An Editor's Life

People who buy books, not counting useful how-to-do-it books, are of two kinds. There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading, if not for ever, then for as long as one can foresee. The second group has to be courted. It is the second which makes the best-seller, impelled thereto by the buzz that a particular book is really something special; and it also makes publishers’ headaches, because it has become more and more resistant to courting.’

Stet; An Editor's Life, Diana Athill’s memoir of fifty years as an editor of André Deutsch publishing is written in a deceptively simple style, as if the author were chatting to the reader over a cup of tea. Or at least, Athill has the gift of cutting through the complicated tangle to the simple heart of the issues that publishers face. Her insights seem perfectly applicable to the current market as to the heyday of publishing, the sixties to the eighties, when she was in the thick of it all. Athill began working in publishing after the war. She had met André Deutsch and had a brief affair with him that left them as friends and life-long colleagues. She was with him through two firms, the first being, of course, the one that Deutsch made the most naïve mistakes with, as a man whose hunger for publishing good books far outstripped his shrewd intelligence for business. Like most entrepreneurs, Deutsch had terrific energy but erratic aim for it, not to mention an inability to admit it when he was wrong. But the second time round he had more money and more experience; André Deutsch the company was born and became one of the major literary houses, publishing such luminaries as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Mavis Gallant, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Laurie Lee, Molly Keane and Gitta Sereny, until old age, battle fatigue and changing times brought about its downfall. As Athill pithily describes it: ‘Although André’s chief instrument for office management was always, from 1946 to 1984, the threatening of Doom, he was slow to recognize its actual coming.’ I have to wonder how many publishers that description applies to in the current climate?

This is a gentle, funny, humane book that draws the reader easily into the centre of the publishing world. But for me, I felt it was mostly a book about friendship, the particular sort of friendship that develops over a long working relationship that has weathered all sorts of ups and downs, and in which Diana Athill seems exceptionally experienced. The first half of the book is an account of the life of an editor from after the war to the moment when publishing became the concern of multimillion dollar corporations, the second half focuses in on her relationships with particular authors. In both sections, the question is what Diana Athill can usefully do for those around her. There are fascinating accounts in the first section of the experiences she has helping Gitta Sereny to put together her landmark account of Franz Stangl, the Commandant of a Nazi extermination camp, and of interviewing the Moors murderer, Myra Hindley in prison and deciding against commissioning her memoirs. In both cases, the issue is writing about evil. The care and support that Athill gives to Sereny – who is in dire need of it – in order to prevent her being swamped by the subject matter is a mirror image of her refusal to take on what must surely have been a highly commercial prospect in Myra Hindley. But she did not think that Hindley’s mental state would survive coming honestly face to face with what she had done. Would an editor today make the same decision? I’d hope so, but I’m not sure.

In the second part the issue of editorial friendship becomes even clearer. It’s a highly particular relationship, we find, between an editor and a writer. As Athill runs around caring for an ill, disturbed and poverty-stricked Jean Rhys (‘No one who has read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.’), or swallows her joy at having the somewhat egotistical V. S. Naipaul off her hands, only to find him desperate to return to André Deutsch, or sitting down to a candlelit dinner in a slummy New York apartment with the clearly bonkers but brilliant Alfred Chester, it seems that being an editor means taking the support, care and loyalty towards a difficult individual beyond the normal bounds. Editors love the part of writers, greater often than the base self, that creates books, and so they find that extra bit of compassion needed to deal with the rest of them. But Athill is no saint – she’s perfectly human and disconcertingly honest. She is upset by Brian Moore’s leaving his first wife, Jackie, whom she likes, and she lacks the courage to deal with Alfred Chester’s slide into what is probably paranoid schizophrenia. But when you read about the things she does do for her writers, I felt, at least, that she deserved to want well shot of them from time to time.

By the end of the book, I had grown immensely fond of Diana Athill’s attitude towards life, her conviction that no matter what happened (and she had had her share of sadness and frustration) it was worth living, her sensible pragmatism, her down-to-earth humility, her clear-sighted sense of humour. I very badly wanted to adopt her as a grandmother. Whilst there may be no scientific evidence that reading a lot of books makes you a better person, Stet; An Editor's Life seems to provide ample anecdotal evidence that it does.

A Shrewdly Selfish Spectator In The Publishing World

Stet, sometimes published as Stet:An Editor's Life, is Diana Athill's fourth volume of memoir (she's published six in total) and the one specifically dealing with her career in the London publishing world.

Born in 1917 and sucked into the published trade after a disastorous love affair in the 1940s, Athill quickly found herself in a post-war London that was shaking off paper rationing and the last vestiges of British Empire and reforming itself into a cultural melting pot. She soon after became a founding director of the publishing house André Deutsch and went on to be editor there for over 45 years. In her time she helped edit and publish authors such as V S Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mavis Gallant, Jean Rhys, Laurie Lee, Simone de Beauvoir, Molly Keane, Stevie Smith, Brian Moore, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and John Updike.

The publication of Stet in 2000 resulted in an unexpected burst of fame, something she appears to have found rather baffling since she was in her eighties at the time and was essentially writing partly for pleasure and partly as a retirement plan (those in her family tend to enjoy long lives).

But her book is nothing like you might expect from that brief summary.

Athill is that very rare thing, a shrewdly selfish spectator. She's quite unlike anyone I've met before, either in person or on the page. Shrewd enough to be astonishingly cool when assessing those she met during her career as an editor. Selfish enough to have no qualms about dallying with married men or reading private diaries when left lying open in her house. An inquisitive spectator with a beady eye for office drama and the specifics of the publishing world rather than a chronicler of the world at large.

This gives the book a very unusual feel. You are getting a very candid, unique perspective on life in the chaotic offices of André Deutsch Limited - but you're only seeing what Athill herself was interested in.

The highlights are very much worth dipping into the book to find. Her account of meeting Myra Hindley and talking with her for an hour about the possible publication of her book is one of almost preternatural insight. Athill, shrewd and observant as she can be when her curiosity is aroused, came to this conclusion after the prison visit:

'By the law of our land Myra Hindley had been condemned to live with what she had done, and she had contrived for herself a probably precarious way of doing so: admitting guilt, but blurring it by exaggerating her youth at the time and keeping the extent to which he had been influenced by, and eventually frightened by, Brady to the fore. What would society gain if she were made to live through those murder again as the sane adult she had in fact been, and ended by saying 'I ought to be dead' or by breaking down completely which seemed to me the likely conclusion? Nothing. So if I enabled her to write the proposed book, and Andre Deutsch Limited published it, we would simply be trading in the pornography of evil, like the gutter press we despised. No, it could not be done.'
(Chapter 10)

Or to put it far more crudely, Athill could spot the flaws in Hindley's narrative but realised just how much psychological damage it might do her to pull on that loose thread.

Another highlight is her wicked assessment of V S Naipaul's rather uppity demeanour and the genuine way in which she recounts feeling sorry for his wife - reminding herself on bad days that it could be worse, she could be married to him...

Athill is famous for saying her books were never structured or planned, she just wrote them as they came to her and Stet feels very much like it came about with a tidal-like rise and fall. So to balance the highs of hearing her talk about 're-discovering' Molly Keane and Jean Rhys, both women late in their life and in great need of the boost given by being re-published, there are lows that come about because her attention was elsewhere or she didn't assert herself.

