Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf

July, 2010: I didn’t realise that Thomas Mann had written “that supposedly impossible thing, a good German comic novel” (Listener, quoted on the blurb), namely, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.

It was enjoyable to read, partly because our guide through the novel is the ridiculously handsome, intelligent, ambitious Felix, AKA Armand, AKA the Marquis de Venosta, whose pride never comes to a fall - quite the opposite! Most novels are about a character’s struggle through hardship or crisis; so novels that depict a character’s sure-footed passage through life (Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is another) are a pleasant change.

The structure is odd: it feels as though Mann started this novel at his usual pace - heavy with detail, accounting for every significant moment of Felix’s life. Felix’s perverse dreams are realised when a marquis wants him to impersonate him and embark on a year-long tour of the world. We start the journey with Felix, go to Spain, and then, about two months into his year-as-a-marquis, the book ends. I can’t help but feel that Mann got tired of his premise, and was called away to work on more dignified, Nobel-Prize-worthy novels. There is one typically obscure thesis through Felix Krull - Felix’s obsession with matched pairs. He is struck by, and refers to regularly, a beautiful, upper-class brother and sister, possibly twins, whom he spots on a balcony one day. The novel ends (abruptly) with another matched pair - Felix smooching a beautiful daughter, then her magnificent mother, to boot. I just don’t get the matched-pair idea. And as Felix Krull is a figment from Mann’s sexual-fantasy life, I suspect the matched-pair theme is, too; somehow I relate it to those men on manhunt.com who say, “Bi-man looking for other bi-men”, because they’ve rationalised this (after much internal argument) as a way of still being straight even while having sex with men. But, the strange thing is, that I have a matched-pair theme in my own life, when it comes to men. This is an enigma I haven’t quite figured out. In my case, it’s almost as though my heart can find what it needs in two men at once (and I’m not talking about threesomes). Maybe it’s the safe way for a ‘commitment-phobe’ to fall in love.

Beauty often comes up in Mann’s novels (did he always find himself very ugly in comparison to the people he admired?). Felix sees a performer, Müller-Rosé, and, like the rest of the audience, is transfixed:

Müller-Rosé dispensed the joy of life - if that phrase can be used to describe the precious and painful feeling, compounded of envy, yearning, hope, and love, that the sight of beauty and lighthearted perfection kindles in the souls of men.

I’m sorry to say that I left this ‘Book of the Moment’ entry unfinished, and now I hardly have the spirit to finish it. I might just transcribe a few of the passages I dog-eared. Here’s one that addresses the theme of together/separate (a preoccupation of mine and D.H. Lawrence’s), as spoken by Felix to a rather cynical young girl:

“Recently you said that Nature had carefully separated and divided one human being from another. Very apposite and only too true. That’s how it is and that’s the rule. But in love Nature has made an exception - a very marvellous one if you look at it with new eyes. [...] It is true: a man lives separated and divided from others inside his own skin, not only because he does not wish it otherwise. He wants to be as separate as he is because essentially he wants to be alone and cares nothing at all about others. Anyone else, everyone else with a skin of his own, is actually repulsive. His own person is the only thing that is not repulsive. [...]

“For now something in through which Nature deviates amazingly from her basic design, something through which man’s whole fastidious insistence upon separateness and being alone inside his own skin is annulled. [...] Well, then! What is the digression on Nature’s part that, to the astonishment of the universe, wipes out the division between one person and another, between the me and the you. It is love. An everyday affair, but eternally new, and, carefully considered, nothing short of miraculous.”

Sometimes Mann can be so damn sweet! There’s another soft-hearted scene, where a Scottish lord, who has developed a deep crush on the beautiful Felix, offers him a job as his personal attendant. Felix, no homophobe, rejects him gently:

“This require careful consideration, milord,” I replied finally. “I need not say that I am greatly honoured by your offer. But it comes so unexpectedly...I must take time for consideration.”

“There is very little time for consideration,” he replied. “Today is Friday, I leave on Monday. Come with me! It is my wish.”

He took one of the cigars I had recommended, regarded it thoughtfully from all sides, and passed it under his nose. No observer could have guessed what he was saying as he did so. What he said softly was: “It is the wish of a lonely heart.”

Who is so inhuman as to reproach me for feeling moved? Yet I knew at once I would not choose this by-path.

“I promise your lordship,” I murmured, “that I will make good use of this period of reflection.” And I withdrew.

He has, I thought, a good cigar to go with his coffee. That combination is highly enjoyable, and enjoyment is, after all, a minor form of happiness. There are circumstances in which one must content oneself with it.

I’ve dog-eared another passage, a very long passage, and I believe it is a dog-ear of protest, of “Why do you, Thomas Mann, think I want to read pages and pages of conversation - theme: human evolution - between Felix and a paleontologist he meets on a train?” I won’t transcribe any of it.

