{reviews} her father's name & the golden child

I have just read two really enjoyable books in a row, and it would certainly be remiss not to share these. They were quite different books, but both made me laugh and reminded me why I love books.

Florence Marryat Her Father's Name (1876)

Leona Lacoste was a woman who would never give in—until she died.

I chose this one because I read a tantalising blog post on it by Catherine Pope, who has published the Victorian Secrets edition of the text. The novel is available free (e.g., archive.org), but this edition is well worth having - actually, I'd say indispensable - for the absolutely wonderful Introduction by Greta Depledge, in which she provides all sorts of contextualization on the author and the varied and often kooky themes of the novel. 

Basically, if you like 'sensational' novels and you admire a strong heroine (with admirable bosoms, "body supple as a cat-o'-mountain's" and "eyes of burnished bronze, like... the eyes of a spotted panther in repose") who scorns the conventions of polite society in order to escape a fate worse than death ("Bah! In a country where the girls marry at fourteen! But were she twelve it would make no difference. She is old enough for me." Ew.) AND clear her father's name of a heinous accusation, then this is for you.

"I am quite determined, father. I shall never marry. Marriage is slavery, and I was born free. I will never be such a fool as to barter my birthright for any man."

But wait, there's more: cross-dressing...

She commenced to stroll leisurely in the direction of the cabin as she spoke, and as Valera followed her, he could not help wondering at the easy grace with which she filled her part, and the admirable disguise it was, to which, however, the effeminacy of many of the men in those southern climates much assisted her.

... hysteria, sweaty sickbeds, effeminacy, a touch of Sapphism on the chaise-longue, duelling, travel, disguises, faint downy moustaches, guitar playing, ethnic stereotyping ("I shall not faint, doctor, I have too much European blood in me for that") and really tall women who smoke cigars. What more could you ask? 

This is my second Marryat, and I'm loving her more and more. I previously reviewed The Blood of the Vampire (1897), which was one of my 'best of 2012'. 

*

My second recommendation is by an author who made it onto my 'best of 2013', although I never managed actually to review that book. That was Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop (which all lovers of independent bookshops should read: what could possibly go wrong with one woman's ambition to bring a bookshop to her country town?). 

I'll try to do better with my second Fitzgerald: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Golden Child (1977):

       

'Three minutes to go... We are all quite clear, I take it. Slight accidents, fainting, trampling under foot — the emergency First Aid posts are indicated in your orders for the day; complaints, show sympathy; disorder, contain; increased disorder, communicate directly with my office; wild disorder, the police, to be avoided if possible. Crush barriers to be kept in place at all entries at all times. No lingering.'

What made me love this? I did wonder if my list of things that I love might only be applicable to me, but I hope not! The British Museum, a golden treasure from a lost civilization, a group of highly eccentric curators and academics, a quick trip to Russia, and a murder or two. No, surely there's universal appeal there?

Half over the sill, the eminent maniac was holding Untermensch by his two thin wrists, hanging him down outside while he sawed the wrists to and fro on the frame. The Professor’s voice came only faintly: ‘Spare me! I alone can read Garamantian!’

Waring Smith is the naive but practical assistant curating a huge British Museum exhibition (inspired by the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition of 1972) of golden treasures from the mysterious civilisation that was Garamantia in Africa. 

Few know anything about the artifacts which were discovered by Sir William Simpkin many, many years ago: there is Professor Untermensch (Fitzgerald's names are brilliant) who has written the definitive study of the Garamantian script, Garamantischengeheimschriftendechiffrierkunst; there is "Tite-Live Rochegrosse-Bergson from the Sorbonne - the distinguished anthropologist, anti-structuralist, mythologist and paroemiographer" (anti-structuralist - still giggling about that; he also believes in "the irresistible impulse to stop thinking at all"); and there is, of course, Sir William himself, who refuses to visit the exhibition. Is this because of an alleged curse? The museum's Director sees the exhibition as a cash-cow, and Sir William as another source of funds which can all go towards his love of French "dix-septième" objets: "He particularly hated Oriental rugs, which took up an immoderate amount of display space." 

But then things start to go awry and Waring Smith is dragged in well over his head:

And the Museum, slumbrous by day, sleepless by night, began to seem to him a place of dread. Apart from the two recent deaths, how many violent ways there were in the myriad rooms of getting rid of a human being! The dizzy stairs, the plaster-grinders in the cast room, the poisons of conservation, the vast incinerators underground! And the whole strange nature of Museum work, preserving the treasures of the dead for the curiosity of the living, filled him... with fear.

