Helene Hanff and "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street"

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I had a big stack of books all set to read once I reached this point of my treatment / recovery: textbooks, novels, history, Latin, et bleeding cetera.

Yes, let's have a good big laugh at my planning.

I am not much in the mood for new books. The idea of cracking "De bello gallico," or Thomas Pynchon's new novel, or the pre-calc book my student assistant very thoughtfully provided for me, makes me utterly apathetic. I managed to read a science-fiction novel, and the first half of "Little Dorrit," and I am afraid that's about it.

But rereading  - !

I was fumbling around the shelves the other week and my hand fell upon Helene Hanff's "84, Charing Cross Road." I devoured it, for the thirty-fifth time. It's a charming little epistolary (!) novel in which Helene enters into correspondence with a little London bookstore back in the early 1950s. Her style is chatty and wise-guyish, and the bookseller's letters are starchy and informational. They get to know one another. She gets to know everyone in the bookstore. She sends gifts of food (rationing was a grim fact of life in England in those days), and talks about Isaak Walton and John Donne as if she knows them personally, and the bookstore staff send her snapshots and tablecloths and - upon occasion - the books she orders.

If you haven't read it - well, it's a gem.

In the sequel, "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street,"  Helene finally goes to London (in 1971) and stays for about six weeks, and keeps a detailed travel diary. This book was never so much a favorite of mine as “84 Charing Cross”; it seemed perfunctory, tacked-on.

Now I have read it twice more, and I have changed my mind.

This book is a minor masterpiece of travel literature. It works under one simple premise: if you dream of visiting a place for long enough, the place you dream of will be there waiting for you when you finally get there. There will be all kinds of U-turns and surprises, but at the end of the day, you will have discovered your dream.

Helene's descriptions of London are peachy. Her observations are wry. She is unexpectedly wise. (She notes, for example, that you could take any block of a London suburb and plop it down into Queens or Brooklyn, and no one would be the wiser. You could never, however, get away with substituting a block of downtown London with a block of downtown New York.) Her descriptions of her traveling companions are poifect. She is irascible and sometimes unhappy and disappointed. It’s one of the truest travel books I’ve ever read.

Put this on your reading list, kids.

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Alphonse Allais

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I was avid to visit the town of Honfleur, up on the damp coast of Normandy, when Partner and I visited France in 2012, because one of my favorite composers - Erik Satie - was born there. (I should note that, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin, Satie left Honfleur as soon as he realized where he was.)

Honfleur is a dour little fishing port with boggy streets and old sad-looking houses. Satie's childhood home has been converted into a very neato little museum, good enough to be featured by Rick Steves on his excellent European travel TV show, but once you've seen the museum - as Partner and I quickly realized - you've seen the shank of the town, and the best thing you can do is bid Honfleur a modest au revoir.

Except that one little detail caught my attention: a life-sized plastic cow in the visitor center, with a bande dessinee painted on the side. (Two Rick Steves-type comments: Normandy is a farm region, so the cow motif is everywhere, and Partner begs me to remind everyone that the restroom in the Honfleur visitor center was the most toxically horrible he ever came across in Europe.) Anyway, the comic strip on the side of the cow depicted Erik Satie and Honfleur's other favorite son, humorist Alphonse Allais, grabbing one another's chin and singing a little children's song. Then one slaps the other on the cheek, very hard (I have no idea if this is part of the children's song or not) and runs away, leaving the other in tears. I was so baffled by this that I don't even remember which one does the slapping and which one runs away.

This led me to Alphonse Allais, whose "oeuvres anthumes" I purchased on an appropriately soggy day in Paris about a week later. (“Anthumes” is meant to be a cute parallel to “posthumes,” meaning “posthumous” – see, I bought the stuff he published while he was still alive, get it?) It turns out that Allais was an essayist / journalist / humorist in a way that no longer really much exists. (If you can imagine the New York Times's Gail Collins without the politics, or "CBS Sunday Morning"'s Bill Geist without the peripatetic folksiness, you've almost got it.) Allais created characters and situations and wrote about them for a page or two. Generally there's a punch line. If the characters or the situations amused Allais, he revisited them.

He was, in a word, a feuilletonist.

Do they exist in American literature? Did they ever? Most assuredly. It was a late 19th / early 20th-century thing to be and do. Mencken was a feuilletonist, as were Don Marquis and H. Allen Smith and Harry Golden. See? You haven't been reading those guys recently, have you? But it's not because they're not entertaining or that they don't write well; it's only that the style has fallen out of fashion.

Allais had the famous dry Norman sense of humor, the "pince-sans-rire" ("pinch without laughing" - basically, "tell a joke all the way to the punch line, but tell it so seriously and drily that no one is sure if you're joking or not." Isn't French neat to be able to put all of that in three words?) Satie used pince-sans-rire all the time in his music, writing pieces of fantaisiste music with titles like "Dried Embryos," and ending them with long strings of Beethovian tonic-dominant-tonic chords.

Allais needs to be translated for a modern American readership.

Now who could do something like that?

Hmm.

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Young adult fiction

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“How did you spend your weekend?” Apollonia asked. “Gambling? Moping?”