It makes her testimony about the sale of André Deutsch in the 1980s much less interesting and there is a sense throughout that, when it counted, she just wasn't present in the boardroom and preferred gossiping over lunch to asking difficult questions about the company's direction.

Perhaps some of this feeling comes from the fact that Athill is trying to cram over fifty years of professional experience into a book of just 300 or so pages. But a lot of it is due to Athill's personality:

'I hadn't just loved being an editor, I had also positively liked not being treated as the director I was supposed to be. This was because, as I have explained, I loathed and still loathe responsibility, am intensely reluctant to exert myself in any way I don't enjoy, and am bored by thinking about money (in spite of liking to spend it).'
(Chapter 7)

This attitude appears to have led to Athill being treated by Deutsch (and others in the company) as a secretary with privileges, which she apparently was perfectly happy with. It made for hard reading as an equalitist when she frankly acknowledged that earning just a fraction of the salary paid to her male colleague, Nick, and being pushed into choosing a small office or being forced to share a normal sized one left her feeling 'less resentment than amused resignation'.

The reality is that her youthful conditioning as a genteel-but-impoverished Major's daughter left her with a need to please and pacify the men in her life. Perhaps this too is why she didn't like to think to hard about money and makes her self-deprecate every time she talks about her work as a career. When she says something like:

'I know that I have sometimes been described a 'one of the best editors in London', and I can't deny that it has given me pleasure; but I also know how little I had to do to earn this reputation beyond routine work and being agreeable to interesting people.'
(Chapter on Molly Keane)

I know that part of that is shrewd assessment and part of it must be Little Wife Syndrome kicking in. As I said, it's a peculiar combination.

Overall I can't help but recommend it as a fascinating example of biography with snippets about working with Elizabeth David on the newly launched cookery book line, the story of how they lost Roth as an author and how sad she was to lose Brian Moore as a friend. It would be dishonest though to not acknowledge that it suffers somewhat from the ebbing and flowing and I was left with a nagging suspicion that, though she cared deeply about her authors, it wasn't a love of books that got Athill out of bed in the morning.

(Cross-posted to my book review blog, Alex in Leeds)

Stet, Or, a Dream of a Job

Diana Athill, still alive and feisty at the age of ninety-five, wrote her memoir Stet: An Editor's Life while in her eighties. She has a strong and sassy voice that at first came off as grumpy which made me worry a little until I got to know her better. By the end of the book I was wishing we were friends so I could call her up for a lunch date.

Stet is a copy-editing term meaning "let it stand." Athill's memoir, Stet is broken into two parts. The first half is about how she came to be a founding editor of Andre Deutsch publishing. The second half is stories and reminiscence about a few authors who had a big impact on her. And what a fun ride the book is. Athill had the luck and pleasure to work in publishing from just after WWII until the mid 1980s. And all my romantic notions about what it is like to work for an important publisher, she lived them. Poorly paid, cramped offices, personalities to deal with (both authors and coworkers), lots to learn from some big mistakes, all made up for by meeting interesting people, the intellectual stimulation, and of course the books.

Throughout the book Athill drops the pearls of her editing experience. At one point she is talking about suggesting changes to the authors of their work and how most of the time authors were grateful and accepting of her suggestions. And then she says something really interesting:

mostly, if what is said by an attentive reader makes sense, the writer is pleased to comply. Writers don't encounter really attentive readers as often as you might expect, and find them balm to their twitchy nerves when they do; which gives editors a good start with them.

I had never thought about how infrequently writers encounter attentive readers before. I now feel a little guilty for not always giving a book my full attention.

I had a good chuckle when Athill talks about the "pull of mystification" as in when you read a book and are totally baffled by it to the point of believing that it isn't the book that is the problem but you the reader and so you end up thinking the book is brilliant because you don't understand it. Athill has fallen prey to it but quickly learned how to suss it out. Nonetheless, she says, a good deal of junk masquerading as art gets published that way.

While an editor, Athill had two ground rules, don't over-tinker with an author's manuscript and never make changes the author does not agree to. Simple but not always easy.

The second half of the book is fun and dangerous. Fun because you get the inside scoop on what it was like to work with the likes of Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul. Dangerous because she title drops and gushes like crazy about books she has especially loved. Mount TBR grew several feet taller! This is not a deep thinker of a book but it is lots of fun.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Our Next Book Will Be....

Stet; A Memoir by Diana Athill (or Stet: An Editor's Life for those in the UK, by which I think I mean, me and Alex). I believe we'll reconvene to post reviews and discuss this on the last day of March, Sunday 31st. Happy reading!

Time To Choose A New Book!

Hello dear Slaves, it's that time once again, and I have the great honor of offering you a selection of titles for our next gathering. I thought it was a while since we'd read any non-fiction, and that it might be fun to read a memoir. But given that it is February and I, for one, have no desire for any misery, I've been looking out for memoirs that might be termed entertaining and which feature a strong bookish theme. Descriptions come from the back covers.

Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels

'Whenever I read the words "Peer's Daughter" in a headling,' Lady Redesdale once sadly remarked, 'I know it's going to be something about one of you children.' The Mitford family is one of the century's most enigmatic, made notorious by Nancy's novels, Diana's marriage to Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity's infatuation with Hitler, Debo's marriage to a duke and Jessica's passionate commitment to communism. Hons and Rebels is an enchanting and deeply absorbing memoir of an isolated and eccentric upbringing which conceals beneath its witty, light-hearted surface much wisdom and depth of feeling.

Diana Athill, Stet; An Editor's Life

For nearly five decades Diana Athill helped shape some of the finest books in modern literature. She edited (and nursed and coerced and coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language, including V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and Brian Moore. The word 'stet' is an instruction on corrected proofs sent to a printer, meaning 'let the original stand'. This candid memoir writes 'stet' against the pleasures, intrigues and complexities of her life spent among authors and manuscripts. This was how things stood.

Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust; A Memoir in Real Time

The Year of Reading Proust is a love story, travel essay, biography, personal history,  mid-life accounting, mother-daughter story and essay on the literary life all in one. Starting with a brilliant description of what it feels like to read Proust, Phyllis Rose moves on to an account of her daily life, inspired by the works of Proust and written with panache and loving intelligence. Set largely in New York City and Key West, Florida, it gives dazzling glimpses of the lifestyles of the talented and famous. A completely original book and an exhilarating literary experience, it invites comparison with autobiographical classics like A Moveable Feast and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and will do for contemporary readers what those books did for an earlier generation.

Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of reading through an array of wonderful and often surprising anecdotes: sharing the pleasures of the local library's vaste cache with his mother when he was a boy, recounting the decades-long relationship with the English teacher who pointed him onto the path of letters, and describing and profoundly influential period he spent in Paris, as well as reflecting on other pivotal people, places, and experiences. His story is a moving and personal one, girded by wisdom and an undeniable honesty. Anyone who not only enjoys the pleasures of reading but also believes in the power of books to shape a life will find here the greatest defense of that credo.

Richard Russo, On Helwig Street

'"Whoever said beggars can't be choosers," my grandfather would remark when she was out of earshot, "never met your mother."' 


Jean Russo was a single mother in the 1950s, badly paid and living with her only son, Richard, in the upstairs apartment of her parents' home on Helwig Street in Gloversville, New York. When Richard left for University, Jean saw her chance to escape a dead-end town in search of a better life elsewhere. So began a series of ill-conceived adventures, as ambitious son and restless mother strove to find somewhere to belong. Hilarious and heartbreaking, a story of growing up and of growing old, of becoming a man whilst remaining a son, of thinking that the grass is greener somewhere else, but knowing that going home is inevitable: On Helwig Street is a poignant tribute to a complicated mother and a brilliant evocation of mid-century America.

