I've decided to repost my book review of Andrea Barrett's Archangel, which originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books five years ago. This collection came to mind when my colleagues and I at the bookstore decided to list our ten or twelve most favorite books. Archangel impacted me profoundly, and yet we never carry more than one or two copies in the store at a time. How it managed to slip through the cracks is a mystery to me. Only Andrea Barrett could have written these stories - and in my opinion, they are among her finest.
The five stories composing Andrea Barrett’s stunning collection,
Archangel, are set in different periods
of scientific breakthrough. In a previous collection, Ship Fever, for which she won the National Book Award, Barrett wrote
about the wonders of science. But these stories are considerably longer and go
further, often focusing on the clash between scientific discoveries and old
worldviews, as well as the tensions between colleagues and their protégées. An epigraph
from the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson explains her concept perfectly: “We
cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that
they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old.”
Barrett’s characters devote their lives to scientific research.
They are methodical, thoughtful and hard working. But new findings stand to undermine
their efforts. This, Barrett seems to suggest, is intrinsic to the scientific
process, and although it is often painful, a rich sense of inner life, as well
as connectedness, prevails.
The cross-pollination between her stories underscores the point.
In the first story, “The Investigators,” we meet Constantine Boyd, who during
the summer of 1908 works on his uncle’s farm in Hammondsport, N.Y., and
witnesses the flight of the biplane June Bug. We encounter him again in the
final story, “Archangel,” set in northern Russia, where he meets Eudora
MacEachern, an X-ray technician. Readers may remember Eudora from Barrett’s
2007 novel, The Air We Breathe.
Barrett also gives us a legacy passed from one scientist to
another. Phoebe Wells Cornelius, the protagonist in “The Ether of Space,” is
the mother of Sam Cornelius, the protagonist in “The Particles.” His mentor
Axel reminds Sam of his scientific pedigree, from teacher to student, which
goes back to the naturalist Louis Agassiz. Then Agassiz crops up again in “The
Island,” where he is the hero of protagonist Henrietta Atkins.
Many stories concern the human yearning to see a divine hand
in the natural order of the world — and the painful difficulty of relinquishing
this notion. “The Ether of Space” is set in 1920. Here a young widow, Phoebe
Wells Cornelius, attends a lecture by Sir Oliver Lodge, who notwithstanding
Einstein’s theory of relativity, hypothesizes that the ether is a universal
link between different states of consciousness. Phoebe is a scientist, torn
between the findings in her own work and the sentiments in Lodge’s lecture. In
spite of herself, she longs to feel that her dead husband is somewhere in the
ether “hovering, just out of sight, in some gaseous form.”
Barrett explores a similar tension between the science we
once believed and new advances that overthrow them in “The Island.” Professor Louis
Agassiz explains that “Nature is the work of thought,” and that in studying
natural objects, “we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading his
conceptions, interpreting a system that is his and not ours.” Agassiz concedes
that Darwin is “an important British naturalist,” but thinks it’s a shame that
he has thrown away his standing “to chase such a wrongheaded theory” as the
theory of evolution.
Meanwhile, his protégé Henrietta Atkins comes to think
differently. Attending his course on Penikese Island, she befriends another
student, who lends her Darwin’s books. Henrietta struggles with her realization
that evolution has nothing to do with divine plan. On a particular expedition,
as students row through a shoal of jellyfish, she thrusts her hand into the
water and is badly stung. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the initial effect of
her struggle to assimilate Darwin’s theory. It is very painful, but the pain
isn’t lasting.
But my favorite story in the collection is “The Particles,”
set in 1939 at the beginning of World War II. Geneticist Sam Cornelius escapes
from a torpedoed British ship and is picked up by another vessel on which he
confronts a rival who is also a fellow student of his mentor. Before the war
interrupted their lives, they had participated at a scientific conference in Edinburgh
(all based, by the way, on historical events). Like his mother Phoebe, from “The
Ether of Space,” Sam feels underappreciated and misconstrued. His rival has publicly attacked Sam’s presentation in Edinburgh. The story explores the
relationship between student and mentor and “what happens when the passion
required to define a new set of ideals went too far” against the backdrop of war.
Barrett deftly slows down to describe scenes of chaos on board the ship. When
she picks up the pace, breaking conventional “show, don’t tell” rules, the
story works brilliantly, because Barrett plucks out the clean narrative thread of
Sam’s inner life. The deeper, private concerns here are not so much about physical
survival as they are about emotional and professional survival.
At the end of this story, as at the end of “The Island” and
“The Investigators,” I experienced something rather like Henrietta with her
jellyfish sting: almost a physical sensation at having been stunned. It was the
emotional impact of a masterfully resonant story. Barrett’s insights into the
legacy of serious work are highly intelligent and profoundly moving. She
implies that although good work may sometimes be misguided in its conclusions, dashed
hopes are never entirely futile. The high-minded must often relinquish the superficial
accolades of personal credit. And however well done, work along the path of
scientific progress is often overthrown. It is an honorable and paradoxical
legacy.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Monday, May 21, 2018
on bad marriages
In his novel The Spoils of Poynton Henry James writes about "the impression, somehow of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly gone." Henry James found poignancy again and again in the subject of missed opportunity. He wrote about it in Portrait of a Lady, in The Wings of a Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors. And in Washington Square, he writes with deep psychological insight about the painful legacy of a love relinquished.
Heiress Catherine Sloper falls in love with Morris Townsend, who hasn't much to show for himself but a pretty face. In fact, Morris has already blown through a large sum of money when we meet him, and we learn as the novel progresses, that he's recently been sponging off his sister.
Naturally, Catherine's father doesn't approve. "The position of husband to a weak minded woman of great fortune would suit him to perfection," Dr Sloper tells his sister. And so he puts his foot down. If Catherine accepts Townsend's proposal, she must give up her fortune as well as her father's love.
In the end, we realize Dr Sloper's assessment was correct. Morris Townsend is certainly after Catherine's money, and had they married, he would definitely have blown through her fortune. This would have made her deeply unhappy.
Or would it?
Was Dr Sloper right to press his point? He was logically correct, yes. But was he emotionally correct?
Had they married, Catherine might have helped Morris grow up. Maybe they would have grown together. Had they married, Catherine would have experienced the joy of marrying the man she loved, however flawed. They might have had children. Her life would have expanded. And who is to say that her calculation would have been wrong? She knew she wasn't charming or clever (in her own eyes, as well as in the eyes of her father), but at least she had money. Was that so bad? And she loved Morris Townsend in spite of his weaknesses. Just because it might have ended badly, would their marriage have been bad altogether?
