Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book review: In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages

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In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages by Hella Haasse. Highly recommended.

This historical novel has its own interesting history. It was written by a Dutch author virtually unknown in the United States, then an English translation was begun by a postal employee who spoke no Dutch. After his death, it was lost for decades in a closet. The final English translation was completed more than 40 years after the novel was written by a Chicago editor who also spoke no Dutch — but who did have the opportunity to get the author’s approval.

In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages is the fictionalized account of the life of medieval poet and statesman Charles d’Orléans, son of Louis d’Orléans and Valentine Visconti, nephew of Charles VI, known as the Mad King or the Well Beloved. The plot is historically accurate and linear, beginning with the time of Charles’ birth (although not focusing on it) and using that occasion to fill in the historical and character blanks for the novice to French medieval history. Unlike other reviewers, I found the first 100+ pages a fascinating setting of the stage, during which the author succinctly conveys the familial, personal, and political relationships of France’s houses, primarily Burgundy and Orléans.

Although it is clear from the outset that Philippe the Bold of Burgundy is the nemesis of a united France and Louis Orléans (his nephew, brother to Charles VI, and father of Charles d’Orléans) is his less selfishly motivated, more trustworthy counterpart, the novel does not fall into the trap of black-and-white villains and heroes. Burgundy and his successors are not evil personified; they are men who know how to look out for their own power. Louis and Charles d’Orléans, both flawed in their occasional lack of will and indecisiveness, in their own way look after themselves, but also attempt to keep France’s greater interests in mind. The most poignant moment early on is a conversation between Louis and his insane brother during one of his rare moments of lucidity — and the ensuing reversion of power to Burgundy.

Charles is born into not only all the internal conflicts within France and the ongoing battles with England, but into a war he must wage lifelong with himself — the conflict between his poet’s soul and his inherited role as a statesman and leader of the House of Orléans. A scholar at heart, he must lead his house against Burgundy and his men against the English at Agincourt, where he is captured. Held prisoner for 25 years in England, Charles uses the time to become one of the leading poets of the Middle Ages, yearning for ideals of love, peace, and beauty — the very things that have escaped him all of his predestined life. He will not find them upon his return to France, as he is once more swallowed by leviathan internal and external conflicts and the need for his skills as a negotiator/arbiter. He is, as he says in one poem, “all rusted over with nonchaloir [nonchalance].” Finally, he promises he will “not disavow the deepest desires of [his] heart” and “no longer give [himself] up to the sin of unhappiness” — a promise his position, his role, and the demands of political reality never allow him to fulfill.

The novel features an array of complex characters and their relationships and interactions, a compelling plot, a fascinating time in the history of England and France, and a spectacular background portrayed in brilliant colours as in a tapestry. Best of all, the novel is meticulously researched and as historically accurate as any fiction can be. Partway through the book, I realised that this novel could, if handled correctly, make a near-perfect epic movie.

In a Dark Wood Wandering has inspired me to look into the life and poetry of Charles d’Orléans, the history of Louis d’Orléans and Charles VI, incidental characters such as François Villon and Agnes Sorel, and so much more. For the history buff, the medieval tinkerer, or the person who likes a thoughtful tale, I highly recommend In a Dark Wood Wandering. Let’s all be grateful that it was rediscovered at last.

7 October 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

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Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf. Not recommended.

Female coming of age. Female desire and sexuality. Feminism. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood attempts to address these issues in the context of Naomi Wolf’s own coming of age in the 1970s. The problem with this approach is that it is too personal (a weakness Wolf admits early on) to offer either much insight or value. The best it can do is provoke clearer thinking in the reader than Wolf is capable of.

The stories are provided by Wolf and her circle of friends, who are for the most part middle-class, urban, and Caucasian. Much of Wolf’s discussion focuses on her childhood/adolescence in San Francisco and her exposure to that city’s counterculture ideas and sex industry — something that may resonate with women of similar backgrounds, but not with this lower middle-class, East Coast, small-town girl whose exposure to the sex industry came at the end of adolescence, not during childhood. (Unlike Wolf, I and my peers didn’t walk past strip clubs every day, see genital fetishes sold in local stores, or know about “sex workers” before hitting double digits.)

