazy allure of the cinema.

When the identify of Mrs Priskin’s other border is revealed, there is suddenly the promise of a saviour: he is not a murder or sex maniac, but Robert Maine, a British theatre actor turned Hollywood movie star.  He is hiding out at Mrs Priskin’s for a break from stardom (and perhaps other things) and while Carol and Christine are briefly impressed by his fame, they soon spot the opportunity to save their own futures: after all, wasn’t it the very play they are staging right now that made Maine a star?  And surely he wouldn’t mind stepping back into it for a performance or two if it means saving their livelihoods?

Robert, drawn to the lovely Carol, does not mind as it makes it all the easier to conduct his flirtation and Carol, dazzled by fame and eager for experience, is delighted to be swept along.  Within days, she’s rethinking her entire future and whether her dedication to the stage is as strong as she once thought.

Suitably, Goodness. How Sad! premiered in the provinces, at the Perranporth Summer Theatre in Cornwall.  It reached London in late 1938 and was (based on the reviews in the edition I read) very well received there with frankly overly generous praise about its wittiness and charm.  I think the News-Chronicle came closest to the mark when it claimed “It easily persuades you to laugh: it comes near to making you cry” because, yes, it has its humour but it is also a story about disillusionment and the heartbreak wrought by longed-for experience.

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A Slow Spring Sunday

Posted in A Century of Books, Alexandra Raife, Fiction, Personal on March 24, 2024| 8 Comments »

The Artist’s House in Paris – T.F. Simon

After several hectic work weeks and a flurry of socializing, today has been a wonderful chance to be lazy.  It is a gorgeous spring day here, with cherry trees and magnolias in blossom, daffodils hanging on (though slightly defeated by a heatwave last weekend), and tulips eager to burst forth.  And, best of all, I had nothing I needed to do.

This meant I was free to run my errands this morning in the most desultory fashion, taking the longest possible routes between my destinations before finally wandering completely off to explore beautiful neighbourhood gardens far from any shops.

This afternoon, it meant I could take my book and a travel cup full of tea to a local park and read in the sun for a few hours, occasionally pausing to watch six eagles having an equally lazy afternoon doing laps high above.

Sun on Snow by Alexandra Raife was my perfect accompaniment for the gentle setting.  I discovered Raife’s gentle books thanks to this “Can you help?” post back in late 2018, where a reader was trying to remember the name of a domestic novel set in Scotland with similarities to D.E. Stevenson.  That book turned out to be Drumveyn, which I tracked down alongside a few other books by Raife, and while none of them were especially memorable, they were just right for quiet Sunday afternoons (much like D.E. Stevenson).

In today’s publishing world, Raife’s books would likely be called women’s fiction.  There is always some sort of romance, but it’s usually fairly subdued in comparison to the family or social relationships of the main characters.  In Sun on Snow, which was published in 1999 and is technically a contemporary novel but could have been set any time in the previous twenty years, young legal secretary Kate arrives at Allt Faar after a series of dramatic events in London.  After a brief encounter with dashing Jeremy, she has discovered she is pregnant and that neither her adoptive parents nor Jeremy are happy about it.  Kicked out of her family home, Jeremy has arranged for her to stay with the Munro family in Scotland in the house where he was raised after his parents’ deaths.  For Jeremy, this neatly tidies everything up.  For Kate and the Munros – matriarch “Grannie” and her three adult children, dull Harriet, widowed Joanna, and only son Max – it’s all rather awkward.

But slowly Kate adapts to life at Allt Faar, learning to pitch in the way everyone else does and proving herself far more capable than suspected.  After a lifetime of feeling like she needed to be worthy of the love of her cold adoptive parents, Kate finds it easy to love the good-naturedly judgmental, slightly chaotic Munros and feel part of a family.  There are tragedies, but not insurmountable ones, and romances, mostly pleasantly resolved, and it is all just exactly what one should read on a lazy Sunday while basking in the sun.