What's today? Friday? Already? Well, I'll tot up the votes in a weeks' time. 

Doctor Glas

Knocked out by a bad cold! I'm still woozy so if anything I say about Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg doesn't make sense, it's the cold and/or one of the many varieties of cold medicine I'm taking. Dr. Glas is a middle-aged, well-respected doctor in Stockholm. He has no wife or children, the only woman he ever loved and who loved him back died suddenly and unexpectedly after they had one lovely day together. Glas's female clients like him and bring their troubles to him, asking for an abortion, which he refuses, not because he thinks it wrong but because it is against the law and he doesn't want to get into trouble. And now Mrs. Gregorious, the beautiful young wife of the Vicar no one seems to like, comes to him asking for help. She is repulsed by her husband and in love with another man. Is there anything Dr. Glas might do to keep her husband from exercising his "rights"? Dr. Glas falls head-over-heels for Mrs. Gregorious; he only ever falls in love with women who are already in love with someone else. He speaks to Mr. Gregorious, telling him that his wife has a condition that requires her to abstain from sex. This works for a couple weeks until Mr. Gregorious can't stand it any longer and forces himself on his wife. The next ploy is to convince Mr. Gregorious that his heart is bad and he needs to go take in the waters. This works for about two months. What else can Dr. Glas do to help? He has a secret drawer in his desk in which he has hidden a few cyanide pills against the day he might decide to take his own life. Could he convince Mr. Gregorious to take one? Dr. Glas is no Raskolnikov, he is neither mad nor does he have high philosophical theories. He views respect for life as a hypocrisy:

What else can it ever be on the lips of anyone who has ever whiled away an idle hour in thought? Human life, it swarms around us on every hand. And as for the lives of faraway, unseen people, no one has ever cared a fig for them. Everyone shows this by his actions, except perhaps a few more than usually idiotic philanthropists. All governments and parliaments on earth proclaim it.

Yet Dr. Glas is not a bad man nor is he unlikeable. He is very lonely and, as his friend Markel says, lacks a talent for happiness. The story is told in the form of a diary but as Glas says, it isn't a confession

To whom should I confess? Nor do I tell the whole truth about myself, only what pleases me to relate, but nothing that isn't true. Anyway, I can't exorcise my soul's wretchedness -- if it is wretched -- by telling lies

Later he tells us he does not write all his thoughts in his diary, only thoughts that recur to him more than once. He is reliable in what he tells us, but what, if anything, is he not telling us? Glas has such a trustworthy voice and I really felt sorry for him and for Mrs. Gregorious, but I can't help but wonder if there were thoughts that got left out and what they might be? Doctor Glas is a most excellent and compact read. It was first published in Swedon in 1905 and caused a bit of a scandal because people saw it as promoting abortion and euthanasia. It doesn't, not really, but there is much in it to think about and I am sure I will read it again one day when my head is not full of congestion and cold medicine. Cross posted as So Many Books

"Morality - you're joking!" Doctor Glas

The obvious comparison for Doctor Glas is probably Crime and Punishment, but as I haven't read that (I know, I know) I was reminded of Poe's tales of horror, specifically "The Tell-Tale Heart," which is also a tale told by a murderer, full of logic and hatred and signifying ... well, actually, that's where the resemblances end, as Poe's murderer is a sociopathic madman, while Doctor Glas is something else. That's he's not so clearly a lunatic makes his story both more creepy and more depressing. It's easy to distance ourselves from Poe's delightfully raving, palpably unreliable narrator. Doctor Glas (and Doctor Glas) elicits a more complicated, even ambivalent response.

Doctor Glas is told as a series of journal entries by the eponymous narrator, a lonely doctor prone to brooding and philosophizing. By any standard, but especially for a doctor, he's disturbingly uncommitted to the value of human life. "Respect for human life--what is it in my mouth but low hypocrisy? What else can it ever be on the lips of anyone who has ever whiled away an idle hour in thought?" He's an outspoken advocate of euthanasia:

The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurably sick person--and every 'criminal' also--shall have the right to the doctor's help, if he wishes to be set free.

He keeps cyanide pills handy -- for his own exit plan, initially, but that bit of forethought turns out to be convenient when he resolves to end someone else's life.

That someone else is the odious Rev. Gregorius, whose pretty wife Helga comes to the doctor seeking help because she finds her husband's sexual demands repulsive...or does she? I wondered at a couple of points just how much of Dr. Glas's version we should accept, given that his own interest in Mrs. Gregorius is fairly intense and he has his own sexual issues, as someone who "at past thirty years of age, [has] never been near a woman." He wonders why that drive that "forces honest men to subject themselves to every sort of tribulation and sacrifice," and women "to surmount those feelings of modesty which the education of generation upon generation of young girls has been designed to awaken and develop," has so far "not driven [him] to anything." Is it that urge or some more philanthropic motive that eventually drives him to murder?

Why would I even entertain the notion that there might be something principled about murder? That's where Doctor Glas is most conspicuously different from Poe. The doctor is not simply a obsessive creep. In fact, I'm not even sure he's creepy at all, though he certainly makes me uncomfortable. We know Poe's narrator is a bad guy because his reasoning is so absurd:

He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

But Dr. Glas's logic is pretty compelling, his murder arguably an extension of his duty to heal. First he tries to solve Mrs. Gregorius's problem by telling her husband she has a medical condition and should be left alone. When she returns to him with the news that "he raped me. As good as raped me," that "he was strong. Wouldn't let her go," he has to try a different strategy. This time he warns Rev. Gregorius that his own health is at risk and prescribes separate bedrooms. When that doesn't work, his dreams of killing Gregorius become plans--though not until after he has an extended debate with himself:

I hear conflicting voices. I must interrogate them; I must know why the one says: I want to, and the other: I don't want to. You first, who say 'I want to': Why do you want to? Reply!

--I want to act. Life is action. When I see something that makes me indignant, I want to intervene. . . .

--But the unwritten law? Morality . . . ? 

--My good friend, the law, you know as well as I do, is in a state of flux. . . . Morality, the proverbial line chalked around a hen, binds those who believe in it. Morality, that's others' views of what is right. But what was here in question was my view. . . . I'm a traveller in this world; I look at mankind's customs and adopt those I find most useful. And morality is derived from 'morales,' custom; it reposes entirely on custom; habit; it knows no other ground. And I don't need to be told that, by killing that parson, I'm committing an action which is not customary. Morality -- you're joking! 

 Though excerpted like that it sounds kind of annoying, the doctor's tendency to think and question adds a lot of depth and interest to the novel, and more importantly, to the character. For a murderer, he's a pretty poignant figure, actually, as he reflects on his sad childhood, his abusive father, his lost dreams of love -- and yet these too have their disturbing aspects, as, for instance, after the drowning death of a girl he once kissed he dreams of her "white body lying among weeds and slime, rising and falling on the water." Love and lust seem hopelessly intermingled, in his thoughts and feelings and memories, with hatred and disgust.

What will linger with me most after finishing the novel is its atmosphere. It is eerily evocative, with a strong sense of place, and of spiritual isolation in that place:

The moon is shining. All my windows are open. In my study the lamp burns. I have put it on my escritoire, in the lee of the night breeze which with its gentle hush fills the curtain like a sail. I walk to and fro in the room, stopping now and then at my writing desk and jotting down a line. For a long while I've been standing at one of the windows of the sitting-room, looking out and listening for all the strange sounds that belong to the night. But tonight silence reigns, down there beneath the dark trees. Only a solitary woman sits on a bench; she has been sitting there a long while. And the moon is shining.

