#3 The Small Room - May Sarton

"It’s just that I feel overwhelmed. I don’t see how anyone can be a good teacher, let alone a great one. You can’t win; either you care too much or too little; you’re too impersonal or too personal; you don’t know enough or you bury the students in minutiae; you try to teach them to write an honest sentence, and then discover that what is involved is breaking a psychological block that can only be broken if you take on the role of psychoanalyst…" –Lucy Winter in The Small Room

The Small Room is a deeply questioning novel about women and the unique relationship between teacher and pupils. Set in a New England college for girls, the book explores how inveterate, established traditions and values of teaching are being challenged as demanded by the ever changing student body over time. Prizing excellence, the college presumes that by setting an uncompromising standard it might develop women who can take the lead, who can become responsible in the deepest sense.

The synonym to academic prestige is the invincible Professor Carryl Cope, a distinguished scholar, inspiring teacher who has been stimulating to her students. Despite her dominating over the faculty, she has adopted her students like orphans, push them, wrangle with them, and force them to grow in academic excellence. Her brilliance, dedication and strengths seem so flawless and formidable until a favorite student of hers, a rising star, fails to cope with the pressure to achieve higher ground, perpetrates an unethical act that threatens to shatter the very tradition of excellence.

Ranged against Carryl Cope is Lucy Winter, a fresh arrival to the school who lives on the heels of a disastrous relationship. Until the outburst of the scandal, Lucy has doubt and feels misgiving about involving with students at a personal level. That she has been haunted by personal affair makes her seek convalescence in this safe world in a college. But this temporary refuge turns out to be one that is reeled with tension, as immense amount of loose hostility and anger unveil and float around against Carryl Cope, who tries to hush up the student’s scandal.

Lucy Winter, who holds the students as individuals, snaps out of her teaching personality in the classroom, is able to answer students’ pleas for personal attention. What she gives to them is exactly the bane to Cope’s fall–for Cope has failed to penetrate to students’ personal lives and problems. In molding and pruning the students, Lucy has taught a most valuable lesson. “It’s not about winning.” Indeed, one can prove to be above the critic but if one doesn’t have self-respect and love, life has no meaning. This is a sentimental education that transcends scholastic merits. It’s about teaching students how to feel, how to live, and how to experience–the means to help ripen in life.

The Small Room is an absorbing work that probes into the most ambivalent and delicate quarters of human heart. It delves into the seemingly calm world of academia in which the faculty, beset by their conscience, are forced to reappraise their profession and motives.

The Man Who Was Thursady

As one of the books for the Outmoded Authors Challenge I chose G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. I have never read Chesterton before so I had no idea what to expect. From the back of the book I knew it was a sort of spy novel, but I had no idea how hilariously funny it would be. What makes it even funnier is that all of the characters are completely serious no matter how absurd things get.

The main character is Gabriel Syme. He is an upstanding police officer who goes undercover in order to discover the identity of Sunday, the leader of the Anarchists. Syme gets himself elected to the Anarchist Council when the previous Thursday meets an untimely end. Here is a portion of a eulogy spoken before the Anarchist cell members who are about to elect a new Thursday:

As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow.

So we have an Anarchist who tried to kill everyone on Brighton pier but thought drinking milk was cruel. And so goes the whole book. The Anarchists are sticklers about following rules and get very upset when someone doesn't play fair.

Syme as Thursday runs off to France to try and stop another member of the Council from going through with an assassination. The book is filled with mistaken identities and no one ever seems to be who they say they are. At the end of the book there is a chase scene that involves horses, cars, boats, an elephant and hansom cabs, and a hot air balloon. A scene that would do James Bond proud.

While the book on its surface is a fun romp of a story, there is another deeper level. Regardless of whether the Anarchists are effective, they are viewed as a group that is trying to destroy the world. The suspects are usually rich people because poor people are either too busy just trying to survive to worry about anarchy, or they are viewed as having too much invested in the stability of a government and system that they imagine themselves someday being able to take part in when they make their fortunes.

The driving question underneath The Man Who Was Thursday is will the human race survive? Chesterton published the book in 1908 and was strongly influenced by the Boer War and his deep religious beliefs. The book's epigraph pretty much says it all:

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing the world have to fight against the world itself?"

Why indeed. I don't think we are any closer to an answer now than we were then.

I enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday so much I raced through it in a day and a half. Those kinds of books don't come along very often. Because I read so fast, I'm sure I missed a lot and I would like to re-read it again sometime. I'd also like to read more Chesterton. The Father Brown books are supposed to be quite good.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Nightwood

So, I finished Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood last week and have decided to go ahead and read it again right away. My response to the first reading was a mixture of awe and bewilderment. The plot is simple to follow, so it was not the plot that bewildered me, but there is not much plot anyway; rather, it’s the things the characters were saying that I sometimes had trouble following. But their speeches were beautiful and in the moments when meaning broke through, I found myself moved.

