MarysLibrary

Summer Visits by Margery Sharp

The protagonist of Margery Sharp's 1977 novel, Summer Visits, is Cotton Hall, an old country house in East Anglia, modernized in the mid-19th century in the worst possible manner (think Viollet-le-Duc) and visited over the years by members of the Braithwaite family and eventually by others. The plot, which vastly overshadows character development or any of the other things we normally look for in a novel, is carefully braided with twists and turns that keep us hoping for the one change we would like to see, but witholding it from us until the very end. I don't think I'm giving away anything if I say this novel has a satisfactory ending. The fun is in how we get there.

The story begins in the 1850s when John Henry Braithwaite, a Lancashire manufacturer, buys the old house from the family that had owned it for 200 years. The old man's wife is dead and his two sons, Henry and George, have gone to university and are now respectively a barrister and soliciter. Of his two daughters, Charlotte and Flora, the former is now married and the latter, a plain, shy girl, still resident at Cotton Hall.

John Henry has made a will in which he leaves the house to his eldest son, Henry, and divides his other property, of which there is a great deal, among the four children. But that is about to change. The old man has hired Hilda, the daughter of his gardener, to be a laundry maid, then house-maid, then parlor-maid, and eventually mistress. Fortunately she and Flora get along very well and Hilda becomes an exceptionally competent housekeeper.

The fun begins when the ageing but innocent Flora finds herself pregnant by a fly-by-night artist and turns to Hilda for help. They work out a plan whereby Flora hides her condition with her voluminous crinolines and Hilda, who is pretty hefty to start with, tells John Henry she is going to have his child. The old man is delighted but the child is a daughter (named Margaret) so he marries Hilda hoping for another son.

Time goes by and there is no sign of another child until a local lad, Sergeant Butley, returns from the Crimea. Shortly after he leaves again Hilda announces she is going to have a child, and a child she has, this time a boy, named Benjamin by his proud "father." No one but Hilda and Flora knows the actual parentage of these children. Flora's siblings and their families don't like all this but when John Henry announces he has changed his will and left everything to this new son they are so angry they cease coming to Cotton Hall for their traditional month-long visit every summer.

The twisted root, as Sharp calls it, is increasingly entangled as the years go by and the old man dies, Benjamin, who has inherited the house, deeds it to Flora, who invites Anglican gentlewomen of small means to live there in a quasi-religious community. There are numerous chances for the few characters who know the real history of the family to set things right, but somehow the chances pass by and the house continues in the hands of people other than the rightful heirs, Henry Braithwaite, his son, and his grandson.

I said the ending is satisfactory, but really the entire novel is satisfactory, gratifying, delightful. Sharp, who wrote a number of very popular children's books, wrote 28 adult novels, all of which appear to be out print. However, as she is not "trendy" or well known except among a few of us who read off the beaten path, some of her books are available at abe.com for reasonable prices.

 

... trying to find you

 

Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
        --HAFIZ of Persia, poet

 

Hint for Birthday Present

I need this. I must have this. I cannot live without it. Go here to learn about it (or to buy it.) The creator has lots of other treasures here.

Thanks to Kilian for this lead.

 

Restless

Now and again I become dissatisfied with what I'm reading, the books I've borrowed from the library, the books piled next to my chair. Nothing suits. In these cases there are usually a couple of book not yet published that are just the thing. But the grass is always greener on the other side of the publication date.

In times like this I tend to reach out and make a virtual sweep of everything on the table and start from scratch. Of all the books in the house, which would I most like to read? Perhaps because I'm supposed to be reading it, Love in the Time of Cholera, which is September's 22nd Avenue Book Club selection, would be a chore (even though I was enchanted by it a couple of weeks ago.) I'd like to read a few chapters of Phineas Finn, which my online Trollope group is reading, but I've learned that it's fatal to get too far ahead of the schedule.

The Barbara Pym spin-off from the Trollope group is reading Less than Angels, which, again, I can't read more of because I'll get too far ahead of the group.

This attitude usually means there's something I want to read but don't think I should. Something like the first volume in Churchill's six-volume history of World War Two, a book that would set me off on three months and more than 3,000 pages of reading. Best not get started on that.

Or Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, which I want to read before the TV film arrives on these shores. But I've heard such negative things about the books. Perhaps I should go back to Dance to the Music of Time and finish all twelve volumes. Or perhaps I should not.

Today's dilemma has been solved by my suddenly remembering that a new book arrived yesterday. I put it away to be read in its turn, but I'm not going to wait. It's The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach. Hetty Green was from New Bedford and she inherited great wealth from her family, which made its money from its whaling fleet. She took her inheritance and made it into an enormous fortune by investing in real estate and railroads and lending money, at one time financing a crisis in New York City.

