An exciting announcement, everybody! I have entered the world of podcasting – with no less than the wonderful Rachel from Book Snob.
Tea or Books? is the name of the podcast – in which we debate the difficult decisions of literature and reading. The title came to me because the idea of choosing between tea and books was such a difficult prospect (and luckily a decision I don’t need to make). The idea of pitting books, authors, and reading habits against each other seemed like a productive vein, and we’ve already had great fun debating.
The first person I thought of, when wondering whom to co-podcast with, was Rachel. I’ve been following her blog ever since it began, back in its Blogger incarnation, and we’ve met quite a few times in person – I thought she’d be perfect, given her taste in books and her hilarious humour, so I was absolutely thrilled when she agreed to co-host. Thanks Rachel!
In episode 1, we’re discussing books in translation vs. books in English set in other countries, and Emily vs. Charlotte Brontë. We’d welcome suggestions for future topics!
A couple other things…
this will be available via iTunes soon, I hope, but the instructions how to get it there have rather confused me. I’ll work on it! And will update when it is. (ADDITION: David says “Those unable to wait for the podcast to be available via ITunes should be able to subscribe via any podcast player or feed reader using this link: https://www.stuckinabook.com/category/podcast/feed“)
I’m aware that the sound quality definitely isn’t the best, so forgive us for that (I’ve already bought a new microphone) – hopefully our charm will carry us through episode 1… (helpful editing tips welcomed) N.B. reuploaded from the first try! A bit better now.
Rachel’s having difficulty uploading to her blog, which might be the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org… any tips??
Remember how I bought a copy of The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) in the US, all proud of myself for finding a beautiful NYRB Classic? And how it turned out I already had it, also from NYRB, with a different cover? Yep. And NYRB know what they’re doing; I can’t bring myself to part with either of them. But I did decide that it was about time that I actually read the book – especially since it’s only 108 pages long.
Truth be told, that brevity was almost the downfall of Wescott’s novella – because I carried it around at work, reading it for a few moments while waiting for a friend to buy lunch, or on the bus, etc. Basically, I read about 20 pages in 20 separate dip-ins (having read a handful earlier, on holiday), and that isn’t at all the way to treat The Pilgrim Hawk. Structurally, it is actually probably more like a long short story than a novella, and (as such) should be read in one sitting. Thankfully I cottoned onto that, and read the final 70 or so pages that way, at least.
Alwyn Tower narrates the story; he is an American would-be writer, visiting his friend Alex near Paris, when an Irish couple drop by. They are Madeleine and Larry Cullen; he is a little taciturn and embarrassed, while she is moderately vivacious and a little exasperated by her husband. Also with them is the love of her life, for the time being at least: Lucy the hawk.
For one thing, the bird charmed me so that nothing else mattered much. And it served as an embodiment or emblem for me of all the truly interesting subjects of conversation that there very sociable, travelling, sporting people leave out as a rule: illness, poverty, sex, religion, art. Whenever I began to be bored, a solemn glance of its maniacal eyes helped me to stop listening and to think concentratedly of myself instead, or for myself.
Lucy is the focal point of their marriage; the meeting place of his exasperation and her distracted attention. Madeleine shows her off, explaining the habits and nature of hawks – how they never mate in captivity; how they periodically still try to escape, even though they come back when let loose to hunt prey – while Larry shows how uninterested he is, and how this obsession is both symptomatic of their disintegrating marriage and a cause of it. Alwyn the narrator, meanwhile, keenly observes their dynamics – and both Wescott’s prose and the conversation of those present suggest ways in which the hawk can be a metaphor. And, cleverly, Wescott then undermines this process through Madeleine’s reaction to it:
She slightly turned her back to him and contemplated Alex and me rather unkindly. It was the careful absence of expression, absence of frown, that you see on a clever lecturer’s face when the irrelevant questioning or heckling begins. There was also a sadness about it which, if I read it aright, I have often felt myself. She did not want us to take her hawk, her dear subject-matter, her hobby and symbol – whatever it meant to her – and turn it this way and that to mean what we liked. It was hers and we were spoiling it. Around her eyes and mouth there were lines of that caricatural weariness which is so peculiar to those who talk too much.
There are only really two moments that could be called dramatic, and both happen towards the end of the short book – one of them off the page. The rest follows a gentle curve of observation and exploration, using the extremely unusual figure of the hawk to highlight and unravel the very ordinary dynamics of a failing marriage. Wescott has the poignancy and nuance of Katherine Mansfield, if not quite her genius.