The Golden Child is black humour at its best - gentle, ridiculous and wonderfully well written. 

{review} desert of the heart

Jane Rule Desert of the Heart (1964)

Fidelity to any human place, except the heart, seems to me a dubious thing.

When Desert of the Heart appeared in 1964, Jane Rule became, she says, "for the media the only lesbian in Canada." It might, nowadays, (thankfully) be hard to see why the book was such a game-changer, but it is certainly far more than just a 'lesbian novel'. 

It engages - generally wittily, sometimes brutally, frequently heart-breakingly - with all manner of conventions about the expectations surrounding how a woman should live her life. It is an engagingly important feminist text, I thought, as well as a thought-provoking examination of contemporary sexual politics. It is also, as Jackie Kaye notes in her introduction to this Virago edition, a "relatively positive work of fiction, where no lesbian dies."

Evelyn Hall goes to Nevada to get a divorce from her husband of sixteen years. She is an educated woman, an English professor, but not, we discover, prone to anything but a quiet dissidence:

She was one of the few women she knew who preferred Mrs to Dr, perhaps because her marriage had been more difficult than her Ph.D. to achieve and maintain... Dr now was her only 'proper' title, but it seemed too easy a solution, or too ironic.

One of the joys of Desert of the Heart is how Evelyn's somewhat stifled inner voice begins a regeneration.

The divorce is her choice - "She was to be divorced, a convention that might be as strange to her as the convention of marriage had been" - and to obtain it she must live in Reno in Frances Packer's boarding house, until the divorce comes though in six weeks' time. Evelyn is prepared for boredom, prepared to read and get on with her academic work, prepared even to rediscover a life alone; but she is not prepared for the effect that Ann Childs will have on her as she crosses off the days until she is free. 

Ann is a permanent resident in the boarding-house: a slot-machine change girl at a casino, easy with her favours - "the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered." Will she also be Evelyn's salvation from the dull sadness, that "desert of the heart", the "aesthetic distance", her "care about morality"? "But decorum was a climate in which Evelyn lived." Can she lose - and find - herself in "unimportant intimacy"? "Must I be careful?", Evelyn begins to ask herself, as she (of course!) begins to over-intellectualize "the grotesque miracle of love" and whether she is embarking on "an attempted moral suicide".

"Why have you loved me at all?" "Lack of social orientation. Latent homosexuality. Moral amnesia. Masochism. Revenge. But I'm willfully ignorant in these matters. My terms are probably very inaccurate."

You might see here how dangerously close Desert of the Heart runs to a good wallow in the clichés of lesbian melodrama that inform its background (e.g.,. The Well of Loneliness). But that would be, I think, to miss how manneredly Rule deals with her potentially florid material.

If she had never actually made love to another woman, she was intellectually emancipated in all perversions of the flesh, mind and spirit. Her academic training had seen to that.

I addition, the Reno setting works beautifully as a background to the novel. It makes emphatic the fluctuating status (rich/poor, unmarried/married, married/divorced, morality/amorality, fidelity/unfaithfulness, even living/dead) of the characters, and the desert too functions as a clichéd yet powerful image - a sort of demarcated zone signifying both sterility and the potential for (re)development and fulfilment. Its emptiness is particularly potent in contrast to the Hogarthian (Rule's image, not mine!) chaos of the casinos.

So, in sum? A quiet, clever, beautifully written, heart-breaking love story.

Highly recommended.

{review} lucia on holiday

Guy Fraser-Sampson Lucia on Holiday (2012)

 

It is a brave writer indeed who would take up the challenge of adding to E. F. Benson's canonical 'Mapp & Lucia' series. Fraser-Sampson is up to the task - tonally he carries it off exceptionally well, and the element of over-the-top mayhem is never far from the scene. It is almost as cruel as the originals. As pastiche it is excellent. Fraser-Sampson's Georgie is a particular delight, but then Georgie has always been my favourite ("He crossed his legs and shot out his cuffs perfectly at the same time, and was disappointed that nobody appeared to notice"). 

