MarysLibrary

A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 by George Orwell

Time ran out on George Orwell's A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, Volume 12 in the 20-volume complete works edited by Peter Davison. I borrowed it on Interlibrary Loan (ILL) from the Spokane Public Library (who got it from South Dakota State University) and I still had about 200 pages to read when the book was due. A heartfelt plea to the circulation librarian to let me keep it for a few more days went unrewarded.

 But Wilhelm pointed out that it might be time for a break. I had been grousing for two weeks about Orwell and his ridiculous, wish-fulfilment predictions about how World War Two would turn out (there must be a revolution in England for us to win the war, everyone in England but the "working man" is in favor of capitulation to the Nazis, etc.) Add to that the problem that in a volume of truly complete works one reads the same ideas and sometimes the very same words over and over in journals, letters, essays, and books and you get exasperation with a soupson of boredom.

I was very interested and not the least bit weary of reading Orwell's personal journal, which was mainly about what fence he repaired on his little farm, what he planted, what in his garden had made it over the winter (not much), how many eggs his hens were laying, and how much he was selling his eggs for (3 shillings 6 pence for a score in the fall of 1940.) It was when I got to the third iteration of his lectures to the Home Guard on how to secure an urban street, build a barricade (use a lot of sand bags), and otherwise train for a Nazi invasion that boredom began to take over.

The title comes from, I think, a letter in which he talks about how he had long been a pacifist but when the war broke out he realized he was a patriot after all. Orwell's prose is always exceedingly clear and his book, movie, and drama reviews are superb whether you agree with them or not. I should not be complaining about having to read Orwell. So I'll take a little break here before I tackle the next book. And although I didn't finish this one, I'm going to count it as "read." I'll borrow it again on ILL one day and finish it.

2012  No 65 

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

"How I shrieked!" 

Nancy Mitford said that often, according to her sister, Jessica, who wrote the introduction to this new Vintage trade paperback of The Pursuit of Love. And how I shrieked at this hilarious novel. 

How did I get to this stage of my life never having read Nancy Mitford's novels? Last month I discovered the world of Georgette Heyer and now this. What else is out there that I don't know about?

 The world of the Mitfords is one of money, blood, snobbery, wit, beautiful clothes and rich furs, eccentricity, and a special language that the six Mitford girls shared. Only Deborah Mitford is left, now the dowager duchess of Devonshire, but when she and Diana and Jessica and Nancy were in their prime they had the world on a string.

Not all this ended happily, however, with one sister, Diana, incarcerated during World War II because her husband was Oswald Mosley, the head of England's Nazi Blackshirts, and another sister, Unity Valkyrie Mitford, enamored of the Germans and Hitler in particular, tried to kill herself when the war began and had to be nursed for the remainder of her life.

Nancy escaped this misery and used the most engaging parts of her family background to write eight novels and numerous and highly-regarded nonfiction books. But it is her light, witty, autobiographical novels that she is best known for.

The story? The growing up of the family of "Uncle Matthew," based closely on her father, the 2nd baron Riddlesdale. The marriages of "Linda," the composit character of Nancy, Diana, and Deborah. And Linda's flashing affair with a rich and cultured Frenchman. Filled with classic scenes and inimitable characters, this is a novel that should be on everyone's top 100 novels. You, too, will shriek with laughter.

2012  No 65

No Mark Upon Her by Deborah Crombie

No Mark Upon Her is Deborah Crombie's 14th Kincaid and Duncan mystery. Around the 8th or 9th book in this series I started looking for decline. Nobody, it seemed, could keep up the quality of these mysteries that long. But Crombie did. And still does. Each new novel is as good as the last.

One of the things that keeps these books so lively is the ongoing story of Gemma Jones, a single mother who starts out in the first book (A Share in Death, 1993) as Duncan Kincaid's detective sergeant. She struggles throughout the series to be taken seriously as a police officer, to take care of her son, and to analyse her feelings for her partner and Gemma has come a long way by this latest book. This is a series that relies a good deal on the private lives of the detectives and should be read in order.

In No Mark Upon Her, the setting is Henley and the story includes a number of characters who are elite rowers. The descriptions are not what we usually appreciate most in murder mysteries, but the picture Crombie draws of the town and the river and the quiet and intensity of rowing are exceptionally well done in this book.

The story is not overly complicated. Rebecca Meredith is an ambitious, abrasive, and above average detective chief inspector and an Olympic hopeful. When she drowns one evening when training on the river, it is agreed that she was too skilled a rower to have had a fatal accident. And there are plenty of suspects for her murder, including one of the search and rescue workers, her ex-husband, and a retired police officer.