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Grievance – K.C. Constantine

Posted in A Century of Books, Fiction, K.C. Constantine, Mystery on March 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

Grievance by K.C. Constantine is not obviously the kind of book that will break your heart.  Published in 2000, it’s the sixteenth book in a long-running, hard-hitting crime series set in fictional Rocksburg, a dying industrial town in Pennsylvania full of people with sad pasts and no futures.  And it is the kind of good, or even great, book that shakes you as you’re reading it and stays with you for days after.

I’d never heard of Constantine before I picked up Bound to Please earlier this year, in which Michael Dirda enthuses about his work and Grievance in particular:

There are plenty of novels and memoirs about Jewish intellectuals and Gaelic charmers, about the African American experience and the legacy of the Civil War in the South, about drugged-out Gen-Xers, unhappy academics, Connecticut divorcees, and Washington bureaucrats who stumble upon global terrorist plots.  But who today writes about working-class America?  And by the working class I mean the Italians and Poles and blacks who do the real labor of the world, in foundries and factories, with lathes and diesel shovels and sweat.  I mean the people who need to stuff their dirty clothes in grocery bags and take showers in locker rooms before they go home at the end of an eight-hour shift.  Sure, much of Rust Belt America is vanishing, but a lot remains, and one of its few laureates is K.C. Constantine.

This kind of effusive praise is echoed in the blurbs on the book itself, from the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist.  But where have Constantine’s books gone?  I had to order this in via interlibrary loan and it came all the way from Montreal.  How can books this good, in a series this large, disappear so completely from library collections and print?

Our protagonist is Detective Sergeant Ruggiero (“Rugs” to his colleagues) Carlucci, a scrawny forty-six-year-old Vietnam vet who lives with his increasingly violent and disoriented mother and works for the Rocksburg police department.  When J.D. Lyons is murdered, Carlucci finds himself with almost too many suspects to investigate: who wouldn’t want to kill the executive who was responsible for laying off the majority of the steel factory’s workers when jobs were outsourced to South America?  But he is soon able to narrow it down to a specific sub-group of former workers, whose story is painfully plausible.  During the firm’s restructurings, the plant foremen ended up in limbo between the union and the executives.  When the critical gap was realised, it was too late: not only were there no pensions for these workers, there was no money left to fund them even after they won a court case determining their entitlement.  Some left, some killed themselves, and some soldiered on, stringing together what income they could find in years when they had hoped for a comfortable retirement. 

Working alongside Carlucci is a younger state trooper, who can’t understand the apathy of their various suspects, why they don’t sell up and go somewhere else, start anew.  But it’s hard to start anew when you are old and tired, and impossible to sell your house in a city full of abandoned ones that no one wants.  That is the world they live in, and the one the victim created as one of his former employees notes:

‘Hell, all you have to do is look around, see what you see.  Empty, rusty buildings, a whole lotta people on welfare, and a whole lotta real estate generating no taxes for the city or the schools.  That’s the man’s legacy.’

Juxtaposed with these harsh economic circumstances and the colourful (but so pitch-perfectly written) language of the blue-collar workers, is an immense amount of sympathy and kindness.  Carlucci worries constantly about his mother – with good reason – and about the women who come to care for her when he as at work.  After she recently wandered off, he has installed hooks on the outside doors to latch when he goes out so that she can’t run off and he prays when doing so that there won’t be a fire.  Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who care for him, like his old boss, who plies him with wine and sympathy when he needs them both, and the beautiful Franny, who is keen for their long conversations to lead to something more and not afraid to tell that to her shy suitor, while also making her warm family accessible to him amidst the chaos of his own disintegrating home. 

It is all so, so good and surprisingly funny.  But, like all stories about good people trying their best and failing in a society set up to fail them, it will break your heart. 