July, 2010: In Love In A Cold Climate, Fanny lends Lady Montdore a copy of Mrs Dalloway, and Fanny’s husband asserts that Virginia Woolf might be one of the few women capable of intellectual enterprises (I’m paraphrasing, too lazy to get Love and find the passages). So I read Mrs Dalloway, too. It is an unusual book, with the narrative a thread that floats from one character’s mind to another’s, against a common background of the sky overhead, the sound of bells tolling, the familiar landmarks of twixt-War London through which the characters meander, and against the background of one warm, summer day that ends with Clarissa Dalloway’s party. It’s a neat, ingenious way of structuring the life-stories of numerous characters, some of whom have almost no connection with each other, except that they’re in London on that day. I’m not a big fan of “neat and ingenious” - I prefer “rambling, groping and vainly trying to reach”. There were times when Mrs Dalloway seemed contrived, and Virginia Woolf seemed too in control of all her characters, with the method of telling the story, and the narrative voice, overpowering the voices of her characters. But there were enough passages groping towards something indescribable to keep me reading.

Here’s a short passage that describes the World War grief that must have been a constant undercurrent in that quarter of the twentieth century (it certainly is in literature from that period):

But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard’s shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance, a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.

Lady Bexborough had opened a bazaar, as planned, and only later had Clarissa found out that the piece of paper she had been holding while giving her polite and proper speech, had been a telegram informing her of her son’s death in the War.

Here’s a description of the wife of the domineering Sir William Bradshaw:

But Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. For example, Lady Bradshaw. Fifteen years ago she had gone under. It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his. Sweet was her smile, swift her submission; dinner in Harley Street, numbering eight or nine courses, feeding ten or fifteen guests of the professional classes, was smooth and urbane. Only as the evening wore on, a very slight dulness, or uneasiness perhaps, a nervous twitch, fumble, stumble and confusion indicated, what it was really painful to believe - that the poor lady lied. Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through; so that without precisely knowing what made the evening disagreeable, and caused this pressure on the top of the head (which might well be imputed to the professional conversation, or the fatigue of a great doctor whose life, Lady Bradshaw said, ‘is not his own but his patients’’), disagreeable it was; so that the guests, when the clock struck ten, breathed in the air of Harley Street even with rapture; which relief, however, was denied to his patients.

One thing that’s really enjoyable and admirable about this book, is that although it follows some tortured and miserable characters, including a man who hears voices and finally throws himself out a window, the main character, Clarissa, is happy and conventional - an atypical heroine; but Woolf certainly makes her heroic, and not by burdening her with unexpected depths, talents or dark sides, but by celebrating her mysterious ability to be happy. I liked this defence of frivolous party-throwing:

Why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another [...chopping out a bit...] Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!

Well, how was she going to defend herself? Now that she knew what it was, she felt perfectly happy. They thought, or Peter at any rate thought, that she enjoyed imposing herself; liked to have famous people about her; great names; was simply a snob in short. Well, Peter might think so. Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.

“That’s what I do it for,” she said, speaking aloud, to life.

Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, “Yes, yes, but your parties - what’s the sense of your parties?” all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. [...I cut out another little bit...] She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

Thomas Mann, Nancy Mitford

June, 2010: I read Death In Venice and Other Tales (other tales including Little Herr Friedemann, Tonio Kröger and Harsh Hour) by Thomas Mann. He’s a favourite of mine, and after these short stories, he became even favouriter: he is a very serious novelist, and in his short stories, he dealt with material that he might not have deemed ‘serious’ enough to be part of his opus. Not that the short stories were trivial; rather, they were very personal, and about the trivial emotions and incidents that loom very large in our trivial lives. Thomas has, perhaps, two themes, explored from all angles in each piece of work; the first (the ‘serious’ theme) is the sacrifice, the self-denial and the isolation involved in being an artist; the second theme is infatuation - secret, impossible, unrequited, explosive (or implosive). Thomas’s obsession with these themes eventually twist together to paint a picture of the author himself, as someone who has decided that he couldn’t endure the life he would find himself leading if his desires were unleashed, so has cut a deal to stay on the sideline, safe in chair at desk, experiencing life only through the barrier (barrier in this case having positive connotations, such as ‘zinc and castor oil barrier cream’ or perhaps, a spermicide) of art. “He worked in silent and invisible seclusion, disdainful of those small-minded people for whom talent was a social asset, who, whether rich or poor, went about wild and dilapidated or lived high on the hog with very individualistic neckties, who were devoted to their charming and artistic lives and unaware that good works can emerge only under the pressure of a bad life, that the person who lives does not work, and that an artist must virtually die in order to be fully creative.” (from Tonio Kröger).

There’s Little Herr Friedemann, whose physical deformities make him unfit for love, and on the sidelines of life he manages to find his versions of happiness and fulfillment:

He learned to understand that everything was enjoyable in its way and that it is almost foolish to distinguish between happy and unhappy experiences. He most readily took in each mood and sensation and cultivated them, the sad as well as the cheerful ones - and also the unfulfilled wishes, the yearnings. He loved them for their own sake and told himself that with fulfillment the best would be past. Aren’t the sweet, vague, painful yearning and hoping of quiet spring evenings a richer joy than any fulfillment that the summer might bring? Yes, indeed, he was an epicurean, that little Herr Friedemann.

Here’s a nice description of the effect that nature can have on a troubled human:

All his tender love of life trembled through him at that moment, all the profound yearning for his lost happiness. But then he looked around at the silent, endlessly indifferent peace of nature, saw the river flowing along in the sunshine, saw the grass quivering and moving and the flowers standing where they had blossomed in order to wither then waft away, saw everything, everything yielding to existence with that mute devotion - and he was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation of friendship and rapport with the inevitable, which can make us superior to all destiny.