Rumors about Hetty abound - she lived only on oatmeal heated on the stove in the office in her bank where she did all her financial dealings. She never washed her hands. She once spent all night searching her carriage for a 2 cent stamp. Are these stories to be believed? I'm about to find out the real truth about The Witch of Wall Street.

Joseph Anton

Last week's New Yorker magazine has a splendid piece by Salman Rushdie called The Disappeared: Learning to Live with the Fatwa, an excerpt from his new memoir, Joseph Anton. The title comes from the pseudonym Rushdie used while he was in hiding because of threats on his life.

Not that the threats have gone away. In fact, the Iranian price on his head has recently been raised from $2.8 million to $3.3 million. In the New Yorker article Rushdie tells about the first days and years after the fatwa calling for his murder and his sometimes awkward but ultimately grateful relationship with the police who were assigned to protect him.

He tells how he chose the pseudonym. He wanted to use the names of his favorite authors, but somehow Vladimir Joyce and Franz Sterne didn't sound just right. So he used Joseph Conrad's and Anton Chekov's first names to come up with something sounding realist. When his police protectors began calling him "Joe," which was almost inevitable, for reasons he is unable to articulate he was really annoyed. It is in this unreal world that verges on magic realism that Rushdie lived for many years.

As a novelist, Rushdie has the skills to describe those first days on the run, leaving his house one morning to make a TV appearance and not returning to that house again for three years. Hiding in his wife's basement apartment/office. Saying good-bye to his son and arranging to call him every evening at 7 PM.

I think it was being separated from his nine-year-old son, Zafar, that most bothered Rushdie at first. After a time the police bodyguards arranged for them to meet on a police soccer ground where they could play ball and at a fair. When Zafar said he wanted a stuffed toy at one of the booths one of the bodyguards, probably realizing Rushdie didn't know one end of a gun from another, offered to try to get the toy - and pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, just like that he won it. The vendor was slack-jawed.

So the article and I am quite certain the book, which was released a week, are entertaining, being far enough away from those horrifying days when Rushdie's life was in imminent danger and he didn't know whether his family was targeted or not. He is grateful to his friends, who provided places for him to stay for a day or two as he moved about. His former agent was the most helpful - she phoned him to offer him her cottage in Wales, a place no one would expect him to be as the two were thought to have had a falling out. He eventually bought his own cottage and lived there as Joseph Anton for many years.

All of which is a preface to my usual lecture on the importance of free speech. When free speech is threatened our very lives are threatened. When publishers, bookstores, libraries back down in the face of threats from whatever quarter, their speech is censored as is the speech of the author of the book that they do not publish, or sell, or provide to the public on their shelves. The free speech of all of us is endangered.

And free speech is the essence of freedom. No one is truly free without it.

A higher value on ourselves ...

 

She sometimes felt . . . that she was worthy of a more gracious setting, but then there are few of us who do not occasionally set a higher value on ourselves than Fate has done.

       -- Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy

Over the years I've often encountered the title, The Constant Nymph, and I suppose I should have read the book before now because that's a really lovely title and the cover of the Virago Modern Classics is a dreamy portrait of Ophelia, another constant nymph. When it was published in 1924 it was tremendously popular, everybody in England and America apparently read it, and then talked about it. The title did not die away and I've seen it mentioned in memoirs, by characters in novels, and recently in Barbara Pym's 1943 journal, where she mentions that she is reading the book while waiting to be accepted by the WRNS.

Perhaps I expected too much from this seemingly ever-popular book. The story is simple. Albert Sanger, an English composer who lives, mostly, in a chalet in Austria, has many children (I lost count) by various wives. By the time he dies, Tessa, 15, the most sensitive of these out-of-control children has fallen in love with a man 20 years her senior, another British composer, Lewis Dodds, who also lives a Bohemian life and shows no courtesy to anyone.

Tess and two or three of her siblings are the children of an English woman, Ellen Churchill, and the niece of that woman decides to go to Austria and rescue the children. Florence, an unmarried woman who has been running her father's house at a college in one of the universities, finds the whole Bohemian scene delightful, falls in love with Lewis Dodds, and before anybody can do anything about it, marries him.

This is not a match made in heaven, especially considering the undying love of Tessa for Florence's husband. It becomes increasingly obvious that he loves her as well. Trying to cope with a basically uncivilized man and recognizing the ardent love between him and Tessa, Florence becomes increasingly shrill. The obvious solution: send Tessa (and her siblings) off to boarding school. Not b..... likely!