Wolf describes in detail such things as her procurement of birth control in preparation for the planned loss of her virginity to a “sweet guy.” She would have you believe she was thinking about when a girl becomes a woman, what makes a girl a woman, the ritual of becoming a woman, and the adult attitude toward teenage sex at this tender age while making this well-thought-out decision. According to her description of the event, which feels meaningless to her because of the way society disregards it, there is no teenage impulsiveness or passion involved — again, something that does not resonate.

Wolf’s primary point is that we were taught to believe, falsely, that females control sexual relations because males have uncontrollable desires, while we do not. Her exception to this teaching is, of course, valid. She hypothesizes that not only do females have tremendous desire, but that we are capable of a higher level of more prolonged desire and that we are nothing short of sexual deities. She illustrates this with a “history of the clitoris” (in which it is forgotten and rediscovered over the millennia) and of the extensiveness and sensitivity of the female sexual skin. She cites ancient wisdom that is no longer in practice or understood about male/female sexuality and relations; they understood sexual relations in a way we do not. Along the way, she occasionally makes valid points, for example, that all too often, parents of the 1960s and ’70s abdicated their adult roles to pursue their own pleasures and that there is no real transition from girlhood to womanhood.

In the end, however, her points rely too much on the personal anecdotes and on selected sources, that is, sources skewed toward her viewpoint. This is not an objective analysis of legitimate issues and theories, but an agenda that has little substance behind it. Wolf does manage to successfully illustrate the muddiness of sexual attitudes with the muddiness of her own thought. She is a barely adequate writer because she is neither a clear nor a deep thinker. Promiscuities is no more than pop feminism that adds little to what has already been written upon the subject other than Wolf’s own narrow perspective and need to be more sexually charged than men — a need that her passionless relationships and anecdotes belie.

If you really want insight into female desire and sexuality and what it means to become a woman, there are surely much more universal, fundamental, and emotionally and intellectually integral truths available than the weak mental ramblings offered here.

6 September 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Henry and June

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Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin. Recommended.

Henry and June (from A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931–1932) by Anaïs Nin is a portion of the writer’s famous journal from October 1931 until October 1932 — the year in which she met Henry and June Miller and fell for Henry’s sensuality and June’s mystery, a year of writing, lies, deceit, sexual awakening, introspection, psychoanalysis, and “love.”

Nin is an evocative, poetic writer, if not a particularly substantive one. Henry and June, edited from her journal to focus on Miller and his wife, is beautifully written but, in the end, is devoid of meaning to anyone other than the participants. She obscures the truth of how much she writes. If the journal is accurate, then Nin had mastered deception — she lies to her husband, to June, to Henry, to her psychoanalyst, to her lover/cousin Eduardo, to virtually everyone she knows, all seemingly in an attempt to hide herself from them, and perhaps from herself. She writes frequently of costumes, makeup, jewelry, nail polish and how one can put them on to create a new self. It quickly becomes clear that, despite the introspection of the journal, despite the psychoanalysis, despite her complete focus on herself and how she relates to those people in her life, Nin is no more self-aware by the end of the year than she was when she met Miller, and the reader can’t be too sure, either, of where Nin ends and where the self-deception begins. When the obvious is pointed out to her — that she is still trying to find the “love” that she didn’t get from her father — Nin accepts it at first, but denies it as she talks more and more to herself. And while she may grasp that her father’s abandonment was harmful to her, she finds it easy to mistreat her husband, whom she portrays as psychologically simple and refers to as a “child” without relating how he might feel to how she felt about her father. She seems incapable of grasping the importance of another person’s feelings, no matter who that other person might be.

Nin writes of spending entire days and nights with Miller, of going from him to Hugo, her banker husband, with no suspicion on Hugo’s part. Hugo is jealous of Miller, although she repeatedly tells her journal she doesn’t know why he would be. She writes of not wanting to hurt the soft, weak, emotional Eduardo, but continues her sexual relationship with him until he is bound to be crushed by her sudden decision to end it. She tells Eduardo about Henry, Henry about Hugo, and her psychoanalyst about all of them. She writes of having sex with three of them in one day, ending with “What does that make me?” She does not want to know the potential answer to that question. She wants “experience” at any cost. She does not want to be hurt, but she hurts others freely. She believes she has deep insight into others, but does not understand at more than a superficial level what their thoughts and feelings may be. Much of what she attributes to the elusive, mysterious June are the shifting sands of her own personality.