Maybe all marriages, however good in the beginning, eventually wind up as compromises. Some end up bad and some end up mediocre. Others end up not so bad. But how long is a marriage expected to bless both husband and wife? Some answers might be found in our And the Winner Is... Book Club selection this month - Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. In this novel, marriages start out as one thing, but end up as something quite different. Life is very long and people are always complicated.
In the first story 'The Pharmacy' Olive's husband Henry becomes enamored of his coworker Denise, and he's particularly protective and tender with her when her husband dies. But right from the beginning, Olive doesn't like Denise. She is jealous and annoyed at the prospect of entertaining Denise and her husband, and whenever Henry shows tenderness for Denise, Olive reacts with impatience.
But Olive's close observation of Henry and the habits of their domestic life have, over a long marriage, come to stand in for love. We are introduced to Olive as an unpleasant woman who never apologizes for anything. Olive has no patience for good people, least of all for Henry - but meanwhile she has endless insights into and sympathy for the underdogs of the world.
In a later story, Olive looks at childhood photographs of her son and thinks to herself, "you will marry a beast and she will leave you." She then looks at a picture of Henry as a young man and thinks, "You will marry a beast and love her." Yes, she, Olive, is the beast that Henry will love.
In 'Tulips' the most complex story in the collection, Henry gives Olive an ugly bunch of daisies and when he embraces her, Olive is annoyed. She endures his embrace, waiting for it to end. In a later story, she wonders why she feels such deep loneliness with Henry, even though he is such a loving man. We as readers also wonder why Henry puts up with Olive. When they are observed coming into a church at one point, one character remarks to another, "I don't know how he can stand her."
All marriages, Elizabeth Strout seems to say, deepen and sour over time. When Olive observes young girls in a sundae shop she thinks how there loomed "... great earnestness great desires and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead of them and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired too."
We are left, after reading both these very different novels, with the sense of people who forgo their deepest passions for the sake of something else. For something supposedly more endurable - and longer lasting. Maybe that something else is familiarity and comfort in one's own discomfort with the smallness of life. Elizabeth Strout seems to suggest that it is more intrinsically human to stick with each other's flaws, madnesses and mistakes than to break free of them, and that perhaps there is something ennobling in such steadfastness.
Except at the end of Olive Kitteridge when Olive's life is all but over, she finds a new and very surprising lover. She begins to understand what she misunderstood about love in her youth, how she had taken it for granted and how it could transform her.
Not so for Catherine Sloper in Washington Square. One of our regular participants in the Classic Books Discussion group said he was sorry that Washington Square hadn't ended like its film adaptation The Heiress - with Catherine empowered, resisting Morris Townsend as he pounds on her door begging for her hand in marriage. Because in the novel, Catherine Sloper does something sadder and more predictable. She is left alone in the parlor and she's broken. She has had it with love. When Townsend leaves, she settles down to her needlepoint, "for life, as it were."
Heiress Catherine Sloper falls in love with Morris Townsend, who hasn't much to show for himself but a pretty face. In fact, Morris has already blown through a large sum of money when we meet him, and we learn as the novel progresses, that he's recently been sponging off his sister.
Naturally, Catherine's father doesn't approve. "The position of husband to a weak minded woman of great fortune would suit him to perfection," Dr Sloper tells his sister. And so he puts his foot down. If Catherine accepts Townsend's proposal, she must give up her fortune as well as her father's love.
In the end, we realize Dr Sloper's assessment was correct. Morris Townsend is certainly after Catherine's money, and had they married, he would definitely have blown through her fortune. This would have made her deeply unhappy.
Or would it?
Was Dr Sloper right to press his point? He was logically correct, yes. But was he emotionally correct?
Had they married, Catherine might have helped Morris grow up. Maybe they would have grown together. Had they married, Catherine would have experienced the joy of marrying the man she loved, however flawed. They might have had children. Her life would have expanded. And who is to say that her calculation would have been wrong? She knew she wasn't charming or clever (in her own eyes, as well as in the eyes of her father), but at least she had money. Was that so bad? And she loved Morris Townsend in spite of his weaknesses. Just because it might have ended badly, would their marriage have been bad altogether?
Maybe all marriages, however good in the beginning, eventually wind up as compromises. Some end up bad and some end up mediocre. Others end up not so bad. But how long is a marriage expected to bless both husband and wife? Some answers might be found in our And the Winner Is... Book Club selection this month - Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. In this novel, marriages start out as one thing, but end up as something quite different. Life is very long and people are always complicated.
In the first story 'The Pharmacy' Olive's husband Henry becomes enamored of his coworker Denise, and he's particularly protective and tender with her when her husband dies. But right from the beginning, Olive doesn't like Denise. She is jealous and annoyed at the prospect of entertaining Denise and her husband, and whenever Henry shows tenderness for Denise, Olive reacts with impatience.
But Olive's close observation of Henry and the habits of their domestic life have, over a long marriage, come to stand in for love. We are introduced to Olive as an unpleasant woman who never apologizes for anything. Olive has no patience for good people, least of all for Henry - but meanwhile she has endless insights into and sympathy for the underdogs of the world.
In a later story, Olive looks at childhood photographs of her son and thinks to herself, "you will marry a beast and she will leave you." She then looks at a picture of Henry as a young man and thinks, "You will marry a beast and love her." Yes, she, Olive, is the beast that Henry will love.
In 'Tulips' the most complex story in the collection, Henry gives Olive an ugly bunch of daisies and when he embraces her, Olive is annoyed. She endures his embrace, waiting for it to end. In a later story, she wonders why she feels such deep loneliness with Henry, even though he is such a loving man. We as readers also wonder why Henry puts up with Olive. When they are observed coming into a church at one point, one character remarks to another, "I don't know how he can stand her."
All marriages, Elizabeth Strout seems to say, deepen and sour over time. When Olive observes young girls in a sundae shop she thinks how there loomed "... great earnestness great desires and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead of them and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired too."
We are left, after reading both these very different novels, with the sense of people who forgo their deepest passions for the sake of something else. For something supposedly more endurable - and longer lasting. Maybe that something else is familiarity and comfort in one's own discomfort with the smallness of life. Elizabeth Strout seems to suggest that it is more intrinsically human to stick with each other's flaws, madnesses and mistakes than to break free of them, and that perhaps there is something ennobling in such steadfastness.
Except at the end of Olive Kitteridge when Olive's life is all but over, she finds a new and very surprising lover. She begins to understand what she misunderstood about love in her youth, how she had taken it for granted and how it could transform her.
