new year’s eve 2013
don’t you understand
truth is a seed
planted deep
you can’t get it
unless you dig
I rarely pick up poetry — I’m not schooled in reading it and know that the craft and conventions go over my head — but there’s something very special about Katherena Vermette’s collection in river woman. Written in free verse, and often without punctuation or capitalisations, it feels like poetry as an act of decolonisation: as an author of Métis heritage, her people were here in Canada before the settlers came with their writing’s craft and conventions and her poetry feels precrafty; preconventional; I got this because it spoke straight to my heart.
Separated into three sections (black river, red river, and an other story), the poems feel broadly separated into love narratives, feminist narratives (the river as a woman), and political narratives (and with an epigraph by Chrystos that states that “poetry without politics is narcissistic and not useful to us”, Vermette is well-supported in expressing rage and resistance in her work.) I acknowledge that giving any excerpts out of context is a bit meaningless (and therefore unfair), but I can’t help but share a few lines, if only to help me remember what I found so powerful in this collection.
From black river (this is the only “shape” poem in the collection and I kept reading this one over and over; lapping my tongue around the texture; the only poem I'm sharing in full)
arch
night
comes as
comfortable
as a bed as
cumbersome
as limbs as soft
as an arch to put
your hand under
as rich as a slice
of moon so sweet
you have to spoon
me small rounded
bites I nibble slow
and savour in long
languid mouthfuls
lapping my tongue
around their texture
a taste so beautiful
I miss it before
I even
swallow
From red river
riverstory
I search
for stories of the river
scratch at the surface
dig deep
pull at bits of limestone
and other forgotten things
but I can’t find them
those things we were never supposed to
lose
And from the final section, an other story
métissage / Métis Sage
my blood has been here forever
as rooted as the river
and just as much in danger
I have enjoyed reading Vermette’s novels and I appreciate the deeper dive into the author’s mindset that her poetry provides: these poems are accessible, thought-provoking, and wise; enthusiastically recommended.
Irish people go to funerals. They circle the wagons, count the survivors. Everyone could still hug and kiss, wipe away the tears and snot, shake hands with her husband, her family, her kids. Nobody knew it then, but this would be the last good funeral of the year.
Learning in February of 2020 that an old girlfriend (it was a brief fling, they were never “in love”, and they knew enough people in common to have kept casually crossing paths over the intervening twenty-eight years) had died of cancer, author Ed O’Loughlin found himself suddenly feeling old and unmoored and casting about for the meaning of it all. When pandemic-related lockdowns then hit and O’Loughlin was relegated to an attic boxroom to do his writing (while his wife and daughters did their own writing and schoolwork downstairs), he found himself going back over his life — an unhappy childhood, family loss, years as a foreign correspondent before turning to writing literature, his current happy home — and the result is The Last Good Funeral of the Year. By turns touching and funny, always interesting and contemplative, I most appreciated learning how details from O’Loughlin’s personal life show up in his novels (him having been a journalist in Africa and the Middle East makes so much sense now that I know it), and if nothing else, this makes for a fine record of the 2020 experience in first rate prose. This might appeal most to a niche audience (although I think everyone should be reading this author), and as for me, I loved it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He told himself this from the start: this wasn’t just about Charlotte. It was about him suddenly being faced with facts he’d been ignoring — that he was getting old, that he wasn’t what he used to be, that his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. Anyone could see the gears turning, the facile clockwork. It was selfish and dishonest. And worse, it was dull.
