a gallimaufry

Of mice and enthusiasms

(Beatrix Potter, ‘Presently there was a little scuffling, scratching noise in a corner near the fire-place’, from A Tale of Two Bad Mice, 1904; available here)

The guests chez gallimaufry now include a bold black mouse, who emerged from a heap of paper in the corner of the cupboard-like room I pretentiously refer to as a study to dance about our house all last evening. I thought mice were supposed to be shy! This one has no qualms and even scampered across the bed while my daughter (E) and I were playing on it. Despite the mouse’s compulsive exhibitionism, my partner did not spot it for ages – little E did keep shouting ‘Rat! Rat!’* but as she sees imaginary peacocks and dogs running about the house all the time K paid no attention to this. At last the mouse went too far and sat in front of the television while K was watching it. I would quite happily share the house with a mouse or two, yes yes, I know I am a slattern, mice steal your cake and poo on your rugs and Beatrix Potter has much to answer for, but I can’t help thinking it’s all about context. If we caught the mouse and put it in a cage it would be a pet and acceptable (except to my mother), if probably unhappy. Yet wild and free it is a pest. For now, K and I have compromised on a humane trap and mouse rehoming a cycle ride away.

Samuel Beckett made a film! Perhaps you knew that? I didn’t. It’s called Film. You can watch it at Brain Pickings. (Via Lauren Elkin.) It’s ... Becketty, and fascinating.

‘I’m [...] intrigued by the thought of new ways to write about books, and I wonder what the book blogging world will come up with next?’ Thoughtful post and discussion at Tales from the Reading Room on why we post and read book reviews (or not). Join in!

Further to my previous post, Elio Di Rupo is back! And yesterday, after Standard and Poor reduced Belgium’s credit rating and the rate of interest on the country’s borrowing rose further, the acting prime minister Yves Leterme demanded that Di Rupo and the parties involved produce a 2012 budget before markets re-open on Monday. They pulled an all-nighter and have done so! Whether this will improve Belgium’s interest rate, and what the long-term impact on the euro may be, remain to be seen. Next step: a government.

‘Doubt is very much a feature of my working day, and an essential one at that’: the translator Margaret Jull Costa talks about her work, language and reading at The White Review.

A combination of beautiful cover and the review at Desperate Reader engendered book lust in me – so I bought a copy of Enthusiasms for my mother for Christmas and am now shamelessly – if carefully so as not to mark it – reading it myself. I’m altruistic like that. Has anyone else ever done this? Enthusiasms is a most enjoyable read; it’s a series of essays on literary subjects that intrigued Girouard when he was having time off from being a brilliant architectural historian (his work is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the English country house). The essays are usually inspired by a need to correct an inaccuracy or a false myth. So far, I have discovered that Jane Austen failed to finish a novel called Catherine which may lay claim to being her first ‘properly Austenish’ work; that there was an anonymous Victorian author named ‘Walter’ who kindly chronicled his sexual exploits with over a thousand women; and that John Masefield, whose most famous poems are the romantic ‘Cargoes’ and ‘Sea Fever’,  hated the sea. Like being told wonderful anecdotes by a very clever and entertaining uncle, reading this is the thing for an idle November afternoon.

* We have rats in our ceiling but probably best not to dwell on that.

The land with no government

As yesterday’s reader so perspicaciously noted, a gallimaufry has wandered from its original path of variety and now is dallying in the groves of book reviews and ignoring the rest of the world. In fact, you might not even know that I live in Belgium, so deracinated is this web-log, let alone that Belgium has been in the grip of a constitutional crisis since well before I began writing. The ‘living in belgium’ category is woefully underused.

So. Assuming you aren’t overly familiar with Belgium, here is a very crude summary of the situation (and if any Belgian reads this, please forgive all my mistakes and point them out in the comments). Belgium has three official communities – the Flemish-speaking Flemings in the north, the French-speaking Walloons* in the south and the Germans, who occupy a small area on the German border. Historically the Walloons have been dominant, with the Flemings having to fight to have their language recognised as the equal of French. This has contributed to a tension between the two larger communities, exacerbated by increasing calls (by politicians, rather than the populace it seems) for separation into two nations.