Crombie makes her stories richer by including information about the area or subjects in her books and in this case we learn a bit about search and rescue and the faithful dogs who are the heart of it. We get to know a bit about rowing, it's rich history in Henley, and the rigors of training to make the Olympic team. And for those of us who have been reading the books in order, the developments in Kinkaid and Jones' private life are gratifying.

I've just requested the first of the series from the library as I'm going to have to re-read them while I wait for the 15th book, which won't be out for a year or more.

2012  No 64

Clover Adams by Natalie Dykstra

Clover Adams is best known because of the statue her husband, Henry Adams (author of Mont St Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams), commissioned from Auguste St Gaudens after her death. Commonly called "Grief," but actually untitled, it marks the graves of husband and wife in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC.

All Henry Adams said to St Gaudens was that he wanted a monument that portrayed grief combined with the serenity seen in statues of Buddha. He then went off on a 30,000 mile round-the-world trip in hopes of recovering from his paralyzing grief at Clover's suicide.

Clover was born in 1843 and died just three years before Louisa May Alcott. She was part of that late 19th century American cadre that included Henry James, H H Richardson, John Hay, and James G Blaine. She was not a beautiful woman but she was clever, well educated (she went to the Agassi school in Boston where she learned Latin and Greek), and sharp-tongued. She married at the age of 28, which was very late for those days, and she and Henry were very happy for many years.

She was a woman who needed a job to do living in a time when women were not always allowed to do anything meaningful. She was a talented amateur interior decorator, making a home for herself and Henry wherever they lived. And she was creative and not constrained by tradition.

Athletic but petite, at five feet two inches in height, and her husband just an inch or so taller, Clover had the legs of all chairs and sofas shortened to better fit their personal proportions. When offered a seat, much taller guests, including the six-foot-two Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, later a Supreme Court justice, would precipitously drop onto the low seating.

In the last few years of her life Clover bought a camera and took carefully posed pictures of her friends and of landscapes. Her photo of the historian George Bancroft was so exceptional John Hay suggested it be used for the cover of Century magazine. But Henry would not allow it. He did not want his wife to become known for any undertaking outside of her household; he was fervently against giving women the vote and more conservative than one would expect from a man of his time.

Clover suffered from depression all her life, and she did not recover from the loss of friends and family. Her mother died young of tuberculosis, her aunt killed herself, and when her father died she was not to be consoled. After her death her sister also killed herself and her brother tried to do so. Her grandmother had deserted her family and lived as a recluse leaving her husband and five children to fend for themselves without a wife and mother. Today this family tendency to depression would be recognized and treatable but in the 19th century not only was there no effective treatment, it would be social suicide to admit to mental illness. As Natalie Dykstra says in her subtitle, Clover did, indeed, live A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life.

2012  No 63

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy, I predict, will be a best seller. First, it's based on the Jane Eyre story and a plot better than that has seldom been devised. It has everything that enhances such a novel - an engaging heroine, a wicked step-mother (step-aunt), a Dotheboys Hall for girls, a dashing hero with a dark secret and all the rest.

The story takes place in the 50s and 60s and it has been moved about a bit. Gemma was born in Edingurgh of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father and she spent her first three years there among the volcanos and hot springs and within sight and smell of the sea. When both parents die her uncle takes her to live with his family but when he dies she is treated cruelly by the rest of the family until she is sent to a dreadful school where she is treated as a servant.

At school she has a friend, much like Jane Eyre's and it is because of the trials of that girl and her health problems that there is some softening at the school and Gemma is able to get an education. But shortly before she is to take her exams to be admitted to university, the school goes bankrupt and she takes a job as an au pair in the Orkneys.

Mr Rochester is Mr Sinclair, a London banker. Many of the other Bronte plot points are used, mutatis mutandis - the beautiful young woman who makes a play for Mr Sinclair, the gypsy fortune teller, the blasted tree, the interrupted wedding, the wandering and rescue, and the engagement to a man who is not the right one for her.

I had not encountered Margot Livesey before and I wonder why because she writes very well, adapts her story very cleverly, and creates in Gemma a character similar to Jane but different in important ways that make her a 20th century woman. I really loved this novel and recommend it highly to readers of food women's fiction.

2012  No 62

Is it time for the Banned Books List to be retired?

National Library Week has rolled around again and the Americal Library Association has once again announced the list of books that people have requested be removed from children's classrooms and juvenile collections in school and public libraries. They call them "banned books" and every year they make the list the heart of National Library Week.

