Happening – Annie Ernaux (French)

Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. I found only one of her many books in my local library, and it was shelved in the non-fiction stacks. But the copyright page describes it as fiction. I can understand the confusion. Ernaux writes about herself – Happening, which was published in 2000, is about an abortion she had thirty-five years prior to the writing, when she was twenty-three. Her style is flat, devoid of embellishments. It doesn’t read as a novel – it’s more an exploration of a situation. We do get the emotions of Annie as a young woman (it’s written in the first person), but there’s a clinical feel to Ernaux’s approach. She even includes sections in parentheses, in which her adult self makes observations. Abortion was illegal in France at the time the events take place, and doctors – who were subject to imprisonment – wanted no part of it. From people Annie knows she finds little help, little understanding, little kindness. The impression I got was of a lonely young woman searching in a bleak, uncaring world. She even attempts to terminate the pregnancy using knitting needles. She’s finally put in touch with an old woman who performs “back street” abortions. It doesn’t go smoothly, and we get the unpleasant details. Ernaux never tries to make her younger self endearing. At no point does she refer to what she’s carrying inside her as a baby or a child; its potential as a human being never seems to enter her mind – it is only a foetus. Also, the father is not interested in helping her, but she had unprotected sex with someone for whom she had no emotional ties. The  book can be taken as a denunciation of the French anti-abortion law, but as such it is belated – when it was published the law had been revoked many years ago. Ernaux had a purely personal agenda: she set out to recreate – to relive – an experience that had great significance for her, and on those terms she succeeds. But do you want to accompany her?

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek – Elizabeth Silverthorne

A good biography by someone sympathetic to its subject. Not that Rawlings’ flaws are glossed over (her over-drinking, her black moods during which she could say hurtful things), but all-in-all she was a remarkable woman. What I will concentrate on in this review is how, after many years of submissions and form rejections, she attained success as a writer. It began with her moving to Cross Creek, a remote area of the Florida Scrub. She fell in love with this world, and proceeded to learn about it – the animals, the plants, and, most of all, the people. Marjorie immersed herself in how the “Crackers” thought – their values, their outlook on life – and she kept notebooks in which she transcribed how they talked. She interacted with them as a neighbor; her house was not unlike the ones they lived in. She hunted, grew crops as they did. She could kill a rattlesnake, butcher a pig. So, when she turned to writing about the residents of Cross Creek, there was an authenticity. She was thirty-five when she submitted a story set in that region to a New York magazine – Scribners. It was a life-changing choice. A sophisticated audience was interested in the exotic world which, in Rawlings’ capable hands, was most definitely a real world. The story was passed on to the chief editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins. Max Perkins – the premier editor of his era. He wrote Marjorie, telling her that he thought the story was excellent, but he had many suggestions for revision. She found his suggestions sound, and made the changes. So began a relationship – and a friendship – that lasted until Perkins’ death. Marjorie would, under his tutelage, produce two enduring works – The Yearling and Cross Creek. She was introduced to just about everybody of importance in the literary world. But the negative aspect was that she developed a dependence on Max. After his death she would produce one novel, The Sojourner, but it wasn’t up to the standards of the previous books. She went into an emotional and physical slump, and would die at age fifty-seven (four years after Max’s passing). I’ll close with an excerpt from a letter she wrote to her secretary while working on Sojourner: “I should not be in such anguish if Max were here. He could have told me long ago whether or not I’m on the right track, and there’s absolutely no one else I could allow to see unfinished work . . . There’s no one I trust for an honest answer as I trusted Max . . . I have lost all faith in my creative ability.” (Max and Marjorie is a collection of the correspondence between the two, and it includes nearly 700 letters, notes and wires.)

Over to Candleford – Flora Thompson

If you appreciated Lark Rise (as I did) and grew to like and care about Laura (as I did), you won’t find this sequel disappointing. Thompson does something akin to adjusting a telescope. In the first book we get a broad view; in this one she turns the knob and we get a closer look. Most significantly, Laura emerges as a more developed individual. But this is not an autobiography or a memoir. Thompson obviously had no desire to reveal intimate details about her family, and she only touches on her own feelings. We do get to know the mother much better, but the father stays in the background (though when he emerges he is kindly toward Laura). We learn more about life in the hamlet of Lark Rise, but gradually the locale shifts to Candleford. It’s a bustling market town where Laura has relatives with whom she stays for long periods of time. She meets and develops a friendship with the postmistress, who also owns and runs a blacksmith shop in the neighboring village of Candleford Green. When Laura reaches the age of thirteen (after her meager schooling ends) it’s time for her to get a job and leave home. Laura’s mother wants her to become a nursing assistant, but she recognizes that Laura as no inclination in that direction. And her needlework is so poor that she can’t be an apprentice to a dressmaker. What to do with Laura? At this point a propitious offer comes: the postmistress needs an assistant. So, in a final chapter entitled “Exit Laura,” she moves to Candleford Green. The virtues of this book are in the lovely writing and the acuteness of observation and perception. Thompson possessed a gift: when she describes a person they come alive, and the world she creates was made real to me. I look forward to the last instalment in the trilogy. *