“Mostly moping,” I said. “Also reading young-adult fiction.”

She roared with laughter. She, of all people, knows what I mean. Apollonia is the world’s most tragically obsessed Twihard, and would happily pluck a leftover egg-salad sandwich out of the garbage and eat it, if there were any chance it had been gnawed on by Robert Pattinson. It goes without saying that she knows the Stephenie Meyer books by heart, the way Islamic clerics know the Koran.

Naturally all of us read the Harry Potter books, though they were “too young for us.” Why? Because they were well-told stories, and entertaining, and full of conflict on every level. They ask questions like: why is my family (and Professor Snape, for that matter) so mean to me? Why won’t Hermione and Ron realize they love one another? Why is Lord Voldemort trying to kill me? Also, the books are funny and colorful and full of incident. (There are some dull patches – the middle third of “Deathly Hallows,” in which Ron and Harry and Hermione wander in the wilderness and snipe at each other, was pretty deathly itself – but overall these books move pretty briskly. And who doesn’t like a six-hundred page book that moves along briskly?)

Also, some years ago, I discovered Diane Duane’s “So You Want to Be A Wizard” series, which is serious fun. Who doesn’t want to be a teenage wizard? You get to save the planet, and sometimes the entire galaxy, over and over again. You get to meet interesting people like the Archangel Michael and Satan. And Diane Duane can really write; she’s light-years ahead of Meyer, and I think she writes more fluently than Rowling. Naturally you really ought to read the books in order, but I didn’t, and I don’t think I missed out too much. I especially like “A Wizard Abroad,” in which a New York girl (and secret wizard) is sent off to Ireland to visit relatives, and ends up discovering an entire world of Celtic folklore, helps to reenact the Battle of Moytura, and (incidentally) saves the world one more time. (Diane Duane also maintains a great Tumblr in which she interacts with readers and fans – I don’t know how she finds the time – and is very obviously a funny and generous person. This makes me like her writing even more.)

And if you still find yourself with time on your hands, try Rick Riordan’s Greek-mythology series – the five novels of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and the three novels of “Heroes of Olympus” he’s published for far. (The fourth, “The House of Hades,” is due out around the time that this blog is to be published; the series is set to conclude a year from now.) These are reimaginings of Greek and Roman myths, set in modern America; they’re goofier than the “Wizard” books, and the humor can be juvenile, but the stories are gripping (let’s face it, Greek mythology is good source material), and there are some nice touches. (If you saw the first movie based on the series, “The Lightning Thief,” rest assured that the books are much better.)

I could go on. Do Tove Jansson’s Moomin books count as Young Adult? Parts of them skew a little young (even for me!), but I love them anyway.

J. R. R. Tolkien said it best, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories”:

In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? . . .

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Reading list

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As of this writing, I’m still pretty bouncy: I’m working, and living a normal life, and walking to work, and eating relatively normally. In a month or two, however, I will be pretty house-bound: the radiation and chemotherapy will make me tired and achy, and there are dozens of other unpleasant side effects which may manifest also.

I will need distraction.

So I am pulling together a stack of books to read as the year darkens and as I become less active.

I pre-ordered Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” from Amazon, and got it a few weeks ago. I’ve read a few pages, but Pynchon’s a difficult read, so he’ll be good for a dark November day.

Also a book of stories called “Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts,” recommended to me by my Internet friend Flora Gardener in Ilwaco, Washington. The author, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, is an acquaintance of hers, and the stories are part of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, so I’m looking forward to them.

Also Rick Riordan’s latest “Heroes of Olympus” installment, “The House of Hades,” which arrived in the mail only the other day. Okay, it’s young-adult, but who cares? Riordan writes very well, and it’s an entertaining story. I had a hard time putting it down after I unwrapped it; I made it through the first twenty pages, just enough to see that it’s good, and sighed, and put it down.

Also a pre-calculus book given to me by my student employee Ralph, who listened to me complaining that my Coursera calculus course was too difficult for me, and realized immediately that what I needed was pre-calculus. When I’m sick of fiction, I can relax with some numbers and formulae.

Also: “The Power of Now,” by Eckhart Tolle. My friend Joanne sent it to me, and I’ve browsed it, and it’s not bad. If it teaches me to live in the moment and relax a bit, then I will have really learned something.

Also it’s probably time (as Flora reminded me a few days ago) to reread E. F. Benson’s “Lucia” books. I first read them in college, and fell desperately in love with them. I haven’t reread them for years. I’m long overdue.

Also: I can listen all the music I've collected over the years. And I can finally watch all the pre-Code movies I have on the DVR. And . . .

I’m not saying this will be fun.

But I think I’m looking forward to some downtime, and some serious (and not so serious) reading.

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H. P. Lovecraft

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As soon as I moved to Rhode Island, I discovered Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He was a local author, who died back in 1937; he wrote fantasy and horror stories and novels, often with Rhode Island / New England settings. Sometimes he used real locations (there are a couple of stories set in Providence); in other stories, he used New England settings, but gave them assumed names. (If you’re a follower of the Batman saga, and the “Arkham Sanitarium” means anything to you, you should know that Arkham was Lovecraft’s alias for Salem, Massachusetts – “witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham.”

