My last three books, and possibly the last time I post - since Blogger seems to be changing to a format which doesn't work on my laptop at all(!)
Chronicles of Wasted Time, Vol. II: The Infernal Grove, by Malcolm Muggeridge.
I
enjoyed both of Muggeridge’s volumes of autobiography (I read the first a few
months ago). He is good company, funny
and dry and a lovely writer (although he does, at one point, use the word
‘surlily’ which, even if it is proper English, sounds rubbish). His book is full of anecdotes and references
to other interesting characters from that time period – Orwell, Greene, Waugh,
Wodehouse, Chanel, Andre Gide, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, among others.
Apparently
he wrote a book called ‘Winter in Moscow’, about what was happening in the
Soviet Union, whilst many other British socialists were still celebrating
Stalin. Another of his books was called Picture Palace, and was based on the
culture in the Guardian offices,
which the newspaper successfully sought to have suppressed. He wrote for Time & Tide like Winifred Holtby, although he does not mention
her, and became a soldier in the Second World War – not a role in which he
convinces (either himself or his readers) – before switching to intelligence
work.
I
think it is, in part, his independence as a writer which makes him so enjoyable
to read. When I try to write
politically, I tend to latch on to a particular idea, body or personality, and
treat it/them as a sort of moral guide.
So I end up, unintentionally, being quite polemical and probably
short-sighted. Muggeridge was writing at
the time of the Second World War when politics was particularly polarized by
the conflict/cooperation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and when
moral questions were in some ways less clear-cut than ever. Lots of people seemed to group around
particular bodies or ideologies.
Muggeridge for the most part manages to avoid the kind of rabid
political loyalities that seemed to infect many of his contemporaries – such as
the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, Orwell, and A. A. Milne. He maintains an idiosyncratic, personal tone,
criticizing everyone (himself included) easily and with a sense of humour. In this way, his account sounds much more
authoritative than others, despite lacking, in temporal terms, objective
distance.
Something
I did find curious was his own personal morality. When I read the first volume of his
autobiography, I vaguely remember warming to him because of his obvious love
for his wife. He seemed, to use a
romantic phrase, like a one-woman man – someone who’d found the right person
quite early on and for whom, from then on, that part of his nature was
settled. I think also, one of the few
things I knew about him before I started reading his books was that he was,
without being (at this point at least) particularly evangelical, a man of
faith. Several times he pauses in his
narrative to confess to his own faults and sins (e.g. p.145). At first, I took this to be just the humble, self-effacing
side of his personality, but he briefly mentions infidelities when he worked in
India, and admits to a sense of relief when, on the start of the Second World
War, he can leave his wife and family and go off and do what he wants. He spends a lot of his time in this book in
positions of authority over others – colonial India, Mozambique, liberated
France – and although he recognizes and criticises the power structures that
exist in these places, he still makes use of them; being carried about by ‘coolies’ in
India, visiting brothels and bars in Mozambique. One could argue of course that his job in
Mozambique (he was an intelligence agent) was hardly one for the fastidious, or
for the protester, but it made me think that his attitude to people living less
advantageously than himself – and particularly to women – wasn’t as benign, as
liberal, as he made it sound.
To
take women as an example, he divides them broadly into the pretty and amorous,
or the hairy and academic, and without admitting to any bad behavior of his own,
his references to women get progressively slimier. On p.139, ‘this sense of importance… was
characteristic of SIS personnel at all levels; particularly the females, who,
however careless they might be about their chastity, guarded their security
with implacable resolution.’
On p.192,
he describes someone as ‘one of those well-educated French women who manage to
be intelligent without becoming like Simone de Beauvoir.’
On p.226,
he tells how one French intelligence agent applied to his employers for, and
obtained, a set of Dunlop tyres on the grounds that it would draw attention if
he tried to obtain them locally, and then goes on to relate his own suggestion
– that a message should be sent ‘complaining of being troubled by his sexual
appetites, to the point where it was impossible for him to concentrate on his
work, and that he hesitated to avail himself of local facilities for fear of
giving himself away.’
On p.232,
he talks about the grateful welcome afforded Allied officers in Liberated
France, and how, as he made his way through it for the first time, his
willingness to accept offerings of drinks ‘and to exchange embraces with any
agreeable females in the vicinity’ increased.
On p.237,
again in Liberated France, ‘a British uniform continued to procure friendly
smiles, embraces, bed-fellows even, as and when required’.
With
regard to his wife, it’s sometimes a bit like reading William Burroughs’s Junkie – you don’t even know he’s
married until he mentions slapping his wife for spilling his heroin. With Muggeridge, references to his wife and
family, whilst always whole-hearted, are sparse, isolated incidents.
Anyway,
incipient sliminess so noted, it was easy enough to ‘read around’. I still very much enjoyed this book.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston.
I
heard about this book on the Radio 4 programme, ‘A Good Read’, and I really enjoyed it. I was slightly put off initially by the
dialect writing. I found it difficult to
read, although I did get used to it.
