A Life in Letters - George Orwell
In his carefully composed letters Orwell comes across as a man who was sane and sensible and reserved. When he does express his state of mind – or the state of his health – it’s presented in a reasonable way. No outbursts – except exasperation regarding some political subject. Politics was Orwell’s first passion (and definitely not mine, so much of his correspondence was of no interest to me; I did a lot of skimming). Orwell lived in near-poverty for most of his adult life; his income came mainly from doing reviews. He finally began to make money with the publication of Animal Farm in 1945 – five years before his death. He wrote four novels before AF, and none of them sold well. He avidly disliked two of those early works (A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying) and wanted them suppressed. He stated in one letter that he wasn’t really a novelist. He felt that his talents were more fitted for nonfiction, such as The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, which are politically oriented (as are his fable, AF, and 1984). Writing came hard for him, but he was a diligent worker. For much of his life he was a sick man (tuberculosis), and he faced his illness with stoicism. In his last letters he expresses a wish for five more years; he felt he had something to say, and the world was finally listening. He was married twice. I was grateful that Peter Davison, an Orwell scholar who put together this compilation, included the letters his first wife, Eileen, wrote; they’re entertaining, lively, funny, and have a spontaneity that Orwell’s lack. She emerges as a flesh and blood personality, and I felt emotionally drawn to her. She too had serous health problems; her last, upbeat letter to Orwell was written as she was about to go into the operating room for removal of an ovarian cyst; she died under the anaesthetic. I don’t believe their marriage was a bed of roses; I also felt (perhaps unfairly) that Orwell was a neglectful husband, too involved with his writing and political activities. They adopted an infant son, Richard, and Orwell had deep concern for the boy’s welfare. In his last, mostly bedridden years he proposed marriage to several women. It was a practical proposition, as befits this practical man (he noted that, as widows, they would receive royalties). But he also wrote one of the women that he needed “someone to be fond of me.” This plea, coming from a man like Orwell, is touching. He married Sonia Brownell – the ceremony took place in his hospital room; a few months later he would die in that same room. His headstone has the words “Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair” and gives the dates that span the forty-seven years he lived and wrote.

The Journals of John Cheever
The nearly 400 dense pages that make up this book represent only one twentieth of the words Cheever wrote in the journals he kept for over forty years. To publish all the three to four million words wouldn’t be feasible, and the decision as to what to include was made by Cheever’s longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb. He has omitted the journals from the forties, which, he writes, “. . . seemed considerably less consistent in their intensity and quality than what was to follow . . .” Indeed, quality was of concern to Cheever. These pages contain carefully crafted prose. Even the last entry, written three days before his death, is a lovely piece of writing. He admits to the “narcissism” (that’s the word he uses) of his journal-keeping: “At the back of my mind there is the possibility of someone’s reading them in my absence and after my death, and exclaiming over my honesty, my purity, my valor, etc. What a good man he is!” This is a self-conscious undertaking, meant to impress. His perceptiveness and powers of observation are often on display. He also includes lengthy descriptions of nature and of people he happens to observe; there are scenes that could come off the pages of a novel or short story. For me this amounted to extraneous clutter, and I found myself skimming. What I wanted were his thoughts and feelings, and there is much of that. He could be unsparing of himself and others (foremost his wife). We learn of his miserable marriage (one which he describes as “obscene and grotesque” but which lasted for over forty years); his alcoholism (which he overcame late in life); his depression; his rampant bisexuality. He had a complex and contradictory nature which he struggled with. Considering that struggle, I should have developed more sympathy for him than I did. Often I didn’t like the man. As for those above mentioned virtues he wanted to inspire in the reader, I thought he often didn’t face the truth. Such as why his wife came to loath him; reading between the lines, I could see how she would get to that point. As for purity, he could be lyrical about love and sex, but he could also be extremely gross. Valor and goodness are things he aspired to, at least in words; his wife and children would be the ones who could say whether he achieved those virtues. At times I wondered why his family allowed the journals to be published (maybe money played a role). He kept them for his eyes only until three years before his death, when he floated the idea of their publication to his son. When they did come out (first as excepts published in The New Yorker) he had been dead for years, but his family members had to live with words that must have been extremely painful. I wonder if he was aware of that. Or if he just didn’t care.

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill - John Cheever

How good was Cheever? Very good as a prose stylist. The problem is that too many stories are infused with yearning. Yearning for beauty, sexual love, youth. The yearning is elusive; it cannot be satisfied. This theme, when repeated, becomes tiresome. In the worst story of the lot, “O Youth and Beauty,” a wife shoots her drunken husband as he sets out to run the hurdles in their living room (he had once been a star athlete). Unfortunately, I wanted a lot of the people in this collection to be put out of their misery. The best story is the shortest and simplest. In “The Worm in the Apple” the residents of Shady Hill closely observe a happy family; they’re waiting (and hoping) to find the worm at the center of their life. It never appears.