What I’ve read of O’Loughlin has always engaged me at a deep level; his writing simply speaks to me. So whether he’s writing about the “banality” of his unhappy childhood (I understand too well the “habits of secrecy and shame” that small children of quarrelling parents acquire) or describing falling “through a trapdoor into his twenties” while walking along Edmonton’s High Level Bridge in the middle of a winter's night (I spent most of my twenties in Edmonton and that’s where my own trapdoor of nostalgia would lead), it’s all familiar and relatable and well-captured. And where O’Loughlin is writing about his years as a foreign correspondent (reporting from South Africa or Somalia or the Middle East), I was fascinated by what he witnessed and intrigued that he carried over a journalist’s refusal to put himself in the story he was writing (to “distance himself from the scene of the crime”) by continuing to refer to himself in the third person throughout this memoir. The tone changes abruptly in one section that reads as a tongue-in-cheek, chapter-long stream-of-consciousness:
he said to his wife once he said if I ever start writing about being a writer or about a fictional writer who is writing a book get a five-pound steel lump hammer and strike me repeatedly on the back of the head
I both liked the way that this section seemed to capture the in-your-headness of being in a continuing lockdown, without O’Loughlin actually taking it too seriously, writing at one point:
an artist friend once told him that he thought writing was the purest art because you can’t hide behind the form and when you’re writing you always have to try to find something new and he said that for example someone had told him about a recent American novel that was only one long sentence and it had won experimental prizes and wasn’t that an interesting idea and he told his artist friend that in the past five years not one but two novels that were only one long sentence had won the big English prize for experimental fiction and that Joyce first ran that experiment a century before and his artist friend laughed
But then the tone changes back, there’s another funeral, more ghosts and cemeteries and the weighing of a life, and by the end, O’Loughlin comes to some thoughtful conclusions:
So now he had, after all, a photograph of himself with Charlotte, from their short time together, a long time ago. It hurt now to think of them all, happy there together, but here was the evidence, a last-minute twist. But what did it prove? We were. That’s all. It was good. And some of us continue. Could any true story end any other way?
Again, this might have niche appeal, but I do hope O’Loughlin sells enough copies to buy those hearing aids; at least while we’re still wearing masks and he doesn’t know he’s being cussed at without the help of subconscious lip-reading. And I hope he writes many more novels and that I get to read them.
As we all sit here in horror watching Russia invade Ukraine — forces quickly taking control of Chernobyl, displacing millions of citizens, and threatening the use of nuclear weapons to enforce Putin's will — the following passage struck me as too unfortunately ironic; I'm sure the thirteen Ukranian defenders of tiny Snake Island would have preferred a slow death from climate change than putting their soft bodies between their country and a Russian warship:
He’d grown up during the Cold War, and, like many of his generation, he sort of missed it now. The possibility — probability, it had seemed — that he and everyone he knew would be annihilated at short notice by thermonuclear weapons, whether by accident or on purpose, was terrifying, but at least it would have been tragic. The present reality, of a slow, onanistic auto-asphyxiation, in which only the 0.01 per cent will achieve sterile orgasm before the planet chokes out, seems farcical at best. Not even a bang for our bucks. And if we had pushed the button, back in the good old days, most life on the planet would probably have survived us. The Chernobyl exclusion zone, now teeming with nature, has shown us that. Now, it could already be too late.
sentence n. 1 A grammatical unit comprising a word or group of words that is separate from any other grammatical construction, and usually consists of at least one subject with its predicate and contains a finite verb or verb phrase; for example, The door is open and Go! are sentences.
On first reading this definition, I marveled at the italicized examples. These were not just sentences, I thought. The door is open. Go! They were the most beautiful sentences in the world.
In The Sentence, author Louise Erdrich plays around with the different definitions of that seemingly straightforward titular word: Starting with a bizarre crime caper, the main character, Tookie, is committed to a ridiculously long sentence of incarceration, and when a former teacher sends her reading material (including a dictionary from which the above definition is sourced), Tookie begins parsing sentences in the literary sense. Then when Tookie is eventually released and begins working in a (haunted) bookstore, she is given a diary that she believes contains a mysterious sentence that is capable of literally killing anyone who reads it.
This is a very literary book — set mostly in the bookstore, characters recommend books to customers and talk often about what makes a good book — and in one scene, the character Louise (obviously the author, who owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis) explains that a well-written book should flow naturally, not have a feeling of having been cynically constructed. And if I had to name what caused me to not completely connect with this read it’s that it felt too natural and unconstructed: I got the sense that Erdrich started writing a book about a haunted bookstore and a cursed diary (the bits set in the bookstore start in November of 2019) but then COVID hit, and perhaps more urgently for her, George Floyd was murdered in her hometown and Minneapolis became a nightmare scene of riots and looting and police using tactical gear and tear gas against peaceful protestors; and Erdrich puts it all in this book, to the detriment of the narrative setup: A mysteriously cursed diary becomes less compelling when actual people are dying in the streets and in the COVID wards. I appreciate what Erdrich wanted to capture of the tumultuous times she was living through, but I didn’t love this novel.
“What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book — a written sentence, a very powerful sentence — killed Flora.”
Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. “I wish I could write a sentence like that.”