Fraser-Sampson takes Lucia at co. to an Italian lake resort on the eve of the 1929 financial collapse. There is some nice use of near-contemporary events - the thoroughly irritating Gabriele d’Annunzio is beautifully done:

Amelia had no time for any of this and was prone to interject ‘Pah!’ or ‘Balderdash!’ into other people’s statements, and she seemed to have quite decided views on Italian politics which, while Lucia knew nothing of such matters, were clearly at variance with d’Annunzio’s. She was pro-Mussolini because he had made the trains run on time. D’Annunzio was anti-Mussolini because Mussolini had tried to kill him by throwing him out of a window. When this fact had been made clear, the party gathered around the dinner table in the saloon had fallen silent, clearly weighing the pros and cons of each position, and most siding mentally with Mussolini on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

There are some wonderful scenes involving hashish and Georgie's quite unwarranted reputation as a Lothario to either sex:

Francesco brought an ashtray over to the balcony table, and leant close to place it beside him, so close that Georgie could clearly smell his perfume. He wondered if it might be one of those new French colognes, and what it might be like to wear a daring cologne himself rather than just boring old toilet water.
‘I did enjoy your recital with Miss Bracely, sir,’ his valet murmured respectfully. ‘I had no idea you were such a talented pianist in addition to your painting skills.’
‘Thank you,’ Georgie replied awkwardly into Francesco’s shirt front. He found his heart was suddenly beating more quickly, doubtless as a result of his agitation.
‘Tell me, sir,’ Francesco enquired softly. ‘You are clearly such a sensitive gentleman. Do you possess any other particular ... artistic tastes?’
This at least was an easy question to answer. ‘Why, yes,’ Georgie said brightly. ‘How clever of you to guess. Actually, do you know, I’m very fond of needlepoint.’
Francesco moved away and said, ‘Indeed, sir’ as he gently closed the French window.

Rating: Decent entertainment. I love the originals and am deeply suspicious of sequels, but Lucia fans are in quite safe hands here.

 

{review} the 19th wife

David Ebershoff The 19th Wife (2008)

According to the St. George Register, on a clear night last June, at some time between eleven and half-past, my mom -- who isn't anything like this -- tiptoed down to the basement of the house I grew up in with a Big Boy .44 Magnum in her hands… What happened next? Nearly everyone in southwest Utah can tell you. She nailed an ace shot and blew his heart clean from his chest. The paper says he was in his computer chair, and from the way the blood spattered the drywall they're pretty sure the blast spun him three times around.
At the time of his death my dad was online playing Texas hold em and chatting with three people, including someone named DesertMissy. He spent the final seconds of his life in this exchange:

Manofthehouse2004: hang on
DesertMissy: phone?
Manofthehouse2004: no my wife
DesertMissy: which one?
Manofthehouse2004: #19

This is a big book. 600 pages. It made my thumbs hurt. I nearly bought another copy for my Kindle but parsimony gave me a FFS!-kick in the head, so I didn't. I preferred this cover too.

A number of elements made this a good read. The first of these is the narrative itself, which blends a contemporary murder investigation in a breakaway polygamous Mormon sect in Utah with an historicizing narrative/mystery of the life of the so-called 19th wife of Brigham Young, Ann Eliza Young, who led the crusade to end polygamy. The historical element far outweighs the contemporary events (in size as well as interest, in my opinion) and is also crucial to making sense of the modern murder.

Second, the characters of the novel are well drawn and the interconnections that we discover between them make for a fascinating and puzzling read. The hero is the son of the alleged murderer (and the victim). He's also gay, which guarantees doubly that the sect won't warm to him again. Driven out of the sect as a teenager (indeed, dumped by his mother on a roadside to fend for himself), Jordan has survived by his wits and returns only with great reluctance to the scene of the world which so damaged his childhood. But the polygamous sect is reluctant to give up any secrets and quite content to allow his mother to face execution for murder.

Third, there is the murder. When the victim manages to type the identity of his murderer just before the Big Boy Magnum takes him out, it's sort of like a classic locked room puzzle, isn't it?

Four, the setting: the historical travels of the early Latter Day Saints as they made their way to Utah and the contemporary world of the polygamous sect (the logistics of being a polygamist are way beyond me. Nineteen wives, 100 kids, etc. Imagine doing the laundry...) in the red hot Utah sun. Fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.

Fifth, a big dose of easily digestible quasi-history.

And, finally, at the very end, a little surprise which shakes to the core one's implicit faith in the narrative. That was a master-stroke which elevated this book above being just a bit of crime fiction with some historical overlay.

My only quibble with this book was its bloated, thumb-aching size. It was too long for what it was attempting, I think - neither pure crime nor pure historical fiction - and perhaps the history could have been pruned a little. But, all in all, a fascinating setting and a strong and interesting narrative. 

