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Book review: Wide Sargasso Sea

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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Highly recommended.

Jean Rhys, troubled by the one-dimensional Bertha Mason in Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre, or perhaps seeing an opportunity to take the depiction of Creoles out of the hands of English writers, decided to “write her a life.” The result is Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre (Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea) finally steps out of the realm of caricature and becomes both human being and symbol. In the Norton Critical Edition edited by Judith L. Raiskin, several commentators expound on their views of what that symbolism means from a Caribbean, British, and feminist perspective.

First, I have noticed that several reviewers mistakenly assume Antoinette is of mixed race (the modern assumption about what Creole means). In the context of the time, however, Creole meant a person of English or European descent living in the Caribbean. Rhys makes this even clearer with terms such as “white Creole” and “white cockroach.” This is an important distinction because it, combined with her French ancestry and poverty, sets Antoinette apart from the wealthy English and from the former slaves on the islands who are of African descent. That theme of having no home, no society, nowhere to go, and, essentially, being nonexistent, is integral to the storyline — and fits in perfectly with Bertha’s role in Jane Eyre.

Another important point is that Antoinette’s mother (as well as her nurse) is from Martinique, a French island at a time when the French and the British were in bitter conflict. This makes Antoinette even more alienated from the societies in which she dwells but of which she is not a part. It’s interesting to note that some of the academic commentators mistakenly attribute her mother’s birthplace and the origins of the nurse Christophine (one calls her a Haitian, no doubt because of that island’s strong associations with obeah) and even get Christophine’s name wrong.

Although there are parallels between Antoinette and Jane, between Antoinette and the Black child Tia, and even between Antoinette and her carefully unnamed husband (Rochester), this is a brilliant novel that does not depend on the reader’s knowledge of Jane Eyre; like Antoinette herself, it stands alone. There are also many cycles throughout the book, including Antoinette’s repeated dream. Antoinette’s lack of identity is reinforced by Rochester’s invocation of a principle of obeah; he calls her Bertha, a name that is not hers (this also emphasizes the predominance of an English identity over that evoked by the French name Antoinette). There are the clear dichotomies between Rochester and his England, where he is a disenfranchised second son, and Antoinette and her Caribbean, where she belongs neither to the wealthy whites or the freed slaves.

Wide Sargasso Sea invokes the Bible several times. Rochester’s father and older brother betray him to Antoinette’s stepfather Mason for 30,000 pounds, alluding to the 30 pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot takes from the Romans for betraying Christ. There are numerous references to a rooster or cock crowing at key moments, as the cock did after Peter had denied Christ three times. The Christian allusions are intermixed with the presence of obeah throughout — just as the Christian faith and obeah beliefs from Africa became intermingled in the Caribbean.

Reality and dream are equally inseparable. “Is England like a dream? . . . She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.” The unnamed husband (Rochester) retorts, “Well, that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.” Their erotic life is no less a dream. “I watched her die many times . . . Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. . . . It was at night that I felt danger and would try to forget it and push it away.”

Rhys, saddled with the pre-determined ending of Jane Eyre, manipulates its foreshadowing and symbolism brilliantly. Rochester says, “I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place.” Obeah woman Christophine responds, “You choose what you give, eh?” In a return to the beginning, Antoinette, determined mad by an equally mad Rochester, burns down Thornfield Hall, just as her own childhood home was burnt by the freed slaves who held her and her mother in such contempt (“white cockroach”).

There are seemingly endless layers of meaning within the slight 112 pages of Wide Sargasso Sea, about ethnic and national identities, about imperialistic and patriarchical repression, about madness, and about the relative relationship between reality and dream. Ultimately, Antoinette reclaims her identity and reality through a dream — and with her death. The more times you read this rich novel about a poor woman, the more you will discover.

8 December 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Stories of John Cheever

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The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever. Highly recommended.

John Cheever has long had a reputation as the quintessential American writer of the 20th century, and this collection, which he edited, is illustration of why he is a favourite of the American literati.

Cheever’s stories are populated by mostly mundane people in mundane settings — the corporate executive and rising stars who go home every night to an affluent suburb like Shady Hill, with its unforgettable recurring cast of characters (the Beardens, the Farquarson, the Parminters) who live on such unforgettable streets as Alewives Lane; the New York City elevator operator whose life consists of going up and down all day and whose mind and imagination never leave their comfortable paths; other apartment building workers, half of whose lives are spent on the fringe of luxury and the other half in grimy poverty; the thoughtless affluent who cannot conceive of any other life; the downwardly mobile who have no choice but to lower their level of existence closer to that of their former servants and who cannot seem to grasp that things will never be what they once were; the social outcasts, like Mrs. Hewing, who is “kind of immoral”; the former duchesses and other members of the old European elite who wear their rags with grace while their estate homes crumble around them; the expatriates who fit in neither where they come from nor where they live; and the travelers who find tragedy awaits at the end of the trip with the death of their child — or even the beginning of the journey of their doomed marriage.