I learned pretty quickly I couldn’t read and re-read passages until I understood them perfectly, because that moment didn’t always come; instead, I read slowly and figured out what I could, and kept going even if I didn’t get everything. I did this partly because I knew I’d mostly likely be reading the book again, but also because trying to figure everything out would lead to frustration. I think this is the kind of book where you can read for mood and atmosphere and for the beauty of the language as much as you read for logical meaning.

Here’s a typical passage, a speech from one of the most important characters, the doctor:

Suppose your heart were five feet across in any place, would you break it for a heart no bigger than a mouse’s mute? Would you hurl yourself into any body of water, in the size you now are, for any woman that you had to look for with a magnifying glass, or any boy if he was as high as the Eiffel Tower or did droppings like a fly? No, we all love in sizes, yet we all cry out in tiny voices to the great booming God, the older we get. Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget.

I’m not entirely sure what this passage means, but I do like it. The book it not entirely made up of passages like this one; it also has plenty of dialogue and narration that’s easier to follow. The novel tells the story of a group of characters, following them through many years as they wander around, fall in love, marry in some cases, break up, despair, talk it over, despair, talk it over, etc. There’s the doctor, who has most of the eloquent, poetic speeches, who doesn’t seem to do much but talk to the other characters. There’s Baron Felix, who marries Norah Flood, who then leaves him to pursue Robin Vote, who leaves Norah to pursue Jenny. The conversations that come out of all this loving and leaving are more important than the actions themselves — the book is really about the sense that the characters make of what happens to them.

I do not at all feel as though I have a handle on this book, but perhaps after a second reading, I’ll get more of it. Perhaps I’ll look up some critical work as well.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage recounts the first 30 years in the life of Philip Carey, from the sudden death of his adored and adoring mother, to his decision to marry and to settle on a career as a doctor. This is a quiet book, and Maugham's writing is deceptively spare and plain. His meaning is always clear so the story progresses swiftly, unobstructed by authorial cleverness. I found it absolutely gripping while I was reading it, despite the fact that Philip is not always sympathetic or even likeable.

The story draws heavily on episodes from Maugham's own life: he was an orphan, he hated the boarding school to which he was sent, he attended university in Germany, he studied medicine; all these episodes are reproduced in the book. In addition, Philip Carey suffers from a club-foot, a physical disfigurement that perhaps stands in for the stutter that plagued Maugham throughout his life. And, Philip is a sharp-tongued, angry youth who does not make friends easily, another characteristic that he shares with Maugham. In the Foreword to my edition, Maugham says:

Of Human Bondage is not an autobiography, but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own but not all the incidents are related as they happened and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate. The book did for me what I wanted and when it was issued to the world ... I found myself free forever from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me.

If the emotions are truly his own, then Maugham was capable of turning his penetrating and ruthless gaze inward. He pulls no punches in his telling so that Philip stands revealed in all his weaknesses; only in the latter half of the novel do his strengths begin to display. He would in fact be a deeply unpleasant character but for Maugham's choosing to depict so many instances of petty meanness, jealousy, casual cruelty that Philip becomes only very human. Literary characters are so often better or worse than real people; Philip is not, and although the reader may dislike what they see of him as a child and a young man, by the time the book ends he is beginning to change into an altogether more personable individual.

Philip is nine when his mother dies, and although he does not quite understand, he knows he is a suitable object for sympathy: 'He knew that Mrs Watkin and her sister were talking to friends and it seemed to him - he was nine years old - that if he went in they would be sorry for him...'
After his mother's death, Philip goes to live with his aunt and uncle. Mr William Carey is the vicar at Blackstable and is a selfish, cold man around whom his entire household revolves. He is the sort of man who denies the use of the stove for heat because of the expense of the coal, but has a fire lit in his own study. His wife is a faded, pathetic woman who has longed desperately for a child of her own; she immediately loves Philip unconditionally and longs for him to reciprocate in whatever small measure. Philip does love her back, but rather fitfully, in that the emotion is usually prompted by his own guilt or regret at having, once again, reduced her to tears.

The solitary life with his aunt and uncle turns Philip into a shy, quiet, introverted boy who takes solace in reading and develops a precocious intelligence. His club-foot makes him self-conscious, and at school, he grows a carapace of bitterness and sarcasm to cover his loneliness and insecurity. At first he is destined for the church, but he begins to lose interest and decides against ordination. This is the first of several paths that Philip enthusiastically follows, then determinedly rejects, a pattern that repeats itself until he gets to medical school.

