a gallimaufry

on Beatrix Potter and Brer Rabbit

Perhaps you missed the slight kerfuffle about Beatrix Potter recently? I certainly did; it wasn’t until I was chatting on the phone on Sunday with M that it came to my attention. M had read about it in The Times; Beatrix Potter was being accused of cultural appropriation by some crazed academic because Peter Rabbit was a talking rabbit like Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit stories were originally told by enslaved Africans. We both thought this seemed a bit silly.

Curious, I found the article in The Conversation by Dr Emily Zobel Marshall. It is a really interesting article! I am so glad to have read it. If you are a Potter fan, I urge you to do the same. And if you are a fan of Enid Blyton, for once she comes out of it well!

(Beatrix Potter, illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published by Frederick Warne, London, 1902; found here)

Zobel Marshall makes a compelling case that Potter knew and loved the Brer Rabbit stories of ‘Uncle Remus’ and drew on them for the plots of some of her stories as well as some of the language. Fearful of plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism, Potter herself never publicly acknowledged the link; since then very few academics have acknowledged the link either.

Finally, Zobel Marshall sites this refusal to discuss Potter’s use of Brer Rabbit as part of a wider appropriation of Black culture, in which Black culture is used by predominantly white culture and not acknowledged.

I mean, can any of this actually be disputed? The article is measured and well argued. I do disagree with her claim that the plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, of the trickster stealing food, being the ‘plot [that] is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales’. The plots of most of her books are quite different. Still, I was curious about M’s interpretation of the article, based as it must have been on what they read in The Times. And a cursory Google brought up a list of furious headlines in the right-wing press.

I couldn’t read The Times article because it is behind a paywall. I think it must be this one. I note the use of the word ‘stole’; not a word that Zobel Marshall used once in her article, as far as I could see. However, inflammatory headlines in the Daily Express (‘Beatrix Potter Accused of ‘Copying’ African Slaves’ Stories for Peter Rabbit) and the so-called news site GB News (‘Now Peter Rabbit is Under Threat by Woke Mob as Beatrix Potter Attacked’) were followed by reasonable summaries of Zobel Marshall’s article so perhaps the Times article is also better balanced.

Not so Libby Purves’s reaction in the Daily Mail: ‘Academic Accusing Beatrix Potter of Stealing Peter Rabbit Needs a Lie Down.’ To be honest, I never have high hopes of the Mail and this is an opinion piece, but I do respect Purves and was therefore very disappointed by what I read. Purves admits that what Zobel Marshall writes is ‘fairly convincing’ but the problem is her tone: ‘her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, I suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt’. Purves then goes on to explain that cultures have always borrowed from and influenced each other, which is not Zobel Marshall’s point, and to complain about the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

(A.B. Frost, illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, by Joel Chandler Harris, published by D. Appleton and Co., 1911; found here)

Purves uses Zobel Marshall’s article to make a wider point, and I intend to do the same with hers. I find her reaction absolutely typical of those people who lose their wigs when the National Trust dares to include information in their properties that a family enriched itself through slavery or who immediately tell you, when the topic of slavery comes up, that Black Africans profited from slave trading too. Why are they so frightened about accepting historical fact? Why can’t we say that some British families profited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade? Why are we only supposed to feel pride in our past and not shame as well? Why can’t we acknowledge it if we draw on another cultural tradition for our own creative work?

Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated wonderful books that we still enjoy today, and she drew on the stories of Brer Rabbit to do so. See – it’s not difficult to make a start, is it?