What sets the stories and the characters — and Cheever — apart is the surreal nature of so much of what happens in the course of these vignettes. Instead of addressing an addiction like alcoholism directly, Cheever tells of an ordinary woman who cannot stop listening to her neighbours as their lives, their arguments, their loves, and their passions are voiced over a new radio her husband has bought for her in “The Enormous Radio.” The birth and course of the affliction are seamlessly revealed through Irene Westcott’s inability to withdraw from vicariously living through her neighbours’ conversations.

“The Five-Forty-Eight” reveals how an ordinary event — sexual relations between executive and assistant — can lead to the humiliation of a confident, secure man, who finds himself falling into the filth, while the disturbed and wronged ex-assistant is finally free of the demons he helped to feed while ignorant of their existence.

In “The Swimmer,” which takes place on a Sunday where the recurring refrain is, “I drank too much” can be heard at every home, Neddy Merrill decides to go home from a party by swimming across the county through all the pools in between his host’s home and his own — a novel idea taken to its surreal level as the weather and the trees change, and Neddy finds himself lost in a world where he knows what has become of himself but not how or why.

The world of John Cheever is primarily male; the vast majority of the stories are told by a man in the first person. The women whom they encounter range from their tired wives to their enigmatic lovers — and, in the case of the third of “Three Stories,” an enigmatic wife. Sex is central to many of the tales; the happily and the miserably married are in many cases equally open to sexual adventure and excitement if occasionally afraid of the consequences. It is the rare protagonist who would voice the thoughts of one incidental character: “After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.” (“The Country Husband”)

It is fascinating to watch Cheever’s subjects and style evolve from the 1920s and ’30s to the 1960s — from an era of elevator men, fedoras, ubiquitous cigarettes, Martinis (with a capital “M”), and “affairs” to a time when “Artemis, the Honest Well Digger” can refer to the sexual act by its most unacceptable term and be whisked off to Washington, D.C., for making the mistake of falling in love in the U.S.S.R.

The surfaces here are untroubled, but the depths roil with repressed thoughts and emotions that are typical of Shady Hill and its ilk — but are neither acknowledged nor acceptable. Nearly everyone, whether they live in New York, Shady Hill, or Rome, is desperately seeking something — love, sex, passion, something — anything — to lift them above the towers of the city skyline where they work and the chimneys of the suburban trap they cannot — and really do not wish to — escape. An empty life is still a life of social acceptability.

1 September 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Middlemarch

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Middlemarch by George Eliot. Highly recommended.

It seems that it’s nearly impossible to talk about Middlemarch without mentioning its breadth and scope. The irony is that the entire novel takes place within the confines of this small community and within the sometimes-small minds of its various citizens.

Although a vast number of characters populate Middlemarch and its environs, each who speaks has a distinctive voice, yet does not fall into being mere type only. The horse dealer sounds like a horse dealer — but one with a particular background and perspective. The setting itself represents every type of town, suburb, village, or neighborhood where you’ll find the complacent, the critical, the aspiring, the intellectual, the earthy, the wealthy, the poor, and the worker in between. As with many English novels, the setting, in this case Middlemarch, becomes as much a central character as any other, whether it’s Dorothea or Lydgate.

The tapestry Eliot weaves is complex; one character’s actions can affect the lives of others he or she may rarely meet, while the unknown behavior and works of Bulstrode in his youth decades ago eventually touch nearly all.

How the characters come together is sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. Dorothy’s interest in Causabon, although a puzzle to her friends and family, is painted in broad strokes to the reader; her later interest in Will Ladislaw, grows somewhat more delicately if based in the same altruistic roots. Mary Garth and Fred Vincy have, in their way, come together in their childhoods; they are still struggling with mutually agreeable terms that will allow both to acknowledge the love and affection that are already there. Lydgate and Rosamond are both more of a puzzle and less of one — a case of two opposed personalities with opposing views, opposing goals, and opposing personalities drawn together by that most capricious of matchmakers, proximity and circumstance, to form a union that will frustrate both and satisfy neither.

Against the background of these four sometimes difficult relationships (Dorothea and Causabon with its lack of love or eros, Dorothea and Will with the barriers set by Causabon’s will and that of the Middlemarch society who frown on Will and Dorothea’s association with him, Fred and Mary with her imposed restrictions to set him on the correct course in life before she can make a commitment to him, and Lydgate and Rosamond with their diametrical oppositions) is the long, happy marriage of Nicholas Bulstrode and his Vincy wife Harriet. Unlike the others, there are no visible barriers to their happiness, and they are happy as a couple — except for the events in Bulstrode’s past that haunt him in the back of his mind and then at the front with the appearance of Raffles. The marriage survives the ensuing scandal, but the individuals — Nicholas and Harriet — become poor shadow of their former selves.