Maugham says of him that 'he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were', and this is true for things but not for people. A passion for reading fills Philip's head with romantic ideals of life at a German university or later, as an artist. Each time, his propensity for seeing things as they are means that he cannot mistake bad art for good, or tawdriness for glamour. But, at Heidelberg he falls in with a fellow-student called Hayward, the outward embodiment of the man steeped in literature, who can turn out an apposite quote for any occasion but has no real learning. Philip is entirely deceived by appearance, ignoring all the proofs that Hayward is a phony.

On his return to Blackstable after his year in Germany, Philip again displays that same lack of judgement and embarks on an ill-advised affair with Miss Wilkinson, who is a guest in the house. She is considerably older than him, and certainly experienced, although she affects the dress and manner of a younger woman. Knowingly, she reels Philip into a physical relationship, and he is too naive and too keen to experience sex, to escape. When he first visits her room and sees her unclothed and without make up, he knows he's making a mistake:

She looked grotesque. Philip's heart sank as he stared at her; she had never seemed so unattractive; but it was too late now. He closed the door behind him and locked it.

Philip's attempts to extricate himself from the web in which he is now caught offer decidedly comic moments, but fortunately Miss Wilkinson lives in Berlin, and she leaves. Philip embarks on a career in accountancy, but after a year he leaves that and goes to art school in Paris. Faced with the knowledge of his own mediocrity he leaves that in its turn, and returns home again. His next career choice is medicine, and again he goes up to London and enrolls.

The third time is the charm, and after a somewhat rocky start, Philip begins to apply himself at medical school and to do quite well. During this portion of his life he also falls in love with and pursues the entirely ghastly Mildred. She is a singularly unpleasant character, with skin so pale that it is 'greenish', 'of a faint green colour', with a 'greenish pallor'. Even when he first loves her, Philip is disgusted by her:

...he hated the thinness of her, only that evening he had noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening-dress; he went over her features one by one; he did not like her mouth, and the unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common. Her phrases, so bold and few, constantly repeated, showed the emptiness of her mind; he recalled her vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the music hall comedy; and he remembered the little finger carefully extended when she held her glass to her mouth; her manners, like her conversation, were odiously genteel...

When Philip meets her she is a waitress in a cafe; by the time of her last appearance in his life, she is a prostitute with an unspecified communicable disease. Fully aware of her illness, she still continues to ply her trade. Throughout their protracted, wretched relationship, Philip is unable to break away from her entirely and indeed, for a while is subjugated to her. It is really difficult to like Philip when he is so smitten with Mildred that, for example, he pays for her and another lover to go away for the weekend. He also pays for her treatment when she is pregnant with yet another man's child. Mildred, for her part, never wants Philip; but she wants him to want her. When he finally does reject her, her resentment explodes into violence.

(Mildred is the most fully described of all the female characters in the book, but all the women are either 'mothers' or 'whores', almost types rather than actual people. I wish Maugham had addressed this point in his Introduction.)

Of Human Bondage works as a protracted coming-of-age story, and Philip's last rite of passage is his temporary poverty and homelessness. This downward mobility takes the edges off Philip's stolid, middle-class snobbery. He is befriended by a mixed class family (father originally upper class, mother working class) and is also forced really to work at something he dislikes, with no luxury of changing employment at a whim.

Of course, he transcends these obstacle and in the end, he does complete his medical studies and is a cooler, wiser and more sympathetic person.

He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Most people will know the story of Pygmalion, from My Fair Lady if nowhere else, where Eliza Doolittle is taught to speak 'like a duchess' by Professor Henry Higgins. Shaw describes this as a didactic play in his preface, revelling in its success when popular opinion says that art should not be didactic. Yet it is also a charming play with likeable characters, which allows you to painlessly engage with the serious message underlying it.
It begins with a scene on a rainy London street. A flower girl begins causing a nuisance of herself, trying to sell her flowers to anyone standing still; gradually the people milling around realise that a man is noting down everything they say. After accusations that he is a copper's nark, the note-taker astounds everyone by being able to pinpoint exactly where they come from by how they speak.

'THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER: Yes: tell him where he come from if you want to go fortune-telling.
THE NOTE-TAKER: Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.
THE GENTLEMAN: Quite right.
Great laughter. Reaction in the note-taker's favour. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc
THE GENTLEMAN:May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?
THE NOTE-TAKER: I've thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.'

