MarysLibrary

Long Plain School

This is where I went to school, grades 4 -8. Two grades in a room. The photo is from around 1910, which is a few years before I was there; they did a little renovating in the 40s. They left the horse trough out front although nobody was riding a horse to school any more. (Except Tommy Braley, once. The teacher went ballistic and sent him home.)

Two high school kids from Verona by Gilbert and Sullivan (an adaptation by William Shakespeare)

I recently spent an hour or two with my pal, Will. Mr Shakespeare and I are getting to know one another much better, lately. I call him Will and he calls me Marye. I read in school what they made me read of his work, I read or (mostly) re-read some of the plays over the decades, and a few years ago I read the sonnets. Most of the sonnets. I like sonnets. I’ve always loved structure.

But recently I’ve decided to read all of the plays. Imagine my surprise when I found some new ones. I really did think Will had quit writing quite a while ago. I read some in alphabetical order just before we left Virginia. Not the optimal way to approach them. I was going to read them in order by history (ancient Britain – Lear, Greece and Rome – J Caesar, Renaissance – R and Juliet, etc.) But then, thanks to a recommendation by my friend, Pamela, I got my hands on a guide by Harvard professor, Marjorie Garber, that lists the plays in the order they were written. Well, as they were written in her opinion. There are as with everything else Shakespearean, many opinions. Including the theory that the plays were written not by Shakespeare himself but by another man with the same name. (No, I'm not making that up.) (Shakespeare After All, 2005.)

So I started a few weeks ago with Two Gentlemen of Verona, for reasons I cannot explain – either I had no reason to start with or I’ve forgotten, or both. I had read this play within the last couple of years. And instead of crediting myself with it I decided to re-read it. That’s because I . . . not love, I don’t love it the way I love The Winter’s Tale or Julius Caesar . . . because I have a crush on it.

 One of the reasons scholars place the play so early in Shakespeare’s career is because it’s so sloppy. Let me give you one example. The two boys – to call them gentlemen is laughable, but then so is most of the play. Anyhow, the boys are from Verona and their fathers would like them to travel, see the world, live at the court of the nearby Duke of Milan (or emperor – the play can’t seem to decide which he is), and gain some polish.

One of them, Proteus, is in love with a local girl, Julia, so he opts to stay in Verona. But Valentine, a handsome lad with an IQ of about 90, is getting ready to go to Milan as the play opens. In fact the ship is waiting in the harbor for him and he has to hurry to catch the tide.

Now you don’t have to know much Italian geography to know that both Verona and Milan are inland. To go by ship from one to the other would entail an overland trek to Venice, a sail around the boot, a landing in Genoa, and another trek. By land there would be a well-traveled road taking you directly from one to the other.

Either Shakespeare was having a joke on his audience or he was incredibly sloppy. Or he had an uneducated collaborator, or the printed version of the play was corrupted, or who knows what. Shakespearean scholarship is sometimes a little out of focus. But I go with sloppy. Also sloppy is one character's welcome of another “to Padua.” There’s more, but you get the idea. Proteus, by the way, ends up in Milan as well, forgets about Julia, falls in love with Sylvia, and tells the duke about his best friend, Valentine’s, plan to elope with her. Julia, who really loves Proteus, follows him to Milan, dressed as a boy of course – so Shakespearean.

Why do I like this play so much? Because it was really written by Gilbert and Sullivan. Valentine, kicked out of Milan by the duke for planning to abscond with his daughter, is taken captive by a gang of outlaws who, because he,  like them, is an “outlaw,” and because he is handsome, vote him their leader. Reference is made to Robin Hood's merry band.

Right behind Valentine is Sylvia, followed by Proteus, followed by the duke, followed by Julia. When Valentine happens on Proteus trying to rape Sylvia and realizes his best friend’s treachery, he’s angry. But Proteus immediately repents and voices his regret, so of course Valentine immediately forgives him and offers him Sylvia. Julia faints and is recognized under her costume, the duke agrees to allow Valentine to marry his daughter, Proteus decides he loves Julia after all. Exuent to a marriage feast.

 One other highlight:

 Who is Sylvia? What is she,/That all our swains commend her?