It is in a town like Middlemarch that a woman like Dorothea will find it impossible to find approbation for her plans and Bulstrode will find the antagonism of those who have come to terms with their own worldly desires. It is in a town like Middlemarch that merely the raving words of a delirium tremens-afflicted Raffles can upset the respectable work of a respectable lifetime. The downfall of Bulstrode validates the town and its modernizing secular culture.

Middlemarch is a novel of insight into personality, motivations, social behaviours, and history. In the end, even the happiest characters have failed at most if not all of their youthful aspirations and have become variations on the Middlemarch theme — husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, day-to-day toilers rather than dreamers and achievers. Middlemarch is Everytown, where you will find an example or two of Everyone — and their dreams or lack thereof.

If you intend to glean the utmost from it, begin with an annotated, critical edition; while Eliot enjoyed a high enough level of erudition to reference the current events of 1830s England along with mythology, religion, quotations, and developments in science and medicine, most of us today cannot begin to follow them without assistance. Knowledge of these references will enrich the rich text of a rich mind.

1 September 2002
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life

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Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Shirley Foster. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. 480 pages.

A tale of Manchester working life set in the 1830s, Mary Barton begins as bucolically as any gritty urban novel can. The Bartons, who are expecting an addition to the family, meet the Wilsons, who are carrying their infant twins, at Green Heys Fields. The charm of these low, flat, treeless tracts lies in their rural contrast to “the busy, bustling manufacturing town [he] left but half an hour ago.” The couples adjourn to the Barton home for tea, where Gaskell lovingly describes every modest luxury such working folk can manage — the bright green japanned tea tray with its scarlet lovers, the cupboard of crockery and glass of which Mrs. Barton is so proud, and the hodgepodge of furniture (“sure sign of good times among the mills”). In honor of their guests, the Bartons send young Mary out for fresh eggs (“one a-piece, that will be five pence”), milk, bread, and Cumberland ham.

Thus Mary Barton commences with a self-conscious air of cautious prosperity, but underneath the pleasure of the occasion are hints of despair to come — Mrs. Barton’s distress over the disappearance of her sister, and the Wilsons’ “little, feeble twins, inheriting the frail appearance of their mother.” In chapters I and II, Gaskell sets up the end of abundance and joy for the Bartons and the beginning of misery for their entire class in the mill city of Manchester.

Mary Barton is a novel of contrasts. While the Bartons take homely pride in their furniture and wares, the Carsons live in a “good house . . . furnished with disregard to expense . . . [with] much taste shown, and many articles chosen for their beauty and elegance.” As Carson’s former employee, Ben Davenport, lies dying in a filthy basement in the company of his wife and children, who are “too young to work, but not too young to be cold and hungry,” Carson’s youngest daughter Amy tells her brother and father that she “can’t live without flowers and scents” and that “life was not worth having without flowers.” They can’t live without food and shelter, and she thinks she can’t live without luxuries. Perhaps the most terrible contrast is between the “listless, sleepy” Carson sisters and the tragedy that interrupts their idle chatter.

The contrast and conflict between the rich and the poor, the men and the masters, is not conventionally based on envy or even class; Carson was once no better and no richer than anyone else. The men don’t aspire to wealth, at least for now. They want to feed their families and perhaps to enjoy the simple comforts the Bartons once shared with the Wilsons. What keeps masters and men apart is not class or money, but a more fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the other’s humanity. Mr. Carson can’t be bothered to recall who Ben Davenport is, other than one of the many faceless men who worked for him for many years, or to give Wilson more than a useless outpatient order. Instead of approaching the masters, the men, who are powerless as individuals, join groups and send delegates like John Barton to London and Glasgow to try to gain government support for their cause. On their own, they fail.

Neither side is willing to break the communication barrier. Ignoring one of their number who wisely notes, “I don’t see how our interests can be separated,” the masters choose to hide the conundrum they face from the men, who are described as “cruel brutes . . . more like wild beasts than human beings.” Even as the omniscient narrator shows the just causes for both groups’ anger toward one another and tries to avoid demonstrating a preference, she can’t resist retorting parenthetically, “Well, who might have made them [the men] different?” It takes a murder and a near miscarriage of justice merely to open the door to redemption for the man in each side’s leading role.

Mary becomes the fulcrum of the characters and plot, connecting the Bartons to the Carsons, the unforgiving John to the repentant Esther, the worldly men and the more spiritually minded women. Through positive and negative models like Alice, Job, Margaret, Esther, Mrs. Wilson, and Sally, and through her true and patient if frustrated lover, Mary avoids Esther’s fate and is transformed from a heedless young girl into a courageous woman who is able to withstand the pull of her divided loyalties.

Confronted with the undeniable humanity of John Barton and the relentlessness of his unfamiliar poverty, Mr. Carson finally recognizes the need for change. As guardian of the old institutions, however, he struggles with his ambivalence toward taking action. Meanwhile, Mary Barton simply leaves the dead and the past behind to embrace an entirely different kind of future in a new country.

