The Getting of Wisdom – Henry Handel Richardson
Henry Handel was actually Ethel Florence, and she went to a girls’ school in Melbourne, Australia similar to the one Laura attends in this novel. But, according to Germaine Greer’s Introduction, the author’s career at school was one of multiple successes, whereas Laura blunders from one social disaster to another. Upon this intense, impetuous twelve-year-old newcomer the girls wield their double-barbed cruelties of ridicule and exclusion. Laura isn’t presented in the protective garb of a sympathetic character; she’s replete with flaws and weaknesses, among which self-centeredness and neediness stand out. Her efforts to conform and to impress lead her into her worst transgression. It occurs when she stays for a few days at a minister’s house and returns to tell the girls about her romantic involvement with the handsome, married Mr. Robertson (something that has absolutely no basis in fact). This is libel, but it makes her admired, so she feels impelled to embellish her story with additional “spicy happenings.” She is “as little able as a comic actor to resist pandering to the taste of the public . . .” When her lies are uncovered she becomes even more of a pariah (mainly because the other girls feel duped). Though Laura suffers during her years at the school, there’s a light, comic touch to the way Richardson depicts her experiences. But there’s empathy too – Laura is real and relatable, and I was relieved at the exuberant ending, which shows her with spirit intact. This is a very entertaining book, and an oddly instructive one. Young girls who find themselves in a situation in which they feel like square pegs should read The Getting of Wisdom. I think it would offer them some solace and some hope. *

Concluding – Henry Green
I’ll begin with a spoiler: the missing girl is never found, nor is she accounted for. In fact, none of the issues presented (e.g., will Mr. Rock get to remain in his cottage?) are settled in any way. Green creates people and scenes with a remarkable vibrancy; that was his thing, and there it ended for him. His two successes (Loving and Living) are amorphous mood pieces in which people talk; in those books his weakness at plotting was not a factor. But this novel is made up of multiple dilemmas involving at least a dozen characters. Near the end he continues to pile on new complexities, as if he were unable to curb his imagination. Long before the last page of Concluding I had concluded that nothing would be resolved. Though I felt a bit gypped about Mary (the missing girl), I should have known better than to expect Green to play by the conventional rules of narrative. Even his quirky style of prose is something the reader has to adapt to. He wrote for himself, not for the reader.

The Professor and the Madman – Simon Winchester
If you have an interest in how the Oxford English Dictionary came into existence, this is the book for you. If you have little or no interest you may still find Winchester’s account to be an engrossing read. He focuses on two men: one a scholar in charge of the project, the other a man who, for twenty years, contributed mightily from his cells at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Dr. William Minor, an American surgeon who served in the Civil War (where, possibly, the horrendous events at the Battle of the Wilderness set off his mental decline), was undoubtedly insane. But he was also brilliant – extremely well-read, an accomplished flutist and painter – and when the call for contributions came from Oxford, he leapt to the task. No doubt it gave purpose to his days, a feeling of being a part of a grand enterprise. I felt, in a sense, that the scope of this enterprise (which took seventy years to complete) was driven by the obsessions of all parties involved. The book is short for such a vast topic – a little over two hundred pages – and moves along at a nice clip, mixing scholarship with the sometimes sad, sometimes lurid story of Dr. Minor. The Professor of the title, James Murray, gets much less attention than the Madman, for whom Winchester obviously has a great deal of sympathy. The last word in the OED, which was completed in 1927, was zyxt. In my American Heritage Dictionary (which I’ll stick to, thank you very much) the last entry is xyster. As for the meanings of these words, you can always look them up.