In Lovecraft’s story “The Haunter of the Dark,” a man on the East Side of Providence (where I live) sees an oddly-shaped building on Federal Hill in the distance. He walks over to see it – and awful things ensue.

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a New Englander takes a bus to a little Massachusetts coastal town and finds that its inhabitants are not quite human.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” some professors from Miskatonic University (whose campus is, of course, in witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham) seek out a horrible invisible presence somewhere in central/western Massachusetts.

Lovecraft believed in something he called “cosmicism.” In brief: the universe is utterly incomprehensible to human beings, and is in fact mostly inimical to them. Almost all of his stories show human beings as foolish pawns, always on the verge of total destruction.

My favorite Lovecraft stories involve the Great Old Ones. They’re kind of hard to explain, because they’re supposed to be mysterious, but anyway: the Great Old Ones are extra-dimensional beings lingering right off to one side of our reality. They are very powerful, and they are just waiting to get back into our world. One is Cthulhu, a gigantic horrible octopoid god-monster; another is Yog-Sothoth, a mass of glowing lights. There are many others, like Hastur and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth (who “blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”). It’s only a matter of time before they reassert themselves here, and once they do – that’s all, folks.

So, kids, repeat after me, before it’s too late:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

(It probably won’t help, but it couldn’t hurt.)

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George Steiner

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I like pictorial books: graphic novels, et cetera. I agree with Alice Pleasance Liddell: “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”

Recently I picked up a little book called “Philosophy: A Discovery in Comics,” by a Dutchwoman named Margreet de Heer. It’s a nice mini-summary of Western philosophy, done mostly through illustrated biographies of major philosophers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle up through Erasmus and Spinoza.

She does a nice little summary of George Steiner which makes me want to learn more about him. He’s a deeply intelligent man, a polyglot who knows everything and has memorized everything, and who has made some very intelligent pronouncements about the modern world.

Steiner says that all of us should have a suitcase packed at all times. We need to be ready for the worst; we need to be ready to move along. We need to acknowledge to ourselves that nothing lasts forever, and that sometimes terrible things happen, and when they do, we have to get away, the quicker the better.

He also speaks (very eloquently) about the need to memorize things. Once you’ve memorized something, it can never be taken away from you. Who cares if they burn the books? You have the books in your head.

Here’s Steiner himself talking about the importance of memorization:

The world is a wonderful and perilous place. So it’s probably a good idea to have a suitcase packed.

Because you never know.

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Reading in the bathtub

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We never had a shower in the house when I was growing up, but only a bathtub. I know for a fact that my mother never took a shower until the morning of my sister’s funeral in 1995. (She was terrified of it, and I had to talk her through it, from outside the bathroom.)

I take showers most days, because they save time. But on weekends, and during vacations, I take baths.

Baths are lovely and luxurious. You can add salts if you like, but they really only create stains on the porcelain. All you need is hot water – the hotter the better, as hot as you can stand – and a bar of soap.

And a book.

Naturally one reads in the bathtub. I remember Anne Parrish’s comment about her copies of E. F. Benson’s “Lucia” novels being stained by being “dropped into brooks and baths.”

Well, of course we drop them! Our hands are wet as we turn the pages.

This kind of use marks a book. It lets everyone know that it was well-beloved. I have lots of used books, and I can tell you in every case whether or not their previous owners read them lovingly.

Some have marginal notes. Some have greasy spots, probably where crumbs fell while their readers ate. And some have been dunked in water, and then carefully (or not so carefully) dried.

My own books – the books I bought brand-new – reflect this too. Some are pristine. Others are in terrible shape, dog-eared and stained and ragged and broken-spined.

Care to guess which ones are my favorites?

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Eat your books

Natalie Babbitt (the wife of one of my old bosses, and the author of “Tuck Everlasting”) is a terrific person who writes and illustrates pretty good books. She was featured in a documentary called “Library of the Early Mind” a few years ago. Some of the documentary’s participants complained about the publishing industry. Natalie, being smart, did not complain about it, probably because it's like being an oxygen breather complaining about breathing oxygen. 

Instead, she talked about her own love of books.  “I write books for children,” she said, “because my childhood was the most important part of my life to date.  And I'm seventy-two.”  Later she talked about her love of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,” noting that Alice was the smartest person in the book, and that the adults were “idiots.”   “And,” she added, “I grew up to find that that's true.”

That’s one of those sharp little zaps you get from a really smart observer. Myself, I didn't read the Alice books until high school, and I was immediately taken with Alice's brisk businesslike manner, and how she deals with the various kinds of nonsense around her.  She can be brusque, as with the Queen of Hearts; she can be nannyish and mothering, as with the White Queen; she can be sweet and sentimental, as with the White Knight. Alice, at the age of seven, is the only really adult-acting person in either book.

Children are generally not surprised by this. Children love their books. I know I loved mine.

I once read a wonderful Maurice Sendak anecdote, which I hope is true:

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

So: you really liked that John Grisham novel, did you?