A Day to Remember to Forget, by Rosalind Brackenbury

It’s the late 1960s and Phil and Lucy have just decided to get married; they are still students but have fallen in love with an old farmhouse they intend to buy even if it’s not entirely clear how they’ll pay for it (‘when the loot runs out, I’ll sell books and vegetables,’ says Phil airily). They are on their way to Phil’s childhood home in suburbia, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday. This novel centres on that birthday and on the relationships between the members of Phil’s family, the Ridgelys. It explores the tensions between generations, the frustrations of love and the power of domesticity. By soaking the reader in the thoughts of Lucy, Phil, Phil’s mother Felicity, and Mrs Fletcher, the Ridgelys’ elderly neighbour, Rosalind Brackenbury weaves a striking and acute novel that has stayed with me. Unlike a lot of ‘stream-of-consciousness-type’ novels, it has a physicality, an earthiness to it. The characters are so deeply and solidly imagined that it’s impossible not to believe in them and I catch myself wondering what happened to them all, where is Lucy now aged almost seventy?

(Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Felicity Ridgely is the very definition of house-proud. Her home is spotlessly clean, she works ceaselessly to ensure that her kitchen is ordered and her linen ironed. Why this is so important, she no longer knows. She spends most of her birthday cooking, preparing and clearing up meals for the rest of the family: breakfast, a roast lunch, afternoon tea, supper. Her husband, George, and her sons try to lure her away, to have a drink, to rest, but she refuses. She takes no pleasure in all this housework – in fact, she deeply resents it and plays the martyr constantly. But if it were to be taken away from her, her life would be empty. She has nothing else.

She and George are conventional in their attitudes – pathologically so, in Phil’s eyes. They mistrust Mrs Fletcher, who lives next door in a dark, decaying house: her husband was a conscientious objector and died unhappily. They cannot express their love for their sons. Felicity feels her blunders painfully, but cannot pull herself out of the pattern that elicits them. But their worst crime, according to Phil, is their dishonesty. They lie about the past and Phil’s childhood.

Andrew, Phil’s elder brother, is kinder to them:

‘I see they had to invent it all,’ Andrew said, ‘because they’re so bloody miserable now. Because they can’t stand not having had a happy past to gloat over, so they invent one, they allow themselves to see it all different because otherwise life would be intolerable. [...] So don’t take it away from them. Because it’s cruel, and unnecessary. [...] Shit, they didn’t even have a chance to find out who they were and where they lived before they were slap-bang in the middle of a bloody war, shooting hell out of a bunch of other kids on the other side of Europe. They didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t say, me first, and this is what I want, and I want to live in a big house in the country and nobody bugging me please.’

Andrew has followed the path laid out by his parents – university, job, marriage, child – but he has adapted it to suit himself and sublimated his resentment. Phil, however, wants none of it, rejects ‘all the rubbish’ of this sort of life, ‘nothing natural or living or real’. Rejection is the only way he believes he can survive.

Phil said, ‘But how can one have a choice, really? Everything’s there before you’re born. All the things other generations have done, in their turn, I suppose, without a choice. And they go on after one’s dead. You can’t change anything. You can only decide not to accept it. You just have to go and do your own thing, as they say, and let the rest get stuffed, if they want to. It’s too late. One doesn’t have time.’
‘Just one life,’ Mrs Fletcher said, not answering him, her eyes blurred now with fatigue. ‘Just a few years. You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

Yet of course it’s a qualified rejection, because the life he envisages is, like Andrew’s, ultimately only a different version of the same thing. It’s property ownership, marriage and children, just with long hair and cigarettes and swearing. When he and Lucy visit Mrs Fletcher for a glass of sherry, they describe their dreams with great enthusiasm:

‘But a house,’ Lucy plunged in, her thin hands in the air, gesturing around a shape. ‘A house can mean more than just walls, more than just a place. You know? One makes something, expresses something. And sometimes, one just finds the perfect thing, the perfect place, something that’s been sort of waiting for one.’
‘And if one falls in love,’ said Mrs Fletcher, ‘one must act.’
‘Yes! That’s just what happened! It was as if it had been left there for us, just at the right moment. That’s why we have to have it, at whatever risk. Because I do think, don’t you...’ her hands moved again, swiftly, ‘that if one is offered something great one is offered a risk too; and if you can accept the risk, you get the greatness. Oh, dear, I am explaining it badly. But no, this is what happens, if you fall in love with a person, isn’t it? You risk your whole self, you give yourself away – oh, completely – and it’s the most awful risk, but if the person accepts you, then you have the greatness too, oh, and everything.’