Is it time to drop the annual banned books list? Obviously I wouldn't be asking the question unless I thought the answer was yes, the list has outlived its usefulness. Here is the 2011 top ten list from PW.

Most of these books are objected to primarily because they contain explicit sexuality and foul language but a few mention the real objection to most of them: unsuited to age group. And this is often an entirely valid objection.

I read with a four year old every Wednesday morning and she is omniverous. Her mother and I are always looking for new books for her. I picked up a book last week, a wonderful book, much loved by American children (and adults.) But it starts out on page one with a man grabbing an axe with the intention of killing a baby pig because he is the runt of the litter. It's saturated with death and the threat of death. It's simply not a good book to read to a four-year-old. It's inappropriate for children like my friend who is not yet able to understand and cope with so much death. The book is Charlotte's Web.

So her mother and I have banned the book from the child's library. For now. And I don't think we need to turn ourselves in to the ALA police and plead guilty to banning the book. Parents are entitled to decide what their children read and when.

Back in 2008 a Spokane author, Sherry Jones, had written a book, The Jewel of Medina, that was accepted by Random House, who gave her a contract for $100,000 and an option on her second novel. They were all set to publish, the book was printed and ready for release, when Random House suddenly pulled it. The novel was sympathetic to the main character, one of Muhammad's wives, and not critical of Islam in any way. But although there were no threats from Muslims Random House chose not to publish because of fear of violence from Muslims who might object to the subject matter.

THAT is what a real banned book looks like.

The Deadly Dinner Party and The Viral Storm

Jonathan A Edlow follows in the footsteps of Berton Roeuche (known as Crouton Ricochet in the parodies) and his Annals of Medicine in the New Yorker magazine, telling us in The Deadly Dinner Party and Other Medical Detective Stories, about puzzling illnesses and outbreaks that baffled the doctors trying to diagnose them and sometimes even The Centers for Disease Control.

In the dinner of the title only three of the people who attended got sick, but those three got very sick indeed. As in a good murder mystery with this plot (Dorothy L Sayers' Strong Poison comes to mind) everyone seemed to have eaten everything. The host was an exceptionally good cook. Could it have been one of the more exotic ingredients that caused the trouble?

In chapters titles like The Baby and the Bathwater, An Airtight Case, A Study in Scarlet, and The Case of the Unhealthy Health Food, Edlow takes us through the process of figuring out what's wrong with a patient, how he or she came to be in that condition, and who else might be in danger. Fascinating.

2011  No 201

The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age by Nathan Wolfe is beyond fascinating. The emerging diseases he describes and the intense research he and his colleagues are doing to identify them and do something before they become pandemic are truly remarkable. This is a brilliant man with a compelling story to tell.

Unfortunately, the author's self-regard drips off the pages. The photos he includes are sometimes wildly off topic and the name-dropping, however valid - I mean, he does know these famous medical figures - is tiresome. Nonetheless the book is necessary reading for those of us who follow infectious diseases and public health developments.

2011  No 202

Is He Popenjoy? by Anthony Trollope

It is to be regretted that Anthony Trollope, following the fad of his day, gave so many of his characters satirical names. Some of them are amusing, like Mr Slope, the slippery chaplain of Bishop Proudie. And the Duke of Omnium with his seat at Gatherum Castle. The lawyer Chaffenbrass and the law firm of Slow and Bideawhile.

But unfortunately in the case of Is He Popenjoy? he gave one of these silly names to a major character, Lord Popenjoy, which is the courtesy title of the son of the Marquis of Brotherton. The reader infers this will be a humorous novel which is emphatically not the case.

The background is a bit complex. The marquis is an irresponsible man with a mean streak who has decamped to Italy (always in Trollope novels a location of fecklessness and immoral living.) His brother, Lord George Germain, lives at and manages the family estate, Manor Cross, without enough money to run it properly. With him are his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Brotherton, and his three sisters. As with so many Trollope men, it seems obvious to all that he must marry money.

And money there is aplenty in the deanery of Brotherton Cathedral. The dean's daughter, Mary Lovelace, is much younger than Lord George and is not in love with him but the dean encourages her to marry him. The son of a man who owned a stable, the dean has risen to almost unimaginable heights in his profession and by marrying the daughter of a wealthy tallow chandler has become extremely wealthy. He is, in effect, buying a title for his grandson: Lord Popenjoy and eventually Marquis of Brotherton.

