“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with scenes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have thought of to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.” Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety.
Struck by the power of this image when I first read Stegner’s novel some years back--it came out in 1987--I tried it; yes, the slug dissolves. And yes, I‘ve thought of it often. Stegner’s story of two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, is worth a read, or a re-read if it’s been a while. A thoughtful look at love, survival and marriage, it has much to say about our ability to absorb and move beyond the tragic without dissolving or in essence, our capacity to reconstitute ourselves.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A Lost African Childhood
The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. 352 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.00
Cooper’s memoir of her tumultuous childhood in Liberia and her life after fleeing to this country as a teenager in the 1980s is an uneven book saved by the power of its story. Cooper’s resume is impressive; she has been the Diplomatic Correspondent at The New York Times since 2006 and wrote for The Wall Street Journal for twelve years before that. I have been struck by the incisiveness of her reporting and by her ability to make complex political issues comprehensible. But in this book Cooper confronts more personal material, a challenge evidenced in the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of past and present that characterizes the tone of the narrative.
Some readers may remember the excerpt of Cooper’s book that appeared in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It ended with her return to Liberia to find her lost foster sister Eunice, whose memory she had blotted out in remaking herself as an American. It focused on Cooper’s early life as a member of the Liberian elite and her relationship with Eunice, who was brought into the family to keep her company, and also described the country’s sudden descent into chaos capped by the soldiers’ arrival at the house at Sugar Beach, an event detailed with emotional restraint that does little to diminish its horror. The book fills in the rest of the story, including Cooper’s reunion with Eunice, who had experienced the full brunt of a country gone mad.
What emerges is a picture of a colorful but hopeless country and of a bright indulged child whose parents loved each other but could not stay together, whose extended family defined her identity and whose survival skills enabled her to remake herself into an American woman with a successful career in a high-powered profession. All you have to do is read Cooper’s description of herself as a stranger in an American high school—in the south, no less—to realize the extent of her achievement. Yet I can’t help wondering if the immensity of her experience helps to explain the tonal inconsistencies that one reviewer identified as a disconcerting flipness, most evident to me in her description of being embedded with the troops in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which her Humvee was crushed by a tank. “Flipness” suggests an attitude of dismissal on the part of a writer, a reduction of deep emotion to something less. In Cooper’s case I sense no lack of feeling; rather, it’s as if she can’t find the language to join together the extremes of her relatively short lifetime. But I can’t believe she won’t keep trying, and I expect she will succeed. This book is so good that it seems cruel to ask for more, but few reporters have her life experience, and if she can bring together her powers of observance, her linguistic gifts and her obvious depth of feeling Cooper will astonish readers even more than in The House at Sugar Beach.
Cooper’s memoir of her tumultuous childhood in Liberia and her life after fleeing to this country as a teenager in the 1980s is an uneven book saved by the power of its story. Cooper’s resume is impressive; she has been the Diplomatic Correspondent at The New York Times since 2006 and wrote for The Wall Street Journal for twelve years before that. I have been struck by the incisiveness of her reporting and by her ability to make complex political issues comprehensible. But in this book Cooper confronts more personal material, a challenge evidenced in the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of past and present that characterizes the tone of the narrative.
Some readers may remember the excerpt of Cooper’s book that appeared in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It ended with her return to Liberia to find her lost foster sister Eunice, whose memory she had blotted out in remaking herself as an American. It focused on Cooper’s early life as a member of the Liberian elite and her relationship with Eunice, who was brought into the family to keep her company, and also described the country’s sudden descent into chaos capped by the soldiers’ arrival at the house at Sugar Beach, an event detailed with emotional restraint that does little to diminish its horror. The book fills in the rest of the story, including Cooper’s reunion with Eunice, who had experienced the full brunt of a country gone mad.
What emerges is a picture of a colorful but hopeless country and of a bright indulged child whose parents loved each other but could not stay together, whose extended family defined her identity and whose survival skills enabled her to remake herself into an American woman with a successful career in a high-powered profession. All you have to do is read Cooper’s description of herself as a stranger in an American high school—in the south, no less—to realize the extent of her achievement. Yet I can’t help wondering if the immensity of her experience helps to explain the tonal inconsistencies that one reviewer identified as a disconcerting flipness, most evident to me in her description of being embedded with the troops in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which her Humvee was crushed by a tank. “Flipness” suggests an attitude of dismissal on the part of a writer, a reduction of deep emotion to something less. In Cooper’s case I sense no lack of feeling; rather, it’s as if she can’t find the language to join together the extremes of her relatively short lifetime. But I can’t believe she won’t keep trying, and I expect she will succeed. This book is so good that it seems cruel to ask for more, but few reporters have her life experience, and if she can bring together her powers of observance, her linguistic gifts and her obvious depth of feeling Cooper will astonish readers even more than in The House at Sugar Beach.
Monday, October 27, 2008
A Graveyard in Avignon
Occasionally I’d like to comment on something of a literary nature that has caught my fancy. Recently I read a review of a biography of Victorian notable John Stuart Mill, perhaps best knownfor his resounding defense of civil and social liberty entitled “ On Liberty.” The biography is Richard Reeves’ John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand and the reviewer was Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Published in the UK, Reeves’ book is not yet available here yet but given what Gopnik says of it, I hope it soon will be. Mill himself is a fascinating figure, as is his wife, Harriet Stuart Mill, a formidable feminist thinker and writer in her own right. Married in 1849, they enjoyed only a few years of happiness before she died in 1854. Shortly after their union, John Stuart Mill published an article called “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which came out under his name but was written primarily by Harriet, his beloved intellectual equal.
