Great Book #70: The Third Policeman
Even if I'd read The Third Policeman before I'd heard anything about Brian O'Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, et al.), I still would have figured the author was a total character. 'Maddening' is one of many adjectives used on the back cover, and it's certainly the most apt.The unnamed narrator tells us of his claustrophobic existence somewhere in rural Ireland, and of his relationship with the leech-like John Divney, who's taken over his dead parents' farm and refuses to leave. Divney hatches a plan to murder a local miser, Mathers, and steal his money, and the hapless narrator agrees.After returning to the house of the dead-and-buried miser to retrieve the money box, the narrator encounters Mathers in a dirty old bathrobe sipping watered-down tea. The money box has disappeared, and needless to say the narrator can't really be asking the inexplicably-alive-or-maybe-undead Mathers where it is. So he goes to the local police station thinking he'll claim he's lost his (nonexistent) American gold watch, and get the policemen's help finding the money box instead. There are a pair of cartoonish policemen at the station, and they spend a lot of time blabbing about humans who are part-bicycle and bicycles that are part-human, declaring this or that an 'insoluble pancake.' They take the narrator through the woods and down an elevator into a subterranean complex they claim is eternity, which they've found via the cracks on a bedroom ceiling that just happen to form a map of the area. Down in eternity the narrator wishes for wealth, a bottle of the best whiskey, and a fine suit, all of which materialize, but then the policemen tell him he can't take it into the elevator or they'll all explode. And so on and so forth.After the first two (thoroughly engrossing) chapters I found The Third Policeman quite a tough slog--much too much gratuitous bizarreness, and the footnotes drove me nuts--but looking back on it now I see it all makes perfect sense. I wish I could discuss the ending, but I don't want to spoil it for you. I'll just say that what once seemed clever now feels derivative, because Brian O'Nolan did it first.I think I'll be including my favorite passage in each of my '100 great books' write-ups. From page 40 of The Third Policeman:
...A good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there. If you go with such a road, he thinks, it will give you pleasant travelling, fine sights at every corner and a gentle ease of peregrination that will persuade you that you are walking forever on falling ground.
Next up (talk about a diverse assortment of titles!): Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
100 Great Books
I've come across several 100-great-books lists on various blogs, and I think it's a great idea: read 100 books (fiction or nonfiction) that you feel you ought to have read already, setting an end-date of five or seven (or ten?) years from now. They don't all have to be classics per se, but reading them can fill in the gaps where your literary education is concerned.I decided that at least 20% of the books on my list should be translated works (which are starred on my list below). I intend to consume several of these books on CD/podcast, because let's face it--if I don't "read" while I knit, it's probably going to take me well over 10 years to get through this list. I also don't think I'm going to get around to reading any doorstoppers like Ulysses, Herodotus' Histories, de Toqueville's Democracy in America, or War and Peace; I'll read them eventually, but in the meantime I'd rather read the Joyce and Tolstoy I already have on hand (Portrait of the Artist and a collection of the shorter novels and stories, respectively). I'm also thinking about making somewhat shorter lists for plays and poetry.If you're thinking about making a list yourself, check out the 'best' lists at the Modern Library, Waterstones, The Guardian, and San José State University (that one's aptly titled 'The Guilt List').1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov3. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin4. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac *5. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (Librivox)6. Beowulf7. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio *8. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges *9. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Librivox)11. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov *12. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess13. Possession by A.S. Byatt14. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote15. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson16. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather17. Cathedral by Raymond Carver18. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes *19. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever20. The Vagabond by Colette *21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad22. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper23. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier24. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (Librivox)25. The Divine Comedy by Dante *26. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (Librivox)27. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (Librivox)28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick29. Hard Times by Charles Dickens (Librivox)30. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser31. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky * (Librivox)32. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco *33. Middlemarch by George Eliot (Librivox)34. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison35. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner36. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding37. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert * (Librivox)38. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster39. The Magus by John Fowles40. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl41. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons42. Neuromancer by William Gibson43. Lord of the Flies by William Golding44. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Librivox)45. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene46. Hunger by Knut Hamsun *47. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (Librivox)48. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway49. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse *50. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban51. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston52. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce53. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka *54. On the Road by Jack Kerouac55. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston56. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling57. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence58. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing59. If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi *60. It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis61. The Call of the Wild by Jack London (Librivox)62. The Giver by Lois Lowry63. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer64. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez *65. The Magician by Somerset Maugham66. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller67. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami *68. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch69. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky70. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien71. A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor72. One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. Arabian Nights) *73. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon74. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque*75. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth76. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie77. The Little Prince by Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry78. Blindness by José Saramago *79. Rob Roy by Walter Scott (Librivox)80. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Librivox)81. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight82. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith83. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn *84. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck85. The Red and the Black by Stendhal *86. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (audio version, Forgotten Classics)87. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Librivox)88. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (Librivox)89. Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau90. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy *91. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne * (Librivox)92. The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas *93. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut94. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells95. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty96. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe97. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (Librivox)98. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf99. Native Son by Richard Wright100. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin *The plan is to annotate this list periodically, blogging brief(ish) 'book appreciations' as I go. Feel free to leave me more recommendations --the master list is actually much longer!