But poor, brave little Herr Friedemann is destined (and in just a few more pages) for a very undignified end. His infatuation with a real, live woman reveals to him the hollowness of impossible yearnings, and the fact that without some kind of consummation, life is not worth living.

The main character of each story is, I believe, a Thomas proxy. They share similarities: male, not handsome (to the point of being deformed or obese), often dark in colouring, dreamy rather than robust and active. They suffer terrible public humiliations, often brought upon them by themselves, e.g. (in Little Lizzy) the attorney whose legs, “in their column-like shapelessness...always inserted into ash-grey trousers, recalled the legs of an elephant”, whose slavery to his beautiful younger wife culminates in him performing at a party, wearing a blonde wig and a blood-red silk dress, singing a song composed by her lover, and dropping dead of a heart attack. Often his main character is even a writer, such as Herr Spinell (inTristan, which seems to be a preparatory sketch for Magic Mountain; I’ve read it somewhere before...but where?):

...Herr Spinell announced that he wanted to work this afternoon - he liked using the term “work” for his dubious activity.

A few pages later, he is writing a letter:

“Dear sir...the words come flooding toward me so vehemently that I would choke on them if I could not unburden myself of them in this letter...”

To give truth its due, “flooding” was not quite the case, and God only knew the vain reasons Herr Spinell asserted it. In no wise did the words seem to be flooding toward him; for someone whose stated profession was writing, he was woefully sluggish about getting started, and anybody watching him would have had to conclude that a writer is a man who has more a more difficult time writing than anyone else.

With two fingertips, he clutched one of the strange bits of fuzz on his cheek, twirling it for whole quarters of an hour as he stared into space without advancing by a single line; then he wrote a few dainty words and stagnated again.

All writers must recognise themselves in this description, and perhaps excommunicate Mann for revealing secrets of our hallowed trade.

I could write for hours about these stories; this daunting prospect goads me along to the passage in Tonio Kröger that I loved: Tonio, a writer, is having a crisis of disgust about art and being an artist, “I tell you, I’m often utterly exhausted from depicting what’s human without participating in it. Is the artist even a man? Ask a woman!” His disgust goes on for pages. “No one suspects that this [artistic talent] maybe be an extremely bad, extremely dubious ‘gift’...deep, deep down, I nurture a suspicionof the artist as a type - the extreme suspicion that each of my honorable and respectable ancestors up north [like Thomas, whose family were bourgeois merchants from the northern city of Lübeck], in that cramped town, felt toward any mountebank or adventurous peformer who entered their town.” It’s a very sweet diatribe, and his friend Lisaveta provides this observation:

“I’ve listened to you carefully, Tonio, from start to finish, and I will give you the answer that fits everything you’ve said this afternoon, and it will solve the problem that has unsettled you so deeply. Here it is: The solution is that as you sit here you are quite simply a burgher.”

“Am I?” he asked, drooping.

“That really hurts, doesn’t it? As well it should. And that’s why I’d like to soften my verdict a little, which I can do. You are a burgher who’s gone astray. Tonio Kröger - a lost burgher.”

I read that and laughed, having been with Tonio through much of his argument. I thought, “And I’m a lost housewife! A housewife that’s gone astray.”

And so I skip over a whole lot of other dog-eared pages, over Harsh Hour, an hour in Schiller’s (I believe) life, when he is having (yes) a crisis about being an artist, “One thing was crucial: a good heart for giving his life grand and beautiful names! For not blaming his sufferings on indoor air and constipation!”

Death In Venice is really, truly wonderful. It was a brave act for Thomas Mann to have written this story: it features another Thomas Mann character, a well-respected, ‘serious’, national-treasure-type author in his sixties who takes himself, uncharacteristically, on a holiday to Venice. Oh, just read it! There’s another impossible infatuation (with an adolescent boy), and more grotesque humiliations (Thomas Mann starts dyeing his hair and wearing make-up!), and the obscure happiness and fulfillment that we sometimes find, and rarely admit to, in odd, dark corners.

June, 2010: While reading Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, I was reminded of Nancy Mitford and Love In A Cold Climate, which I bought secondhand for $6.50, only $3.50 cheaper than its ‘rrp’ - I really do love those Penguin classic reprints, not the concept of them (on first seeing an orange-and-cream stand of them, I thought, “How twee!”) so much as the reality, which means that I can cheaply buy books I actually want to read at airports and railways stations. Yesterday at Spencer Street station, I baulked at spending $25 on a Tim Winton novel; if it had been just $10 cheaper, I would have done it!

Love In A Cold Climate has that atmosphere of despair and hilarity that I associate with writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, who have lived through the two World Wars. I looked forward to picking up Love every night, yet when I put it down, it would leave me feeling melancholy. These novels are underpinned by a kind of absurdism, or an almost complete lack of belief, at least in the things in which they’re supposed to believe.

