Harriet Devine's Blog

Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

I have been stuck indoors in bad weather for almost a week and have read a LOT of books. This one was one the last ones I read and just happened to be on the shelf in my friend's house. I have known about Eudora Welty for many years but had never read anything by her before. She lived almost all her life in Mississippi and died there in 2001 at the age of 92.

Many novelists write autobiographically, but Welty evidently made a conscious effort not to do so in most of her fiction. Instead, as she said, she tried 'to enter the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination I set most high'. In this book, however, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, she seems to have included some memories of her own childhood and of the lives of her parents. But that is really by the by. This is a most compelling book, in the quietest way. It tells the story of Laurel McKelva who returns to her Southern home from Chicago when her 70 year old father, Judge McKelva, has to have an eye operation. After ten years of widower-hood, the Judge has recently remarried and his flighty young wife Fay is possessive and resentful of his returning daughter. That is how it starts. But events take over, and Laurel is forced to rethink her own past, her childhood, her memories. I particularly liked the contrast between the two women -- Laurel so quiet, restrained, well-bred, thoughtful, and the terrifyingly convincing Fay, who takes out her damaged, unstable personality through hatred and anger. But there are also wonderful scenes where whole families appear, and again Welty shows such telling contrasts -- Fay's rough, honest, sad family with Laurel's conventional traditional Southern one, for example. So understated, all this, and yet so utterly believable.   

If you have never read Welty, do read this book. It is so subtle and so thought-provoking.

 

Woolf, The Platform of Time

I've only just started this and am so looking forward to the pleasure I'm going to get from it. It's a collection of Woolf's non-fiction, much of it not published before, or not in its entirety. The first piece is something Woolf wrote in the terribly painful days after her nephew Julian Bell was killed in the Spanish Civil War. She wanted to record her memories of him before they faded. It is vintage Woolf, honest, perceptive, wonderfully written. There's lots more great stuff in here including her own account of the so-called Dreadnought Hoax, when Woolf and her friends managed to deceive the entire crew of this ship into thinking they were visiting dignitaries from an exotic Eastern country. Look out for the photo of Woolf in full male costume, with a beard!
The book has an excellent introduction by S.P. Rosenbaum, a distinguished Woolf scholar. Oh yes, and it's another Hesperus book, of course. 

8 Random Things

Lots of bloggers have been doing this and I got myself tagged by litlove on Tales from the Reading Room.

1. I've been a vegetarian for about forty years, but had a relapse in the 1980s and ate bacon sandwiches for a while.

2. I have a cat called Timmy but I also love dogs. My first dog, when I was about seven, was called Alfred. He was a medium sized black poodle, never clipped or shaved, and my parents had bought him cheap because his tail had been lopped off too short.

3. In the garden of every house I've ever owned (and I have owned quite a few in my time) I have always planted a glorious rambling rose called Alberic Barbier, in memory of my mother whose favourite it was. She died when I was 22.

4. I recently went to see an opera, Satyagraha, music by Philip Glass. I was expecting to find it hard going but absolutely loved it.

5. I  am incapable of keeping my office tidy.  Bits of paper defeat me.

6. If I hadn't been an academic I'd like to have been a property developer. I love fixing up dilapidated houses and making them beautiful.

7. One thing I could never do is pot-holing. I find the thought of being in a tunnel under the ground absolutely terrifying.

8. All through the years when I was growing up I really wanted to be an actress. But when I went to drama school I found out I was no good at it.

I'm supposed to tag some others but loads of people seem to have done this already. But I would like to nominate Rob on Topsyturveydom, Lisa on The Hesitant Scribe, Simon on Stuck-in-a-Book, and anyone else who reads this and hasn't done it already!

Edith Wharton, Sanctuary

Another Hesperus book -- how nicely presented they are. This is not much longer than the Balzac I wrote about last week, and was published quite early in Wharton's career, in 1903. It starts with Kate Orme, a young girl, feeling "undividedly happy". She is excitedly looking forward to her wedding to a man who she thinks is perfect in every way -- handsome, charming, affluent, Denis Peyton is "used to being met with a smile". But almost at once, events take an unexpected turn, as Kate discovers that Denis has been guilty of a moral lapse for which she cannot forgive him. She decides, though, for strangely altruistic reasons, to go through with the marriage. Part Two now shifts forward in time. Kate has been widowed just a few years after the marriage and her son Dick is now an adult, and an architect. She is proud of his artistic abilities and his disdain for material rewards, but at the same time afraid for him, fearful that he may have inherited his father's questionable morality. And indeed, when he is put to the test, this seems initially to have been the case.....
So, what is this novel actually  about? as I am fond of saying to my students. Morality?  That makes it sound like a pretty dreary sort of book. But in the end this is not, I don't think, what interests us in this story, or at least what interested me. I think it's really about love, and what that actually means. What qualities make us love someone? Kate stops loving Denis when she finds out that he is morally fallible, but she will never, certainly, stop loving Dick even if he gives in to the temptation he is faced with. Dick's fiance, Clemence Verney, on the other hand, will love Dick more if he does give in. As for Dick...but you will have to read the story to find out his angle.
Wharton was living in Paris when she wrote this, and was friendly with Henry James, whose convoluted writing style seems to have infected her rather at this time -- there are some pretty complex sentences in here! But don't let that put you off. Wharton is a great writer and this is an interesting addition to her better known novels.