Let’s see you eat it.

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Book report: Anthony Powell's "Venusberg"

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There’s a certain kind of novel that was produced in great quantity by British writers in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s.  They are usually brief, and set in Asia, or Eastern Europe, or Africa.  The characters are almost entirely expatriates – not only British, but Canadians, Americans, exiled Russians, and are often diplomats, or con men, or spies.  The atmosphere is usually light, until something oddly serious happens: an assassination, a declaration of war, some tragic event. 

 

 

These novels were (I think) a response to the British Empire’s expansion through the world.  There were enormous numbers of British people working in countries all over the world, living in unfamiliar environments, clinging to one another (and to other English-speakers and Europeans) for a sense of community.

 

 

Think of Kipling’s “Kim” as a progenitor of the genre.  Think of Graham Greene, with his African and Asian and Caribbean comedy/dramas like “A Burnt-Out Case” and “The Quiet American” and “The Comedians” and “Our Man in Havana.”  Think of Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy” (did I ever tell you that I knew someone who knew her?).  Think of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet.”  Think of Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” series.  Think of Muriel Spark’s first story, “The Seraph and the Zambezi,” and her novella “The Go-Away Bird.” Think of Rose Macaulay’s wonderful “The Towers of Trebizond."

 

 

I recently discovered a prime example of the genre: Anthony Powell’s “Venusberg.”

 

 

It’s a simple story: a British journalist, Lushington, goes to an unnamed Baltic country on assignment.  Lushington is in love with a Englishwoman who is, in turn, hopelessly in love with the local British attaché, who (perversely and carelessly) doesn’t care about her at all. 

 

 

Whom do we meet in our unnamed Baltic country? Not one but two displaced Russian counts, one melancholy and doomed, the other probably a fake.  A local woman who’s only too eager to have an affair with Lushington.  Her husband, a clueless eminent local professor.  An American embassy worker who rattles on endlessly about virtue and progress and the future, while pronouncing himself a man of few words.  A local military officer named Waldemar, who is very pleasant and sincere, and who is trying very hard to learn how to be a true European.

 

 

We never discover the name of the country we’re in.  Everyone is speaking English most of the time, with a little bad French thrown in.  Now and then we’re told that someone speaks “in an unknown language”; the joke is that it’s probably the local language, which few of the main characters speak.

 

 

Love affairs happen.  Death happens.  Lushington goes back to England.

 

 

All in one hundred and sixty pages.

 

 

Here is Powell’s epigraph for the novel, which explains the title:

 

 

“Here, according to popular tradition, is situated the grotto of Venus, into which she enticed the knight Tannhauser; fine view from the top.”

 

 

From the sublime to the absurd: from the airy beauty of folklore and mythology to the flat pronouncements of a travel guide.

 

 

"Venusberg" is sad and funny and lovely, and gave me a few hours of pleasure, and it will stay with me.

 

 

Try it, if you can find it in your dusty old public library.  You may like it.

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Robert Heinlein

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Do you remember Scholastic Books? Jake, one of my student employees, informs me that they still exist. They sell cheap paperback books to public-school students. (In my day, it was maybe twenty-five cents. Jake tells me that, in his day – maybe ten years ago – it was more like $1.99. Still very cheap.)

 

 

Around the sixth grade or so – when I was ten years old – I acquired a Scholastic Books copy of Robert Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

 

 

It was my first science-fiction book, and it blew my ever-lovin’ ten-year-old mind.

 

 

It is a book of short stories, set mostly in the 21^st century. Earth has colonized the Moon and Mars and Venus. It’s full of –

 

 

Well, but was I remembering the stories correctly? I didn’t have my old copy to refer to, so I went on eBay and bought a cheap copy.

 

 

It turns out that I remember it very well.

 

 

It is extremely sexist. (A woman’s competence is summed up this way in one of the stories: “She can count to ten.”)

 

 

It manages to be xenobiologically racist. It describes the Venusian (alien) natives as silly amphibians who will do anything for tobacco, which they call “thigarek.” (“Cigarette.” Get it?)

 

 

Men are the heroes in these stories. They are burly, and they brawl. They have names like Sam Houston Jones and Humphrey Wingate and Johnny Dahlquist.

 

 

But there are glimmers of hope in these stories. The first story in the collection, “Delilah and the Space-Rigger,” is about how a woman can do as well as a man in space. Another, the title story, “The Green Hills of Earth,” is a subtle story of how the image of a rough Whitmanesque space poet was romanticized for the sake of the media. 

 

 

But the best story is the last one: “Logic of Empire.”

 

It’s the story of a Earthman who gets shanghaied and shipped to the Venus colony against his will, after claiming that the Earth government can’t possibly do such evil imperialistic things. 

 

 

Most chillingly of all, it predicts that American culture will be taken over by a Christian religious dictator, the “Prophet,” Nehemiah Scudder.

 

 

When I read this in the 1960s, the story seemed outrageously unlikely on all counts.

 

 

How does it sound to you now, kids?