Mrs Fletcher, who once also defied convention for the love of a man named Phil, is gently sceptical. And underneath, Lucy is a little sceptical too. Does she really want to marry Phil? (She’s only nineteen.) She imagines the perfect life, but will the house provide that, or will it prove a trap like the one that has caught Felicity? Will her marriage be a union of equals, or will she end up afraid of Phil? At the end of the novel she and Phil drive out at dusk to see the house, and it is surrounded by little fires as the farmers burn the stubble: a potent and ambiguous image.

Lucy and Phil’s dream is essentially static. They will achieve the perfect house, the perfect state. What will happen after they are perfectly married and living in the perfect house? They don’t seem to know, other than that it will be wonderful. Yet, Brackenbury’s novel warns, do not expect romantic love to endure, do not stake all your happiness on it. Do not assume that loving your children will be enough, because you will easily warp and damage that love. ‘You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

The edition of A Day to Remember to Forget which I read is a new one published by Michael Walmer (and sent to me to review months ago – I am really sorry Mike to have taken so long). It has an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble, which places it in its context (1971) and discusses its novelty and even shockingness. But it’s worth reading not just as a historical document of a particular socio-cultural shift in British society, between the Boomers and their parents, but because it is a really good novel and a painfully honest description of the limits of family love. In the end, we are all alone.

(Carel Weight, The Silence, 1965; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

brian wildsmith

One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.

(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)

(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)

(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)

If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.

Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.

(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)

Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:

‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’

Mabel responded magnificently:

‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)

But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.

(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)

In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.

Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:

‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’

I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:

(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)

(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)

(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)

Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:

(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)

(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)

His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.

As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.

(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)

In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:

‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’

(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)

EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!

A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day, by John Donne

(Aert van der Neer, Landscape with a mill in the moonlight, oil on canvas; found here)

’Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
         The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
         Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
                The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th’ hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their Epitaph.

 

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
         For I am every dead thing,
         In whom Love wrought new Alchimie.
                For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse;
He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

 

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soule, forme, spirit, whence they beeing have;
         I, by loves limbecke, am the grave
         Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
                Have wee two wept, and so
Drownd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two Chaosses, when we did show
Care to ought else; and often absences
Withdrew our soules, and made us carcasses.

 

But I am by her death, (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing, the Elixer grown;
         Were I a man, that I were one,
         I needs must know; I should preferre,
                If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; Yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

 

But I am None; nor will my Sunne renew.
You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sunne
         At this time to the Goat is runne
         To fetch new lust, and give it you,
                Enjoy your summer all;
Since shee enjoys her long nights festivall,
Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

(From Donne: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson, OUP 1929)

(Ferdinand Keller, Böcklin’s Tomb, 1901–1902; oil on canvas; found here)

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (3)

Civilisations have risen and fallen since I started rereading The Portrait of a Lady, but I am now on the home straight. (Meanwhile, I haven’t read my February What Shall Helen Read? book, Small Island, but I shall as soon as I finish this.) Now that Marie Kondo and I have parted ways (more on this soon!) I have a little more time for Henry James and I thought I’d pause and think about this next part that I’ve read.

(John Singer Sargent, Villa di Marlia, Lucca, 1910; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; found here)

We have skipped forward three years, and Isabel is now unhappily married to Gilbert Osmond who has turned out to be a prize git who really wanted a wife he could shape to reflect his own ideas – a bigger version of the tiny Pansy, I suppose, who is devoted to her papa and does everything she can to please him. Isabel feels that Osmond does have a reason to feel aggrieved, because she was so eager to impress him during their courtship she perhaps made it seem that she was less independent and energetic than she really was. In a way she feels aggrieved with him too, but acknowledges that no one compelled her to marry him: she chose of her own free will. She feels that part of her choice was wanting to bestow her money on her husband, whom she believed a fit recipient. Without her fortune, would she have married him? It seems unlikely that he would have married her.

