Middlemarch

The other night I went to do a bit of Christmas shopping and found myself in a department store looking at one of those miniature villages. It was an elaborate display, each and every little figurine placed perfectly and lit to lend authenticity to the scene of what was touted as an English village, nineteenth century style. Many people find such collectibles to be desirable, and the price tags certainly reflect that value held by some. Of course each piece is sold separately. While I was marveling at the intricate layout of the porcelain village, something occurred to me. I was nearing the end of Middlemarch, the novel so often proclaimed as Mary Anne Evans’ masterpiece. I had truly enjoyed my time in that fictional Midlands village amid each sentence and character so lovingly drawn and perfectly plotted. There is so much of both, plot and superbly drawn characterization, that Middlemarch never sags or becomes anything less than delightful to pick up. Yet I was feeling towards the novel more dimly lit than a figurine lamp whose fuse had blown.

I had allowed the whirl and buzz of modern life to creep into my times alone with the über Victorian, not to mention a clamor from the shelves of all the 3 or 4 novels I had passed over in the month it took to read Middlemarch. Mostly though, I became distracted about halfway through the novel by thoughts of what it must have been like to be Mary Anne planning and implementing sentence upon sentence in order to carry out the vision and statement which is Middlemarch. Did she sit on a worn carpet at times, tired from bending over the manuscript at a table, only to rise with an aching back from hours on the floor with her fountain ink pen and reams of paper? Did her hand hurt the way mine sometimes does when I’ve spent too many hours clicking and typing without watching the angles of my wrists? Did she have to interrupt her work to fix meals or tea? How did she do it?

Middlemarch can only be compared to a marvel of urban planning or perhaps to the software engineering coup that brings an entirely new system into being. I’m forced to look at the novel and its creation through the lens of modern life, my only frame of reference, and a somewhat poor one for understanding the intricacies of an imagination so all encompassing that I can only stand and gawk. The overwhelming presence of Middlemarch the creation had pushed me away from Middlemarch the story. George Eliot’s light of genius fairly snuffed my candle of twenty first century devotion to the work, all because I couldn’t fully enter the story without the aura of its creator blinding and diverting me.

So what’s the use in pulling a volume such as Middlemarch from the shelf? Surely there are other more rapid fire forms of delivery for the reader’s fix. Why did I bother if the whole time I would be held back from true appreciation for the tale by a case of the dumbstrucks at the mechanics it took to bring about?

As I stood looking at the Christmas village display, I wondered what it would take to bring a twenty third century person back into our times for a look. Could it be accomplished by a porcelain representation? Or will it take something like Richard Price’s Lush Life to shout into the future from our present? There was nothing to learn from the department store arrangement. There was everything to be gained by finishing Middlemarch, by letting the huge novel seep into me in the coming weeks and months, by imagining Mary Anne with her full skirts and the discomforts of her nineteenth century life as she executed her artistic vision about a Midlands village and its inhabitants. It does matter, and I answered my own question thusly:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Middlemarch. It exists as certainly as art and creativity and imagination exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Middlemarch. It would be as dreary as if there were no Mary Annes. There would be no Victorian novels then, no Brownings, no Brontës to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment of the worlds that are gone, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which literature fills the world would be extinguished.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance as they are found in literature can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else more real and abiding.

I think Mary Anne might agree.

Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine

There is a tune, for which I’d gladly part

With all Rossini, Weber, and Mozart,

An ancient air, whose languid melody

Has secret charms that speak only to me*…

We’ve all had them, those dreams whose intimations of life are so strong that we can see, smell, and embrace someone we love and long for just as they slip from the grasp of our light sleep. We wake up, dizzy and lump throated, frantic to bring the dream back, to sink into it again and to possess that person for one moment longer, knowing that the trance was sweetest just as it was lost.

The Franco-Russian author Andreï Makine captures this moment when ‘’secret charms” speak in his 1995 novel Dreams of My Russian Summers. I read the novel with mixed expectations, having no knowledge of the author but an interest in his 2006 novel, The Woman Who Waited after reading this review. My utter lack of familiarity with Proust, particularly with À la recherche du temps perdu, caused me initially to doubt my adequacy to approach Makine’s novel of remembrance. However when I sat down with Dreams of My Russian Summers, all doubts and fears were swept aside by the beauty of the language as translated by Geoffrey Strachan.

