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Persephone Secret Santa

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Well, today is the day we are supposed to reveal our Persephone Secret Santa gifts… but… I don’t have mine yet.

 Turns out I was going to be given it at the Persephone Books Open House today, but in the end I couldn’t go… because I had locked myself out!  I wasn’t stuck outside for very long, but I was on quite a tight schedule, and it was long enough to make it impractical to get to London and pack for going home for Christmas (which I’m doing later today.)

However, I did get a card from my Persephone Secret Santa this morning!  In lieu of a book, I’ll show off my lovely, intriguing card:

Thanks to Claire and Verity for organising this – I look forward to seeing everyone unveiling their books, and yelping about how exciting it all is.  You’ll just have to comment on my card and cartoon (bonus points if you recognised the Persephone logo…), for the time being…

If you got a Persephone Secret Santa, do pop a link to your reveal post in the comments.  I’ll show off mine when it arrives!

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

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I want to cry a little bit, because I just spent two hours writing a post on So Long, See You Tomorrow, which disappeared when I tried to add a picture.  Sometimes I hate Blogger… Well, I’m going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you’ll know why…

It has ended up being quite neat, though, that I’m blogging about a novella by William Maxwell – following on from other reviews in this vein this week.  I fell in love with Maxwell when I read They Came Like Swallows (thanks Karen!), bought up a few of his books, read half of The Chateau, and… stopped.  Not sure why.  But Rachel’s review of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) catapaulted it up my tbr pile, and while I didn’t love it quite as much as They Came Like Swallows, it’s not far off.

I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events – especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore.  That makes me sound a bit sadistic, doesn’t it?  But examples like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and, even better, Jens Christian Grondahl’s Virginia (reviewed here) show how this can create a structure of dual narratives, looking forwards and backwards, memories and regrets influencing the telling of past and present.  Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify.

The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell’s deceptively simple manner:

One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot.  Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.  Within a few seconds it had grown light.  No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road.  The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.

Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends.  Living on neighbouring farms, their families had grown alongside each other, and Maxwell builds up this dynamic between neighbours and friends in a believable, simple manner – until circumstances change and the friendship is gradually unwoven, with the tragic results already revealed to the reader at the outset.  The narrator’s guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart.  This guilt colours the narrator’s presentation of the past, and is a net from which he has not been able to escape.  The novel moves between past and present, developing each narrative line, and demonstrating the far-flung influence of long ago events – in a way which flows beautifully, never forced, quietly showing Maxwell’s novelistic expertise.

The narrator’s own life was not easy.  Crippling shy and suffering from the early loss of his mother, the narrator feels that he has disappointed his father, and is out of kilter with the sort of boy he is expected to be.  Maxwell touches gently on the father’s grief, in an example of his understated but powerful style:

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.  He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was.

Many lesser novelists would have spent several pages dissecting the narrator’s father’s emotions, but Maxwell’s talent is that he does not need to do so – he encapsulates everything we need to read in two short sentences.  It is this approach which exemplifies Maxwell’s brilliance, but also how easily he could be underestimated.

The father does remarry, and the family is moved to a new home.  I love portrayals of houses in literature, and the scenes of their new home being built make for some great sections – the narrator compares the building site to Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture ‘The Palace at 4am’.  There is no picture of the sculpture in the book, it is only described verbally, but I went and tracked down an image.  In its curious form, seemingly incomplete and distorted, it reflects not only a building site but the structures of memory:

 

For, despite the murder and the family tensions, the true subject of So Long, See You Tomorrow is memory and the fallibility of memory.  Not so much that facts may be altered, but the distortion of remembered emotions and responses; superimposing later feelings over old ones, and the overlap between past and present:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
A murder mystery usually has a fairly straightforward structure – clues must be laid, of course, and herrings must be red, but the masters have laid out the pattern.  By removing the mystery of whodunnit, Maxwell explores the much more human, fascinating dynamics of how circumstances and personalities led to murder – and how the aftermath continues for decades and decades.  To construct a narrative through the abstract themes of grief, regret, love, pain, and guilt, Maxwell sets himself a much more difficult task – and achieves it.  I’m excited eventually to read more of Maxwell, and it was worth having to write this post twice to tell you how good this little book is…

Others who got Stuck into it:
 
“I don’t think I have come across a finer work of modern fiction.” – Rachel, Book Snob
 
“Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose.” – Trevor, The Mookse and the Gripes
 
“This book will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time.” – Lynne, dovegreyreader

Up At The Villa – W. Somerset Maugham

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I’m trying to get through all the books I’ve read and not reviewed in 2011, so there will be a flurry of reviews over the next fortnight.  Prepare yourselves!