What makes this novella all the more sophisticated, though, is the moment when Alwyn outs himself as an unreliable narrator. Not a malicious one, or even a deliberately misleading one, but a narrator who cannot help filling in the gaps in his own observations, which cannot be faultlessly complete from an external perspective:
…and cover #2
Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing; cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgement in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
This gives an interesting blend of narrator and author – for Wescott is, of course, proposing to be a story-teller – and has created the characters in some form that is not available on the page, if the depiction we see through Alwyn’s eyes is somehow a distortion. This confession gives the whole short work a different feel, and adds a layer to an already rich work.
I bought this novella on at least one of the occasions, perhaps both, partly on the strength of an introduction from Michael Cunningham. The association didn’t let me down. The authors come from the same stable of beautiful writing and close attention to character detail. And The Pilgrim Hawk is, indeed, a lovely, thought-provoking, and exquisitely crafted little book.
Hope you’re enjoying the sunshine this weekend! I’m mourning the fact that my lovely boss has left OUP, and she’s pretty much the most fab boss ever, so we should probably just close OUP and start again. BUT a link, blog post, and book never hurt anybody.
Before I go further, though, the winner of the Cornelia Otis Skinner book Nuts in May is – Rosemary Hopkins! Well done, Rosemary! I’ll be in touch soon. For everybody else – do make sure you track down something by her.
1.)The book – I treated myself to the beautiful In Search of Rex Whistler by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil after reading Lyn’s very persuasive post about it, and (of course) Anna Thomasson’sA Curious Friendship. It’s definitely spoiling myself, but Anna’s book left me super keen to see more of Rex Whistler’s work, and this book has lots of images.
2.) The blog post – you’ve got time to join in Mary Hocking Reading Week! Let Ali explain it all… (Oh, and Sylvia Townsend Reading Week has been extended to a month, so I should manage to at least finish the short story I started.)
3.)The link – I couldn’t really think of a link this week, but the most recent xkcd cartoon is one that gets my full support…
I’m a big fan of the designs of the new Faber Modern Classics – which includes Self-Help (1985) by Lorrie Moore – even if the criteria for selection is a bit unclear. Do Ariel, Look Back in Anger, and The Remains of the Day have anything in common? I shouldn’t have thought so, but I suppose Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics don’t have much in common across the series.
Anyway, even if the selection of titles is a bit bizarre (and, sadly, the quality of the paperback doesn’t quite live up to the design), this is still a really intriguing new series. Thanks for sending me this book, Faber! Self-Help had been on my radar for a while, so I thought I’d pick it up to celebrate its 30th anniversary. (I’m kinda terrified every time something celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, because yours truly will be doing the same thing come November…) Oh, and Moore was younger than me when this was published.
Things I didn’t know about Self-Help #1: it’s short stories. I’d assumed, being a shallow type, that it was a self help book, or at least personal essays. The line between short stories and personal essays might be rather slim, of course: every protagonist in Self-Help is more or the less the same person. Their names change and their families and situations change a bit, but they are all intelligent, self-deprecating, introspective, wry young American women. Basically, they’re all (one assumes) Lorrie Moore.
And that kinda works. I’m not a fan of the exclusively-write-about-what-you-know school (A.L. Kennedy responds to this advice brilliantly, which I quoted when I reviewed On Writing) but here it seems ok; the stories come together to form a single snapshot of a certain sort of person at a specific time.
And the stories themselves? The tone is often self-help style, as the title suggest. For example…
Make attempts at a less restrictive arrangement. Watch them sputter and deflate like balloons. He will ask you to move in. Do so hesitantly, with ambivalence. Clarify: rents are high, nothing long-range, love and all that, hon, but it’s footloose. Lay out the rules with much elocution. Stress openness, non-exclusivity. Make room in his closet, but don’t rearrange the furniture.
The first one, ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, is perhaps most representative of the collection as a whole; many of the stories deal with unsatisfying or disintegrating relationships, and this story does exactly what it says: it’s a sombre look at the mechanics of being ‘the other woman’, looking brazenly at the situation without any attempt to find either a moral or a silver lining. It’s also probably my second favourite story in the collection.
My absolute favourite was ‘How To Become A Writer’, because – it’s about being a failing writer. It’s a bit melancholy, but rings true with anybody who feels like there is a writer inside of them somewhere… without, somehow, feeling self-indulgent on Moore’s part, perhaps because of the wit and (again) self-deprecation:
Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. You. however, have not yet reached this stage of literary criticism. You stiffen and say “I do not,” the same way you said it when someone in the fourth grade accused you of really liking oboe lessons and your parents really weren’t just making you take them.
All things considered, there is a lot to like in Self-Help – but it does feel a bit like a writing student trying an extended experiment. It’s clearly a first book, and I’d be interested to see how Moore’s writing developed – particularly when she started considering perspectives other than her own life. As, I’m sure, she did…?