Dreams of My Russian Summers is as difficult to encapsulate as that achingly sought spectre who appears then vanishes in troubled sleep. Makine jumps back and forth in time to tell the coming of age story of a Russian boy who spends summers with his grandmother, Charlotte, in her apartment near the steppe outside the Siberian village of Saranza. From her flower potted balcony, Charlotte entrances the unnamed boy and his sister with stories of France, her homeland, creating for them a gilded world of tragedy and romance that begins with the 1899 death of French president Félix Faure in apoplectic orgasm.

The death of Félix Faure made me aware of my age: I was thirteen; I guessed what ”dying in the arms of a woman” meant, and from now on I could be spoken to on such subjects. Furthermore, the courage and total absence of hypocrisy in Charlotte’s story demonstrated what I already knew: she was not a grandmother like the others. No Russian babushka would have ventured on such a discussion with her grandson. In this freedom of expression I sensed an unaccustomed perception of the body, of love, of relationships between man and woman — a mysterious ”French outlook.”

With the narrator’s entrée to French lore, his imaginative powers are unfettered from their Russian beginnings within the bleak concrete blocks of Soviet housing. Nightly spellbound by his grandmother’s tantalizingly descriptive summer tales of France, the young boy feels himself drawn to her native tongue and its ability to portray emotion. He’s captivated in such a way that his worldview suddenly bursts into being, alive with empathy for persons both fictional and corporeal.

The fatal love that had caused the heart of the president to burst reshaped the France that I carried inside me. This came mainly from storybooks. But on that memorable evening the literary characters who rubbed shoulders on its highways seemed to be awakening after a long sleep…Without being able to explain it myself, I felt as if I heard a string vibrating in the soul of this woman (referring to Emma Bovary). My own heart sang out in unison. A smiling voice that came from Charlotte’s stories prompted me: ”Emma Bovary, c’est moi!”

The burgeoning empathy that the narrator describes suddenly enfolds not only his beloveds, but the unsavory and brutal as well. The boy is able to perceive motivations that are exceedingly noble and those that are much less so. He feels his grandmother’s fear and ultimate bravery in wartime. He keens intimately the excitement of his friend Pashka upon hearing a poem by Victor Hugo. Simultaneously, the now lustful teenage boy understands the desire for power embodied in stories he hears about Lavrenti Beria, the despotic head of Stalin’s secret police and serial rapist who trawled the streets of Moscow for prey in his limousine.

And I hated myself! For I could not help admiring this stalker of women. Yes, within me there was someone who — with dread, with repulsion, with shame — reveled in the power of the man with the pince-nez. All women belonged to him! He cruised around the vastness of Moscow as if in the middle of a harem. And what fascinated me most was his indifference. He had no need to be loved, he did not care what the women he chose might feel toward him. He selected a woman, desired her, possessed her the same day. Then forgot her. And all the cries, lamentations, sobs, groans, supplications, and curses that he had occasion to hear were for him only spices that added to the savor of the rape.

I lost consciousness at the start of my fourth sleepless night. Just before fainting, I felt I had grasped the fevered thought of one of those raped women, who must have realized that whatever happened she would not be allowed to leave. This thought, which cut through her enforced intoxication, her pain, her disgust, resounded in my head and threw me to the ground.

In such manner, the boy grapples with his newfound powers of empathy. All the while, as the narrative shifts and flashes forward and back, both the boy and his grandmother grow older. Now a young man with his own emerging, complex history, the narrator searches for the right tools to wield in the world as an imaginer and empathizer.

This language-tool, employed, sharpened, perfected, was, I told myself, nothing other than literary composition. I had already sensed that the anecdotes about France with which I had amused my fellow pupils throughout that year were the first draft for this novelist’s language: had I not manipulated it to please sometimes the ”proletarians” and sometimes the ”aesthetes”? Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved. French, my grandmaternal tongue, was, I saw now, the supreme language of amazement.

All of which sent a pang through me and caused me to feel the need to rent a Parisian garret and reside forevermore among words, wine, words, words! Then, I looked round the office lunchroom. The jig was up. The reverie was ended; clients would be waiting. As someone who considers herself the most selfish of readers, Makine’s journey of emotional involvement with fiction and her human counterparts affected me deeply, though the novel must be experienced in its entirety for its languorous qualities to seep in. No amount of searching for the best passages can find the wispy loved one. To my unpardonable delight, none of the dog earing I lavished upon my lovely hardback edition can target exactly the right phrases. Dreams of My Russian Summers is the first book in a long time that I instantly began to reread after finishing it, only to quit in exasperation, as though I had tried to hold someone that last, flickering moment before they vanished forever, as though I had awakened from a delectable dream and was caught trying to return.