A while ago I did one of my novella reading weekends, but I don’t think I ever actually told you about it, before or afterwards.  One of the books I read was my first stab at W. Somerset Maugham, only eight or so years since I first bought one of his books.  Which wasn’t the one I read.  Up at the Villa (1941) came recommended by Simon Savidge (see links at the bottom) and is only 120pp – plus it has a lovely cover, so why not?

Up at the Villa is rather difficult to classify – in terms of length, it probably counts as a novella, but structurally it seems much more like a short story.  There are all manner of attempts to define the short story, and I find a few quite helpful.  Brander Matthews suggested over a century ago that “a short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of single emotions called forth by a single situation.” In 1979 Wendell Harris picked up on the same focal word in his definition: “single memorable curve of action revealing a single memorable personality.”  Poe wrote more vaguely, but sensibly, that the short story must have “unity of impression”.  All these definitions essentially suggest singularity – no room for interweaving plots, multiple focalisation, etc. etc.  Of course, there are dozens of writers and hundreds of short stories which break these rules, but rather fewer novellas and novels which fit so neatly into the definition.

Up at the Villa doesn’t take us far from beautiful young widow Mary Panton’s perspective, nor from the events of a single momentous day.  In the wake of her husband’s death, Mary is living in a beautiful borrowed villa overlooking Florence.  Her beauty is striking, she is privileged (if not quite opulent) and at the beginning of the novel she even receives a proposal from an older man who is soon to be Governor of Bengal.  Not to mention the rakish attentions of Rowley Flint, who doesn’t have marriage on his mind.

So where does this single memorable curve of action take us?  It starts with one act of generosity:

They had dined late and soon after eleven the Princess called for her bill.  When it grew evident that they were about to go, the violinist who had played to them came forward with a plate.  There were a few coins on it from diners at other tables and some small notes.  What they thus received was the band’s only remuneration.  Mary opened her bag.
“Don’t bother”, said Rowley.  “I’ll give him a trifle.”
He told a ten-lira note out of his pocket and put it on the plate.
“I’d like to give him something too”, said Mary.  She laid a hundred-lira note on the others.  The man looked surprised, gave Mary a searching look, bowed slightly and withdrew.
“What on earth did you give him that for?” exclaimed Rowley.  “That’s absurd.”
“He plays so badly and he looks so wretched.”
“But they don’t expect anything like that.”
“I know.  That’s why I gave it.  It’ll mean so much to him.  It may make all the difference to his life.”

And, one thing leading to another, it does make a difference to a lot of lives.  But I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot…

I do love stories where one seemingly innocent action leads to a huge fallout.  The only one which comes to mind right now is a broken cup in an episode of Flight of the Conchords, which probably isn’t a seriously helpful example… but you know what I mean.   I thought Maugham manipulated the situation well, and without contravening the personalities of the characters drawn at the beginning.  Mary is impulsive and romantic and not always able to deal with the outcome of her actions, and this makes for a plot which snowballs out of her control – a touch melodramatically, but still within the realms of feasibility.

My only confusion is why it became a 120 page book.  Most authors would have condensed it into thirty pages, or added more characters, more ideas, more occurrences – and another 120 pages.  It might seem an odd thing to focus on, but Up at the Villa falls between two stools, which is difficult to ignore.  What makes me want to return to Maugham, and try one of his more famous books, is that even with these reservations, I still found Up at the Villa a skillful, interesting read.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“Up at the Villa is a perfect book when you want something slightly familiar and yet something that completely throws you.” – Simon, Savidge Reads

“The pacing of the story is excellent, starting off at the slow, languid speed that you might expect from a novel about the English upper classes in Italy and gradually speeding up until it feels almost out of control.” – Old English Rose

“It’s a fine and entertaining diversion, and it’s got guns in, and sometimes that’s all we need” – John Self, The Asylum 

The Element of Lavishness by William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner

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38. The Element of Lavishness : Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell

I have had a very good reading year – so many wonderful books which have blown me away. It’s going to be tricky, compiling a list of my top ten at the end of the year – indeed, making lists of my all-time favourite books is getting harder than ever – but I’m pretty certain this volume will be featuring on 2011’s best reads (coming up soon). And it’s nabbing place 38 on the books I think you should read, but might not have heard about. Which means there are only twelve more that I can add – ooo! Thrilling, no?

I still have so many novels and stories by Warner and Maxwell to read – it seems crazy that I’ve only read two novels by Warner and two-and-a-bit by Maxwell, since I still consider them amongst my favourite writers. But even with these stockpiles still to read, I was delighted to discover that they were correspondents. It seemed too good to be true – that two authors I love should have collaborated on a book in this way, especially since Maxwell lived in the US, and Warner in England, and they met only two or three times.  (Most, perhaps all, of my quotations here are from Warner, but that is because I read the book whilst researching a chapter on Warner – Maxwell is equally wonderful a letter-writer.  Almost.)