Not so for Catherine Sloper in Washington Square. One of our regular participants in the Classic Books Discussion group said he was sorry that Washington Square hadn't ended like its film adaptation The Heiress - with Catherine empowered, resisting Morris Townsend as he pounds on her door begging for her hand in marriage. Because in the novel, Catherine Sloper does something sadder and more predictable. She is left alone in the parlor and she's broken. She has had it with love. When Townsend leaves, she settles down to her needlepoint, "for life, as it were."
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
cancelling junot diaz
Like many readers I have been trying to wrap my mind around the recent accusations of misogyny and sexual misconduct surrounding Junot Diaz, in the light of his extraordinarily brave and painful article in the New Yorker about childhood trauma and rape at the age of eight.
I don't know what saddens me more - the stories of his misconduct or the public reaction to it. When I first read the New Yorker story I was stunned. Diaz had dismantled his image - removed, in a sense, the very impetus for much of his writing - unmade the persona he had created and revealed deep personal agonies. You couldn't get more vulnerable. "Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me," Diaz wrote. "The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible."
Then came allegations of his own misconduct. When I talked to a few colleagues, I found myself in the minority since only one person agreed with me that Diaz' New Yorker article, preemptive or not, put his behavior in stark perspective - and that this should be weighed more seriously. Others were less interested in the complexities of the story.
For them, his article was preemptive, pure and simple. Publishing now was all about control, and little about anything else. Junot Diaz is now grown up, and heartbreaking thought his childhood trauma must have been, he should know better than to go off on people at conferences and forceably kiss them. He had it coming.
So now he has withdrawn from the Sydney Writers Festival and likely other conferences and festivals will also cancel his appearances going forward. But as Roxane Gay has suggested "we need a more nuanced conversation than just Junot Diaz is cancelled."
Where there is sexual trauma there are ripples, and these ripples reach into the author's public life. Junot Diaz has gone off on women in bizarre and disproportionate ways - and he once forceably kissed a graduate student. I will undoubtedly get flack for saying this. But my reaction is - really? Maybe it's generational. Frankly, most women in my generation have been forceably kissed at some point or other. Yes, by their professors, too. Is it unpleasant? Sure. Repulsive? Certainly. But would I equate the trauma I experienced with the rage and pain experienced by an eight year old rape victim, who has nobody to turn to? Not one bit. I wouldn't even call it trauma. I'd call it one of the many unpleasant things that sometimes happens in life
I should probably mention here that I was raised on Bible stories - and what comes to me when I think about all this, is a story in the book of John about stoning an adulterous woman. "He who is without sin among you," said Jesus "let him cast the first stone." I am so longing for a more complex discussion about misogyny, anger and sexual misconduct - one that will heal wounds rather than pour salt into them. And yes, I would like Junot Diaz to be part of that discussion. I would like to hear more than that he has taken responsibility for his behavior.
Aside from all this, there's the question of our relationship to the work itself. Diaz' work relies heavily on a persona - and those of us who have read him will recognize his persona in the reprehensible behavior he's now seen to have exhibited towards women. His stories in Drown - in This is How You Lose her, all the objectification of women and his language are cut from the same cloth as Diaz himself. Those stories were revered - championed, and early in his career, when he read in New York from Drown, received with cult like enthusiasm.
Years ago, I went to a reading he gave with Ursula Le Guin. It was in a church. Later a friend asked, "do you think there was too much pussy for the church?" I met Diaz at the reception afterwards and he was very edgy - very on, and yes, absolutely ready to shock all and sundry in conversation.
But let's remember that the man and his work are two separate things. I know some serious readers who refuse to read V S Naipaul, for instance, because he is such a nasty piece of work as a person. After all, he beat up his lover so badly that she couldn't walk out in public for several days. But Naipaul is also a Nobel Laureate and his work is extraordinary. Sometimes I hate his perspective. But I read it not because I think the man is good - but for the work's intelligence and insight, for the way it gives me a way into material I would not find on my own.
Beethoven had a fiery temper. Ezra Pound was a Nazi. As was Wagner - Hitler's favorite composer. Louis CK is a jerk - but you cannot deny that he's also very funny. Surely we can separate the work from the people who create it. Is Oscar Wao less wondrous now that we've discovered that Diaz is an asshole?
Again, I think of Helen Garner's observation, included in my previous post, that our sense of powerlessness, our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the real predators of the world "must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes."
Diaz is more than a blunderer. But I categorize a forced kiss - or bad consensual sex as on the same spectrum. Not nice, mean, demeaning and misogynist. And yes, certainly entitled. But it belongs in a very different category to the rape which destroyed his innocence when he was a child.
Meanwhile, we have the ugliest, most crass, self serving bully misogynist serving in the highest office in the land. Can it get any worse? Maybe our sense of powerlessness to oust such a scumbag from center stage causes us to 'cancel' the lesser misogynists among us.
I wish we could do better.
I don't know what saddens me more - the stories of his misconduct or the public reaction to it. When I first read the New Yorker story I was stunned. Diaz had dismantled his image - removed, in a sense, the very impetus for much of his writing - unmade the persona he had created and revealed deep personal agonies. You couldn't get more vulnerable. "Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me," Diaz wrote. "The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible."
Then came allegations of his own misconduct. When I talked to a few colleagues, I found myself in the minority since only one person agreed with me that Diaz' New Yorker article, preemptive or not, put his behavior in stark perspective - and that this should be weighed more seriously. Others were less interested in the complexities of the story.
For them, his article was preemptive, pure and simple. Publishing now was all about control, and little about anything else. Junot Diaz is now grown up, and heartbreaking thought his childhood trauma must have been, he should know better than to go off on people at conferences and forceably kiss them. He had it coming.
So now he has withdrawn from the Sydney Writers Festival and likely other conferences and festivals will also cancel his appearances going forward. But as Roxane Gay has suggested "we need a more nuanced conversation than just Junot Diaz is cancelled."
Where there is sexual trauma there are ripples, and these ripples reach into the author's public life. Junot Diaz has gone off on women in bizarre and disproportionate ways - and he once forceably kissed a graduate student. I will undoubtedly get flack for saying this. But my reaction is - really? Maybe it's generational. Frankly, most women in my generation have been forceably kissed at some point or other. Yes, by their professors, too. Is it unpleasant? Sure. Repulsive? Certainly. But would I equate the trauma I experienced with the rage and pain experienced by an eight year old rape victim, who has nobody to turn to? Not one bit. I wouldn't even call it trauma. I'd call it one of the many unpleasant things that sometimes happens in life
I should probably mention here that I was raised on Bible stories - and what comes to me when I think about all this, is a story in the book of John about stoning an adulterous woman. "He who is without sin among you," said Jesus "let him cast the first stone." I am so longing for a more complex discussion about misogyny, anger and sexual misconduct - one that will heal wounds rather than pour salt into them. And yes, I would like Junot Diaz to be part of that discussion. I would like to hear more than that he has taken responsibility for his behavior.