Flowers in Cheshire

If you ever have  a bit of leisure time and find yourself in Cheshire, go to beautiful Arley  Hall, not far from  Knutsford.  It has the most glorious gardens, with tremendous  herbacious borders and a wonderfully  large walled garden.  Delicious lunches in the 17th-century barn, too.

Miss Hargreaves

Inspired by Simon at Stuck-in-a-book and by the e-reading-list I've joined but don't contribute to enough, I have just managed to finish reading Miss Hargreaves. Written by Frank Baker (of whom I certainly had not heard) in the 1940s, this is described on the cover as 'A Strange and Charming Book'. Strange it certainly is, but charming does not really encompass the effect of this work, which has taken me a long time to read because I didn't find it at all comfortable. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- I kept returning to it and dipping in -- but it was not the sort of book I felt like curling up with in bed of an evening, my preferred time and place for reading.

Narrated by young Norman Huntley, an organist in a cathedral town, it tells the story of the eponymous Miss H, who is, essentially, a creation of Norman's own somewhat bizarre imagination. A creation, though, who lives and breathes and affects Norman's life in a number of ways, many of them far from comfortable. On holiday in Ireland with his friend Henry, Norman has visited a small out-of-the way church and, in conversation with the vicar, claimed to know an elderly lady, Miss Hargreaves, who he has invented on the spot. Egged on by Henry, he endows her with many eccentricities, including a parrot and a hip-bath which she carries everywhere with her. Imagine his surprise, and indeed horror, when, back home, he gets at message to say Miss H is arriving at his local station. Thinking, and hoping, that this is some kind of joke, he turns up and there she is, just as he described her, complete with parrot and bath. There is, certainly, much comedy of a slightly disturbing kind in their early encounters and conversations -- every time Norman invents some new facet of their supposed earlier acquaintance Miss H immediately 'remembers' it, but her memory appears to be extremely vague on subjects Norman has not mentioned himself. Norman is (understandably) appalled by this turn of events, and tries his best to escape Miss H, who is deeply hurt by his rejection of her. His friends and family are shocked by his apparent rudeness to this sweet old lady, who, they believe, he must have had some kind of sinister designs on. Things go from bad to worse, and Norman's state of mind becomes increasingly desperate and unstable. In the end he finds a solution of sorts, but I am not going to say more about this.

This book is really challenging in some ways. Mainly, I think, because it provides no easy answers to what has actually taken place. A stray reference at one point to JW Dunne's 1927 book An Experiment with Time provides a clue, I think. This book, which I remember my parents reading with great excitement, is described by Amazon as a work which "explores the relationship between dreams, time, and reality. It shows how a scientific experiment probes the nature of time and the barrier dividing past and future, and offers a scientific argument for human immortality". I've never read it myself, but think I might now have a go. But of course you don't have to get into all this in order to enjoy Miss H, which is really a remarkable and mind-bending read. A film was apparently made starring Margaret Rutherford, and I couldn't help picturing that wonderful actress as I read of the escapades of this extraordinary fictional character.

By the way, it appears as costing £30 on Amazon, but I got mine from abebooks for a lot less!

Colonel Chabert

                                                             Like some other book bloggers I recently got a lovely parcel of books from Hesperus Press. I'd deliberately asked for books I wouldn't normally buy or read, including one by the great French novelist Honore de Balzac. This isn't it, actually, as the one I wanted wasn't immediately available -- a good thing, as it turned out, since I got the chance to read this one instead and am very glad I did. I'd never read de Balzac before, though I vaguely knew of him as an influence on Dickens, which even from dipping my toes in here I can easily see that he was. This delightful little book -- only 83 pages of story -- is probably best described as a novelette, much as I hate that coy-sounding term. But my goodness, de B certainly packs a lot into those 83 pages. Written in 1832, it tells the story of an old soldier, the Colonel C of the title, who, after a heroic military career, is declared dead following a battle in 1807. His young and beautiful wife claims her pension and his estate and, now a wealthy woman, remarries well and has two children. But suddenly one day into a solicitor's office in Paris comes an old, decrepit man in a worn-out army greatcoat, claiming to be none other than Colonel Chabert  himself. The story of his survival -- having been cast into a mass grave -- and his subsequent struggle to keep alive while living in direst poverty in various European countries, is almost incredible, but the young solicitor is excited by the case and takes it on. Eventually he manages to bring Chabert and his former wife together for a discussion of their situation, but matters do not take the expected course. This is a powerful, moving and very thought-provoking story, and though it has tragic overtones, also says something very profound about human beings and the survival of the spirit against almost impossible odds. 
I have, for a long time, had a resistance to reading literature in translation. I've always had the feeling that too much is lost if you substitute other words for those chosen by the writer. But this is obviously a short-sighted view in many ways since it means I haven't read a lot of things I should have read. So I welcome the advent of these lovely Hesperus Press books, many of which are, as Hesperus points out, 'little known in the English speaking world'.