The title Element of Lavishness comes from a letter in which Maxwell writes to Warner that:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy.  There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving is fifty-fifty, at most.
I love the ethos here: even if they don’t know whether or not their letters will be read more than once, fleetingly, it’s almost as though they can’t help writing to the best of their ability.  Evidently a lot of the Warner/Maxwell correspondence did survive, and it certainly reflects their talents.  While I love them both as novelists, I think The Element of Lavishess is the best thing I have read by either of them.  It’s quite possible that this post will descend (ascend?) into a myriad of quotations – so beautiful are the sentences these authors penned so casually.

They wrote between 1938 and Warner’s death forty years later, but only really became friends in the early 1950s, where the letters veer from the strictly practical to the lavishness of the title.  The relationship between Warner and Maxwell began professionally – Maxwell edited The New Yorker, to which Warner started contributing stories.  He loved them (I have shelves full of them, unread) and gradually this exchange became a friendship that encompassed not only work and writing but every conceivable facet of their lives.

Warner and Maxwell remained each other’s most fervent fans, and happy to express it.  Novels and stories were read and praised, always carefully and thoughtfully; Warner embarked on her successful Kingdoms of Elfin series expressly to please Maxwell – and yet, throughout, Maxwell maintained his role as New Yorker editor.  He praised and praised – but would also, occasionally, turn down submitted stories.  How strong a friendship must be to survive this!  How brave of Maxwell, and how gracious of Warner!  And how beautifully Maxwell himself phrases his response to Warner’s appreciation:

You have a way of putting praises that makes it hard for me to walk afterward.  My feet have a tendency not to touch the ground.  Listing a little to the right or the left, I levitate, in danger of cracking with happiness.  When one has been pleased one’s whole life as profoundly as I have been pleased by your work, one does terribly want to do a little pleasing in return, I mean I love you.

Naturally they did not solely get to know one another, but became as intimately involved in each other’s families.  Warner’s partner Valentine; Maxwell’s wife Emmy and his two children.  They often ask after these people, of course – but, more than this, they grew to understand and love these background figures to their correspondence.  I love this quick note of Warner’s:

I am thankful that Emmy is back.  In her absence you do not spell as well as at other times.  Does she know that?  It is a delightful tribute, she should wear it in a brooch.
Maxwell helped Warner through Valentine’s illness and death, acting as a necessarily far-flung support – and the exchange of touching, thoughtful, perceptive letters became all the more vital. For Warner, in her final years, to all intents and purposes widowed, the correspondence was a weapon against loneliness.  Those little observances and stories she might have told Valentine across breakfast became the anecdotes she wove into her letters.  This was possibly my favourite letter – indeed, I immediately wrote it down and sent it off to my own correspondent, Barbara-from-Ludlow:

All this time I was picking & cursing strawberries.  I had an enormous crop, & my principles are of a niggardly kind that can’t let fool go to waste.  But I got one pure pleasure out of this.  I was picking & cursing and searching who I could give the next lot to when I saw a paddle rise above the garden wall.  And looking down, there were two boys in a canoe.  So without explanation, I commanded them to keep about, & hurried (to Valentine’s workroom) for the shrimping net, and filled it with strawberries and lowered it down to them.  They were silent and acceptant; & it was all very Tennysonian, & I realised that when they are old men they will remember those strawberries.
(This was written in 1972.  Let us assume the boys were twenty years old, at the most – so they are now no more than sixty.  Where are they?  Do they remember?  I believe I, at least, will remember this quirky, moving scene for many eyars.)

Here, in letters, where Warner is not constrained by the novelistic strictures of plot and character and can instead turn her attention to anything and everything, Warner is at her most perceptive – and at her most deliciously playful.  She never writes a dull letter, and here are just a couple of examples from the notes I made:

Don’t ever think twice about asking me to amplify.   I love amplifying.  If I had lived when people illuminated MSS I should always have been looking for unoccupied capital O’s and filling them up with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and a pig-killing.

and

One of the emotions of old age is amazement that one was alive so long ago.  I suppose that is why so many people write autobiographies.  They are trying to convince themselves that they really were.
They are so lovable, so warm!  I want to quote to you endlessly – I want to tell you how Maxwell has ‘a defective sense of rancour […] the first thing I know I am beaming at someone I suddenly remember I shouldn’t even be speaking to’; how, when Warner and Valentine had a servant, ‘we used to count the hours till her half-days & evenings out when we would rush into the kitchen and read her novels and magazines: […] such a grateful change from Dostoevsky.’  But I shan’t – because I think you should just go and buy it yourself.   If you’re even remotely fond of Warner or Maxwell, you’ll love this.  Even if you’ve not read a word by either, or don’t even recognise they’re name, I would recommend this collection to you – anybody with any interest in friendship, literature, letters, perception… this book will delight.

