A Gentle Adventure

Right from the first page I knew that I was going to like Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It began in a women’s club in London on a February afternoon,—an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon—when Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless eye down the Agony Column saw this:

To Those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.

That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.

My fellow Betsy-Tacy fans will understand why the mere mention of The Agony Column caused me to anticipate a bit of magic even in a wholly unrelated fictional universe. And it wasn’t just The Agony Column that captured my interest but also the women’s club in which Mrs. Wilkins perused it. I had recently encountered a London men’s club of that era in Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale but it hadn’t occurred to me that parallel women’s clubs existed. I wondered about this club and its denizens, in particular the listless Mrs. Wilkins. Who was she, what sort of life did she lead, and what change in that life might be wrought by a month on the Italian Riviera in the springtime?

It’s not giving too much away to tell you that Mrs. Wilkins does indeed embark on this adventure and that she does so in the company of three very different but equally intriguing women, one an acquaintance from church, the other two strangers to her: the pious Mrs. Arbuthnot full of good works and deeply buried resentments; the young, bored, beautiful Lady Caroline Dester who seeks to escape the frivolous demands of her social station; and the rigid Mrs. Fisher, an elderly widow who wishes to be left alone to reminisce about long-dead friends.

I’m inclined to describe the book as a gentle adventure, but I’m afraid that you’ll interpret gentle as boring. Far from it. It’s true that not much happens on the surface in the small castle at San Salvatore, at least not at first:

To the servants San Salvatore seemed asleep. No one came to tea, nor did the ladies go anywhere to tea. Other tenants in other springs had been far more active. There had been stir and enterprise; the boat had been used; excursions had been made; Beppo’s fly was ordered; people from Mezzago came over and spent the day; the house rang with voices; even sometimes champagne had been drunk. Life was varied, life was interesting. But this? What was this? The servants were not even scolded. They were left completely to themselves. They yawned.

But there is a great deal going in the minds and hearts of the women in residence there. Dramatic shifts are underway within each woman and ultimately these shifts manifest externally as well in their relationships to one another and to the family and friends that they left behind in England.

By the time I reached the end of the book, I felt as if a bit of San Salvatore’s transformational magic had been worked on me as well.

Moments of Epiphany

(Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity)

James Joyce has been credited with coining the literary usage of the term “epiphany”. In Writing Short Stories Ailsa Cox sums it up thus:

Joyce coined the term ‘epiphany’ to describe a moment of intense insight, which briefly illuminates the whole of existence. In image-based fiction, it serves as an emotional turning point, replacing the moment of outward revelation or decisive action which performs this function in a story dependent on plot. In a plot-driven story, a revelation leads towards a final resolution grounded in external action. An epiphany in image-based fiction hints at subjective, personal meanings hidden beneath the surface, which may or may not lead to action.

[…]

Epiphanies are usually invisible and private. On the outside, things seem pretty much as usual. It’s very important that they take place inside the everyday, subtly altering the character’s perceptions and making time seem to stand still.

“The Dead” is regarded by many as an exemplar of the centrality of the epiphany to the short story form. Typically, the epiphany in the story is pinpointed as occurring in the final pages after Gabriel’s wife Gretta tells him of her youthful romance with Michael Furey. I read the story with all this in mind and I don’t dispute this characterization. But I see “The Dead” as a story not of a single epiphany but of many such moments that build to that final one.

It seems to me that the most significant of those moments occur in Gabriel’s interactions with women: first in his brief exchange with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, upon arrival at the party, then in his “row” with Miss Ivors the “enthusiast” and “propagandist,” and finally in his response to Gretta’s revelation of a romantic past into which he has apparently never before thought to inquire.

First Lily:

‘O, then,’ said Gabriel gaily, ‘I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?”

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: ‘The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.’

Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his galoshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.

This exchange “cast[s] a gloom over him” and causes him to doubt the speech he has prepared to deliver later:

He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

Later he is similarly discomfited by an encounter on the dance floor with Miss Ivors:

‘O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself?’

‘Why should I be ashamed of myself?’ asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.

‘Well, I'm ashamed of you,’ said Miss Ivors frankly. ‘To say you'd write for a paper like that. I didn't think you were a West Briton.’