Aside from all this, there's the question of our relationship to the work itself. Diaz' work relies heavily on a persona - and those of us who have read him will recognize his persona in the reprehensible behavior he's now seen to have exhibited towards women. His stories in Drown - in This is How You Lose her, all the objectification of women and his language are cut from the same cloth as Diaz himself. Those stories were revered - championed, and early in his career, when he read in New York from Drown, received with cult like enthusiasm.
Years ago, I went to a reading he gave with Ursula Le Guin. It was in a church. Later a friend asked, "do you think there was too much pussy for the church?" I met Diaz at the reception afterwards and he was very edgy - very on, and yes, absolutely ready to shock all and sundry in conversation.
But let's remember that the man and his work are two separate things. I know some serious readers who refuse to read V S Naipaul, for instance, because he is such a nasty piece of work as a person. After all, he beat up his lover so badly that she couldn't walk out in public for several days. But Naipaul is also a Nobel Laureate and his work is extraordinary. Sometimes I hate his perspective. But I read it not because I think the man is good - but for the work's intelligence and insight, for the way it gives me a way into material I would not find on my own.
Beethoven had a fiery temper. Ezra Pound was a Nazi. As was Wagner - Hitler's favorite composer. Louis CK is a jerk - but you cannot deny that he's also very funny. Surely we can separate the work from the people who create it. Is Oscar Wao less wondrous now that we've discovered that Diaz is an asshole?
Again, I think of Helen Garner's observation, included in my previous post, that our sense of powerlessness, our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the real predators of the world "must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes."
Diaz is more than a blunderer. But I categorize a forced kiss - or bad consensual sex as on the same spectrum. Not nice, mean, demeaning and misogynist. And yes, certainly entitled. But it belongs in a very different category to the rape which destroyed his innocence when he was a child.
Meanwhile, we have the ugliest, most crass, self serving bully misogynist serving in the highest office in the land. Can it get any worse? Maybe our sense of powerlessness to oust such a scumbag from center stage causes us to 'cancel' the lesser misogynists among us.
I wish we could do better.
Saturday, May 5, 2018
on helen garner and #metoo
I'm reposting this from my previous blog The Irrelevance of Hope -
because I have mixed feelings about Junot Diaz. His recent New Yorker article about being raped as a child has given rise to allegations that
he has also been sexually abusive. Perhaps what we need is more
compassion all round. I don't know. But I'd be interested to hear
your thoughts.
In the initial wake of #metoo and the endless slew of sexual harassment allegations in the news, I found myself turning to a book by Australian writer Helen Garner. The First Stone is a work of investigative journalism/memoir - and I devoured every word.
It's about a charge of sexual harassment made by two female students in the 1990s, against a college professor in Melbourne. Although the case ultimately came down to one person's word against another, it ruined the professor's career - and took a huge toll on his accusers.
But what makes Garner's analysis extraordinary, is the way she examines first one side and then the other - parsing generational and gender perspectives, interspersed with her own experiences. "What happens to truth when rage and fear and ideological passions are on the rampage," she asks.
She begins with asking why the young women went to the police? The affronts were relatively minor. Couldn't they have been addressed more immediately within the college and on a different basis? But here's a second equally compelling question she addresses: Why do women so often becomes passive at the time of an actual sexual offense, only to come forward in full force long afterwards? Some of Roy Moore's defenders have asked this question. Why are they coming forward now?
In her analysis, Garner recalls a time when she was the victim of an assault. "What was my state that allowed me to accept his unattractive advances without protest?" she asks. "I was just putting up with him. I felt myself to be luckier, cleverer, younger than he was. I felt sorry for him. I went on putting up with him, long past the point at which I should have told him to back off. Should have? Whose should is this? What I mean is, would have liked to. Wanted to. But I lacked the... lacked the what?"
This reminded me of an experience I had in my twenties. I'd discovered that my sister's then boyfriend was the stepson of a man I had worked for a few years earlier. He had a small recording company in Cambridge Massachusetts and upon the discovery of this new connection, he invited me over to catch up.
I had not been in his office for more than ten minutes, when he began to make the moves on me. I was completely surprised. I had been interested in his mind. I thought he was interested in mine too! How naive I had been. Your mind? You actually think your mind is interesting? Of course it's not your mind! You're a pretty girl. What else do you have to offer. These were the recriminating thoughts that ran through my head. But still I was shocked that in spite of the fact that my sister was going out with his stepson, he was willing to take such a risk. He locked me in an awkward embrace and in his gravelly voice explained that he had always found me attractive. The next thing I knew he had his tongue in my mouth.
Why didn't I simply kick him in the balls?
First, I was afraid of changing the mood so drastically - even though the atmosphere had been altered for me beyond repair. I didn't want to embarrass him. Here he was, this fifty something guy - Whatever had given him the idea that I, a pretty young woman in her twenties, would find him attractive? Therefore, I wanted to help him save face.
Also - and this was equally crucial - I didn't want to unleash his displeasure and anger. I was afraid and suddenly on high alert. I didn't want to be raped. We were in a basement office in an old brownstone and I needed to get out in one piece. So I sat with him for what seemed like an eternity on his horrible leather sofa, with his arm around me, pretending to make chit chat - all the while trying to work out how to extricate myself without further damage.
"Thank you for sharing with me," I remember him saying as I made my escape. Sharing?
I never saw him again. But of course, I did have to face my sister's boyfriend. And although I was planning on telling him nothing, as soon as he saw me he knew what had happened. He read it on my face. I felt so guilty because now he knew this about his mother's husband and I couldn't undo the damage.
What would have happened had I slapped him across the face or simply asked him to show me out of the door? Well, I remembered another time when crossing a street in Boston, and a car of guys drove by in a convertible heckling me, and in response, I flipped them the bird. Boy, did I regret it. Because what that gesture unleashed was a stream of such violent and hateful verbal abuse that I ran into a building on the other side of the road and cut my way through to another street - afraid they would follow me. Another pedestrian - a man - came to my rescue, screening me from the car as we crossed the road. "What did you do?" he asked in amazement.