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Biographies

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Lately I’ve found myself drawn to the biography section of the Providence Public Library. Think of it! Truman, Marechal Foch, Thomas Cranmer, Napoleon, Cleopatra, Nellie Bly, all side by side.

 

 

Recently I read two biographies in a single weekend: one of Edna St. Vincent Millay (“Restless Spirit,” by Miriam Gurko), and “O Rare Don Marquis!” by Edward Anthony.

 

 

By Sunday evening I was sad and thoughtful.

 

 

Biographies generally end with the death of the protagonist. These two were no exception. Millay loved life and dreaded death, so the account of her death at the age of fifty-eight (very soon after the death of her beloved husband) was very saddening. Marquis saw much death in his life – his two children, both of his wives – and died young himself, of a stroke, at fifty-nine years of age.

 

 

I’m fifty-five. Maybe you can see where I’m going with this.

 

 

Millay was the spirit of her age. She wrote tons of lyric poetry, in traditional meter and rhyme; she lived in Greenwich Village and associated with all kinds of people; she was a feminist ahead of her time. Her poetry is memorable, and still anthologized. I find that I know lots of her poetry by heart, even now.

 

 

Is she still taught at all? Does anyone still read her?

 

 

Marquis was a newspaper columnist. He created characters: the Old Soak, an alcoholic managing to get by during Prohibition; Hermione, a fashionable intellectual; Archy, a cockroach who’d been a free-verse poet in a previous life; and Mehitabel, an alley cat who claimed she’d been Cleopatra in a previous life.

 

 

Marquis wanted to be remembered for his serious verse, and his plays.

 

 

He is remembered to this day for Archy and Mehitabel.

 

 

He foresaw this, and dreaded it. He did not want to be remembered for two comic characters he’d created: a literary cockroach, and a cat who was a lady in spite of everything.

 

 

And yet, to this day, these are his books that are remembered.

 

 

There are lessons to be learned from biographies, if you know where to look for them.

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Book report: Martin Stannard's "Muriel Spark: The Biography"

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Over the past few months I have read quite a few biographies.

 

 

Most of them aren’t very well-written, but this is probably to be expected. Most books in general aren’t very well-written.

 

 

But it’s a shame to read a badly-written book, especially when it’s the biography of a writer.

 

 

There have been excellent biographies of writers, of course. Do I need to mention James Boswell’s life of Doctor Johnson? (Of course, most of the wit was courtesy of Samuel Johnson himself, but Boswell was the genius who remembered every word Johnson said, and who edited Johnson’s life and words into the joyfully lively memoir we have today.) And I remember that I almost wept when I read Quentin Bell’s opening sentence of the bio of his aunt, Virginia Woolf: “Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen.” It’s a perfect sentence: stiff, Victorian, but telling you something you vitally need to know (and probably don’t know) about his aunt.

 

 

And recently I discovered Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark.

 

 

Muriel Spark is one of my favorite authors. Well, I mean really: “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and “Memento Mori,” and “The Abbess of Crewe.” I’d heard that her personal life was a ghastly mess, and now (having read some of the bio) I know it for a fact. (Her life was no more a mess than, let’s say, mine, but still – she’s an author, and it’s in a book!)

 

 

But Martin Stannard can write.

 

 

From only the first few pages of the book:

 

 

[Speaking of how to refer to Muriel Spark in the body of the book:] “At the risk of appearing over-familiar, I decided to describe her as ‘Muriel.’ This does not signify that she counted me as a friend.”

 

 

[Regarding Muriel’s grandmother Adelaide:] “Adelaide never welcomed Uncle Phil’s children. She was an appalling cook and there was always the danger that she might offer food.”

 

 

[Regarding Muriel’s mother Cissy:] “Cissy sailed through life like a ramshackle galleon.”

 

 

[A few pages later, also about Muriel’s mother:] “Cissy had once asked her mother how one kept men happy. ‘You have to feed ‘em both ends,’ she replied.”

 

 

Martin Stannard is a remarkable writer – probably more so for having dealt with a famously private and prickly writer.

 

 

Go read “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” if you haven’t already (the movie doesn’t count!). And then read Stannard’s biography.

 

 

And then get back to me, you old ramshackle galleons.

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The Hobbit

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Are we looking forward to Peter Jackson’s filmization of “The Hobbit”? Yes, of course we are.

 

 

I was born into the Lord of the Rings Generation. When I was in the seventh grade I bought “The Two Towers,” not knowing that it was the second book in the trilogy, and not understanding how trilogies worked in any case.  Naturally I didn’t understand a bit of the plot, but I struggled through it anyway. Then one of my teachers, Mister Lorenz, bless him, noticed what was going on, and offered to lend me his copies of “Fellowship of the Ring” and “Return of the King,” so long as I didn’t damage them.

 

 

I was an immediate convert to Tolkienism.

 

 

A summer or two later – around 1970, anyway – I wrote to Ballantine Books, and sent them my $2.00, and received in return a copy of “The Hobbit,” which was described on the cover as “the enchanting prelude to ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”

 

I devoured it in a couple of days.