Rating: 7/10.

If you liked this… I want to read his The Danish Girl, a fictional take on one of the first male to female gender reassignment surgery cases.

 

{review} the naked civil servant

Quentin Crisp The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

 

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, 
Be yourself no matter what they say. 
(Sting, 'Englishman in New York', 1987)

When, in preparation for his move to America, he was asked at the US Embassy if he were a practising homosexual, he replied, "I didn't practise. I was already perfect." (source)

I was surprised by my melancholic reaction to this book. Quentin Crisp - "one of the stately homos of England" - was responsible for some of the wittiest turns of phrase ('Crisperanto') of the twentieth century but this book is by no means a barrel of laughs. Crisp (born Denis Pratt in Surrey in 1908) lived through nearly a century of openly - and often violently - expressed homophobia in a country where 'homosexual offences' were only partially decriminalised in 1967 (the year before The Naked Civil Servant was published).

From the dawn of my history I was so disfigured by the characteristics of a certain kind of homosexual person that, when I grew up, I realised that I could not ignore my predicament... I became not merely a self-confessed homosexual but a self-evident one.

Crisp achieved no more than local prominence until The Naked Civil Servant was turned into a TV drama, starring John Hurt in the early 1970s. At that point Crisp became a celebrity who could sell out theatres with his one-man show, part of which involved his offering spontaneous answers to questions taken randomly from the audience. In 1981, after living 40 years in the same London bed-sit ("There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse"), he moved to New York (thus Sting's lyrics, above). He died, still touring, near Manchester in 1999, at the ripe old age of 90.

At work I never once understood what I was doing. In theory I was employed as an engineer's tracer. This was one of the many kinds of work at which I could never hope to become proficient. Accuracy is alien to my nature. Many years later a woman asked me what a 'point' was. When I told her it was a seventy-second part of an inch, she said, 'But there isn't such a thing, really. Is there?' That is what I have always secretly thought. When I was given plans to trace, I copied the mistakes as well as the revisions and neither of them properly; when I was told to transfer the positions of electric pylons from one map to another, I did so with such a jolly laugh that construction men telephoned from distant shires to ask what on earth was going on at head office.

Crisp's most successful and long-term job was as an artist's model, which obviously granted his narcissistic tendencies full rein. He was, he writes, hooked on exhibitionism, "taking doses so massive that they would have killed a novice." He sported dyed red hair (which he changed to blue when he hit his 40s, "my blue period"), long polished nails, sandals and a mincing gait that wore out the knees of his trousers. 

"When war was declared I went out and bought two pounds of henna". When he went to sign up,

 ...a young man appeared holding at arm's length, as though he were about to read a proclamation, a sheaf of papers which he tore up with a flourish: 'You'll never be wanted,' he said and thrust at me a smaller piece of paper. This described me as being incapable of being graded in grades A, B, etc. because I suffered from sexual perversion. When the story of my disgrace became one of the contemporary fables of Chelsea, a certain Miss Marshall said, 'I don't much care for the expression "suffering from". Shouldn't it be "glorying in"?'

As he writes, "Many of my friends were able to find work in camouflage. This seemed an unlikely way for me to earn a living." One consequence of being loose on the streets of London during the second world war was Crisp's exposure to the sexually and financially generous American invaders, whom he loved: "Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few." He also found his effeminate persona fitted in better on these streets where so many women were wearing trousers. And the streets themselves had become so much darker: "As soon as bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed." Circumstances favoured the sexually provoking flâneur: "though some of the buildings had been ruined, most of the people had been improved."

It's an odd memoir: the structure maintains a sort of life-time time-line, but the repetition of events (boring jobs, beatings, café life, people dropping in and out, the endless walking walking walking of the streets with hennaed hair and painted toe-nails) gives the narrative a strangely syncopated rhythm, as though it doesn't really matter when an event occurred. This is perhaps a marker of a long life, as well as a not overly tight narrative.

Crisp is an mix of exceedingly brave (or bold) and physically cowardly; narcissist and agoraphobic, masochist and hmmm... whatever the vanilla-ish opposite of that might be. His attitude to homosexuality seems sometimes to border on an enculturated disgust.

If there is a heaven for homosexuals, which doesn't seem very likely, it will be very poorly lit and full of people they can feel pretty confident they will never have to meet again.