Well, I had stood up for myself. I had insulted their pride. I hadn't laughed it off or smiled. I had not been flattered by their attention.
This is not to say that every action that has the potential to be offensive, actually is offensive.
Another time, during the same era, I remember a man yelled out at me as I was walking down the street "You have the best ass in Boston!" He was driving by on a busy street and wasn't going to stop - so perhaps that's why it didn't seem threatening. In fact, I think I actually took it as a compliment! I was flattered to have the best ass in Boston!
But that was in the 1980's, and since then a lot has changed. There's the internet and its proliferation of porn - there's texting and sexting and dating apps - all of which I thankfully escaped.
Which brings me to Kristen Roupenian's story Cat Person which generated so much controversy in social media. The reluctance - in fact, the impossibility of walking something back once certain sexual buttons have been pushed, is part of what her story is about.
At one point, prior to having sex with a man Margot thinks she likes but barely knows - (a man she's already discovered to be a terrible kisser), she reflects that “It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.”
It's often only later - as Helen Garner observes in The First Stone - that anger builds up and a woman feels she must take action. Sometimes this happens when she grows older and more confident. I've always hoped I will turn out to be an old lady who won't hesitate to hit a disrespectful man over the head with my rolled up umbrella if necessary! I hope I am well on my way to becoming such a nasty woman.
But when we are younger, Helen Garner maintains, our sense of powerlessness, our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the real predators of the world "must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes." That's what happened
with Al Franken. Could it also be what is now happening to Junot Diaz? "The ability," Garner continues, "to discriminate must be maintained. Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world."
In the initial wake of #metoo and the endless slew of sexual harassment allegations in the news, I found myself turning to a book by Australian writer Helen Garner. The First Stone is a work of investigative journalism/memoir - and I devoured every word.
It's about a charge of sexual harassment made by two female students in the 1990s, against a college professor in Melbourne. Although the case ultimately came down to one person's word against another, it ruined the professor's career - and took a huge toll on his accusers.
But what makes Garner's analysis extraordinary, is the way she examines first one side and then the other - parsing generational and gender perspectives, interspersed with her own experiences. "What happens to truth when rage and fear and ideological passions are on the rampage," she asks.
She begins with asking why the young women went to the police? The affronts were relatively minor. Couldn't they have been addressed more immediately within the college and on a different basis? But here's a second equally compelling question she addresses: Why do women so often becomes passive at the time of an actual sexual offense, only to come forward in full force long afterwards? Some of Roy Moore's defenders have asked this question. Why are they coming forward now?
In her analysis, Garner recalls a time when she was the victim of an assault. "What was my state that allowed me to accept his unattractive advances without protest?" she asks. "I was just putting up with him. I felt myself to be luckier, cleverer, younger than he was. I felt sorry for him. I went on putting up with him, long past the point at which I should have told him to back off. Should have? Whose should is this? What I mean is, would have liked to. Wanted to. But I lacked the... lacked the what?"
 |
This reminded me of an experience I had in my twenties. I'd discovered that my sister's then boyfriend was the stepson of a man I had worked for a few years earlier. He had a small recording company in Cambridge Massachusetts and upon the discovery of this new connection, he invited me over to catch up.
I had not been in his office for more than ten minutes, when he began to make the moves on me. I was completely surprised. I had been interested in his mind. I thought he was interested in mine too! How naive I had been. Your mind? You actually think your mind is interesting? Of course it's not your mind! You're a pretty girl. What else do you have to offer. These were the recriminating thoughts that ran through my head. But still I was shocked that in spite of the fact that my sister was going out with his stepson, he was willing to take such a risk. He locked me in an awkward embrace and in his gravelly voice explained that he had always found me attractive. The next thing I knew he had his tongue in my mouth.
Why didn't I simply kick him in the balls?
First, I was afraid of changing the mood so drastically - even though the atmosphere had been altered for me beyond repair. I didn't want to embarrass him. Here he was, this fifty something guy - Whatever had given him the idea that I, a pretty young woman in her twenties, would find him attractive? Therefore, I wanted to help him save face.
Also - and this was equally crucial - I didn't want to unleash his displeasure and anger. I was afraid and suddenly on high alert. I didn't want to be raped. We were in a basement office in an old brownstone and I needed to get out in one piece. So I sat with him for what seemed like an eternity on his horrible leather sofa, with his arm around me, pretending to make chit chat - all the while trying to work out how to extricate myself without further damage.
"Thank you for sharing with me," I remember him saying as I made my escape. Sharing?
I never saw him again. But of course, I did have to face my sister's boyfriend. And although I was planning on telling him nothing, as soon as he saw me he knew what had happened. He read it on my face. I felt so guilty because now he knew this about his mother's husband and I couldn't undo the damage.
What would have happened had I slapped him across the face or simply asked him to show me out of the door? Well, I remembered another time when crossing a street in Boston, and a car of guys drove by in a convertible heckling me, and in response, I flipped them the bird. Boy, did I regret it. Because what that gesture unleashed was a stream of such violent and hateful verbal abuse that I ran into a building on the other side of the road and cut my way through to another street - afraid they would follow me. Another pedestrian - a man - came to my rescue, screening me from the car as we crossed the road. "What did you do?" he asked in amazement.
Well, I had stood up for myself. I had insulted their pride. I hadn't laughed it off or smiled. I had not been flattered by their attention.
This is not to say that every action that has the potential to be offensive, actually is offensive.
Another time, during the same era, I remember a man yelled out at me as I was walking down the street "You have the best ass in Boston!" He was driving by on a busy street and wasn't going to stop - so perhaps that's why it didn't seem threatening. In fact, I think I actually took it as a compliment! I was flattered to have the best ass in Boston!
But that was in the 1980's, and since then a lot has changed. There's the internet and its proliferation of porn - there's texting and sexting and dating apps - all of which I thankfully escaped.
Which brings me to Kristen Roupenian's story Cat Person which generated so much controversy in social media. The reluctance - in fact, the impossibility of walking something back once certain sexual buttons have been pushed, is part of what her story is about.
At one point, prior to having sex with a man Margot thinks she likes but barely knows - (a man she's already discovered to be a terrible kisser), she reflects that “It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.”
It's often only later - as Helen Garner observes in The First Stone - that anger builds up and a woman feels she must take action. Sometimes this happens when she grows older and more confident. I've always hoped I will turn out to be an old lady who won't hesitate to hit a disrespectful man over the head with my rolled up umbrella if necessary! I hope I am well on my way to becoming such a nasty woman.