Considering how disastrously her own marriage has turned out, Isabel’s decision to interfere in Pansy’s future merely to curry favour with Osmond shocked me. She justifies this to herself by remarking that Pansy is docile and obedient, as if these qualities mean that she has no views or feelings of her own. In another novel perhaps the doll-like Pansy would turn out to be a psychopathic killer, but I don’t recall The Portrait of a Lady ending in a bloodbath. Isabel wishes to deny Pansy the freedom to choose for herself that she, Isabel, was able to exercise. In fairness, perhaps Isabel feels that her own bad choice of a mate proves that girls in love do not have very good judgement and someone wiser and more experienced should take charge. Still, it is surprising that she considers herself to be that person, what with her record of character misjudgement... Fortunately, she now seems to be rethinking her interference, if only because she is becoming increasingly doubtful of Lord Warburton’s motivation in offering for Pansy’s hand. But I fear that Pansy’s future will be as grey as that of every other married woman in the novel. Even if she is allowed her choice of Edward Rosier, I am not sure she would be happy, since his appreciation of her principally as an aesthetic and pure object is not so very different from Osmond’s attitude towards Isabel (though Rosier seems a bit silly rather than malignant).

I am enjoying James’s way of using unexpected, detailed and beautiful similes to describe his characters; he uses physical things and spaces to delineate their metaphysical states. He has just described the Countess as:

like a bright rare shell, with a polished surface and a remarkably pink lip, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess’s spiritual principle, a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her.

For me, it’s the flourish of ‘the remarkably pink lip’ which really makes this simile so precisely suited to the Countess; it’s particular and makes the simile concrete; it conveys something of her hard, frivolous and licentious character. And the rattle is her silly chatter, her rattle-pate. But I really love this description of the Osmond marriage, which turns their relationship into a physical space:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

Such a horrific evocation of the kind of living entombment Isabel must now endure.

(Romaine Brooks, Le Piano, 1910; found here)

The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Untitled, c. 1949–50, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

This year is the centenary year of Leonora Carrington’s birth. She is best known as an outstanding artist, and for many years most of her writings have been out of print. Being a fan of her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, I have long wanted to read her short stories but second-hand copies of the Virago collection, The Seventh Horse and Other Stories, always seemed remarkably expensive. Now, to mark the anniversary, her collected stories are being re-issued in the US by Dorothy, a publishing project; I eagerly tried to order a copy but for some reason was unable to obtain them, so instead I have contented myself with the seemingly less complete The Debutante and Other Stories, published in the UK by Silver Press (UK), along with children’s book called The Milk of Dreams and her account of being institutionalised, Down Under (both published by NYRB). I’ve decided to try and write about all of them here. Meanwhile, to prepare myself I am re-reading The Hearing Trumpet and looking again at the lovely pictures in Susan L. Aberth’s Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries).

Carrington led an exciting life, as you can read in Marina Warner’s recent piece in the Guardian or Karen’s nice review of a new biography of her in Shiny New Books by Joanna Moorehead. Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet in 1950, in a noisy café in Mexico City according to Aberth, but it wasn’t actually published until 1974, and then in French. Fantastical and many-tentacled, it is one of the weirdest novels I’ve ever read, and funny too, consistently overturning the reader’s expectations and appearing to have been thrown together quite casually. Our heroine is also unusual: Marian Leatherby is ninety-two years old:

Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures dos not in anyway discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of soft edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway. [...]

Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I found it rather gallant.

Marian is a widow who lives in her son Galahad’s house, in a room overlooking ‘a fine back yard which I share with my two cats, a hen, the maid and her two children, some flies and a cactus plant called maguey.’ The gift of a splendid hearing trumpet, from her bald and excitable friend Carmella, allows Marian to overhear Galahad and his wife plotting to send her away to an old people’s home.