He positively cultivates his ability to rub everyone up the wrong way ("I discovered that my great gift was for unpopularity") and he is a failure at emotional intimacy: "Living with him was the practical part of an examination in the theoretical section of which I had already done badly. In the second half I scored no marks at all." He is in love with death, yet lives to 90, almost in spite of himself. This is an unabashedly brutal memoir with very little face-saving:

I clearly see that my life was only an imprudent dash between the cradle and the tomb across open country and under fire. Yet I find it hard to take a prolonged look back and not attempt to excuse results by rearranging causes. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weakness.

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked this... the Quentin Crisp Archive (Crisperanto) is well worth exploring.

{review} the line of beauty

Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty (2004)

‘I’m just looking up Lebanon,’ she said, after a minute.
‘Oh yes …’ said Nick.
‘It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight.’
‘Really,’ said Nick.
‘It does. “L’homosexualité est un délit”,’ she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.
‘Yes, délit is a crime, unfortunately.’
‘Oh, is it?’
‘Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour.’
‘Well, it’s bloody close …’
‘Well, they often are,’ said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself.

It seems wrong to cover a Booker Prize winning novel in a few sentences, but I couldn't warm to this one. I thought the writing was gorgeous and Hollinghurst's ability to capture Thatcher's 1980s quite extraordinarily fine (as was his ability to nail the early 1980s in The Swimming Pool Library). But was I meant to like any of the characters in The Line of Beauty?

Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.

Nick, the protagonist, is a young man who enters into a parasitic relationship with a wealthy family closely connected with the aristocracy and the ruling Conservative government. Nick is also taking his first steps into the world of homosexuality. He considers himself an extremely bright and self-aware young man who can make a good pass at walking the walk with his upper-crust friends. Yet nothing is quite right. 

The reader comes to realise that, like many people who consider themselves to be good readers of others' characters, Nick's own self-awareness is quite flawed. He is neither fish nor fowl: not part of the aristocratic circle he so enjoys; not part of the family with whom he lives; unable to get over an unreciprocated passion for the son of the family; not able to be open about his relationship with the closeted scion of a wealthy Lebanese family; almost unable to fend for himself in the real world without the cushion of comfort provided by others.

It is very telling that one insight he gains from cocaine is that, "He felt he could act himself all night." And Nick is, ultimately, a coward who possesses nothing that he has earned. When he returns to his home village in a car given by his lover, we read:

Now he revved round it, the lads looked up, and he savoured the triumph of coming home in a throaty little runaround. It was as though the achievements of sex and equities and titles and drugs blew out in a long scarf behind him. No, it was real superiority, it was almost lonely, a world of pleasures and privileges these boys couldn’t imagine, and thus beyond their envy.

The problem is, of course, that it is not his world. 

I find it very difficult to maintain the energy to the end - of what was quite a long book - without some sort of either empathy or implicit assumption in redemption. Of course, I guess that's the problem with the 1980s: there seem to be no redeeming features amid all the Tories, easy money, corruption, parliamentary sex scandals, fast cars, the immense privilege vs. shocking poverty of Thatcher's Britain, the beautiful lines of cocaine and the spectre of AIDS.

In sum: wonderfully written (and I'd definitely persevere with more Hollinghurst), but it dragged for me. I think I have Booker issues. Fear of the books being too smart for me, I suspect. Silly, isn't it? Maybe I also need to read more of the Hollinghurst's inspiration in The Line of Beauty, Henry James. I could relate to this [on Trollope]:

‘To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.’
‘You must know that one, though,’ said Lord Kessler.
‘No, this one is pretty good,’ Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I enjoyed The Swimming Pool Library. 

{review} constance: the tragic and scandalous life of mrs oscar wilde

Franny Moyle Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde (2011)

‘My dearest Otho,’ his sister announced, ‘Prepare yourself for an astounding piece of news! I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and perfectly and insanely happy.’

Poor Constance Wilde. This book made me very angry with Oscar Wilde. I don't think that I had fully perceived the amount of damage that his sensational fall from grace had done to anyone apart from himself.

Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you, but yet all I have and so you will not despise it.

Franny Moyle has written a most interesting book about the woman who married Oscar Wilde. In a sense it is also an interesting book because it reveals how little remains of a Victorian woman's life unless it is recorded contemporaneously with that life. Constance, we find, has been almost entirely historically subsumed within the life of her famous husband. Perhaps, too, the 'cult' of Oscar Wilde has pushed her into a lesser position? And, further, owing to the loss of many of her letters and possessions (for example, when the Wilde household was sold off to pay his creditors), there are some very patchy areas of her life which require an imaginative leap towards reconstruction.