Not having read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the book he was writing during the year of his relationship with Nin, it’s difficult for me to say how accurate Nin’s portrayal of him is. At times, she feels pity for him, for his weak eyes, for the mind-numbing work he does to support himself. At others, she describes him as “monstrous.” The sketch of Miller is less one of the man himself than of Nin’s infatuation with her own perceptions. At one moment he is the ultimate sensualist; the next, he becomes a gentle romantic. She also enjoys him largely for his worship of her as a writer and as a lover. The relationship is less about the dynamics of their interactions than about her ego and her relationship with herself. Miller is never much more than a two-dimensional, ever-changing character — Henry Miller according to Anaïs Nin. While Nin’s journal is certainly more thoughtful than those of most people, ultimately, it lacks the insight and depth that another writer could have brought to such an intense relationship. At the end, Nin and Miller are still strangers to the reader who has spent hours over dinner and in bedrooms with them. Perhaps it is Nin’s amorality that gets in the way of any true intimacy.

Nin has somehow become a model of a woman’s sexual awakening and awareness, perhaps because of the perceived candor of her journal and her desires for the depths and heights of sexual experience. It is as though such desires for such experiences are what should define a woman — a notion that may work for some women, but certainly not all who are sexually awakened in their own ways.

Henry and June is self-indulgent and even occasionally adolescent in its focus, obssessions, and attitudes. Perhaps because I find so little to relate to in Nin, I found her cold, uninteresting, and annoying — perhaps because I don’t like to be deceived. On the other hand, this will be a fascinating read for anyone who is deeply interested in Nin or Miller or anyone, like me, who would like to free themselves to speak freely in their own journals.

9 June 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

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Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle. Highly recommended.

In Trail of Tears, John Ehle (who is, as far as I can tell, non-Native) sketches the people and events that led to the infamous Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee Nation to “Indian Territory” (primarily Arkansas and Oklahoma) where they would “never” be bothered by whites again. The focus is on the “Treaty Party,” consisting of Ridge, his son John Ridge, and his nephews Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie, along with Moravian, Methodist, and other missionaries sent to convert the Cherokees to Christianity and who are caught up in Cherokee/state/federal politics.

Ehle’s bias is evident in the title; the “rise” of the Cherokees is the effort, not wholly embraced by the Nation, of adapting to European-American culture, language, religion, and even livelihood (e.g., Cherokee hunting is uncivilized, whereas the adoption of American farming is preferable). The story begins with some background and the birth of a Cherokee man named Ridge not too long before the American Revolutionary War. The white impact has already begun to be felt, as one of Ridge’s forebears is white, and he and his family are driven into the wilds by the war.

After the war ends, the new Americans have one craving — land and more land. A gold strike in Georgia adds to the fever. The Cherokee, along with the Choctaw, Creek, and other southern tribes, are perceived as “wasting” land that their white counterparts should be entitled to. From this point on, it is clear that the Juggernaut of American expansionism and greed will displace the Native peoples. The question is only how and when.

Meanwhile, Ridge, who will not convert to Christianity but who wholeheartedly adopts many white ways for himself and his children, becomes not only a wealthy plantation owner but a leader of the Cherokee Nation. His son becomes an attorney, while Boudinot becomes the first editor of the Cherokee newspaper, The Phoenix. Both young men marry white New Englanders they meet while at school. Ridge and his family and allies are the first to see the writing on the wall — that the Cherokees will be removed; it is a matter of whether it is “voluntarily” on their own terms in their own time or involuntarily.

The principal chief of the Cherokee, a Cherokee-Scot named John Ross, is portrayed as a man in a state of denial. It is never clear how he thought the Cherokee could overcome the overwhelming tide of white intrusion without bloodshed and without losing. He and his followers blame the Ridge faction for selling the Cherokee out when they sign the Treaty of 1835 that puts the seal on the removal. They feel that they can continue to “negotiate,” not realising that Andrew Jackson has set the tone and the terms — and that the federal government under his leadership has loaded the die. Ehle is no John Ross fan; when the inevitable finally happens and the Cherokee are removed, Ross sends them via the lengthy, dangerous, time-consuming land route, resulting in hundreds if not thousands of deaths (the number remains unknown), while Ross and his family use the quicker, less treacherous water routes.