 2012  No 17

George Orwell is disillusioned

I'm reading the Peter Davison 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell and I've arrived at Volume 11, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939. Orwell went to Spain in December of 1936 to fight with the International Brigade, but he ended up as part of POUM, Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, with which he connected through representatives of the Independent Labour Party who were fighting in Spain.

He fought until May when he was shot in the throat and went to Barcelona to recover. He and his wife escaped from Spain just ahead of the Stalinists who had broken into his wife's hotel room and stolen all her papers and his diaries. They then held a secret hearing and convicted the Orwells of being Trotskyists and sentenced them to death.

At first Orwell didn't want to admit that these other people who were fighting the good fight were executing people, with or without a trial. But eventually he faced up to what the totalitarian Stalinists were doing - and what had happened to the Russian Revolution. He accepted finally that the glowing reports from Stalin's world were fanciful and that there was a grim gulag in the workers' paradise.

Orwell may have been no political theoretician, especially in 1937; and he certainly did not have the facts available to him that have now surfaced; but, intuitively, he assessed the position accurately. The vision of a socialist society that he experienced on first arriving in Barcelona was not destroyed by Franco; it was betrayed by his Communist allies. As described by him in Homage to Catalonia, this has all the inevitability of tragedy. That peculiar evil feeling in the air - an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred' that he found on his final visit to Barcelona was precisely that of the miasma of evil and terror dramatised in his favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth. The effect of that experience marked all else he wrote and did until the day he died.

There is an excellent quote in this volume from a letter written by Jennie Lee, the wife of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of British socialized medicine.

. . . up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions - he never had much - in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

Anthony Trollope's Best Novel, "Can You Forgive Her?"

All Trollope aficionados are periodically asked The Big Question: Which of Trollope's books should a newcomer read first? Even with 47 novels to choose from it's difficult to answer that question. I think you have to have read all of Trollope and be re-reading him before you truly appreciate his books. But of course you have to start somewhere.

Can You Forgive Her? should be the place to start. It has everything that makes Trollope so beloved. There's a love story in which a young woman has to choose between marrying the man she loves or the man her family wants her to marry. In fact, there are two of them, with very different women making very different decisions. There's a hunting scene, one which is exciting to read and which throws light on one of the love plots. There is an election story, where the candidate we are following must put a lot of money into the hands of questionable lawyers and innkeepers in order to bribe the voters.

There is not one but two trips to Switzerland. Trollope liked to send his characters abroad to places he had recently visited and use the scenes and atmosphere of those places to enhance his stories. There's a wonderful inheritance plot, always interesting and important in Trollope novels. There's political negotiating for important jobs in a new government, if there is to be a new government. And there are house parties where the characters get to like one another - or in some cases to loathe one another.

Most important in Can You Forgive Her? the reader is introduced to one of literature's most scintillating characters, Lady Glencora Palliser, the richest woman in Britain aside from the Queen, who is in love with one man but must marry another because she is too young to fight the countesses and marquesses who are her guardians and carries too heavy a weight of wealth. What she makes of that marriage and how is, in my opinion, one of the finest stories in Victorian literature.

What about the title? Whom are we being asked to forgive and for what? Ostensibly we are judging Alice Vavasor, who breaks her engagement (a serious sin in itself) with the man she loves and becomes engaged to her cousin because she can't face the boring life she would lead with her beloved in Cambridgeshire, a place Trollope apparently felt was the most cheerless in England. By accepting her cousin's proposal she feels she can be part of his political campaign and have some interest in life aside from housekeeping and babies. And those dreary fens.

But we are aslo asked to judge Lady Glencora who marries a man she doesn't love, a cardinal sin in Trollope. She then obsesses on the possibility of running away with the man she really loves. This is almost beyond possibility in Trollope as in most Victorian novels. Whether she elopes with this other man or not, can the reader ever really forgive her for even thinking of it?

All of these delights make Can You Forgive Her? the ideal Trollope novel for a beginner except for one thing. It is about 1,000 pages long. Perhaps 50 years ago you could hand this to a reader inexperienced in the 19th century novel. But today could you seriously expect someone with no feel for the measured language and slow pace of the book to enjoy it - or even to finish it? Do you think they would forgive you for recommending it?

