extreme legibility

*Peter Waring by Forrest Reid (Readers' Union, 1939)

 

Peter Waring is a completely rewritten version of Following Darkness, one of Reid's early novels, published in 1912. 

It is the coming-of-age story of Peter Waring, a boy growing up in Newcastle, Northern Ireland, early in the twentieth century.  Peter's father is a bitterly unhappy school teacher, whose wife left him for another man when Peter was a child.  So Peter grows up shuttling between his father's cold and mean cottage and their neighbor Mrs. Carrol's lovely seaside estate, Derryaghy, which is full of warmth and color and love (and perhaps ghosts).  Mrs. Carrol virtually adopts Peter, allowing him to spend long periods at Derryaghy, pays for his education, and introduces him to Kathleen and Gerald Dale, her sophisticated niece and nephew from London, who are both a bit older than Peter (he is about 16 when he first meets them).  Peter falls in love with Kathleen, and Gerald seems to fall in love with Peter.  Peter is sent away to a grammar school in Belfast, and made to live with his father's sister's family, who are an unattractive lot struggling with poverty and to whom Peter feels superior.  In Belfast Peter meets and befriends Owen Gill, an attractive, intelligent, and highly moral and intellectual boy from a wealthy family.  

The novel mainly concerns itself with Peter's friendship with Owen, and his misguided and doomed pursuit of Kathleen, who likes Peter but doesn't love him, a fact which Peter is curiously and maddeningly unable to believe or accept.  His pursuit of her ends in an act of sexual assault that is much more disturbing than it is treated, and from which Kathleen mysteriously absolves him.  Peter tries to kill himself by exposing himself to the cold night rain, but only suffers a long illness, the cure for which is happily a months-long trip to Southern Europe, paid for by the ever-generous Mrs. Carrol.

Peter is a hard character to like--he's not self-aware, he misjudges other people, he's a snob, he's petulant and often nasty.  While these qualities make him a believable adolescent, they don't make him particularly sympathetic or engaging, and he doesn't seem to mature very much despite his experiences.  Many of the secondary characters are more complex and interesting than Peter.

There is also a constant reference to some unnamed and unexplained "thing" that is bothering Peter throughout the book, something Peter longs to confide in someone but cannot, not even to the reader (the book is narrated in first person).  He finally divulges all to Mrs. Carrol, but the reader is only told the fact of his confession, not its content.  It seems as if Reid assumes the reader--or certain (gay?) readers--will know what is plaguing Peter, but the effect is a maddening obscurity at the very depth of the book that today seems extremely coy and unsatisfying, especially as Peter is not allowed to have--or at least reveal- any homoerotic feelings or actions. 

 

 

 

*Tropical Night Falling by Manuel Puig (Simon & Schuster, 1991)

 

A lovely book, tender and sad, and completely engaging.  Tropical Night Falling is Puig's last book, finished shortly before his death in 1990.

TNF is a story about two octogenarian sisters, Luci and Nidia, Argentinians living  in Rio de Janeiro.  Most of the book is composed of their unadorned dialogue, which includes Luci's relating to her sister the long and complicated story of her neighbor Silvia's affair with an inconsiderate widower.  Nidia befriends the handsome young night watchman from the neighboring building, a friendship that, despite Nidia's good and generous intentions, ends by devastating her.

The novel is masterfully written, its complex and unorthodox narrative structure--dialogue, letters, police reports--brilliantly conceived and sustained.  I was very moved by this book's elegiac tone, and its deep sense of empathy and humanity.  Perhaps reading it during this time of quarantine and estrangement made me particularly susceptible to its melancholy charm. 

 

 

*Bright Center of Heaven by William Maxwell (Harper & Brothers, 1934)

 

Maxwell "suppressed" his first novel, published in 1934,  by not allowing it to be reprinted in his lifetime.  (It was included with his other early novels in the Library of America two-volume set of his work published in 2008, eight years after his death).

Bright Center of Heaven is not a good book.  It chronicles a mid-summer day in a sort of improbable mix of guest house/artist colony/farm in Wisconsin run by the widowed Mrs. West and inhabited by Thorn and Whitey, her two sons; Aunt Amelia, her sister-in-law; an actress; a painter; a pianist;  a "reformed" schoolteacher; a German cook; and a (perhaps) Norwegian elderly farmhand.  Into this mix Mrs. West invites Jefferson Carter, a Harvard-educate "Negro", a public speaker, and a "leader of his race."  Also, the actress, who is in love with the ex-schoolteacher, thinks she might be pregnant.  Maxwell deals bravely but ineptly with both of the developments, and most of this book is confused and unconvincing.  It is not the beautiful assured performance of his subsequent novels, although there are a few glimmers of what's to come: an animation of rooms and furniture (a la the short story "The Lily-White Boys") and a sympathetic and appealing portrait of adolescent boys (a la The Folded Leaf). The issues of race are no doubt rendered sensitively for the time in which the book is set and was written, but now give the book an unpleasant and troubling veneer.

One of the reasons Maxwell suppressed the book was that he felt it was too obviously influenced by Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf"s To The Lighthouse, but I don't think there is more than a very superficial trace of either of these books.  A curiosity.    

 

 

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch (Viking 1974)

 

A typically engaging and well-written novel by Murdoch, but not among her best.  Like all her novels, this one deals with a tangled web of many characters: Blaise and Harriet Gavender; their sixteen-year-old son David; Emily McHugh, Blaise's mistress; Luca, Blaise's and Emily's eight-year-old son; Montague Small, the Gavender's neighbor (they live in a suburb of London), who is a best-selling and famous writer of detective novels; Edgar Demarnay, Montague's childhood friend; Constance Pinn, a sort of mysterious go-between amongst all parties; and Kiki LaFoy, a 17-year-old student who is loved by David, loves Blaise, and is deflowered by Montague.  After Blaise leaves Harriet to set up house with Emily, Harriet alternately throws herself at Montague and Edgar.

None of these people are remotely likable, with the exception of Harriet and Edgar, who are both so selfless they become annoying and pathetic.   All the remaining adults are monsters.  The children are all much-abused innocents.  Murdoch is generous with children and dogs--they have not been corrupted and damaged and made toxic like the adults.

Murdoch does a good job establishing all these characters, and their various complicated relationships; she's a master at combing exposition, description, dialogue, and internal monologue to create a rich, sensual, and engaging brew.  She's not concerned with plot and despite some clever machinations in the first two-thirds of the book, the ending is seriously marred by an overabundance of coincidence and not one but two violent deaths (one death by terrorist attack, one near-death by dog attack).  So one finishes the book feeling a bit drained, exhausted and disappointed, like a ride on a scary but not thrilling rollercoaster.

 

 

 

*The Confession by Mario Soldati, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (Knopf, 1958)

 

I'm fairly certain that I've read this book before, but my memory of it was vague and became no clearer as I read it: proof of how (almost) completely I now forget the books I read.  That is sad to me, for I do feel that books enrich and expand one, and I believe they can only do that to the extent that they are assimilated and remembered.  But perhaps assimilation and memory are two different things, and the first does not depend upon the second.

The Confession is a short novel about a very pious 14-year-0ld boy (Clemente) in Turin shortly after the WWII.  He believes he is called to be  a Jesuit priest, and this belief is supported and encouraged by his devout grandmother and the priests who educate him.  And so, striving to remain pure and sin-free, he is constantly examining his conscious and confessing.

During a summer holiday at a villa on the beach he finds himself seriously attracted to and unsettled by Jeanette, a voluptuous and flirtatious friend of his mother, who is staying with the family.  He manages to avoid the temptation of Jeanette (they spend the night in adjoining hotel rooms) only to fool around with a handsome boy he meets on the beach a few days later.  Ironically, neither Clemente nor his grandmother nor his confessor consider this homosexual dalliance a sin: Clemente, because he feels it happened without him willing it; and the grandmother and the priest because they think that playing (chastely) with other boys his age will prevent him from other venal and mortal temptations.

It was interesting to read this book directly after reading Strait is the Gate, which also deals with the damaging and warping effects devout Catholicism can have upon adolescent psyches and sexualities.

A beautifully produced mid-century Knopf book, with decorated boards and a stunning cover illustration by Milton Glaser.

 

*Strait is the Gate by Andre Gidé, translated by Dorothy Bussy (Vintage 1956; originally published in 1909)

 

I found this slim book among my paperbacks and realized I have no memory of ever reading Gide, so I began it at once.  Strait is the Gate is a very simple story set in France in the 1880s, of two cousins, Alissa and Jerome, who fall in love as children and, although their love and devotion only deepen as they age, are unable to marry.  It is Alissa who constantly demurs:  she thinks she is too old for Jerome; she want her younger sister, Juliette (who also loves Jerome) to marry first.  And then it is slowly revealed that her desire to love God somehow prohibits her from loving Jerome; she feels that marrying him would prevent him from fully loving God, and so  inspired by a sense of  perverted piety, she toys with him for several years before finally rejecting him and dying from what appears to be heartbreak.

Jerome narrates the first two-thirds of the book; the final third is comprised of Alissa's journals, which she bequeaths him and which explain her mysterious behavior, and a coda in which Jerome meets Juliette many years later.  He confesses he is still in love with Alissa and will never marry, never love anyone else.

The book is elegantly composed and written, but its central concerns of Alissa's romantic/theological dilemma did not make much sense or interest me.  And Jerome's apathy and blindness--his continued misguided and unfounded devotion to Alissa only makes the book that much more impotent, unable to deeply move or engage the reader (me).

 

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, translated by Anthea Bell (NYRB, 2018; originally published Germany in 2006)

 

Sigrid Nunez recommended this book to me at one of our lunches last fall and I immediately went to 3 Lives bookshop and bought it.  Soon thereafter Afterwords, the book club I belong to, decided to read it, and we were scheduled to discuss it on March 17, but had to postpone our meeting due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

All for Nothing is set in a large manor house outside a small village in East Prussia.  The year is 1945.  The Russians are advancing from the east and a large part of the population is fleeing westward, but the von Globigs, the family in the Manor House, seem unable to to make a decision about whether to flee or stay.   

The family consists of Katherina; the beautiful, introverted, and depressed mother; her twelve-year-old son, Peter; Auntie, a distant relative, a spinster who runs the estate in exchange for room and board, some pocket money, and grudging affection.  Two resentful Ukranian maids and a Polish manservant complete the household.  The father, Eberhard, is serving as an officer in the German army in Italy.  During the final weeks the family remains in their beloved homestead various refugees are quartered, officially or secretly, in the house.  The presence of these strangers force familial secrets and strains into the open, resulting in inevitable flight and tragedy.  The concluding chapters harrowingly describe the plight of the family as they join the mass doomed exodus west.  By focussing on the family's intimate lives during a time of tremendous public upheaval, Kempowski succeeds in telling a riveting story about the personal effects of war.  He writes with brutal and unsentimental honesty, and reading the book is painful and upsetting.  It was especially difficult to read this book during this period, for its constant sense of menace and imminent doom seem too close for comfort.