Glyn Hughes recreates the Bronte siblings

I’m rereading Glyn Hughes’ Bronte (damn Word Press which will not let me do an umlaut!)and it is every bit as powerful as I remember.

 

The landscape of early 19th-century Yorkshire is described in convincing detail,  and realism, with attention to the grimy stinking Haworth below the parsonage with its proximity to the graveyard. The chilly and unhealthy climate was in part responsible or the deaths of the sisters Emily and Anne who died very quickly from consumption, as tuberculosis was then known. And Hughes is good too onalcoholism and the despondency of Branwell, with his pretensions and unhappy love affair and bills run up at all the loca taversn.

Emily remains enigmatic — I was surprised to read about the school run by lesbian horsey types mistaken at a distance for men, where Emily taught for a short while.And Anne is brought to life here, the quieter and less eccentric sister who wrote that overlooked classic The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

 

But the key character remains Charlotte, dwarfish, dumpy and daunting, with her toothache and ugly woollen hairpiece and unreciprocated passion for the peculiar little Belgian schoolmaster. Her outrage at the way her ill sisters Maria and Elizabeth were treated in boarding school was one of the impulses that led to the writing of Jane Eyre and there is something very Dickensian about Charlotte, dying of morning sickness after a late and reluctant marriage to her father’s curate.

 

I loved rereading this, it made me want to go and reread Wuthering Heights and Villette and Emily’s poems again. The character of Patrick Bronte, so puritanical but with an Irish gaiety and passion, his grief at losing her wife so young to stomach cancer.

And throughout the book, there are the references to the Moors and the thunderstorms and the old manors, and wool-wealthy gentry — and tales of wild and dissolute young farmers and squires, each providing something towards the black-browed Heathcliff. The last decades of that vanished storytelling ‘deep England’ amidst the Industrial revolution.

A woman abandoned: Vivienne Eliot

Carole Seymour Jones wrote a biography of Vivienne Eliot (called Vivien for much of the book) becuse she believed, in common with various others who had known the first wife of TS Eliot, that Vivienne was not mad and should not have been incarcerated in an asylum from 1938 until her death in 1947.

 

The image of the crazy jittery Vivienne of Tom & Viv has haunted modern literary history. There is no doubt that Vivienne was extremely neurotic. She was born Vivienne Haigh-Wood, daughter of an artist belonging to the Royal Academy, a prosperous man who also had a number of Irish properties. When Eliot as a young American at Merton, Oxford, first met Vivienne as a ‘River Girl’ fond of punting on the Cherwell on summmer afternoons, he thought of her as upper middle class. She was not — and friends commented that he had married the ‘landlady’s daughter’. She was not a virgin either. Her own mother had blocked a previous marrige on the grounds of Vivienne’s ‘moral insanity’.

 

But Eliot married the lively moody Vivienne after knowing her only three months. She had menstrual troubles (poly-cystic ovaries?) and bled profusely for weeks of each month, stealing the soiled bed sheets from hotels so that she could launder them and send them back. Eliot was fastidious and easily revolted. He may have had an intimate relationship with his handsome friend Jean Verdenel, who died in the First World War at Gallipoli and became the model of Phlebas the Phoenician in The Waste Land.

 

Within months of marrying, Vivienne was having an affair with philosopher and philanderer Bertrand Russell who helped out the impoverished Eliots with monetary loans and by providing a cottage near London they could share with him, while playing the role of avuncular mentor to the young poet. Seymour Jones goes to pains to indicate that TS Eliot was never as badly off as he claimed to be and often accepted money from friends under false pretences.

 

Illnesses and the michief-making of Bloomsbury made the Eliots miserable — a visit from his 77-year-old New Englnd mother, terrifyingly energetic and implacable in her opposition to Vivienne, may have been one precipitating event that made Eliot decide he needed a life apart from his ill but fiercely loyal wife.

 

And she does sound like a handful. Despite the biographer’s best efforts, Vivienne Eliot comes across as extravagant, self-absorbed, prying, chattering, neurotic and a nightmare to be around. Just reading her letters is enough to fill the reader with exasperation. Yes, it was a tragic life — a waste– and the incarceration was brutal. These days she might have been medicatd with greater success. But without having her put away and locked up, Tom Eliot would have gone mad. Her family despaired of her. Her friends could not bear the sight of her. Madness is not romantic in reality: the gibbering, the endless dramatising and psycho-somatic illneses, the obsessive  and uncesing chatter — and sadly I did feel that Vivienne was much iller than her biographer mkes out. She may have been bipolar nd then had psychotic episodes, perhaps brought on by the chloral that produced dark red and purple blotchines all over her skin.