Mary Barton lacks some of the psychological depth and nuances that make Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters more interesting and engaging; here, the characters behave consistently and predictably. Despite the ease of its characterizations and assumptions, though, Mary Barton is a surprisingly stark, unvarnished look at the poorer, seamier side of urban industrial life. Gaskell accomplishes what the masters and men have failed to do — she recognizes the humanity in each of them and hints at its potential if only it is discovered and embraced.

16 September 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Mansfield Park

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Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, edited by James Kinsley and with an introduction and notes by Jane Stabler. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. 2003. 480 pages.

In Mansfield Park, “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players.” The cast of characters of both the novel and the play within it is drawn from three families and their social circles: the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, the Grants/Crawfords of the parsonage, and the Prices of Portsmouth. Even as she refuses to participate in her cousins’ staging of Lovers’ Vows, Fanny Price is at center stage as the observer we observe in Austen’s social and familial drama.

As the poor relation of the Bertrams, Fanny is a natural outsider. Lacking social or financial aspirations, she is free to see the folly of those around her and bound by what seems to have become a quaint form of honor from warning Edmund about his. For all her acquiescence to fate, however, Fanny is not weak. Just as she takes a firm stand about not appearing in the ill-fated Lovers’ Vows with its ill-fated cast, she stays on her moral high road even when it requires her to assert herself to Sir Thomas, to whom she is beholden and whose own daughters dare not defy him so directly.

Marriage is central to Mansfield Park. Maria Ward “had the good luck . . . to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.” Despite the narrator’s cynicism, the Bertrams have what seems to be an effective marriage; Sir Thomas is the domineering household head, while his decorative lady provides the services of her busybody widowed sister and her niece Fanny. Lady Bertram’s passivity complements Sir Thomas’s active nature; she is “guided in everything important by Sir Thomas, and in smaller concerns by her sister.” She can do without companionship, but only if Sir Thomas reassures her.

Motivated by his money and status and her good looks, the Bertrams have established a solid marriage, but its sons and daughters are not its pride. Restrained by and resentful of Sir Thomas’s patriarchal hand, his elder son and daughter rebel against and eventually flout his authority and threaten the family’s good name. His younger daughter seeks escape through the closest means possible, and even his younger son is spared from his poor judgment only by fate.

Unlike Lady Bertram, her youngest sister marries for love, or at least on impulse, and suffers the consequences of ignoring what matters most—money and social standing. Self-condemned to a life of poverty and negligence, Mrs. Price cannot depend on either husband or servants to manage day-to-day life so she can indulge in her natural laziness, as Lady Bertram does. Even as her family lives in filthy squalor, Mrs. Price, could, if she were capable of noticing, take pride in Fanny’s personal growth and moral fortitude, William’s accomplishments and career, and Susan’s promise. Like the Bertrams on their extensive estate, she is trapped in the narrow drama she has written for herself. Those who exit—Fanny, William, Susan—are able, it seems, to craft a more positive narrative for themselves.

Like a proscenium arch, the trip to Sotherton and the use of Lovers’ Vows frame Fanny’s view of the relationships around her. Much of the action takes place out of her sight (to her dismay), but Fanny sees enough to disturb her sense of propriety and to bring to light her own desires. Fanny, and the reader, can only guess what is happening offstage and how it may affect her.

Relationships founded solely on money (Rushworths), rebellion or love (Prices, presumably), and lust (Henry/Maria) fare poorly, as does the Crawfords’ sister’s second marriage (to the admiral). Austen’s narrator does not give up on the institution, however. “With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune or friends . . . happiness . . . must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be,” the omnipotent stage director steps in to say after having dispensed justice and wisdom to those characters who require one or the other, just before before the curtain falls on Mansfield Park and environs. In the end and with a heavy hand, the narrator redeems marriage, at least for the deserving (Fanny) and the enduring (the Bertrams).

Readers who prefer strong, attractive women may not appreciate Fanny, her apparently rigid morality, and her seeming weakness of will. As a perceptive outsider who understands what she observes, Fanny is a complex character. She knows and respects how Sir Thomas would feel about Lovers’ Vows and participates to the extent she can so she can keep an eye on Edmund. She knows where his future unhappiness lies, yet does not deter him although it is in her power. She may be judgmental, as people are, but she asserts herself strongly only when she is herself affected, for example, when she is wanted for the play and when Henry pays his attentions. She is true to herself and allows others the same freedom, succeed or fail, with her real feelings hidden within her inner emotional life.

Set in a time of war and slave-supported prosperity that seems remote, Mansfield Park can still reach across the years. In spite of the antiquated social and moral codes that rule their lives, the out-of-touch adults, the rebellious children, and the lonely and unconventional heroine still hold interest today.

Friday, 28 November 2008.
Copyright © 2008 by Diane L. Schirf.

Book review: Cousin Phillis

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Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Hesperus Press, 2007. 144 pages.