Moyle has done a good job of filling in the blanks. Her Constance is a woman of letters, a clever translator, a contributor to her husband's work, a feminist, a political animal, an avid interpreter of Aestheticism in art and design, a fashionista (and early advocate of 'rational dress' who "used fashion to convey something of her political, feminist leanings") and a woman of intense religious feeling. She was also 5'8" (I love that detail).

When they became engaged,

Oscar was just as infatuated with her as she was with him, a fact revealed in Oscar’s letter to his friend Lillie Langtry. ‘I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd,’ he wrote, a grave, slight, violet-eyed Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her.

What happened? It is possible to make some assumptions in the broadest terms: Constance's second pregnancy was very difficult; and Oscar had always enjoyed spending time apart from his wife anyway. And then there was the increasing recognition of his sexual preference for men.

The journalist and author Frank Harris, a friend of Wilde’s, claimed that years later Oscar recounted to him how during this period his sexual attraction to Constance plummeted: When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself around the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and – oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome.

There were constant worries with money; with the children; with Constance's health (Moyle makes a valiant attempt to figure out what was wrong with Constance; unsurprisingly, given the lack of information, it was likely something gynaecological); with Oscar's absences; with his friendships with young men as he strove to fill that ‘secret sacred niche’ [urgh! What a phrase…]. Yet they managed to hold things together:

On the surface they were fine. Yeats, who joined the Wildes on Christmas Day in 1888, described Oscar’s life in Tite Street as a ‘perfect harmony … with his beautiful wife and two young children’. And yet Yeats, with terrific perception, added that his home life ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition’.

Constance with her eldest son Cyril, 1889 (Source)

Constance filled her life with activities. She was a keen supporter of clubs where unaccompanied women could dine without critical comment. Her other interests were political, such as the Rational Dress Society and the Women's Liberation Federation (to whom she gave papers on Irish Home Rule and other international issues):

‘I was astonished and delighted to notice yesterday … how very much Mrs Oscar Wilde has improved in public speaking,’ one critic noted after a WLF event. ‘She was always graceful and always charming, but now there is an earnestness and an ease about her which is the result of practice in platform speaking, and I shall not be surprised if in a few years Mrs Wilde has become one of the most popular among “platform ladies”.'

It seems that she also turned to religion and the occult (Theosophy was a popular pastime for Victorian men and women), becoming a member of the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (amusingly, "[p]rospective members… could apply via the offices of the Sanitary Wood Wool Company in Holborn"). The Latin name she chose to assume in the Temple was, tellingly, 'Qui Patitur Vincit' - 'Who Endures Wins' and her course of study for the Temple involved learning Hebrew.

Her tolerance for Oscar's young male friends was extraordinary; it is difficult to determine how much she understood about what was going on around her, literally in her own home.

‘Having got all our rooms quite full yesterday a telegram comes from Lord Alfred Douglas asking to be put up for a night! I don’t believe that even you have to contrive to put 7 people into 6 rooms. However, fortunately he put it off till to-day, and I think we can manage.’41 The day after Bosie arrived, Constance had to return Cyril to Hunstanton. When she got back to Cromer, she discovered that, far from staying for just a day, Bosie had installed himself for the duration. She didn’t mind too much. The daily golf sessions Oscar began enjoying with Bosie were a source of amusement for her rather than concern. ‘I am becoming what I am told the wives of golfers are called a “golf-widow”,’ she quite happily related...

It is with Bosie, of course, that it all goes off the rails. It has always astounded me that, even after his prison time, Wilde was unable to resist Bosie, 'a friendship that was entirely destructive of everything fine in me either from the intellectual or ethical point of view' (1893). Constance's unhappiness about Bosie's influence leads her, in turn, to look outside her increasingly fraught marriage for support and love. There are hints that she fell in love with Arthur Humphreys (general manager of Hatchard's), with whom she was editing some of Oscar's works. But then the great scandal broke, Wilde was sentenced to jail, the Wilde house was broken up for the creditors, and Constance was forced to flee overseas with the two children to escape the scandal. As one of her few remaining friends, Lady Georgina Mount-Temple wrote to her daughter,

‘I do not think there could be a greater trial with such disgusting shame … one cannot bear even to allude to it... Can one touch pitch and not be defiled? You are quite right in keeping aloof – so would I if I did not feel called upon to shelter her.’

And that's a friend!