Though, following the dictates of the self that argued "life is action," Dr. Glas does ultimately act, the much-anticipated action is anticlimactic, bringing little satisfaction and no resolution. "Life has passed me by," he concludes, and we're left with another image of emotional bereavement:

Autumn pillages my trees. Already the chestnut outside my window is naked and black. Clouds fly in thick droves over the rooftops, and I never see the sun.

(cross-posted at Novel Readings)

January's Read

Sorry for the delay in counting up the votes! It turns out to be pretty easy since everyone voted for the same book.

Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg

Discussion starts on January 30th.

Happy holidays and happy reading to all!

Choose a Book for January

Time to vote for the next book. There is no rhyme nor reason to the selections other than they are shortish and seem interesting. If there is a theme, it is something like "modern classics with an international flair" or something like that. Cast your vote. I'll count them up in a week (December 1). And if it works for everyone, discussion will start January 30, 2013.

• Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister’s beautiful wife complains of her husband’s oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.


• All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani Wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre, All About H. Hatterr is one of the most perfectly eccentric and strangely absorbing works modern English has produced. H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang who has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is of his search for enlightenment as, in the course of visiting seven Oriental cities, he consults with seven sages, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of “Living.” Each teacher delivers himself of a great “Generality,” each great Generality launches a new great “Adventure,” from each of which Hatter escapes not so much greatly edified as by the skin of his teeth.


• The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout The Ten Thousand Things is a novel of shimmering strangeness—the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.


• Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and why? In Tun-huang, the great modern Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue tells the story of Chao Hsing-te, a young Chinese man whose accidental failure to take the all-important exam that will qualify him as a high government official leads to a chance encounter that draws him farther and farther into the wild and contested lands west of the Chinese Empire. Here he finds love, distinguishes himself in battle, and ultimately devotes himself to the strange task of depositing the scrolls in the caves where, many centuries later, they will be rediscovered. A book of magically vivid scenes, fierce passions, and astonishing adventures, Tun-huang is also a profound and stirring meditation on the mystery of history and the hidden presence of the past.


• The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay Hailed as “an utter delight, the most brilliant witty and charming book I have read since I can’t remember when” by The New York Times when it was originally published in 1956, Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond tells the gleefully absurd story of Aunt Dot, Father Chantry-Pigg, Aunt Dot’s deranged camel, and our narrator, Laurie, who are traveling from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond on a convoluted mission. Along the way they will encounter spies, a Greek sorcerer, a precocious ape, and Billy Graham with a busload of evangelists. Part travelogue, part comedy, it is also a meditation on love, faith, doubt, and the difficulties, moral and intellectual, of being a Christian in the modern world.

Talk is Cheap

I've been wanting to read Rose Macaulay ever since she appeared in Nancy Pearl's Booklust. Pearl recommends The Towers of Trebizond for the notable opening line, " 'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." That was back in 2003 and here we are nearly at the end of 2012 and I have just finished reading my first Rose Macaulay. It did not turn out to be Towers of Trebizond but Crewe Train. My copy of the book came from the Minneapolis Public Library and was a gift to the library in July 1942 from one Rufus Rand, a most delightful name don't you think?

The book is the story of Denham who, at the age of seven, was dragged abroad by her recently widowed father who had thrown up his hands at being a clergymen and was looking to live cheaply and as far away from the English as possible. We zip through Denham's unconventional childhood to begin the story when Denham is a young woman living in Andorra. Her mother's sister, Evelyn Gresham, and her adult children are visiting and it is at this point Denham's father dies. Her Aunt Evelyn decides to take Denham under her wing, bring her back to England, and civilize her into a proper English girl. Denham goes along because she has nowhere else to go, but she firmly resists being turned into a proper lady.

All these do's and don't and should's and so many forks and different kinds of plates and why can't she use one fork and eat her entire dinner at once on one plate? But worst of all, in Denham's opinion, everyone talks too much and they talk about things that don't matter. Denham unexpectedly falls in love with Arnold Chapel, a young man who works in Mr. Gresham's publishing office. They get engaged and are soon married and for Arnold, Denham makes an effort to live up to the "high life" as she calls it. Talking for the sake of talking, talking in order to entertain one another, is an art beyond Denham. She tries though, and fails spectacularly. Talking, she determines, is a creative art

for by it you build up things that have, until talked about, no existence, such as scandals, secrets, quarrels, literary and artistic standards, all kinds of points of view about persons and things. Let us talk, we say, meaning, let us see what we can create, or in what way we can transmute the facts that are into facts that are not yet. It is one of the magic arts.

Denham is much too practical and literal-minded to be able to carry on much conversation at all. She is unable and unwilling to leap from "facts as they are" to "facts that are not yet." She ends up asking questions that make people uncomfortable and, not being interested in gossip or politics or art or most any topic, she sits dumb and bored as people babble on around her.

Of course Arnold falls in love with Denham because she is so very different but it also becomes the source of their disagreements. Why can't Denham be like everyone else? But Denham doesn't care what other people do and think, everyone should be allowed to carry on as he or she likes:

'It's such rot,' Denham protested, 'doing things we don't like doing because someone else does them.'

And Denham protests and does her own thing right up to almost the end when she and Arnold compromise and find a house in the far suburbs of London and Denham becomes pregnant. The book leaves the end up in the air. Does Denham give in and become like everyone else or does she continue on in her silent and resisting ways? I like to think she does not give in, that she remains true to herself in spite of the overwhelming pressure to conform.

A good part of the delight of this book comes from Denham's outsider viewpoint. She inadvertently points out to Arnold and the Greshams and everyone else, the absurdities of middle class and upper-middle class life as it is lived. The other thing that makes Crewe Train so much fun is the writing itself. It sparkles and trips along. Macaulay has a wonderful comedic eye and like any good comedy, serious truths are uncovered but we are whisked away from being able to think about them too much or grow too serious over them. Only when we stop reading and close the book are we allowed to pause and think.

I am so happy to have finally gotten around to reading Macaulay. She has quite an oeuvre that includes novels, biography and travel writing. The Towers of Trebizond is considered her fiction masterpiece and since I enjoyed Crewe Train so much I know I will be in for quite the treat when I get to Trebizond, and I will get there most definitely.

Cross posted at So Many Books

Crewe Train - Oh, Mr Porter, Whatever Shall I Do?

Oh, Mr. Porter, whatever shall I do?
I want to go to Birmingham, but they've sent me on to Crewe!

Taking its name from an absurd little 1920s ditty, this book was one of the small pile I read during the October readathon. It's stayed with me since as the protagonist's plight is a peculiar kind of nightmare and there is just as much humour in it as there is horror.

When her father dies, Denham Dobie, a rather selfish, very uneducated teenager who has been raised in the hills of Andalucia, is hauled back to London by relatives she's never met before. Aunt Evelyn and her three grown up children take her silent lack of interest in other people or the world around her as something that can be shocked out of her extended exposure to 'society' and set about trying to make her one of them. Soon she is trapped in the hectic whirl of their society life and longing to escape.