Less easy to shake was the suspicion that some kind of stereotyping may
be involved. In one of the volumes of
Maya Angelou’s autobiography, there’s a bit where she gets work in a record
store and the lady who runs it is white
- the first friendly white person Angelou has had much contact with. At one point the white lady tells her about
some small black boy who came into the store asking for something, and she
tries to imitate the dialect. It doesn’t
go down well with Angelou, who regards it as an attempt to caricature black
people. At any rate, I felt slightly
better about it in this book when reading the contextual information in the
afterword (see further on).
The
story is about a black woman, Janie; her grandmother was born into slavery, her
mother was raped by her school teacher and ran away after she was born. Janie is more or less corralled into marriage
with a man of property by her grandmother, who thinks this is the way to safety
and security for a woman. She is unhappy
so she walks out and marries someone else (bigamously?). Her second husband builds a big house –
builds a town in fact – becomes mayor of it, and owns and runs the general
store. So Janie has everything material
she needs, but to her husband, she is another possession, another mark of his
status; he expects her to curb her own personality and behave like the mayor’s
wife. Then he dies and she meets Tea
Cake – a property-less, wandering gambler, with whom she falls in love,
marries, and goes off to live with, sharing his home and his work and his
friends. Then there is a hurricane, and
in their rush to safety, he saves her life but gets bitten by a dog in the
process. From there on, he sickens. I think I’ve probably spoiled most of the
story for anyone who hasn’t read it(!) but I’ll leave the end part for you.
It’s
a love story, and also a story about a woman who gradually moves towards
choosing her own way of life – although, as Holly Eley points out in the
introduction, the secure position Janie is in by the end of the book has
everything to do with the conventional feminine role she took early on, and
nothing at all to do with her own chosen way of life as reflected in her third
marriage. Given that fact, perhaps it’s
not possible to read any strong feminist message into the story. On the other hand, I’m not sure the financial
security of the final pages is particularly important. I read this as a story about personal
happiness, through being genuine, honest and independent.
I
loved the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake. However, two things rang alarm bells for me –
both probably products of their era (or rather, perhaps my concern is a product
of my era). One was the fact that he was
a gambler. The other was a weird moment
where he gets jealous and ‘slaps Janie around a bit’, ‘no brutal beating at
all’ – just a bit(!) (p.218-219) Hurston
doesn’t make much of it – it seems a bit of a non-issue to her in the 1930s. Nonetheless, for me it blotted out the
supposition of equality and independence of spirit in the relationship, which I
think was one of its chief attractions.
I
was very taken with Hurston’s way of expressing things. When Janie’s grandmother is talking about the
time when her own daughter was young, she says, ‘Ah said Ah’d take a broom and
a cook-pot and throw up a highway through the wilderness for her,’ (p.32) which
is a dramatic and beautiful way of talking about raising a child in difficult
circumstances. A few pages on, when
Janie is trying to express to her grandmother about her dissatisfaction with
her first husband, she concedes that he does chop wood and keeps the water
buckets full for her. Nanny’s response
is ‘Humph! Don’t ‘spect all dat tuh keep up.
He ain’t kissin’ yo’ mouf when he carry on over yuh lak dat. He’s kissin’ yo’ foot and t’ain’t in uh man
tuh kiss foot long. Mouf kissin’ is on
uh equal and dat’s natural but when dey got to bow down tuh love, dey soon straightens
up.’ (p.40-41) Love, in other words,
doesn’t work for long when you put someone on a pedestal.
There
were lots of occasions throughout the book where I stopped to write down
particular turns of phrase. ‘Some folks
need thrones, and ruling-chairs and crowns tuh make they influence felt. He don’t.
He’s got uh throne in de seat of his pants.’ (p.78-9) And, ‘it happened over one of those dinners
that chasten all women sometimes. They
plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchen-dwelling fiend slips a
scrotchy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans.’ (p.111-112) And, ‘she sent her face to Joe’s funeral, and
herself went rollicking with the springtime across the world.’ (p.137) I have a notebook full of such quotes.
The
afterword by Sherley Anne Williams was also interesting. Apparently Hurston wrote a particularly
uninformative memoir, but there is a biography by Robert E. Hemenway which fills
in some of the gaps. Hurston was born in
Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town with a general store, like in the
book. ‘The gatherings on the front
porch… came to symbolize for Hurston the richness of Afro-American oral culture,
and she struggled for much of her career to give literary renderings of the
oral richness and to portray the complex individuality of it’s unlettered,
“uncultured” folk creators.’ (p.290) I
remember, when I was studying history, much the same was said about
working-class and European peasant cultures: they had a strong sense of
tradition but it was handed down as oral histories. At some point around the middle of the
twentieth century, there were efforts made to start recording such histories –
hence the availability of some ‘working-class autobiographies’ – but otherwise,
they were lost. In terms of historical
evidence, the next best thing, I guess, to autobiography is contemporary writers
using such material in novels.
The
only thing to add is that this novel reminded me of Sula by Toni Morrison, in the way a rural township is described and
given personality as a single entity, creating a strong sense of community. There must be other books that do this, but I
can’t think of any.
Dear Girl: The diaries and letters of two working
women 1897-1917, edited by Tierl Thompson.