The final years of Constance's life were a misery. Exiled from England by the scandal, she continued to face constant battles with money, and with Oscar's friends who wished to interfere with their putative divorce and financial settlements (astonishingly, Constance continued to provide funds to her husband). There was the indignity of his taking up with Bosie again - and breaching the conditions under which she was providing an allowance. And there was her continued ill-health, which led to her decision to undergo what proved to be a fatal surgical procedure. Constance was only 40 when she died, on the 7th of April 1898. She is buried in Genoa.

Moyle's biography is a well-researched and sensitive reclamation of her subject's life. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. So that you can become nicely irate about poor Constance Wilde, I leave you with Bosie's comment on her death:

‘As to his wife,’ Bosie said, ‘he married her for love and if she had treated him properly and stuck to him after he had been in prison, as a really good wife would have done, he would have gone on loving her to the end of his life … Obviously she suffered a great deal and deserves every sympathy, but she fell woefully short of the height to which she might have risen.’

Ouch.

Rating: 9/10.

If you liked this... I'm in the mood to loath Wilde after this book, but he's still a genius. Perhaps I ought to go back and try to read between the lines of An Ideal Husband...

{weekend words}

Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been.

Alan Hollinghurst (1988)

The Swimming Pool Library

{review} hindoo holiday

J. R. Ackerley Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (1932)

Park your political correctness at the door. 

In 1923 J. R. Ackerley took the advice of a Cambridge friend - E. M. Forster - and got himself a job in India as secretary to the Maharajah of Chhatarpur. Hindoo Holiday - a striking example of the travel-memoir genre - was the result. When it first appeared it was in a form expurgated of the Maharajah's homosexuality, among other things, and it wasn't until the 1970s that the full text became available. 

He wanted some one to love him - His Highness, I mean; that was his real need, I think. He alleged other reasons, of course - an English private secretary, a tutor for his son; for he wasn't really a bit like the Roman Emperors, and had to make excuses.
As a matter of fact he had a private secretary already, though an Indian one, and his son was only two years old; but no doubt he felt that the British Raj, in the person of the Political Agent who kept an eye on the State expenditure and other things, would prefer a label - any of the tidy buff labels that the official mind is trained to recognize and understand - to being told, "I want some one to love me." But that, I believe, was his real reason nevertheless.
He wanted a friend. He wanted understanding, and sympathy, and philosophic comfort; and he sent to England for them. This will seem strange to many people who have always understood that Wisdom dwells in the East; but he believed that it abode in the West - and perhaps I should add that he had never been there.

The Maharajah - an exceedingly camp figure in Ackerley's portrayal - wants to discuss philosophical questions with his Cambridge-educated secretary, who he assumes will be the fount of all knowledge:

"Is there a God or is there no God?" rapped out His Highness impatiently. "That is the questions. That is what I want to know. Spencer says there is a God, Lewes says no. So you must read them, Mr. Ackerley, and tell me which of them is right."

Ackerley soon finds himself quite out of his depth: he is bewildered by India - the filth and strange customs; he is alarmed by his fellow English visitors in the region (almost caricatures); he is troubled by the problem of how he can seduce a nice looking boy; he is totally at sea with the Maharajah whose life is governed by his interpretations of omens and by his 'cupidity' (as he himself terms it); and he soon realises that the palace contains a number of enemies who would like to see his tenure with the Maharajah cut short.

Verdict? I love Ackerley's style; I could read his writing forever - so conversational yet so perfectly structured and nuanced. His subject matter sometimes made me uneasy, but this is a memoir of another era - one just accepts that.

Rating: 9/10.

If you liked this: in terms of books about India this was, for me, right up there with Kipling's Kim and Scott's Raj Quartet. I have Ackerley's My Dog Tulip - a memoir of his dog - on the TBR, as his writing is such a delight.

 

{poem} frank o'hara

 

I love poetry, but - shamefully - until I had the luck in the 90s to share a house with someone studying post-war American poetry, I rarely read anything later than the 1930s. My lovely housemate happily took me in hand and now I'm a convert. She worked primarily on Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). 

 Jasper Johns 'In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara',1961 (source)

I cannot read any of his poetry without wanting to get straight on a 'plane to New York, preferably via a time-machine to transport me to the late 1950s. 'The Day Lady Died' (1959; from Lunch Poems, 1964) is one of my favourites. It is about - at least, superficially - the death of the astonishing jazz singer/songwriter Billie Holiday. 