Like Cranford and Wives and Daughters, Cousin Phillis is a variation on the themes that seemed to have preoccupied Elizabeth Gaskell: the changes wrought by mechanization and the different spheres in which men and women live and operate.

When the narrator, then 19, meets Phillis, her physical world is small, contained, and regular, predictably following the seasons as agricultural life does. Her intellectual life, however, is vast. She is comfortable with Latin and the principles of mechanics; she attempts to read Dante in Italian. As Jenny Uglow notes in the foreword, “. . . she does not crave ‘independence,’ but connection . . . She yearns to use her mind and give her heart.” She wants to be a woman.

By contrast, the men around her are reshaping the world with their thought, their inventions, their ambition, and their work. Even the narrator, who admittedly lacks his father’s inventive genius and Holdsworth’s drive, is doing more than Phillis ever could simply by serving as Holdsworth’s assistant.

With her flourishing intellectual curiosity and her growing sexual awareness, it’s natural for Phillis to discard the pinafore that represents the restrictions placed on the Victorian woman-child and to desire a man whose tastes, abilities, and drive seem to parallel her own. The result is not surprising. As a woman, her opportunities are limited, while those of the man stretch across two continents and grow greater with each rail laid. It’s clear who is destined to be disappointed.

As with the other novels, Gaskell captures a world within her own memory that in many ways had already ceased to exist. The narrator, older and married now, recalls in vivid detail an experience colored by the passage of time and by the changes that have transpired. The bogs, “all over with myrtle and soft moss,” could not fail to be altered irrevocably by the railway line, nor could the Hope Farm, with its cozy “house place” and “the clock on the house-stairs perpetually clicking out the passage of the moments.” Phillis’s father learns that she cannot be kept in a pinafore and all that it represents, and the narrator “feared that she would never be what she had been before.” No one is.

The narrator leaves us with enticing mysteries. What has prompted him to write about Phillis? What has happened? What does he want to accomplish by telling her story now? What is he trying to recapture? What happened to Phillis? What happened to the Hope Farm and its way of life that he so beautifully recalls and the tenor of which is so effectually altered by events?

Cousin Phillis is a tiny treasure — always evocative, never overwrought. We see Phillis and her natural evolution from child to woman with the narrator’s wisdom of maturity and the clarifying, yet softening filters of time. The narrator — and Gaskell — leave Phillis trapped in time, changed, newly aware of the broadness of her desires and of the obstacles she faces, and determined to “go back to the peace of the old days” — a hope that is nearly impossible to achieve. There is no going back, as Phillis must surely know.

27 April 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Portable Dorothy Parker

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The Portable Dorothy Parker with an introduction by Marion Meade. New York: The Penguin Group, 2006. 656 pages.

As I read The Portable Dorothy Parker, I thought of the short stories of John Cheever. Although many of their stories are set in about the same boozy time period, Cheever’s focus is often the suburban family man who has everything the successful American male should — and who still finds that life is elusive, even wanting and empty. Parker’s tales are primarily of the urban woman, some rich, some poor, rarely satisfied, never happy. In some ways, Cheever’s man and Parker’s woman live in the same void, although not at the same comfort level.

In Parker’s world, as in Cheever’s, the sexes seem to be at cross purposes, unable to communicate openly and hoping to hint their way to understanding. When the girl in “The Sexes” says, “There isn’t a thing on earth the matter. I don’t know what you mean,” the young man, along with the reader, must be able to guess at the nature of the conversation that is about to follow and its inevitable outcome — including the final, “I was not sore! What on earth made you think I was?” Parker’s keen ear and sense of timing make even the dated dialogue and references relevant today.

“Lady with a Lamp” requires only monologue to reveal the actions, sufferings, and feelings of the silent Mona, whose garrulous friend observes her every move and expression and yet is oblivious to the depth of Mona’s pain.

In many stories, Parker relies on monologue and dialogue to reveal the truth underneath the words, which mean nothing. In “Arrangement in Black and White,” the more the “woman with pink velvet poppies” asserts her colorblindness, the deeper her racism is revealed to be. She can say sincerely both, “You know, so many colored people, you give them an inch, and they walk all over you,” followed by, “I haven’t any feelings at all because he’s a colored man” without seeing any hypocrisy.

For “Big Blonde,” perhaps Parker’s best-known story, she uses a narrative approach. Like Hazel Morse, the reader becomes lost in an ill-defined haze of men and alcohol. “She was always pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go” sums up Hazel’s meaningless relationships and life. Parker captures the American obsession with the show of happiness and the burying of genuine emotions in the constant exhortations to “slip us a little smile” — an effort that requires alcohol to sustain. Even the maid responds to Hazel’s suicide attempt with, “You cheer up, now.”

In some ways, the title character of “Mr. Durant” evokes Cheever. An insignificant and complaisant business- and family man leads a double life for which he pays no consequences. Women are to be used until they threaten the security and comfort of his position, yet his actions toward the stray dog his children find reveal that he sees himself as the victim. His “peace with the world” is more important than anything, including people.