Belief in love, and its redeeming qualities, does not underpin Love In A Cold Climate. The main plot thread deals with Polly, the beautiful, young, rich daughter of Lord and Lady Montdore, who, season after season, refuses proposals from eligible bachelors. Eventually we find out why...I’m reluctant to give away in a cheap sentence what Nancy develops so beautifully and outrageously over a hundred pages. Love, in this novel, is grotesque. Our narrator, Fanny (who I couldn’t help thinking of as the grown-up Maisie - her oft-married mother is known as The Bolter) undramatically marries a fellow called Alfred of whom we hear very little, except for things like:

A more difficult and exacting relationship was the one which now developed between me and Lady Montdore...nobody has ever sapped my will-power as she did, and like Lord Montdore, but unlike Polly, I was quite completely under her thumb. Even Alfred lifted his eyes for a moment from pastoral theology and saw what was going on. He said he could not understand my attitude, and that it made him impatient.

Fanny’s marriage occurs and stays in the background, without a trace of the grotesque, which, in this context, makes it seem a bit loveless. The real love story occurs towards the end of the novel, when Cedric, the new heir to the Montdore estate (with Polly being disinherited), turns up at Hampton Park from Nova Scotia to acquaint himself with his distant relatives:

A glitter of blue and gold crossed the parquet, and a human dragon-fly was kneeling on the fur rug in front of the Montdores, one long white hand extended to each. he was a tall, thin young man, supple as a girl, dressed in a rather bright blue suit; his hair was the gold of a brass bed-knob, and his insect appearance came from the fact that the upper part of his face was concealed by blue goggles set in gold rims quite an inch thick.

He was flashing a smile of unearthly perfection; relaxed and happy he knelt there bestowing this smile upon each Montdore in turn.

“Don’t speak,” he said, “just for a moment. Just let me go on looking at you - wonderful, wonderful people!”

Lady Montdore falls happily in love with Cedric, who picks up a handsome young lorry driver and gives him a live-in job at Hampton. Cedric and Lady Montdore spend their days working on their beauty, taking in “Facial operations, slimming cures, exercises, massage, diet, make-up, new clothes, jewels reset, a blue rinse for her grey hair, pink bows and diamond daisies in the blue curls.” Cedric “lived in a perfect welter of parties, dragging Lady Montdore along in his wake.”

“Isn’t she wonderful? You know, she’s seventy - eighty - ninety - “ her age went up by leaps and bounds. “She’s a darling, so young, so delicious, I do hope I shall be just like her when I’m a hundred.”

So Cedric had transformed her from a terrifying old idol of about sixty into a delicious young darling of about a hundred.

On the last page of the novel, the love story, in all its grotesque beauty, finally falls into place.

Here’s one passage (out of many) that made me laugh:

A motorcar was now heard approaching, the scrunch of tyres, and a low, rich hoot...not at all the Chubb Fuddler’s little Standard, but the huge black Daimler from Hampton Park containing both Lord and Lady Montdore. This was indeed a sensation! Callers were unknown at Alconleigh, anybody rash enough to try that experiment would see no sign of Aunt Sadie or the children, who would all be flat on the floor out of sight, though Uncle Matthew, glaring most embarrassingly, would stand at a window in full view, while they were being told ‘not at home’.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Willy Vlautin

May 2010: The weeks of rain we’ve lately had in Sydney might have influenced my reading choices - after Turn Of The Screw, I started on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, which provided me with more dark, spooky, English country houses of “grey, lichened-blotched stone”, “stained and streaked with damp and bad weather”.

All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amidst the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried, with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought that comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

I didn’t feel like reading short stories. I had started a Kipling collection, and though the three short stories I made it through were truly wonderful, I had put the book down, because...because I wanted some continuity in my fits-and-starts, fractured life! Sherlock Holmes was all I had left in my bookshelf, and I hesitated when it came to packing it into my bag, to take to Melbourne. Would it do the job? Would it be a companion? I’d read the first few stories, and they’d been enjoyable, a bit populist, with the story-telling stomping along in heavy boots (i.e. very easy to follow). I packed it. And I didn’t regret it - the continuity is, of course, in Watson and Holmes’s friendship, which is subtle, complex and very interesting, and more than makes up for the walk-on, walk-off characters that fill out the detective stories.

Towards the end of this collection, Holmes, in a bad mood (coming down from one of his cocaine and shag-tobacco binges, perhaps) is criticising the “little records” that Watson writes (and we read) of Holmes’s cases.

“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherrywood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood - ‘you have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”

“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I remarked, with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.

“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing - a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a series of lectures into a series of tales.”

It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs, through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit, and shone on the white cloth, and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet.

The constant intermingling of dark and light, good and bad - in Sherlock Holmes more than anyone - is another aspect that makes these stories, as a whole piece of work, more sophisticated than they seemed at first. It’s atmospheric, but it’s also one of the difficulties that we have to cope with in life: how much bad can we bear to see in what we love, and how much good can we bear to see in what we despise? I think of this as ‘the ugly truth’ conundrum; truth being, by definition, beautiful, and something I want to see.

Joseph Bell, on whom Sherlock Holmes is partially based, was an Edinburgh surgeon who taught Doyle, a medical student. Bell also taught my great-grandfather, who emigrated to Australia as a doctor and died of a morphine overdose in Eidsvold, Queensland. Sherlock Holmes enjoyed a bit of intravenous cocaine, and my father has always drawn connections between Sherlock Holmes, Joseph Bell and our ill-fated relative, William Rainer - perhaps it was common for medical men to have intravenous drug habits. Part of WIlliam Rainer’s story was that he kept (as was discovered after his death) all the delicate glass ampoules that the morphine had come in. It was my grandmother, aged fourteen, who found him dead.