I really did enjoy the start of The Sentence — the bodysnatching was bizarre and Tookie seemed like a fascinating character that I was looking forward to spending more time with — but I didn’t understand why she kept dissociating every time things got tough; I kept feeling like I had missed important information along the way that would have explained her and what she was going through. (Did I miss an earlier novel by Erdrich that showed Tookie and Pollux’s history or the history between Flora and Tookie’s Mom? I kept waiting for more info to drop and I’m still confused about their backstories.) As a bookseller myself, I did like everything set in the business of the bookstore — the satisfaction of having a customer love a recommendation; the pressures of lockdown but still filling online and curbside orders; watching the looting on the news and wondering if their store could remain untouched — but what started as an interesting story of a haunting and a cursed book really didn’t pan out for me; just, meh, despite the gestures at exploring indigenous identity in a way that seemed promising (even the bits about the rugaroo felt only hinted at and then abandoned.) It really felt like Erdrich pivoted to include the real-life trauma she was witnessing all around her (and who can blame her for that?) and her characters got tossed around by events instead of directing them; and I felt tossed around and confused right along with them (which might have been Erdrich’s intent, but it wasn’t satisfying for me.)
There was a sentence people were chanting all over the world now. I can’t breathe. I wanted to run out the door again.
Again, with a front row seat to some of the most traumatic events of recent history, I can’t blame Erdrich for including so much on George Floyd and how Minneapolis exploded in the aftermath of his murder. With a cast of indigenous characters, it is natural for them to react along with the African-American community as fellow marginalised peoples: from the original land thefts by white settlers to the more recent history of local Natives being taken down to the river by cops for “questioning”, beatings, and being left for dead, the indigenous and African-American communities are natural allies against bad cops, and this made for an interesting perspective. It made less sense for me to have had Tookie, upon her release from prison, marry the tribal police officer who had originally arrested her and have her only now, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, think of him as just another cop with questionable motives. For Tookie to be trying to deal with a ghost and a killing book (and a new grandchild and COVID and a confrontation with her own past) all at the same time, made little narrative sense to me: it might feel like real life, but it doesn’t feel like a novel (or maybe it felt like two different novels mashed together). I just couldn’t love this one.
As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you — assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you — that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.
When I finished David Sedaris’ latest volume of diary entries (A Carnival of Snackery), my biggest complaint was that it felt, overall, mean in spirit and in tone. And while the humour in Sedaris’ latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, can also cross the line from arch to snide, there’s something polished and refined in each essay — a narrative arc, space for comedic recalls, a thematic thread — that made it feel like there was a point to reading each, and I was entertained throughout. Further, as these essays were written during the last few years of his father’s life, Sedaris writes often here about their uncomfortable relationship, and where the author seems to have come to a place of peace about that relationship, I was touched. Proving himself, once again, to be a humorously caustic observer of modern life, Sedaris serves up everything here that I came hoping for. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As in Snackery, Sedaris likes to remind us here that he’s “made it” (mentioning in a couple of places that he has recently bought an original Picasso sketch, casually writing about all of the homes he owns [including recently buying the apartment upstairs from his in Manhattan’s Upper East Side so his boyfriend of thirty years, Hugh, can have privacy while practising the piano], referencing his obsessions with shopping, and high-end fashion, and first class hotels), but while the “diary” form of Snackery made Sedaris feel out of touch to me, the essays in this collection give him the room to show the human behind the outward appearances; the naked face behind the clown paint. Sedaris acknowledges that the pandemic was harder, in a lot of ways, for other people, but it was also devastating for someone like himself who craves travel and the attention of a live audience. It may be hard to feel sorry for a rich couple who lost their holiday home to a hurricane, but while Sedaris admits that there were others worse off — those who had no other home to go to — it was still a devastating loss to Hugh, whose diplomat father was forever moving his family one step ahead of the anarchy of failing states. And while living well might be the best revenge against a father who assured him his entire life that he was worthless and untalented, it’s hard to know how much (money, fame, stuff) would be enough to prove that point to one’s self. And so, along these themes (although Sedaris writes about much more than these themes in Happy-Go-Lucky), we find the ironic humour:
The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them. How unfair that we lost Terrence McNally but not the guy on the electric scooter who almost hit me while he was going the wrong way on Seventh Avenue one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2021. Just as I turned to curse him, he ran into a woman on a bicycle who had sped through a red light while looking down at her phone. Both of them tumbled onto the street, the sound of screeching brakes all around them, and I remembered, the way you might recall a joyful dream you’d once had, that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem, and life can actually be beautiful.
And the touching:
Through other people’s eyes, the two of us might not make sense, but that works in reverse as well. I have a number of friends who are in long-term relationships I can’t begin to figure out. But what do I know? What does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy? When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise? When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again? And you can forgive and forget again. On and on, hopefully. Then on and on and on.