The note-taker is, as you will have gathered, Professor Higgins. The play concerns his attempt to take this cockney flower girl and teach her to speak properly, and how this affects both their lives.
'You see this creature with her kerb-stone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party.'
Reading this has reminded me that Shaw's plays are both eminently readable and, I've always found, eminently watchable. It is light and engaging, with witty dialogue. The play is dated in the sense that it is firmly set in the Edwardian era and I feel it would be hard to set it in the present without significantly changing the text (for instance, the swear word 'bloody' does not have the same capacity to shock in the twenty-first century), but the dialogue is clear and natural, and you can believe in the characters, no matter how bizarre the situation they are in.
However, there is a social commentary underlying the romantic veneer - Shaw's didacticism; this is a play very firmly about class. As Higgins says:
'This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with £80 a year, and end up in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths.'
Class is something that still obsesses us in England ninety years later, and for this reason the play stands the test of time. There are constantly new books written, television programmes being made about it; we have just recently had a furore in the press about 'middle-class drinking'. We all define ourselves and others as belonging to one class or another, and the way we use language is a large part of that. This obsession is satirised by Shaw in this play, this need to classify ourselves and others and present ourselves according to the station we believe we belong, or want to belong, to by the way we speak.
As time passes, Eliza comes to realise that there is more to becoming a lady than her accent. Her character develops throughout the play as she becomes a strong, dignified woman who is able at last to stand up to Higgins.
She also finally recognises in Higgins and her father the meaning of true classlessness, in the way that, with no thought for ceremony or situation, both treat everyone the same whether they be a duke or a dustman: Mr Doolittle with easy-going familiarity and Higgins with bored contempt.
Raymond Williams (in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht) describes how Shaw did not consider plays where there was little more than the dialogue to be a true art form, they need the directions of the playwright for the entire vision. For example, Shaw believed that we do not have the full genius of Shakespeare available to us because we lack his character notes and directions. Shaw will not allow this to happen to his plays, and with a preface, an epilogue and detailed directions throughout Pygmalion has more the air of a play-novella hybrid than a piece of drama. For reading purposes this is fine, but I wonder how restricting directors find this interference from Bernard Shaw.
An example of Shaw's control over his vision is the ending of the play, which does not make clear what will happen to Eliza. In case you should be tempted to romantically decide for yourself, however, in the epilogue Shaw provides a realistic and pleasing, if not romantic, future for Eliza, Henry and the other characters.
It is pleasing because I had grown very fond of the defiant yet vulnerable Eliza, and the infuriating but essentially innocent and child-like Higgins, as well as the other characters. So even if there is a slight irritation at Shaw's need to control even after the end of the play, there is also a certain satisfaction in ending with everything sorted, rather than having Eliza and Higgins teetering on the edge of either perfect happiness or abject misery.

#2 Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen

Outmoded Author Challenge #2

Sixteen years old Portia Quayne has grown up exiled not from her own country but from normal, cheerful family life. She is the product of an ignominious affair between her mother Irene and a married man. However much chagrin the adulterous number has caused Thomas Quayne, Portia’s half-brother, his mother, before she died, had gone out of her way to accommodate the mistress and approved the marriage.

Recently orphaned, Portia moves into Thomas’ house at Windsor Terrace, a luxurious but emotionally sterile London home where each person lives impaled upon a private obsession. Life is so restrained and edited that no feeling can ever thicken intimacy. It is not so much that the Quaynes don’t like the teenage girl as they find her keen eye, observant perception unsettling. Anna, Thomas’ wife, especially finds Portia unnerving because she “doesn’t like to be watched.” Her eyes are so riveting as if the invincible innocence and perspicacity give her power to see through Anna’s secrecy.

But the monotonous life at Windsor Terrace is quickly intruded by Portia’s falling for Eddie, a close friend of Anna with whom she has a liaison. That Eddie has made a villain of Anna, who treats her with a polite hostility, hypnotizes her and binds her close to him like an alliance. Unfortunately Portia cannot (she has no clue) comprehend evil or unkind motives. Though the main plot follows her relationship with Eddie, the novel’s real tension lies between Portia and Anna, as the girl comes to grief against Anna’s cynicism and insidiousness.

Bowen has very keen eye for such shadings of morality that in between the lines of her writing she exposes the ugliest, the most cruel, the most despicable in the genteel society. A sensitive observer of the way we live, she deals in motives and mind games that render the novel very psychological and haunting. The tension between Portia and Anna is not revealed by their interactions, who are meager, but between their ears.

I mentioned a very significant quote on innocence in a previous post. So the theme of innocence being corrupted is inverted in order to fully accentuate the destructive power of innocence. While innocence is a virtue, those who are innocent can be very vulnerable to betrayal, for innocent people, who exact a very brave happiness and sanguine nature, are strangers to the world. Portia’s innocence might poise as a challenge to a society that is completely lacking in compassion. In the end this respectable virtue makes her a victim of the social conventions in which the players tend to be more civil and kind than they really are.