‘Remember Galahad,’ added Muriel, ‘those old people do not have feelings like you or I. She would be much happier in an institution where there’s proper help to take care of her. They are very well run today. This place I told you about in Santa Brigida is run by the Well of Light Brotherhood [...] It is all very efficiently organised and reasonably inexpensive.’

However, advance knowledge doesn’t help Marian very much and she is shipped off to the institution:

First impression are never very clear, I can only say there seemed to be several court yards, cloisters, stagnant fountains, trees, shrubs, lawns. The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boat, another like what I took to be an Egyptian mummy.

These odd buildings are the sleeping places of the old ladies (the toadstool is particularly inconvenient). The institution is run by Dr Gambit and his horrible wife along the lines of a Christian cult. But just as you are imagining that this is going to be a comic novel, tensions among the institutions’ inmates lead to murder; and just as you think it’s going to be a comic novel with a murder, an ancient book containing the gothic tale of the abbess Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva takes the plot in another direction; in fact, whenever you feel you have any idea as to what’s going on, the novel swerves into completely unexpected territory involving, among others, alchemy, orgies, cookery, werewolves and apocalypse. It gallops on, pell mell, faster and faster until abruptly ending.

(Leonora Carrington, Nine Nine Nine, 1948, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

Marian, from the beginning a devotee of the planet Venus, is repeatedly guided by golden bees and bee society – led by a queen, dominated by the sisterhood, altruistic, fruitful and renewing the fertility of the plants around them – is in direct contrast to the dessicated Christianity practised by the Gambits and the mean-minded hypocrisy of Marian’s family. It is reflected in Abbess Rosalinda’s convent, blasphemously given over to indulgence, sensualism and levitating. In the Womb of the World, Marian has an encounter which is both fairytale and eucharist, Baba Yaga and Last Supper. The total destruction of the existing world order and orientation, far from being a catastrophe, in fact signals the rebirth of the Goddess and a better future:

Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets.

After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.

(Leonora Carrington, unattributed photograph from here)

shiny new books: A House in Flanders review

Souvenir Press have just published a new edition of A House in Flanders, Michael Jenkins’ memoir of a summer in northern France with a houseful of elderly ‘aunts’, and I have reviewed it for Shiny New Books here.

If your taste runs to slightly eccentric families, golden summers and a hint of nostalgia amply balanced by the reminders of two world wars, then you will enjoy this – needless to say, I did. I’m only sorry that Jenkins didn’t write more books as he has a real talent for character and atmosphere (and here’s an interesting fact: he was the nephew of Elizabeth Jenkins, author of The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth I etc.).

(César Pattein or Patteyn, Landscape in Flanders, oil on canvas, found here; no date is given for the painting but according to Christie’s Pattein was a French artist who lived 1850–1931, a little early for the summer of 1951 when Michael Jenkins was there but since the ‘aunts’ continued to live as they had done for decades it seems appropriate to the spirit of the book)

a defence of guilty pleasures

(Rex Whistler, Ave Silvae Dornii, oil on canvas laid on panel, 1928, Dorneywood; found here)

I’ve just read this fascinating post by Desperate Reader on guilty pleasures. Both Hayley and her commenters have lots of lovely guilty pleasures; I immediately tried to think of some of my own to add and – failed rather. Here is my list:

1. Watching detective series on the television whilst scoffing slabs of cheap, mild and rubbery cheese mindlessly and without restraint. Part if this pleasure involves loudly changing my mind about who dunnit and why every ten minutes and then, when the solution is reached, claiming that I knew it anyway. The cheese must have almost no discernible taste: very young Gouda is my preferred choice but a very mild Cheddar is perfectly acceptable when in Britain.
2. Reading children’s books – I don’t mind admitting that here, but in real life I feel more judged, principally by non-readers, weirdly enough.
3. Holidaying by myself. I am a rabid and indefatigable tourist, I love visiting churches and museums and galleries and wandering about the streets, and it’s just so much easier to do this alone than when I’m having to take into account what other people want. Especially if they want to sit around drinking coffee or lunching for hours – for God’s SAKE people, we don’t have time for this!
4. Making dolls’ clothes and the odd (in every sense of the word) toy for my daughter – I don’t feel guilty about doing this as much as I feel guilty about how much I enjoy it, surely an unadult quality?