And the relationship with his father:
My father’s last words to me, spoken in the too-hot, too-bright dining room at his assisted living facility three days before his ninety-eighth birthday, are “Don’t go yet. Don’t leave.”
My last words to him — and I think they are as telling as his, given all we’ve been through — are “We need to get to the beach before the grocery stores close.” They look cold on paper, and when he dies a few weeks later and I realize they are the last words I said to him, I will think, Maybe I can warm them up onstage when I read this part out loud. For, rather than thinking of his death, I will be thinking of the story of his death, so much so that after his funeral Amy will ask, “Did I see you taking notes during the service?”
The title phrase “happy-go-lucky” doesn’t appear in this collection (although there is an essay of that name along with “Lucky-Go-Happy”), and in conjunction with the creepy clown cover picture (laugh, clown, laugh!) and the often cataclysmic material (the pandemic, the hurricane, social and political unrest, abuse and death and gun violence), I can only conclude that it’s meant ironically: Sedaris acknowledges that he is lucky to not have been materially affected during our recent financially challenging times, but despite being a comic writer expected to find the funny in the chaos, that doesn’t mean he’s always been happy. And that’s fair and totally relatable. There’s a lot of humanity on display in this collection and I’m pleased to have been an early reader.
I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet.
I do love retellings of classic works that focus on the women sidelined in male-centric stories (see: Circe, Lavinia, The Silence of the Girls), and as the story of a queen barely mentioned in Shakespeare’s account, Learwife is a thoroughly satisfying companion piece to the play. As Lear’s banished queen learns of the death of her family and looks back over her life and marriage(s), author J. R. Thorp creates a credible and affecting tale that goes a long way toward explaining the scheming machinations of the daughters Goneril and Regan. Other than weirdly deciding to make frail old King Lear a man of fifty, I loved everything about this plot, and it must be noted that Thorp’s language is lush and poetic — but also a bit stilted and stuttering; this is not a smooth and easy read, but my pleasure wasn’t too too strained by the effort. I would happily read Thorp again.
Dead and dead and dead. Under the crack of this grief I feel myself slipping out into other forms: animal, vegetal, sea-spill foam, winter wind, a boar roaring blue in the dark. Then at least I would fit the tales: story-woman, death’s head, corrupting flesh at the touch. Oh, I know them, every ghost has good ears.
Fifteen years earlier, in the dead of night and without explanation, Lear’s queen was banished to a convent, taking along only what she could quickly pack and one dull-witted maidservant. When a messenger arrives at the Abbey to deliver the news that Lear and his daughters have all died, the queen appears for the first time among the common nuns, assuming she will finally be allowed to leave the grounds in order to attend her family’s funerals. When a pestilence arrives that puts the Abbey under quarantine, the queen accepts that she must stay where she is for now — but as she interacts with the women of the convent for the first time, and is asked to play a decisive role in their lives, she finds herself flooded with memories and visited by ghosts; highly Shakespearean stuff.
I don’t know if it was necessary to her backstory to have the queen married to another young king before Lear — a marriage barely consummated and childless — but I suppose it explains why she would be so worldly and cunning in courtly affairs; able to quickly fashion her twenty-year-old ruffian into a warrior king to be feared. I appreciated the backstory of her young childhood (with an icy mother who sent her to a convent to be raised) that made the queen aspire to be a more hands-on mother herself; and I appreciated even moreso how the queen’s well-intended interventions turned her daughters into nemeses.
Thorp's language is gorgeous; perhaps distractingly so. Lovely turns of phrase may be picked out on nearly every page, but I was always aware of the artistry (which is a complaint, even while enjoying it). In particular, I couldn’t help but notice how many things Thorp described as “green”: “green fingers of sky”, “green waves that baffled the breeze”, “irritable, that green womanish emotion”. In a climactic scene, over the course of one page, Thorp writes: “I appeal to Jesus on His statue above the altar, but His green mouth remains pale, unspeaking…the ghastly green fire that comes of burning wet things…we can hear them before we see them, screams in the green dark,” and it was undeniably distracting to me.
Pleasure. Queens live lives entirely made of pleasure, a girl said in my childhood convent. As if power were never discomfiting, as if luxury were always simple. And yet I had luck: it laid its pollen on my skull; I was a blessed woman. I had my children and none died in the cradle. I had two husbands and I lived past their span. I was imprisoned and frequently thwarted but still there is this, the golden cake, the beginning rain.