First up: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (I just finished it this week).
Mad Madam Mim
The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite Disney movies. Tonight I watched it for the first time in umpteen years, and it was every bit as good as I remembered--partly because of this scene-stealing witchy lady (you know I have a thing for witches):
The Explosionist
Every so often I like to treat myself to a really smart children's or young adult novel. Last week it was Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist, an alternate history set in 1930s Scotland I got excited about before it was published, and then I forgot about it because the pub date was still so many months away.Fifteen-year-old Sophie lives with her great-aunt Tabitha in an alternate version of Edinburgh in the late 1930s; Tabitha is rich, politically connected, and hosts seances in their dining room on a weekly basis (which in this reality isn't as eccentric as it sounds). The world is on the brink of war and Sophie and her aunt are both trying to figure out which organization is behind the city's frequent suicide bombings; Sophie has a big crush on her awkward young chemistry teacher, but fears he may be involved. Just as troubling is the prospect of her own life after boarding school; Sophie wants to study science at the university, but with war on the horizon she may be forced into the Institute for the Recruitment of Young Ladies for National Security (the acronym is pronounced "irons"--which, needless to say, is no coincidence).The overarching premise is that Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and consequently the early 20th century is only vaguely recognizable. The United States is split in two (since Delaware, which had most of the munitions factories, sided with the South), and Europe is also divided--between the independent (mostly northern) nations of the Hanseatic League, and the Fascist state that has already gobbled up France, Germany, and all the rest. England lost the Great War, and is now reduced to mass starvation and barbed-wire borders; an independent Scotland has taken its place as a world power. This alternate political reality is really interesting 'what-if' food for thought, although the frequent historical-figure switcheroos (Oscar Wilde as an obstetrician who invented the incubator?!) are pretty distracting. But that's my only real quibble with the novel--there's no mystery as to who's behind the terrorist attacks, but because Davidson is more interested in exploring this alternate reality than in a traditional whodunit, this wasn't an issue for me.This is a pretty intense read, and I don't think I'd give it to anybody under the age of fourteen. The glimpses of an Orwellian women's secretarial training academy were downright horrifying, as was the prospect of suicide machines that look like telephone booths available in the lobby of every post office and library in the country.The ending isn't so much an ending as a 'this is now 450 pages long so we'll save the rest of it for next time,' which is a little frustrating because the sequel (The Snow Queen) won't be out until fall 2010. Looking forward to it!
Moldy Oldie: Trash Your Panties!
Awhile back I mentioned this Washington Square News "op/ed" I wrote in the spring of 2000. It was headlined "Trash Your Panties: Going Commando With Camille." Sadly, it was by far the best thing I ever wrote for the paper. Hope you enjoy it.Thirty years ago we burned our bras. We didn't go far enough.I have issues with underpants. They are expensive, unnecessary and often uncomfortable. No one ever seriously considers the possibility that we women could avoid the nearest Victoria's Secret (or K-Mart) altogether in favor of a far more authentic way to live - with perfect freedom.The prospect of going "commando" always makes for a hearty laugh, and it's true that there's no better place for a pair of lacy panties than atop an inebriated frat guy's head. But why do we bother wearing underpants at all? Underwear, if you're in the market for something a little more feminine than a pair of bland white cotton undies, will cost you more money than I consider it to be worth.A girl makes a trip to the lingerie department for one reason and one reason only, whether she admits it or not -- she's looking for the most enticing scrap of something sheer and frilly just in case the opportunity for a certain type of encounter with the opposite sex should arise. In that case, why bother wasting $30 on a pair of underpants that are just going to be ripped off with wild beastly abandon anyway? So what if the joy of unwrapping the present is gone with the panties; we have more important assets to make use of.Not that I'm advocating a panty boycott to make it easier for those crazy boys. It makes absolute sense that female underwear evolved from the chastity belt, the ultimate symbol of feminine oppression. It is for that very reason that we should abstain from wearing panties; such a defiant act would symbolize quite appropriately the social freedom we continue to desire with such fervor.Fetishization of female undergarments is certainly widespread; girls, if you're ever in desperate need of tuition money, you can always sell your panties steeped in that oh-so-attractive "natural aroma" online and make a bundle. (If I weren't so concerned with simple decency, I might advocate ridding yourself of every pair you own by this method; it's certainly more profitable than throwing them out in the trash.) If we were to avoid the wearing of underpants, men would have to find a more productive and meaningful garment to worship. I suggest socks because of their wintry practicality and distance from the danger zone.Reasons of simplicity and freedom aside, we should reject the restrictions imposed upon us by underwear simply because this article of clothing is a constant source of male delight and strange fascination. We still want them to be fascinated, of course -- just not with our panties. Getting rid of them now would force men to hurry a little faster along that evolutionary path. The absence of underwear also makes it easier for the more carnal and filthy-minded among them to get what they want, but I'm not worried. Men like that use newspapers for house-training themselves rather than for reading material, so if this idea catches on, they won't know about it.No more annoying wedgies, no more unsightly panty lines and no more hard-earned money wasted on garments that nobody is ever going to see. (At least that's what your mother thinks.) It's a curious thing that no one ever included the suggestion to "get rid of your underwear" in any of those "Simplify Your Life" books. Spend your money on something more practical, like ice cream, crossword puzzle magazines or itching powder. I'm holding onto my bra though; there's a three-letter word that begins with S and ends with G that scares me too thoroughly to light that match.
