A Year in Reviews

Besides writing reviews for my own pleasure, I also write them for Kirkus Reviews. I get the "indie" or self-published books, which are quite a mixed bag. Since Dec. 29, 2011,  I've written 62 reviews. A few reflections...

I've learned that truly bad novels are fun to laugh at and easy to review, truly good novels are very few and an honor to review, and hardest of all are mediocre romance-y kinda books where I pretty much hate the characters and their supermarket-aisle-magazine values because they're boring and stupid, but I can't just say that and be done with it.

I've come to hate: "smirked," overworked synonyms for "said," the phrase "broke the kiss," "matching' as synonymous with good taste, characters who fall in love because they're both hot and that's about it, frequent mention of brand names cool or uncool, male writers leering at their female characters, lurid descriptions of child abuse even/especially if true, self-involved hipsters, and vampires.

I love: writers. Even the bad ones are trying, and are not deliberately out to bore me and piss me off. The good ones? You are my life's chief delight. Thanks for getting the words out of your head and onto paper.

Young Romantics: the tangled lives of English poetry's greatest generation, by Daisy Hay

This book focuses on the Shelley/Keats/Byron circle, which first took shape as a group supporting journalist Leigh Hunt (the original for Harold Skimpole in Bleak House). Though Hunt later becomes a tangential, even denounced figure, the principle of sociability he represents is important, Hay writes, to understanding sociability in general among the later Romantics (those coming after Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake).

Other important members of the fluidly changing groups discussed in the book are Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's sister and (for a time) Byron's mistress. She was very much part of the Shelley menage, accompanying Mary when she ran off at age 16 with Shelley. Other figures include Hazlitt, the Lambs, Thomas Love Peacock, and musician Vincent Novello. The book locates these Romantic figures in the context of their relationships with, between, and among one another. Hay does an especially good job of showing how Shelley, Mary, and Byron would, in some rented villa or another in Italy or Switzerland, spend the days wandering, sailing, picnicking, playing with the children, and then getting together at night to read and listen to each other's work.

The book also makes clear what a raw deal "free love" was for the women in the group. Claire Clairmont, young and hungry for love, threw herself at Byron and became pregnant. By the laws of the time, he as father was entitled to custody of the daughter, and he forced penniless Claire to hand over the 15-month-girl she doted on--just so Byron could ignore her and eventually stick her in a convent, when she was only four years old. Claire begged and pleaded to take care of her own daughter and get her out of the convent's unhealthy situation, but Byron ignored her, and the girl died at 5 from typhus.

Hay wants us to focus on the nature of shifting relationships and sociability, but my overwhelming impression was that when young men philosophize about radical politics, free love, life on the road, and all that, it's young women who suffer the heaviest consequences. Mary Shelley lost two small children in one year from illness and suffered greatly from depression, while Percy wrote self-pitying poems about how she was inexplicably cold to him. Claire was treated abominably. Shelley left his first wife, Harriet, for Mary, and she eventually drowned herself.

Keats, to me the most interesting poet of this group, gets little treatment in this book. He was too poor and too ill to really socialize much, and because he doesn't fit the author's thesis, we get little discussion of some of his greatest poems--The Eve of St. Agnes rates only a mention.

Hay takes us past the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron to follow Mary and Claire and the remaining figures to the ends of their lives. It's interesting stuff--especially when Mary, a depressed, almost penniless widow returns to Britain and one of the first things she discovers is that Frankenstein is a huge hit as a stage production. But Hay's focus on "tangled lives" is as much about the fraying of that tangle by the end.

I found the emphasis on sociability to be of some, but limited interest, and would have liked more discussion of the poetry as such. Still, I learned a lot about the biographies of these fascinating and talented people, and would recommend the book to anyone interested in the period. I recommend it too for fascinating tidbits like the Novellos. Vincent Novello helped to found the London Philharmonic Society, and founded a publishing company whose central principle "was that music should be made available to all and not just those who could travel to London to hear it." It's thanks to a man like Novello that parlor piano music, that mainstay of Victorian musical evenings, became available and cheap. Now there's sociability.