The Day Lady Died
FRANK O’HARA


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me


I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                                             I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness


and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with 
                                                                   her face on it


and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

 

 Billie Holiday (source)

{review} also seen (& read)

Also known as: books that I'm pretty sure that everyone else in the entire world has already reviewed so that I am paralysed by my inability to say anything original, but I can't put these books away until I mention that they were quality reads and well worth a go.

Alan Bradley The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (2010)

 

For a moment there seemed nothing to say. And then the woman spoke:
'You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette, would you? I'm dying for a smoke.'
I gave my head a rather idiotic shake.
'Hmmm,' she said. 'You look like the kind of kid who might have.'
For the first time in my life, I was speechless.
'I don't smoke,' I managed.
'And why is that?' she asked. 'Too young or too wise?'
'I was thinking of taking it up next week,' I said lamely. 'I just hadn't actually got round to it yet.'

The first Flavia de Luce mystery (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) set such a high standard that it is doubtful that any sequel could live up to the hype. I enjoyed this book mostly for its wonderful setting - the archetypal, almost Utopian, English village of the 1950s. I wonder if it could only have been written by someone who was not English. It contains a sort of nostalgia that, as a colonial, I sometimes feel for the 'motherland'. The plot had holes the size of, um, really big holes in it and Flavia herself is a bit of a pain. Read it for the evocation of England, My England and the wonderful light touches of humour. On Mrs Mullet's awful cooking:

'I knew you'd like it, she said, 'It was no more than this morning I was sayin' to my Alf, "It's been a while since the Colonel and those girls 'ave 'ad one of my lovely jells. They always remark over my jells [this was no more than the truth], and I loves makin' 'em for the dears.'"

She made it sound as if her employers had antlers.

{Have I mentioned that I HATE dialect?}

Jo Nesbø The Snowman (English translation 2010)

At that moment Harry felt it again. The sensation he had had at Spektrum, earlier that evening. The sensation that he was being observed. Instinctively, he switched off the torch, and the darkness descended over him like a blanket. He held his breath and listened. Don’t, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Evil is not a thing, it cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

OK. Really gripping, high quality stuff. Great plot. Excellent build up of tension. Serial killing. Who could ask for anything more? Less: I could have done with a little less police politicking, but I can live with that for some really inventive and grotesque crimes. The murderer also belongs to my favourite occupational category for a serial killer but I can't say any more than that (apart from that when you both live and work with this group of people, nothing much they do can surprise you). Fabulous crime novel. I've now read all of the Nesbøs that have been translated so far and this one is by far the best (IMHO. I loved The Redbreast next best: better plot, more interesting subject matter, but not so scary).

Mabel Maney The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse (1993)

"It's all my fault," she sobbed, collapsing on the bed in tears. "People are always disappearing around me. Why, when I was a dude ranch nurse-in-training, an entire family disappeared and was never found!"

Were you brought up on Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames? Do you like a tongue-in-cheek girl detective parody with some spoofy lesbians thrown in for good measure? Join Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless as they search for Cherry's missing aunt and a gaggle of lost nuns. Eat a lot of pie. Always carry a clean handkerchief. Accessorize. These books are very funny and spot on in their take-offs of the ultra-nice, well-fed, immaculate good girls of 50s' young adult fiction. There's a Hardy (Hardly!) Boys spoof out there too. Verdict: amusing. But maybe not in large doses. You'll never read a Cherry Ames' story again with a 'straight' face. Warning: very small font. The next one I'll get on the Kindle, I think.

Audrey Niffenegger Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)

'Ahem,' she said. 'What are you doing?' Jessica had a voice that rose and fell like a swooping kite. The children instantly stopped what they were doing and looked self-conscious, like cats that have fallen off something ungracefully and now sit licking themselves, pretending nothing has happened. Jessica walked carefully to where Robert and James sat. Two of her friends had broken their hips recently, so she had temporarily modified her habit of striding boldly wherever she went.

I hope that this book makes a lot of money for Highgate Cemetery because the cemetery is the big star here. This book is completely freaky, and for ages I kept oscillating wildly between love/loathe. I think, on the whole, if not 'love', then 'definitely liked' wins out. Certain passages were so beautiful that they carried the book for me. But what a strange creature it proved to be: love story, ghost story, horror story, family history, local history. The story of two American identical twins and their inheritance of a flat in Highgate from their dead aunt receives a twist in the tail of the tale (another feline reference) that is astonishing, spooky and absolutely fitting. I've not read any other of Niffenegger's books. Should I? Not sure...