Note to Self
"Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I'll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by the prissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don't mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to--but few of the good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion. I've had, and continue to receive, my full share of abuse, some of it extremely personal, but it doesn't faze me any more. I can read the most outrageous libel about myself and never skip a pulse-beat. And in this connection there is one piece of advice I strongly urge: Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper."—Truman Capote, from an interview in the Paris Review, 1957.
The Last of Summer
The Last of Summer (1943) isn't the best-known of Kate O'Brien's novels, and I was quite lucky to find it at Charlie Byrne's a few months back. (I check the Irish lit shelf every time I go in, but I usually find only the novels I've already read.) O'Brien is among the great Irish novelists, though she isn't nearly as well known (in or out of Ireland) as she ought to be.
Raised in Paris by a French mother and an Irish father (both of whom are dead by the time this story takes place), Angèle first comes to Ireland in 1939 with several other actors over on holiday from London. Towards the end of a sunny, sultry August--yes, sometimes in Ireland the weather is really that fine!--Angèle skips out on her companions to visit her father's relations for the first time.
The Kernahan clan is headed by her frosty, magisterial Aunt Hannah (widow of her father's brother Ned), and Angèle is puzzled by Hannah's hot-and-cold reaction to her sudden appearance. She also meets her father's other brother, the bumbling, kind-hearted Uncle Corney; Hannah's cousin-slash-unpaid servant Dotey; and three cousins all about her age--Tom (the mild-mannered, responsible one), Martin (the brooding, cynical academic), and Jo (who is bound for the convent). Despite the weird vibes Hannah is giving off, Angèle becomes quick friends with her cousins, and Martin makes his attraction to her all too clear.
Having studied in Paris, Martin has far more in common with his long-lost cousin than his older brother, who is the quintessential 'mama's boy.' Their father died when Tom was a teenager, and he has managed the farm and served as his mother's most beloved companion ever since. The conversations between manipulative mother and all-too-malleable son leave the reader feeling squirmy, to say the least, and the author's treatment of their Oedipal relationship isn't exactly subtle ("Always she pleased his eyes as no other woman did." Whoa.) When Tom and Angèle announce their engagement after only a few days' acquaintance, naturally Hannah is outraged, but decides to give her blessing while secretly doing her utmost to unravel the attachment. This way Tom will come running back into her arms when the whole thing ends in tears.
Tom and Angèle don't even know each other, but they believe that the magnitude of their infatuation and their essential good natures will triumph over that pesky requirement of a papal dispensation--for being first cousins, and all--as well as the looming specter of another war in Europe, which may very well prevent Angèle from ever seeing her mother's family again. Their attraction makes sense in that Angèle is an orphan looking for a place in the family she's long wondered about, and Tom sees in her all the worldly experience he's been denied through his father's premature death and mother's 'strangling affection' (to use one of my favorite phrases from another Kate O'Brien novel). Without Angèle, Tom will live the rest of his life under his mother's thumb. He believes he needs her, but he'll never understand the real reason why.
In all her novels O'Brien does a marvelous job laying out the tangles of confused thoughts in a character's head, all the fragmentary images and memories and motives, the weird or spiteful thoughts one would never dream of uttering aloud. We are also privy to the interior monologues and personal history of minor characters like Dotey, who is no less fascinating for all her pathetically self-interested scheming, and the 'genially selfish' Dr. O'Byrne, whose daughter Norrie has been in love with Tom since childhood:
Dr. O'Byrne almost nodded his head as he listened to this delicate little speech--so exactly did it tell him what he had already told himself very often about this woman. She's certainly a great fly in the ointment, he reflected now with anxiety. I could hardly choose a worse mother-in-law for my girl. And she's only about fifty, so far as I recall, and she hasn't a thing wrong with her. Superb organic health. Nothing to stop her hanging on in vigour into the nineties. Upon my word, I think Norrie will need the heart of a lion to face it--but sure, that's what the child has! The heart of a lion, and it's set on Tom Kernahan...
And Jo Kernahan, the twenty-one-year-old future nun, is wise beyond her years, surveying the household's growing confusion over Tom and Angèle's proposed union with dispassionate sympathy. Her interior passages are particularly lovely:
And she had visited Sainte Fontaine--and knew that the best part of her soul was waiting for her there, had gone ahead of her to that out-of-date, cold, mediaeval centre of discipline and rigidity and elimination...