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A Couple of Duds

Posted in A Century of Books, Felicity Cloake, Fiction, Food Writing, Lois McMaster Bujold, Non-fiction, Science Fiction, Travel on February 29, 2024| 9 Comments »

I am generally fairly callous about abandoning books if I find them unimpressive but I had such high hopes for these two that I persevered until the very end, unwilling to abandon all hope.  Sometimes patience is not rewarded.

Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake (2022) – I adore One More Croissant for the Road, Cloake’s foodie travel book about cycling around France and enjoying local dishes.  What better pastime for a food writer!  And Britain, though hardly a culinary competitor to France, certainly could have offered up an interesting array of meals – but sadly Cloake focuses her regional travels through the British Isles on just one meal: breakfast.  While there is some regional variance (laverbread in Wales, porridge in Scotland), it’s really not enough to carry an entire book and whereas Cloake was delightful in her excitement over the ever-changing French scenery, injuries that limit her cycling adventures, Covid restrictions, and perhaps over familiarity make her less descriptive when it comes to her native land.  Too much time is devoted to talking about the friends and family who host her along the way, which is a very nice way to thank them but not of interest to most of the readers who are looking for a food- or travel-focused book.  Even the title is a weak framing device, as neither the author nor many of the people she encounters like either ketchup or brown sauce with their breakfast.  I hope Cloake cycles off towards more varied cuisine sometime soon.

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (1986) – I have heard rave reviews for years about the Vorkosigan Saga; the books have been nominated for countless prizes and won many of them, and the diverse cast of characters is deeply beloved by many readers.  It had been a while since I last read any proper science fiction so I picked this up hoping to be starting a new and exciting series.

The concept is certainly appealing: Commander Cordelia Naismith finds herself stranded on an unpopulated planet with an injured comrade and Lord Aral Vorkosigan, an infamous soldier from the powerful and deeply political planet of Barrayar.  After a few days trekking to find help, there is a clear attraction between Cordelia and Vorkosigan but interplanetary politics are vicious and Cordelia is soon fleeing for home.  Of course, their paths cross again (as they must, given that they are the parents of the series’ main hero) but the politics never become less messy.

I was reminded almost immediately after starting of why I’ve never had success with Bujold before: dialogue.  There were other things I didn’t like – the pacing was too fast, the twists and plots that were supposed to be clever were overused – but in the end it was the dialogue that killed this for me.  Cordelia is meant to be an intelligent, capable, mature woman, but slips into vapid slang at the most inopportune moments.  Every time it happened, I was jolted out of the scene by my frustration.  There is an inadvertently hilarious scene when Vorkosigan is somberly telling her of the evil that surrounds them, the weight of the subject making him quieter and quieter as he eloquently goes on about the perfidy of man.  To which she responds, like a complete idiot: “Commodore Vorkosigan – Aral – what’s eating you?  You’re so keyed up I expect you to start pacing the ceiling any minute.”  Jesus wept.

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Getting Married in Buffalo Jump – Susan Haley

Posted in A Century of Books, Canadiana, Fiction, Susan Haley on February 25, 2024| 2 Comments »

I picked up Getting Married in Buffalo Jump by Susan Haley on a whim from the library, remembering the TV movie that aired frequently on weekends when I was growing up.  Published in 1987, it is the story of Sophie, a rural Alberta kindergarten teacher whose father has recently died, leaving her and her mother with a farm they love but cannot run on their own.  When Alexander Bresnyachuk, who was a few years ahead of her at high school before he suddenly dropped out and left town, comes to work as their farmhand things immediately begin looking up.  But very quickly he shocks Sophie by proposing; Alexander has a vision of a practical marriage, unbothered by the lack of romance that has passed between them so far:

‘I’ve been around.  I’ve been around too much and I’m tired of it.  I want a place and I want a wife, and I want to have kids.  You’re a real nice girl, Sophia.  I think I’d make you a pretty good husband.  So?  What about it?’