The Greshams do everything they can to get this wayward relative to 'buck up' but she thinks books are silly and boring, hates dinner parties and just won't make the effort to fit in. Time and again she talks about barometers instead of baronets and baffles those around her. There's an element of relief when Arnold becomes interested in Denham and seems intrigued by the prospect of a wife more interested in sailing paper boats than clothes shopping. The problem is that Denham isn't really cut out to be a wife to anyone, Arnold is a writer who needs support in his attempts to get his debut novel published and of course, now she's married a man who's friends with the Greshams she'll never escape them...

"This bright, finished, gay, polite family, so merry, so chattering, so friendly, so kind, so expensively neat - what was she among them? A cold kind of wary doubt, like an animal's, fought in her with adventurous doubt. One was trapped by such desires into intimacies closer than one's sober self approved."
(page 35)

Oh, poor Denham. She is ignorant, willfully ignorant and horribly lazy and selfish... but she really does just want to be left alone. Her ideal life would be like something in an Enid Blyton children's book - full of boating on the sea and picnics and running away from adults. Crewe Train, a rather odd title for this book at first glance, is actually rather accurate when you understand the rhyme and watch the Greshams from her perspective.

I do wonder about the strength of the story though, it felt like Macaulay had pulled her punches too often. Narrating it as Denham allowed her to mock the Greshams and all they represent but, since Macaulay is definitely not one of the Denhams of the world, she can't help making Denham an unbelievably exaggerated caricature. In amongst all the witty barbs about social rules and pretended amazement about why anyone would write another book when there's already so many unread ones in the world there's an equal amount of laughing at Denham's desire for a husband who doesn't want to talk about love or enjoying the childish pleasures of secret tunnels in the cliffs.

This switching of perspective and punchlines does keep the reader entertained but it also limits the impact of the book significantly. It keeps Denham firmly in the reader's mind as a difficult, childish character and the Greshams as just misguided but ultimately lovely which blunts a lot of the barbs. It keeps the story in the camp of 'nice' and 'gentle' rather than 'biting' and 'satire'.

There is fine writing here and I can't wait to read more of Macaulay to get a better understanding of her work, but for me this particular book is let down by too many polite retractions and a weak ending.

(Cross-posted to Alex in Leeds)

Crewe Train: Society - can't live with it, can't live without it!

Crewe Train is the first novel by Rose Macaulay I've read. I can't decide if it makes me want to read another! It was easy to read: the prose is brisk, the tone is lightly satirical, the characters and incidents are quirky but mostly engaging. It has something of the flat quality I've noticed in other non-modernist novels I've read from the twenties and thirties: everything's just narrated in order, one thing after another, artlessly. Yet of course there is an art to this too: it's just not an art that makes itself felt.

Crewe Train tells the story of Denham Dobie, the daughter of a widowed English clergyman who can't stand chatter and sociability and so tries to find a place to live where he can avoid people who "insist on conversing with you." Unfortunately for him, the English "cannot stay at home" and his quest for perfect peace is ruined by cheerful, well-meaning, annoying people who "insisted on making friends with him and his grave, square-faced, brown-legged girl." They end up in Andorra: "enquiring about it, he ascertained that it was very difficult of access, being snowbound from November to May, and mountainous all the year round, and that the approach to it was by mule." Promising as that sounds, Mr. Dobie nonetheless is still unable to cut himself off from life, and ends up remarried and drawn back into society in spite of himself. The irresistible pull of relationships with other people turns out to be a central idea of the novel.

Denham takes after her father in her dislike of "that strange love of human intercourse, of making talk." She finds other people mostly just puzzling and troublesome in their demands and expectations: "when she saw anyone whom she knew approaching, she plunged aside off the path and lurked hidden until they were passed by."

Mr. Dobie dies and Denham is taken back to London by her mother's family, the Greshams. And so the stage is set for the fish-out-of-water comedy that makes up the bulk of the novel. Denham is a perfect device for Macaulay to poke fun at the conventions and morés of high society. She can't see the point of all the rules--what to wear, what to say, where to sit, when to stand, how to pass one's time. Since, of course, most of these really are perfectly arbitrary rules, it's not that hard to satirize the mindless compliance of the Greshams and their friends--but once you get the idea, it's also not really that interesting or sophisticated a critique. Here's Denham newly arrived in London, for instance:

London. The problem was, why did so many people live in it? Millions and millions of people, swarming all over the streets, as thick as flies over a dead goat, as buzzing and as busy. Why? Did they all agree with Uncle Peter that nothing was like London and that they must, therefore, be in London, this unique spot? Did they all have to be here? Had they been adopted by relations and brought here, or did they do something here which they couldn't do elsewhere? . . . 

And then the streets. Thousands and thousands of omnibuses, taxis, vans and cars, all roaring down the streets together, like an army going into battle, mowing down with angry trumpetings all human life that crossed their path. Were they all necessary? Was human life in London so cheap? Denham, after the first, had no personal anxieties on this head, for she felt competent to evade the assaults of these monsters; neither had she much pity for the victims, for they could probably well be spared, and certainly the population needed thinning; but it seemed a curious way of doing it.

Funny, right, especially that deft little jab at the end? And the theme is funny in all of its variations, even as its underlying point is serious and well-taken:

With these Greshams life was like walking on a tight-rope. The things you mustn't do, mustn't wear. You must, for instance, spend a great deal of money on silk stockings, when, for much less, you could have got artificial silk or Lisle thread. Why?  Did not these meaner fabrics equally clothe the leg? Why had people agreed that one material was the right wear and that others did not do? Why did not anything do?

The same with gloves, with shoes, with frocks, with garments underneath frocks. In all these things people had set up a standard, and if you did not conform to it you were not right, you were left. . . You had, somehow or other, to conform to a ritual, to be like the people you knew. 

It's not only expensive living up to these standards, but it is also a lot of trouble, and if there's one thing Denham hates, it's going to any trouble. She dreams "of a life in which one took practically no trouble at all. One would be alone; one would have no standards; there would be a warm climate and few clothes, and all food off the same plate, if a plate at all. And no conversation." Awash  in the trivial chatter and clutter of London society, Denham goes along to get along, but it's all folly, as far as she's concerned.

The novel follows Denham to marriage (to Arnold Chapel, a writer) and then a pregnancy that (happily, from her perspective) ends in a miscarriage -- imagine how much trouble motherhood would be! Despite these gestures towards normalcy, she still craves escape, and she finds what she thinks is the perfect alternative to the Greshams' lifestyle in an ill-kept Cornish cottage complete with a smuggler's passage to the sea and a cave she sets up as her parlor. Then, when her privacy in this not-so-bucolic retreat is destroyed by a news story about her eccentric choices, she heads off on a bicycle tour, believing that in constant motion she can free herself from the constraints of society.

No such luck, however. Just as her father was drawn into a second marriage by "madness of the blood" and Denham herself also into marriage by her own passionate response to Arnold's kisses, so once again it's passion that thwarts Denham's plans as she has an affair with a fisherman and becomes pregnant again. Her return home feels something like a failure, as she's clearly capitulating, of necessity, to the trivialities and domesticities she has always hated. For all that human relationships are troublesome and social conventions pointless, life outside them is an impossibility, a fantasy. "Love," reflects Denham, "was the great taming emotion":

Oh, life itself was the trap, and love the piece of toasted cheese that baited it, and, the bait once taken, there was no escape.