Erm – that’s it. How dull! I nearly included reading vintage detective novels, as they’re now called, which used to be a guilty pleasure twenty years ago but now seems to be too widely accepted to count. A guilty pleasure, after all, has to be something you’d feel embarrassed about if someone else discovered it, and nobody sniggers at the mention of John Dickson Carr or Margery Allingham any more. Society now seems much more tolerant of a few foibles; also, I’m middle-aged and things that would have crippled me with mortification when I was in my twenties – reading Georgette Heyer! Liking some of the pre-Raphaelite artists! – because someone might think the less of me no longer trouble me because I am just a bit less bothered about other people’s opinions of me (though not entirely unbothered by any means!).

To me, a guilty pleasure is something subversive – it’s doing something that we know or believe is disapproved of by our peers or society and enjoying it anyway. It’s that part of you which has survived from when you were a teenager, the rebel who was in bed by ten every night; it’s not truly wicked or revolutionary nor are you alone in doing it. It’s the you who puffed on shared Marlboro Lights at parties and then frantically sucked Polo mints before you went home; the you who keened along to The Smiths and drove your father nuts by declaring that Meat is Murder, who shared half a bottle of cooking sherry with your friends and then puked behind the rose bushes. You did those things because your friends did them too and you didn’t necessarily enjoy them, so they aren’t quite the same as guilty pleasures, but the enjoyment of that feeling of naughtiness and sticking it to The Authorities is what links the two.

Yet I think a guilty pleasure isn’t just doing something that society deems unworthy – I think it’s something that chips at our own image of ourselves. It’s reading romance novels when your usual fare is literary fiction, it’s buying an expensive dress when you consider yourself to be ‘above’ fashion, it’s eating a slice of cake when you normally take care to follow a healthy diet. You’re being a little cheeky to yourself, flipping the finger to the Boss You who creates your self-image and shapes who you are. Look – I can be wild and let my hair down ha ha HA! However, a guilty pleasure is an occasional treat rather than a way of life. When you pick up a Betty Neels paperback, you’re dipping your toes in the waters of deviance, but then stepping back into your normal self, the clever person who reads poetry and modernist fiction. By keeping your guilty pleasure under control, you remind yourself that, while you could read nothing but Mills & Boon, you are not that sort of person really. But you acknowledge, somewhere, that possibility. That slight loss of control is exciting.

Without the mild sense of transgressiveness, there can be no guilty pleasure (is that why I don’t read vintage detective fiction very much any more? There’s no thrill involved?). This enjoins secrecy, and that’s important too. It’s nice not to be a person who is all surface, who doesn’t have any hidden surprises, and who doesn’t tamely follow the script. So I say: let us not be surfacey and controlled! Let us rebel, even in a small way! Let there be more guilty pleasures and let us revel in them! But covertly!

What about you? Do you have any guilty pleasures? And do you think that they’re a secret gesture of defiance or deplorable self-indulgence – or something else?

(Rex Whistler, detail from The Triumph of Fancy, poster, c. 1928; found here)

merry christmas!

(David Jones, Nativity, 1930; drypoint; found here)

I am afraid I have been a very bad blogger recently, and have not been around much. But I am full of good resolutions for next year!

I hope that you all enjoy the holidays and have a peaceful and happy 2016.

little big readalong: Book 2 Brother North-Wind's Secret

The Little, Big readalong continues, but some of us are not doing terribly well. I forgot that this is quite a busy time of year for teachers, and my reading time and brain are being eaten into by making and marking tests and final exams. I’ve only just finished Book 2. Still, I feel that Little, Big itself doesn’t mind: it’s a leisurely book.