Book Ends

The pictures are rubbish  I'm afraid but you get the idea -- I bought these two rather nice bookends in our local monthly attic sale for £2.50 the pair -- beat the man down by 50p, rather  shamefully, really.  Bookends don't  seem to be a feature of our lives these days but these ones are going to be really useful and though a bit chipped on one of the edges are really quite nice, I think. They are different -- both have little cupids disporting themselves but in one they are driving chariots and in the other playing with a donkey.

Courtesans

A few years ago I read and hugely enjoyed Frances Wilson's The Courtesan's Revenge: The Life of Harriette Wilson, the Woman Who Blackmailed the King . Katie Hickman's book came out at about the same time but I have only just finished reading it. Hickman describes, in lively detail, the lives of five women who  lived between the 18th century and the late 19th in what came to be known as the demi-monde -- the half world of the courtesan. And my goodness, what a world it was. All of the ones in Hickman's book came from relatively humble beginnings (though some aristocratic women also ended up here through having made some kind of faux pas) and all ended up with quite staggering riches during at least the height of their careers. Diamonds, silks, lace, fine linens, magnificent mansions, princely lovers and, most important in later life, an annuity if they were lucky, to see them through the last years when they were no longer desired and courted by the wealthy and aristocratic men who had been their patrons in their heyday. Without an annuity, those final years could be grim indeed. Sophia Baddeley, who at the height of her fame could command £500 (£30,000 in todays money) for a single night, ended in penury on the streets of Edinburgh and died aged just forty one. Others were more lucky or more careful -- Elizabeth Armistead, who rose to her celebrity by a route that probably included various London brothels, ended up as the adored and respected wife of the politician Charles James Fox, whose family came to accept and love her during her long widowhood. Cora Pearl, the sprightly English girl who lived for most of her life in Paris,  lived cheerfully though in reduced circumstances, managing to survive by selling off her valuable property and possessions. Catherine Walker (Skittles) declined into ill health but managed to live in relative comfort, still adored by her past lovers. My own particular favourite has to be my namesake, Harriette Wilson -- who could fail to love someone whose memoirs begin: "I shall not say why or how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. Whether it was love, or the severity of my father, the depravity of my own heart, or the winning arts of the noble lord, which induced me to leave my paternal roof and place myself under his protection, does not now much signify: or if it does, I am not in the humour to gratify curiosity in this manner". Harriette's memoirs did gratify quite a lot of curiosity in other ways, and the list of her aristocratic lovers amazed and delighted her readers. As seems to be true for all these women, it was intelligence and wit that made them famous and sought after as much as beauty -- Harriette herself was not particularly beautiful but she had a dazzling personality and a lively and highly intelligent mind.
It is of course fascinating to read of all the affairs, the money, the jewels, and the clothes. But what I found most interesting in the end is the light these women's lives cast on the public morality of their age. They could never be accepted into the houses of respectable married women, who nevertheless had boundless curiosity as to how they lived, and, presumably, how they entrapped their husbands. All of them, in their different ways, valued their liberty above all else -- as Cora Pearl wrote, "My independence was all my fortune, and I have known no other happiness; and it is still what attaches me to life". Harriette Wilson summed up the morality of the age well"
"Now the English Protestant ladies' virtue is chastity! There are but two classes of women among them. She is a bad woman the moment she has committed fornication; be she generous, charitable, just, clever, affectionate, and ever ready to sacrifice her own good to serve and benefit those she loves, still her rank in society is with the lowest hired prostitute. Each is indiscriminately avoided and each is denominated the same -- bad woman, while all are virtuous who are chaste".

caring for the sick

I have been very caught up in the last few days helping to care for a sick friend. She had a wisdom tooth extracted, has had a very bad reaction to the medication she was taking, and even now 10 days later is still extremely unwell. She will recover but it is hard on her partner, who adores her and has had to put the whole of his life on hold to take care of her. So I come and help when I can to give him a bit of respite. I don't say this to make everyone think what a wonderful person I am, but it may explain my silence.