May 2010: In reference to Benjamin Britten, Chris mentioned Turn Of The Screw by Henry James, and Death In Venice by Thomas Mann, and I was annoyed at so narrowly missing the opportunity, all too rare, to discuss books with Chris; though Henry James and Thomas Mann are among my favourites, I haven’t read these two works, simply because they are short, and I prefer ‘em long. So I started with Turn Of The Screw. Reading it was scary - at the foot of my bed, the wardrobe doors, left ajar, gaped darkly at me until I jumped up and closed them; when I would finally turn out the light, rain pouring down outside, I’d pull the blankets right over my head and breathe through a gap. It’s a ghost story, and it worked. But some elements were disappointing, and almost seemed unfulfilled, possibly because the story is about one-hundred-and-ten years old. The fact that the eerie young siblings’ parents had died, simply and conveniently died, was not considered, in 1898, an issue that needed working through, as it was fairly commonplace. But I thought James missed out on an extra layer by not featuring the parents in the plot, or at least in the children’s psychological profiles. The other assumption that James makes, and that present-day reader won’t make, is that Quint and Miss Jessel are damned. Miss Jessel seems to have died giving birth to an illegitimate child (Quint’s), and Quint seems to have been a lower-class man who rebelled against his place in society - this present-day reader rather likes the sound of Quint and Miss Jessel. And the mere fact that they are ghosts, rather than in heaven with the angels, means that they’re bad. I struggled to go along with all that, much as I tried.

Here’s one bit I liked, because it could loosely be applied to a man I had just (briefly) been involved with: [The children’s governess, who is also our narrator, is discussing the weird goings-on with the cook, who, unlike Quint, does know and accept her inferior place]:

“...the very things that have delighted, fascinated and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game,” I went on; “It’s a policy and a fraud!”

“On the part of the little darlings?”

“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace it - follow it all up and piece it all together. “They haven’t been good - they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them because they’re simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!”

“Quint’s and that woman’s?”

“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs Grose appeared to study them! “But for what?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!”said my friend under her breath.

‘Evil’ is a concept that puts me on the wrong side of an author (e.g. Lionel Shriver, in her silly and sloppy Something Or Other About Kevin). I don’t accept evil. An author has to work very hard to convince me a character is bad-at-heart - they can’t just slap the ‘evil’ label on someone and expect me to believe it. I don’t think Turn Of The Screw is one of Henry James’s best works. I suspect it’s one of his quickies - one of those works that has contributed to his reputation of writing a paragraph (containing a zillion commas and one full-stop) when, with a bit of self-control, he could have conveyed the same information in a couple of lines.

May 2010: Darren lent me Northline by Willy Vlautin, and I duly read it. I sent a text to Andy, “I’m in bed reading a depressing book.” “Why read it then?” “Because when someone lends me a book, I want to finish it so that at least I can talk about why I didn’t like it.” I enjoy talking with a friend about a book we’ve both read (recently enough to remember), and it doesn’t happen very often. One reason I write ‘Book of the Moment’ is to impress on my mind the books I’ve read - I forget books, movies, love affairs and TV shows scandalously fast, a failing of memory that I’d like to improve.

I’m no fan of Raymond Carver. I read one book of his short stories (Cathedral, I believe) several years ago, and discovered that its surface of austere, unembellished honesty covered up no great truth (too ugly for most of us to bear), but just a stunted, self-involved sentimentality. I thought he had nothing much to offer, and - to think! - he has spawned (or rather, misled) so many followers! Every second modern American book I pick up (true, not that many) doffs its hat to Carver. That kind of bleak ‘realism’ gives me the shits, and Northline plays this one note without a break, from the seedy beginning to the egg-shell-fragile hope-of-happiness ending. It’s not that interesting to read about Allison trying to cut her wrists then hating herself for not having the guts to go through with it. I don’t want to see the world through her grey haze of depression. That’s not realism; that’s not reality. That’s someone who is too self-involved to see the world for what it is, namely marvellous.

The Carver-genre should not be known as realism; in fact, it is romance, dressed down so that men won’t be embarrassed to be seen with it. The female characters are vulnerable and bruised, the males are scarred (and all the more manly for it!), the settings all empty bottles, full ashtrays, bare mattresses and rundown cars, and the emotions are pubescent.

Charles Dickens

April 2010: I bought a discounted copy of Tale of Two Cities in a newsagent in Tamworth (as an aside, though there are many things that make me despair of humankind, the fact that the novels generally known as literary classics also happen to be exactly the ones I consider novels at their finest is very reassuring, and the fact that these books are endlessly reprinted in great masses, and sold at cheap prices all over the place, is one of the wonders of the modern world). I started reading what the anonymous introduction describes as Dickens’s “masterpiece” while I was at the Railway Hotel, Koorawatha; the introduction also deems Barnaby Rudge, which I loved, one of his weakest works, and erroneously claims that Two Citiescontains little of Dickens’s typical humour.