 

 

Have you ever noticed that “Hobbit” is exactly the same story as “Lord of the Rings”? A hobbit (Bilbo / Frodo) is enticed by Gandalf to leave the Shire with a group of oddball travelers. They encounter problems on the way (trolls, Nazgul, whatever). They get to Rivendell and have a chitchat with Elrond. They cross the Misty Mountains, but not without difficulties (Bilbo with Gollum and the goblins, Frodo in Moria). They pop out the other side and have a little rest (Bilbo and the dwarves with Beorn, Frodo and his companions in Lorien). They cross the river, and get into trouble, and get separated. There are spiders. There’s an ominous mountain. There’s a treasure that needs to be thrown away or given away (the Arkenstone / the Ring). There’s a big climactic battle. “The eagles are coming! The eagles are coming!” A few key people are killed in each battle (Thorin in “Hobbit,” Theoden in “Rings”).

 

 

And then the hobbit goes home to the Shire.

 

 

I’m delighted that Jackson is bringing back some key people: Ian McKellen, the perfect Gandalf, and Hugo Weaving, a grave (if intense) Elrond. (Please note that I love the Elrond that Tolkien gives us in the books; he’s thousands of years old, but he’s also very nice. Hugo Weaving looks irritated all the time, or maybe constipated, which is maybe more likely for someone who’s half-human and thousands of years old.)

 

 

Martin Freeman, like Ian Holm and Elijah Wood, is a perfect hobbit; like them, he’s a little unearthly-looking.

 

 

I hope the movie isn’t too CGI-reliant. “Hobbit” is a children’s book, but this had better not be a children’s movie.

 

 

And I don’t know if this is true, but I hear that Stephen Colbert is in the movie, as an elf. (He’s spoken Elvish on his show more than once, so he’s got the right background.)

 

 

We will see.

 

 

Here’s hoping for the best.

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For Sunday: "archy at the tomb of napoleon," by Don Marquis

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The first time I went to Paris was in March 1984. I was hopping from the USA to Morocco and had only about six hours to waste, so I raced into the city from the airport, had a cup of coffee and a brioche, and visited the Hotel des Invalides, which houses the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

 

 

Why? Because Archy the Cockroach went there back in the 1920s and wrote a whopping good poem about it.

 

 

 

Partner and I visited the Invalides again in October. Napoleon is still there, in his gigantic stone tomb that looks like a cross between an overstuffed sofa and an enormous old-fashioned radio. And, like Archy, we left feeling “solemn but likewise uplifted.”

 

 

 

Herewith: “archy at the tomb of napoleon,” by Don Marquis.

 

 

 

paris france

i went over to

the hotel des invalides

today and gazed on

the sarcophagus of the

great napoleon

and the thought came

to me as i looked

down indeed it

is true napoleon

that the best goods

come in the smallest

packages here are

you napoleon with

your glorious course

run and here is

archy just in the

prime of his career

with his greatest

triumphs still before

him neither one of us

had a happy youth

neither one of us

was welcomed socially at

the beginning of his

career neither one of

us was considered much

to look at

and in ten thousand years from

now perhaps what you said and did

napoleon will be

confused with what

archy said and did

and perhaps the burial

place of neither will be

known napoleon looking

down upon you

I wish to ask you now

frankly as one famous

person to another

has it been worth

all the energy

that we expended all the

toil and trouble and

turmoil that it cost us

if you had your life

to live over

again bonaparte would

you pursue the star

of ambition

i tell you frankly

bonaparte that i myself

would choose the

humbler part

i would put the temptation

of greatness aside

and remain an ordinary

cockroach simple

and obscure but alas

there is a destiny that

pushes one forward

no matter how hard

one may try to resist it

i do not need to

tell you about that

bonaparte you know as

much about it as i do

yes looking at it in

the broader way neither

one of us has been to blame

for what he has done

neither for his great

successes nor his great mistakes

both of us napoleon

were impelled by some

mighty force external to

ourselves we are both to

be judged as great forces of

nature as tools in the

hand of fate rather than as

individuals who willed to

do what we have done

we must be forgiven

napoleon

you and i

when we have been

different from the common

run of creatures

i forgive you as i know

that you would forgive

me could you speak to me

and if you and i

napoleon forgive and

understand each other

what matters it if all

the world else find

things in both of us that

they find it hard

to forgive and understand

we have been

what we have been

napoleon and let them laugh that off

well after an hour or so of

meditation there i left

actually feeling that i

had been in communion

with that great spirit and

that for once in my

life i had understood and been

understood

and i went away feeling

solemn but likewise

uplifted mehitabel the

cat is missing

archy

 

Chapter books and picture books

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Last summer, my assistant Ezra said: “Are you going to the bookstore at lunch today? Because I want to go with you.”

 

 

“Why?” I said. “You want a book? I can pick it up for you.”

 

 

“No,” he said with certainty. “It’s the new Game of Thrones book. It’s the first one in six years. I want to buy it myself.”

 

 

So we went to the (now defunct) Borders Bookstore, and I turned him loose.

 

 

He was immensely happy, and I left him alone with his prize. I wandered off to the “graphic novel” section, and browsed for a few minutes, and rejoined him shortly with a big black-and-white Superman anthology. “What’s that?” he said suspiciously.