Perhaps I should end with an excerpt from Warner, one of their early letters, which leaves me wondering quite how she would respond to my adulation:

But no reviewers ever understand one’s books; and if they praise them, they understand them even less.  Praising reviewers are like those shopwomen who thrust a hat on one’s head, a hat that is like the opening of the Judgement scroll in which all one’s sins are briefly and dispassionately entered, and then stand back and say that it is exactly the hat that Modom needs to bring out her face.  I have never yet had a praising review that did not send me slinking and howling under my breath to kneel in some dark corner and pray that the Horn would sound for me and the Worms come for me, that very same night.  The horn doesn’t and the worms don’t, and somehow one recovers one’s natural powers of oblivion, and goes on writing.

“Reading is primarily a symptom”

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I mentioned Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! the other day, and I am still loving it – so much so that I’m not going to confine it to one post.  I love essays about books, mostly because I agree with what they say – even better is when they make me reshift and reconsider my passionate views on reading.  Here’s a quotation from Mark Haddon’s essay ‘The Right Words in the Right Order’:

Talking about reading as the cause of anything is to get things back to front.  It exists in the valley of its own making.  It gives us pleasure; and our embarrassment about pleasure, our fear that reading is fundamentally no different from sex or sport, tempts us into claiming that reading improves us.  But pleasure is a very broad church indeed, and we do literature no great service if we try to sell it as a kind of moral calisthenics.

Reading is primarily a symptom.  Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be still and quiet, of our ability to dream during daylight.  And if we want more people to enjoy better books, whatever that means, we should concentrate on the things that prevent people reading.  Poverty, poor literacy, library closures, feelings of cultural exclusion.  Alleviate any of these problems and reading will blossom.

–Mark Haddon, ‘The Right Words in the Right Order’
Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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First things first – happy birthday to Our Vicar!

It’s definitely getting Christmassy at our house, since the Christmas tree has gone up (sans tinsel) and presents have been wrapped.  I’m heading down to Somerset at the end of next week, where Sherpa will inevitably destroy any decorations which go up – but I could forgive that little sweetheart absolutely anything, of course.

I’m not going to be particularly festive right now, though, as the weekend miscellany is dashing everywhere from the derivation of a popular phrase to the Twilight Zone.  It’s an odd one this week… enjoy!

1.)  You know when you start with an honest, sensible Wikipedia search… and then quarter of an hour later you’re reading about the chart hits of Destiny’s Child or an unsolved murder case from the 1840s?  Yes?  Perhaps you’ll sympathise with me: my initial search started with something for my DPhil on fantastic novels where rooms shift shape.  It ended with… an episode of the Twilight Zone called ‘Five Characters in Search of an Exit.’  I thought I’d post it here, because (a) it makes for good watching, and (b) since it plays on the title of the Pirandello play Six Characters in Search of an Author, it’s literary-by-proxy.  I do enjoy The Twilight Zone because it’s surreal and mysterious without being terrifying or gory.  You can read the Wikipedia article here, and watch below (hopefully).

2.)  I spotted this via Kirsty, I think (whose blog Other Stories seems to have disapparated?)  Ever wanted to know where the odd expression ‘stealing someone’s thunder’ comes from?  The Oxford Words blog obliges here.  I absolutely love these quirky little idioms and their history.  Any others to share?

3.) I haven’t read nearly enough books published in 2011 to submit my own results, but if you have, pop over to The International Readers Book Awards on the website for my new favourite podcast, The Readers, run by Simon of Savidge Reads and Gav of Gav Reads.

4.)  This weekend’s book (I have taken liberties with my normal Weekend Miscellany, but there has to be a book, doesn’t there?) came through my letterbox from Vintage Books.  It’s called Stop What You’re Doing And Read This – what else could I do but obey?  I’m afraid it’s not out until 5th January, but I couldn’t resist telling you about it in advance – because it’s just the sort of book-about-books that I adore.  To quote them, ‘this book is a mission statement about the transformative power of reading.’  Well-known authors, publishers and sundry others have written essays about reading and the importance of books – preaching to the converted here, of course, but a topic which always captivates me.  So far I’ve read Zadie Smith on libraries (wonderfully impassioned), Blake Morrison  (mainly about biographies, and very interesting), Carmen Callil (most fascinatingly for me, the origins of Virago), Tim Parks (the one dud essay so far; trying far too hard), and Mark Haddon (unexpectedly brilliant, actually.)  Other essayists are Jeanette Winterson, Michael Rosen, Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Jane David, and Nicholas Carr.

Of course I’ll write more in depth about this later, but I wanted to sound the alarm early.  It’ll only be £4.99 when it’s published, which I thought pretty reasonable, and it might just join Anne Fadiman, Susan Hill, and Alberto Manguel on my beloved books-about-books shelf.