The Mills are buried together in the cemetary of St. Veran on the outskirts of Avignon, where they were living when Harriet died. Many years ago when I was there with my husband, I determined to find her grave. It was a hot September Sunday and we had enjoyed too much good French wine the previous night, but undeterred, we set off from the center of the town, map in hand. Neither of us is an expert map reader and a somewhat quarrelsome few hours passed before we reached the cemetery, inconveniently located on the fringes of the city. And in time, we even found the grave, a white marble tomb surrounded by greenery and lit by the late afternoon sun. I thought of it when I read the following quotation from Mill in Gopnik’s piece: Claiming that few would really want “the lure of immortality” if they thought about it, he writes that the “mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied or extenuated.” That last sentence, albeit understated, is rich with felt emotion.
Thanks to the internet and
The Mills are buried together in the cemetary of St. Veran on the outskirts of Avignon, where they were living when Harriet died. Many years ago when I was there with my husband, I determined to find her grave. It was a hot September Sunday and we had enjoyed too much good French wine the previous night, but undeterred, we set off from the center of the town, map in hand. Neither of us is an expert map reader and a somewhat quarrelsome few hours passed before we reached the cemetery, inconveniently located on the fringes of the city. And in time, we even found the grave, a white marble tomb surrounded by greenery and lit by the late afternoon sun. I thought of it when I read the following quotation from Mill in Gopnik’s piece: Claiming that few would really want “the lure of immortality” if they thought about it, he writes that the “mere cessation of existence is no evil to any one: the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead. What is odious in death is not death itself, but the act of dying, and its lugubrious accompaniments: all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality. Nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one; the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him. That loss, indeed, is neither to be denied or extenuated.” That last sentence, albeit understated, is rich with felt emotion.
Thanks to the internet and
Mrs. Woolf Goes Below Stairs
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. By Alison Light. 362 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.00.
Just when you thought there is no more to say about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, along comes Light with a new slant on the subject, except this time it’s below stairs in the spotlight. It’s obvious enough if one thinks about it—especially if one is female--that Woolf’s writing life was made possible by the women who emptied her chamber pot, mended her clothes and cooked her meals. It was their labors that allowed her to shut the door on the rooms of her own to produce such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to name my two favorites.
Light looks at Woolf’s often uneasy relations with her servants from both a social and a literary perspective. She has unearthed some interesting material about these women, such as Sophie Farrell, who worked for Virginia’s parents and who remained in the family until 1931. Woolf was a woman of her time, and however advanced she may have sounded in print, she and her husband Leonard—an avowed socialist—often treated their servants as lesser beings, as a barely tolerated necessity. Although Light points out the sometimes disconcerting disconnect between the political opinions of both Woolfs, she allows that neither can be blamed for being creatures of their time, an era when few regarded their household staff as social equals. Light also correlates Woolf’s over-fastidious reaction to bodily needs and her sometimes appalling attitude towards the lower classes as smelly and worse, a perspective that surfaces in her fiction and non-fiction alike.
Ultimately, as Claire Messud, a novelist herself, points out in a perceptive review in The New York Times Book Review (10/19/08), “we must be grateful that Virginia had the good fortune to have help” because her emotional condition was such that “she would have written little without it.” Thus it boils down to the eternal trade-off, especially for women artists; does one stick to one’s principles and get little done, or accept help and live with the guilt?
Just when you thought there is no more to say about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, along comes Light with a new slant on the subject, except this time it’s below stairs in the spotlight. It’s obvious enough if one thinks about it—especially if one is female--that Woolf’s writing life was made possible by the women who emptied her chamber pot, mended her clothes and cooked her meals. It was their labors that allowed her to shut the door on the rooms of her own to produce such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to name my two favorites.
Light looks at Woolf’s often uneasy relations with her servants from both a social and a literary perspective. She has unearthed some interesting material about these women, such as Sophie Farrell, who worked for Virginia’s parents and who remained in the family until 1931. Woolf was a woman of her time, and however advanced she may have sounded in print, she and her husband Leonard—an avowed socialist—often treated their servants as lesser beings, as a barely tolerated necessity. Although Light points out the sometimes disconcerting disconnect between the political opinions of both Woolfs, she allows that neither can be blamed for being creatures of their time, an era when few regarded their household staff as social equals. Light also correlates Woolf’s over-fastidious reaction to bodily needs and her sometimes appalling attitude towards the lower classes as smelly and worse, a perspective that surfaces in her fiction and non-fiction alike.
Ultimately, as Claire Messud, a novelist herself, points out in a perceptive review in The New York Times Book Review (10/19/08), “we must be grateful that Virginia had the good fortune to have help” because her emotional condition was such that “she would have written little without it.” Thus it boils down to the eternal trade-off, especially for women artists; does one stick to one’s principles and get little done, or accept help and live with the guilt?
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia
October 15, 2008
The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia. By Douglas Smith. Yale University Press. 328 pp.
This is a quirky little book about an "illicit" love affair between Russia's richest aristocrat, Count Nicholas Sheremetev (1751-1803), and Praskovia Kovalyova, his serf and the greatest opera diva of her time--quite a contradiction there, or so it seems until learning what Smith asserts about the tradition of serf theaters. Many aristocrats like Sheremetev maintained elaborate theaters, with their serfs as actors, musicians, scene painters, etc. Praskovia joined his theater as a little girl and their affair began when she was barely in her teens. Soon renowned for her talent and beauty (and intelligence it seems) as "The Pearl," she sounds like an amazing woman. Many years later Sheremetev freed her and eventually married her. Sadly, she died shortly thereafter giving birth to their son Dimitry. The book is full of information about life among the Russian aristocracy, but often Smith seems to be stretching what little is known about The Pearl and about the relationship between her and Sheremetev. If you're interested in anything and everything Russian, and have read widely in the field, this book has its charms; otherwise, go for a bigger picture.
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