Just as some people’s faces can’t look stern or grim no matter how hard they might be trying to reprimand someone, Dickens simply can’t keep humour out of his writing, no matter how bloody and cruel the subject matter, in this case the French Revolution. As usual with Dickens, I have dog-eared dozens of pages, sometimes simply for a turn of phrase or a passing idea that made me smile:

“The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction...The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea.”

His descriptions of places and faces are always vivid, and also handy. Because his stories always involve a large cast of characters, and numerous locations, Dickens labels each one with at least one memorable detail. There is the road-mender in the blue cap; there is the wine-seller’s wife with her impassive face and interminable knitting. Our heroine, Lucie Manette, has predictably wavy golden locks and blue eyes; the less morally righteous characters are more interesting physical specimens, such as Jerry Cruncher, with his “spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheet to ribbons” or else “like an animated bit of the spiked gate at Newgate”. Cruncher, when provoked, cries out, “B-u-u-ust me!”. Towards the end of the book, he is accused of the unsavoury crime of grave-robbing:

“...Mr Lorry looked at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested as often as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.”

Dickens’s stories always work, though sometimes he gets them to work with passages that could almost have a heading - such as, “Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay experience a period of domestic bliss” - that would tell the readers in a sentence all that we find out in a few padded-out paragraphs. Most novels, especially plot-driven novels, have a few of those unnatural ‘snapshot’ passages, or else bits where a contrivance has been inserted and the author does his or her ineffectual best to disguise the entry and exit scars. But in this novel, the drama works - some nights I read Two Cities far longer than I intended to, skimming ahead a page or two to find out what happened. But it wasn’t my favourite Dickens novel. Heroes and heroines freeze up his descriptive powers. Charles Darnay, principal goody, is described merely as “well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye”. He doesn’t really do anything remarkable. His counterpoint, Sidney Carton, a debauched drunkard or a “dissipated cat”, is much more colourful. “Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard”; Carton, after a binge, pulls himself together to help his colleague with a law-suit:

“Sullenly enough, the jackal [Carton] loosened his dress, went into an adjoining room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he folded them onto his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and said, “Now I am ready!”

“...Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp head-gear as no words can describe; which were made more ludicrous by his anxiety.”

This passage ends with:

“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”

Henry James

March, 2010: When I was packing for my three weeks at the Koorawatha Hotel, via my niece’s school fête in Melbourne, I knew that at some point in my journey, my back would feel every single gram of luggage. So I eschewed the collection of Henry James’s short stories that I had almost finished (and was a bit tired of), and brought his novel, What Maisie Knew, and also my reliable old travel companion, Charles Dickens - this time, A Tale Of Two Cities.

When I started Maisie, on the XPT from Spencer Street, I first thought, “Argh, I can’t read this!” It’s about a little girl whose warring, divorced parents share custody of her, with Maisie spending six months with one then the other. By no means is it the story of my childhood, but there are enough similarities to give me a personal interest in reading it. But aside from that, it’s a beautiful piece of work. To write, from a child’s point of view, a novel that manages to be engaging for an adult reader, without straying beyond the child’s necessarily limited ken, is a feat; and for a sophisticated writer like H.J. to be interested enough in a little girl to choose her for his principal character makes me like him even more than I already do. I can’t help thinking that he must have been a little bit like Sir Claude, who says:

“The truth about me is simply that I’m the most unappreciated of – what do you call the fellows? – ‘family-men.’ Yes, I’m a family-man; upon my honour I am!”

…and a page later:

“I’m an old grandmother,” Sir Claude declared. “I like babies – I always did. If we go to smash, I shall look for a place as a responsible nurse.”

Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her years which at another moment might have been bitter; but the charm was sensibly interrupted by Mrs Beale’s screwing her round and gazing fondly into her eyes, “You’re willing to leave me, you little wretch?”

The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had become a cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it very gently, “Isn’t it my turn for mamma?”

“You’re a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now said about ‘turns’, the better,” Mrs Beale made answer. “I know whose turn it is. You’ve not such a passion for your mother.”

“I say, I say: do look out,” protested Sir Claude quite amiably protested.

“There’s nothing she hasn’t heard. But it doesn’t matter – it hasn’t spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with you!” she pursued to Maisie.

Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the child.

I’ve always had trouble, in my writing, in limiting myself to a sensible number of points of view. So I started studying H.J.’s methods of sticking faithfully to Maisie, but not at the expense of any interesting details that might have missed her. For a start, Maisie is not a stupid child stuck in a nursery. He creates a situation where she has extensive access to the adults’ personal lives – he has them confiding in and confessing to her (she’s a child – she won’t judge!), and using her as a chaperone and a “pretext”. At other times, her presence is simply ignored or unnoticed. All of this exposure to adult goings-on makes Maisie exceptionally wise; but also, being a dependent child, gathering information about her unstable world is her survival instinct. H.J. pre-empts any reader who (in his or her ignorance) can’t believe in a child-narrator knowing so much by making Maisie’s knowledge the thesis of the whole novel, as is indicated by the title.