This is also the device through which we discover that all three of the Kernahan brothers were in love with Hannah, and that she and Angèle's father (also named Tom...hmm!) were engaged before the elder Tom jilted Hannah (glimpsed her true colors just in time) and ran off to Paris, never to return. Anxious to acquire the wealth and status of the Kernahan name, Hannah accepted Ned's subsequent offer. This tidily explains Hannah's instant hatred of her sensitive, pretty niece, but what's not so tidy (and is all the more satisfying for it) is that Angèle never discovers the real reason behind her father's hasty departure. These stream-of-consciousness passages are too intimate, all too messy, and that's precisely why they're such a delight to read.
I loved The Last of Summer for the same reason I love all Kate O'Brien's novels: the situation is a train wreck waiting to happen. You know early on how it's going to end, but it's so well done you'll never consider putting it down before you've finished it.
Screaming Skulls, part 2
(See Screaming Skulls part 1 and the first excerpt from Elliott O'Donnell's Haunted Britain, The Ghost of Anne Boleyn.)
Another screaming skull haunting is associated with Wardley Hall, Lancashire. Roger Downes, the last male representative of his family, was one of the most abandoned courtiers of Charles II. One evening, when out with several of his companions, as rowdy and reckless as himself, he insulted a girl, and on being reprimanded by a tailor, he ran the unfortunate man through the body with his sword, killing him instantly. For this atrocious crime he was brought to trial, but thanks to his social status he was acquitted and allowed to go free, with the result that, instead of reforming, he continued his former abandoned career.Time passed, and then came an evening when his sister and cousin Eleanor were sitting together in a lavishly-furnished room of Wardley Hall. A servant entered with a box, which had come all the way from London. It was addressed to Roger's sister in a queer handwriting she did not recognize. Suspecting nothing, she opened the box and to her horror it contained the bloody head of her brother. On a piece of paper were written these words:"Thy brother has at last paid the penalty for his crimes. The wages of sin are death. Last night passing over London Bridge he engaged in another drunken brawl with the watchmen, one of whom sliced off his head and threw it into the river, whence it was rescued by an eye-witness and sent to thee as a memento."When the sister had recovered from the shock the ghastly spectacle had given her, she had the head buried, but the next day, bearing all the horrible indications of interment and decay, it was back in the house, and every attempt to get rid of it was of no avail. Whenever it was removed such terrible screams resounded through the building during the night that the inmates were frightened to death, and glad to have the head back so as to be able to sleep in peace.When, some time in the 'nineties of the last century, the skull was removed from its habitual resting-place and thoughtlessly put in another spot, albeit in the house, a storm arose in the neighborhood, creating such dreadful havoc that as soon as the cause of it was ascertained (or thought to be), the skull was quickly restored to its former home, when the weather once again became tranquil.Wardley was some years ago, and I believe still is, the property of the Earl of Ellesmere, and according to hearsay the skull even now reposes in its old resting-place in a recess specially made for it on, or near to, a staircase in the hall.How much truth there is in either of the skull hauntings I have mentioned is difficult to say. I imagine they both rest on somewhat slender foundations.
Screaming Skulls, part 1
More creepy stories from Elliott O'Donnell's Haunted Britain (see the first post here):
Screaming skull phenomena are certainly among the strangest of hauntings, and yet they are not uncommon. A particularly sad and tragic story is associated with one in the Lake District.Several centuries ago--exactly how long is apparently not known--there lived in an old farmhouse near Ambleside a much-respected farmer and his wife, Kraster and Dorothy Cook. The little land they owned was coveted by one Myles Phillipson, a wealthy and influential magistrate. On several occasions he asked the Cooks to sell it to him, but they steadily refused on the grounds that it was all they possessed and was, therefore, indispensable.Enraged at being balked in his desire, Phillipson swore he would get the land whether they were alive or dead. Pretending to be very friendly with them, he invited them to a banquet, and during the evening contrived to have a silver cup, which had been purposely placed in front of one of them, while they were dining, put covertly in one of their clothes which had been left in the hall. Pretending that the cup had been stolen by one of the guests, he had everyone searched, and the cup being found secreted in one of the Cooks' belongings, he had Kraster and Dorothy arrested at once. Stealing in those days being a capital offence, Phillipson, before whom they were brought, sentenced them both to death.Directly their doom was pronounced, Dorothy rose in the courtroom, and in tones which rang through the sombre building, pronounced the following curse: "Guard thyself, Myles Phillipson! Thou thinkest thou hast managed grandly, but that tiny lump of land is the dearest a Phillipson has ever bought or stolen, for you will never prosper, neither will your breed."Whatever scheme you undertake will wither in your hand; the side you take will always lose; the time shall come when no Phillipson shall own an inch of land; and while Calgarth walls shall stand we'll haunt it night and day. Never will ye be rid of us."In due course the Cooks were hanged. Some time after their execution, consternation was caused in the Phillipsons' home by the appearance of two ghastly grinning human skulls at the head of a staircase. They were at once taken to a distant spot and buried. That night everyone in the house was awakened by the most blood-curdling screams, and in the morning, to the alarm of the whole household, the skulls were back in their place on the staircase, with even wider grins. And so it happened again and again. Whenever the skulls were removed they came back, and the night of their return the household was appalled by the most unearthly screaming. The skulls were smashed, they were burned, but no matter what was done to them, they recovered and were to be found back in their staircase home, always grinning.In the meanwhile Dorothy's curse was working. Nothing the Phillipsons did ever prospered, they lost all their land and all their money. Their old home, and with it Calgarth, passed into other hands, and what became of them afterwards was never known.