At twenty-eight, Sophie has some failed affairs behind her and while there is no great bitterness, there is also not a lot of hope.  Indeed, on Alexander’s first visit to the farm she had mused to herself that it was love when he started to help her immediately in the garden:

It was not that there were not many men who would offer to help with a manure fork; it was that there were not many men.  Sophie had begun to wonder whether there were any at all.

Sophie accepts his proposal, but warily.  Her mother is initially horrified – her educated daughter should do better than a poor drop-out Ukrainian – but for Sophie the hesitation comes from Alexander’s past and how little she knows of it.  Slowly, she seeks out the people in his life so she can better understand who he is, why he left, and, ultimately, why he came back.  She befriends Annie, his high school girlfriend who is the mother of his son, gets to know his troubled sister, and enjoys his adoring Ukrainian mother and dramatic Russian-Ukrainian father.  And through it all, she unravels the mystery of Benny, Alexander’s childhood best friend who is at the centre of all the old stories but nowhere to been seen now.

This is a lovely low-key romance, with Alexander quietly showing his worth and dependability, but it is even more a portrait of a prairie town, and all the prejudices and problems that entails.  There is too much drinking, smoking, and, for some, drugs but these are not ‘Issues’ for the novel, merely realistic background.  Likewise the racial tensions: the Bresnyachuks are Ukrainians, a sizeable ethnic minority on the Canadian prairies; indeed, prior to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022 and the flood of refugees to neighboring European states, Canada had the third largest Ukrainian population in the world after Ukraine and Russian because of early 20th century immigration.  But that didn’t make them a respected minority and that condescension is captured here, with the attitudes of Sophie, her mother, and various friends towards Alexander’s family.  Worse though is how First Nations people are treated, like Annie and Benny.  Racial slurs are casually used by and against each group in a way that feels very true to life and the era.

It is a book of straightforward people.  Sophie is trying to understand Alexander, to figure out what the catch is around a man who is handsome, kind, and hardworking; but sometimes, happily, people are what they seem.  Annie, despite being left a single mother in her mid-teens, has no fight with Alexander and wishes him the best; she is happy to prop up the local bar and then go home to her trucker husband and children.  Poppa Bresnyachuk is dramatic, full of contradictory over-the-top stories about his wartime exploits, but irrepressibly loveable.  Momma Bresnyachuk is doting over her favourite son but pleased by his choice of Sophie; the most realistic moment in the entire book for me was Momma overseeing Sophie preparing a plate of pickles and cured meats on her first visit to Alexander’s family home.  This is absolutely how a Slavic mother will judge you.  Sophie’s own mother is a straightlaced WASP who thinks the lessons of her passionate marriage don’t apply to her daughter’s marriage of convenience.

All in all, this was a pleasant surprise with a welcome sense of humour and I’m so glad my whimsy led me to it.

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My Name is Million – Anonymous (Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler)

Posted in A Century of Books, Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler, Memoir/Biography, Non-fiction on February 22, 2024| 4 Comments »

There are some books so raw with emotion that it is almost painful to read them: My Name is Million is one of these.  Published anonymously in 1940, it is a memoir of the terrifying first months of the war by Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler, an Anglo-Irish writer (who published as Martin Hare) who was married to a Pole and living in Warsaw when the war broke out.

Writing from England and still reeling from her experiences, Zajdler treads an interesting line between passion and detachment.  They feel like they should be polar opposites but perhaps it is the only way to write your way through the kind of shock Zajdler was still in, having lost so much so quickly.  And, as she describes, it was hard to feel much of anything normal during such abnormal times:

After I had lost everything, when not a stone, not a piece of paper, not a stitch of clothing remained of what a few weeks before had been our homes and the accumulation of two people’s whole lives; when I never knew whether I should eat again, sleep or wake, live or die, from one second to another; when I had seen everything I had cared for collapse like a house of cards, a nation stretched out on the cross, a fair country burning behind me like a box of matches and hell itself opening in front of me, there were whole days when I never suffered anything.  I was incapable of passion, even of fears; even of the desire for revenge.  All that was left was the human instinct for some roof of my own, some place to crawl into.