There is some tension in the plot (as we hope to learn why the queen had been banished and to see what she will do next), but this is primarily a narrative of memory; of putting the queen back into the known events of King Lear, and a mighty presence she was. I loved this.
Imagine its white underside against the white dust and ash and sand or whatever it is on the moon, looking identical, like a mirror image, and that dark topside looking like the moon from farther away, patterns like craters. Dark side of the moon, essentially. The halibut has been waiting for this meeting, waiting for millions of years, brought home, finally. Destiny. And then it hits both ends, hard, like wings, and the gravity is so much less. Even on Earth, they can launch a few feet above deck. But on the moon, this halibut flew.
I don’t know if the story behind Halibut on the Moon is general knowledge, but I knew it going in, and there are clues in the narrative itself, and as knowing it definitely affected my “enjoyment” level, I’m going to save all spoilers for my second paragraph; forewarned. This is my second David Vann novel (after the wildly transgressive Dirt), and it is so different from that previous read as to feel like it’s from a different author. Certainly well written and emotionally affecting, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the backstory, and despite appreciating what Vann was going for here, I simply couldn’t surrender myself to the experience. Rounding up to four stars because this is well written and because I’d feel like a jerk giving anything less.
The bare light bulb humming, another torture, moth wings fusing to its surface. Too many things. Rhoda, the IRS, his divorces, the sinus pain, his job, the empty new house, winter, this trip that has not made things better at all. He was making it through the weeks until this trip, a kind of finish line, but now he can see all the weeks waiting after it, and no change, no improvement. The doctor was supposed to help. And Rhoda, and his family, seeing his kids, getting away from winter and loneliness and insomnia and work, but it’s no easier here. He’s no closer to seeing a way through. How to stay alive long enough to where life becomes something wanted again.
Spoiler(ish) time: I knew going in that this is a novelisation of Vann’s father as he struggled with bipolar disorder and suicidal thoughts (and if one doesn’t know that beforehand, the main character refers to his son as David Vann). In the storyline, Jim has flown from his home in Fairbanks to visit with his family in California, all of whom know that Jim is struggling physically, mentally, and financially, and they’re all hoping to intervene in his dark plans. Vann does a wonderful job of capturing Jim’s mental struggles — of capturing the swings from mania to depression; of giving a voice to an intelligent, well-spoken man who honestly can’t think of a reason to keep living in unrelenting pain — but I was never unaware that this was an author trying to get into his own father’s head. When there was a scene that involved both Jim and young David, I’d be thinking, “Did he really see his dad running on all fours like a werewolf in the mud as he chased an old man complaining about them trespassing on his land?” When there was a scene with Jim and his brother Gary, or with their elderly parents, as Jim tried to suggest that his childhood set him up for self-loathing, I wondered, “Is this an actual encounter that was shared with the author?” When there are countless scenes of Jim trying to feel something real with porn or prostitutes, I had to wonder, again, if these were actual events shared with Vann or flights of imagination (and which is the more unsettling option?) I simply could not surrender to the story and my reading experience suffered for it. Forgive my morbid mind, but the most interesting thing to me was to discover how the author would choose to end his “novel”.
It hits both ends and knows flight, true flight, for the first time. Not restricted by the thickness of water. No resistance. Something no human has ever felt either, and no bird, to fly in an airless place, and without any suit. No barrier. Only the purest flight ever known, pure also because both its eyes are on the top side of its head. Any other fish would see the astronauts below, the lunar module, the surface of the moon, but not the halibut. It sees only emptiness above, undistracted, or maybe it sees Earth, a blue-and-white orb so far away, and knows the ocean is there, Alaskan waters, reaches for home, flops again against nothing to try to propel itself faster. What does a halibut think in that moment of flight? Until we know that, do we know anything?
Again, I appreciate what Vann intended and achieved with Halibut on the Moon, and I wish I could report that I liked it better (it really is a remarkable account of a damaged psyche) and I do look forward to reading Vann again.
Life was that lake, thought Lady Slane, sitting under the warm south wall amid the smell of peaches; a lake offering its even surface to many reflections, gilded by the sun, silvered by the moon, darkened by a cloud, roughened by a ripple; but level always, a plane, keeping its bounds, not to be rolled up into a tight, hard ball, small enough to be held in the hand, which was what people were trying to do when they asked if one’s life had been happy or unhappy.