Exile and the Kingdom - Albert Camus (French)

Camus was a philosopher who wrote fiction – and did it very well in The Plague and The Fall. But in most of these stories the philosophical aspect takes precedence. The characters and plot (which is what I value in a work of fiction) are of secondary importance to an overriding Idea – one which often remained obscure to me. I was left feeling detached and unsatisfied.

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories - Machado de Assis (Portugese)

Many of these unique stories dwell exclusively in the mind and emotions; some are about people with obsessions. The long title story is an exploration of sanity. Who is sane, who is insane? By framing those questions from an intriguing perspective Machado succeeds in undermining our standard assumptions. The prose (which was translated by different people) is lovely; I felt as if I were being carried along on a strong river current in the night. But because Machado attempted to capture something so elusive, the experience provided by these stories is limited and fragmentary. I can’t categorize this collection – but Machado always defied categorization.

The River - Rumer Godden

Initially I found this book pleasant enough, but I started to get annoyed. Irritated with little Harriet’s contemplating the Big Issues of Life (she’s a budding writer of great talent). Captain John, with his tragic war injuries and his melancholy presence, struck me as right out of a movie (a young Ronald Colman would be good in the role). Then there was the business about Harriet’s brother and the cobra. How could a reader possibly not know, many chapters before it happened, that the boy would be killed by the snake? Not only were Godden’s situations staged in too obvious a way, but her characters were stagy too.

Jane and Prudence - Barbara Pym

Good Pym. She has the ability to involve the reader with her ordinary characters (actually, all people are odd, if one looks at them closely, which this author does). Of the two women, Pym didn’t quite get Prudence; I never believed in her affairs (which weren’t fully explored – how far did she go?). Jane was much more solidly grounded. All the men were vain, selfish and fatuous, and this was unfortunate (come on, Barbara, you can be more fair-minded than that!). Still, no meanness was intended. One of Pym’s strengths was that she knew the sadness and loneliness of life, and how we must cope; she coped by absorbing herself in the harmless occupation of writing quiet, humorous, perceptive novels.

What Makes Sammy Run? - Budd Schulberg
Through the eyes of Schulberg’s narrator we observe Sammy Glick, one of the more fascinating characters in American fiction. I believed in Sammy – his amorality and his abilities, his rise from copy boy to Hollywood mogul. He could do it. Every scene with him exudes energy – except the last ones. The novel peters out badly at the end. Sammy gets his comeuppance, but it’s not believable (Sammy is nobody’s dupe). A re-creation of his youth is supposed to provide reasons for how he got to be the way he is, but it doesn’t do justice to the complexity of Sammy. Schulberg abandoned the character he had breathed life into. It’s as if a decision was made: this can’t simply be a story of an avaricious man who climbs over people on his way to the top. So Sammy is punished, he’s explained away. Which is a crying shame, because when Sammy was at full throttle this book was bright, sharp, smart, and it raced along.

In Country - Bobbie Ann Mason
Cumulatively, pretty effective, and by obvious means. This book makes a direct and naive appeal for your sympathies through the character of Sam. It succeeds because Sam is appealing. She’s a very decent young girl, at the stage when she’s thinking about big issues and deciding how to live her life. Mason has her contemplating Vietnam intensely, and this is a unique way to look at that war. The novel’s only problem is a long stretch in the middle when all issues have been presented and we follow Sam going over and over the same ground. However likable she may be, Sam isn’t the most interesting person to hang out with.

The Devil’s Dream - Lee Smith
It started out strongly – strange, gothic, mythical – as each character took center stage and in a vernacular voice told their story. But by the end the dark mystery of that past world was gone. There was too much of the same thing; first person voices, however varied, become monotonous when they repeat the same formula. As lives became entwined in complex ways it got confusing (who’s who, and what are their connections?). But undermining the whole novel is the portrayal of the modern characters. They’re so banal that I began to suspect the mystery and romance of those who came before. Maybe mystery and romance belong to legend; the present is trivial. But that point – a valid one – isn’t explored. Instead Smith just continues having her characters talk, and I began to feel that I was listening to gossip in a beauty parlor.

The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever
This was my second reading of the novel; I loved it the first time around. The beginning is a model of fine prose, the sparkling variety. But the sparkle diminished as the book went on; or maybe it became less able to prevail over the lack of a solid narrative. Cheever creates vignettes that spin out in a self-contained fashion, and then he moves on to the next one. There’s no overriding structure to hold things together. Also, the repeated evocations of romance, lost beauty, sexual yearning, etc. got a bit mushy. Still, this novel has a bright afterglow with decidedly dark hues, and that makes it memorable. At least, to me it does. I reread it for a discussion group and was surprised by how the members hated it. I’m not sure why it got this reaction; nobody explained their objection (beyond using words like “boring”). Still, I remain a faithful admirer. *