It's a potentially poignant moment, but I felt disoriented at the end of the novel about how Macaulay really meant to steer us. So society is silly and superficial--but Denham's life and thoughts hardly offer us an exhilarating alternative. She's no untamed genius, no blooming wildflower ruined by her new unnatural environment, no free spirit caught and tragically tamed. She's dull, sluggish, literal, unimaginative, anti-intellectual, and, in her own dogged way, entirely selfish. She can't see any motive for doing anything other than for personal pleasure or satisfaction. She holds up no positive value except individual freedom--and not freedom of a high order (political freedom, freedom of the mind, freedom from oppression, freedom to create or worship or love) but just freedom to do what you feel like doing and nothing else. She thinks books are pointless, plays are "tedious stuff," children are a nuisance. At times I thought perhaps it was Denham who was being satirized ("What a trade it was, increasing the number of books in a world already stocked with them! As bad as parents, who increased the number of people"). I suppose there's no reason why the scoffing couldn't go in both directions. Society: can't live with it, can't live without it! But the novel would have been more compelling to me--it would have seemed like more than an eccentrically amusing story--if there had been a clearer sense of what the costs are of the two options. I guess I like my social comedy to have a stronger undercurrent of moral seriousness. Vanity Fair, this isn't.

I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone else about the novel!

Crewe Train for November!

Well, that was easy.  I'm not sure we've ever had quite a consensus like that.  Rose Macaulay's Crewe Train for November it is.  We'll start discussing Saturday November 17.  See you there! 

Anyone is welcome to join!  If you're new and would like to post here on the blog, please drop me an email at literarycat@hotmail.com and I will send you an invite.  Anyone can register for the forum.

Time to Choose a New Book!

Ready to vote on a book to discuss this fall?  I was going to come up with a theme, but in the end I decided to offer a list of books that I've been wanting to read and hope you might find one amongst them you'd like to read and discuss as well.  Two of these are out of print and I have noted that next to the title.  I did check, however, to make sure all were available from Amazon (and I am sure other book vendors likely will have them, too, or please consider seeing if your local library has them on their shelves).  In both cases there are copies at Amazon in the US, Canada and the UK (and often at very, very cheap prices).  So without further ado:

Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald -- "In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger - fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications - not only of the heart but also of the head - as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside down." (176 pp.)

All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky -- "Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and his grandfather, the tyrannical family patriarch. Their marriage provokes a family feud that cascades down the generations." (272 pp.)

The Innocent Traveller by Ethel Wilson (OP) -- "Precocious in childhood, irrepressible in old age, Miss Topaz Edgeworth’s singular accomplishment is to live out an entire century in unflagging – and mostly oblivious – optimism. At once outmoded and unconventional, tyrannical and benign, Topaz leads a largely unexamined life. But the magical quality of her consciousness, revealed through stunning narrative technique, makes her into one of the most delightful characters in Canadian literature. Published in 1949, The Innocent Traveller is Ethel Wilson’s most original literary achievement." (245 pp.)

Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay (OP) --"On the death of her father, a retired clergyman, Denham Dobie is forced to leave her wild and carefree life in Spain and is thrust into the gossiping highbrow circle of her well-meaning relatives in London. Thrown into a world of publishers and writers, this awkward young woman—a tomboy and rebel at heart—sees their society for the self-absorbed, self-satisfied world it is and offers a devastating, and very funny, social commentary within her own moving story. A bitingly funny, elegantly written comedy of manners from the incomparable Rose Macaulay." (256 pp.)

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen -- "When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Henrietta longs to see a few sights in the foreign city; little does she know what fascinating secrets the Fisher house itself contains.  For Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the relations between Leopold, Henrietta’s agitated hostess Naomi Fisher, Leopold’s mysterious mother, his dead father, and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalizingly. And when Henrietta leaves the house that evening, it is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge usually reserved only for adults." (288 pp.)

I'll tally votes on Friday September 14.  Since we're a little late in choosing, how about we reconvene to discuss on Saturday November 17.  Please cast your vote!

New List Coming Soon!

Sorry for the delay, but a new list of books to vote on will be coming soon!  If you are interested in joining the Slaves and would like to receive an invite to post on the blog, please email me directly (literarycat@hotmail.com).  I need an email address in order to send out invites (and unfortunately do not have access to them behind the scenes).  Anyone can have access to our forum where book discussions take place.  Watch this space for our next book!

Ragnarok - Myth and Skepticism

With her father fighting the war in Northern Africa, a thin child and her mother flee to the English countryside to escape the bombings of London. With fear and danger around every corner this highly sensitive and imaginative child finds the book Asgard and the Gods, and begins to read.  She also has weekly Scripture lessons with the local vicar and makes frequent mention of Pilgrim's Progress. Norse mythology enthralled the child and fueled questions regarding the truth of Christianity which presented an interesting view of religious skepticism.

She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they prayed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. 


And then this insight.

This death did not seem to have done much good.

Before continuing, let me make it clear that I'm not trying to step on toes or start a religious war. I have carefully edited out my personal views. We all find different themes in our reading and this is the one that stood out to me. And that's all.

The Norse mythology was fascinating and I must say, Byatt is a wonderful writer. The descriptive language is beautiful, yet tight and spare. Strunk and White would be proud. I can't pretend every name and place was absorbed, but I got the gist of most of the stories and a few sucked me right in. Loki's snake daughter that ate and ate until she circled the globe was gleefully horrifying.

I noticed many, sometimes startling connections between Norse myths and biblical stories. At the beginning we see a great tree where life seemed to spring from and I immediately thought of the infamous one that supposedly played a role in humanity's downfall. The comparisons could go on and on with the Creation of the world by the gods, Loki being a type of Satan, and an earlier war between the Norse gods with the war in Heaven where the bad angels and Lucifer were cast out. Hel/Hell were there as well. The last battle seemed very Armageddonish to me, complete with a Lake of Fire. Of course Ragnarok spells the end of the gods versus a resurrection and judgment for people.

The thin child was adept at finding these similarities and it strengthened her growing skepticism. I was rather amused that she found the idea of Heaven boring in both accounts. Here, she feels bad about the inescapable fates for both Baldur and Jesus.

The thin child considered Baldur the beautiful. He was a god who was doomed to die...The figure in the painting of Jesus talking to the animals, all white gentleness and golden radiance, was also a god who was doomed to die. 

The end of the gods verses the end of faith. Or in the thin child's instance, the logical thought processes that rejected the whole premise outright. Ultimately she saw no difference in the Norse tales and the biblical ones. Her conclusion was this.

That the story had always been there, and the actors and always known it. 

Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

I procrastinate everything. Since Byatt's Ragnarok is short, I thought starting it the Friday night before a Tuesday Slaves of Golconda discussion deadline would be ample time. Unfortunately, I ran into that Byatt thing that sometimes trips me up, where she's obsessively going on and on listing, categorizing, something that doesn't line up with my own items-worth-obssessing-over criteria. Remember the marbles in The Biographer's Tale? You have to be in the right mood for that kind of thing. (It's why I hold the opinion that while Byatt at her best is a better writer than her sister Margaret Drabble, Drabble is a more consistently interesting storyteller--for me, at any rate.)

And so when I reached Byatt's Midgard serpent-long list of creatures that live in the sea, with subcategories for all the kinds of sharks and crabs, and her lengthy list of every type of animal, vegetable, mineral, disease, etc., that cried for Baldur to be released from the underworld, I was ready to put this title on my own mental list of Byatts That Don't Work for Me (unlike the more lengthy list of ones I love--The Children's Book's in the number one position there). I couldn't keep from zoning out.