E.M. Delafield in Passionate Kensington

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I recently gave Rachel a copy of Passionate Kensington (1939) by Rachel Ferguson, because it seemed like it would be up her street.  I only flicked through it myself, and now probably won’t be able to afford my own copy if y’all go out and buy all the copies available online – but I photocopied a few pages.  Although about a year in Kensington, Ferguson wanders on all sorts of lovely literary tangents – and I knew some of you would be interested in the excerpt below.  (How lovely would it be to hear EM Delafield on the radio?!) I agree with almost everything Ferguson says – not where Provincial Lady in America is concerned – and wish I lived in a world where this sort of book was still published.

It was in Earl’s Court Road that Messrs. W. H. Smith once organized something of this nature and announced a lecture by E. M. Delafield.  Nothing but my hatred of lectures kept me from her side, for she ranks high in my list of Delights, with certain reservations.  Also, if her broadcast on current books is anything to go by, I am embarrassed and alienated by her voice which came through to my drawing-room not the Delafield I like and admire so well, but as a genteel and didactic governess, successfully flattening the interest from the morning lessons.

It may sound an odd comment upon so prosperous a writer, but I feel pretty sure that she does not, and probably never will, receive the recognition she deserves, and the reason, I think, for this is that she tends to present her material under a guise of flippancy which misleads all but the acutely perceptive.  There are passages in The Diary of a Provincial Lady of absolute genius, and that is not a word one flings about lightly, and this book was an unmistakable success because it was earmarked as a frolic.  But the good things and subtleties in her ‘straight’ novels are far worse submerged by this same general effect of flimsy treatment which, too often, is so fatally of the ‘light’ school of fiction undertaken by writers not fit to be mentioned school of fiction undertaken by writers not fit to be mentioned in the same breath with her that she is in danger of going through life self-cheated.  She is, by those who seem to have missed the point of her, roughly rated as an agreeable rattle.  These assessors would probably dismiss the works of Jane Austen as nice books for the beach, and do not perceive that petit point, though very small indeed, may be exquisite.

It was this agreeable rattle notice which resulted in Miss Delafield being invited to ‘go and be funny about Russia’, and gave us Straw Without Bricks.  Now, Russia is a tragedy, not a comedy, and she is a comedy, not a tragedy.  The result was neither good Leningrad nor good Delafield.  A rather similar error occurred in Gay Life, which sought, if it sought anything, to rouse our pity and contempt for the wealthy-waster class in a Riviera resort.  This novel, so to speak, agreeably rattled just enough to eliminate our social scorns, and was, on the other hand, just sufficiently bedroomy and cocktailed to put Miss Delafield herself under the table and alienate her following.  Neither good adultery nor recogizable author, it was not her cup of tea or my gin and It.  Let cheaper pens and brains, lacking her delicate inner resources, deal with this tiresome stuff.  It is not for her and never will be.

The fact is that E. M. Delafield is essentially great enough to be the mouthpiece of the very small.  She can, if she will, tell ordinary human nature about itself and for them render articulate that humiliating compromise which is the daily life of most of us – a fine and splendid gift, handsomely withheld from most writers of to-day.  It is a trust she should respect, for it carries with it that balm we all need which is reassurance, the comforting knowledge that one we admire has also trudged through bogs of boredom, pettiness and disappointment.

Why was The Provincial Lady in America so unbelievably dull and inferior to its two predecessors?  Because Miss Delafield had been false to her real metier, fobbed us off with what was barely more than a traveller’s note-book and perpetrated a type of work which has already been done ad nauseam (and better) by writers of not half her quality.  And whether in Russia, France or America she fails us because she has no need to seek outside herself for what we want and she can give.

What do the critics think about her?  The gist of two comments remains in my memory:

“I do not know what the standing of E. M. Delafield is, I only know I enjoy her work thoroughly.”  The man who wrote this was evidently worried subconsciously by his dual perception that, with a strain in this author so unique, so individual, she should yet be in the ranks of those novelists for admiration of whose work you still have to shuffle your feet and look sheepish.  It is possible that he does not know her completely perfect novel, The Way Things Are, about which I dare not let myself go.  I have read it at least fifty times and shall read it fifty more; it satisfied on every count (save for some amazing culinary slips), and yet it is precisely this book which, to judge from the blank stares of my friends when I talk about it, is her least known.

The second critics said: “I know of no writer whose journalism is so uneven.”  And here is a tangible grievance, easily stated and accountable.  It is possible to write too much.  Miss Delafield claims, I understand, to be able to “write anywhere”.  But is this a real recommendation?  Can it not be that she is confusing quantity with quality?  The temptation I recognize to the full.

