New Century Reading

It's Tuesday, where are you?

Hosted by Raidergirl

Currently, I'm in Indiana, following a headstrong young man as he has a falling-out with his father that will last a lifetime.

Abraham Lincoln by James McPherson. Sort of the Cliff Notes of Lincoln bios, clocking in at a mere 70 pages. All in preparation to read this.

A new look at Anne Frank

When I was 14, I was into the whole idea of diaries and journals. Of course I kept one myself, and whenever I could find books about people who kept diaries, all the better. So imagine my glee at discovering Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. I'd never heard of her, and I knew little about the Holocaust (my dad was a WWII veteran, but in the Pacific battles, so that's mainly what I'd heard about). Frank's diary had a huge impact on me; for months it was all I read. I'd read from beginning to end, then turn back to the beginning and start over. So many things played into my obsession: a young girl, my age, living under those horrendous circumstances; the brutal ending; the diary-keeping itself; and the fact that, in spite of the living conditions, she still felt like I felt as a teenage girl, decades later. One of the worst moments of my high school life was not getting a role when the drama club performed the play. So unfair. I would have been the perfect Anne, I just knew it.

Frank's book has long been treated as a historical document, which of course it is. But Francine Prose makes a case for viewing it as a literary document as well, in her new book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. 

She argues--very convincingly--that readers are experiencing the rise of what could have been a major literary talent, and at a very young age. What's more--and I didn't know this, and found it so interesting--after hearing a radio speech that talked about publishing documents after the war, Anne became determined that her diary, up until then a private record, could be such a document. She didn't intend to publish it as the Diary of a Young Girl, but as Het Achterhuis (literally, the "house behind"). To that end, she began revising the earlier parts of the diary. The originally published form used her revisions rather than the original diary entries, but as Prose compares and contrasts, it's clear just what an astonishing leap Frank made in terms of her writing abilities in those two short years, and with what clear, professional eyes she viewed the reviewing process.

Prose goes on to examine how the book found its way into print, including the wonderful story of legendary editor Judith Jones finding it in a rejection pile, flipping through it, then reading it, unable to put it down. Prose also looks at issues that arose during and after publication, not the least of which was the obsessive Meyer Levin's determination to bring it to stage, as long as it was his telling, and the road from book to stage to screen. She discusses in detail the effect that both the play and movie had by using the now-iconic line, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart!" as a dramatic finale. In essence, she argues, it softens the blow that Frank's death should have had.

But the diaries did their share of good as well, not only in highlighting that part of the war, but in teaching lessons about anti-Semitism and racism in general. Prose illustrates how groups in countries as disparate as Russia and Guatemala are using the text to teach tolerance and understanding, a legacy Frank surely would have appreciated.

This is an excellent book, filled both with passion and with meticulous documentation. Prose has done a great service to Frank's work, and best of all, it's causing me to revisit this long-ago favorite of mine.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm in Lexington, KY, in the early 1800s, living a life marked by tragedy that will turn me into an enormously unpopular, reviled historical figure.

Mary Todd Lincoln by Jean H. Baker, a deep look at the tumultuous life of Lincoln's wife.

All about the Brontes

Really, now--after I saw this listed on Chris' blog, how could I not sign up to join in all the Bronte-ish fun?

The All About the Brontes Challenge! Geez, it practically has my name written all over it. I love the Brontes, and this past summer I reread Villette for another online read-along, which was a wonderful experience. Villette bored me as a college student, but the second time around I found it gripping, intricate, complex, with an intriguingly unreliable narrator. I followed that up by rereading Agnes Grey, which paled in comparison to Villette, although it was still a good read. Then I found myself thinking, gosh, I should go back and reread those other Bronte books. And maybe some biographies, and maybe the letters...but I never got around to it.

Well, except for reading some fictionalized accounts of the lives of the Bronte sisters. 

The challenge allows to mix and match fiction and nonfiction, and even includes watching movies. After some consideration, here's what I'm going to try and read:

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Juliet Barker's (massive) biography

the collected letters

And, maybe, watch one version of the movies of each of the above novels.

This will be so much fun!

Howards End is on the Landing

What a wonderful book.

With a beautiful cover to boot.