Lord George writes to tell his brother he has married and the response is distressing. The marquis evicts Lord George, Lady George (Mary Lovelace as was), the dowager duchess, and the three sisters. He is about to marry himself and will be bringing his wife back to England and he needs the house. He recommends that his family move away from Brotherton. Far away.

But George's sister, Sarah, has more backbone than to let her brother dictate where the family lives. Her mother has a dower house where she is entitled to live and Sarah decides the sisters and their mother should move there. The dean has written into Mary's marriage contract that she and Lord George will live in London for six months of the year and has provided a house and furnished it for them, and so it is to London that Lord George and his wife move.

Brotherton arrives at Manor Cross accompanied by a wife and a year-old child. But he had written only a few weeks before that he was about to be married. The immediate question is obvious: is the child really Popenjoy? The dean, dragging Lord George along, instigates an investigation into the purported marriage of Brotherton and the birth of this child. Brotherton is infuriated. More complications ensue.

The real theme of this novel is the character development of Mary. Innocently maneuvered into a marriage she didn't really choose she is too young and weak to say no when Sarah and her other sisters-in-law tell her what to do, what to wear, whom to be friends with, how to spend her time (sewing clothes for the poor.) She is grateful when the time comes to move to London where she will be mistress of her own house and she can choose her own friends. She meets a charming young officer with whom she enjoys playing card games and this makes her husband nervous. But he has his own secrets and when Mary discovers whom he has been visiting she becomes a wiser woman.

A fine novel with a great many interesting characters and a plot to chew on. Five stars.

2012  No 61

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

Publisher's Weekly calls this fine biography of Louisa May Alcott by Harriet Reisen the first complete biography of the author, whose books have thrilled so many American girls. Some of us re-read Little Women and it's follow-on books every couple of years. The story of Marmee and the four March girls is the quintessential children's book.

But, as the author says, Alcott's life was no children's book. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was we are told exceedingly charming and he was an important figure among the Transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts. But his eccentricities, verging on insanity, meant his family moved 30 times before Louisa was 20 years old, often because they couldn't pay the rent. He and his friends attempted to create utopian farms, but it was his wife, Abigail, who with her four girls, did most of the work. They were forbidden to eat meat, milk, eggs, cheese or to wear wool or silk because to do so was to "rape" the sheep and the cows and the silkworms. The resulting years of hunger and malnutrition were to haunt Louisa when she was older.

Even as a girl, Louisa considered herself "the golden goose" who provided for the family by writing thrilling tales for popular magazines. A Long Fatal Love Chase is a typical title, a novel that has now been published under the author's real name. It was only when Louisa agreed to write a children's book, something she did not want to do, that Little Women provided the steady and eventually enormous income that made it possible for Louisa to provide for her mother and sisters and father.

It has long been thought that Louisa suffered from mercury poisoning from Calomel, which was prescribed for her when she had typhoid while nursing in Georgetown, DC, during the Civil War. Modern medical thought dismisses mercury as she showed none of the symptoms of mercury poisoning. It is now thought, judging from letters and journals and comments of friends that she suffered from lupus. One hint is a painting done of her shortly after her recovery in which she is shown with the famous butterfly rash on her face that is one of the first signs of lupus. It's impossible to know now what her health problem was but this diagnosis fits better the course of her disease.

Louisa loved Europe and I think might have liked to have lived there but she eventually came home to Concord and Boston where she nursed her sick relatives: her sister (known as Beth in the book), her mother, her father, her niece, her nephews. But at the end of her own life, Louisa died alone in a nursing home that she had helped to finance. She died two days after her father. 

2012  No 60

Lamentations

In the Christian tradition, the Old Testament Book of Lamentations is commonly read on Tenebrae, which was yesterday. So I've been reading the book the last few days. It's short so it can be read in one gulp and re-read an hour later, which is what I did.

 Written in 586 BC by the prophet Jeremiah, the book laments the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and suggests the Babylonian exile. It consists of five poems and 1) describes a weeping widow, 2) attributes the destruction to the city's sins, 3) talks of hope, 4) again laments and blames the city's sin, and 5) finally asks that God remove the curse on the city if the people repent.

My notes also say the first of the four poems are acrostics, but I think you need to know Hebrew to understand that structure. It is said to fulfill the prophesies in Deuteronomy.

The language of the book, in the King James version, is beautiful and evocative:

The Lord hath trodden under foot all my mighty men in the midst of me: he hath called an assembly against me to crush my young men: the Lord hath trodden the virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a winepress.
For these things I weep

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning

The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning. The crown is fallen from our head

2012  No 59