There are several dichotomies in this history — the Upper Towns vs. the Lower Towns; the full-bloods vs. those with white ancestors/family; the uneducated (mostly full-bloods, according to Ehle) vs. the educated (John Ridge, Boudinot); the federal government vs. state government (a dichotomy that would be resolved violently through the Civil War). A forest/mountain vs. town dichotomy is also evident. In any case, anything that speaks of the way the Cherokee used to be is seen as “primitive,” while Cherokee adoption of white ways is lauded by their neighbors. In fact, this is seen as the heart of the problem; the Cherokee people are pliable, are willing to adapt, are willing to live like the whites — and in the end are treated no better than their Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole counterparts. Ehle includes much contemporary commentary on this particular irony.

This book has been said to be controversial because it shows the wealthier Cherokees, like Ridge, John Ridge, and John Ross, as owning African slaves. The Cherokees tried to marry their own ways with that of the European-Americans; they had always had slaves, usually captives from other tribes. But it is clear that the majority of Cherokees were poor, did not own plantations, and did not exploit slaves.

Trail of Tears is an excellent snapshot of a particular situation and will be eye opening to those who are not familiar with the story of the southern tribes and their interactions with the burgeoning American population. Ehle includes a wealth of primary sources, such as letters, journal excerpts, military orders, and the like, that serve to enrich the story. This history lesson is told in a story/fiction format enhanced by contemporary writings that keep it interesting, lively, and personal. Ehle’s biases are clear but do not detract from this book as a history of a moment in time when the fate of a nation was decided. This is an excellent supplement to any broader history of the Trail of Tears.

29 April 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Age of Innocence

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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Highly recommended.

A classic novel made famous by a recent movie, The Age of Innocence is the story of a society man, Newland Archer, caught between two very different women. On the one hand is May Welland, the virginal Diana of New York society, whose seeming frankness and innocence discourage and oppress him: “Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.” All this is “supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”

Her counterpart is her cousin Countess Ellen Olenska, vaguely exotic, vaguely dangerous, forbidden — primarily because she is not the “artificial product” of society, but a genuine, sensual woman whose independent way of thinking is enough to tacitly and then overtly banish her from the very company that Newland’s life is built around. She is “different,” as Archer will later discuss with one of his children. No one else would say, “Why not make one’s own fashions?” thus giving a voice to what Archer himself deep down believes but can’t put into practice.

Ironically, it is May who first forces him and Ellen together, against his will, in her efforts to be kind to her cousin, who has just returned from Europe. As he sees more of “poor Ellen,” estranged from her emotionally abusive husband and seemingly vulnerable to the wiles of the wealthy outsider scoundrel Julius Beaufort, he finds himself returning again and again to her until he realises he is in love with her — long after the reader has reached that conclusion. He resolves the dilemma by rushing his marriage to May, which makes it that much worse. Thus ensues a delicate balance between the life he has chosen with May, with whom he now realises he has no emotional bond, and the life he would choose if he were more sure of himself, more sure that being true to oneself is more important than being true to one’s system.

Nearly every character is memorable — from the massive Mrs. Manson Mingott, May and Ellen’s grandmother who is old enough and skilled enough to intuit all and manipulate all; to the womanizing Lawrence Lefferts, whose behavior is acceptable because he knows how to play the game, how things are “done”; to the frigid bastions of society, the van der Luydens; to May’s mother, who cannot be exposed in any way to “unpleasantness”; to Archer’s virginal sister Janey, who lives life vicariously through gossip and guesswork.

Many scenes and locations are equally vivid: Beaufort’s lavish house and party; the contrast of the van der Luydens’ dinner party; Archer and May’s conventional and stifling honeymoon, more sporty than romantic or passionate; Archer’s pursuit of May in Florida and his following Ellen to the Blenkers’ and then to Boston; a revealing ride with Ellen in May’s brougham; Mrs. Mingott’s house in the middle of “nowhere,” where she rules like a queen and where the politics are only slightly less complicated than those of Elizabeth I’s court — all unforgettable places and scenes.

In less intelligent or skilled hands, the plot could have become mere melodrama, but Wharton knows how her society worked, who inhabited it, what it forgave, and what it could not pardon. Affairs are pardonable; treachery, real or perceived, to the framework of what holds these people together is not. In the end, May saves Archer from himself — and dooms him to her kind of life by doing so. When he gives up all his dreams, he looks into May’s “blue eyes, wet with tears.” She knows what he does not and remains cold as the moon that the goddess Diana rules.