 

And Vivienne Eliot continues unrehabilitated as the madwoman in the attic, a Victorian ghost lingering on into the 20th century, to be pitied but still seen as hopeless and a nuisance despite herself and all the best efforts of her biographer.

Omniscience: Penelope Fitzgerald

My jaw drops in amazement and awe whenever I reread Penelope Fitzgerald. How does she do it? How does she imagine her characters in such depth and their professions and historical period from the inside, magically larger than life but completely convincing, indubitably the real thing?

 

The Gate of Angels opens on an evening in Cambridge in 1912 when a gale is blowing up Mill Road near the cemetery and the workhouse. Cows have been overturned and lie wallowing on their backs with their legs in the air, their horns festooned with willow branches. Fred Fairly is cycling up the road on an old bicycle with ‘Palmer tyres, which left a pattern of  long lines like wires, on a wet glass-clear road.’

 

The image is exact and precise, perfect.  I read that sentence and knew that is how it was, I could see the thin Palmer tyre tracks  for myself. But how on earth does she know these things?

 

So there is Fred Fairly at St Angelicus, the college in Cambridge barred to women. He has an improbable car accident and come around to find himself in bed naked next to an equally naked young woman, the redoubtable Daisy Saunders. Anything might happen and does. It makes for a giddying read — there is the rectory with its surprising suffragettes, the grim London  hospital to which James Elder is taken after his attempted suicide, the ghost stories, the mysterious opening of the gate, the misunderstandings and questions about faith and doubt. Penelope Fitzgerald was related to Ronald Knox the famous wit and Catholic convert/apologist and her Edwardian Cambridge is executed perfectly. As is that hospital just before the horrors of the First World War revealed the inadequacies of Victorian medical knowledge.

 

Although the Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald are out and being discussed in heated detail at the moment along with aspects of her life — her husband drank, the houseboat she lived in sank twice, she was bad with money — I don’t expect any answers when it comes to that omniscience. She is one of those writers, like Jane Austen, who just knew what she was talking about. Her innocents are all enchanting and harmful, blundering through life, unaware of what they are doing to those around them and the threat they pose to those who love them.

 

My favourite Fitzgerald novel remains the incomparable Blue Flower. I took this home to review several years ago, in the mid-’90s, and was so blown away by the first page that I read only that page again and again for days. It is the famous scene of the laundry day in an 18th-century Jena household. Described from inside history, quite unforgettably. The characters remain more real to me than actual people I have known: the irrepressible Bernard saved from drowning once but who will drown after the last page… Friedrich von Hardenberg, Novalis, in search of that eternal blue flower of the Alps, young Sophie the callously  laughing and unlikely Muse who comes to the engagement party in a white cap because she has gone bald and who is to die so horribly in an operation performed without anaesthetic. There is no topic Fitzgerald cannot tackle and write about from the inside. She may well be our leading English novelist of the 20th century.

From The Blue Flower:

‘we are the enemies of the world and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say, this is animate but that is inanimate. I am a Salt Inspector, this is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, this is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that one cannot be measured without the other.’

Doris Lessing: the Hound of heaven has commandeered the attic

The phrase is from Joan Didion, writing in The White Album way back in the 1980s and commenting on Lessing’s A Small Personal Voice. What drives Didion slightly crazy is that cracked dogmatism and Lessing’s indefatigable pursuit of the Snark, social transformation or the truth behind a woman having a breakdown or what is free to happen when we admit we don’t love one another, or how could a racist society like white Rhodesia last so long?

And exhausting as the prospect is, I long to reread Doris Lessing, look again at The Five-Gated City and Martha Quest before I get to Alfred & Emily, the last attempt on the author’s part to exorcise Lessing’s own hardhearted, unloving and thoroughly admirable mother.

She breaks the reader open to possibilities and states of feeling as well as hard, unsentimental and revolutionary perceptions. This happens in all of her books, from The Grass is Singing to Golden Notebook to Shikasta.

Last night I was watching a documentary on Doris Lessing and just a little while ago, as I sat in something of an emotional slump, something came to me. Her breakthroughs in psychic understandings, the way she writes about telepathy, how she was able to capture something never voiced before about women thinking about themselves amidst fragmentation in The Golden Notebook. In the interview she refuses to answer questions about her 30 years of studying Sufi.

And of course she was born in Kermanshaw, Persia, in 1919. The Africa of colonial Southern Rhodesia before the Second World War described in Martha Quest was not her only great inspiration. She was a child in a curiously wild and medieval country, deserts and white-capped mountains, an amah. What lodged there, right at the start of the journey?