In fact, this post has been prompted by a discussion on Frances’ blog of the style and pace of Little, Big, a discussion which I’m too late to join. Frances wrote, noting Crowley’s liberal hand with the comma:

I can’t match my own reading rhythms with the cadence of the author’s language here. [...]True that the book is a comma convention but shouldn’t that actually dictate cadence, the pauses in thought, emphases? Are those pauses so frequent that the text is way out of sync with my personal preference in reading speed? Is this a deliberately paced novel that is pushing back against a greedy consumer?

Teresa and James B. Chester suggested in the comments that Crowley was deliberately trying to slow the pace. But Frances was unsure: ‘The author’s voice, I think, is unique enough that I can’t hear it in a compelling way in a consistent way and I feel less attached to the text.’

So there seemed to me to be two things going on here, a slowness and an alienation, and I have felt them both too. How and why is Crowley creating them?

(Egon Schiele, Woodland Prayer, oil on canvas, 1915; found here)

The slowness derives from both Crowley’s style and his narrative. I notice the narrative particularly because I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books to my daughter recently, and they are driven by ‘what next?’. What will Lucy find through the wardrobe? Where is Mortimer? Can Judy and Mrs Judy save the Shop in the Tree? Little, Big isn’t motivated by this in the slightest. I find I’m not troubled about what will happen next to Smoky or any of the Drinkwaters: they aren’t obviously menaced by anything or in conflict over anything. There is nothing which can really pose a menace: death itself is just another form of transformation or a stepping through a door. And we know that everyone is part of the Tale, foretold in the cards. Everyone reacts to this by becoming quite passive and aware of their unimportance as individuals. They exist to contribute to the Tale and are rather like figures in someone else’s dream. This creates a distance between them and us, the readers.

Crowley also works hard to disorient us in terms of the narrative’s structure and his language. He bends the passage of time – sometimes a few minutes passes between sections, sometimes many years, and we only find out by the bye. He plays with emphasis. What might be a background detail in another novel, a change in the weather, is described carefully, in heightened, intense language:

The previous week’s snow had not cleaved to earth, it was a night’s fall only, the rain returned heavily the next morning and George Mouse went sloshing off in it hollow eyed and confused, having caught, they all thought, Sophie’s bug. The rain continued like unassuageable grief, flooding the low broad lawn where the sphinxes decayed mumchance. Then the temperature tumbled, and Christmas Eve morning the world was all iron-gray and glaring in ice, all the color of the iron-gray sky where the sun made a white smear only behind the clouds. The lawn was hard enough to skate on; the house looked like a miniature house for a model railroad, set beside a pond made from a compact-mirror.

Crowley chooses to place this not at the beginning of the scene but in the middle. When you start reading this section of the book, ‘Agreement with Newton’, it isn’t immediately clear why the characters are ‘speeding’ and ‘sliding’ around. (Nor what Newton has to do with it.) It’s a puzzle to be worked out, and while you’re working it out, you’re being kept apart from the characters again, apart from immersing yourself in the world of the novel. And archaic and unusual language trips you up. ‘Mumchance’! A nice choice of word, conveying not only that the sphinxes are silent but that they are somehow part of a show or a stage set, an idea of artificiality picked up in ‘miniature house for a model railroad’ and ‘a pond made from a compact-mirror’.

(Piet Mondrian, The Gray Tree, oil on canvas, 1912; found here)

Crowley bends time and physics; he elevates small details and he also plays around with scale. The house is ‘miniature’, but it is also, as we know, many houses in one, perhaps a physical impossibility. Characters participate in this play. In Book 1, Smoky felt his one self held an ‘infinity of possibilities’ and many different characters, yet he believed that Daily Alice could contain him. Now Daily Alice experiences something similar:

Daily Alice couldn’t tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty tome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

She is little and big. The novel contains the little and the big, the detail and the grand pattern. We find ourselves trusting to this, as the characters do. But all the time, Crowley seems to be showing us things differently, wrongfooting us and making us work, as if he’s saying, ‘Look, look. See things differently.’ We have to see things differently if we are to accept this story.