And I hated that. I have such a shallow background in Norse mythology and I'd bought this book the moment it was released in the UK in order to remedy that. Surely the fault was all mine.

So Monday night I started rereading the book that failed to hold my attention on Friday night. I was more focused than I'd been over the weekend, plus in the meantime I'd done some dipping into The Prose Edda and Norwegian Mythology, which I conveniently had--unread-- on my shelves. (I definitely want to read The Prose Edda after this quick dip.)

I was much happier with it the second time round. I even appreciated the lyrical nature of the ineluctable listing of things.

What I, here in the Bible Belt, found most interesting first time through and what I continued to marvel at on the second was the young Byatt's ability to reject Christianity at such an early age. She finds the Old Testament and New Testament gods numbing: neither "the sweet,cotton-wool meek and mild one, the barbaric sacrificial gloating one. . .. made her want to write, or fed her imagination."

The thin child walked through the fair field in all weathers, her satchel of books and pens, with the gas-mask hanging from it, like Christian's burden when he walked in the fields, reading in his Book. She thought long and hard, as she walked, about the meaning of belief. She did not believe the stories in Asgard and the Gods. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive. She read the Greek stories at school, and said to herself that there had once been people who brought 'belief' to these capricious and quarrelsome gods and goddesses, but she herself read them as she read fairy stories, Puss in Boots, Baba Yaga, brownies, pucks, and fairies, foolish and dangerous, nymphs, dryads, hyrdra and the white winged horse, Pegasus, all these offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be. But they didn't live in her, and she didn't live in them.

The idea of eternity bored her. A string of days "going nowhere" bored her. She prefers the "stories that ended, instead of going in circles and cycles," finding them "grimly satisfactory." The Norse gods who know Ragnarok, the final battle of the gods and the end of the world, is coming, but are too stupid or too resigned to letting the story they find themselves in play out, are the ones she returns to.


Before Ragnarok, I knew of Byatt and Drabble's mother primarily through Drabble's writings, a portrayal that Byatt's taken issue with. Drabble wrote The Peppered Moth in an attempt to better understand her mother, claiming in the novel's afterward she "went down into the underworld" looking for her, mentioning a myth in which a woman rubbed herself with dead rat water in order to gain admittance to the underworld so that she could search for her loved one there. Drabble said writing about her mother left her unable to get rid of the smell of dead rat and mentions feeling biased in favor of her father. Her experience of the mother was one of a manipulative, intellectually frustrated depressive prone to outbursts of rage. Nonetheless, Byatt has stated that Drabble was the mother's favorite.

In Ragnarok, Byatt's describing the time when the same woman was actually happy. She was a highly intelligent woman, "gallant and resourceful in wartime," permitted to teach,  shoehorned back into the life of a housewife, suffering "a fall into the quotidian," once her husband returns. "Dailiness defeated her. She made herself lonely and slept in the afternoons, saying she was suffering from neuralgia and sick headaches. The thin child came to identify the word 'housewife' with the word 'prisoner'."

Despite the war, the nights spent behind blackout curtains, worrying about the Germans "dealing death out of the night sky," the young Byatt finds these years a kind of paradise. If her family had not evacuated from the city, her asthma may have killed her. The bleak Norse myths hum in her head while she's walking through a countryside covered with flowers. When the family returns to urban life, her father takes an axe to a wild ash tree that's rooted itself on the sill of the garden shed in their walled garden. For a child who's loved the World-Ash, Yggdrasil, the removal of the tree closes a gate in her head. She's now on the quotidian side of life.

Ragnarok

I don't know much about Norse mythology. Sure, I know some of the names of the gods but if you asked me to tell you one of the stories I draw a blank. Ask me about Greek myths and I can babble on for awhile. So I was really looking forward to A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. It is part of the Cannongate myths series and if you haven't discovered any of those books yet you are in for a treat.

Byatt chose to not retell the myth as its narrative story as so many others have done like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and Victor Pelevin's Helmet of Horror. Instead we have "the thin child," evacuated from London to the countryside during WWII with her mother, her father gone off in the Air Force flying over Africa. The thin child reads Pilgrim's Progress and another book she found, Asgard and the Gods. Byatt relates several different stories of the gods in order to set the stage for Ragnarok, the ultimate destruction. The stories are interspersed with the thoughts and worries of the thin child who finds the story of the Norse gods, and Ragnarok especially, much more satisfying than the story of the Christian god in whom she is supposed to believe.

The story of Ragnarok and the complete destruction of the gods and all life mirrors the darkness and destruction of the ongoing war, the war that seems like it will never end, the war the thin child is certain her father will not return from. Leading up to Ragnarok we learn of Loki's monstrous children. The gods manage to contain them for a time and life goes on. But when Frigg tries to guarantee that her son, Baldur the Beautiful, will never be harmed, she unknowingly sets up the beginning of the end. Frigg gets promises from every living creature to not harm her son but of course, she misses one: the mistletoe (the story is very much like Achilles and his mother Thetis dipping him in the river Styx except for his heel where she was holding onto him). Loki discovers the mistletoe and fashions a spear from it and gives it to Baldur's brother who, along with all the gods was playing at throwing things at Baldur and watching them turn aside harmlessly. Baldur dies, the gods and all the world are devastated by grief. Loki continues to stir up trouble and his children escape their bonds and so begins the war between the gods in which mutual destruction is assured. After all the gods die, nothing is left but darkness.

Yet while the thin child reads of destruction and the real world seems to be heading for its own Ragnarok, she is also in a sort of paradise. The thin child has asthma but out in the countryside and away for the dirty city air she is able to breathe again. She walks to and from school everyday through a beautiful meadow full of flowers and butterflies. She experiences a kind of freedom that she did not have in the city.

Unlike the gods, humanity does not destroy itself, this time, it feels as though there is a this time in the story as though next time we might not be so lucky. The thin child's father returns unharmed and they all go back to their London home. But for the thin child, it is as though she has lost paradise. The dirty city air makes breathing difficult again. She has lost her meadow, and even though her father takes on the project of creating a garden, it is not the same especially after he cuts down a tree the thin child liked. "Dailiness" defeats both the thin girl and her mother. During the war the mother worked as a teacher and now in peacetime she is not to work, she becomes bored and lonely:

The thin child came to identify the word 'housewife' with the word 'prisoner'. Fear of imprisonment haunted the thin child, although she did not quite acknowledge this.

A gate closes in the thin child's mind and on the other side of the gate is Asgard and the gods and "the bright black world into which she had walked in the time of her evacuation," and the end of things.

Ragnarok is short and a fairly fast read but it is also a book to savor. I very much enjoyed it and was left feeling a bit sad at the end for the thin girl and for the gods of Asgard. Byatt was also kind enough to include a short bibliography for further reading which I hope to try a few books from sometime.

Cross posted at So Many Books

Why are myths so powerful?
Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, by A.S. Byatt. Grove Press (2012), Hardcover, 192 pages.

Byatt captured me right from the start, plunging me into her vigorous rendition of Nordic myths unfamiliar to me.   The precision of her words, the pace and tension of her writing, and the grim awareness of impending doom were compelling.  Yet my question remained.  Why are these myths so powerful for me, an adult not often drawn to myths?