But when we are younger, Helen Garner maintains, our sense of powerlessness, our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the real predators of the world "must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes." That's what happened
with Al Franken. Could it also be what is now happening to Junot Diaz? "The ability," Garner continues, "to discriminate must be maintained. Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world."
Friday, April 20, 2018
the other - in sex and in daily life
There have been interesting pairings in my reading this week. Driving from Boston to Washington on Tuesday, I listened to the audio-book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. Meanwhile, in my book clubs I read Albert Camus's The Stranger and Kamel Daoud's extraordinary re-imagining of that novel The Meursault Investigation. All three books are about navigating proximity to the other.
Esther Perel is a sex therapist. In her terms, the other is the lover. Her book explores the difficult balance between domestic harmony and sexual desire. In The Stranger Camus gives us an absurdist novel about a man who cannot connect to the other - whose lack of empathy renders connection impossible. The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud's 2013 retelling of The Stranger - gives us the perspective of the family of the unnamed man who is murdered on the beach.
But who is the other? How separate from us are they? Esther Perel writes that in order to maintain frisson in our romantic relationships it is imperative to see our beloved as other - as a separate person with their own thoughts and erotic imagination, as one who is free to stop loving us, to fantasize about others and even to transform themselves into a different person from the one we fell in love with. We cannot expect to own our beloved. And yet, married couples take a vow to become as one. Good marriages, we tend to believe, rest on a couple's ability to make a comfortable and secure nest - each partner as one half of a whole. Perel's book offers examples of how various couples reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: sexual frisson and domestic felicity.
In a very different way, the encounter with the other drives the narrative of The Stranger. The main character, Meursault is an island. He doesn't care to connect - and his existential passage from one physical experience to the next renders him a stranger to us. His mother's dies and he responds without emotion. A neighbor beats his dog, and he does nothing. Raymond beats up his girl and instead of taking her side, Meursault goes to the beach with the intention of punishing her brother. Then he kills a nameless "Arab" - firing his gun four times. "like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness" (Joseph Laredo translation).
This unnamed "Arab" is unacknowledged as human in The Stranger even though their encounter drives the narrative. In a chilling twist, Meursault's conviction rests not on the murder per se, but on the evidence that he showed no feeling at his mother's death.
In The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud treats The Stranger as if it is Meursault's own story - a manifesto called The Other. Since the murdered man is unnamed in The Stranger, his humanity has been negated. There is no encounter between two humans here. The sun is blinding and we aren't even sure Meursault is fully aware of what he's doing. The murdered man has no humanity, since he is just the Arab. "Arab," writes Daoud." I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man's eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces and habits. Period."
Reading this, I was reminded of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only when her protagonist comes from Nigeria to America does she understand that she is seen as "black". Black is an American construct. I remembered too Ta Nehisi Coates' in Between the World and Me where he writes about Saul Bellow's embarrassing quip, wondering who the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is.
Well, Coates responds - the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is of course, Shakespeare.
In order to be fully human, we must recognize the humanity of the others we encounter, while also honoring their otherness - be they lovers, neighbors, or strangers. As Orhan Pamuk observed in his Nobel Lecture "The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is."
But wait! Pamuk's final step is crucial: "We must first travel through other people's stories and books and the writer who writes the stories of other people must not and should not negate them by folding their identities into something about ourselves."
Honor the other and you honor yourself.
Esther Perel is a sex therapist. In her terms, the other is the lover. Her book explores the difficult balance between domestic harmony and sexual desire. In The Stranger Camus gives us an absurdist novel about a man who cannot connect to the other - whose lack of empathy renders connection impossible. The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud's 2013 retelling of The Stranger - gives us the perspective of the family of the unnamed man who is murdered on the beach.
But who is the other? How separate from us are they? Esther Perel writes that in order to maintain frisson in our romantic relationships it is imperative to see our beloved as other - as a separate person with their own thoughts and erotic imagination, as one who is free to stop loving us, to fantasize about others and even to transform themselves into a different person from the one we fell in love with. We cannot expect to own our beloved. And yet, married couples take a vow to become as one. Good marriages, we tend to believe, rest on a couple's ability to make a comfortable and secure nest - each partner as one half of a whole. Perel's book offers examples of how various couples reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: sexual frisson and domestic felicity.
In a very different way, the encounter with the other drives the narrative of The Stranger. The main character, Meursault is an island. He doesn't care to connect - and his existential passage from one physical experience to the next renders him a stranger to us. His mother's dies and he responds without emotion. A neighbor beats his dog, and he does nothing. Raymond beats up his girl and instead of taking her side, Meursault goes to the beach with the intention of punishing her brother. Then he kills a nameless "Arab" - firing his gun four times. "like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness" (Joseph Laredo translation).
This unnamed "Arab" is unacknowledged as human in The Stranger even though their encounter drives the narrative. In a chilling twist, Meursault's conviction rests not on the murder per se, but on the evidence that he showed no feeling at his mother's death.
In The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud treats The Stranger as if it is Meursault's own story - a manifesto called The Other. Since the murdered man is unnamed in The Stranger, his humanity has been negated. There is no encounter between two humans here. The sun is blinding and we aren't even sure Meursault is fully aware of what he's doing. The murdered man has no humanity, since he is just the Arab. "Arab," writes Daoud." I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man's eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces and habits. Period."
Reading this, I was reminded of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only when her protagonist comes from Nigeria to America does she understand that she is seen as "black". Black is an American construct. I remembered too Ta Nehisi Coates' in Between the World and Me where he writes about Saul Bellow's embarrassing quip, wondering who the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is.
Well, Coates responds - the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is of course, Shakespeare.
In order to be fully human, we must recognize the humanity of the others we encounter, while also honoring their otherness - be they lovers, neighbors, or strangers. As Orhan Pamuk observed in his Nobel Lecture "The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is."
But wait! Pamuk's final step is crucial: "We must first travel through other people's stories and books and the writer who writes the stories of other people must not and should not negate them by folding their identities into something about ourselves."
Honor the other and you honor yourself.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
messy emotional journeys in the stories of Alice Munro
The following post originally appeared as one of my 2013 book reviews in Washington Independent Review of Books
Desire can be mysterious. Why do some attractions hold strong while others dissolve for no particular reason? The nature of romantic impulse and the disorienting shifts in the direction of desire provides the central focus of Dear Life, Alice Munro’s extraordinary collection of stories. Here, accidental encounters alter the characters’ internal landscape, often leaving them stunned.