While not unexpected, the speed of the German invasion in September 1939 was famously shocking.  Proud Poland fought a terribly brief and bloody defense, but to no avail – and, shamefully for an Englishwoman, with no support from her supposed allies.  Within weeks, thousands were dead, cities were razed, and the country was being divided between the Germans and Soviets.  But Zajdler would not have had it any other way:

We were all of us wrong, about nearly everything.  Except about one thing.  We knew what was coming.  We preferred it to dishonour.  We have paid, probably, the most fearful price in all history.  But we were right to do it.  We would do it again.  None of us, not one of us, with all our faults, with all our quarrels, with all our regrets, if put to the same test, but would do the same thing again.

Writing in 1940, yes, some of this is propaganda.  It is a reminder to the English, who dawdled with their declaration of war while their ally faced tanks, bombers, and fighter planes alone, that there are things worth fighting for.  But this martial pride is also such an integral part of the Polish character.  Later in their travels, a Lithuanian solider, amazed at his neighbours’ insane gallantry, comments “It is all pride with you.  Polski honor!  A man does not need honor.  What he needs is bread and a warm coat.”  Zajdler has a quick retort for him: “And you have both, and the Poles have neither.  Each has what he prefers.”

From Warsaw, Zajdler and her husband (who, like the majority of their friends, is referred to only by his first initial – A.) find themselves joining a flow of refugees looking for safety.  Injured and exhausted, they make their way to the country estate of an elderly family friend who has seen her home seized and destroyed several times in past conflicts and knows this will happen again.  The Soviets are advancing, the village peasants are feeling torn between customary feudal obeisance and the lure of communism, and the estate’s ever-growing population of aristocratic refugees is caught in a world of surreal horror, with all the elements of an elegant house party contrasted with total war:

All the accessories of a normal life still miraculously existed.  Only the life was not normal.  In the middle of a forced conversation somebody would suddenly stop dead.  The jokes were too successful.  Everybody was too ready to be amused.  The ones who were being amusing, looking round at the other haggard faces, would suddenly realise what their own must be like, and give it up.  Getting through time was like trying to swim in the Dead Sea.  We did the most incredible, fantastic things.  Like sitting under an arbour smothered in roses, reading novels from the library in Pinsk!  Whatever else I forget, I shall never forget the horror of that sort of thing.  In Warsaw, women were throwing themselves against the German tanks, into a jet of machine-gun bullets, with buckets of boiling water.  Warsaw schoolchildren were standing night and day on the roofs of houses, shovelling off the incendiary bombs before they had time to burn through.

In the end, Zajdler is unable to describe her escape.  One paragraph bleakly outlines the facts: from Poland, she and her husband made their way to Lithuania, Latvia, and finally Estonia, where they boarded a neutral ship and set off for Sweden.  Their boat was captured by Germans, Zajdler and her husband were handed over to the Gestapo, and, though Zajdler was quickly released and made it to England, she never saw her husband again.  Even though Zajdler was writing just months later and there was no official word of what had happened to her husband, she had seen enough of the Germans to know he would not survive – and she was, we know reading with the benefit of hindsight, absolutely correct.

I am always interested in reading about Poland during the first months of the war and this was a very worthy addition to my education, especially since Zajdler journeyed east and I found it fascinating to learn more about reactions there to the Soviet occupation.  I was also reminded of Helen MacInnes’ excellent spy novel, While Still We Live, which focused on an Englishwoman in Poland at the outbreak of the war and her experiences.  MacInnes clearly did her research as what Zajdler describes is very similar to what is in that novel.

Zajdler’s eye for detail and utter lack of self-pity make her a fascinating guide to a horrifying period and I’m so glad an article in Slightly Foxed brought this memoir to my attention.

