extreme legibility

*N***** Heaven by Carl Van Vechten (Knopf, 1927)

 

This unfortunately titled novel, written by a white man, is set entirely among the Black community in Harlem, a world Van Vechten experienced and felt he knew well enough to write about (his friend, Langston  Hughes, wrote the many spirituals that are quoted often throughout the book).  It was extremely interesting to read this book, which would never be published today.

Van Vechten's characters are wealthy, well-educated, sophisticated, and have established their own jazz-age world in Harlem because they are excluded from the downtown white world.  The plot revolves around a doomed love affair between Mary, a well-brought up librarian, and B, a handsome young man just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, who wants to be a writer, but because of his race can only find employment as an elevator operator.  He drops the good Mary when he is taken up by a beautiful, wealthy, and sensual woman who tires of him rather quickly, with disastrous consequences.

An odd, problematic book that illuminates (and most probably misrepresents) a fascinating world that one wishes one could experiences less circuitously.

 

*The Ant Colony by Francis King (Constable, 1991)

 

Yet another book about a community of British ex-patriots living in Italy, this time in Florence sometime after WWII -- probably the early 50s, but published, and written (one supposes) in 1991.

The book follows Iris Crediton and Jack Prentis, two very young Brits, who have arrived in Florence to each English for a year at a Language Institute.  Iris is pretty and titled,  has lovely clothes and is socially poised; Jack is middle-class, handsome, has a very limited wardrobe, and is shy but charming.  They are both embraced (literally and figuratively) by the much-older -- some rather ancient -- British expats who, for one reason or another (homosexuality included) have remade their lives in more tolerant (and affordable) Italy.

Iris lodges in a pensione and Jack boards with the school's sub-director, Giles, who is unhappily married to an unhappy woman, Margot, their two children, Prunella and Piers, and Maria, their attractive maid.  Both Iris and Jack get involved romantically, sexually, and/or professionally with many members of the expat and local community, including a hunchbacked Italian poet, a Fascist Countess, a wealthy alcoholic woman, a homosexual man, a lesbian mourning the loss of her life partner.

Francis King is an engaging writer, and The Ant Colony is vividly charactered and located.  The book is episodic and not strongly plotted, and consequently not particularly potent or coherent.  But it is warm and gentle, and reading it is much like taking a pleasant but forgettable Italian holiday.

Indiana by George Sand

 

Indiana is a novel about marriage but Sand's wide-ranging interests and intelligence inform the book, and substantially broaden and deepen the canvas.  

Indiana is 16 years old when she moves from the Ile de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean to France, and marries a much older man, who is an ex-soldier and successful factory owner -- he has money but no class or sophistication.  The match is loveless, and Indiana falls in love with a rakish, titled neighbor who, while seducing Indiana, has an affair with Noun, Indiana's Creole maid.  Noun tragically kills herself when she becomes pregnant.  The plot is operatic and melodramatic, and neither Indiana or Reynaldo, her lover, are very sympathetic or interesting.  But Sand's writing is vivid and vigorous, and the frequent philosophical asides about society and marriage are modern and engagingly expressed.

An unusual book, difficult to place in the chronology of literature, as it is many ways old-fashioned and romantic and in others quite modern and bold.

 

*The Last Boat by John Pollock (Anthony Blond, 1958)

 

Another relentlessly dark and morbid novel by John Pollock, but once again enlivingly laced with his dark humor and keen observation of human behavior at its most desperately alcholic-besodden level.

Some bureaucratic nitwits in the British foreign office decide to stage a trial evacuation of British residents on a small (fictitious) Italian island named Pizza (of course). The off-season weather on Pizza is cold and dreary and the island is populated only by about a dozen British expats (aka outcasts) and the few enterprising locals who earn a meager living housing and feeding them, and keeping them liquored up.  We're introduced to this colorful but damaged and self-destructive (madness, alcoholism, nymphomania, and homosexuality) group of characters, and watch as they attempt to pull themselves together and board the unseaworthy boat that has been commandeered for their exodus.  With the help (?) of a minor British magistrate, who sees this mission as an opportunity for advancement in the diplomatic corps, and the locals, who sense an opportunity to rid their community of these degenerates and make some money doing so, the boat is finally populated and sets out to sea, where it almost immediately sinks.  Everyone on board drowns.

I continue to be intrigued by John Pollock -- this is the third book of his I've read -- and wish I could learn something about him.  All his books share the same acidic and anti-social world view expressed with malevolent glee.  He writes unsentimentally and brutally about outcasts, those men and women who, for one reason or another, have voluntarily or forcibly stepped off the good high road we are all told to walk along, and find themselves crawling in the gutter.

The Provincial Lady in Russia (I Visit the Soviets) by E. M. Delafield (Cassandra Editions/Academy Chicago, 1985; originally published by Harper Brothers, 1937)

 

The Provincial Lady is tasked by her American publisher to spend several months in the Soviet Union and write a funny book about her visit: a brilliant idea.  Delafield accepts the challenge and acquits herself triumphantly: the resulting book is a vividly rendered and keenly observed account of (what tourists were allowed to see of) Soviet life in the 1930s, when the USSR was but twenty years old.

The PL, who had heretofore proven herself an amusing and sharp observer of English rural and urban life, now sets her gimlet eye upon a very different environment and society.  She travels (laboriously) to Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov, and Odessa, spends several weeks on a communal farm, and visits countless hospitals, factories, schools, and museums, always accompanied by official government guides who constantly spout propaganda (often blatantly contradicted by what is being observed) and are inevitably late.  The glimpses of Soviet life and the wry yet sympathetic portraits of people are fascinating, and everything is observed and recorded with Delafield's shrewd eye, intelligent mind, and empathetic heart.