* An Old Tune, Gerard de Nerval

The Great Pumpkin

I don’t usually count page numbers in a book when I choose it. But yesterday, after toting Middlemarch to work and back for a few days, I started wondering just how big a bite I’d taken. Peeking to the back confirmed things. At 800 pages, it’s the heifer of the year, but instantly rewarding. Only 200 pages in, I’m hooked, and hopeful of finishing it before Thanksgiving.

Numberswise, this has been the best year for reading that I’ve had. Yet, with each volume that I pull from the shelf or bring from the library, I’m conscious of how many more I’ll never find the time to read. It’s enough to wake a person in the middle of the night. Snippets of reviews, titles, impressions, words, all combine to produce daily in my head something like a whirlwind symphony that’s only loosely orchestrated and conducted solely on the fly. It’s a bit of a conundrum. Opportunities for literary choice have never been so abundant, but the more I read about books, the less precious time there is to sit quietly in a sunny spot with the 800 page gorilla.

These thoughts don’t even begin to explore the need to discuss and to write about books with other readers. It’s something I can’t do without now, having become proudly addicted to Palimpsest and World Literature Forum. What is a reader to do? I get nervous when there aren’t enough long hours to read, so I fill the short stretches by dipping into discussion. Which leads to extended stretches of clicking and to more tangents than there are universes. Then, occasionally trying to write about some bit or another of it all here. It’s the delicious and unsolvable problem. And everyone knows that it’s rude to raise a problem without offering a solution. So, I’ll make a small resolution to write here once a week for discipline and to stop worrying about the books I can’t have, focusing on the enjoyment of the one at hand. There, that feels better.

The Misfits (1961)

Sometimes it’s better to start with the ending. I’d never seen any of Marilyn Monroe’s films until recently, though I‘ve always admired her extravagant femininity and the dominant, native intelligence of her style and photogenic savoir faire. As an object of both glamour and human frailty, she remains on top of the heap. She’s easy to view alternately as both thing and person- the ever enigmatic public figure, the feminist puzzle, the cinematic cipher dripped in fantastical sheen that seemingly never dulls. How glad I am that my first Monroe film, her last, is the one about which its director John Huston quipped, ‘’She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn.’’

The Misfits, released in early 1961, was, by the reckoning of any age, a financial and emotional boondoggle of production. The monetary costs were the most ever for a black and white film at four million dollars. The cast and crew suffered both self-inflicted maladies and the punishing heat of a desert locale. The story itself is less wasteful, spare even. Four people meet in Reno, Nevada and decide to party at the deserted ranch home of one of them, Guido, played by Eli Wallach. The revelers are themselves remnant of brighter, younger days. Clark Gable portrays a middle aged cowboy, Gay Langland, Wallach an underemployed WWII pilot, Thelma Ritter an older woman, Isabelle, who rents an apartment to new divorcée Monroe, as Roslyn Taber.

Intoxicated by one another as much as by the desert air and whisky they’re inhaling, the quartet form an instant bond, a rectangle of connection whose corners are solid. Ritter and Monroe, mutually protective and solicitous, are ends to sides of the two longhorns immediately fixated upon Monroe. Gable and Wallach, jockeying for position and attention, spend the evening dancing with Roslyn, getting her drunker until she whirls into the desert for something Rumi himself might smile upon.  Monroe,  shot-in-soft-focus be damned, unwinds early in The Misfits, her voluptuous glory and unique presence powering at you from somewhere real within, daring you to come along, make yourself fractionally as vulnerable as she is, then hang on for the bull ride.

For it’s to a rodeo they soon go, lazily picking up Montgomery Clift enroute. Clift’s Perce Howland is unforgettable, one moment all false bravado and the next a crumpled heap of confused and rejected cowboy. In my favorite scene, Perce luxuriates in the tender ministrations of Roslyn as they rest unceremoniously in an alleyway, Monroe’s dusty legs and dress serving as his pillow and rejuvenation. It’s an incomparable stretch, two shockingly beautiful humans, one with a comically bandaged head, licking their wounds and communicating with no wasted words, no junk, amid the garbage cans.