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel's face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, to Web's or Massey's on Aston's Quay, or to O'Clohissey's in the bystreet. He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

Miss Ivors repeats the charge once more and the incident rankles: “[S]he had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit's eyes.” And later: “It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his speech.”

Each of these incidents undercuts his public persona and forces Gabriel to, at least briefly, confront the contradictions within him. As such, they presage this crucial moment near the end of the story in the hotel room with Gretta:

A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

Of course this alone is not the epiphany. Still to come is his consciousness of how little he really knows Gretta, and of his own mortality:

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few questions to contemplate:

1. The story is told almost entirely from Gabriel’s point of view. Why then does it begin before he arrives at the party?

2. I’m sure that I would get something more out of this story if I had a more solid sense of the political and religious context. This is not so much a question as a general plea to anyone who can offer up a bit of knowledge about Irish society at the time in which the story is set. For example, this is the first place I’ve encountered the term “West Briton.” I’m aware of a point in time when Scotland was known as “North Britain” and of the resentment that generated. Is a reference to the Irish as “West Britons” a parallel thing or perhaps something still more fraught? I was also intrigued by the bit about women being kicked out of the church choirs. What was going on in the Catholic church at that time? And what of Mr. Browne described by Mary Jane as being “of the other persuasion”? Does that mean he was Protestant? What would social relationships between Catholics and Protestants have been like in that part of Ireland at that time? Does that explain anything about the role Browne plays in the company?

3. Gabriel dismisses his aunts at one point as “two ignorant old women.” I realize that they’re not as well educated as Gabriel nor are they as well travelled. But why doesn’t their musical expertise, their knowledge of opera and so on, give them some cultural cachet in Gabriel’s eyes? Is he looking down on them as provincial in the very way that he so resented his mother looking down on his wife as “country cute”?

4. Who exactly are “the dead” of the title?

My favourite thing about the story: that gorgeous final paragraph. That’s a perfect ending if ever I’ve read one.

Click over to A Curious Singularity for other perspectives on James Joyce's "The Dead," and then join in the discussion of the story at MetaxuCafe.

Lewis Buzbee on the Bookstore as a Public Space

Lewis Buzbee on the bookstore as a public space:

The unspoken rules we’ve developed for the bookstore are quite different from the rules that govern other retail enterprises. While the bookstore is most often privately held, it honors a public claim on its time and space. It is not a big-box store where one buys closets of toilet paper or enough Tabasco sauce for the apocalypse; nor is it a tony boutique that sells prestige in the shape of sequined dresses or rare gems; and it’s no convenience store either, raided for a six-pack, cigarettes, and a Nutty Buddy on the way home from a hard day at work. The cash register’s chime does not define how long we can linger. A bookstore is for hanging out. Often for hours.

From Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: a memoir, a history (2006).

More Margaret Atwood

There are several highly quotable bits in an article about Margaret Atwood in today’s Globe and Mail. Here are a few.

On autobiography:

“If I were going to write an autobiography,” she says, “I'd feel compelled by truth.”

“Are you going to write an autobiography?”

“No. Why bother? Everyone thinks you're lying.”

On working out at a gym:

“Every once in a while, I join some gym and hope I'll follow through on it. But I'm too busy. To take a slice out of your life to go jump up and down seems an amazing waste of time. The discipline in my life all has to do with writing and the laundry. I don't have room for any more discipline.”

On the supposed dumbing-down of contemporary culture:

Unlike many observers of social trends, Atwood doesn't subscribe to the conventional wisdom about the relentless dumbing-down of the culture. She thinks smartness itself may take different forms that the older generation cannot recognize. “It's like birds,” she says. “People thought birds were stupid because they had very small brains. But you could not match the memory of a chickadee. You could not do it. They can remember exactly where they put every seed and they never come back to the same place twice.” Similarly, “it may be that the younger generation is smart in ways we don't identify as being smart.”

Click here to read the whole article. It should be accessible for a couple of days before disappearing behind a subscription wall.

Distinctive Blogging Voices

Several months ago, Dorothy W. wrote:

If the voice in an essay is interesting, it almost doesn't matter what the subject is. I read them for the personality, the sense of the author that lies behind the words, and I think that's what I enjoy about blogs too. I want a sense of a personality coming through.

I agreed then, and I was forcefully reminded of her point recently when I realized that I could recognize the voices of many of my favourite bloggers even when I encountered them without their names attached.