It could be said that May and Ellen represent two sides of Newland Archer — both are people he is afraid to become. If he is like May, he experiences death of the mind, death of the soul, death of the emotions, becoming what he is expected to be to keep the foundations that society is built upon steady, strong, and standing. (It is no coincidence that a theme in Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the vulnerability of that house to the influx of modern ways.) If he becomes like Ellen, he will lose everything that he has built his own foundations on. In the end, he is neither, nor is he himself. His tragedy is not that much less than that of The House of Mirth‘s Lily Bart, both victims of a society they need but cannot survive.

28 April 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Angela’s Ashes

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Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Recommended as a good fiction.

Angela’s Ashes is the chronicle of author Frank McCourt’s childhood, first in America, then in Ireland, or purports to be. The sadness, tragedy, ugliness, and despair are laid on so thickly as to become improbable in combination. Bad things happen to good people, but in McCourt’s world, the worst always happens. When the family moves, it is to the worst house on the lane, next to the only outhouse. When it rains, their house is the one that floods. When he develops conjunctivitis, it is permanent (he still has it years later). When other kids’ alcoholic fathers go to England during the war to earn money, his is the only one who drinks his pay away and loses the job. Nothing is ever halfway for McCourt. If there is a tragedy to tell, it will be the most tragic conceivable.

There are inconsistencies, such as time frames that make no sense, as well as improbabilities, like his grandmother making several walking round trips of over a mile, all in one night, months before her death. There is also the issue of whether McCourt could possibly recall such detail (as his lengthy story about the IRA refusing to helping his father out and why) during his very early years without any context. It would be as though you were four years old and heard your father talking about the New Deal, and you remembered everything about it even though you had no idea at the time what all the acronyms represented. Oddly, while McCourt goes into great detail about his early childhood, his timeline becomes increasingly compressed as he approaches adolescence. There is much less detail, and whole months are passed by just at a time when a person would be more likely to remember more — and to be experiencing more. It almost feels like he grew tired of the tale (and fabricating it) and was in a rush to get to the end. Or perhaps, having gone through a sleazy conception, rats, fleas, sewage, open sores, tuberculosis, vomited blood, corporeal punishment, prolonged hunger, his mother’s prostitution, etc., etc., etc. (no horror goes untouched), he simply ran out of material.

So, from early on, I viewed Angela’s Ashes as a work of fiction in which none of the characters is likeable. While many would say the father is the worst, as he is a hard-core alcoholic who cannot and will not support his family, I found him to be far more sympathetic a person than his mother as portrayed. When sober, the father often shows his sons small signs of affection and empathy, but Angela herself is nearly always cold, distant, and unsympathetic toward her children. She is always more focused on herself than on them. I’m not sure how many people could write about their own mothers as dispassionately as McCourt does. If she had one good quality, McCourt is careful not to present it.

As a child, McCourt seems relatively balanced, likeable, and ethical, wanting to do the right thing, but adolescence seems to turn him into a different person. He lies, he steals, he takes advantage of people — and the only guilt he seems to feel is that imposed by the Catholic Church. There is never a sense, even when he achieves adulthood, that he has any deep thoughts about who he is, what he is doing, and how he affects others. Even his agonizing over his belief that he is responsible for a consumptive girl’s descent into Hell because he had sex with her is tainted by the selfishness of his focus.

In the end, I must concur with an author acquaintance who said, “Angela’s Ashes? ’tis as phony as the photo on the cover.”

But it is certainly well written and compelling, if you happen to have a large grain of salt handy.

18 March 2011
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Women in Love

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Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. Highly recommended.

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence is a sequel, but knowledge of The Rainbow is not necessary to appreciate the second novel. The title is somewhat misleading, as it is really about women and men, men and women, and men and men — and it’s not always clear with what they are in love. It is the tale of two teachers, sisters Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen, the son of the local mine owner, Gerald Crich, and school inspector Rupert Birkin.

Their complex relationships start to take shape the day of Gerald’s sister’s wedding, as Gudrun and Gerald and Ursula and Rupert are drawn together, often despite themselves. The Gudrun/Gerald relationship becomes a series of conflicts that are won only temporarily and that lead to more conflicts and then temporary reprieves of tenderness and sex. His emotional conflicts with Gudrun are mirrored in Gerald’s dealings with animals; he brutally forces his mare to stay at a railroad crossing despite her terror until blood is drawn and until the cars have passed. Later, when his sister’s rabbit resists being picked up so he can be sketched, Gerald punches him in the head so he will submit instantly. His blind will must triumph in all. The only time that he and Gudrun seem to find an equilibrium is when they balance each other by accepting but not gravitating toward each other. It becomes a tenuous relatonship at best and a dangerous one at worst. Gerald is incapable of love, as is his brooding mother.

Meanwhile, Ursula finds herself in a different kind of battle, with Rupert and his self-contemptous philosophies about relationships, death, and the will. His vision of love, if he even believes it exists, is of two planets circling one another in perfect equilibrium. He did not find that with his former lover Hermione, who does not satisfy his physical desires and who does not calibrate with his spiritual needs. At the end of the novel, he reinforces what he has said all along — his love will always have a missing component and be incomplete without it. As a side note, Rupert seems to be Lawrence’s own mouthpiece, reflecting many of his own views.

As with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the setting for Women in Love becomes a character — the grimy village, the sordid town, and the sullen miners and their wives provide a backdrop of inevitable modernization and dehumanization that counterbalances the individual stories. As mining is mechanized to death, so is the human soul. The will either accepts the inevitable crush of the modern world or fights it to the death. The weakest part of Women in Love may be when the setting changes, that is, when the couples decide to leave all that England has become and to take their relationships and their futures to the Alps, where they find art truly does imitate life with its mechanism. The novel seems to lose a little of its footing at this point, giving in to its tendency to become an intellectual exercise in the arts rather than a human story in a regimented world.

Women in Love starts out slowly, as a lengthy series of vignettes and conversations that seem unlikely or unrealistic, but develops a crescendo as the battles begin. In the end, despite dramatic events and drastic changes, the conundrums remain, and even Ursula’s persistence and will cannot eliminate them now, let alone forever. Women in Love is about destruction and regeneration in an endless cycle and the human under the surface that we are not entirely aware of and cannot express.

29 March 2001
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Sons and Lovers

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Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Sons and Lovers is said to be the most autobiographical of D. H. Lawrence’s novels; according to the introduction by Benjamin DeMott, some critics have found it too flatly so. Like the protagonist Paul Morel, Lawrence was born to a coal miner and a woman who has married beneath her class. His older brother died young, DeMott notes. Many other details coincide as well.

Unlike some of Lawrence’s other works, such as Women in Love, in which Lawrence explores lofty themes in a philosophical and grim tone, Sons and Lovers is as down to earth as Paul’s rough, violent, yet congenial father Walter.

Despite his many apparent and iterated flaws, Walter Morel is shown as a whole person with a gentle, content, industrious side — when he’s sober. His “smallness” is a function of where he is and who he is expected to be rather than who he could be. He’s so tied to his mining lot in life it doesn’t occur to him his gifted sons could aspire to more. That they achieve more is a source of both pride and derision for Walter Morel. Although Walter is a background character, he, “an outsider,” forges the bond between Gertrude Morel and her sons William and Paul.

Gertrude Morel is not the first woman to live her life through her children. Her hold over her sons, however, dooms their relationships with other women to failure, leaving them deeply unsatisfied and unhappy. Her motivations may be questionable, but she is sometimes right. William’s fiancée Lily would have cost him dearly, emotionally and financially, had he lived to marry her, and Mrs. Morel sees her own mistake of a marriage in his future. Although she makes her beliefs known, she seems willing to let William make his decision and suffer the consequences.

Having learned from the experience with William, Mrs. Morel takes a different approach with Paul, who seems to be her last, best hope for justifying her own life. Her relationship with Paul becomes overtly sexual. When they go out together, they behave like lovers on a date. “He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat.” When Paul tells his mother that he doesn’t love Miriam, she “kissed him in a long, fervent kiss. ‘My boy!’ she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love. Without knowing, he gently stroked her face.”

It would be too easy to attribute all this to an Oedipal complex, but it is more complicated, as life is. Paul serves as Mrs. Morel’s alter ego, pseudo-lover, and breadwinner. Everything she did not or cannot have must be Paul’s. She is savvy enough to know who is a threat to her hold and who is not. She recognises in Miriam a woman much like herself — intelligent, thwarted, let down by men, hungry for a kindred spirit or soul mate. Paul, too, is aware of this and hates Miriam for it — and for the fact he does, indeed, love her, making him unfaithful to the woman to whom he owes his fidelity. There are spiritual overtones as well, as the religious Miriam tries to sacrifice herself for Paul, whom she sees as a “Walter Scott hero.” This sacrifice repels Paul ever further.