There comes a point in the career of many successful novelists when journals and magazines solicit them for articles ad stories, and they dash off this snippet and that before lunch; the result is, too often, laboured, mediocre and pot-boiling.  It doesn’t matter from a practical point of view because the literary critics won’t see it, and the circulating library public will miss most of it, but it is sapping, and drains vitality from the novelist’s real work and justification for existence – his books.  It may not ‘tell’ for years, but it will in the long run.  A little journalism, by all means, but don’t make a hard-labour business of it if you can afford not to.  Also, the muse of humour is a tricksy person, elusive, exacting, and by no means always at call, and if, as one definition runs, genius is ‘ calculation rapidly made’, the calculation made too rapidly through overwork is apt to be not greater genius but a slip in which the books won’t balance.

And it is because I have such a belief in E.M. Delafield, because I take such a keen, fighting interest in her work which I feel for few other writers to-day that I come down on her so hard.  I value her because she is potentially qualified for that so rare class of novelist which to myself I have always called ‘the loved writer’, and which on the stage was represented by Hawtrey, Irving, Ellen and Fred Terry and John Martin Harvey.  And when or if she can overcome that insubstantial element in her work – which is probably a defective style or ‘maner’, like a nervous laugh – I firmly believe that her humour and super-sensitive observation should make of her one of the best and most significant writers we possess, a comforting and timeless writer whose comments will delight a hundred years hence.

– from Passionate Kensington by Rachel Ferguson

Let Not The Waves of the Sea – Simon Stephenson

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Jackie recently posed an interesting question about whether or not there had been any books published in 2011 which were destined to become modern classics.  I wasn’t much help… because I’ve only read three books published in 2011 (which is two more than I initially thought) – two novels (The Tiny Wife and A Kind Man) and one brilliant work of non-fiction, which I’m going to write about today: Let Not The Waves of the Sea by Simon Stephenson.

Quite of few of you were moved by this article, which I linked to a few months ago.  It’s by Simon Stephenson, about losing his brother in the 2004 tsunami, and acts as a very touching introduction to Let Not The Waves of the Sea.  It made me want to read Stephenson’s book (which John Murray had sent me, and was stashed in a pile somewhere) mostly because so few books, fiction or non-fiction, centralise the fraternal relationship or pay respect to the bond between brothers.

Dominic Stephenson was 27 when he and his girlfriend Eileen were killed while staying on the island of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand.  I’m sure we all remember the images and videos which were shown around the world – so shocking and appalling an event, which killed nearly a quarter of a million people, is difficult to comprehend.  Stephenson notes in the afterword to Let Not The Waves of the Sea that two people died for every word that is in the book, which brings it home a little.  But this enormous tragedy was a million personal tragedies, and Stephenson’s book is the result of just one of these.

This is not the sort of book I usually feature on Stuck-in-a-Book, where I am more likely to mention the casualties of the Second World War than the victims of a 21st century natural disaster.  But even if this sounds like something you would never choose, can I encourage you to read on – Let Not The Waves of the Sea is a truly spectacular book.  I am conscious of the need to write about it carefully and respectfully, and it feels almost offensive to make any sort of value judgement about so personal and painful a book.  But by publishing it, Stephenson obviously invites others to join him on his path – and Let Not The Waves of the Sea widens its scope beyond that of a grieving brother – or, rather, we see the widening path that leads the brother through grief.

Stephenson starts with the events leading of December and January 2004, as the news unfolds and the waiting game begins – his family had to wait some time for Dominic’s body to be identified, as the quotation below explains, and it is a moving exploration of one stage of grief:

It seems impossible that my brother could have left in such a way, even more so that he might have done so without telling me, that I will never now exchange another word with the only soul that was built from the exact same pieces as mine.  It seems impossible, and so at a certain point I once again simply stop believing that he is dead.  In this new world of chaos it seems no more implausible than any other explanation, and each day that passes without a call to say his body has satisfied the identification requirements only reinforces this.  Stories are how I have been earning my living lately and it seems clear to me that fate is playing this one with a twist: the dental records did not match because of any problem with the nomenclature, but because they were being compared to somebody else’s teeth; the body lying in the funeral home in Thailand is not Dominic’s, but that of a thief who stole his wallet shortly before the water arrived.  Dominic is safely marooned on an island or lying in a hospital somewhere with his transient but utterly fixable amnesia.  Soon a passing ship will spot his signal fire.  Soon he will come to and recall everything with a start.  Soon his name will light up on my phone and I will answer it to hear a voice that asks, “Alright, Si?”
But the phone call that arrives in the middle of March is not this one that I have again started to expect.  A fingerprint on a glass the police officers took from the kitchen of their flat has proven a match and the criteria have been satisfied.  Dominic really is dead, and his body is to be flown home overnight.

Let Not The Waves of the Sea is, however, far from being simply a diary of those awful days.  The blurb notes that the book ‘is something more than a book about what it means to lose a brother: it is a book about what it means to have one in the first place.’  The article I linked to at the top explores some of this aspect – Simon was 16 months younger than Dominic, and they seem to have always been close.  Even if tragedy had not darkened the Stephensons’ lives, this book would be a beautiful paean to brotherhood and childhood – in amongst arrangements for funerals and travel, Simon relates anecdotes they shared, from his earliest days to school days to the time they spent together at university.  There are plenty of memoirs which relate romances, many which document parental or filial affections, but very few which show how important siblings can be.  I’m sure Simon and Dominic argued and fought, but – even if Simon laments never having spoken it aloud –  they never doubted their mutual love.