(Sprouts, perhaps contemplating seizing power while the country suffers a power vacuum)

After the last election, the successful parties tried to form a coalition. But nobody could make an alliance big enough to create a government. Parties in Belgium are fragmented along linguistic lines – for example, there’s a Flemish Christian Democrat Party and a Walloon Flemish Christian Democrat party – so assembling a coalition is particularly complicated. Worse, there were Strong Feelings about two particular issues: the long-standing Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde problem and the election of Francophone mayors in three designated Flemish-speaking districts of Brussels.

At present, the nation has been without a government for nearly eighteen months (a world record!). (Strictly speaking, there is an acting government but it is limited in what it may do.) Still, the future was looking rosy as, under the auspices of the chief negotiator, Elio Di Rupo, nine parties had been in talks and both the problems alluded to above had been settled. Hurrah! (Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde has been a bone of contention for forty-eight years!) But then disaster: on Monday Di Rupo handed his resignation in to the king when discussions over economic reform reached a deadlock. Almost immediately, the rate of interest at which the country borrows shot up – dreadful timing since Belgium plans to raise more funds this coming Monday. We have the largest European debt after Spain; previously, nobody was overly bothered since the economy hasn’t been doing too badly, but suddenly financial markets and the rest of the Eurozone are eyeing Belgium in a less friendly way. The situation hasn’t been helped by rumours (denied by all) that Belgium wants to re-negotiate with France the deal they struck over bailing out the failed bank Dexia.

The king, poor man, convalescing after surgery, has not actually accepted Di Rupo’s resignation but is calling in the leaders of the nine parties one by one and, seemingly, administering a good telling-off to each. I think we all hope that Di Rupo is grandstanding in order to force an agreement, and who can blame him, he must have the patience of a saint.

What this all means for us, the ordinary people, is unclear. Events this week have at least galvanised our interest, I suspect most of us were pretty bored and irritated by the inability of our political leaders to organise themselves into government. Interestingly, Belgian impatience with the institution of Europe seems to be rising, not least because we’ll be slapped with a fine of 700 million euros, which we can ill afford, should the country fail to draw up a budget for 2012 which meets the EU’s approval by 15th December (nobody has even started this). With all the pressure the Belgian situation is putting on other European countries, it is just possible that what happens here in the next few weeks will have repercussions for many outside our borders.

Anyone still reading this? Next post: Wuthering Heights: normal book-obsessed service resuming.

(Photograph of Elio Di Rupo from here, (c) Belga; photograph of King Albert II from here)

* A small and childish part of me is still disappointed that my partner is not a ‘Walloon’, such a lovely word! Although ‘Fleming’ is pretty good too, I add quickly.

Chicken in the mist

A reader writes:

Dear gallimaufry-person, I wish to complain that your web-log is not much of a gallimaufry at all, it’s just all tedious droning on about books you’ve read. You haven’t written a word about your lovely hens in ages. This web-log would be much better if they were in it more often.

Well, dear reader, by a wild coincidence I was about to write a post about those very ladies. Yesterday morning, when fog hung over the whole of Europe, Merle and Anita received an unexpected visitor.

She came in via our neighbours’ compost heap, an unorthodox method of entry.

Since her hosts were unforthcoming with the tea tray, she looked around to see what food was available to the hungry guest.

Then she peered into their little house. This upset Merle, who wanted to lay an egg but was now too unsettled to do so. Anita remained impassive.

The visiting hen concluded that life was better at home, where she has three small fields to roam in and a pack of sisters who provide a superior quality of conversation – not to mention a handsome cockerel with whom to flirt. So she took herself off the way she had come.

Merle laid her egg.

On rereading Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

‘I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. I wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass-grown enclosure within: here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped u in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms – however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me: at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap: you turned an angle of the road: I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke.’

It’s a long time since I first read Jane Eyre, I must have been about fourteen or so, and while I remember enjoying it my impression of it has since been overlaid by the Orson Welles film – a lovely film but I do not think it represents the novel very well at all. Things which surprised me on this rereading: how flawed all the characters are and how much more it is than the relationship between Jane and Rochester. Also (perhaps in reaction to The Golden Bowl) how extraordinarily light and rich the prose is, how quick the pace.