Howards End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill, is a love letter to books and the role they play in the lives of dedicated readers everywhere. It starts simply enough; the author is on the hunt for a specific book in her home filled with books. As she searches, she realizes just how many books she either has not yet read, or should reread, and how many have been neglected for so many years. Her decision to spend a year reading from the stacks makes up the basis of this book, which is rather like a collection of essays around various musings inspired by her close re-examination of the books she owns.

Hill is British, and she recently commented on Nonsuch Book's site that her American publisher had rejected the book, on the grounds that they didn't think Americans would "get it."

I'd sure like to know who that daft publisher is. Are there some authors Hill talks about that I've never heard of? Sure. Does it matter? Not in the least. Any reader who is passionate about books and reading--and I count myself in that fine company--would understand and identify with Hill's adventures in her own private library. Just read what she has to say about the role of books in her life, literally and otherwise:

"But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA. ...

"All through the house, the books are murmuring, turning over in sleep like pebbles on the shoreline as the tide recedes.

"But when I reach the stone-flagged hall and stand for a moment, listening, everything falls silent. I hear the comforting, inhabited, friendly silence of a house full of books."

Anyone who loves books, anywhere in the world, will understand. I understand that there is an American publisher somewhere who has better sense and will be bringing out an American edition. Kudos to them. In the meantime, you can visit Hill's website and purchase the book directly. Then set aside some time to get lost in her literary world, and keep a notepad nearby--you may find yourself jotting down a list of books to check out.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

 

I'm all over the world, following the trail of Phoebe Snetsinger, the first birder to build a life list of 8,000 birds. A great accomplishment--but it came at great cost, to her and to her family. Life List by Olivia Gentile (a great read!).

Southern Reading Challenge, Review 2

My second completed book for the Southern Reading Challenge was the wonderful collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being. (This would also have served as a completed book for the Chunkster Challenge, if that challenge was still operational.)  O'Connor was the Southern-raised-and-bred author of what could best be described as Southern grotesque (her choice of term, over "gothic") stories and novels, including Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

O'Connor lived in the South during the beginning of the integration movement. She left for a few years, heading northeast where she spent time in NYC and at the artist's colony Yaddo, but a diagnosis of lupus sent her back home to Milledgeville, GA ("A bird sanctuary," as the town's sign bragged, a descriptiong O'Connor found endlessly humorous). Her physical world was by necessity very small, but the connections she made with other writers and with fans of her work allowed her to reach out via letters and form friendships that lasted the rest of her unfortunately short life.

A devout Catholic, O'Connor did not approach her religion or its members through rose-colored glasses. Nor did she suffer the fools of literature lightly, frequently groaning in her letters about English students and professors trying to force meaning into details of her work where no meaning was intended. Many of her stories focus on Protestant characters, rather than Catholic, something she wrote about in 1963: "People make a judgment of fanaticism by what they are themselves. To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics...to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. ..the only difference between them is that if you are a Cathoic and have this intensity of beliefe you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don't believe anything much at all down on your head."

But she didn't just write about Catholicism and writing, she wrote about life on a Georgia farm, in a community filled with people that served her well in her fictional pursuits. The letters are full of O'Connor's dry, understated humor, sending anecdotes about the people she meets and sees that are less gossipy and condescending, but more amused and accepting.

By the time I reached the last letter, written just days before her death, I found myself slowing down. O'Connor was a lively, thoughtful letter writer, and it's hard not to wish there were many more left to read.

Flannery

Flannery O'Connor has always seemed something of a mystery. A deeply religious Catholic, living out her short life while suffering from lupus, out on a farm in Georgia with her mother, she nevertheless developed her own style of Southern grotesque writing. Her stories are filled with what today might be called "freaks and geeks." Yet the stories also had an intensely spiritual subcontext, directed by O'Connor's own strongly held beliefs. But who was this quiet woman, and how did she come to write these masterpieces?

Brad Gooch does his best with not much source material in Flannery, A Life of Flannery O'Connor. He has meticulously combed through the existing body of Flannery's correspondence, as well as family records and reminiscences of people who knew her. The portrait he paints is of a precocious, introverted child more interested in her stories and writing than in making friends--a situation exacerbated by her mother's insistence that Flannery only hang out with the "right" people. Situations that occurred in her youth eventually were mirrored in her stories, bearing out Flannery's assertion that you gather up experience in childhood and transfer it to other situations when you write.