Screaming skulls, part 2 tomorrow!
The Bishop of Hell
Catchy title, eh? Alas, I cannot take credit for it. I came across Marjorie Bowen's The Bishop of Hell by way of E. Nesbit's excellent Grim Tales (a.k.a. The Power of Darkness)--they're published in the same series by Wordsworth Editions, Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural.
Despite this thread of cruelty, there are several stories that leave you feeling uneasy in a pleasurable way, as in all the best gothic tales. There is romantic revenge and murder, and revenants aplenty. In my favorite story, "Kecksies," a man who'd sworn to have the wife of his enemy lies dead on a pallet in a remote cottage. The enemy arrives, decides to play a trick on the small group of mourners, and dumps the body in the brush so he can take its place under the shroud. You can guess where this one is going, but what a thrill! The prose is so much fun--"The clouds overtook them like an advancing army"; "his naked chest gleamed with ghastly dews." Even in this memorable tale, though, there's not a single character you can get behind...not even the poor rejected dead guy.I don't usually place much stock in Amazon reviews--I tend to find them more useful after I've read the book, as in this instance. The lone review of The Bishop of Hell echoes my feelings quite neatly, noting the "heavy current of bitterness" that runs through the collection. According to the book's biographical note, Marjorie Bowen, a.k.a. Margaret Gabrielle Vere Campbell Long, "spent the early part of her working life providing for a demanding and ungrateful family." So it seems the series editors and/or critics felt the need to provide at least a partial explanation for that all-too-noticeable "current of bitterness."It may sound like I'm giving The Bishop of Hell a lukewarm recommendation, but you'll really enjoy these stories if you're in a certain frame of mind. E. Nesbit's gothic tales are perfect for a melancholy evening (as Victor Hugo said, it's the pleasure of being sad), whereas this collection is just the thing when you find yourself hating the world and nearly everyone in it. Nothing like an unrepentant scoundrel coming back from hell wearing a mitre of fire to make you feel good about the state of humanity, eh?
The Ghost of Anne Boleyn
Have I mentioned lately the trove of wonders that is Charlie Byrne's? You never know what interesting old tome you'll discover. Awhile back I found Haunted Britain by Elliott O'Donnell, published in 1948. Seeing as the only copy available on Amazon.com is going for $101.75, I figure the €8 I paid for it is a bargain. It's a charming old book, and I thought you might like to read some of the highlights. This is from a chapter entitled "The Tower of London Ghosts":
A very ubiquitous and restless ghost is that of Anne Boleyn. In addition to haunting Hever Castle and Blickling Park, down the long avenue of which she rides once a year in a hearse-like coach drawn by headless horses, with her head in her lap, she periodically haunts the Tower of London.
She was seen there as recently as February 1933. The unfortunate being who saw her was a guardsman on night-sentry duty near the Bloody Tower.
He was standing motionless amid his gloomy surroundings, no doubt wishing to goodness his time there would end, when, with startling suddenness, there appeared before him, seemingly rising from the ground, a white something, shadowy and indistinct. It was not until it had approached nearer to him that he saw to his horror it was the luminous figure of a headless woman. He promptly fled. The post being well known to be haunted, he was merely reprimanded...
How a headless ghost, seen at night, in inky surroundings, by scared-stiff sentries can be identified as the beautiful Anne Boleyn is somewhat difficult to explain. The only warrant for the belief would seem to be that of the proximity to the place where the hapless queen was incarcerated before her execution.
Seemingly easier of identification is the ghost that, with its head in its conventional position, haunts the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula, where Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, and Lady Jane Grey were all three buried.
A certain captain was one evening going the rounds when he saw a strange light in this church. Much astonished, he asked the sentry on duty outside the church the meaning of it.
"I don't know what it means," the man replied, "but I've often seen the light and queerer things of a night here."
Determined to ascertain the cause, the officer procured a ladder and, mounting it, peered into the building. What he saw thrilled him to the marrow. Slowly down the central aisle, with noiseless tread, moved a procession of men and women in Elizabethan costumes, headed by a lady who reminded him very strongly of portraits of Anne Boleyn. After having repeatedly paced the chapel, the procession and light suddenly vanished. Then, and not till then, did the gallant captain fully realize that what he had seen was not of this earth.