So what was wrong with the book that I wasn't as excited about it as some millions of readers seem to have been over the years? The characters were far from realistic. Their overblown emotions were silly rather than tragic. The plot was as thin as it could possibly be and still hold together. The sub-plots were marginally better but still hadn't much to say to me. The many discussions of music were shallow. And the book had no message. I know, if you want to send a message, call Western Union -- but I expected the book to have something to say about the need of an artistic nature to be free or the needs of the creative spirit. Nothing. 

Margaret Kennedy is known as well for her earlier novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, which I have not read. She went on to write quite a few popular novels after The Constant Nymph.

 

To observe their joys and sorrows ...

 

It seemed . . . so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people - to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or a play.

    Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

Winnie the Pooh

Our reaction to a book sometimes depends on where we are when we read it and what the book looks like or who gave it to us. I have always loved Pooh and his friends and I'm charmed by the stories in this little book. I especially admire Eyeore, who when Pooh brings him an empty honey pot and Piglet brings him the rags of his broken baloon - makes the most of it. He is delighted to have a pot to hold things and something to put in his pot.

Like most children's books this one is didactic and I'm sure A A Milne wanted his young readers to take away some messages from these tales. But Eyeore's existential acceptance of the broken and empty birthday presents and his making the most of them makes a touching story even without the overtones of moral instruction.

I've read the book a few times over the years but my most recent reading was last week when I was in the hospital, just starting to feel pretty good, and WITHOUT A SINGLE BOOK. Just as the situation was becoming dire, my friend, Elaine, arrived to visit and she brought this book with her to lend to me. I was the a perfect book at the a perfect time. I read it slowly over the next couple of days. I looked closely at the pictures. I admired Pooh's idea to turn Christopher Robin's umbrella upside down to use as a boat to rescue Piglet. I thought Kanga showed great wisdom and restraint when Rabbit had encouraged the other animals to replace Roo with Piglet.

There are reasons some books become classics and are still being read 100 years after they are first published. Those are some of the reasons Winnie-the-Pooh will never die. Our great-grandchildren may be reading the book in hologram format or some other super technology we haven't even thought of yet. But the stories here of animals helping their friends, looking for adventures, and solving problems are truly classic.

A Trip to the Hospital

Busy week with lots of new experiences, as trips to the hospital tend to provide. I've acquired a new vocabulary: Q waves, troponin levels, stent, LAD. A new diet: low fat, low salt. And new medications: aspirin, a Beta blocker, an ACE inhibitor, and nitroglycerin. Yup, I had a heart attack.

When I woke at midnight with heavy pressure on my chest I thought: the cat. It must be the cat sitting on top of me. But it wasn't heavy enough and there was no purring going on.

It's interesting how we react to these things. My first thought was to brush my teeth. I rattled around a bit and looked online at the Mayo Clinic site for the symptoms of a heart attack. (Hint, if you find yourself looking up heart attack symptoms at 12:15 AM, you are probably having a heart attack.) Eventually I woke Wilhelm who drove me to the emergency room. Took us 4 minutes to get to the hospital.

Though my initial EKG was uninteresting they put me in a bed anyhow, and started treating me for nausea. For six hours I took up an ER bed while they gave me aspirin, Maalox, and nitroglycerin.

After all that slow-motion low-level treatment things suddenly took off when they gave me a second EKG and the second set of blood tests came back. Between the time Dr Haggerty said to me, "You are having a heart attack" and when Dr Hostetler began a cardiac catheterization was less than 20 minutes. I didn't have the hiccups after all.

Thursday I was pretty sick, until a nurse named Ken found somethng to get rid of my nitro headache.  Nurses are incredibly important when you're in a hospital bed. Thursday night I got less than no sleep. It's a cliche that they wake you up every hour to ask if you're sleeping ok. And I do understand that they have to take your blood pressure and draw blood, and that they might want another EKG. But the need to sign Medicare papers at 2 AM escapes me.

Friday morning The Fair Elaine came to visit me! She brought a tiny antique bottle wrapped at the neck with a little bit of lace and with some alyssum from her garden -- the lovliest and most appreciated flowers I've ever been given. And more important, she had picked out a book for me. Winnie the Pooh.

I'm not sure she (and her mom and baby brother, whom I am always tempted to call Kanga and Baby Roo) realized the situation I was facing. Finally feeling well and nothing to read except those afore-mentioned Medicare forms. Not a book in sight. The Cardio ward (everybody in the hospital abbreviates everything - cardio, cath, nitro, BP) does not have a library, more's the pity.

Four days in Bed 1, Room 603, Ward 6 North, Providence Sacred Heart Hospital. And now I'm home, surrounded by books, required to take my blood pressure every day, and on a slowly building exercise program: three walks a day, starting with three minutes each, adding a minute every day. And a whole new subject, heart health, to read about. Book recommendations gratefully accepted.