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Bound to Please – Michael Dirda

Posted in A Century of Books, Literary Criticism, Michael Dirda, Non-fiction on February 8, 2024| 3 Comments »

I love to read about many things.  History, science, romance, fantasy – I eagerly try it all.  But what I love best is reading the thoughts of passionate, articulate, educated people writing about books, and it is hard to think of a better example of this than Bound to Please by Michael Dirda.

Dirda has been reviewing books for The Washington Post since 1978 and this collection, published in 2005, shares a generous selection of one hundred reviews from his first twenty-five years there, plus a few essays for additional enjoyment.  Dirda won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism and it’s clear in every piece why.  I’d read a few of his more personal books before – Browsings and Book by Book – but this was my first encounter with his proper criticism and I was delighted by how engaging and energetic it is, without ever sacrificing intelligence and style.

His choices here are split into intriguingly themed categories.  “Professionals at Work”, “Visionaries and Moralists” (aka Victorians), “Europeans”, and “Performing Selves” proved particularly devasting to my to-read list, but even the sections I wasn’t naturally drawn to (like “We Moderns”) still managed to fascinate.  I may not want to read all these books but I love reading about them.  How could you not want to pick up Grievance by K.C. Constantine after reading this passionate passage at the start of his review?

There are plenty of novels and memoirs about Jewish intellectuals and Gaelic charmers, about the African American experience and the legacy of the Civil War in the South, about drugged-out Gen-Xers, unhappy academics, Connecticut divorcees, and Washington bureaucrats who stumble upon global terrorist plots.  But who today writes about working-class America?  And by the working class I mean the Italians and Poles and blacks who do the real labor of the world, in foundries and factories, with lathes and diesel shovels and sweat.  I mean the people who need to stuff their dirty clothes in grocery bags and take showers in locker rooms before they go home at the end of an eight-hour shift.  Sure, much of Rust Belt America is vanishing, but a lot remains, and one of its few laureates is K.C. Constantine.

Or who doesn’t recognize their own prejudices as Dirda outlines his against Soviet literature?  And when he recants after reading Bulgakov, aren’t you more likely to give that author a chance too?

Even as a kid who lived to read all kinds of things, I knew better than to bother with anything written after 1917 in the Soviet Union.  Tsarist Russia produced masterpieces by the likes of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, but the USSR brought out touching love stories about a boy, a girl, and a tractor, novels with titles like Cement, and propagandistic tracts, disguised as fiction, that emphasized ‘positive’ heroes and conformed to the tenets of ‘socialist realism’.  This was literature by committee, dull, lifeless, unimaginative, and all too politically correct.

Dirda seems to know everything – not just the book he is reviewing, but all the other works by the author, or by the subject, and by their contemporaries.  He may be writing about a single book but there are generally half a dozen others mentioned in the same review.  A piece on a biography of A.E. Housman left me wanting to read not just that, but also two volumes of his poetry, his letters, his selected prose and nine other books about Housman’s contemporaries.  The review is little more than three pages long.

Which is how I finished this book with fifty new titles on my to-read list, spanning everything from solid biographies to fantasy novels.  Thank goodness I’d already read some of these books (and even then it was mostly because Dirda also mentioned them in Browsings).

Dirda is very, very good at what he is doing.  He does not aspire to be an artist on par with those he writes about (as he notes when writing about Martin Amis, “The English language just begs and rolls over at his command.  Should you happen to be a writer yourself, or – God help you – a literary journalist, you suddenly know, with numbing clarity, just how Salieri felt when Mozart sashayed into Vienna.”); instead, his writing is the best sort of journalism, the kind that engages and excites while maintaining an elegance and crispness that delights those of us who enjoy clean and clever prose.