The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897

Full title: The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897, translated from her code writings by Leslie Linder. I think it's most unfortunately out of print; I got my copy from Amazon used books.

Beatrix started her journal when she was 15, and since there's nothing embarrassing in it, it's not clear why she developed a code (mostly simple substitution) except for more privacy. The book includes an explanation of how it was deciphered and plates showing her early and later styles. Other plates show photographs of Beatrix and family, places she lived, and her early artwork.

Victorian girls were supposed to be sweet, sentimental, feather-headed simpletons, and I love the contrasting picture that emerges here of young Beatrix: confident in her opinions, especially on art; interested in everything; full of common sense. At just 18, reflecting on religion, she wrote "Believe there is a great power silently working all things for our good, behave yourself and never mind the rest." Bracing!

Regarding prudery over nude pictures, she wrote (again at 18) "I do not see the slightest objection to nude pictures as a class, nor are they necessarily in the least more indecent than clothed ones. Indeed the ostentatious covering of certain parts only, merely showing that the painter considers there is something which should be concealed, is far worse than pure unabashed nudity. The shame of nakedness is for the naked, not the observer, and the pictures cannot feel." She is exactly right on the prurience of the half-clothed. Even when young, she refuses to praise what she doesn't like, disdaining Michaelangelo, for instance ("the colour was beautiful but painfully brilliant and hard").

She doesn't say much about her situation as a dependent except to remark a few times how nice it would be to have some money of her own, which seems to have been the chief motivation behind her books. Her wealthy parents kept her on a tight leash. She does reject the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House (age 29): "There is supposed to be some angelic sentiment in tending the sick, but personally I should not associate angels with castor oil or emptying slops." Again, bracing.

Wherever she goes, she observes (sometimes in exhausting detail). People, landscape, customs, natural history, geology, fungi (a special interest), and always animals. She worries about badly kept livestock, delights in the antics of her various pet animals, and considers the merits of, say, one kind of cow over another. When you read the journal, it's less surprising that the author of Peter Rabbit gave up writing and drawing in favor of husbandry. She used her proceeds to buy one farm, then another and more, and she eventually left a good deal of land to the National Trust, much of which is now the Lake District National Park.

Roger Sale, in his essay on Potter in Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White, comes away from the journal with the impression that Potter is as straitlaced and humorless as her parents, but I don't know how. She is often quite funny: the station-master at the family vacation spot "is under the delusion that our name is Potts; we are constantly and invariably taken for the servants, but Mrs. Donaldson did remark that she thought my father was a very gentlemanly man for a butler." Sale has a lot of good observations in that essay, but I think he misses something essential about Potter.

This is a delightful book for dipping in and out of. Not every section is riveting, but nearly every page holds something interesting and original. I very much want to read a good biography of her now, and especially learn more about her married life as Mrs. Heelis, breeding prize-winning sheep and preserving land in the Lake District.

Two short reviews

I recently read Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, a graphic story about "Jason Lint." Ware's style is amazing. It starts off in Jason's baby eyes very blocky, with big halftone dots, then gradually becomes more realistic and flowing as he grows up, though there's always a squared-off quality to his drawing. Lint is not a likeable character but the way Ware tells his story is.

One big problem, though, is that the repro is just too small. Even with my +1 reading glasses, some of the writing was teeny tiny. This is a problem I've had before with Drawn + Quarterly Press, who I love for publishing great comic artists like Ware and Lynda Barry, but who I want to shake for making them too small to read!

I also read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. It's a highly praised Pulitzer Prize-winner, about how Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things was rediscovered by Poggio in the 15th century. The poem sums up ideas like atomism and atheism that seem very modern today, and were fresh air to a culture still caught up in orthodoxy and inquisition.

After reading the book I know much more about Poggio, the state of Renaissance book-collecting, the history of libraries, how manuscripts were copied, along with Renaissance politics and especially Epicurean philosophy. But of course the world didn't become modern in one swerve or with one book, so it's irritating that Greenblatt sets the expectation he'll be able to make that argument.