The stories often feature trains. In “To Reach Japan” a young married poet meets a journalist at a horrible party where she feels ignored and disconnected. Sometime later, this leads her to travel with her small child on a train to Toronto, and what happens on the journey itself transforms her emotional destination.
In another story, a soldier jumps suddenly from a train to find himself in “an immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window… coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.” With his reckless jump the character shifts the story’s direction. Then his story shifts again, never heading in a direction the reader anticipates.
All the stories in Dear Life depict characters whose emotional journeys are at odds with their eventual destinations. In the hands of a less skilled writer this would come across as an endless stream of red herrings. Too much story here. Cut out all the detours. But Munro is a master craftsman and she manages her shifts superbly, making them crucial, even though these very shifts make the center of her stories elusive. As you read, you can never quite catch hold. Like quicksilver, the center of each story constantly eludes you.
In “Amundsen,” a young teacher with a new job at a sanatorium gets off a train in a Canadian landscape that feels to her like the Russian steppes. The descriptions are detailed and evocative. But we are already deep into the seventh page when the focus totally changes. “I had not been there more than a day before all the events of the first day seemed unique and unlikely,” Munro writes.
Where is the emotional center of “Amundsen”? As the reader, you never really know. And the amazing part is you don’t really care, because you are invited into an emotional puzzle. Like the character, you find yourself disconnected, jarred, feeling as she does when she leaves Amundsen on the train, “dazed and full of disbelief.”
It isn’t only lovers who are undone by desire. Children get caught in the crossfire too. In “Gravel” an older sister struggles with her parents’ separation. Her efforts to create drama around the family dog end tragically. The younger sister, and narrator of this story, is haunted by a moment of disconnection, when she could have influenced the outcome of events. Instead she “sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.”
Similarly, in “To Reach Japan” a different child is caught in an equally chilling moment between railway carriages, her “eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone.”
Desire can be messy and unreasonable. It springs up like a weed and often chokes a more flourishing relationship. For Munro, desire overcomes people even when they don’t particularly care about what their lovers say or do. In “To Reach Japan” Greta isn’t interested in what the journalist at the party writes about; she can barely remember his name. In “Leaving Maverley” Isabel suddenly leaves her husband for a man who “had been a mid-upper gunner – a position that Isabel could never get straight in her head.” In “Corrie” we aren’t told why the characters are drawn to each other romantically, but it doesn’t matter because we believe their relationship. We feel the connection. As in “Train” one character’s eyes meet another’s, “and a certain piece of knowledge passed between them.”
This might suggest that desire and romantic love are terribly superficial. In “Haven” the narrator comes to understand that “devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.” Except that Alice Munro clearly believes otherwise. Her beautifully crafted stories take hold of the whole messy confusion of desire and handle it with reverence and delicacy. As one of her characters puts it, “Nothing changes really about love.” As you read you long for desire to win out in the end. When you finish reading these stories, you find yourself reeling, hanging on, as it were, for dear life.
Desire can be mysterious. Why do some attractions hold strong while others dissolve for no particular reason? The nature of romantic impulse and the disorienting shifts in the direction of desire provides the central focus of Dear Life, Alice Munro’s extraordinary collection of stories. Here, accidental encounters alter the characters’ internal landscape, often leaving them stunned.
The stories often feature trains. In “To Reach Japan” a young married poet meets a journalist at a horrible party where she feels ignored and disconnected. Sometime later, this leads her to travel with her small child on a train to Toronto, and what happens on the journey itself transforms her emotional destination.
In another story, a soldier jumps suddenly from a train to find himself in “an immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window… coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.” With his reckless jump the character shifts the story’s direction. Then his story shifts again, never heading in a direction the reader anticipates.
All the stories in Dear Life depict characters whose emotional journeys are at odds with their eventual destinations. In the hands of a less skilled writer this would come across as an endless stream of red herrings. Too much story here. Cut out all the detours. But Munro is a master craftsman and she manages her shifts superbly, making them crucial, even though these very shifts make the center of her stories elusive. As you read, you can never quite catch hold. Like quicksilver, the center of each story constantly eludes you.
In “Amundsen,” a young teacher with a new job at a sanatorium gets off a train in a Canadian landscape that feels to her like the Russian steppes. The descriptions are detailed and evocative. But we are already deep into the seventh page when the focus totally changes. “I had not been there more than a day before all the events of the first day seemed unique and unlikely,” Munro writes.
Where is the emotional center of “Amundsen”? As the reader, you never really know. And the amazing part is you don’t really care, because you are invited into an emotional puzzle. Like the character, you find yourself disconnected, jarred, feeling as she does when she leaves Amundsen on the train, “dazed and full of disbelief.”
It isn’t only lovers who are undone by desire. Children get caught in the crossfire too. In “Gravel” an older sister struggles with her parents’ separation. Her efforts to create drama around the family dog end tragically. The younger sister, and narrator of this story, is haunted by a moment of disconnection, when she could have influenced the outcome of events. Instead she “sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.”
Similarly, in “To Reach Japan” a different child is caught in an equally chilling moment between railway carriages, her “eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone.”
Desire can be messy and unreasonable. It springs up like a weed and often chokes a more flourishing relationship. For Munro, desire overcomes people even when they don’t particularly care about what their lovers say or do. In “To Reach Japan” Greta isn’t interested in what the journalist at the party writes about; she can barely remember his name. In “Leaving Maverley” Isabel suddenly leaves her husband for a man who “had been a mid-upper gunner – a position that Isabel could never get straight in her head.” In “Corrie” we aren’t told why the characters are drawn to each other romantically, but it doesn’t matter because we believe their relationship. We feel the connection. As in “Train” one character’s eyes meet another’s, “and a certain piece of knowledge passed between them.”
This might suggest that desire and romantic love are terribly superficial. In “Haven” the narrator comes to understand that “devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.” Except that Alice Munro clearly believes otherwise. Her beautifully crafted stories take hold of the whole messy confusion of desire and handle it with reverence and delicacy. As one of her characters puts it, “Nothing changes really about love.” As you read you long for desire to win out in the end. When you finish reading these stories, you find yourself reeling, hanging on, as it were, for dear life.
Saturday, April 7, 2018
on the legacy of my mother, who read to me
With a mother like mine, I could hardly have become anything but a reader and a lover of books. It was her love for literature that enlightened my path. Although she slipped through the cracks of her very British education, she went on to become an actress, performing several plays a week in repertory theatre- and she always remembered one particular teacher who had recognized that spark in her. It was Naomi Lewis, who went on to become a well regarded book critic. What Naomi Lewis did for my mother Judy, she then passed on to me, along with her passion for words, and particularly her love of Shakespeare.