Mrs. Morel rightly perceives that Clara Dawes is not a threat to her — she is fascinating, attractive, enigmatic, and sensual, but she lacks the ability to be more to Paul than a diversion from Miriam, Mom, and himself. Knowing that nothing of importance will come of this affair, Mrs. Morel even encourages it. It cannot divert Paul from her, and it fails as a result.

In the end, the only intimacy Paul is capable of is with his mother. She has come between him and his own consciousness — and he has allowed her. Everything is filtered through her. How she has achieved this is not always clear, as she uses more than rhetoric and conscious effort to mold Paul. When he wishes her dead, there is hope that then he would begin to live. “Mother!” he whimpered. “Mother!” Then: “He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her.” With the past buried, there may be a future for him. Only Lawrence knew as he wrote this most human of his novels.

25 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Flat Rock Journal

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Flat Rock Journal by Ken Carey. Not recommended.

After reading two pages of glowing reviews (and even a comment about Carey being a successor to Thoreau), I was expecting a well-written, thoughtful book centered on nature, the forest, and the life within. Instead, Flat Rock Journal struck me as more of a tribute to one man’s ego.

The book got off on a bad foot for me when Chicago-born Carey buys a clunker car to begin his quest for nature and life in the forest. It struck me that, 100 years ago, this would not have been an option at all and that it seems a strange way to get around when there are alternatives, such as cycling and walking, that bring one closer to the earth. Next, he runs into the woman who will become his wife on the Berkeley campus with whom he makes love on some bleachers. He sees this as a spiritual moment and her as a strong woman with no fears, while in reality it comes across as young people doing what comes naturally to young people. One also wonders why these children of nature did not find some grass under a tree.

Carey and his wife move to an old farmhouse in the Ozarks, where they have few conveniences (although, of course, they can’t seem to get by without a truck and eventually a gas-powered refrigerator). Carey’s day in the forest gives the reader little real feel for life, but does provide insights into his perspectives, which are at best centered around himself rather than the world around him. He says that a day in the forest helps him to rid himself of assumptions, the baggage of the world, what have you. He then describes clouds, storms, lizards, rock formations, birds, trees — everything in sight — in purely anthropmorphic terms as though he can’t grasp that this is part of those unnecessary, irrelevant assumptions.

He talks about the copperheads that live around the long-abandoned house he buys as “intruders” without seeming to understand that it is his family that is intruding on them. He kills them, albeit regretfully, as a danger to his young children, not seeming to understand that this is how humans have always justified killing so-called “pest animals.” When he can no longer take killing them, he pollutes the atmosphere and uses nonrewable resources by driving them elsewhere so they are not underfoot. He is surprised when they return; he doesn’t even seem to know the basic biology of territoriality that man and his fellow animals all have at heart. When he pets them in his lap and they relax, he thinks this is a sign of friendliness (whereas someone a little more in tune with the mind of reptiles — and I put myself in this category — understands how much reptiles like a comfortably warm spot, like a lap). This kind of anthropormophising is a grave injustice to nature, and anthropomorphising is a large part of what we do that disrespects nature and leads to environmental trouble and imbalance.

Carey also has a fair amount of contempt for urbanites who don’t understand the country and nature, and who exploit “cheap country resources” to lead lives that of excessive consumption. He has a blind side to his own consumption and to his own lack of understanding. He does not absorb nature or sit back and appreciate it; he consistently forces his own predispositions onto it.

He believes environmentalists are wrong to assume that man and nature cannot coexist, and that man has the unique capacity to improve the earth, although he doesn’t really explain how. (I would have liked at least one example of a building, structure, or anything that is manmade that “improves” nature, but one is not forthcoming.) He and his wife produce a large family, which, while well within their rights, is unnecessary in this country of low child mortality and long life spans, and surely even Carey can acknowledge that it is a combination of excessive consumption and overpopulation that will be the downfall of nature. He can happily live on many acres in a forest, but doesn’t seem to think that, if all 280 million Americans tried to follow the same lifestyle, basic as it is, there would be no wild left — all would be farms, gardens, and watering systems simply to accommodate the volume of people.