Leonard Woolf — who was Vita Sackville-West’s publisher at Hogarth Press — called All Passion Spent her best novel, and it’s kind of hard to talk about this book without talking about the Woolfs. Sackville-West began writing this in 1930, while in a relationship with Virginia Woolf (a period considered the artistic peak of each of the women due to their positive influence on one another), and not only would Woolf base the main character of Orlando on the androgynous Sackville-West, but All Passion Spent has been called the fictionalisation of the ideas in Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own. To that end: All Passion Spent is about an eighty-eight-year old woman, newly widowed, who, after seventy years of supporting her husband’s illustrious career and domestic happiness (at the sacrifice of her own artistic ambitions), decides, to her children’s horror, to retire to some rooms of her own and live out her days as she pleases. This novel is philosophically sophisticated as the Lady Slane considers her life and its meaning and it is gently humorous as the underestimated old woman takes her pompous children down a peg or two. Not a long read, there’s a lot to this and I found it all delightful.
Of course, she would not question the wisdom of any arrangements they might choose to make. Mother had no will of her own; all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive — an appendage. It was assumed that she had not enough brain to be self-assertive. “Thank goodness,” Herbert sometimes remarked, “Mother is not one of those clever women.”
After the death of their eminent father (onetime Viceroy of India, British Prime Minister, peer of the realm), the six Holland children — “old, black ravens”, not one below sixty — gathered to decide what to do about Mother. After determining that they would sell the family home and use the proceeds to offset the costs of shifting her around between them, they were flabbergasted to discover that Mother had her own ideas, and indeed, had already set in motion a plan to go see a man about a small house in Hampstead she had admired thirty or so years earlier. Moving there with just the French maid (only two years younger than Her Ladyship) who had served her throughout her marriage, and with instructions for the children to not visit too often (and for her exhausting grand- and great-grandchildren not to visit at all), Lady Slane settles into a life of contented contemplation. She makes a couple of unlikely new friends (her landlord and an eccentric associate of her son’s who had known the Vicereine in India), and the walks that they take around Hampstead Heath — the setting for all their best conversations — apparently echo the frequent walks that Vita and Virginia took upon those same pathways as they discussed the ideas that would become their most famous works.
Sackville-West insisted that she was not a feminist (stressing that women’s rights were human rights and universal human rights were what interested her), and in this novel that is more about ideas than plot, she gives her characters some very interesting conversations about privilege and duty and being true to oneself:
“You really mustn't talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of — nothing.”
“Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of life, and life becomes existence — a makeshift. Face it, Lady Slane. Your children, your husband, your splendour, were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. They were what you chose to substitute for your real vocation. You were too young, I suppose, to know any better, but when you chose that life you sinned against the light.”
For her own part, Sackville-West refused to sin against the light: Entered into an open marriage (that allowed her and her husband to pursue same-sex relationships as they pleased), Vita refused to play the role of smiling hostess in support of her husband’s diplomatic and political careers; insisting on an independent life of her own to pursue her writing and gardening and love affairs. Although she does not judge Lady Slane too harshly here for the conventional roles that she assumed, All Passion Spent ends on the hopeful note of a great-granddaughter who decides to break her engagement, and future hopes of becoming a duchess, in order to pursue her own artistic ambitions. This was a charming and thoughtful novel and I end by acknowledgeing the debt I owe to the Vitas and Virginias who committed to paper an alternative vision of feminine passions and potentiality.
This is what Sarah had always wanted: something — anything — to disturb the quiet, to distract her from the sounds of Mr. Hill’s revolving mastication, and the prospect of another spiritless evening, and the monotony of her own voice reading three-decker novels and three-day-old news. But now change had come to Longbourn, and Polly was staring at it as if she were a simpleton, and Mrs. Hill kept topping up its glass, and even Mr. Hill was smiling and glancing at it and then shyly away, and Sarah was left heartsunk and ignored, and wishing that this change, with its dark hair and hazel eyes, and its skin the colour of tea, had never come to Longbourn at all.
I purchased Longbourn and Pride and Prejudice at the same time, planning from the start to read the one after the other to see how well they chimed together. (I had had a really positive experience with author Jo Baker before, immensely enjoying A Country Road, A Tree in concert with Waiting for Godot.) But as much as I was interested in this premise — revisiting the events of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennets’ servants — it really didn’t pay off for me: I don’t think that Baker was true to Austen’s characters, there was entirely too much bosom-heaving romance and melodrama, and any social commentary jarred as anachronistic. I would give this two and a half stars and am only rounding up because Baker does write nice sentences.