Some of the things she taught me, I will jot down here as they occur to me. First, if you find a writer whose work you admire, you should read everything you can by them, and in that way, become an expert.
If there is a poem that you love, commit it to memory. You will then have a little poetry library in your head, and you can draw upon it whenever you want. Judy encouraged me to learn Shakespearean sonnets by heart - and as a result I have them forever. If I'm sitting in traffic, or the dentist's office or wherever I may be - I can pull one up, and savor it. I have tried to encourage my own children and my students to do the same.
Judy had me read Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress - when I was about twelve or thirteen. I could hardly have been expected to understand the art of seduction! But she had me work out what it was he was trying to do in that poem, and to appreciate how funny it was - and how clever.
She also read to us in the evenings before we went to bed - The Hobbit was one of my favorites and The Secret Garden was another.
When we moved to the United States, and I wasn't challenged as much as she thought I should be in my English classes, Judy encouraged me to keep a little notebook with the books I had read - and to write something about them, as a kind of record. Maybe this was the beginning of my book reviewing life. Armed with the critical skills she had taught me, as well as a hyper sensitive "bullshit" detector, I went on to evaluate scripts for NBC, to write book reviews and yes, also a few books of my own.
It was because of her that I realized the things I was missing in my high school education. I made it a point to read such things as Dante's Divine Comedy and Machiavelli's The Prince - in my spare time because I felt I couldn't consider myself educated unless I'd read these classics.
Getting an A on a book report wasn't what impressed my mother. Sometimes she read my A papers and said I could do better. Just because you know this will get you an A, doesn't mean it's good enough, she admonished. I know you can write with more depth.
Then there was the Elizabethan Companie she directed in Hingham Massachusetts - a huge part of my young adult life - straight into my twenties. My father had been a professional actor in London, and he was a big part of these productions - as was my future mother in law Alice, herself a professional actress - and my dearest friend Walter Van Dyk - and his brother Felix, and Bronwen Crothers, and Sarah DeLima - all of these people went on to professional careers. And all those productions we mounted -there were so many - from She Stoops to Conquer to Blythe Spirit, to Twelfth Night, Cherry Orchard and everything else in between. My mother Judy is the one who made these happen. She was a cultural force - and what better way of internalizing literature than performing it for an audience?
And of course there was also her love of the Bible - King James version, of course - which both my parents read weekly - as did I. The beauty of the prose in that translation - the economy and poetry of it, has for me embodied the spirit of the Word, and sustained me all my life.
"How did you get interested in reading Brideshead Revisited?" she asked me in a recent phone conversation. She was remembering how I had done a huge project on it in high school well before it became popularized in the TV series. "You suggested it to me, of course!" I reminded her.
So it was only natural when I had children of my own, that I read to them every night as well - the whole Narnia Chronicles of C S Lewis, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - and with my daughter Rosalind (named, I might add, for Shakespeare's heroine) Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and The Professor.
I still have this card she send for Rosalind's first birthday.
This is what she wrote inside. "I had to get this... it's my idea of heaven I think! It also suggests the shape of things to come perhaps with you and Rosalind."
And has it ever! My daughter Rosalind, Judy's grand daughter recently completed her D Phil at Merton College in Oxford - on French Enlightenment Literature. A more avid reader or expressive writer you could hardly hope find.
Some of the things she taught me, I will jot down here as they occur to me. First, if you find a writer whose work you admire, you should read everything you can by them, and in that way, become an expert.
If there is a poem that you love, commit it to memory. You will then have a little poetry library in your head, and you can draw upon it whenever you want. Judy encouraged me to learn Shakespearean sonnets by heart - and as a result I have them forever. If I'm sitting in traffic, or the dentist's office or wherever I may be - I can pull one up, and savor it. I have tried to encourage my own children and my students to do the same.
Judy had me read Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress - when I was about twelve or thirteen. I could hardly have been expected to understand the art of seduction! But she had me work out what it was he was trying to do in that poem, and to appreciate how funny it was - and how clever.
She also read to us in the evenings before we went to bed - The Hobbit was one of my favorites and The Secret Garden was another.
When we moved to the United States, and I wasn't challenged as much as she thought I should be in my English classes, Judy encouraged me to keep a little notebook with the books I had read - and to write something about them, as a kind of record. Maybe this was the beginning of my book reviewing life. Armed with the critical skills she had taught me, as well as a hyper sensitive "bullshit" detector, I went on to evaluate scripts for NBC, to write book reviews and yes, also a few books of my own.
It was because of her that I realized the things I was missing in my high school education. I made it a point to read such things as Dante's Divine Comedy and Machiavelli's The Prince - in my spare time because I felt I couldn't consider myself educated unless I'd read these classics.
Getting an A on a book report wasn't what impressed my mother. Sometimes she read my A papers and said I could do better. Just because you know this will get you an A, doesn't mean it's good enough, she admonished. I know you can write with more depth.
Then there was the Elizabethan Companie she directed in Hingham Massachusetts - a huge part of my young adult life - straight into my twenties. My father had been a professional actor in London, and he was a big part of these productions - as was my future mother in law Alice, herself a professional actress - and my dearest friend Walter Van Dyk - and his brother Felix, and Bronwen Crothers, and Sarah DeLima - all of these people went on to professional careers. And all those productions we mounted -there were so many - from She Stoops to Conquer to Blythe Spirit, to Twelfth Night, Cherry Orchard and everything else in between. My mother Judy is the one who made these happen. She was a cultural force - and what better way of internalizing literature than performing it for an audience?
And of course there was also her love of the Bible - King James version, of course - which both my parents read weekly - as did I. The beauty of the prose in that translation - the economy and poetry of it, has for me embodied the spirit of the Word, and sustained me all my life.
"How did you get interested in reading Brideshead Revisited?" she asked me in a recent phone conversation. She was remembering how I had done a huge project on it in high school well before it became popularized in the TV series. "You suggested it to me, of course!" I reminded her.
So it was only natural when I had children of my own, that I read to them every night as well - the whole Narnia Chronicles of C S Lewis, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - and with my daughter Rosalind (named, I might add, for Shakespeare's heroine) Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and The Professor.
I still have this card she send for Rosalind's first birthday.
This is what she wrote inside. "I had to get this... it's my idea of heaven I think! It also suggests the shape of things to come perhaps with you and Rosalind."
And has it ever! My daughter Rosalind, Judy's grand daughter recently completed her D Phil at Merton College in Oxford - on French Enlightenment Literature. A more avid reader or expressive writer you could hardly hope find.
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