Small Town – Sloan Wilson
What does it say about me that I read all five hundred pages of what is, literary-wise, a mess? I was aware of the book’s many deficiencies, yet I kept going, and was entertained rather than displeased. Or, rather, my displeasure had entertainment value – often I’d think, You don’t mean Wilson is going to go there? Yes, indeed, whenever he moved into love and sex (which he did a lot), he was actually going straight into the flagrantly improbable. His awkward depiction of women – their words and actions – was cringe-worthy, but it was also amusing. So, like an afternoon soap opera addict, I kept reading, carried along on the smooth flow of the prose. As for plot, our hero (a famous photographer) returns to the small town where he grew up and instantaneously falls in love with thirty-year-old Rose. But their bliss of total commitment runs into a snag when, during their first sexual act, she has a heart attack; then, at their wedding reception, another heart attack kills her (I had never believed in her, and so was uninvolved). Her seventeen-year-old sister Ann comes to Ben’s rescue, making sexual advances which he nobly (though wavering at times) resists. Ben, by the way, is forty-five, and his son is the boyfriend of Ann, so there’s a sort of triangle going on. A bunch of other plot lines are introduced as major ones and then allowed to wither and die. They die because Wilson was interested only in Ben Winslow’s emotional travails. Ben is initially forceful and competent, but by the end he’s a hapless soul, clinging to a few hopes. I think this book was very personal to Wilson, and was written with great sincerity. Despite all the sappiness of Small Town, it still manages to impart a sense of loss and longing.

The Way Home – Henry Handel Richardson
In this second installment of Richardson’s trilogy there’s less of the sprawl found in Australia Felix. Richard Mahoney and his wife Mary (previously Polly) are the main focus. As for what befalls them, they move to England (despite Mary’s protests); Richard hates it there, so they return to Australia; some stock he has in a mine takes off and overnight he becomes a wealthy man; he stops practicing medicine and builds his dream house, which he calls Ultima Thule; Mary gives birth to a son and twin girls. It all sounds wonderful, right? Wrong, and this is due to Richard’s congenitally dissatisfied and restless nature. Mary, no longer the seventeen-year-old girl who idolized Richard, begins to openly rebel at having to deal with his “unreckonable impulses.” Richard feels that she’s a narrow person with whom he doesn’t share one single interest, liking or point of view. Arguments occur with growing frequency; when Richard begins attending seances (in which, among tilting tables, the dead speak through a medium), Mary expresses her exasperation: “. . . if these really are spirits who came back, it doesn’t make me think much of heaven. That the dead can still take an interest in such silly, footling things!” Despite the rift in their relationship, Richard never loses sight of Mary’s inherent goodness, and she’s bound to a man who has been the central figure in her life. On the closing page, as matters start on a downward plunge, Mary feels a “fierce uprush of pity for him, so solitary, so self-centered, so self-tormented. Oh, that he might be spared the worst!” I don’t think the author will spare Richard anything. I’ll soon find out, for I’m going directly to Ultima Thule.