Parker is a literal writer who seems to avoid the type of symbolism that makes Cheever’s “The Swimmer” so powerful. This lack of literary and psychological stretching may have kept her from achieving her dream — writing a novel, which she believed was necessary for a writer to be taken seriously by both the literary establishment and the reading public. Her failure did not prevent her from being a harsh critic, and The Portable Dorothy Parker includes rather flippant dismissals of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and others.

Parker despises whimsy and fantasy, including the works of J. M. (“Never-Grow-Up”) Barrie and A. A. Milne (“And it is that word, ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”). One wonders what she thought of the more adult efforts of her British contemporary, J. R. R. Tolkien.

If Parker cannot say anything positive about another writer’s work, however, she sarcastically praises the book itself. “. . . it is brought out by the Grove Press in a most pleasing form — a small book with excellent print and paper, and hard covers, though not of cloth.”

Parker’s poetry reflects her no-nonsense, stark view of love and life (and death); there’s little romanticism here. “Unfortunate Coincidence” (“Lady, make a note of this:/One of you is lying”) is compact blend of eroticism and cynicism; “Faute de Mieux” reveals a rare wistfulness (“I never said they feed my heart”); and “Fighting Words” (“But say my verses do not scan,/And I get me another man!”) shows what she believes her priorities to be, although Enough Rope‘s many suicidal and death-wish poems lead the reader to another conclusion. While Parker often stretches a rhyme, rhythm, or literary device to the breaking point, her verse is often painfully personal and evocative.

Already hefty, Dorothy Parker is made less portable by the addition of “A Dorothy Parker Sampler,” random ephemera that includes letters. Most of these are not highlights of the Parker canon and could have been left out. The one exception is a long letter to Robert Benchley, written from Switzerland. Parker reveals heartfelt compassion for her friends and their sick children as well as her own anguish over a dead love affair (“I honestly don’t know where John leaves off and I begin.”). It’s a rare glimpse into Parker’s heart that isn’t obscured by sarcasm and wit.

Parker’s straightforward, surface style can detract from the darkness of her subject matter. As Marion Meade notes, Parker had a “capacity for listening and watching with amazing clarity.” If only Parker had been willing to dig a little deeper, she might be remembered as a successful novelist rather than as a wit — a label she despised.

16 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

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St. Mawr and The Man Who Died. By D. H. Lawrence. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1959. 212 pages.

Not truly novels, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died seem to be experimental works in which D. H. Lawrence continues to explore the themes found throughout his longer fiction — the emasculation and dehumanization of men, the power and inscrutability of nature, the cynicism of post-war England, the difficulties in relationships and sex, and the potential of reinvention and resurrection.

Young Lou Witt, married, dispirited, weary, and bored, finds in the stallion St. Mawr the vitality the men around her lack. Although “some inscrutable bond held them together . . . a strange vibration of the nerves rather than of the blood,” Lou’s marriage to Rico enervates her. The relationship soon becomes Platonic, “a marriage, but without sex.” The vital animal element of marriage “was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it.”

When Lou touches St. Mawr, she finds him “[s]o slippery with vivid, hot life!” His “alive, alert intensity” fires her emotions, which she realizes had died in the post-war era of facile friendships and fun. St. Mawr “seemed to look at her out of another world.”

With her purchase of the stallion, Lou’s perspective alters; “she could not believe the world she lived in.” Although unreachable and unknowable, St. Mawr is more real to her than her husband, his friends, and even his apparent new love interest. For Lou, “all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard, let’s-be-happy world.” Rico becomes almost a caricature of a man, imitating his father’s officiousness and righteous indignation without feeling them. Lawrence describes Rico’s meticulous attention to his appearance in detail: “. . . he dressed himself most carefully in white riding-breeches and a shirt of purple silk crepe, with a flowing black tie spotted red like a ladybird, and black riding-boots.” While Rico is decorative and transparent, St. Mawr is vital and mysterious.

Lawrence uses long swathes of St. Mawr to philosophize, often directly or through the Welsh groom, Lewis, who says, “But a man’s mind is always full of things.” St. Mawr has no plot, and the stallion himself disappears from the narrative before Lou decides to “escape achievement” in the desert of New Mexico.

In New Mexico, Lawrence finds the “wild tussle” of life, which is missing from the long-civilized England, where everything is fenced in and where “the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War.” The displaced New England housewife who precedes Lou, seeing beauty in the desert first, then struggle, may represent Lawrence’s own perspective and evolution during his stay there.

The Man Who Died begins with a peasant’s acquisition of a cock — perhaps the one that crows three times before Peter realizes his three denials of Christ. Like the cock, the man who died (or, more accurately, didn’t die and therefore didn’t rise again) is tied “body, soul, and spirit” by “that string,” his commitment to mankind to die and to be resurrected. “The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life.”