 

 

“It’s an anthology of some comic books from my childhood,” I said happily.

 

 

He looked down on me (seriously: he was at least five inches taller than me) with disdain.

 

 

He was buying a chapter book and I was buying a picture book.

 

 

Well, so what? I love my picture books. Some of them remind me of my childhood, which is reason enough. Some are artistic / beautiful, which is reason enough again. Some are profound and moving (like “Maus”). Some are just for fun, like my comic anthologies, or my volumes of Lynda Barry and George Herriman and Edward Gorey.

 

 

To quote Charles Dodgson (from - surprise! - a chapter book!):

 

 

 “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'”

 

 

Amen, sister.

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Maira Kalman

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Maira Kalman is a writer and artist and thinker. She has created something I can only call the “graphic essay,” and which can only be understood by looking at / reading one.

 

 

Her graphic world is full of bright colors and unusual angles. Her unique calligraphy swoops and flies among her images. She loves capturing Daily Life: hats, kitchen sinks, burger platters.

 

 

 

One of Maira's great themes is ephemerality: the preciousness of every moment that passes, under the threat of mortality. Every moment, for her, becomes a visual poem.

 

 

Here are the first few images from one of her “And the Pursuit of Happiness” pieces:

 

 

 

Never in a million years could I have come up with “soigné diatoms.” Nor could I have rhymed “Beringia” with “herringia,” nor seen the obvious link between motorcycles and dinosaurs.

 

 

The sketches and paintings and drawings are all her own work, and the photos, and that candy / cookie / Play-Doh single-celled creature at the beginning.

 

 

But the real magic lies in the combination of all these with her words, and her thoughts.

 

 

She described herself in a recent Thinkr video as a “loopy optimist,” and I think that’s appropriate, but I think she’s too modest. Here’s the video:

 

 

 

 

She has written on history, and democracy, and travel, and music. She has shared chocolate with both Kitty Carlisle Hart and Louise Bourgeois, and shown us both encounters:

 

 

"Nature is the guarantee of sanity. Or maybe love. Or both. Or not. Anyway . . ."

 

 

I feel extraordinarily encouraged when I read her essays. They make me feel that it might actually be worthwhile to continue for a few days or months more on Planet Earth.

 

 

And for that: thank you, Maira Kalman.

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Rest in peace, Nora Ephron

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So sorry to see another witty smart person go: Nora Ephron, who died just yesterday.

 

 

I love her novel “Heartburn.” Here are a couple of (inexact) excerpts:

 

 

“I was hired by the National Caper Council to develop a bunch of recipes including capers. For a month I put capers in everything including milkshakes, and I realized that everything that tasted good with capers tasted better without.”

 

 

Also (I paraphrase broadly on this one): the narrator is in the hospital, watching over her critically ill mother. The nurse comes in and covers her mother’s face with the blanket. “Our mother’s dead,” the nurse says warmly.

 

 

Narrator flares up. “She’s not our mother! She’s my mother! And – “

 

 

And all at once Mother sits up in bed, spreads her arms in triumph, and says:”Ta da!”

 

 

(And then dies shortly afterward.)

 

 

(Rest in peace, Nora. We will miss you, and your wit, and your warmth.)

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For the first day of summer: a young-adult reading list

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Summer is all about recreational reading, but everyone's idea of light reading is different.  Some like John Grisham, or Patricia Cornwell, or Stephen King.  I like young-adult stuff.

 

 

For me, “young adult” is any chapter book not directed to an adult readership.  Some are perfectly appropriate for bright eight-year-olds, and some aren't. 

 

 

Young-adult literature is unassuming, and it gets right to the point without dithering.  There's very little padding in most young-adult books.  Sometimes the authors pander – they lay it on too thick, or they get the atmosphere wrong – but there's some pretty good stuff out there, both old and new.

 

 

Let's acknowledge J. K. Rowling right at the top of the list.  I hope she figures out a way to continue her story.  What about Harry and Ginny's kids? 

 

 

Still have your set of Narnia books?   I've purchased them and gotten rid of them twice over.  I like the characters and the storytelling, but C. S. Lewis's drippy Christian moralizing makes me feel sticky after a while.  I can't even touch “The Last Battle” anymore, although Neil Gaiman has written a wonderful short story about the flip side of that story.

 

 

(Lewis, for all his faults, was a pretty good writer.  If you haven't read the space novels - “Out of the Silent Planet,” “Perelandra,” and (especially, and weirdest of all) “That Hideous Strength” - do it.  Great stuff.  Nasty stuff here and there, too.  If you don't wince a couple of times while reading these, you're not reading very carefully.)

 

 

If you like surreal whimsy – and who doesn't? - try Tove Jansson’s Moomin books.  My favorite is “Moominland Midwinter”: the Moomin family is hibernating, but the little Moomin boy wakes up and discovers that, during the winter months, their house is completely taken over by all kinds of peculiar creatures.  It has the creepy stillness of a deep Scandinavian winter, and it's lots of fun: perfect ice-cold reading for a hot New England day.