In the 1960s, as I understand it, she was influenced by Idries Shah and his notions of the commending self, a false persona of rigidity contradicted by all the fleeting impulses and innovative understandings of the liberated self, open to paradox and change. I am phrasing this very badly because Lessing herself has both great schematic rigidity, a kind of enduring dogmatism, combined with sudden breakthroughs of understanding and a willingness to tackle amorphous troubling topics and ideas, inchoate states of becoming or unbecoming, breakdown.

How much this insight has to do with Sufi teachings I don’t know.

But it does interest me that she has been able to overcome that rational poopooing within herself and hold onto a certain irony while continuing to explore themes like telepathy and extrasensory perception.

Making for magic realism: Graham Joyce’s The Limits of Enchantment

Graham Joyce’s The Limits of Enchantment is a novel recommended by someone in my writers’ group who described an extraordinary scene in which a naked young initiate into the Craft crouches in a hedge and communes with a hare. I had never heard of Joyce and went off to the local Hay library where the novel was not on the shelves but was praised by the librarian. So I asked for a copy to be put aside for me and went along to fetch it as soon as a copy came in.

 

Graham Joyce is a fantasy writer who grew up in a mining town near Coventry in the UK and teaches at the University of Nottingham. He was influenced in the writing of The Limits of Enchantment by the work of Angela Carter (that alchemy with gothic!) and Fay Weldon.

 

“It’s about two women living on the margins of society. They are both respected and feared by the community. When their way of life is threatened, they have to defend themselves. Where I live in the English Midlands there are still today pagan festivals at Eastertime, and the idea for the novel came from the annual ‘Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking’ festival that takes place in Leicestershire. “

 

Immensely readable and taking Wicca away from schoolgirls. Joyce is writing about the English MIdlands he recalls from childhood – he grew up in Leicester — and a girl named Fern with an aptitude for the Craft, living with an elderly herbalist and unlicenced midwife called Mammy. The name was too much Deep South and voodoo for an English folk magic tale, but the characters are strong and the dilemma around that witchy vocation very realistic.

 

Fern is fascinated by the 1960s space project and satellites, the music of Green Onions, attracted to but wary of the group of hippies who arrive to live in the village. She wants to become a health practitioner and develop the traditions Mammy has shared with her but doesn’t know how much she believes in the Craft. And Mammy is dying in a country hospital so Fern must decide for herself and begin dealing with economic hardship and life choices on her own.  Fascinating account of a girl turning into a hare during a druggy initiation. Lovely subtext too on ‘blink and you miss your life’, the follies of not paying attention to daily reality. But the romantic theme was very predictable and the enemies of the helpful witches stay enemies and the good village folk all turn up trumps. More complexity and surprise needed in characterization.

 

Taking a break before I tackle another Graham Joyce — hoping there is a development towards the complex and more psychological depth. The Uncanny needs plenty of the everyday to hold my attention.

On not rereading Raymond Carver

The trouble with Raymond Carver is that I read him when I was drinking. When I read him now I am assailed by memories of myself drunk, weeping over my paperback copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love sometime in the late 1980s, drinking from a five-litre box of white wine secreted in a hall cupboard next to an unending supply of smoked mussels in flat oval cans given to me by a recovering alcoholic who was a travelling salesman for John West seafood. The salesman had two years sobriety when he relapsed on holiday in Victoria Falls and tried to shoot his wife and a waiter on the hotel verandah overlooking Mosi oa Tunya, the’smoke that thunders’.

 

When I began reading Raymond Carver I didn’t know he was becoming famous. His stories frightened and depressed me, but I found them a mirror to the parts of myself I would not look at. Years later when I read he was termed ‘minimalist’ I was surprised because I thought he had amplitude and felt at home in the world of deadbeat drunks, had an affection and even nostalgia for places where it never seems to get any better. I had grown up in an ugly small town of used car lots and army barracks and bungalow motels and hated that life. I had escaped into fiction to get away from it and Carver took me right back there.

 

There were faults, it seemed to me then. He wasn’t honest about adult children, he blamed them for not forgiving the drunk who was their father. His bitterness skewed that aspect of his writing. He also wrote about being honest in Fires in a way that made me think of the practised sincerity of an alcoholic liar who has managed to get away with half-truths all his life. His own life was not available for the same kind of truth-telling he could reach in his fiction.