Having survived his promised destiny, the man who died again renounces his godhood to become a man, this time permanently and with no agenda. His near death drives him to seek life, but not the “greed of giving” or the “little, greedy life of the body . . . he knew that virginity is a form of greed . . . he had risen for the woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to give, not greedy to take . . .”

In his new situation, “the presence of people made him lonely.” He believes he has fulfilled his mission and is beyond it: “My way is my own alone . . . I am alone within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain.”

Also alone is the virgin priestess of the temple of Isis, patiently awaiting the return of Osiris. Like Lou and many other female characters in Lawrence, she senses the superficial sexual appeal of men, but even to the great Anthony, “the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in the shadow of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine.” An old philosopher tells her, “Rare women wait for the re-born man” and that the lotus responds to “one of these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more,” dismissing Anthony as one of the “golden brief day-suns of show.”

The consummation of the relationship between the virgin god and the virgin priestess, in a temple surrounded outside by suspicious, vindictive slaves, is beautiful and moving. “It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose!” Instead of being a mere part of the “little life of the body,” sex (and procreation) becomes a deeply spiritual experience, “the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire.”

In both St. Mawr and The Man Who Died, Lawrence is rarely subtle or restrained, covering pages with repetitious expositions of his favorite themes, sometimes reveling too much in the variety of expression. In spite of their flaws, both works are inventive, imaginative, and stirring. For anyone who is familiar with Lawrence primarily though his more well-known novels and stories, these two works are worth a read.

9 March 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Black Arrow

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The Black Arrow. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1963. 256 pages.

With the War of the Roses as its backdrop, The Black Arrow blends the romance of young love and the excitement of its hero’s initiation into war and politics. The theme of loyalty runs throughout — loyalty to parents, guardians, leaders, followers, lovers, and oneself.

England’s loyalties are divided between Lancaster and York, although the distinction makes little difference to the country’s more practical citizens. “It is the ruin of this kind land,” a woman said. “If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots.” When the naive young hero, Richard Shelton, reassures her that men “cannot better die than for their natural lord,” another man points out, “No natural lord of mine . . . I followed the Walsinghams . . . And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did it; call ye that natural?”

Despite young Dick’s idealism, which makes him faithful to his guardian and to the men with whom he has served, despite many disturbing rumors, it soon becomes apparent that most men are loyal primarily to their self-interests, whether they seek power like Richard Crookback or favor and riches like Dick’s guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley. Even the mysterious “Jon Amend-All” of the black arrow, whose objective is to revenge himself and his friends on Brackley, is found collecting rents from Brackley’s cottagers, acknowledging that they will suffer the hardship of having to pay twice. The man behind “Jon Amend-All” is no beneficent Robin Hood, but as cold and crafty a political operative as Brackley himself.

Brackley’s loyalties are soon explained. “I lie in Kettley till I have sure tidings of the war, and then ride to join me with the conqueror . . . Tosspot and Shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o’ one side, waiting.” As Clipsby says, “For, indeed, he is one that goes to bed Lancaster and gets up York.”

Fleeing from one danger into another, Dick finally understands that he cannot trust Brackley simply because he is Dick’s guardian, or even Ellis Duckworth as his savior and protector. The only person upon whom he can rely is the girl he loves, who, ironically, was intended to be his wife in one of Brackley’s financial maneuvers. The black arrow flies from Tunstall Forest to Kettley, then through wetlands back through Tunstall to the Moat House and on to Shoreby, with treachery and the threat of war hanging over all.

With every adventure, Dick’s loyalty turns more inward on himself and his heart’s desire. He is loyal to York because Ellis Duckworth is and Daniel Brackley isn’t. When he finds himself rapidly in and out of Richard Crookback’s favor, he is “neither glad nor sorry.” Danger and treachery transform Dick into a more mature man who recognizes that loyalty is neither won nor lost so easily or quickly. In one of the novel’s strangest and weakest scenes, he proves his loyalty to his bride-to-be by rejecting the advances of her best friend, peculiar as they are.

The series of events that makes Dick a man is his theft of the Good Hope, its subsequent destruction, and the death of the captain’s man, Tom. “Dick’s heart smote him at what he heard. Until that moment he had not perhaps thought twice of the poor skipper who had been ruined by the loss of the Good Hope; so careless, in those days, were men who wore arms of the goods and interests of their inferiors . . .” Dick achieves his aims, but at the cost of many lives and the prosperity of the innocent Arblaster, who mourns “my man Tom” until the end of his days.

As a protagonist, Dick is refreshingly and painfully human, at least outside battle. While brave, he lacks the ability to pick up on clues that are obvious to his less-sheltered acquaintances, including those about the true nature of Jack Matcham. He suffers remorse for what he has done and begins to ask others like Ellis Duckworth to reconsider their course. He has the mercy that Richard Crookback and Brackley lack.