Monroe bonds with each man in the truest sense. She befriends them in three distinct ways, evolving into their moral compass, their not-so-silent inner voice. Guido, Gay and Perce plan to go ‘’mustanging’’, rounding up wild horses that they sell for a very rough maintenance. Monroe goes ”along for the ride”, but that’s such a tremendous expression of disservice to the emotional power she brings to the film’s centerpiece. It’s impossible to rope you any further without giving away much of this film’s dry, prickly beauty, which, to my surprise and delight, has nothing to do with any of Monroe’s physical appearance and everything to do with what can only be described as her guts. John Wayne was never this strong. Monroe in The Misfits is an almost feminist marvel, and for the first time I really saw her as a person, someone making a statement about what her life meant. And, equally, I wondered how she could manage such strength even as that life unraveled.

In searching for just the right photo to use here, I learned that earlier this fall, most of her images were judged as belonging to the public domain. She’s ours now, lock, stock and barrel, the push-pull between any vestige of her privacy and that of her stardom forever tipped to the side of the hungry public. But these are just photos. She lives in The Misfits.

The Secret Scripture

Any delving into the relationship between patients and their doctors, patients and other patients, physicians and colleagues, is fertile soil for fiction authors. Countless stories spring to mind, chief among them as I write is Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel that pits the wits of prisoner-patient Grace Marks against those of her equally clever and devious psychiatrist. In that novel, Atwood playfully and with her customary dark humor suggests that an inversion of the relationship between healer and client is always a near and even a dear possibility. Much of what is special about Alias Grace are the subtle and not subtle enough machinations that Dr Simon Jordan and Grace wreak upon one another in efforts to learn the truth about one another while fuzzying truths from themselves. Next to mind is Asylum, Patrick McGrath’s 1997 novel where the practice of psychiatry is carried to levels that can only be deemed eccentric.

The Secret Scripture, then, with its cover of a woman sporting angel wings and inside cover blurb which hints at doctor and patient coming to understand one another, surprised me. I was fully prepared for all the gamesmanship that could be thrown a reader’s way, short of, say, Nabokov. I was ready for another Alias Grace, or something darkly akin to Asylum. Instead, Sebastian Barry uses a delicate, direct, and almost formal style to relate what is at times a fairly brutal tale, the life of Roseanne Clear and that story’s reception in the hands of her psychiatrist.

Roseanne, from her vantage point as centenarian and long-term resident of the Roscommon Hospital, feels the need to write, a life’s reckoning that Barry places squarely in the hands of a character who seems fully competent to do so. Alternately, Roseanne’s long time psychiatrist, Dr. William Grene, embarks upon a full psychological assessment of his oldest patient, after decades of benign neglect and for the purpose of determining her suitability for release when the old Roscommon facility is razed and a new one built. This accounting leads to a personal assessment, an unconscious attempt at ”Physician, heal thyself”. Dr Grene, in counterpoint to Asylum’s Dr Peter Cleave or Atwood’s Dr Jordan, gives voice to a sense of purpose and strength found in a noble practitioner.

But as time goes on, as I am slowly like everyone else worn out, finding a tatter here and a tear there in the cloth of myself, I need this place more and more. The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. Maybe I should be more frustrated by the obvious cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry, the horrible depreciation in the states of those that linger here, the impossibility of it all. But God help me, I am not. In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.

Roseanne’s story recounts her girlhood, life as a physically beautiful child whose loving relationship with her father stretches the cloth of their poverty to find extra fabric for play and the comfort of one another. As a young adult, dark shapes from her father’s past and pressures crowding Roseanne’s present combine to strain her life to a point where she could be broken.

I must admit there are ‘memories’ in my head that are curious even to me. I would not like to have to say this to Dr Grene. Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there. I certainly suspect — well, I don’t know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be — may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that — that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don’t know.

What makes this novel remarkable is the deft placement of one elegant word upon another, until 300 pages of history, mystery and revelation are swiftly ensconced in the reader without a sense that they have pummeled their way in. Roseanne is a woman from another era, a time when people wrote in careful longhand and chose words simply for their efficacy and proper placement. I’ve always loved elegant, careful narrative such as this that rewards, not in tricksiness, but in steady story building that brings to mind a brickmason putting a solid wall into place, complete with layers between and betwixt where one is free to search for connections, themes, and old fashioned insight.

All of those things are twigs in the mortar of The Secret Scripture. The elements of family strife, Irish political and religious history, sparrows and gardens, hammers, feathers, and, above all, the search for identity and understanding. I’m happy to have found and read at least one Booker nominee before the prize is announced. If the fields of UK literary competitions are crowded with offerings such as this, I can only look that way enviously and look forward to their westward release dates.