As for the poem itself, he sums it up, but it was frustrating to keep hearing how elegant and gorgeous it was with maybe one little example to go by. He says several times that it was the poem's literary qualities that excited the book collectors as much or more than its content--so why not discuss those qualities in depth? That might be hard to do for a poem in classical Latin, but then one wonders, why keep bringing it up.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

It's very much the less talented sister's version of Jane Eyre, stripped down as a simple governess romance. Agnes, a put-upon governess, falls in love with Mr. Weston, a curate, and must wait patiently until he declares himself--that's pretty much the whole story. For me the real tension in the novel isn't romantic, it's spiritual. How will Agnes learn to bear her life? Like Anne herself, with patience and submission.

Governessing involved hard work, or social isolation, and a job where you're supposed to raise children while having no authority over them. Her helplessness pains her the most, and I thought this was interesting, when it comes to animals. She hates the mean-spirited cruelty of her charges, like the boy who enjoys taking nestlings and ripping them apart alive, and finds her highest courage in standing up for innocent creatures. She's one herself, of course, as encoded in her name--Agnes means "lamb."

Agnes isn't always likeable, as when she frets over the eternal souls of the children she watches, because they act like children. A six-year-old girl loves being told she's pretty, "which I had instructed her to regard as dust in the balance compared with the cultivation of her mind and manners." It's not hard to see why these children might not like their governess and make a point of teasing her. She has class issues--she resents having to call an 11-year-old Master Bloomfield--but doesn't even notice that she herself calls an elderly cottager Nancy, not Mrs. Brown.

Reading this novel reminds me what a powerful achievement Jane Eyre was--that Charlotte Brontë could make Jane so much her own person and an actor in her own life. It also reminds me, though, what a fantasy of governessing Thornfield Hall is, with just one child to teach and a biddable one at that, and consideration made within the household for Jane's comfort and convenience. Not so in this novel. At one point Agnes is a guest, kind of, in a former ward's house, stuck in her room, not knowing when to come to dinner because there's no clock in her room and she "was not rich enough to possess a watch." That kind of detail makes Agnes Grey an interesting, and more realistic, read.

Singled Out

Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson (2008)

The 1921 Census in Great Britain revealed some 1.75 million “surplus women,” those left single because the men they might have married had been slaughtered on the battlefields of World War I. At a time when the only acceptable fate for a woman was marriage and child-raising, how did surplus women cope? In her fascinating, utterly compelling social history, Virginia Nicholson examines contemporary accounts, memoirs, biographies, advice manuals, novels, and personal memories to find out. Many women suffered poverty, loneliness, and social disapproval. But, Nicholson shows, many also found new opportunities for financial and personal independence—and happiness.

A woman’s destiny was to get married and have children. But after the war, there were simply not enough men to go around, and those remaining had their pick. If you were unlucky enough to be left on the shelf, that was it: no husband, no social status, no children, and often, penury. Working class jobs were grueling and underpaid. Middle- and upper-class women, who grew up assuming they’d be supported by their husbands (and learning little beyond water-colors and conversational Italian), found few opportunities for making money. Jobs were for men, at least when the soldiers returned from war.

British society offered some sympathy to surplus women, but also contempt. Despite the shortage of men, spinsters were assumed simply to have failed to attract a husband—and such a woman was a complete failure. Bereaved and lonely, unable to have love and sex without great risk, she was often mocked as a sour, frustrated, dried-up spinster.  She couldn’t win.

But she could cope. Nicholson discusses the many strategies such women adopted to combat loneliness in fulfilling ways, and quotes from contemporary diaries and memoirs to show that, often, these strategies worked well. For example, a woman who loved children could become a beloved nanny, often closer to her charges than their own parents. Single women could share digs and become lifelong friends (or sometimes more). They could pursue their own interests.

As the social landscape changed between the wars, determined women banged on the doors of politics, science, business, social work, and other professions. Nicholson draws from many autobiographies and memories to illuminate the lives of some pretty amazing women. Her variety of sources is wonderfully helpful in showing the spectrum of possibilities for single women. Especially open were the worlds of academia and Bohemia; women with intelligence, talent, and enough money to get by could live surprisingly independent, powerful lives, and did not at all regret missing out on housework and childcare. They drew their happiness from success.