But Let Not The Waves of the Sea adds another dimension to these facets – Simon, understandably, wants to visit Ko Phi Phi.  In the end he stays there for months, and returns for several anniversaries of the event.  His book becomes also the documenting of his travels, getting to know the locals and forming the deep friendships which can exist only between those who have suffered the same pain.  Foremost amongst these is Ben, a Thai man who lost his wife and daughters, and deals with grief in a way entirely different from Simon.  Although (as you know) I don’t usually read travel writing, Simon’s journey was far more than geographical – and the things he does and learns on the island are engrossing – sad, but with that irony of good coming out of bad.  Still, some of his experiences continue to be unsettling in new ways – the everyday can never be quite everyday, in a place still recovering from the extraordinary.  Here, Simon sees a bone which has washed ashore:

It is down on the water’s edge, nestled in seaweed and bleached by the sun, the tapering downstroke of a brilliant white exclamation mark.  I pick it up and turn it over in my hand: three inches by one half inch, S-curved along its long axis and gently bowed across its short one, it is a perfect match for the clavicle of a young child.
I tell myself that there are a hundred other creatures this bone could have come from, and yet when it comes to it find that I can name at most three: a dog, a cow, perhaps a goat, though in truth I have never seen either of the latter on Phi Phi, where even dogs are a rarity.  I run my finger along it, trying to think of reasons why it cannot be human, trying to recall my anatomy lectures from medical school, as if there were some fact that, if I only could remember it, would allow me to discard it.
I wish that I had not noticed it, wish I had not picked it up, wish that I could simply throw it back into the sea, but I cannot.  It might be nothing, but there is a chance that even such a single small bone could yield all the information that a family ever gets.  I wrap it in a tissue and put it in my pocket.

The book doesn’t always make for the easiest reading.  I cried pretty much every time I picked it up – including when I was reading it on the bus, in a cafe, and in a quiet ten minutes at work.  Partly that’s because my worst nightmare is something happening to my own brother – partly it’s because Simon invites us to join him in his journey.  Horrible expression, much overused by reality TV programmes, but it is fitting – literally and figuratively, the reader goes on Simon’s journey: around the world, through all the stages of grief, into his happy memories – and through two other medical crises he has to face along the way.  Note how I have unconsciously changed from calling the author ‘Stephenson’ to calling him ‘Simon’?  That’s the sort of closeness that develops, without ever feeling mawkish or as though the reader is intruding or rubber-necking.

And the title, Let Not The Waves of the Sea?  It comes from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, a sort of fable composed of essays (it seems) which was beloved by Dominic.  This passage provides the title, and were the words Simon read at his brother’s funeral:

Let not the waves of the sea separate us now, and the years you have spent in our midst become a memory.
You have walked among us a spirit, and your shadow has been a light upon our faces.
Much have we loved you. But speechless was our love, and with veils has it been veiled.
Yet now it cries aloud unto you, and would stand revealed before you.
And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. 
It is often said that first-time authors put everything into their book – with novels, this is meant is a criticism.  Every idea is thrown in, to the detriment of the structure and unity required of fiction.  With non-fiction, with Let Not The Waves of the Sea, putting everything in is what makes Stephenson’s book so special.  It is not a memoir, not a travelogue, not a work of philosophy – or, rather, it is all of these things.  Let Not The Waves of the Sea is a response to grief and the outworking of it – this book is as full and varied and complex as the life it commemorates, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to read it.

The Double – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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And here is the other ‘strange little book’ I was going to tell you about, finally!  The Double (1846) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  (Initially it might seem like it has nothing common with my first ‘strange little book’, A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee – and, strangeness apart, the narratives don’t really.  But The Double was translated into English by Constance Garnett: mother of David Garnett, owner of A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee.  It’s nice when these connections appear…)  So, it’s by a well-known author, but perhaps he is better known for his longer titles.  The Double, at only 135 pages in my Dover Thrift edition, probably only counts as a short story for this author.  Indeed, the subtitle is ‘a Petersburg poem’ – although it is certainly prose, from where I’m standing.

The Double concerns Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a humble office-clerk who discovers himself followed and usurped by a doppelganger.  It’s more or less the blueprint for later doppelganger narratives, often referenced in theory on the topic, and although the idea of the double is probably as old as humanity, Dostoevsky seems to have been one of the first modern writers to develop the idea.