April Fool's
According to the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, April Fool's Day may have originated with the introduction of the Gregorian calendar. Those who had gone along with the change--celebrating New Year's on the first of January--"began to make fun of those who persisted in celebrating New Year's Day on 1 April because they either had not yet heard of the change or stubbornly refused to adopt it...over time this evolved into a general tradition of playing tricks on people and sending them on fool's errands on 1 April."The entry also offers a few traditional dos and don'ts. "Any joke or trick must be played before noon; after that, it is said to rebound on the trickster. Anyone who takes an April Fool's Day joke in bad part is thought to risk bad luck, while a more optimistic belief holds that if a trick is played on a man by a pretty girl, he will be compensated later by her marrying him. Getting married on 1 April is not recommended for men, however, because it is believed that a man who marries on this date will be ruled by his wife from that day on. It is also said that children born on April Fool's Day will enjoy good luck in most respects, but will be disastrously unlucky gamblers."Lastly, the entry mentions a BBC documentary on the "Swiss Spaghetti Harvest" that aired on April 1, 1957. In a black-and-white photo, a girl plucks strings of spaghetti that are hanging from a tree. She is admirably stone-faced. (Click here for the original clip on Youtube. Spaghetti weevil! Bwahahaha!)
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin
Marion Meade's Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin follows the amorous adventures and professional struggles of four iconic women writers of the 1920s: Edna Ferber, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Zelda Fitzgerald. The brisk, gossipy prose is perfectly fitting; as Meade writes in her acknowledgments, "The jittery rhythms seemed to suit the lives of my subjects."Dottie Parker was the greatest wit of them all, but she was also chronically depressed, making several suicide attempts and telling perfect strangers at her favorite speakeasy all the lurid details of her spoiled love affairs. Zelda Fitzgerald was the prototypical flapper, a pampered Southern girl who gave her early stories to her husband to be published under his name. The responsible, hard-working, commercially successful Edna Ferber inevitably seems rather dull in comparison.Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose work I'm most familiar with, comes off the least sympathetically of the four writers. According to the author, she slept with as many as three men (or women) a day and tossed her lovers aside like yesterday's undies, conned a small publisher into giving her a $500 advance for a novel she basically had no intention of writing, failed to return a typewriter that belonged to the Red Cross (which a former lover had only given her on loan)--the Red Cross, of all places!--and treated her sisters and mother with a great deal of callousness. Of "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and Millay's family's reaction to it, Meade writes:
The ballad depicted not just the outlines of Cora's struggle--certainly nothing was made explicit--but her ideas, her experiences, the essence of her being. It was piracy so surprising that she was incapable of replying for three months. Kay, always alert to shady motives in her sister, was aghast. "I cried when I got that poem," she said afterward, thinking Vincent had no right to use such painful family experiences and pass them off as her own. "Years of hard filthy labor on her part--and you get the Pulitzer Prize for such a pretty song you made of it."
Meade's account of Millay's life during the '20s paints the poet as a classic narcissist; one of her friends planned to write a piece of thinly-veiled fiction about a poet-genius with an "inability to love anybody or anything but the secret guarded image of herself." I'm not much for poetry, but I've read and admired Millay's for several years now, and until reading Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin I knew next to nothing about her life. This is an issue that occasionally troubles me. When you hear something distasteful about a writer's personal life, how does that affect your reading of their work? Is it at all relevant? I'm not talking product-of-their-times kind of flaws; I'm talking the sort of shenanigans that contribute to common stereotypes and misapprehensions about what it means to be a writer--the alcoholism, mental illness and suicide attempts, infidelity, promiscuity, general recklessness and outrageous selfishness. (And yet there are other details that are no doubt relevant to a writer's body of work--I find it odd that Meade never mentions any of Millay's many homosexual relationships. She mentions some nude photographs taken with the wife of Millay's longtime friend Arthur Ficke, but that's pretty much it.)Another all-too-colorful character is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose drunken buffoonery, emotional coldness, and financial abandon are thoroughly recounted here ("...he scribbled obscene words on the walls of an opera singer's villa and kicked over the tray of a woman selling trinkets outside the casino.") He generally regarded his daughter, Scottie, as a nuisance (though Zelda wasn't much better). Meade describes the early meetings of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in Paris, and how Hemingway was appalled by the elder writer's misbehavior. "Being around him for even a short time could make a person weep with frustration."On the other hand, it's fascinating to read of all these literary friendships and associations, and how this motley cast of journalists, poets, playwrights, actors, novelists, publishers, and posers all impressed and influenced one another. The book is organized by year, not by writer, so you get a great sense of who's lunching (or sleeping) with whom while so-and-so's book has just been published to rave (or rotten) reviews, meanwhile the other one's hiding from the creditors in some broken-down villa on the French Riviera, and so on. Back then, a writer could wire her publisher asking for an advance on top of what she'd already received, and her editor would send the money with no questions asked. Those were the days, huh?It's also interesting to note which titans of the day have long since fallen into obscurity (Elmer who?), and which widely-panned works are now considered classics (like The Great Gatsby). And I always find it amusing when these writers, who were then in their twenties and thirties, proclaim themselves (and each other) hopelessly 'over the hill.' Dottie Parker in particular was obsessed with writing about death and dying:
It costs me never a stab nor squirmTo tread by chance upon a worm."Aha, my little dear," I say,"Your clan will pay me back one day."