Whenever the maturity of Maisie’s insights risks being implausible, H.J. is there to justify it, saying things like, “It sounds, no doubt, too penetrating, but...” The novel’s point-of-view, or its ‘voice’, manages, against the odds, to be staunch and unwavering. But where (I started to wonder) does an author position him- or herself? The novel is not in the first-person; the author and the narrator are not one and the same. Maisie is told by a strange synthesis of Henry James and a little girl. Does H.J. take the position that he met Maisie and she told him all of this? And then I came across this line, “ I [the author] so despair of courting her [Maisie’s] noiseless mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being from this time forward...” And I thought, “Yes, it’s as simple as that. He’s known a little girl, to some degree or another, a bit like Maisie, and he’s imagining what it would be like to be her. He’s ‘courting her noiseless mental footsteps’.” It might not seem like a great discovery of mine, but it’s a relief finally to have gotten it straight.

J.M. Coetzee

January, 2010: Stella left J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on the kitchen table, and it was so much easier to read than Origin of Species that I finally returned Darwin to the bookcase. Disgrace was a good holiday read, in its way. The story-telling is excellent; I wanted to know what happened next. It’s just that the misogyny bothered me more and more, until, by the time I’d read the last page, I thought the whole book stank. The hero’s and others’ treatment of women is in fact the book’s theme (though it’s never called “misogyny”), and because Coetzee is such a cool, clear-eyed observer, there are some insights into the mind of a man with whom I don’t really want to spend a book.

The fifty-ish professor turns up at his twenty-ish student’s flat:

He has given her no warning: she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette’s. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. “No, not now!” she says, struggling. “My cousin will be back!”

But nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd slippers, kisses her feet, astonished by the feeling she evokes. Something to do with the apparition on the stage: the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk. Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that.

She does not resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of a fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.

“Pauline will be back any minute,” she says when it is over. “Please. You must go.”

Be obeys, but then, when he reaches his car, is overtaken with such dejection, such dullness, that he sits slumped at the wheel unable to move.

A mistake, a huge mistake.

“A mistake”, or a wrong-doing? “Not rape, not quite that” – well, Germaine Greer can supply the term he’s groping for: ‘petty rape’. In her essay ‘Seduction is a Four-Letter Word’, published in Playboy 1973, she says, “In all cases of petty rape, the victim does not figure as a personality,” and that’s certainly true for Melanie. We hear from her boyfriend what he thinks of her ‘affair’ with Professor Lurie, and we hear from her father what he thinks of it, but we never hear from Melanie. All we know about Melanie is that she’s young and pretty.

According to Lurie, women are either young and pretty, or “young…pleasant-faced rather than pretty, shy, clearly pregnant”, or else they have “chunky legs and a no-nonsense business suit” or they’re “more self-conscious in their dressing and undressing. But the women he is used to are not as young, as perfectly formed’. David Lurie describes his lesbian daughter, Lucy: “A year has passed and she has put on weight. Her hips and breasts are now (he searches for the best word) ample.” At one point (I can’t be bothered finding it), he finds himself gazing at the back of Lucy’s knee, the least beautiful part of a woman’s body. There’s the opera he’s writing about Byron and his lover, Theresa, “with her heavy bust, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs…Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman?” Or there’s Bev Shaw, “a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive.”

And I don’t like books that make no effort to make their main character attractive.

Post-script: Professor Lurie’s idea for an opera is terrible. He should read Thomas Mann’s wonderful Lotte In Weimar if he wants to know what happens to these women eclipsed (in the public eye, anyway) by a brief affair with a famous man. They forget about him, and go on to have a real life.

P.P.S.: A few days later, and I continue to think about how little I liked this book. In Germaine’s essay, she also describes a scenario where a famous or charismatic man uses these advantages of his to exploit a less powerful (e.g. young) woman, treating her in a way he’d never get away with if paired with his equal. Mutual contempt is the aftermath of such encounters, and also, I’d add, self-contempt. There was something very evasive about Disgrace; not only that David Lurie never got around to considering what he’d done as wrong, and not only that we never heard Melanie’s side of the story, and very little from Lucy, too, who was also raped (conveniently for this evasive author, Lucy clammed up and refused to talk about it). It wasn’t social punishment or ‘disgrace’ that our hero was evading: it was self-contempt. The whole book was an elaborate construction to protect him from self-contempt. That’s how little I liked it. I doubt I’ll ever read another J.M. Coetzee book again. Especially not the one where the hero is called ‘J.M. Coetzee’.

Charles Darwin, Evelyn Waugh

December, 2009: For months, Origin of Species has been my kitchen-table reading, unless there’s something more ephemeral passing over it (the table), such as an issue of the Monthly, or the Inner West Courier, or the SMH. Darwin is a clear, considerate writer, and “I got a song out of it” (a frequent consolation for my failures), but my steam seems to have run out for Origin at page 76. To answer the question of species’ origins, Darwin saw that it was necessary for one single person to review every piece of available evidence. He devoted himself to this almost superhuman task, not to prove his points, but to find out what the evidence would tell him. In the editor’s introduction, there’s a quote from Darwin describing his own mental qualities and conditions that were most important to his success, “the love of science – unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject – industry in observing and collecting facts – and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense.”