Whatever its historical flaws (some of which Stevenson points out in footnotes), The Black Arrow is beautifully written, with well-drawn characters, a plot that rarely stalls, realistically bloody battle scenes, and dialogue that is often poetic without being jarring. While not Stevenson’s greatest effort, The Black Arrow is exciting and fun for anyone of any age who loves a solid historical drama.

3 February 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Cranford

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Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited by Elizabeth Porges Watson. New introduction and notes by Charlotte Mitchell. ISBN 0-19-283209-3. Recommended.

Not a novel, not an anthology of short stories, Cranford is perhaps best described as a cohesive series of vignettes. Recounted by a young woman of about 30 from the city of Drumble [Manchester], these stories depict family, friendship, and love lost and found in a village dominated by poor but genteel spinsters and widows. “. . . all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Small, rural, and elitist in its way, Cranford is a place out of time, where faded fashions and proprieties still matter.

Gaskell begins Cranford with a series of descriptive statements. Some are accurate, while others prove to be ironic. For example, “Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” While discovering Cranford and the Amazons who possess it, we also learn the dry perspective and voice of the narrator, who clearly loves the village while gently highlighting the foibles of its female inhabitants. “But I will answer for it, the last gigot, the last tight and scanty petticoat in wear in England, was seen in Cranford — and seen without a smile.”

Like Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Cranford is focused on gender roles and the different lives of women and men. The sexes share many characteristics; Captain Brown and Peter Jenkyns display the thoughtful, neighborly solicitude associated with women (with Peter going so far as to don a woman’s dress), while Miss Jenkyns (the woman Peter impersonates) exhibits a manly will and resolution. It is the opportunities they have and the way in which they live that separates the sexes. Captain Brown, Peter, and Signor Brunoni have traveled and seen some of the world, and have even influenced it, while Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty, Miss Price, the narrator, and their friends are constrained by their gender, gentility, and social code to hearth and home. Here, they perform their small household tasks, including ensuring that their maidservants are not disturbed or distracted by “followers,” or interested young men. The social code that prevents any of them from working in “trade” also determines the hours that can be spent outside the home. “Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls . . . ‘from twelve to three are our calling-hours.'”

In such a small, interconnected village, everything that happens is noteworthy, and every decision is important if the occasionally cruel social order is to be maintained. “The whole town knew and kindly regarded Miss Betty Barker’s Alderney,” whose fall into a lime-pit warrants Captain Brown’s advice, “Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers . . .,” so the narrator can ask the reader incredulously, “Do you ever seen cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” Miss Matty’s decision not to marry against her family’s wishes keeps the peace at great personal cost, and her wistful decision to allow Martha to have a follower recompenses her later when the outside world intrudes into her realm with its ugly realities — one of the many signs that Cranford must and will change. When Lady Glenmire renounces her title and takes the name of Mrs. Hoggins upon her remarriage, Cranford reels with shock and dismay, and it takes Peter Jenkyns, and his broader perspective from India, to reconcile the village and its de facto leader, Mrs. Jamieson, with the new ways.

The narrator, who divides her time between her father in the progressive world of Drumble and the slowly and reluctantly changing Cranford, finds herself under the village’s influence. As an observer, she describes the complex set of rules that govern Cranford society and the social slights they necessitate, not without a sense of regret. She is aware of the absurdity of Cranford society’s beliefs and behavior combined with expediency, such as the occasion of Miss Betty Barker’s party for the Cranford elite. “‘Oh, gentility!’ thought I, ‘can you endure this last shock?'” when “all sorts of good things for supper” appear. “. . . we thought it better to submit graciously, even at the cost of our gentility — which never ate suppers in general — but which, like most non-supper-eaters, was particularly hungry on all special occasions.” More seriously, she pities Miss Matty and her lost love and life, and like her other well-meaning friends determines that she shall be happy.

With the arrival of Signor Brunoni and the ensuing panic over the perceived crime wave that seems to hit Cranford, the narrator loses some of her wryness and seems to become nearly as frightened by the rumors of strangers and robberies as her elderly friends. It is the new outsider, Lady Glenmire, who “never had heard of any actual robberies; except that two little boys had stolen some apples from Farmer Benson’s orchard and that some eggs had been missed on a market-day off Widow Hayward’s stall.” Even while caught up in the panic, however, “I could not help being amused at Jenny’s position . . ..” When she speaks of Jenny’s ghost, the narrator says, “. . . for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be . . ..”

Through the narrator, who seems to represent Gaskell’s own perspective, Cranford pokes gentle fun at a time and place that had already become a fairy tale-like setting, where goodness outdoes pettiness, justice prevails over setbacks and hardships, and even the prodigal son (or prince) can return to set things right. In Cranford, Gaskell reminds the reader of a recent past that is both amusing and moving, a time to look upon fondly but without regret for the changes that Peter and the marriage of Lady Glenmire/Mrs. Hoggins bring about. The one constant in life is change, and inCranford change is at least as much for the better as for the worse.

29 December 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf