A Reader's Place

The characters in Andre Dubus’ novel, Gone So Long, can’t find their equilibrium. They can’t sit still, they can’t forgive themselves for what they’ve done or who they are; they can’t calm down. It’s not hard to understand why. In a moment of rage, Daniel Ahearn murdered his wife in the presence of their three-year old daughter, Susan. Although Susan can’t remember the incident, it upends her life: her father goes to prison and Susan is brought up by her grandmother in rural Florida, far away from her childhood home. She believes her parents were killed in a car crash. It isn’t until she’s a teenager that she learns the true story.

When the novel opens, it’s forty years after the murder and Daniel has been out of prison for twenty-five years. He’s living in a trailer supporting himself by re-caning chairs, a skill he learned in prison. His life is minimalist, claustrophobic, and he’s dying of cancer. Susan is forty-three, married, a writer with a college teaching job, but there’s no joy in her life. She suffers from depression and can’t reciprocate her kind husband’s love. Her grandmother still rages about the loss of her daughter.

Daniel wants to see Susan before he dies and locates her on the Internet. He packs up his truck and unbeknownst to Susan, heads down the coast to find her. The reader knows that his hopes of explaining his life to his daughter are delusional. Susan has ambivalent feelings about seeing her father but his crime occupies large portions of her waking mind and she begins to write about it, hoping for some clarity and peace. Her grandmother rages on; there’s no hope of forgiveness from her.

As Daniel heads down to Florida and Susan continues writing her memoir, Dubus builds up the tension by filling in the background to the story. The Kirkus reviewer wrote that “Dubus puts this pot on a very slow boil, continuing to fill in the backstory as he inches his characters toward their climactic meeting.” Just so. I had to stop reading periodically to slow it down even more. What would happen when they met? One of the characters has a gun and wants to use it. I remember years ago reading Dubus’s novel House of Sand and Fog and experiencing the same emotion, needing to take breaks from the sadness and fear.

Ahearn could be a hard character to like, but in Dubus’s hands, while he’s not exactly empathetic, we get that he’s flawed and vulnerable. In parallel to Susan’s memoir is the long letter Ahearn writes to her, hoping to win a place in her life. How is that going to work out? It’s Dubus’s character-driven, evocative writing, filled with bottled-up emotion that keeps us on the hook.

A few weeks ago I posted a review of The Sun and Her Stars, Donna Rifkind’s bio of the remarkable Salka Viertel. I turned next to Viertel’s own memoir, The Kindness of Strangers. While the narrative covers some of the same anecdotes and events of Viertel’s life, it was a pleasure to read her own words and excerpts from the letters between Viertel and her husband Berthold as well as the extended portion about her childhood and acting career in Germany and Austria. There’s more emotion in her own telling, and that was a treat.

Towards the end of the memoir, I was struck by Viertel’s comment, “…it occurs to me that as the years went by, my life ceased to be solely my own. It became like the estuary of a big river into which other streams flowed. I could not influence their course but I was affected by it.” Her husband, siblings, and children were scattered around the world; the  writers, artists, and actors she befriended were always coming and going; and her precarious financial state kept her on the move. Many of our lives are like that. We juggle friendships and love relationships from different times and places, appreciating the memories and connections we’ve made, watching as the trajectories of their lives spin towards us and away. As we get older, these connections take on more emotional weight, more poignancy. There’s sadness but also the richness of memories, and that’s what Viertel captures in her memoir.

The years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the next century were filled with outsize personalities and scandals–great stories for readers of social history. In A Dirty Year, Bill Greer focuses on the turbulent year 1872, when New Yorkers were riveted by “stories of love and murder, warring women and feminine financiers, smut dealers and moral crusaders, mommy mutilators and baby killers.”

The book opens with Jim Fisk, who, with his partner Jay Gould, had bilked investors of millions and taken the Erie Railroad out from under Commodore Vanderbilt’s nose. But the scandal in the tabloids in 1872 concerned the very public love triangle of Fisk, the prostitute Josie Mansfield, and Ned Stokes. Fisk was a notorious player in New York’s business and social life. New Yorkers flocked to the opulent musicals he staged at the Grand Opera House on Eighth Avenue that included something called the “Demon Can-Can.”

A Dirty Year follows the story of Fisk, Stokes, and Mansfield, during the course of that year, but that story is joined by two others that filled the newspapers and titillated readers. Anthony Comstock, for one, roamed New York, seizing literature he deemed “smut,” and bringing printers to trial. His crusade extended to abortionists and the deaths that resulted from their techniques. The trials made front-page news.

The third story, and maybe the one most filled with outsize characters, is the tale of Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin, two women who broke all the boundaries of ladylike behavior. The two sisters started a successful brokerage firm on Wall Street, published a newspaper which became a mouthpiece for their progressive views, and revealed the adulterous relationship of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, beloved preacher of Brooklyn Heights. The glamorous sisters, especially Woodhull, were fiery, persuasive speakers who knew how to get what they wanted from men. Advocates of free love, Woodhull claimed the “natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.” She joined the suffragist movement and for a while was hailed as a champion, but her extreme views did not accord well with the more gradualist views of Susan B. Anthony and others. She ran for president of the U.S. at a time when women couldn’t even vote and surprised Frederick B. Douglas with the news that he’d be her vice president. The sisters always made good copy.

As Greer writes, “the paths of Fisk and Woodhull and Claflin and Beecher and Comstock… would cross and recross in a tangle not even God could unravel.”  For lovers of social history, this is a good book to read to remind us, in our own time of outsize personalities and scandalous behavior, that we’ve been here before.

Last week was very exciting for me: I attended the (virtual) Association of Jewish Libraries conference, which had been scheduled to take place in Evanston, IL before everything was upended. I’ve been a member of AJL for many years; it’s a great group of (mainly) librarians in the Judaica field. The conference was a very successful virtual event.

This past year I chaired AJL’s Jewish Fiction Award committee so I also moderated the program we had at the conference, “Fresh Lit: Recent and Forthcoming Adult Jewish Fiction.” Our two award-winning authors were at the program: Goldie Goldbloom author of On Division; and Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. I interviewed them both at the beginning of the program.

I wrote about The Flight Portfolio in this post a few months ago and was eager to talk to Julie about the book. The novel is based on the true story about how Varian Fry rescued Jewish intellectuals, artists, and writers from Nazi Germany in 1941. The story is rich in character, plot, and writing; the characters beautifully developed. At the end of the interview, I asked Julie if she had read the biography The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood by Donna Rifkind. I asked because some of the people that Fry rescued are part of that story, most notable Heinrich Mann, older brother of Thomas. Julie already had it on her to-read list.

I’m always interested in stories about exile; how people manage in changed circumstances and The Sun and Her Stars has a full range of experiences. Some of the emigres were cranky and sneering, full of derision for American culture, especially Hollywood culture, even if jobs at the studios kept them solvent. Viertel herself wanted to continue her acting career in Hollywood and was disappointed when that didn’t happen.

Despite her own losses, Viertel was a survivor and didn’t spend time regretting what might have been. It wasn’t just her own survival that she was interested in, but others’ as well. She and Greta Garbo became close friends and Viertel worked on the screenplays for some of Garbo’s most successful films. Viertel’s house on Mabery Road in Santa Monica became a center of culture, a salon, feeding the stomachs and minds of the emigrés and many Hollywood actors and cultural icons: Charlie Chaplin, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann, Sergei Eisenstein. The weekend parties at the Mabery Road house were legendary for the guests, the networking, and especially  Salka’s warmth and hospitality.  