It also does not hurt that Dirda and I share a certain sensibility.  He – like all the best readers and writers – is a romantic at heart as he proves in his introduction to the section called “Europeans”:

One of the pleasures of middle age – there aren’t many – lies in a growing appreciation for art that is urbane and refined.  To be a man of the world is, in my mind, to be a courtly, music-loving intellectual living in Vienna or Prague during the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  It is the last glimmering of a now vanished era when you could still find yourself standing on the field of honor with a raised pistol, or attending a masked ball where the mistress of the emperor, her eyes wide, her breasts heaving, might squeeze your hand and whisper ‘tonight’.

It would have been nice to have more female writers – or subjects – represented but you can’t have everything.  The period these reviews were drawn from was not a great one for female writers, and there is a strong focus on older fiction as well as biographies of historical figures so that is natural enough.  It is a minor disappointment rather than a criticism.

One hundred reviews was not enough to satisfy me.  A further twenty years have passed since the end of this collection – is it not time to put out another one?  I know I have more of his books left to enjoy but it will be hard to match this.

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Mother Knows Best – Edna Ferber

Posted in A Century of Books, Edna Ferber, Fiction, Short Stories on February 2, 2024| 4 Comments »

When the short story collection Mother Knows Best by Edna Ferber was released in 1927, the title story was being turned into Fox Films’ first talkie even as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author’s most recent novel (Show Boat) was being adapted into a show that would arguably revolutionize musical theatre.  A busy year indeed for Miss Ferber and an exciting one for her many fans.

Coming to this some years later, when Ferber’s name is far from being on everyone’s lips, is no less enjoyable.  There is a reason she was successful then and why she continues to be worth reading now:  she is a polished, confident writer who knows exactly how to draw her readers in.  The bulk of these stories focus on ordinary working-class Americans – and even the exceptions are about workers who managed to pull themselves up (for better or worse) into a new realm.  Most of the characters feel like very real people, full of habits that annoy their families, resentment over their jobs, and dreams of something better or different.  This was compelling in 1927 and remains so in 2024.

I love Ferber for her humour but in this collection it appears in glimmers rather than overwhelming waves.  The title story indeed is a tragedy in miniature about a recently deceased stage star whose great success – and loneliness – are the result of a managing mama.  Happily, it was followed by one of my favourite stories, “Every Other Thursday”, about a young Finnish servant and the great excitements of her day off, when she can abandon the middle-class family she sullenly serves and escape to a little Finnish enclave in the city.  A chance to chat, to go to the sauna, to dress beautifully, and to be admired by a dashing fellow Finn – these are simple pleasures but crucial ones in an otherwise dully repetitive life.

I was unsettled by the melancholy “Holiday”, which reminds me of A Fortnight in September in some ways.  The Cowans – Pa, Ma and spinster daughter Carrie – leave Newark for a holiday in Atlantic City full of small, sad, and somewhat seedy pleasures.  In particular, Carrie’s longing for a bit of freedom and a touch of romance felt all to plausible, as did the sense of danger when a small reckless act finds her out of her depths.

In other stories, working girls aspire to better things before recognizing (with chagrin) the value of the hardworking boys they grew up with, elderly widows jaunt off to Europe together after feeling ignored by their families, a middle-aged couple leave their snug home and set off like gypsies in their car with no fixed direction, and, in my second favourite story (“Our Very Best People”), a young woman handles the loss of fortune and position with courage and the pioneer spirit while her twin sister does the opposite.

It’s not a very quotable book (I find short stories rarely are), but I did love this passage from “Our Very Best People” explaining the Tune twins and their very different inheritances:

An Eastern finishing school, followed by Vassar, had rarely turned out a more unfinished product than Hannah Tune, who was, she would explain to you, the elder of the Tune twins.  Hannah resembled her simple, straightforward, plain-featured mother, who had been the Kansas City heiress of the stockyards stock.  Hilda was undeniably her father’s daughter – authentic offspring of Rutger G. Tune, of the Massachusetts Tunes, who were born to be ancestors as some people are born singers, writers, drunkards.  A true Tune, posing for a casual snapshot, always emerged looking like a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

I love Ferber as a novelist but it was as a short story writer that I first encountered her (she has an excellent story about a grandmother who goes to work at a munitions factory in the Virago collection Wave Me Goodbye) and possibly still like her best.  I’ll just have to keep reading on through all her works to make a more thorough judgement – with pleasure!