The Glassy Sea by Marian Engel

Despite a dreadful cover and excruciating blurb, this short novel is wonderful and I am delighted that this challenge encouraged me to read it. Consisting largely of a letter from a middle-aged woman to her Bishop, it tells the story of Rita from her rural childhood, through her transformation into an Anglican nun, Sister Mary Pelagia, her gentle "eviction" out of the order and into marriage and motherhood, and her eventual breakdown. As she re-reads the letter, written the previous summer, she begins to regain a sense of equilibrium about the past, and to review and reaffirm her decision about the future.

The writing is down-to-earth, almost chatty, even when considering matters of life and death, but there is a seriousness of tone, and earnestness, that tells us that the protagonist, while capable of efficiency and practicality, is in essence a dreamer, a lover of solitude. As a youngest child, we find she learnt her solitude early, along with an introspection her family find hard to deal with:

I liked it in church , too, because . . . I thought I understood Jesus. I didn't understand any of the other people I had read about because they did unheard of things like get caught in lobster pots or vanish down rabbit holes, or were orphans, but there was He, born in a barn, child of a man who worked with his hands (and my father, too, would have walked miles in winter to be honest and pay his taxes) and a woman who obviously worked her fingers to the bone. And, like me, He asked a lot of questions. I was always asking questions.

When Rita is taken ill at university, and sent home to recuperate, she takes lessons from a retired Anglican clergyman, Mr Laidlaw, who introduces her to a community of nuns. Because the Anglican church can find no practical role for them, the Eglantines live a largely contemplative existence and Rita is drawn, despite immense parental opposition, to join them. And for ten years she is happy:

William Morris would indeed have been pleased with the Eglantines and I can't think God himself wasn't, at that time. I have read, since, books and stories by women who have dropped the veils of the Sisters of St Joseph, of the Ursulines - indeed, there must be dozens of them. But none of them seems to have found the earthly paradise I found for a while in Eglantine House, in London, Ont., as we call it, the heart of your diocese.

Unfortunately for Rita, the Eglantines are an ageing community and, although she spends a time as its acting head, her Sister Superior decides that she is young enough to build a new life for herself and ejects her kindly but firmly into the arms of her friend Maggie, to help care for her children. Filled with grief at the loss of the community, she inevitably meets a young lawyer - in fact, they have met before, in high school, where Rita considers Asher Bowen the most beautiful man she has ever seen - and recognises in him some of her seriousness and religious fervour. Continuing the separation of each stage of her life, Ash renames her Peggy, they choose a church to attend together and are quickly married:

I was empty. I handed my void to him. He told me what to wear, what to do; when he knew me better, he told me what I felt. He filled my mind, my thoughts, my body. He sat beside me in church. During sacraments his face gleamed pale and fanatic; he had an intensity I had never seen in any Eglantine but Mary Elzevir. I loved him very much indeed.

When she gives birth to a hydrocephalic child, the young couple are devastated. While Ash gradually withdraws, Rita becomes obsessive, dedicating herself to her child's welfare and survival. A "dreadful thing" occurs when Ash purchases the house of Rita's much hated (and child abusing) Uncle Eddie, as a summer cottage. For Rita, who has learnt detachment painfully during her parents' rejection, the return to her childhood home, the intrusion of the "messiness" of her country family, is too much.

With the death of her child, Rita's disintegration into alcoholism, breakdown and divorce is rapid, but she eventually redeems herself through contemplation. She considers that her life has gone wrong when she is required to be Martha rather then Mary yet, as she finally begins to achieve an inner peace, she allows herself to be persuaded that she will return to Eglantine House to re-establish and lead the order. She has learnt the difference between detachment and hiding, the need for balance between Mary and Martha, even the necessity of uncertainty. At the end, still debating with herself about the rightness of her decision, she says: "Enough. Enough. I've made my choice. I shall learn how to live with it."

Despite its brevity, this is a thoughtful book. It was first published in 1978, a time when there was rather more turmoil about woman's role in society, and this is considered at some length here, but it goes deeper, too, to a consideration what it is required for anyone to play their role. In the course of the book the Eglantines too have developed, and will play a greater role than that which they had formerly been allowed; they will no longer be a contemplative order, yet the need for a spiritual dimension to their work is still recognised and permitted time. To me this book provides a powerful affirmation of the need for spirituality, whatever the creed, and I find it already influencing my response to my next book for the challenge, which considers the role of women at an earlier period.