In the 1930s and 1940s, she worked tirelessly against National Socialism and arranged emergency visas for artists and writers trapped in Europe. Her family life was complicated: she and her husband Berthold had three sons, but Berthold was often in Europe living his own life while Salka had her own romantic liaisons in Santa Monica. She was a sophisticated woman with a classical European education who spoke eight languages; despite that, she ran a rather bohemian household, with a rotating cast of lost souls

Unfortunately, Viertel was caught up in the McCarthy Era witch hunts, along with other Hollywood notables and blacklisted, a slap in the face to someone who nurtured so much talent and contributed in no small way to the Golden Age of Hollywood. In another irony, her own memoir of those times is titled The Kindness of Strangers. Indeed, the kindness was all Salka’s. I just put a reserve on the memoir; I’d like to hear her own version of the story.

It’s likely that you’re thinking about medical issues more than you usually do–it’s hard not to. I think about friends and family who have what’s euphemistically called “underlying conditions” and the risks they face if they catch the coronavirus. I just heard the other day that certain blood types make you more susceptible to a serious case of the virus. Sigh. Sometimes it’s hard to stop your brain from wildly proliferating about the risks of going back to some sort of normal life. I was cheered to learn that this is the Year of the Nurse named in honor of the birth of Florence Nightingale, two hundred years ago. Nightingale professionalized the occupation of nursing and introduced many of the methods and ideas that we take for granted in hospital care today.

Earlier this month, there was an article in LitHub about Nightingale by Dr. Danielle Ofri, who writes about the doctor-patient interaction. I read her excellent book What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicinewhen it came out in 2013. The LitHub article is adapted from her recent book When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error. In the LitHub article, Ofri recounts how prescient Nightingale was in understanding that the way we treat patients can be beneficial or harmful.

Nightingale believed that cleanliness was paramount in treating patients. She was an advocate for “Hygiene” with a capital H much to the dismay of the medical profession. From the LitHub article: “Nightingale set rigorous standards for hygiene, wound care, food preparation, medical supplies, and patient triage. Over the course of the year 1855, the mortality rate in the hospital dropped sharply, from thirty-three to two percent.” In this Tempus Covidae we’re thinking about the same things that Florence Nightingale thought about. We disinfect everything we touch, people are wearing sterile gloves in the grocery store, we do our best to limit our contact with contagion, etc. While we’ve made so many advances in medicine, we’re still at the mercy of viruses.

It’s worth thinking about Florence Nightingale, the stickler for “Hygiene” at this particular time. I haven’t read a biography so I can’t recommend one, but her own volume, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not (1859) might be an interesting book to read.

I’m finding it hard this week to write cheery posts recommending books. It’s hard not to be distracted with anxiety and fear. This blog is not political and especially now I don’t want to venture into that fraught territory. Many of my friends are telling me that they are finding it difficult to focus long enough to read a novel. (I noticed today that the New York Times Book Review didn’t review any fiction.) It may be easier to listen to books or podcasts, so I’m recommending Paul Holdengraber’s podcasts, below. 

I’m a big fan of Holdengraber, a stellar interviewer. Holdengraber is able to pierce to the heart of issues and he encourages his interviewees to do the same. For fourteen years he directed “Live from the NYPL” and each interview I attended was stunning and memorable. In particular, his interviews with Edmund de Waal and Jhumpa Lahiri were transcendent. I was very sorry when he left New York for LA, but he has continued his extraordinary interviews in podcast form so I’m happy.

Lately, he’s hosting a series called The Quarantine Tapes, a weekday podcast where he calls someone for a half-hour discussion about how they are managing in quarantine. Among the people he calls are poets, architects, novelists, actors; a diverse group of thoughtful people. I just listened to the podcast with the poet Aja Monet, who spoke about the value of poetry and art in these times, but also the importance of standing up for our beliefs. Monet and Holdengraber talked about the lines from William Carlos Williams’ poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” A quote that bears reading at least twice. Monet also mentioned a quote from JFK: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” Good food for thought.

In another interview, Dr. Jason Hill, an Emergency Dept. doctor in New York, talked to Holdengraber about his experiences with patients dying of the coronavirus without family and how painful that was for patients and staff. Hill wrote a Buzzfeed article about his experiences in the Emergency Dept. in late March and April. It’s worth reading. One of my meditation teachers just sent out an email about her mother’s recent death where she wrote: “Bearing witness to the process of death and dying holds a power that no words can describe.” She was lucky enough to be at her mother’s bedside.

On the home page of The Quarantine Tapes, there’s a description of the program that starts with a quote from Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and philosopher: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I’m not sure I agree completely, but it’s certainly a good discussion starter in these times.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that in December 1910 there was a fundamental change in human nature. A startling remark, prompted perhaps by the dizzying pace of change in the period that led up to World War I. For Woolf, as well as many upper-class Britons, the political, economic, and social stability of the long Victorian era was crumbling.  (Will we be able to look back and pinpoint a similar demarcation in our own times? There’s lots of resonances with our own times in the books below.)

In Britain, industrialization, with the accompanying push for trade unions, was changing the relationships among the classes. Members of Parliament fought over an historic bill that would limit the power of the House of Lords and debated Home Rule for Ireland. Trusted servants were publishing exposés of their employers’ private lives and militant suffragists had taken to the streets. Motor cars, planes, and expanded railway connections had begun to change people’s lives in fundamental ways. In the political sphere, Russia and the European powers were engaged in an arms race that was supposed to guarantee peace but really ensured that armies were at the brink of war. Kaiser Wilhelm’s expansionist adventures and rhetoric, especially his vow to achieve naval supremacy over England, was a threat that spoke directly to the hearts of British Empire builders. Woolf’s perceptive comment recognized that, at least for the British, times were changing in irreversible and unexpected ways.

Juliet Nicolson, in her book The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just before the Storm, uses the events of that unusually hot, dry season—almost the chronological center point of the era–to provide a snapshot of British life. A year after the death of King Edward VII, the festive coronation of King George V and Queen Mary led off the summer with an historic display of ceremony, royalty, and fashion for the delight of the lower classes. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe arrived in London and the upper classes fell in love with the supple and sexually charged star Nijinsky; some saw their favorite ballets multiple times. Fabulous country house parties with eight-course dinners–all made possible by armadas of poorly paid servants–provided entertainment and a semblance of activity for the moneyed classes.

But there was more to that summer than conspicuous consumption. The unusually hot, dry weather created tinderbox conditions in the fields and on the streets of the cities. Farmers struggled to find grazing for cattle, trade union organizers and suffragists called for strikes that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets and brought some of the dreadful factory working conditions to public notice. Nicolson puts a personal face on all these events, following a diverse cast of historical figures, among them politicians such as Winston Churchill, writers such as Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke, nobility such as Lady Diana Manners, and union organizers such as Ben Tillett. Her witty and absorbing chronicle catches England on the cusp of the war that would change, if not human nature, then so much else.

Many novelists have written about class relationships in the Edwardian period, but possibly none more brilliantly than E. M. Forster in Howards End, published in 1910, a story of three families and the house named Howards End, which draws them together. The upper class Wilcoxes, who have made their fortune in business, are all about “telegrams and anger,” while the middle class Schlegel sisters live for music, literature, and cultured conversation with friends. Leonard Bast, an unhappy insurance clerk, is accidentally drawn into their orbit with dire results. When Mrs. Wilcox bequeaths Howards End to Margaret Schlegel, Forster uses the bequest to expose the gulf among his characters’ values. Beautifully written, witty, and filled with great characterization and sense of the times, Howards End is a wonderful portrait of the contradictions of Edwardian England. The film version, made in 1992, is faithful to the novel and highly recommended.

Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren married into many of the royal families of Europe, creating a far-reaching network of relationships that influenced political alliances. Catrine Clay, in King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War writes about George V of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas of Russia, first cousins whose tangled relationships contributed to the causes of World War I.  Clay focuses on their personalities and the childhood experiences that shaped them and sheds light on their behavior as rulers. George was the younger brother who never expected to inherit the throne until his older brother Eddy’s unexpected death. Wilhelm and Nicholas were bound to the British royal family through their mothers, although the militaristic Wilhelm and his mother disagreed violently on politics. Tsar Nicholas, who married Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, was ill-equipped by temperament to navigate the violent changes of the Russian Revolution. It’s an enlightening story of how these three cousins affected the course of world history.