In part, Byatt answers that question through her creation of “the thin girl,” bright, curious, and asthmatic, living in the countryside to be away from the bombs falling on London.   The story of her need for these stories is interwoven with Byatt’s telling of the myths.  The thin girl lives with war.  Her father is fighting in Africa, and she has no hope he will return.  Planes fly over the countryside, and news of fighting and death is inescapable.  She is taken to the church with its stain glass window of Jesus, meek and mild, surrounded by bunny rabbits, but Christianity seems dull and irrelevant to her.  It is the Nordic myths, with all their colorful gore that hold her attention.  She doesn’t “believe” them, as she is told to believe in Christianity, but “the myths stay coiled inside her.”  The death of the gods is very real for her, something she needs to read about.  Resurrection can be ignored.  At night she dreams of her parents made helpless by the Nazi.  She likes the fact that that the gods can be stupid and dumb and will be judged, unlike the all-good, all-powerful God of Christianity.  When the war is over and her father returns unharmed, the family goes back to a London suburb, the thin girl misses the countryside and the myths she read there.

Byatt ends the book with her own views on myths and their importance.  She sees myth as depicting impersonal forces without the personal, psychological forces of fairy tales.  They also lack assured happy endings of other narratives.  Byatt also confirms the autobiographical nature of “the thin girl.”  In addition, she writes of how we today face the same kind of lurking dangers as global warming and chaos approach.

This week, as I read Ragnarok, I was overwhelmed with my own health problems, my dog was dangerously hurt, and budget cuts that were threatened at the library my husband directs.  Like the thin girl, danger was palatable for me.  More generally, I cannot escape the vulnerability of our entire globe, the ongoing financial crises, the fiasco of American politics, and global warming.  Somehow, the gods and their self-inflicted destruction give me more satisfying images of upcoming disasters than all the charts and videos of future floods and heat waves.  Because I can visualize the death of the gods, as Byatt tells it, I can control my own panic about the future.  And like the thin girl, we have all survived.

Read on my NOOK

Ragnarok

Whilst it is the business of myth to put powerfully enigmatic stories in the places that we find numinous and inexplicable – like the start of the world, for instance – probably none are quite so fascinated by destruction and disaster as the Norse Myths. The one word ‘Ragnarok’ most vividly evokes this collection of stories, and refers to the final apocalyptic battle of the Gods in which they all die, bringing their world down with them. It was interesting to me to think that this was the myth that A. S. Byatt would choose to update for the Canongate series, when I think of her as such a controlled writer, so coolly organised and mentally astute. What she has written is a tribute to the difficult nature of Norse mythology, an unflinching account of its radical strangeness, and its dark, demonic passions. And then she has added on the end a neat, intelligent overview that carefully steers these awkward myths into an academic parking place.

Unlike other writers in this series, Byatt has resisted the impulse to turn the myths into an allegorical story. Instead, she has chosen to focus on their reception by using as a focaliser the autobiographical figure of the ‘thin child’. The thin child has recently been evacuated to the country with her mother, her father being sent to certain death (she believes) in the air force. She is reading Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and then this, Asgard and the Gods, written by an academic German author. For the thin child, the Norse myths have emotional resonance with her own world, plunged into warfare that may well last forever, or so it seems. They certainly make more sense of what is happening around her than the gentle, tepid myths of Christianity which she wishes she could believe but cannot. The narrative that unfolds now follows on from, and elaborates, the thin child’s experience of reading the Norse myths.

The creation of the world in which the Norse myths take place is a perplexing one. In the gulf of nothingness, Ginnungagap, stretched between icy wastes to the north, hellish hot ones to the south, a giant is formed, Ymir. The first Norse Gods set upon the giant and slaughtered him, making their world out of his body. In its centre they placed the home of the Gods, Asgard, and around it were the gardens of Midgard, where other giants lurked. Odin, the leader of the gods lived in Valhalla, the hall where those slaughtered in the endless daily battles were brought back to life. For these Gods are even more capricious and argumentative than the Greek and Roman ones, existing only in conflict. Somewhere in this world (and if anyone can enlighten me as to how they fit in, please do), there are two great natural resources, the tree of life, Yggdrasil, and the sea-tree, Rándrasill. These are important in Byatt’s retelling of the myth as they support a huge and complex eco-system, a rich flourishing of plant and animal life that spawn great passages of lyrical, concentrated Byatt prose. The almost excessive attention the author gives to this natural world is there, I think, to balance out the destructive nature of the Gods, but also to give the reader an idea of what they waste and plunder.

At the centre of the Norse myths is the figure of Loki, the God of mischief and misrule. Loki is clever and intelligent, but he is also irresponsible, a trickster. His power is that of the demonic, the fierce uprush of energetic life that can be turned to good or evil, the ferocious spirit of humankind that metes out creation and destruction without purpose or plan. We see this in his dual family life – one ‘regular’ family in Asgard, but three demonic children, spawned from his shapeshifting liaison with a wolf-giantess. These children are suitably disparate – a wolf, a snake and a giantess. Knowing that these children spell doom to the Gods, Odin does his best to contain them. The giantess, Hel, is sent to the freezing cold lands in the north to look over those who have not died in battle. The snake is thrown far into the sea, where she grows outlandishly large, eventually swallowing her own tail as she encircles the world. The wolf is set upon by the Gods who try to tie him down, and finally manage it on the third attempt. This is the thing about the Norse myths: they are hard to hold in the mind because they exist on a foundation that is inconsistent, jagged, disparate. You can see it in the impossible-to-imagine world of the myths, you can see it in the three ‘unorthodox’ children that Loki fathers. And it struck me again in the magical bindings the Gods create to hold Fenris the wolf down, fashioned on commission by the dwarves:

‘And the dwarves made a supple skein from unthings. There were six, woven together: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. The thing was light as air and smooth as silk, a long, delicate ribbon.

The world of the Norse myths has its seemingly constant repetitions, like the resurrection of the Gods, but this is a pecularly constructed world, one that shivers on the edge of imbalance for all its richness and recklessness. When the Gods suspect that Loki is behind the death of their beloved Baldaur, the beautiful God who brings spring and liveliness into their world, they decide they’ve had enough of his behaviour. They track him down and overcome him. But this whole story, the only thing that feels like a proper story in Byatt’s retelling, the death of Baldaur and the God’s revenge, sets in motion the ultimate destruction of the world through an entropy that ressembles environmental crisis:

The spring of the world was gone. There was a rainbow but it was watery and incomplete, patches of hectic colour here and there in the thick cloud, which never seemed to lift. The tides, swelled by tears, were irregular and unpredictable. Things on the earth drooped in their wetness which would not quite dry. Yggdrasil had stains of mould and decay. Rándrasill was scraped bare, in places, by rasping tongues licking up tearwater. A kind of sloth was at the heart of things.

Loki breaks free, followed by his bad children, and in the ensuing battle with the Gods, everything, but everything, is destroyed. Having recounted the myths from the perspective of the thin child, who is pleased with this finality, Byatt then adds a coda from the perspective of the adult she has become. Myths, she says, are not explanations, they are not allegories, and yet the contemporary parallel with a world spinning towards ecological disaster exerts its own magnetism:

If I were writing an allegory [Loki] would be the detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration. As it is the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their armies and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.

This is a perfectly shaped ending to a series of myths that resist coherence and easy assimilation, that are rich in resonance but recount folly and misadventure with the greatest possible consequences. Byatt writes a strange, hybrid text here, neither story nor analysis, although containing elements of both, and as ever her work requires an alert and responsive reader. She doesn’t make this heterogeneous narrative slip down the reading throat. But she gives us a lot to think about, which is precisely what a good myth should do.