Ultima Thule – Henry Handel Richardson
Richard entrusts the investment of his money to a crook, and as a result he and Mary are left in greatly reduced circumstances. He begins practicing medicine again. He moves here and there; his initial enthusiasm for a new place blinds him to practicalities; when he becomes disillusioned (and he always does), he plunges into the depths of despair. This recurring sequence wears thin for Mary; she feels bitterness as she hears him waxing eloquent about some half-baked scheme; no matter what she says, he will do as he pleases, and she and the children will suffer the consequences. She begins to tell him the truth about himself, to put into heavy words that which he doesn’t want to hear. This flawed man is under great stress; he suffers one disappointment after another, one step down the social ladder after another; he feels the debilitating inroads of age. But all that doesn’t support the abrupt mental disintegration that takes place. When he’s with Mary he’s either argumentative or contrite, but he’s a coherent human being. Alone he’s tormented, fear-racked. When things finally descend to the point where he loses touch with reality, he became inexplicable to me. It’s here that Mary fills the void. She’s no saint (her no-nonsense attitude toward life has a harsh side), but what’s impressive is her loyalty to husband and children and her determination to make the best of things. There’s a third character who plays an important role. Cuffy, their son, observes his parents, and through his reactions we can feel the enormous emotional toll their problems are having on him. At the end Mary takes the lowly job of postmistress at a desolate township. She rescues Richard from an insane asylum, but there’s nothing left of this once-prideful man. Mentally and physically he’s in a near-vegetative state. Yet, on his death bed, he rouses himself to utter his last words: “Dear wife!” These words, to Mary, are like “balsam on her heart. All his love for her, his gratitude for her, were in them: they were her reward, and a full and ample one, for a lifetime of unwearied sacrifice.” On one level I didn’t believe that this broken man would be capable of uttering those words. At the end of the last novel of the trilogy Richardson lets her intense feelings take over. But those feelings were ones I had come to share, so I accepted a last affirmation.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney – Henry Handel Richardson
Ethel Florence Lindesey Richardson was born into an affluent family in Melbourne. Her father was a doctor (as was Richard Mahoney); he was committed to an mental asylum (as was Richard); he died of syphilis. At the time of his death Ethel was nine (as was Cuffy; and, like Cuffy, she was a musical prodigy). Her mother took up work as a postmistress (as did Mary). This novel clearly drew from the author’s personal experiences. There’s one element missing from the fictional story: syphilis. And it is exactly that disease which would account for Richard’s rapid mental deterioration. But, in the context of the story, there was no way it could play a role. Peter Craven, in his lively Introduction to the Text Classics edition of the trilogy, describes Richardson’s use of the skeletons in her closet as “gargantuan and unbalanced.” These words are not to be taken in a negative sense; they convey the book’s bursting-at-the-seams quality. He also notes that the author “chose to embrace naturalism at precisely the moment when those conventions died.” The novels that make up Fortunes were published between 1917 and 1929, a time when a different sensibility – that of Proust and Joyce – was changing the literary landscape. Craven characterizes the author’s style as “stately, rhythmical, visually precise and full of the points of view and idioms of the characters it wrestles with.” It is also “high, nearly stiff” and “incorporates a good deal of European polish.” (Think of Mann’s Buddenbrooks.) “It’s a workmanlike technique but the cumulative effect, through every detail of the articulation, is one of truth.” The truth includes a picture of Australian life that is exceedingly bleak. (Richardson left her native country when she was eighteen and came back only once, to do research for Fortunes; the Great Australian Novel was written by an exile.) Craven describes Richardson’s accomplishment as a “big, blind stumbling block of a novel, this love letter written in blood and bile to a vanished Australia and the father whose ghost would always be heard.”

Australia Felix – Henry Handel Richardson
Ethel Florence Richardson chose to publish, in the early 1900s, under a male pseudonym. This Aussie lady had an ability to write narrative fiction that is Trollopian in its scope and flow; for four hundred pages I remained unflaggingly absorbed in the fortunes of Richard Mahoney. Over the several decades covered, we sees signs of emotional problems, such as his intense dislike of the godforsaken land he’s stuck in and his sense of isolation from the people around him. Yet he seems stable and sensible, he works hard to achieve a comfortable life as a doctor in frontier Australia, and he loves his wife. Polly is, for much of the book, presented as simple, obedient and nothing more (in Richard’s eyes “pure, clean and sweet”); the lack of conflict in their relationship is offset by a large cast of secondary characters, all with dilemmas. Things ramble along pleasurably, but at the end my suspicion that Richardson set out without a firm grasp as to where she was headed was solidified by some questionable plot twists. Richard is suddenly in the grip of a debilitating depression. Despite this he still has enough energy (and optimism) to sell all his worldly goods in preparation for an arduous return trip to England, where he will have to start over from scratch. Polly, who at this point has a mind of her own, is justifiably appalled. In the final scene they’re aboard a ship. As it departs, Richard asks Polly to come on deck; but she, “with an eye to the future, was already encoffined in her narrow berth.” I felt that the author had arranged a setup for the second installment of a trilogy: How will Richard and Polly fare in England? Read The Way Home and find out – and I care enough that I will. The faults of this novel, such as its haphazard structure, are offset by its strengths. Faults can even become virtues in the hands of a prodigious talent: that overly-large cast of peripheral characters, though often difficult to sort out, serve to create a colorful tapestry of life.  *

Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
The novel opens at a funeral for a woman whose descent began with a tingling in her arm; soon she’s engulfed in madness and pain. Vernon Halliday, a former lover, comments that she would have killed herself if she had been able to. He’s speaking to his “oldest friend” and another of her lovers, Clive Linley. Vernon is the editor of a newspaper, Clive a composer. Shortly after the funeral, Clive experiences a tingling in his hand; then Vernon begins to get the sense that he doesn’t exist. Worried that they will go the way of poor Molly, both men promise that, if one of them is disabled, the other will intercede and end his life. But the tingling and the feeling of non-existence disappear entirely from the book, and we go off into two separate story lines. Clive works on a symphony, and we get lengthy meditations on music and creativity. Quite boring stuff, though its inclusion boosts the word count above the novella category. As for Vernon, he’s gotten possession of photos of a would-be prime minister in drag, and decides to print them. The yellow journalism part is more lively, but at this point I felt mired in a deeply-ingrained grubbiness; not helping matters was the fact that the two main characters (and all minor ones) were eminently distasteful. Clive botches his symphony and Vernon gets fired as editor; both “friends” blame the other for their downfall and go into an attack mode that can only, considering its virulence, be attributed to mutual psychosis. And it’s here that the city of Amsterdam comes into play. Vernon invites himself there to attend a performance of Clive’s symphony. The men are pretending that they’ve patched things up, but they still despise one another. So what are they planning? It seems that in liberal Holland some unsavory types with medical degrees will, for a price, eliminate inconvenient relatives. McEwan had included the strange symptoms and the death pact at the beginning because each man intends to have the other killed. If all this seems inane, the final twelve page stretch is the capper. At a party Vernon and Clive have spiked drinks that they maneuver the other into drinking (“Cheers!”). Later, drugged and hallucinating, they’re visited in their hotel rooms by a doctor and his nurse (whom they both believe to be Molly); they joyfully sign release forms and are dispatched by injections. McEwan was credited by many critics as being witty and wicked, but flailing about with a barbed stick is neither. What is truly amusing about this nasty, empty little novel is that it won the Booker Prize.

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Wharton cared enough about her three characters and their predicament to build a solid foundation from which she could move into the rarefied realm of passion. At first she observes the rites and ceremonies of upper crust New Yorkers, circa 1870, with an amused detachment. But when the focus narrows to Newland Archer’s evolving and shifting feelings for two women, things darken. Newland loves Ellen but marries May. Timing and circumstances play a deciding role: if, before he met Ellen, he hadn't already been engaged to May (and thus committed, according to the dictates of society), all would be different. Wharton imparts an element of tragedy into this situation by making us believe that Newland and Ellen were meant for one another. His marriage to May is a mistake only in the light of his feelings for someone else. He and Ellen could cast convention aside, but she refuses to be part of destroying a relationship. Newland would destroy his marriage, for he finds it a prison keeping him from what he wants. He proposes to Ellen that they flee to another place where they will be “simply two human beings who love one another, and are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.” Ellen responds with: “Oh, my dear – where is that country? Have you ever been there?” She shares Newland’s feelings but not his romanticized viewpoint. In this novel of unconsummated love there’s one solitary kiss. May turns out to be resourceful in holding onto her marriage; a strategic deception brings this affair of the heart to an abrupt end. Ellen moves to Paris and Newland buckles down to a life as husband and father. The last chapter, which takes place twenty-six years later, was a risky proposition, but Wharton has such a firm grip on her material that she uses this new perspective to deepen the situation. We learn that Newland found fulfillment with May. Though he looks back at Ellen as “the flower of life” that he had missed, he doesn’t mourn the loss; he has relegated her to an unattainable vision whose rightful place is as a memory. The question of “What if?” has great weight. What would Newland’s and Ellen’s life have been, together? The ache that thought evokes attests to how fully this novel succeeds. *