“Surplus” women, Nicholson also suggests, often benefited society rather than becoming the drain on it that contemporary commenters feared. Many well-educated single women of the time became superb teachers for the next generation, probably better teachers than most students get today. It was a golden age for social work and the caring professions, which drew in unmarried women in great numbers, and they had enormous influence. Many women’s lives were greatly diminished by not having men to marry, but, Nicholson shows, many found unexpected freedom and power for the same reason.

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Although they don’t detract from the book’s useful and riveting account, a few problems exist. Nicholson doesn’t spell out some unfamiliar acronyms like VAD, PEN, and ICI. The first is for  Voluntary Aid Detachment, the field nursing service; the second, I think but couldn’t determine for sure, is PEN International, an NGO that’s originally short for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists; as for ICI, where Bessie Webster worked—even Google couldn’t help me there. I found the occasional infelicity, like the women who “had sex with men, and in some cases children.”

When Nicholson turns to literary sources for illustration, her remarks can be ill-considered. For example, she’s most unfair to Dorothy L. Sayers, citing her indelible  “image of the academic spinster . . . as a round-shouldered woman in a yellow djibbah,” but ignoring the wonderful Miss Climpson, whose energy and intelligence are highly valuable to Lord Peter, and he knows it. And Miss Marple as any kind of failure? She’s a woman to be reckoned with, just like Miss Climpson. If they get away with a lot because society writes them off as old maids, that’s part of the point. And Nicholson quite misunderstands the typist in The Waste Land, calling her “pretentious.”

However, Nicholson does discuss many contemporary novels now little known today and that reveal much about conditions for women of the time. I do wish she’d included Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938), which would have been a perfect illustration of the hard-up lady’s companion type who finds happiness in an unusual, creative way, partly through breaking class boundaries—this would have fit in well with her argument. But that’s a quibble. Her bibliography for those wishing further research is highly useful. This was a terrific, eminently readable, valuable book.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

Works on Charles Dickens are sprouting up like weeds lately, no doubt at least in part because of the upcoming bicentennial of his birth on Feb. 2, 2012. Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst have both just published new biographies, and these follow several recent ones: Peter Ackroyd's 1991 Dickens and Michael Slater's 2009 Charles Dickens. I read the Ackroyd, which was strange in places, but valuable and evocative of the man's complexities.

I've just read Tomalin's 2011 Charles Dickens: A Life, and the first most obvious question is, why a new biography at all? This book cries out for an author's introduction explaining what's new about her outlook, her evidence, her sources, or whatever. But none is given. (Luckily for readers, the New York Times reviewer David Gates nicely summarizes the Dickens biography situation in his review "Being Charles Dickens."

What I found most valuable was Tomalin's attention towards Catherine Dickens and Ellan Ternan. The biographies I've read before don't give much sense of poor Catherine, calling her "shadowy" or "passive" and having done with it. Tomalin shows how hard it was to stand up to Dickens, and shows Catherine's good nature--her kind, pleasant nature, her love of puns, her fortitude in all the difficult Victorian travel they did.

Tomalin has written before about Ellen Ternan in Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. She provides a good deal of strong evidence to show how deeply they were involved, even (perhaps; Tomalin makes it seem likely) having a baby who died in infancy. This relationship is something other biographies tend to skim over, and Ackroyd even maintains that Dickens and Ternan probably never consummated their relationship. Anyone weighing the evidence will want to read Tomalin's account.

Tomalin's scholarship, while admirable, can become tiresome. Dickens traveled frequently, and Tomalin seemingly records every train trip, every ferry crossing. Details of the publishing process, copyright law, and so on were less than riveting.

Tomalin obviously loves Dickens's writing, and she also provides useful, thoughtful summaries of his works. While she never looks away from his considerable faults, she understands what makes him irresistible to readers. "He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens." And perhaps that helps explain why all the biographies, 142 years after his death.