There are a couple of blogs that I visit several times a day, not because I greedily anticipate more than one post, but because their authors have a genius not just for penning interesting posts but for provoking interesting comments. Commenters respond to the post and, as comments accumulate, respond to one another’s comments, and a lively conversation develops. I keep checking back to see if more people have weighed in on the topic under discussion, and what they’ve said about it, and whether the author of the post has resurfaced in the comments section to respond.

It’s in these comments sections that I found I could recognize bloggers’ voices out of context. Well, not entirely out of context. Communities of litbloggers develop around shared interests and it’s not at all surprising to repeatedly encounter one another visiting the same blogs. But when you visit a blogger at home, you know whose post you’re reading. Whereas in the comments section of someone else’s blog, you often read several sentences before you scroll down far enough to see the signature.

Not long ago, I was reading a comment and thinking to myself, This must be BlogLily. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. When I got to the signature, sure enough it was. Since then it’s become a bit of a game with me—like trying to identify the song that’s playing on the radio from the first few bars. I’ve found that within a sentence or two, I can usually recognize Dorothy W., Litlove, BikeProf, Ella, Stefanie, Danielle, or Victoria, as the author of a comment. And, given the opportunity, I’m quite sure that I could similarly identify the voices of other favourite bloggers.

There are a couple of listservs to which I have belonged for several years. In that context, as I get to know people that I’ve never met in person, I develop a visual image of them. I’ve realized that I don’t conjure up visual images of bloggers the same way; rather, I imagine what their voices sound like. Identifying the authors of comments has something to do with content—familiarity with their literary tastes and preoccupations through regular reading of their own blogs. But it also has much to do with tone; I feel as if I can recognize the sound of their voices.

I’d love to think that this phenomenon demonstrates my fabulous powers of deduction but of course it’s not that at all. What it demonstrates is the distinctive, compelling quality of these bloggers’ voices.

David Long on Stories and Novels

David Long on the difference between writing stories and novels:

Stories are tough. It's not that writing a short story is harder than writing a novel, but writing a book of short stories is really difficult—for me, at least. My last collection, Blue Spruce, represented seven years of work. A book of stories is all beginnings and endings, each of which has to be just right. Whereas a novel is mostly middle. If you get stuck while writing a story, then you're just stuck. But in a novel you can go and work on a different place.

[Note: For those participating in Carl V.’s Autumn Reading Challenge, David Long’s new novel, The Inhabited World, sounds like a good prospect—a most unconventional ghost story. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sufficiently intrigued by what I’ve read about it to add it to my list.]

A Preview of Margaret Atwood's New Book

There was a ripple of excitement across the convention floor at Book Expo Canada back in June when it was announced that Margaret Atwood had arrived to do a signing. I lined up along with everybody else. Alas I was after a book not a signature, and it soon became apparent that no advance copies of Atwood’s new short story collection, Moral Disorder, were being distributed. But we weren’t sent home empty handed. We were each given a nice little chapbook containing one story from the new collection to serve as a preview.

Moral Disorder is a collection of linked short stories which trace the life of the central character from her 1940s childhood through to the present day. The story contained in the chapbook is titled “The Art of Cooking and Serving” and, though I understand it’s not the opening story of the collection, it is chronologically the first. In it, the narrator recounts the story of her eleventh summer which she spent waiting anxiously for the birth of her sister. She explains:

I was knitting this layette because my mother was expecting. I avoided the word pregnant, as did others: pregnant was a blunt, bulgy, pendulous word, it weighed you down to think about it, whereas expecting suggested a dog with its ears pricked, listening briskly and with happy anticipation to an approaching footstep. My mother was old for such a thing: I’d gathered this by eavesdropping while she talked with her friends in the city, and from the worried wrinkles on the foreheads of the friends, and from their compressed lips and tiny shakes of the head, and from their Oh dear tone, and from my mother saying she would just have to make the best of it. I gathered that something might be wrong with the baby because of my mother’s age; but wrong how, exactly? I listened as much as I could, but I couldn’t make it out, and there was no one I could ask.