Since I am thinking about fairy tales a lot at present I was particularly struck by the fairy-tale elements in the novel. Amateur Reader points out that narrator-Jane herself refers to the passage to Bertha’s room, ‘with its two rows of black doors all shut, [is] like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’, and although the murderous monster is the wife rather than the husband, certainly the forbidden chamber keeps his terrible secret (and Bertha ultimately throws herself off the battlements to elude Rochester’s outstretched hands, so perhaps he is not entirely innocent of her death in some sense). However, like Hayley at Desperate Reader I think the echoes of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ are strong too, with Jane as the dependant in the household of the brooding, moody Rochester, at the end of the novel returning to him and bringing him back to life. The decaying old house in the forest is also reminiscent of the Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted palace surrounded by briars. In his conversations with Jane, Rochester allows his imagination to play freely with the idea that she is an elf, a fairy, and Mrs Reed would probably agree with him that she is some sort of changeling. Mrs Reed herself is a wicked stepmother, Brocklehurst a wolf (‘What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large, prominent teeth!’) and Blanche a wicked stepsister who is vanquished by Cinderella-Jane. Jane is also an intrepid heroine who, upon learning her partner’s true nature, must undertake a quest to restore him, in the vein of stories like ‘East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon’. The novel ends with a marriage, as all good fairytales should.

These fairytale elements are overlaid with folk lore and the supernatural – narrator-Jane refers to the ghostly hound the Gytrash when she first sees Pilot gliding through the hazel in the moonlight, and to will-o’the-wisps; her dreams of Thornfield in ruins are prophetic – which all somehow make more plausible the terrors of the Red Room, the madwoman haunting the attics and creeping down to stare at Jane in her bed, Rochester’s remorseful cry which Jane hears far away with St John.

(Fritz Eichenberg, ‘A long grace was said an a hymn sung’, illustration for 1943 Random House edition, filched from Jane Eyre Illustrated which is a fascinating site)

Did I say that the novel ends with a marriage? That’s not quite true, is it? The novel ends with St John and his imminent demise. It is the fourth death in the novel (and yes, I cried when I read Helen Burns’s), and each death invites a consideration of the life which preceded it. Jane’s constant struggle is to live a ‘good’ life, to be true to herself, while yet being virtuous – not necessarily religious. Indeed, once out of Lowood she doesn’t seem to be much of a churchgoer. During the novel Jane comes into contact with different forms of Protestantism – Eliza Reed’s, Helen Burns’s, Brocklehurst’s and St John River’s. Brocklehurst, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, is easily dismissed as a hypocrite who starves and bullies children and causes their deaths. Eliza is also hypocritical as her religious ways do not blunt her spite; her obsession with the rubric and decision to retire to a convent reveal her to be a woman interested only in her own salvation and unprepared to work in the world for the good of others. St John, unlike Eliza, is an active Christian whose purpose in life is to save souls and this draws Jane’s admiration (also, he saved her life!), but he is like Eliza too for he is without love (see 1 Corinthians 13). Helen teaches Jane a great deal, not least to survive the horrors of Lowood. It’s very clear that while her philosophy is self-abnegating, it is an entirely justifiable way for a dying child to make sense of her brutally short and powerless life. I wish I knew more about nineteenth-century Christianity because I am sure there is a lot more to all this than these simplistic sketches suggest.

(Helen Sewell, ‘In sleep forgot sorrow’, illustration for 1938 Oxford University Press edition, also from Jane Eyre Illustrated)

Religion isn’t necessarily in opposition to fairytale, although organised religion seems to stifle the imaginative life the fairytale may represent. I think the two work together. Jane is a sort of pilgrim, but also a missionary who ‘saves’ Rochester. While he witters on about elves, she is often grooming his morals. Perhaps this missionary quality is what in her is sympathetic to St John (it’s true that he’s not a likeable character but narrator-Jane is at pains to emphasise that he has the qualities of a hero). At the end of the book both of them have succeeded.

Rats. This was supposed to be a short post written as a break from revising for my Flemish-language exams.

(The first illustration is by Dame Darcy for this illustrated Penguin edition)