I saw an article the other day about the various artists who have illustrated Alice in Wonderland. Sir John Tenniel drew the classic illustrations and even though they hold a sacred place in our hearts, I loved some of the others. Would we have the same feelings about Alice if we had always read it with different illustrations? Here’s a link to Maria Popova’s wonderful “Brain Pickings” blog so you can see some of them.  They range from Salvador Dali to Yayoi Kusama and beyond. My copy of Alice is very old and falling apart; I suspect it was my mother’s.

I loved the poems in Alice and memorized several of them when I was young. I often recite them to myself when I can’t sleep. (It doesn’t help.) The Walrus and the Carpenter was (and is) a favorite, as is the one that begins, “They told me you had been to her and mentioned me to him; she gave me good character but said I could not swim.” And of course the “Jabberwocky“, where the neologisms are so evocative:  “my beamish boy,” the “frumious Bandersnatch,” and “as in uffish thought he stood.” I often feel like I have moments of “uffish thought.”

But the Lewis Carroll poem that holds a special place for me is The Hunting of the Snark, not part of the Alice books, but separately published. As a child it mystified me and it was only by reading it over and over as I grew up that I was able to make sense of the story. I have the Ralph Steadman edition with his grotesquely hilarious drawings. If you don’t know the story of this long poem, it’s about a ship with a strange crew that searches for the fabled Snark. I’ve never read an annotated edition, but I’m sure that it tracks the political issues of Carroll’s day and Victorians would recognize the people and the situations. The search for the Snark is futile, and the last line sums it up: “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” How many of us have searched for Snarks but found Boojums instead?

There’s a refrain in the poem about how diligently the crew searched and I think it can be used to sum up any fraught political era, so I reproduce it here.

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

I thought the part about charming the Snark “with smiles and soap” quite apt for now or maybe “masks and soap” would be better. 

LitHub marked Wednesday as the day when Julian Grenfell, the British poet and soldier in the First World War, was shot. He died 13 days later and the following day, his poem, Into Battle, was published in the London Times. I was startled to see the note about Grenfell, which was accompanied by a picture of him in uniform.  I was startled because he’s not someone you hear about often.

Years ago I became interested in the social and literary history of England in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  I began by reading The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell, about how the poems, novels, diaries, and letters of that time reflected and encouraged far-reaching societal changes. Fussell’s book is penetrating, insightful, and heartrending all at once. Hooked on the subject, I then moved on to Children of the Sun: A Narrative of “Decadence” in England After 1918, by Martin Green, which is where I encountered Julian Grenfell. Poor Julian Grenfell. He was a victim of English upper-class idealism about the war: the belief that it was glorious to send one’s son off to die for one’s country and that the war would soon be over anyway, so no worries. The truth was quite different. The fascinating Nicholas Mosley biography, Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, which I read next, tells how his mother and her social set–“The Souls”–encouraged him to go off to glorious battle. Approximately 750,000 British soldiers were killed and over 1.5 million were wounded in World War I. The trench warfare in France, which is where Grenfell fought and died, was horrific, inflicting psychological damage on the soldiers who managed to survive. The idea of dying a glorious death for one’s country met an inglorious death.

Grenfell’s poem was not included in the LitHub note, so I looked it up. You can read it here. 

You may have seen the film made from Vera Brittan’s classic memoir Testament of Youth.  As haunting as that movie is, the book is even more powerful. Brittain calls her riveting account “the smashing up of my own youth.” In 1914, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she was engaged to a soldier. Desperate to assist the war effort, she volunteered as a nurse and after rigorous and exhausting training, served at hospitals in Malta and France, where she experienced firsthand the devastation of trench warfare on the Western Front. She lost her fiance, her brother, and her innocence as well. I found it completely absorbing and even cathartic when I read it twenty-five years ago.

These are all older titles, some more easily available than others. I will write again soon about this period, with links to newer, more popular fiction and nonfiction.