Gooch's writing style is amiable and approachable. It does on occasion seem like he never met a fact or tidbit he didn't like well enough to add to the book--there are perhaps too many sentences devoted to this or that obscure relative that have little bearing on Flannery's development as a writer. Still, when he quotes friends who had the privilege of hearing Flannery read her work out loud in her deep Southern drawl, you can't help but wish you could have been there too.

There's no doubt that lupus played a defining role in Flannery's life. She had already attained success in her writing career and was building a life away from her mother and Georgia when she was diagnosed. The debilitating nature of the disease forced her back to her mother's farm in Milledgeville (also known as "a bird sanctuary," to Flannery's wry amusement). Though it seems clear through anecdotal reports that Flannery's mother was not necessarily a fan of her work (Gooch records a scene where Mrs. O'Connor, in front of Flannery, asks Robert Giroux to help her daughter write about nice people), nor overly supportive of her writing time, nevertheless Flannery continued working up until her far-too-early death in 1964. She maintained friendships with such luminaries as Katharine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, Robert and Sally Fitzpatrick, and Robert Giroux through extensive correspondence, and those letters serve as a jumping-off point for Gooch to look at the interior life of this gifted writer.

Even though her life was outwardly a quiet one, not filled with the angst of other writers of the time who turned to alcohol, drugs, and dealt with mental illness, Gooch's portrayal of Flannery still manages to make her interesting--and perhaps most important, brings the reader back to the work itself, a worthy accomplishment.

Savage Beauty

Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, is as riveting to read as a novel. Its central character is Vincent herself, a fiery, unstable and formidably gifted poet who spent her life trying to manipulate others while ultimately being controlled by those she wanted to dominate. A groundbreaker sexually and politically, Vincent represented a generation of women who wanted more from life than household drudgery, and her poetry titillated and outraged the country. Her sad later years, declining into drug and alcohol addiction, read as the tragedy they are, although Milford delicately steps away from assigning too much blame to any party. Would Vincent have become the poet she did if she had not had the help of so many people, and what would she have accomplished if her husband had not, as we call it today, co-dependently fed her addictions? Milford doesn't attempt to answer these questions, but this highly readable and fascinating literary biography shows how Vincent's life is far from obsolete.

Her Husband

In what must be one of the best-written literary biographies of this year, if not of many years, Diane Wood  Middlebrook manages to uncover new perceptions of an oft-told tale: the nearly mythical marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In her wonderfully written book, Her Husband (the title refers not only to Hughes’ status the husband of one of the twentieth century’s most iconized female writers, but to his own references to himself in the third person when annotating Plath’s work), Middlebrook presents a clearer picture of how the work of the two poets influenced each other. Middlebrook had access to many papers in the Emory University Hughes archive that no other biographer had seen, lending new details as well as a clearer picture of how the poems from the early days of their marriage were written in an almost back-and-forth literary conversational style.

 

The two poets often used each other’s discarded draft papers to create new works, and Middlebrook shows how they were not unaware of the words on the other side of the page. This was a technique very apparent to readers of Hughes’ late work, Birthday Letters, which had a kind of “asked and answered” relationship to many poems of Plath’s. But Middlebrook’s work demonstrates how that back-and-forth routine was already in play, if much more subtly, in the earlier years.

 

While not glossing over any of Ted Hughes’ womanizing or contributions to the failure of the marriage, Middlebrook does not condemn him, either, which creates a more balanced and complex view of the man. Her insistence that Plath died, not out of despair rooted in Hughes’ departure from the marriage, but from clinical depression that had trailed her most of her adult life, is a new view and a welcome one. What we know about depression now is significantly different than how it was addressed in 1963, or even 1973 and 1983. Middlebrook isn’t saying that the condition wasn’t exacerbated by Hughes’ behavior, but that she believes Plath’s death cannot be fully blamed on him, either.

 

The only disappointment regarding this excellent biography is that Middlebrook did not have access to all of Hughes’ papers; there are archives sealed until 2023, 25 years after the poet’s death. There are tantalizing speculations, included in Middlebrook’s text, of what those archives might hold: possibly the “lost” Plath journals or final novel, letters, maybe even poems Hughes did not publish. Twenty years will be a long time to wait, but at least in the meantime, we can uncover deeper insights with repeated readings of Her Husband.