 

Harper and Brothers, 1937

 

 

 

 

Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press, 1973)

 

Because I so enjoyed reading Barchester Towers, I searched abe.com and bought several Trollope novels I haven't yet read.  Among them was Is He Popenjoy? and being intrigued by the title (as mentioned elsewhere, I like titles with question marks and other punctuation) I began reading it, and was hardly able to put it down over a very few days.

Perhaps it was my mood and my current disenchantment with life, but I found that being immersed in Trollope's world was far preferable (and pleasurable) to languishing in my own.  Is He Popenjoy? is, like Barchester Towers, broader and more consistently comic than the Palliser novels, and, although it features a Dean in a primary role, it is less ecclesiastically concerned than the Barchester novels.  This Dean is quite merry, and spends as little time as possible at the Deanery or in the Cathedral, much preferring to seek social pleasure and amusements in London.

The plot -- the main plot; there are, of course, several -- concerns the Dean's daughter, Mary Lovelace, who inherits a small fortune from a wealthy Great Aunt, which allows her to marry into the aristocracy.  She weds Lord George Brotherton, a second son, who lives with his somewhat senile mother, the Marchioness, and his four pious and cheerless spinster sisters.  They are all dependent upon Mary's money, for the family's fortune belongs entirely to Lord George's older brother, Lord Brotherton, the Marquis, who lives in Italy and shuns his native land and family.  His sudden and unexpected return to Cross Manor, the family estate, with a perhaps illegitimate Italian Italian wife and correspondingly illegitimate son, not only displaces his family but causes a scandal concerning the Brotherton legacy.  The Dean, born of humble origins and socially ambitious and eager for his daughter to become a Marchioness and his (expected) grandson to one day become a Marquis, instigates and funds an investigation into the legitimacy of the present Marquis' marriage, hoping to disqualify his son (Popenjoy) from inheriting the title, which would then pass to Lord George.

This central plot is refracted in several subplots involving the difficulties of reconciling love and economic reality in terms of marriage; too often a mutual attraction is not supported by the financial means on either side to enable a prosperous (or even possible) marriage, and the resulting matches, often made on purely pecuniary grounds, destabilize the society around them.

Both Mary and her father are flawed characters, and Lord George is a rather a dreary and unlikeable man.  Despite this -- or perhaps because of it -- the book is addictively compelling and I enjoyed reading it very much.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (Literary Guild, 1945)

 

Barchester Towers is set in the upper echelons of the clerical world in Barchester, a fictitious cathedral city in England.  A spineless new Bishop arrives to the consternation of the Warden and the Archdeacon, and upsets the status quo.  He is controlled by his formidable wife, Mrs. Prudie, and his revoltingly ambitious Chaplain, Dr. Slope.  A triangularized romantic plot centering around an independent and wealthy young widow (the Archdeacon's daughter) allows happy endings for all the good characters, and appropriate come-uppences for all the bad.

Perhaps because the edition I read (published by the Literary Guild in 1945) featured several cartoonish color illustrations (by Donald McKay), this book seemed considerably less  nuanced and complex than other Trollope novels (especially the Palliser novels), and therefore less satisfying -- but entertaining and fun to read nonetheless.

illustration by Donald McKay

 

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Hated it.  An endless rant by an inordinately uninteresting crazy man followed by a very brief inconsequential narrative about his liaison with a gold-hearted prostitute.  This book seemed, like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as  Young Man (another supposedly great book that I hated), especially designed to discourage young readers from ever wanting to pick up another book.

A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble (William Morrow and Company, 1964)

 

Having recently re-read The Garrick Year, which I believe was Drabble's second novel, I decided to revisit her debut, which I first read in 1979 (fifteen years after it was first published in 1964).

A Summer Bird-Cage -- the title is never mentioned in the book, but it must be a reference to something* -- is a rather tepid, underdeveloped story about two sisters, one who is recently married to a somewhat famous but completely undesirable author (he might be queer).  Neither sister is very sympathetic, but there is something bracing about their nastiness, and Drabble's intelligence and eloquence are both fully displayed, especially as manifested in the first-person narrative voice.  One feels that Drabble is, at this very early stage of her career, an excellent writer but a facile observer of human life.  She is ahead of herself technically, which results in a polished but minor book.

 

*According to Wikipedia, the title of the novel is taken from a quotation from the play The White Devil by John Webster:  ‘"Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out."

*The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester (Simon and Schuster, 1967)

 

The Exquisite Corpse is an audacious and fascinating, but failed, attempt to push the boundaries of literary fiction to the extreme edges (or beyond) of obscenity.

It is designed  to work in the manner of the folded-page drawing game whereby a picture of a human body is created by juxtaposing parts randomly drawn by various artists.  In the novel Chester moves arbitrarily from one chapter to the next by introducing a new character,  or a different version of an already introduced character, and in this way attempts to create a whole that is larger and more meaningful than the sum of its many parts.  Unfortunately, Exquisite Corpse doesn't achieve that goal, but individual chapters provide a unique and stimulating reading experience.  Chester embraces -- nay, celebrates -- many subjects not often encountered in conventional, mainstream fiction: sexual aberration (homosexuality, transvestitism, necrophilia, bestiality, S&M), colostomy bags (erupting), and many other taboos.  His smart, funny, and oddly humane writing make all of this almost palatable, and often quite amusing, yet one wishes all the sex and gore amounted to something a bit more powerful and resonant.