In
some ways, this book reminded me of the life of Canon Barnett, in the way it
plods along – gently interesting, but with no thrilling plot twists. Interestingly, there was a reference to ‘Mr
Barnett’s sermon’ (p.67), although I’ve no guarantee it was the same Mr
Barnett. It could well have been though:
Ruth seems to have spent some time around Whitechapel. She also mentions the Whitechapel Art Gallery
(and it’s Tuberculosis Exhibition) and Beatrice Webb, who she describes as ‘a
winsome, sweet-faced little lady, with a very beautiful voice’ (p.143) –
perhaps not a description Malcolm Muggeridge would have recognized.
The
book is made up of the letters and diaries of two women – Ruth Slate and Eva
Slawson. They were clearly not the poorest of the poor – both had clerical
jobs, and Ruth talks pityingly of the very poor people she saw when doing
outreach temperance work with the Church.
However, there are various incidents of drunkenness and domestic
violence among neighbours, and one of Eva’s very close friends has to apply for
parish relief on several occasions, after her husband dies (p.201). She also receives baby clothes sent by ‘a
lady’. (p.200)
One
of the notable things about the book is the evidence of ‘romantic friendships’
– where women wrote to and about other women in passionate, sometimes
lover-like terms, without apparently attracting comment. On p.130, Ruth writes ‘Mrs Horncastle
fascinated me completely. She is a very
beautiful character. I fell in love with
her. I believe I fall in love with a
certain type of woman as easily as some girls fall in love with men.’ On p.193, the husband of one of Eva’s close
friends dies. ‘I slept with my darling,
or rather lay close beside her, my arms around her, for we scarcely slept… I
have lived at my Minna’s, and at
night she has wept in my arms, and I have started from a tiny doze to hear her
murmuring “My comfort!” Once she threw
her arms around me and whispered, “Oh Eva, I should have died without you.”’
As
has been said elsewhere (see, e.g. Lillian Fadermann), this may be partly
literary convention, and partly also that the parameters of female
relationships were different, back then. Passionate friendships between women were fairly
common and unsuspicious, in a way that they were not between men (male
homosexuality was both illegal and increasingly the object of study by people
like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis).
Female life partnerships, whilst by no means unimaginable, were not
taken quite so seriously, or seen as threatening.
Both
women also suffered from ill health – which was a bit of a Victorian
convention, imputed to women (although how much adopted by them is a question that still needs addressing). As with Mrs Barnett though, it is sometimes
difficult to gauge (indeed, probably ridiculous to try to gauge) how much of
this was due to the conventional understanding of the female constitution, and
how much to organic illness. Certainly
in the case of Eva, who dies suddenly from undetected diabetes, the terrible
problems she had with aches in her legs and side can hardly be written off as a
sort of psychosomatic response to a medical model of the female body which predicted
dire consequences from exhausting one’s finite supplies of nervous energy on
‘extraneous’ mental or physical activity.
However,
it is interesting that when Eva sees a doctor (see pp.187, 191, 260), the
diagnosis given is neurasthenia, of which the dictionary says ‘(dated) an
ill-defined medical condition, characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache
and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.’ This does sound very Victorian. The doctor’s recommendation, perhaps a little
unhelpfully, was ‘a complete change of life’ (p.260). Later on, writing to Ruth about her health,
Eva says ‘I am feeling so much better nervously’ and refers to ‘these mental
conditions into which I frequently get’. (p.292) It would appear
therefore, that she did see her physical ill-health as being rooted in a
nervous condition – and that she was encouraged in this interpretation by the
doctor she saw. In other words, her
reproductive cycle was making her ill; or she was ill because she was a woman.
What
else to say about these women? Both of
them took up academic study at Woodbrooke Settlement (I had no clue about
university settlements until this and the Canon Barnett biography). Whilst both were academically inclined, it
was Ruth who excelled – being apparently both clever and terribly practical and
adept at social relationships. Eva
failed her first set of exams, but she was more introspective, more
philosophical than Ruth, which is some ways makes her diaries more interesting
to read. ‘If there is any truth in the
possibility of an “ideal man”’, she wrote (p.167), ‘woman will not aid his
development by meek submission – she will only create tyranny; she must compel
him to recognize her as a personality.’
And on p.265, ‘some men are blind – pearls scattered before them are
wasted. What they need is a surgical
operation.’ Whether she means an eye
operation or something of a different nature, I’m not certain(!)
She
writes a lot about her reading too – for example, on Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward: ‘I found it difficult
reading, and comprehended but little.
Oh! how wearisome are Scott’s long sentences, and unnecessary padding!’
(p.164) L. M. Rossetti’s Life of Mrs Shelley however, comes
highly recommended. (pp.266, 269) Also,
both women make continual dubious references to ‘the Odd Women’, a ‘New Woman’
novel by George Gissing. I suppose I
should read it, but it does sound rather depressing from the Wikipedia blurb. Finally, in this connection, there is a
dashing French woman who appears in the book, Francoise Lafitte, who runs round
having babies outside of marriage, helping with the French Resistance, living
with Havelock Ellis, generally eschewing convention and doing what she
wanted. Apparently she wrote an
autobiography, which sounds like it would be a cracking good read.
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