It should be remembered that systematists are far from being pleased at finding variability in important characters, and there are not many men who will laboriously examine internal and important organs, and compare them in many specimens of the same species. It would never have been expected that the branching of the main nerves close to the great central ganglion of an insect would have been variable in the same species…yet Sir J. Lubbock has shown a degree of variability in these main nerves in Coccus, which may almost be compared to the irregular branching of the stem of a tree. This philosophical naturalist, I may add, has also shown that the muscles in the larvae of certain insects are far from uniform. Authors sometimes argue themselves in a circle when they state that the important organs never vary; for these same authors practically rank those parts as important (as some few naturalists have honestly confessed) which do not vary; and, under this point of view, no instance will ever be found of an important part varying; but under any other point of view, many instances assuredly can be given.

Much of the first 76 pages is about the necessity of organising things into categories (species, variations), but the mistake of forcing things into categories. We’re so uncomfortable with things that are neither one thing nor another. But if we insist on making things fit, then we miss out on seeing the truth.

Nothing is easier to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult – at least, I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

December, 2009: Unconditional Surrender (1961) is Evelyn Waugh’s last novel in the trilogy. Guy Crouchback reaches the final stage of his disillusionment, and learns to find meaning in little things, instead of searching for it in grand things. “Quantitive judgements don’t apply”; this is what Guy’s father, seeing his son in a crisis of apathy, writes to him. He’s talking about Catholicism and saving souls, but I, an atheist, have no difficulty translating this beautiful decree into a secular one. To me, it’s about leading a principled life on whatever modest scale you can manage.

“I don’t ask anything from you”; that was the deadly core of his apathy; his father had tried to tell him, was telling him now. That emptiness had been with him for years now, even in his days of enthusiasm and activity in the Halberdiers. Enthusiasm and activity were not enough. God required more than that. He had commanded all men to ask.

In the recesses of Guy’s conscience there lay the belief that somewhere, somehow, something would be required of him; that he must be attentive to the summons when it came. They also served who only stood and waited.

Again we meet Ludovic (see below), who is now a successful author, and a commandant of a parachute training ground. He is hugely tall and pudgy, haunted by a bad conscience, and becomes increasingly bizarre.

Into this jolly company Ludovic entered like the angel of death. No one had believed the literal detail of de Souza’s fantasies but their repetition and enlargement had created an aura of mystery and dread about the commandant who lurked overhead and was seen and heard by none, which Ludovic’s appearance did nothing to dispell.

He overtopped the largest man in the room by some inches. There was at that time a well-marked contrast in appearance between the happy soldiers destined for the battlefield and those who endangered their digestions and sanity at office telephones. Standing before and above those lean and flushed young men, Ludovic’s soft bulk and pallor suggested not so much the desk as the tomb. Complete silence fell. “Present me,” Ludovic said, “to these gentlemen.”

Captain Fremantle led him round. He laid a clammy hand in each warm, dry palm and repeated each name as Captain Fremantle uttered it “…de Souza…Gilpin…” as though he were reciting the titles of a shelf of books he had no intention of reading.

Ludovic reappears the next night:

At dinner he introduced one topic only, and then to Captain Fremantle, saying: “I think I shall get a dog.”

“Yes sir. Jolly things to have about.”

“I don’t want a jolly dog.”

“Oh, no, I see, sir, something for your protection.”

“Not for protection.” He paused and surveyed the stricken staff captain, the curious and silent diners. “I require something for love.”

No one spoke.

Ludovic goes on to buy a Pekinese that he names ‘Fido’ after the man he probably murdered in Crete.

Another wonderful character – not delivered up to us to judge, but to observe in all his fascinating detail – is Uncle Peregrine, a bachelor. Virginia, the woman whom Guy marries twice, grills him:

“Didn’t you ever want to marry?”

“Not really.”

Uncle Peregrine was not at all put out by these direct personal questions. He was essentially imperturbable. No one, so far as he could remember, had ever shown so much interest in him. He found the experience enjoyable, even when Virginia pressed further.

“Lots of affairs?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“I’m sure you aren’t a pansy.”

“Pansy?”

“You’re not homosexual?”

Even this did not disconcert Uncle Peregrine. It was a subject he had rarely heard mentioned by a man; never by a woman. But there was something about Virginia’s frankness which struck him as childlike and endearing.

“Good gracious, no. Besides, the ‘o’ is short. It comes from the Greek, not the Latin.”

Virginia gives birth in Peregrine’s apartment. Peregrine says to his niece’s husband:

“Angela has been a great help. Of course, you must know all about childbirth. It has been rather a surprise to me. I had never given it much thought but I had supposed that women just went to bed and that they had a sort of stomach ache and groaned a bit and that then there was a baby. It isn’t at all like that.”

“I always moved out when Angela had babies.”

“I was awfully interested. I moved out at the end but the beginning was quite a surprise – almost unnerving.”

“I am sure nothing ever unnerves you, Peregrine.”

“No. Perhaps ‘unnerving’ was not the right word.”

It doesn’t quite seem right to note down the most important passage in the book, plucking it from the beautiful, subtle setting of this trilogy. A Jewish woman, a refugee, whom Guy has tried to help while in Yugoslavia, says to him:

“Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians – not very many perhaps – who felt this. Were there none in England?”

“God forgive me,” said Guy. “I was one of them.”