(Titled "Thought for a Sunshiny Morning.")For better and for worse, these writers shaped what it means to be a modern woman, and a modern woman writer. Reading about their lives, loves, and work makes me feel a certain longing: for an artistic circle (backbiters and all), an unlimited supply of bootleg scotch, and an apartment in the Village for fifty bucks a month.
The Best Ghost Story I've Ever Read
One of the best, for sure. It's "The Affair at Grover Station" by Willa Cather, and you can read it here. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.I found this story in The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, which is certainly worth seeking out. Another deliciously eerie story in the collection, Rosa Mulholland's "Not to be Taken at Bed-time" (find it here, PDF link at the bottom of the page), contains some very compelling descriptions of Connemara. The plot is loaded with witchcraft, love-charms made from corpse-flesh, and pacts with the devil, yet none of that is quite so haunting as the sea and landscape:
The sashes were open, and nothing was visible but water; the night Atlantic, with the full moon riding high above a bank of clouds, making silvery tracks outward towards the distance of infinite mystery dividing two worlds.
Granny Weatherwax knickers
My new novel is about witches (and spies), and while I was writing it I read either WWII/occult research or fun witchy fiction. Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad are my two favorite Discworld novels so far—Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are terrific fun.When I saw the Witches' Britches pattern in Knit2Together, I wanted to knit a black-and-red-striped version I could see Granny Weatherwax wearing. (The Flickr link above is Kat Coyle's striped version, which is my favorite on Ravelry.) The perfect lounge pants!Here's my swatch:
Knit Picks Swish DK in bordeaux and coal, US 6 needles, 6 stitches/8 rows per inch.I'm definitely going to go with the thinner stripes. I didn't get gauge, nowhere near it, so I'll have to tinker with the numbers. I'll most likely end up using size 5 needles, so I need to knit a second swatch.- - -
'Baths is unhygienic,' Granny declared. 'You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.''What do you do, then?' said Magrat.'I just washes,' said Granny. 'All the bits. You know. As and when they becomes available.'--Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
More for your listening pleasure
I haven't posted any Librivox links in awhile because I've mostly been listening to podcasts lately--though I recently finished listening to Dreams From My Father, which was terrific. Hearing President Obama read his own work more than makes up for the abridgment, and since I got the two-in-one edition from my grandparents for Christmas I still have The Audacity of Hope to look forward to!Anyway, my new favorite podcast is the Paranormal Podcast, which features a thirty-minute to hourlong interview with an author/ investigator/what-have-you in each episode. It's not nearly as kooky as you might think--there are lots of tidbits to interest even confirmed skeptics (how the CIA employs psychics--"remote viewers" --on intelligence-gathering missions; the scientific aspects of after-death experiences; and suchlike). One of the psychics interviewed on the show posited that twenty percent of our thoughts don't actually belong to us, which is something even a die-hard skeptic would find difficult to reject out of hand (though I do wonder how one can possibly quantify it!)And if you're interested in folklore, the episode on zombies is a must-listen. The guest author, Bob Curran, is from Northern Ireland, and he tells a wonderful, possibly-true story about a grandfather who comes back from the graveyard to visit his family. Well worth checking out on iTunes.
Lolly Willowes
I've been fairly preoccupied with the subject of witchcraft (in all its forms and fakery) for this past year and a half or so. With that in mind, my friend Deirdre lent me her copy of Lolly Willowes, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner published in 1926.The novel is beautifully written, and I was completely engrossed for the first two chapters. The natural imagery is wonderfully vivid--a "thick roof of lime trees" in a churchyard, or
[She] only cried when alone in the potting shed, where a pair of old gardening gloves repeated to her the shape of her mother's hands.
At first, Lolly Willowes reminded me, in very general terms, of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, except our protagonist is a maiden aunt who finds satisfaction in nature (she fills her tiny bedroom with exotic flowers, gathers plants to make herbal remedies, and goes for all-day walks in the forest) rather than illicit romance. Laura--called Lolly by her nieces and nephew--doesn't break free of her stultifying London life under her brother's thumb until halfway through the book, but I'm not one of those readers who gets annoyed with the writer when "not much happens" (so long as the prose is good).I loved the way this novel began, and I wanted to love it all the way through. But...I'd better back up and read you a few lines off the back cover:
After twenty years of self-effacement as a maiden aunt, she decides to break free and moves to a small Bedfordshire village. Here, happy and unfettered, she enjoys her new existence nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover. That secret--and her vocation--is witchcraft, and with her cat and a pact with the Devil, Lolly Willowes is finally free.