Sarah landed hard on the stone flags. Her nose confirmed what she had already guessed: she had slipped in hogshit. The sow had got out yesterday, and all her piglets skittering after her, and nobody had cleared up after them yet; nobody had the time. Each day’s work trickled over into the next, and nothing was ever finished, so you could never say, Look, that’s it, the day’s labour is over and done. Work just lingered and festered and lay in wait, to make you slip up in the morning.
With a narrative centering primarily on the young housemaid, Sarah, there is no end to the work this small staff must suffer in order to support the family of seven living upstairs. It was semi-interesting (“semi” because it was not more than I could have imagined) to see how much behind-the-scenes work went into the meals and clothing and errands as described by Austen — as Baker writes in an Author’s Note at the end, “When the Bennet girls enter a ball in Austen’s novel, they leave the carriage waiting in this one” — and based on one small detail from P & P (a footman, only mentioned once, who delivers a note to Jane), Baker chooses to show a handsome young man joining the staff belowstairs and shaking things up. Not only does the appearance of James Smith set up a will-they-won’t-they romance between James and Sarah, but his presence reveals a (predictable and not very satisfying) domestic twist, and allows Baker to write gritty flashback scenes for his time as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. All very dramatic and little to do with Austen’s novel.
As for Baker’s treatment of Austen’s characters: I truly did not recognise them here. Mr. Collins is not a terrible blowhard and he disappears into happiness with his new wife, Charlotte, despite the housekeeper’s best efforts to get him to notice the heartbroken, red-eyed Mary. Mrs. Bennet is doped up for her nerves, and Mr. Bennet not only doesn’t get any snappy lines, but he’s frail and old before his time, only consoled by the housekeeper’s gentle hand. Mr. Bingley is given a Black footman so that Baker can explain the “triangular trade” to us (in her version, the Bingley wealth comes from sugar: the elder Bingley trading British iron goods for African slaves who were then sent to his Caribbean plantations, where sugar was collected to bring back to England; this footman, Ptolemy, being a freed slave brought to England in the Bingley employ), and it would, apparently, not have been scandalous for Sarah to have married Ptolemy if she couldn’t have James. There’s a marriage of convenience between a sexually active gay man and a heavy-hearted woman; Wickham has creepy intentions towards an underage maid (which is echoed in the flashbacks by James’ Sergeant trading crusts of bread for sex with starving young maidens in wartorn Spain; perhaps that was just the way it was with gentlemen soldiers); Jane and Elizabeth are said to be lovely young women but neither is capable of regarding or treating Sarah as an actual human being. This probably would have worked better for me if it had been just some random servants’ stories, but it was still a whole lotta drama.
Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.
In the end, I didn’t buy the freedom that the servants appeared to have to change their lives — Sarah chose to tramp off into unknowable danger to chase a rumour of James rather than stay at the cushiest job she’s ever had or throw her lot in with Ptolemy; Mrs. Hill can sit with Mr. Bennet in his library as he drinks wine and eats cake and not think she would have liked life better as Mrs. Bennet; could an orphan housemaid like Polly actually train to become a teacher, and be encouraged in it, while working dawn til midnight? — they seemed to have believed more in social mobility and the insignificance of class distinctions than feels true to the period. Ultimately, I didn’t really find Longbourn to be credible or to chime much with Pride and Prejudice; Baker does write lovely sentences though.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
I read some Jane Austen novels (and a selection of other “classics”) when I was teenager (for my self-improvement, if not my ultimate enjoyment), and they’re mostly all swirled together in my memory as fine, romantic, stodgy reads. Pride and Prejudice has the distinction of being so present in pop culture that I didn’t really need to reread this book to know what it was about, but it turns out that I did need to reread this from my current vantage (of maturity, life experience, and exposure to “difficult” writing and history) in order to really know what it is about. Austen revolutionised the English novel — in particular through her “innovative use of free indirect discourse as a style of third-person narrative”; I may not be able to define that, but I felt and appreciated the intimacy and realism Austen’s writing provides — and what she captures here of gentlewomen’s confined reality during Regency England was entirely satisfying to my literary and sociological interests. And it made me laugh, repeatedly. Of course this isn’t a universal story of the average person (whose miserable existence would be taken up by Dickens fifty years later), but Austen was writing of her own class, writing what she knew, and golden restraints are still restraints when used by the patriarchy to control women’s speech, movement, and lives. I feel no need to go over the plot of this OG enemies-to-lovers tale that everyone knows, but I am going to use this space to record what struck me personally this time through — who knows? Maybe I’ll reread this again in thirty or forty years and want something to compare my then thoughts with — and will note that five stars represent what I think of Pride and Prejudice as an artefact and not my absolute pleasure with this reading experience.