He goes about his fairly insignificant life, unpopular with women and colleagues, cheated by his servant and ignored by the world – when this happens:

The hero of our story dashed into his lodging beside himself; without taking off his hate or coat he crossed the little passage and stood still in the doorway of his room, as though thunderstruck.  All his presentiments had come true.  All that he had dreaded and surmised was coming to pass in reality.  His breath failed him, his head was in a whirl.  The stranger, also in his coat and hat, was sitting before him on his bed, and with a faint smile, screwing up his eyes, nodded to him in a friendly way.  Mr. Golyadkin wanted to scream, but could not – to protest in some way, but his strength failed him.  His hair stood on end, and he almost fell down with horror.  And, indeed, there was good reason.  He recognized his nocturnal visitor.  The nocturnal visitor was no other than himself – Mr. Golyadkin himself, another Mr. Golyadkin, but absolutely the same as himself – in fact, what is called a double in every respect…

Golyadkin’s double usurps not only his likeness but his name and occupation too – turning up opposite him in the office.  But Golyadkin Jnr. (as the narrative often refers to him) is more popular, confident, and powerful than Golyadkin Snr.  What is worse, he is incredibly changeable.  Sometimes he treats Golyadkin Snr. as a dear friend – at other times, with disdain and insult.  The Double becomes the narrative of Golyadkin Snr.’s humiliation – it often makes for uncomfortable reading, as he is not only menaced by this doppelganger, but mocked and pilloried at the same time.

As the novella progresses, unsurprisingly the question of Golyadkin Snr.’s sanity rises in the reader’s mind – and is never wholly satisfied.  There are plenty of options. Is he mad?  Is he schizophrenic?  Does he have dissociative identity disorder?  Is he the victim of some elaborate prank – or is it (within the novella) simply true?  It all makes for a fascinating psychological study, whether or not there is a natural explanation within the narrative.  Since the whole work is from Golyadkin’s perspective (albeit in the third person) the reader is trapped claustrophobically in his panicked and chaotic mindset.

Lending support to the madness theory is the writing style.  Perhaps it’s just because it’s from the Russian, but a lot of the narrative left me a little confused.  Golyadkin himself tends to talk at tangents, not completing sentences, and leaving his interlocutors more baffled than anything:

“But I will say more, gentlemen,” he added, turning for the last time to the register clerks, “I will say more – you are both here with me face to face.  This, gentlemen, is my rule: if I fail I don’t lose heart, if I succeed I persevere, and in any case I am never underhand.  I’m not one to intrigue – and I’m proud of it.  I’ve never prided myself on diplomacy.  They say, too, gentlemen, that the bird flies itself to the hunter.  It’s true and I’m ready to admit it; but who’s the hunter, and who’s the bird in this case?  That is still the question, gentlemen!”

That’s Golyadkin’s voice, but the narrative is equally clause-strewn and confusing at times.
The narrator does say, after two pages of description, “For all this, as I’ve already had the honour of explaining, oh, my readers! my pen fails me, and therefore I am dumb.”  I really hope Dostoevsky was being ironic, there.  I know it makes me sound ignominiously unintellectual, but if I have to struggle to make sense of paragraphs, I’m unlikely to love the novel.  Enormous sentences with dozens of clauses is a big no-no for me (hence my dislike of Turn of the Screw, for instance) and while The Double wasn’t as bad on this front as some works I’ve read, it certainly wasn’t easy going.  There was enough of interest to sustain me, but I had to read it slowly.

The difficulty of reading an author’s writing style is, of course, made more difficult by the mediating presence of the translator.  Constance Garnett was responsible for 71 translations of Russian works (so the Wikipedia article tells me, and who am I to doubt it?) and helped popularise Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov amongst English-speakers.  That brief Wikipedia article does make for interesting reading – apparently Garnett has her fans and detractors.  DH Lawrence and Joseph Conrad (*shudder*) gave her the thumbs up, but Russian poet, essayist, and unknown-to-me Joseph Brodsky wrote:

The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.

Ouch.  Low blow, Joe.  But it is food for thought, isn’t it?  How much of my struggle with Dostoevsky’s prose – indeed, how much of my appreciation for those sections I got my head around – is owed instead to Garnett’s writing?  It’s the perennial question for translated works, but I think it’s all the more pertinent when discussing a popular translation which is itself nearly a century old – and thus carrying its own datedness.

But until I learn Russian, I don’t have any other option.  I’m definitely glad that I read The Double, not least because it proved useful for the chapter I’m writing of my DPhil, and the themes Dostoevsky explores are fascinating and important.  I suppose I’m trying to say that Dostoevsky is a writer I admire, and could grow to find very interesting, but I will never love him.  I shan’t be kicking back with a hot chocolate, biscuit, and Crime and Punishment – but I respect anybody who would, and recommend The Double for anyone interested in exploring a literary archetype – but would probably recommend A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee for anyone more interested in an engaging book to read with a cup of tea.