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The Fourth Wall (or, The Perfect Alibi) – A.A. Milne

Posted in A Century of Books, A.A. Milne, Play on January 29, 2024| 4 Comments »

When I first did a Century of Books in 2012, it helpfully coincided with my discovery of a new favourite author: A.A. Milne.  He was so prolific that a full 18 years of that century were filled by his works and while he won’t prove quite as helpful for my 2024 ACOB, I will work him in wherever possible, starting with The Fourth Wall (or, The Perfect Alibi), a “detective story in three acts” from 1928.

Like all good mystery stories, we open at a country home, owned in this case by Arthur Ludgrove.  Generally quiet, the house is this time full of people: there are the usual occupants – Arthur, his ward Susan who is acting as hostess, and his nephew Jimmy – plus a charming widow and her adult daughter, a Major who hopes he is still eligible at 60 for the attentions of said charming widow, and two middle-aged men to round out the group, Mr Carter and Mr Laverick.

The play begins like so many Milne plays with affectionate bantering between our young leads.  The notes have already explained the situation between Jimmy and Susan to us before we ever hear them speak: “They were not engaged, but it would be ridiculous for them to put it off much longer”.  Jimmy at 27 is “one of those charming and apparently not very intelligent young men whom the Universities empty into the world so hopefully and so regularly” while Susan, a bit younger, is the typical quick-thinking Milne female, always a few steps ahead of her menfolk and far more practical.  Reclining with one of her beloved detective stories, she can’t help but offer her advice to Jimmy when she discovers that the letter he is writing is one that will benefit the houseguest she has taken against so strongly since his arrival:

JIMMY: If you want to know, I’m giving Laverick a letter of introduction.

SUSAN: I shouldn’t.

JIMMY: Why?

SUSAN: Because people hate losing their pearls

Jimmy, bless him, won’t stand for such libel, even though he too admits there is something about the man that he finds unsettling.  But quickly they segue to discussing the sensational story Arthur told the night before.  Or rather, Jimmy tries to segue until Susan reminds him that she never heard the story:

SUSAN: I’m afraid, James, that the ladies – God bless them – had withdrawn.  Doubtless wisely.

JIMMY: It wasn’t that sort of story.

SUSAN: Even though it wasn’t, I should like to hear it.

JIMMY: He was in South Africa when the Boer War was on.  Did you know that?

SUSAN: I knew that there had been a so-called Boer War which excited our ancestors tremendously and I knew that Arthur had been in South Africa.  I didn’t know they had met.

It transpires that years before Arthur had been in South Africia working for the police.  While there, he rounded up a gang of three criminals, one of whom was executed while the other two were sentenced to penal servitude for life.  Before they were taken from the courtroom, the two sentenced men swore the get their revenge on Arthur one day.

Before Act One ends, revenge has been sought and Arthur is dead.  And we as readers witness the entire thing.

The remaining two acts deal with the investigation, first by the local P.C. and his visiting son, a Scotland Yard sergeant, and later, and more successfully, by the intrepid Susan whose passion for detective stories has made her observant, suspicious, and far better equipped to get to the truth than the professionals.

This is one of Milne’s middling works.  You would have a pleasant evening at the theatre watching it or at home reading it, and then forget it entirely – as I almost had, after reading it for the first time five years ago.  Milne loved detective stories so it’s natural enough that he tried writing a few, but he never mastered them. Too much explanation is required in such stories, which hardly gives him the time to engage in the quick, clever dialogues he wrote so well.  But middling Milne is still fun and I was glad to have picked this up again.

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