Later she continues:

The danger that loomed was so vague, and therefore so large—how could I even prepare for it? At the back of my mind, my feat of knitting was a sort of charm, like the fairy-tale suits of nettles mute princesses were supposed to make for their swan-shaped brothers, to turn them back into human beings. If I could only complete the full set of baby garments, the baby that was supposed to fit inside them would be conjured into the world, and thus out of my mother. Once outside, where I could see it—once it had a face—it could be dealt with. As it was, the thing was a menace.

As the story unfolds, we see the narrator growing up under pressure, her relationship with her mother shifting, and the contours of her future relationship with her sister being determined. Everything that is to come is tantalizingly hinted at in two perfect final paragraphs. I’d like to quote them to illustrate my point but I don’t want to spoil the end of the story for anyone so I’ll resist.

A new book by Margaret Atwood is always an exciting prospect to me. That it is a collection of short stories, and a collection of linked stories at that—perhaps my favourite literary form—makes it still more exciting. Needless to say, the marvellous sample story with its tantalizing ending has ratcheted up my anticipation even further. Happily, I need wait no longer, nor need most of you, at least not much longer. Moral Disorder went on sale in Canada today and in the UK yesterday, and it’s due to be released in the US on September 19th. I’m off to track down a copy. I promise a full report once I’ve read it.

Next Up at the Short Story Discussion Group

Next up at the short story discussion group is James Joyce’s "The Dead", a story from his 1914 collection The Dubliners.

The discussion will begin on Tuesday, September 12th. Participants are invited to begin posting their thoughts on the story at A Curious Singularity on that day. If you’re not yet a member of the short story discussion group and you would like to join, please e-mail me. Of course, anyone can contribute through the comments sections of the posts without officially joining the group.

I look forward to the discussion!

Patricia Highsmith on Writing and Perseverance

Patricia Highsmith on writing and perseverance:

A book is not a thing of one sitting, like a poem, but a longish thing which takes time and energy, and since it takes skill, too, the first effort or maybe the second may not find a market. A writer should not think he is bad, or finished, if this happens, and of course writers with real drive will not. Every failure teaches something. You should have the feeling, as every experienced writer has, that there are more ideas where that one came from, more strength where the first strength came from, and that you are inexhaustible as long as you are alive. This requires an optimistic turn of mind, to say the least, and if you don’t have it by nature, it has to be created artificially. You have to talk yourself into it sometimes.

From Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1983).

Autumn Reading Challenge

On the whole, I like to keep my reading list flexible. Required reading brings out the rebel in me, even when I’m the one dictating which reading is required. Thus I’ve not yet been tempted by any of the reading challenges that have circulated round the litblogosphere. Nor do I respond well to scary books. So you wouldn’t think that Carl V.’s R.I.P. Autumn Reading Challenge would be the one to finally lure me in. The challenge he’s set is to read at least five books that fit the “broad criteria of being scary, eerie, moody, dripping with atmosphere, gothic, unsettling, etc.” between now and Halloween.

But thanks to the Slaves of Golconda, I’ve got a head start on this one with The Island of Dr. Moreau. How much creepier does it get than an assortment of mutilated beast-men stalking our hero about an island on which he is trapped in the company of a mad scientist? And while reading it, I began to wonder about the extent to which H.G. Wells was influenced by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a classic that I haven’t yet read. Another in this vein that I’ve been meaning to read is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a copy of which I bought recently while exploring Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh haunts. Then there’s Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in which my interest was piqued by one of Litlove’s recent posts. (Incidentally, I think Litlove is tied with Danielle for the title of litblogger whose posts most consistently increase my TBR pile to alarming heights.) And also Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise Longue, recommended by Emily and Iliana in comments on Litlove’s aforementioned post.

Other possibilities include Coraline by Neil Gaiman which, children’s book or no, sounds terrifying (see what Mrs. Book World had to say about it in a recent post); Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier which I’ve long been meaning to read; and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue which I’ve not yet read despite the fact that many assign it a key role in spawning the mystery genre that I love so well.

No doubt many other possibilities will capture my interest as I follow the progress of other participants in the challenge. I’m certainly open to any and all suggestions, especially of more gothic titles. For example, I’d love to know what’s on the reading list of the American Gothic class that BikeProf teaches.

I think that I can manage to read five titles from this myriad of possibilities before Halloween. So, Carl V., count me in. But I’m blaming you if I don’t get much sleep over the next two months with all this scary stuff occupying my imagination!