 

But one of his stories was all about a man who is deaf in one ear, a build-up of wax, a temporary stoppage. This narrator is also drinking himself to death all alone in an apartment. His wife, angry and frightened, comes to visit him. He has a bottle of champagne hidden in the bathroom. He can’t hear anything his wife is saying, even after she has jabbed at his ear with a hatpin. She has spoken to his landlady upstairs and has found out how bad his drinking is. The narrator is oblique in telling us any of this but he lets the truth slip out. He can’t hear his wife, just a sloshing noise in his ear. But he doesn’t want to hear what his wife has to say to him. Even when he can hear again, he doesn’t want to listen. No matter how bad it gets he wants to be alone in that apartment with the light of late afternoon coming through the blinds and a fridge full of champagne.

 

It is a devastating short story. For years I could not read it when I was sober, only when I was soothed and anaesthetised by alcohol. The despair would come up inside me like a great dark wave swelling out of nowhere and I would sit all alone in tears, unable to say to myself why the story moved me so much. I knew and didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

 

As long as there are drunks and ex-drunks, Carver will be read for his austere and bitter truthfulness. The amnesia and lost places of drinking were his territory, he understood what alcoholism does to consciousness, that inexorable downward spiral:  ’This is what it felt like and this is what happened to my life while I was off drinking somewhere.’ In the meanwhile I look forward to the day I can reread Carver without having my former self walk into the room, swaying a little, eyes unfocused and ready to start weeping those tears of bad faith and self-injury.

Ivy Compton-Burnett in later life

I’m busy rereading an old favourite, the second volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. I have read the first volume and ironically, that is where all the tragedies and ‘events’ of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s life take place. The tyrannies of step-parents; the deep-seated family conflicts and plots around money and inheritance; the death of her beloved brother Noel on the Somme; the sudden deaths from an overdose of veronal of her two younger sisters; the battle with her step-sisters over the family inheritance and finding independence from them; the near-fatal Spanish ‘flu that almost killed Ivy as a young woman.

 

The second volume describes Ivy living a settled life with her friend Margaret Jourdain, resigned to life as a spinster because all the likely men had died in the First World War ( I used to think this was an excuse until I read more widely on the phenomenon. All the eligible men really did die and many thousands of women did not find husbands), a woman to whom nothing dramatic would really happen again until her death in 1969. She remained in many ways an unmodified character from the Edwardian society of her girlhood, formal and respectable and aloof.

 

Her books however tell a very different story. She explored the cruel and terrifying details of family tyranny, murder in the family, incest, homosexual passions and the position of servants trapped in domestic service to heartless  or uncaring employers, the vulnerability of children bullied and tormented by wilful and vicious adults. Her novels are like the ancient Greek tragedies in their unsparing analysis of power relations in the absence of love.

 

If I hadn’t read and loved Spurling’s biography I might never have persisted with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. I still have trouble telling them apart and have read all of them several times. They are deceptively Victorian and very dry in terms of description. The brilliance reveals itself in dialogue and flashes of insight, odd asides and the terse fast-moving plots. There is nothing like them in English literature, they are as strange as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in terms of not fitting with contemporary fiction. Ivy wrote right through Modernism into the post-war novel years, into the 1960s. Yet her novels are of a piece and owe very little to their social or historical context. Again and again, writing in longhand in notebooks while comfy in a black velvet armchair, sweets and magazines at hand, Ivy Compton-Burnett returned to her childhood and youth to create archetypes of dysfunctional families, the oppressors as admirable as their intended victims.  her characters show humour sweetness and courage along with unflinching self-knowledge and very little remorse. This is human nature at its worst and most pitiful, unlovely but fascinating. Truth blazing out in the darkness.

Reading for Wales

Hiatus through some very intriguing months. Here I am staying in the Wye Valley under the Black Mountain and treating myself to a glut of Welsh writers. Some I have known and loved for years, some I have just discovered and intend to reread.

 

I began with Jan Morris, half-Welsh and a superb travel writer. The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country is a great introduction to the spirit and culture of Wales, the history and  regional diversity. Then I had a zoom through Raymond Williams’ What I Came to Say, his collected essays on culture and class with some references to the Welsh Borders he loved so deeply. The son of a railwayman at Pandy who went to Cambridge and revitalised literary criticism. I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of Dai Smith’s new biography of Raymond Williams. Smith spoke at the Hay festival this year on the lyric beauty of Raymond Williams’ writing in Border Country, one of his few novels.