Mr Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.
Mrs Bennet might have been a gossipy, uncouth, ninnywitted hypochondriac, but her concerns were genuine: With five daughters (aged from about fifteen to twenty-two at the outset?), and a husband whose estate was entailed to a distant cousin — meaning that when Mr Bennet died, his wife and family would be left homeless and with small incomes as he had produced no male heir — Mrs Bennet was desperate to see her daughters married; and ideally, at least one of them married to a man with a fortune large enough to take care of them all. This wasn’t far off of Austen’s own circumstances: When her father (a poor but respected rector from a good family line) died, Jane, her unmarried sister, Cassandra, and their mother became dependent on Jane’s brothers’ support, eventually settling into a cottage together on one brother’s estate. With no respectable means for women of the genteel class to support themselves — even Austen’s novels were published anonymously, as writing and seeking to publish were seen as unseemly and unfeminine — of course Mrs Bennet was obsessively looking for matches for her daughters (Mr Bennet, with his ironic detachment and desire to do no more than read in his library every day without distractions from domestic matters, was by far the more negligent parent).
I found it intriguing that Austen explores this situation primarily from the POV of Elizabeth Bennet: the strong-willed second-oldest daughter who eventually refuses not one but two offers of marriage from suitors who could have solved everyone’s problems if only she would have them. It was unsurprising that this character would refuse the odious and obsequious Mr Collins — the cousin who was to inherit Longbourn upon Mr Bennet’s death — even if it’s hard to imagine that an actual young woman in her position would have had the freedom to deny him:
My situation in life, my connections with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take it into further consideration, that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.
(And I do appreciate that Austen has a twenty-seven-year old friend of the family accept this proposal: Lizzie might believe that she can hold out for a love match, but most young women would have felt more pragmatic as their “marriageable years” waned and their prospects dimmed.) To the crux of the title (which Austen apparently borrowed from a passage in Fanny Burney's Cecilia upon the advice of her publisher): Elizabeth and Darcy are each prideful in their own ways (as Lizzie’s sister, Mary, explains, “Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”), and while each have high opinions of their own worth, they each form bad first impressions of the other (she thinks him cold and prideful, he thinks her plain and common; incidentally, “First Impressions” was the original title for this book), and this initial “prejudice” will colour what each thinks of the other, even until the moment that Darcy finds himself proposing to the young woman whom he continues to think of as beneath him:
Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement; and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed; and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority — of its being a degradation — of the family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
I enjoyed the verbal sparring and the arch humour between Elizabeth and Darcy, and I also enjoyed the fun that was made of the most self-satisfied characters — Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet, for sure, but also Lady Catherine (who in her worst excesses was only protecting the rights of her own daughter, sickly as she was, to marry well.) I was intrigued by the amount that was left unsaid between people because propriety forbade it (Does she actually care for me? Would he actually propose to me if he knew my heart?), and it was suitably frustrating to see how people’s impressions of one another (their prejudices) were formed because good manners prevented frankness. Perhaps it was unrealistic, after all, for Austen to pair off the poor-but-deserving Bennet sisters with the two most eligible bachelors to ever breeze through Meryton, but at least they were, ultimately, love matches. (Jane Austen herself never married, and like Elizabeth, turned down a proposal that would have been most advantageous had the suitor not been, according to her first biographer, “a man very hard to like, let alone love”.) I did appreciate that, as aloof as Mr Bennet was from the family, when it came to his favourite, Elizabeth, he hoped Darcy would prove to be a better match than he had found within his own marriage, saying, “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about.” Easy for a man to say, especially when his “unrespectable” partner is left with all the legwork of getting their daughters settled:
Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.
Again, I did very much appreciate this time around what I learned of the times that Austen was writing in — fast on the heels of the French and American Revolutions, the “natural rights of man” never did include women, and the landed gentry in England must have seen the end coming for their own way of living — and Pride and Prejudice not only explores those times, intriguingly, from a female POV, but it does so with immense entertainment value. I loved the whole thing and ought to dust off more of the Austen that has long resided on my shelves, waiting for a reread and rethink.
* I acknowledge that this is a very uninteresting cover for this book, but it is from the edition that I read.