 

 

P. L.Travers wrote “Mary Poppins,” and “Mary Poppins Opens the Door,” and “Mary Poppins in the Park.” Her original Mary Poppins is not Julie Andrews: she’s ferocious, and truly scary sometimes – the cobra in the London zoo calls her “cousin”! – and Jane and Michael worship her.

 

 

Thornton Wilder wasn’t really a young-adult writer, but some of his novels – especially “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” – fit perfectly in this category. I read it in high school, and was moved to tears, and I still quote it endlessly. If you haven’t read it, read it immediately.

 

 

And finally, here’s a writer who’s still among the living: Rick Riordan.  The Percy Jackson books were a Greek-mythology knockoff of Harry Potter, but Riordan can really tell a story too.  He left the Percy Jackson story to tell a sort of parallel story involving Egyptian mythology instead, but it doesn’t quite have the energy of the Percy Jackson books. He seems to have realized this, however, and has gone back to Percy, with a side twist through the Roman version of the Greek myths; he’s written two of these, and they’re both wonderful, and I'm looking forward to number three.

 

 

There’s your summer reading assignment, kids.

 

 

And it’s fun.

 

 

So get reading!

 

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Bloomsday 2012

 

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Today, June 16, is Bloomsday. As all lovers of James Joyce know, it is on June 16, 1904 that all of the momentous and mundane activity in the novel “Ulysses” takes place: the hero, Leopold Bloom, wanders aimlessly/purposefully around Dublin; his wife Molly does God knows what with Blazes Boylan; the young Stephen Dedalus teaches school, and does his own bit of wandering, and ends up in Nighttown with Bloom, and the two of them go home together.

 

 

 

It’s a whopping good novel, if you haven’t read it. It’s a little threatening at first – really big, a little menacing – but it’s hysterically funny. My high-school librarian, Catherine Schwarz, gave me an old hardback copy back in the early 1970s, which I still have. I poked and pecked at it for some time, until I came to the Nighttown episode, which is written as a kind of surreal drama. When I encountered Mananann Mac Lir, the Gaelic sea god, intoning: “Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter” – well, I decided I liked it very much.

 

 

When Partner and I were in Ireland some years ago, one of the few things I bought for myself was a nice paperback copy of the original text of “Ulysses,” including all of the original typographical errors. It makes a nice companion piece to my old hardback copy. And it’s from Ireland.

 

 

Joyceans celebrate Bloomsday in all kinds of ways. The NY Times has a blog about it: readings, articles. My friend Bill, who has published an excellent book of texts derived from Joyce (go see it on Keyhole Press: it’s called “Unknown Arts”), just put up a text on Fictionaut which collects all Andy Warhol’s diary entries dated June 16. It’s creepily appropriate for the day.

 

 

Speaking for myself, as a very amateur Joycean, I will probably have a drink tomorrow (which I would probably have anyway, but of which I’m sure James Joyce would approve), and maybe take a quick glance at “Finnegans Wake,” Joyce’s later novel, which I will never really finish, but maybe someday, when I’m in my nineties.

 

 

And then I will thank Our Lord and Savior, on behalf of scholars and writers and critics, that most of Joyce’s work is no longer under copyright.

 

 

Then (maybe) another drink.

 

 

Oh yes I said yes I will Yes.

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The Library of America

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The Library of America has been around for a couple of decades now.  They print little blue-covered books with black paper covers, and they use onion-skin paper. 

 

 

They are assembling the definitive collection of the Essential American Writers.

 

 

They started with the obvious: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, the letters and speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers.

 

 

Then they started to think about what made someone an “American writer.”

 

 

I own their edition of George Washington, and two volumes of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, and Wallace Stevens (everything he wrote fits in one book!), and Flannery O’Connor (ditto!), and Philip K. Dick, and one of their Thoreau volumes, and probably a couple of others I’m forgetting. We have a huge literary history in this country, and LOA is memorializing and perpetuating it in this series.  Their books ain’t cheap, but they’re nice editions, and they're worth owning.

 

 

They are not perfect.  In the Lincoln volumes, I would love to know what Lincoln was responding to when he wrote his letters. Even a summary of the other person’s letter would be good. But, no, they just give you Lincoln.  (I have a collection of Groucho Marx’s letters – no, not from the Library of America, but they should think about reissuing it – and you get everything: not just the letters he wrote, but the letters he received.  Most of the time they are just as clever as his, and you get the context too.  So huh, Library of America.  Get a clue.)

 

 

LOA has covered the nineteenth century pretty completely now, I think.  They are doing the same with twentieth-century lit too (as you can probably tell, with Philip K. Dick included above). 

 

 

They are doing a pretty damned good job of preserving our country’s literature.

 

 

They do a neat little thing online: A Story A Week.  They send an email once a week, with a link to their website, and you can go read a story from one of their publications.  It is invariably something I’ve never read before.  Recently I read a bit of Mark Twain, and a short personal reminiscence by Dreiser, and a very odd thing by Edith Wharton, and a couple of things by people I’d never heard of.

 

 

It’s nice to be reminded that we have such a rich literary heritage.

 

 

And it only took us three hundred years to get there!

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