 

 

There is a lurid John Cowper Powys next to the loo to be looked at, along with Arthur Machen. I skimmed through Fiona MacCarthy on Eric Gill and only really read the chapter on Gill’s stay up at Llanthony Abbey near Capel-y-Ffyn. Such a brilliant and amoral artist, the beautiful lettercutting in stone, magnificent typography, but neither his daughters nor the sheep were safe from him.

 

Then to Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, prior to reading Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. Chatwin stayed with Diana Melly in her isolated tower near Usk as well as with Penelope Betjeman at New House high above Hay-on Wye.

 

Haven’t yet found anything by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, but I do have Owen Shears’ Resistance, set in a valley near here. And then there is the fey Methodist hymn writer and mystic Ann Griffiths and earlier Welsh authors — the letters and journals of the Ladies of Llangollen. Celtic poetry. Legends of white ladies and lakes, dragons and islands that vanish in lakes, histories of Owen Glendower and the magician Taliesen,  Merlin and the court of King Arthur.

 

Along with books on Welsh cooking, histories of Ludlow and Hay-on-Wye, not forgetting Dylan Thomas. Can I really face that overwrought contrived density again?

 

Well, braced with Barra Brith tea cake and elderflower cordial I shall try my best…

Nightmare: Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck

A short fragmented text, fragmentary in design but dazzling, that I read when I was twenty-two and studying German literature at university under the apartheid state, moving between Schiller, Brecht, Heine and Heinrich von Kleist. Living through the last years of a racist nightmare. Here is the medical student Buchner undoing the scientific mindset of his time. The cruelty towards animals that are more human than the characters depicted, more and less human becuase to be human is to be nothing. There is the Captain, the Doctor, the Drum Major, charcaters who are their professions, their social roles, filling them with vitality and horrifying verve. There is the poor confused figure of Woyzeck, barber and soldier, whose lover Marie is unfaithful to him with the Drum Major The world is the new brutal world of the Enlightenment, as irrational and heartless and secret as the old animalistic and totemic ancient world, the world Woyzeck tries to decipher from the patterns of toadstools growing and overheard voices on a fiendish wind, the secrets of the Freemasons who are hidden but powerful, driving Woyzeck further  along the brown road of insanity. There is a child hearing a fairytale of abandonemnt, the universe empty and the stars like flies, the moon just rotten wood, the sun a wilting sunflower, a dying and empty universe in which the child in the Marchen is utterly alone. And as the grandmother’s fairytale ends without comfort, a tale of terror, Woyzeck goes out to kill Marie by the pond in the grwoing darkness. He sees her throat slit after he has killed her and thinks she has on a necklace of rubies from her lover. The red wound of her throat is a mystery, it taunts him.

 

As I thought in recent months about the daughter kept underground in an Austrian cellar for 24 years, forced to raise her own children, those incestuous children who were also her sisters and brother, in darkness and with only the flickering light of the television screen as guide to another reality left behind — the text and crazy brilliance of Woyzeck came back to me. Lucid madness found right at the heart of the Enlightenment, ‘the scream that fills the whole horizon and that is known by humankind as silence’ – 

 

The young Georg Buchner in Leipzig, inventing a new genre of writing, ranting against the insanity of his times, leaving this unfinished fragment to history at his death aged 23. Extraordinary and because of Buchner we read Thomas Bernhard with opened eyes. The Sleep of Unreason contuinuing into eras of historical optimism.

 

 

Worth reading twice

This is a blog about the books I enjoy rereading. They are books I have bought and lent to friends and replaced on my shelves several times, books I pick up when I can’t sleep late at night or when I am getting over ‘flu, or when I am packing to go on holiday. My tastes are those of Woolf’s common reader, eclectic but choosey, quirky but in some ways predictable enough for a bookish woman of a certain generation and background.

The books I most often reread are diaries and collected letters, books I can dip into and put aside when the moment passes. Just before I began writing here I was reading Louise Erdrich’s startling short story in the New Yorker, The Reptile Garden, in which the narrator talks about being infatuated with the lyrical but self-indulgent diaries of Anais Nin. How I loved those lurid red and blue paperback editions of her endlessly rewritten accounts of her meetings with friends captivated by her! Not somebody I’d reread now. But there are diaries I return to read each autumn — those of Sylvia Townsend Warner writing about Dorset and Norfolk in the 1930s and ’40s — and those I read in times of loneliness or adversity – Elizabeth Bishop’s selected letters, especially those from Brazil, for her gaiety and courage. Pepys, of course. And diaries about the perils of travel to inaccessible places, the travails of fiction-writing, along with diaries that detail the pleasures of observing nature. Which is why I am going to start with Kilvert’s Diary…