Here's the problem. There's absolutely no hint of supernatural activity until page 165 (out of 247 pages)--so that when she finds a strange kitten inside her (previously locked) parlor, the kitten bites her, and she 'realizes' she's entered into a pact with the Devil, I had to wonder if the promise of witchcraft on the back cover was nothing more than a delusion on Laura's part. It would have made sense if her pact with the Devil were something she had imagined to make her life more interesting, but it's not. It's real, and most of the other villagers have made the same bargain. But for a few pages there, until she goes to a midnight Sabbath attended by all the rest of the village, I was convinced that Lolly is mentally ill.As a writer, I'm very conscious of this basic principle of consistency. The writer makes a sort of contract with the reader on the very first page, the very first line even. You might not have any idea yet where this story is going to go, but you ought to know what sort of world the characters inhabit. So to begin a story in an all-too-realistic situation and end it with a conversation with Satan (who is posing as an easygoing gardener) is, in a sense, pulling a fast one on the reader. It feels cheap. I'm not saying an imp should have jumped out of a hole and cried "tee hee, I'm the Devil's minion!" before the first paragraph was out; but however it's done, the reader should proceed with the distinct impression that there is a supernatural layer to this story, a dark secret to which she'll eventually be made privy.When I finished the novel, I googled in search of some discussion on Lolly Willowes that might validate my feelings of disappointment. The novel is considered, by feminist readers especially, to be an unjustly forgotten classic, but virtually none of the blogs or other websites I visited mentioned the inconsistency that had partially spoiled the story for me.I had lent the book to my mother to read while I finished Hogfather over the holidays, and I wasn't fazed when she told me she hadn't cared for it much--our literary tastes don't always overlap. But when I finished the novel, I realized she'd had the very same reaction that I had. "It just doesn't work," she said. So it wasn't only me.Despite the consistency issue, Lolly Willowes is still worth a read for all its fine descriptive passages and classic feminist message. I wish I could recommend it with a whole heart.
Where My Books Go
All the words that I utter,And all the words that I write,Must spread out their wings untiring,And never rest in their flight,Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,And sing to you in the night,Beyond where the waters are moving,Storm-darken'd or starry bright.
Present at a Hanging
Ghost stories are my (not so guilty) pleasure, as you know, and I'm still sifting through the Librivox catalog looking for old goodies. Right now I'm listening to Present at a Hanging (Gutenberg text here), stories by the American journalist/satirist Ambrose Bierce. So far my favorite is "A Man With Two Lives." These stories are much shorter and sharper than the gothic tales I usually read, and I like that--sometimes a story goes on for thirty or forty pages, and the dénouement isn't as dramatic as all that narrative build-up would suggest. Make sure you read "A Man With Two Lives"--it'll only take you a few minutes.And speaking of Ambrose Bierce: I've been thinking a lot about epigraphs lately, how they flavor and (hopefully) enhance the reader's experience of the story they're about to read, and I thought I would show you the epigraph that opens Petty Magic:
WITCH, n. 1, Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil.2, A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
More thoughts on epigraphs in a future entry.
Romantic Germany
Lately I've been preoccupied with the new novel and spending QT with the fambly before I head back to Galway (tomorrow, weeeeeee!) Thrift-shopping has become an increasingly frequent family activity, and look what ten-dollar treasure I found at the Moorestown Friends' Thrift Shop yesterday:
It was originally $20, but all books were half price this weekend, and my mom got it for me as an early birthday present. (Thanks, Ma!)
Just look at the dedication!:
I guess this makes me a bonafide book nerd, but I love when a book has initial letters, the more ornate the better.
I may have neglected to mention that Kelly and I are heading to Germany in mid-September, which is part of why I was attracted to this fascinating old book. We're spending a few days in Berlin and a few days in the Harz mountains, about three hours' train ride west of the capital. The Grimms got most of their fairy tales from the villages of the Harz, and the region is steeped in witchy legends. Peeeeeerfect. One of the highlights will be a trip here.)And here:
The first castle is in Wernigerode, the second (the Kaiserhaus) in Goslar (2 hours west by train). Funny how I would've most likely overlooked Goslar and all its attractions were it not for this book:
You appreciate the half-timbered dwellings so much that your appetite is whetted for better ones. If you are persistent you find them at the head of the Markt-Strasse. Crescit indulgens! The taste grows upon you. Presently, unless you are very reserved or blasé, you give a cry of pleasure. You have discovered the Brusttuch, a crooked late-Gothic gildhouse named after an indispensible part of the local peasant's costume. It has an amazingly sharp, high ridge. Its lowest story is of picturesque rough stone; its second is half-timbered and filled with such homely, humorous carvings as riot along the streets of Brunswick. Among them are reliefs of convivial monkeys and of witches riding their broomsticks to the Brocken...
I love the florid descriptions in these old books! It'll be interesting to see how much (or little?) the place has changed in 99 years; it's a little eerie reading about these places as yet untouched by the Third Reich and all its horrors. (By the way, the V-2 factory was located in a subterranean factory in the Harz. Parts of it are open to the public, or so I hear, though I think we'd need a car to get there.)Anyway, expect a load of pictures here when I get back to Galway in late September...