In the early days of discovering authors for myself, it seemed like every one I stumbled upon turned into a lifelong favourite. I still have massive devotion to A.A. Milne, E.M. Delafield, Richmal Crompton, Stephen Leacock, The L-Shaped Room (because, let’s be fair, it’s that book; not Lynne Reid Banks in general) etc. There were so few duds. And these sorts of epiphanies come so infrequently now that I’ve started wondering: is it just the glitter of the new? Or even the opportunity to blitz through an author’s work, when there aren’t teetering tbr piles (real and imaginary) of pressing reads?
Well, thank you Cornelia Otis Skinner, for coming along and proving me wrong. Consider me devoted.
I read Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, which she wrote with Emily Kimbrough, after Danielle lent it to me. I absolutely loved it, and kept an eye out for the authors ever since – but they are tough to come across in the UK. I did manage to read Popcorn by Cornelia Otis Skinner, which I wholeheartedly adored – and brought five of her books back with me from the US. That included a duplicate of Nuts in May – which I’m going to write about today, and offer as a giveaway to people in the UK, who will also have a tough job tracking her down. (Btw, in the US, they’re available cheaply online, so… have at!)
Skinner is a humorous essayist who reminded me a lot of Delafield and Diary of a Provincial Lady – which, if you know me well, you’ll realise can hardly be bettered as a compliment. Essentially, her books are masterpieces of self-deprecation. If that’s your cup of tea – and I live for it – you’ll find Nuts in May hilarious. Skinner (or her essay persona, at least) takes us through various aspects of her life, and activities she has attempted, and gives extremely amusing portrayals of how horribly everything goes wrong. Small stakes, of course: the worst that happens (and it repeatedly happens) is embarrassment or awkwardness. Take, for example, this (longish) excerpt from the chapter most redolent of the Provincial Lady, ‘Ordeal for Sons’, wherein Skinner visits her son at boarding school. (Incidentally, subscribers to the New Yorker can apparently read the whole article in its original glory. And I daresay that’s true for other Skinner essays.)
I set forth with my child who, the moment we get to territory totally unfamiliar to me, again disappeared. I wandered on aimlessly, passing stray professors and groups of boys who looked at me as if they wondered if my attendant knew I was loose. Some of the mink-coat mothers also passed and we bestowed on one another that sickly smile which can be taken for recognition or pure imbecility. After a time, my offspring hove in sight armed with skates and a stick and told me to follow him. Hockey was being played on a pond some hundred yards beyond us and the people I had passed were all heading for the barrier, which seemed to be the vantage place for watching the game. Once arrived at the pond, however, my son started leading me off in an oblique direction. When I shyly asked the reason, he said he didn’t want me near the barrier… that I might get in the way, or fall down, or otherwise make myself conspicuous. His method of making me inconspicuous was to station me off on a remote and windy promontory. A strange, solitary figure, silhouetted against the snow, I felt like the picture of Napoleon overlooking Moscow. I could hardly see what was going on, much less make out which of the distant swirling figures was my child, which, perhaps, was just as well as it saved me the anguish of seeing him make a goal on his own side which counted some sort of colossal penalty and made him a pariah for the remainder of the game. On my forthcoming visit I am told the sport will be boat racing and I suppose by way of making me inconspicuous, I shall be placed behind a tree.
Oh, Cornelia. You and me are going to be best buds, I can tell. I mean, sure, I wish you had learnt more about paragraph lengths (this lady loves a long para) but I shan’t fault-find too much, as you’re so darn hilarious.
While her family shows up in quite a few sections (notably when her son believes he has discovered dinosaur bones, and they lug their find to the New York Museum of Natural History), Cornelia Otis Skinner’s name loomed largest as an actress, apparently. It’s a rich vein for anecdotes and amusing stories: she writes wittily about being demanded to appear in unpaid productions, the anguish of opening nights (for one’s friends and family), and the sort of person who comes backstage after a play. More unexpectedly, she writes a section about meeting the Pope. The only section that didn’t win me over was a spoof of John Steinbeck.
I’m at the risk of typing the whole thing out, so I shall just reiterate that she has that rare touch – to make stories entirely about herself and her situation (which is unashamedly middle-class) somehow hilariously identifiable, and light without being disposable. She is frivolous, but great frivolity takes enormous talent.
So, that giveaway part. As I say, I’m afraid it’s UK only – because Skinner’s work is tricky to find over here, and I feel like we Brits deserve a chance to get to know her. To be in with a chance of winning, just let me know your favourite American writer in the comment section, and I’ll do the draw on Saturday 6 June. I’m hoping to nab some suggestions along the way.