He seems to think that depression is something that one shrugs off with the proper attitude and that too much of depression is blamed on “childhood” or “somebody else.” This reveals only his profound ignorance of clinical depression as well as issues of child physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

His pseudospiritual ramblings are more annoying than enlightening. They are not the type of beliefs that can be universally felt, but are based on his own approach to his own readings, thoughts, and feelings. They are frequently contradictory to both common sense and a sense of wonder.

I was looking forward to a book that would make me feel like I was part of the forest, part of the Ozarks, part of the world. I have read the works of many environmental and nature writers who put their egos in the back seat and channel the beauty of the woods around them with minimal interjections of self, and those are the works that transport me, move me, and help me renew my own touch with my world and with all that inhabits it. This is not it.

Despite the glowing blurbs, which make me wonder if reviewers put any thought into their reviews, this book is not worth the time when there are so many more thoughtful, eloquent writers out there. It is apparently out of print. I can understand why.

29 July 2000
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: My Ántonia

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My Ántonia by Willa Cather. Recommended.

Willa Cather is known as the chronicler of the American prairie and frontier, having written such novels as O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. My Ántonia is also set in the prairie midwest, Nebraska, where the Jim Burden finds himself living with his paternal grandparents after the death of his parents in Virginia and where Ántonia Shimerda and her family find themselves in search of a better life than that offered by their native Bohemia. The tale, or series of tales, are told by lawyer Jim Burden as his remembrances of Ántonia. Tellingly, when he hands over his manuscript to a journalist who also knew Ántonia, he adds the “My” in front of her name, which “seemed to satisfy him.”

My Ántonia is an episodic novel, and Ántonia herself is often absent from the story. In many ways, she did not seem to me to be a clearly defined, real character or even a part of the novel named for her, but more of a symbol of the westward expansion and growth of America.

Ántonia — daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother — seems to be an everywoman. She is sensual and maternal, intelligent and hard working, naïve and shrewd. While narrator Jim Burden finds her attractive and desirable, their relationship never extends beyond friendship. This is an interesting point, since the framing narrator does not find much to praise in the woman Jim Burden marries, whom he describes in oddly masculine terms: “handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.” She may be Mrs. Burden but she is not my Ántonia.

Ántonia’s family, the Shimerdas, are a reminder that, despite snobbery on the part of long-settled families, there is no American who didn’t originate elsewhere. One character says, “So it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.” Americy, poor and wealthy, rural and urban, is a society built not around a common history, past, or ethnic background, but around the land. For Ántonia’s father, Mr. Shimerda, the bleak land of winter cannot replace the richness of the camaraderie of his Bohemian friends at home. Even the Bohemians in the new country cannot compensate for the loss — they are, after all, now Americans. Fittingly, Mr. Shimerda rests at a crossroads, where man marks where the four directions meet.

Small-town America is no less provincial than its European prototype. In Blackhawk, Ántonia and the other “country girls” bring what the new country needs to grow as Jefferson envisioned: youth, enthusiasm, and unfettered sensuality that threatens the newly settled middle class.

As in other Cather novels, most notably The Song of the Lark, no matter how fond characters may be of their rural roots, opportunity in America lies elsewhere — for Jim Burden, as a lawyer working for a western railway and living in New York, far removed from Blackhawk and his life on his grandparents’ farm. Ántonia, however, after a disastrous sojourn in Denver, finds herself back in the country, doing what many American women had done before and have done since — raising the future generations the new country needs.

While Jim contributes to industrial growth, Ántonia is Earth Mother, producing the future. There may be a feminist dig here; Cather and her characters are well aware that, for now, the nature of opportunities for men and women are worlds apart, as is the nature of what they can accomplish. Indeed, the topic troubles Burden as he watches the activities of the country girls. In the end, he marries the woman the framing narrator does not like while Ántonia the sensualist seems spiritually free in her earthy existence.

My Ántonia is the story of America — written by those like Jim Burden, but also written by Norwegians, Swedes, Bohemians — and Africans, as Cather works in the story of the blind piano and his “instrument,” a double entendre for his piano and his sensuality. To understand America and her story, you must understand Jim, Ántonia, Ántonia’s grasping brother and mother — fand Mr. Shimerda, too. Each is the evolution of the new land born of the old.

24 May 2003
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf