extreme legibility

The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow (Doubleday Doran, 1932)

 

I had vaguely heard of this author but didn't know much about her life and work.  I read about The Sheltered Life somewhere -- I think on a blog about books written by women -- and have had it on my shelf for a couple of years.  I'm glad I read it, for it's a beautifully written book about a well-off and socially prominent family living in Virginia (Richmond, I think, although it is called Queensbury in the book) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The first part is set in 1906, and after a short impressionistic interlude, the third part is set in 1916. In this formal way, as well as other stylistic and texturous ways, the book resembles Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  Both books are sharply bifurcated by time and follow the internal lives of many characters within a family and small community of friends.  And Glasgow's assured, intelligent, and lyrical writing often reminded me of Woolf's.

At the heart of The Sheltered Life is a tragic romance between a young girl and an older man.  Jenny Blair Archbald is 9 years old in the first section and about to turn 18 in the third; as both a young girl and as a young woman she has been powerfully charmed by George Songbird, a handsome neighbor who is married to Eva Birdsong.  Eva is a beautiful and charismatic women whom everyone adores, including George, although that does not stop him from being chronically unfaithful and thereby destroying the woman he so dearly loves.  Eva Birdsong is a  wonderful character -- a supreme creation.  Jenny Blair, along with her grandfather, her widowed mother, and her two aunts, who all live together down the street from the Birdsongs in a once-genteel but quickly fading neighborhood, observe the disintegration of the Birdsongs' marriage, and Jennie Blair's flirtatious infatuation with George, which he is unable to resist, hastens its tragic demise.

The rapidly changing world of the South, becoming less  genteel and stratified in the wake of the Civil War and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, is deftly suggested throughout the book.  Glasgow creates a world that is richly detailed and sensually evoked.  The book is longer than it needs to be and would have benefitted by a tighter editorial vision, but it's a rich and complex novel of wisdom and compassion.  I'm not surprised that Glasgow, a very fine writer, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her novel In This Our Life.

 

Ellen Glasgow's house in Richmond, Virginia

*Helmet of Flesh by Scott Symons (Dutton/NAL, 1986)

 

People (or at least people in books I read) seem to go to Morocco to misbehave and/or fall apart, and York, the Canadian hero of this book, does both.  He leaves his partner John and their quiet life in a village in Newfoundland and travels to Marrakesh, where he falls in with a very gay and dissolute group of expatriots and visitors who are taking full advantage of the readily available men and boys offering (or selling) themselves for sex.  York makes a dangerous and debauched journey out over the Atlas Mountains into the Sahara, which ends in Suddenly-Last-Summer violence and mystery.  Back in Marrakesh, York takes shelter in a queer hotel populated exclusively, it seems, by eccentrics and degenerates, has a scary visit to a sadistic sheik's isolated castle, and pursues an affair with a  decent and beautiful young Moroccan man, who he heartlessly (yet somehow poignantly) abandons when he decides to return to Canada.

Symon's writing is ambitious and intelligent, if sometimes chaotic and puzzling, but his imagistic and impressionistic prose hits more often than it misses.  This book doesn't quite hang together or amount to anything entire, and includes a fairly dreadful flashback to York's life back in quaint Newfoundland, but it's filled with captivating scenes and amusing and engaging characters,

*Happy Trails by Adam Shand Kydd (Heinemann, 1984)

 

I made it 2/3 of the way through this intentionally silly novel, a far-fetched thriller/adventure story about two middle-aged gay men.   Bizarre (and unbelievable) circumstances thrust them out of their quiet life in a village rectory into the world of decadent nightclubs and international terrorists.  The writing is breezy but it lacks the brilliant British zaniness to allow it to levitate and consistently entertain -- thus my premature exit.

 

*The New Life by Tom Crewe (Scribner, 2023)

 

This is a novel based upon the lives of Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, two Victorian men who collaborated on the book Sexual Inversion, which attempted to destigmatize and decriminalize male homosexuality by placing it in a historical context and detailing case histories of homosexual men.  Addington is a homosexual who has married and produced three daughters and hides behind this shield of heteronormative domesticity, destroying both himself and his long-suffering wife in the process.  Ellis, who seems to be only sexually excited by women urinating, is married to a lesbian writer and feminist, who is living with her female lover.  Theirs is not a happy marriage.

The novel, which follows the two men in alternating chapters, is set in the few years the men spend collaborating on the book and the few years after it is published in the wake of the Oscar Wilde scandal.  A bookseller is arrested for selling the "obscene" book, and the resulting court case destroys both men and their marriages.

The book is cleverly conceived and vividly imagined.  I read it with much pleasure and engagement, although I found much of the writing oddly inexact and estranging, as if Crewe was trying to be inventive and poetic and more often than not failing.  A less ambitious, more straight- (no pun intended) forward style would have made the book even more affecting and effective.

 

 

 

*The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Knopf, 2008)

 

I had read and enjoyed King of the Badgers (another inscrutable title) by Hensher many years ago, and remember thinking that it was amusing and somewhat diffuse and inconsequential.  I felt much the same about The Northern Clemency.

Like King of the Badgers, The Northern Clemency is a big book (600 pages), a saga that follows two families in Sheffield from the late 70s into the late 90s, in jumps of five to ten years, chronicling the lives of all the family members, particularly the wives/mothers and the children (one family has 3 children, the other has 2).  It touches rather obliquely on socio-political issues like the miner's strike and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, but politics is always subverted to the exigencies of the character's personal life.

While evoked in great and authentic detail, none of the lives are particularly unique or interesting.  Hensher writes adroitly about everyday life and minor disturbances, and the stakes and subsequent drama seem rather low for a novel of this scope.  I read it with flagging enthusiasm, and while I think Hensher is accomplished, I don't think his novels are brilliant or noteworthy (that is an observation more than a criticism, for I did enjoy reading this book and felt sympathetically engaged with its world and its characters).

Bring Home the Bride by Gale Wilhelm (Morrow, 1961)

 

Another beautifully etched book by this extraordinary and sadly forgotten author, who writes in a brilliantly honed and elegantly succinct style about how people relate to one another and the world around them.

Carol is a a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman -- she is independent, spirited, sexually experienced and effortlessly charismatic.  While vacationing with her disengaged mother at a mountain hotel in what appears to be the Pacific Northwest, she meets a beautiful young man named Hans who lives in a house he has built for himself on a large compound owned by his father, a famous playwright with whom Carol had a brief affair a year or so before.

Carol and Hans fall immediately and completely (and completely convincingly) in love and get married, and begin living together in Hans' chalet-like house in an idyllic setting.  But secrets from both their pasts (SPOILERS) -- Carol's affair with Hans' father and the potentially dangerous genetic nature of Hans' mother's mental illness -- encroach upon their edenic solitude with eventual tragic results.

Bring Home the Bride is a masterful example of a short novel.  Wilhelm imbues her characters -- through their speech, their actions, and their internal monologues -- with exact and vivid life.  She writes so perfectly and tersely that the book has an authenticity and incandescence that is invigorating and exciting.  Her prose seems to be mentholated and gives the reader (me) a rush.

A rare, curious, perfect book.

Note: it's interesting to me that Wilhelm's books -- published by Knopf and Morrow -- were gorgeously and expensively produced.  These publishers must have known how special Wilhelm's books were, and obviously strove to present them to readers in the most beautiful and sumptuous way. 

 

*At the Cross by Jon Rose (Andre Deutsch, 1961)

 

A memoir by this fine writer about two years he spent in Sydney's bohemian ghetto when he was 16 and 17.  Jon Rose leaves his unloving and thwarting family in Melbourne at the tender age of 16 and travels with a couple -- a man and a woman who both are (sexually) interested in him -- to the "Cross," an enclave in Sydney that is home to artists, homosexuals, and other outliers.  Jon quickly moves in with Bella, a middle-aged prostitute, who guides him with kindness and wisdom through the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of the Cross.  Jon meets and befriends a wonderful gallery of eccentric and vividly drawn characters, and learns a lot about life and love before being drafted into the army at the age of 18, in the midst of WWII.

Rose's writing isn't as luminous as in Peppercorn Days, but it is wonderfully engaging and vivid.  Like Denton Welch, Jon Rose was a vulnerable young man with an amazing sense of empathy for both objects and animals.  He's less adept at understanding people than Welch, but his experiences related in this book move him towards a more mature understanding of human nature.

This is a funny, wise, heartbreaking book -- a brilliant depiction of a rare young individual growing into himself in a long-lost but memorable time and place.

*Peppercorn Days by Jon Rose (E. P. Dutton, 1959)

 

This is a beautiful little book, an imagistic memoir about early childhood that is as vivid and untethered as a dream.  It is utterly transporting; I felt not as if I were reading it but as if I were floating in it.

Peppercorn Days takes place in a small town in coastal Australia sometime in the 1930s.  Parents have gone away for a few days leaving their four children -- three girls and a boy -- home alone, to be casually supervised by a local woman who as 19 sons.  The book is  narrated, or more accurately deeply felt, by the boy, the youngest child.  He lives in a kind of ecstatic erotic freedom -- he is frequently  stripping, or being stripped and fondled, and experiences the world in constant sensual pleasure.  He exists as much in an imagined future or remembered past as in the present, and flows amongst these equally vivid and alive realities effortlessly.

Peppercorn Days recreates the lost kingdom of childhood as brilliantly as any book I know, and brought me back to something in myself I had lost or forgotten.

 

 

Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley (Harpers, 1900)

 

I must have read something about this book somewhere, otherwise why would it have ended up on my bookshelf?  But of course I just forgot what and where...

Red Pottage (the terrible title refers to a lentil stew mentioned in the Bible) is a wonderful book -- smart, funny, engagingly plotted and charactered.  It's about two young women, Hester Gresley and Rachel West, who are close friends and both unmarried at 28.  Hester lives with her brother, who is a self-deluded and narrow-minded vicar, and his equally petty and vindictive wife and their mewling children; Rachel, who has recently inherited a fortune and ascended into aristocratic society, travels from one country house to another.  Hester has published one novel to considerable success and is trying to finish a second, but family life at the vicarage makes it difficult for her to write.  Rachel is pursued by two men and falls in love with one, despite his having had an affair with her new friend Lady Westhaven.  Both Hester's novel and Rachel's romance come to a tragic end.

Chomondeley not only creates two strong, independent, smart, and sympathetic heroines but also uses her finely-honed satirical wit to delightfully and delicately skewer many of the clerical and aristocratic characters.  The book has an insouciance and freshness that makes for delightful reading.  I look forward to reading more Chomondeley, which is apparently (and disappointedly) pronounced "Chumley."

 

 

 

 

 

Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch (Viking Press, 1969)

 

Bruno's Dream is one of the less interesting and satisfying Murdoch novels that I have read.  This may be because it's rather brief and  episodic; it doesn't have much depth or texture, and the characters are all rather vague and underdeveloped, palely colored.  What drives what little plot there is, is love -- or rather, the fickleness and instability of love.  The tensions mount but are are resolved not by any development of character, but by a natural disaster -- a terrible rainfall and flood.  Because it's Murdoch it's engaging to read -- she seems to know and tell the truth about her characters, it's just that in this case their truths are not very complex or interesting.