2012  No 16

This is, according to my records, the seventh time I've read the novel. I've also re-read parts of it many times. It's my favorite Trollope.

Two for Sorrow - the latest Josephine Tey/Archie Penrose mystery

Here I am again grousing about a book I thought I was going to be giving five stars. This third mystery in which the amateur detective is Josephine Tey has a clever and complicated plot. But the book, which is nearly 500 pages long, should have been closer to 300. The author couldn't resist throwing the kitchen sink in there: a plea for prison reform, a description of women's prisons at the turn of the 20th century, a history of "baby farming," and a lengthy and boring subplot in which a character from a previous book tells Josephine that she loves her and Josephine anguishes over how she feels about this woman.

I think the subplot is a failed attempt to round out the character of Tey, which is flat and one dimentional. That is not a complaint. I don't expect my fictional detectives to be real people. Miss Marple is perfect the way she is. The detectives in the Deborah Crombie and Susan Hill mysteries are a surprising exception. There was no need for the boring and ultimately ineffectual lesbian relationship, which slowed down the action annoyingly.

The book begins with Tey starting a new detective novel in which she takes an historical situation and plans to fictionalize it. Two women in 1902 are running a scheme where one of them, a nurse and midwife, runs a home for unwed mothers. When the babies are born she takes money from the young mothers to place the children in homes where they will be welcomed and loved. Unfortunately, instead of adoption it is death that awaits these children. A second woman takes the babies away, kills them, and disposes of the bodies.

Grim as this is the plot is based on a real case and reference is made to another woman who did much the same thing only abandoned the babies rather than killing them. It was called baby farming. As the fictional Tey researches this practice she becomes embroiled in a murder that takes place in the book's present, 1936. The motive seems to be an attempt to keep the murdered woman from telling what she knows about the baby farming case of 30 years before.

Archie Penrose's cousins are busy making sets and costumes and evening dresses for a gala fund-raiser for a nursing school and attached women's club, a club to which the real life Tey belonged. The scramble to get everything done on time, the internal politics of the nursing vs the club factions, the ongoing murder investigation in the middle of this chaos - these are excellently well done and I was engrossed in the story.

But the author kept stopping dead in the water to talk about how a particular woman prison manager allowed female prisoners to have mirrors and photographs in their cells at Holloway Prison. Or to lecture us on how uncivilized hanging was. (It was, actually, but the middle of a fast-moving mystery plot is not the place to discuss it.) The lesbian sub-plot dragged very slowly. I read it carefully because I assumed there was some carefully placed clue there that would lead to the identify of the killer. There wasn't.

So instead of the 5 stars that this book would have earned if a tough editor had forced the author to control herself and focus on the story - the book gets only 2 stars. I am exceedingly disappointed because there is so much potential for this series to become really first rate. I'm putting my hopes on the next volume of Tey/Penrose adventures.

2012  No 15

Believing the Lie

Believing the Lie is the 17th Inspector Lynley mystery and the series is wearing out. I discover I'm no longer interested in Lynley's private life and his skills at solving mysteries, never all that sharp, rely more on Sergeant Havers than ever. Meanwhile, Havers' private life, which I do care about, is not given enough attention. That may change with the next novel as this one leaves us with a cliff hanger.

The set up for Believing the Lie is unrealistic, though I don't really begrudge a mystery writer who reaches for strange situations. All the ordinary ones (like insane serial killers, etc.) have been worn out. In this book a friend of Lynley's boss' boss asks that Lynley be sent to visit him at his estate in Cumbria, undercover, to determine whether his nephew's recent drowning was really accidental as the inquest decided or if he was murdered. The boss, with whom Lynley is having an affair (which really is beyond belief) spends the entire book trying to find out where he is and what he's doing.

There are a dozen little and big mysteries, with family members and spouses and partners discovered to have interesting pasts. The "biggest" mystery, the background of the estate-owner's daughter-in-law, is bizarre. But I guessed it very early in the book. I guessed at a few other things and was wrong. This is a guesswork because there aren't a lot of solid clues.

This book, more than other Elizabeth George mysteries, has some disgusting characters, and the language is, in my opinion, overly offensive and vulgar. There were no likable characters at all. The people one sympathizes with are presented without subtlety. The reader never suspects them of anything nefarious. Some of the descriptions of Lake Windermere and Morecambe Bay are lovely. But when the descriptions of scenery are more gripping that the "suspense" you have a problem.

2012 No 14

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf is a surprisingly popular author considering how difficult her books are to read. She is lauded for her "stream of consciousness" style, and of course she was in at the beginning of that trend and so has historical importance. But just how meaningful is that technique now? What do her books have to say that we still in the 21st century want to hear?

I'm afraid my answer is, not much, though one does come away from To the Lighthouse with a warm picture of life in the Ramsay household summer house in the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Actually, when they begin building fortifications on the beach and the sound of the guns in France can be heard from the house during World War I, you realize the author has lost her focus a bit and is describing, as she has been doing all along, the house in Cornwall where the Stephen family summered when Virginia was a girl. But wherever the house is located it is really the heart of the beautiful Mrs Ramsay, who makes the house come alive with her family and the artists and academics invited to visit there.

Two extended scenes demonstrate what is best about the novel. The first is a dinner party in which Mrs Ramsay's thoughts wander about as she thinks about not having the money to repair the greenhouse, worries about her husband being annoyed because he isn't accorded the attention his vanity requires, watches for a young couple to come back from the beach where she has sent them hoping the young man will propose, considers the feelings of an old man who is a frequent guest and who annoys her husband by asking for a second bowl of soup. It's a beautiful scene which takes place in 1910, before electricity has arrived on the island, and at a time when people still dressed for dinner. The party is reflected in the windows of the room and the description of the entire affair is beautifully done. Difficult to read but worth the work.

The second passage, written in a more straightforward style, is seen partly through the eyes of an old woman who is paid by the family to clean the house during the winter. We learn in a startling sentence that Mrs Ramsay has died. The family does not return to the house for many years. Despite the work of the cleaning woman the house deteriorates, plaster falls, rats inhabit the attic, books molder, swallows nest in the drawing room, and the garden, which Mrs Ramsay loved, goes to ruin with carnations among the cabbages and poppies in with the roses. The description of the deterioration is stunning.

And the lighthouse? The book begins with the child, James, wanted to sail to the lighthouse the next day but his father tells him it will not be possible because of the weather. Indeed, the visit is not made at that time. But when the family returns to the house after an absence of 10 years, two of the children go to the lighthouse with their father and they connect with him, perhaps for the first time, as he praises his son's sailing skill.

The only character besides Mrs Ramsay that I was sympathetic with and really understood was Lily Briscoe, a painter, who is insecure about her work in 1910 because she is criticized by a fellow visitor because her work is not in the acceptable style. And besides, he says, women can't paint or write.

Ten years later Lily completes a painting she had begun on the previous visit 10 years earlier just as the family sailing expedition reaches the lighthouse. What does that signify? I haven't a clue. But I was gratified that Lily was now able to paint as she liked without concerning herself with what other people would think about her work.

Note, I began re-reading this book back in October as it was the November choice for the 22nd Ave Book Club. I didn't get around to finishing it until mid-January. As I've implied, it's not a page-turner.

2012  No 13

Mid-Winter Cleaning Day

Today our house was "deep cleaned." All the heavy furniture was moved, the walls were dusted, ledges above doors and windows cleaned, and Mary's Library was straightened and reorganized.

Here's what it looked like when the cleaners started.

And here's what it looked like when they were done. Every book was taken from the shelf and dusted. I'm extremely grateful to Beverly and Rick for doing this for me.

View from my front porch

Wonderstruck - My Newberry Pick

Wonderstruck is THE children's book of 2011. When I encountered it I quit reading children's books in my project to predict the Newbery winner. This is it.

Half of the book is a normal story, simply but elegantly written, that tells about a young man who has hearing difficulties. The other half is a graphic novel about a deaf girl. Both are engrossing.

And at the end of the book the two stories converge and each completes the plot of the other. It's brilliant and it's a winner.

2012 No 12