The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I wasn’t sure what was causing my problem with novels – so many failed to engage me. Were there any books left out there that were truly outstanding? Or had I lost the capability to appreciate fiction? Then this one comes along, and restored my faith. It’s a fine work from beginning to end, and it deserved being a best seller, it deserved the 1939 Pulitzer Prize. My appreciation is a bit strange, for I recall, as a teenager, trying unsuccessfully to get into this book. Here I am, over six decades later, turning to it again. This is mainly because I was so impressed by Cross Creek, Rawlings’ memoir about her years spent in the Florida scrub. She was born in Washington, D.C. and lived much of her life up north, but at age thirty-two she moved to a place that would give rise to deep feelings. Though The Yearling, which is set in that primitive world, has been classified as suitable for young readers, I disagree; it’s a very adult work, something a boy of fourteen could not possibly understand. Especially nowadays, when life is so different from the precarious existence depicted. Man must kill to survive; not just for food, but for clothing and sundry other uses. And the failure of a crop is a disaster. The story is commonly described as being about a boy and his pet deer, but it’s actually about the relationship between a boy and his father. Penny Baxter is a good father — every boy should have such a man to bring him up. (Possibly prospective fathers are the ones who should read this book.) The mother is a woman damaged by too many infants lost in birth or shortly thereafter; by the time Jodie arrived something warm and loving had closed down in her. The deer Jodie adopts doesn’t appear until about a third of the way into the novel. Penny is bitten by a rattlesnake, and immediately shoots a doe that happens to appear nearby so that he can use its liver to draw out the venom (this snakebite episode, and its aftermath, is appalling). Jodie notices that she has a fawn. Later, when they return to the house, Jodie lies on the floor beside his father’s bed, and his mind goes to the fawn, alone by the body of its mother, without the warmth and food and comfort she had provided. And though Jody routinely kills animals, he has a soft spot in his heart, and “was torn with hate for all death and pity for all aloneness.” When he later goes to where the doe was shot he sees the fawn still there, and he brings it home. Maybe Penny allows Jodie to raise the fawn because he had taken the life of the mother to save himself. But the decision turns out badly. Would an adolescent understand (or accept) the grim ending of the novel, in which Jodie leaves the things of childhood behind and accepts a life of toil on isolated Baxter’s Island? As for Rawlings’ prose, it flows, with not a bump, even when she’s using the backwoods vernacular in the speech of the characters. How she, with her Northern upbringing, could get this speech so right, how she could recreate what a group of men talk about around a campfire – well, it’s downright amazing. *

Blood of My Blood – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I was so caught up by The Yearling that I was interested in an “autobiographical novel” by Rawlings – I wanted to know what made her tick. Why did the scrub country of Florida hold such appeal for someone born and raised in the north? Actually, the answer may be that she was rebelling against her upbringing. That upbringing was dictated by the wishes of her mother, who believed in surface values: money, clothes, a big house, a husband with status. (Things which the mother never had, but sought through her daughter.) In the beginning Marjorie (all the names used are actual ones) tried to live up to the mother’s wishes. But while in college she abruptly turns away from that value system. What precipitated this change is not made clear, though it could be due to the influence of the man she would marry. That said, the novel is not really about Marjorie. It’s about the mother. The first third is devoted to Ida, from childhood on to marriage (and the birth of a daughter). Rawlings is to be lauded for this portrayal. It could have been a hatchet job, but instead it’s an exploration of the emotional life of a misguided soul. Marjorie comes across as an unattractive personality, both as the compliant striver and as the rebel. In the first role she was a callous user, in the second a harsh rejecter. When exactly Rawlings wrote Blood is not known, but in 1929 she submitted it to a competition (she had the manuscript returned with a polite form rejection). Apparently she put the novel away, and, when fame came, she didn’t revive it (her editor, Maxwell Perkins, never knew of its existence). It wasn’t until long after Rawlings’ death that it was published. Would she have been pleased? I have my doubts. Not because it was a novice work, which it isn’t. And not because she portrays herself so harshly – she would accept the truth. But I think she came to see it as a purely personal unburdening, to a large degree an offering of supplication and appreciation to her deceased mother. Why else that last, moving paragraph? At any rate, I’m glad it did become available. It’s an absorbing and perceptive psychological study with something to say about life.

Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The town of Cross Creek is located in north central Florida, deep in “scrub country.” In 1928 Rawlings moved into a rundown farmhouse and set about trying to make the surrounding orange grove a paying proposition. Something in this world – one far from the comforts of civilization she had known – fulfilled her; it was loving care that compelled her to dedicate so much effort in describing it. What’s remarkable is the completeness of her description; it encompasses the land, plants, animals, insects, people. She establishes a personal connection to her subjects; if it’s snakes, we get to know how Rawlings felt in her encounters with them; if it’s okra, she gives her recipe for preparing it; if a freeze is threatening the orange crop, we get an account of how they kept fat pine fires burning throughout the night. As for the people she lived among, she applies her considerable novelistic skills to bring them to life; both blacks and whites are involved in incidents, acts, conversation. There’s no sugar-coating applied to them, and the author’s attitude toward blacks may not meet the current requirements for correctness. But she feels respect to all who deserve it. In most of the book Rawlings doesn’t try to dispense wisdom, but some of her observations stand out. She believed that no people can be relegated to the status of inconsequential; in fact, the opposite is true: “The rich, the well-favored, the well-situated are surrounded by a confusing protective mass of extraneous and irrelevant matter that tends to hide the substance beneath. The poor, the unfortunate, have been put through the sieve and stand nakedly for what they are.” The personality of Rawlings emerges: she was a tough, down-to-earth lady; she could be compassionate, she could be hard. She and I share little in common, and the place she captures with such authenticity is not one that I wanted to live in – it’s too primitive for me. But for Rawlings it was the place on earth where she felt she belonged, and she immersed herself in that world – and wrote about it in this memorable book. *

Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad

This novel – which hinges on a political assassination in Czarist Russia – was completed about six years before the Bolshevik Revolution, so it had relevance at the time of its publication. Conrad concerns himself primarily with the role played by Razumov, a young student. One of the assassins – a fellow student – seeks refuge in Razumov’s room. Razumov makes an effort to help him escape, but when that attempt fails he turns Haldin over to the police. These early events were engaging, but as the novel progresses Conrad’s ponderous probing of Razumov’s tortured psyche – which goes on at length and repetitively – suffocate his character under the weight of verbiage. He didn’t give the man room to breathe. It’s interesting that two characters for whom the author has contempt – and who are treated superficially, as stereotypes – have a vitality that Razumov lacks. Conrad’s passion and seriousness of purpose are virtues, but in his hands they often became a liability. He didn’t realize a simple fact: reading a novel shouldn’t become burdensome.

The Letters of Jean Rhys

In these letters there was no reluctance by Jean Rhys to express emotions, and most of what is on display for 300 pages is her unhappiness. Or, to put it more forcefully, her misery. Though misery makes for interesting reading, repetition of woes tends to dilute their force and can get tiresome (something Rhys was aware of; but she couldn’t stop herself). Another dominant element in these letters is Rhys’ struggle to get Wide Sargossa Sea into proper shape. The struggle was a long and grueling one; in a letter from 1945 she states that she has a novel “half-finished.” In her last letter, written twenty-one years later, she finally feels that Sea is complete. Seldom is the effort by a novelist to produce something of value been more vividly chronicled. My main problem with this book concerns what’s been omitted. It opens with a letter Rhys wrote in 1931, when she was forty-one; it ends with one written in 1966, just seven months before Sea was published. One of the two people who did the selecting and editing (and who was a recipient of many letters) was Francis Wyndham. In her Introduction she writes that she couldn’t get her hands on letters Jean wrote before 1931. I find this hard to believe – at that time Rhys was being published and was a figure on the literary scene in Paris; when the letters in this book begin she had sunk into obscurity. Worse – much worse – there are no letters after the immediate success of Sea. Wyndham states that these letters aren’t of much interest. This I flat out don’t believe. How could a woman so expressive of her feelings suddenly become a reticent bore? She surely continued writing to her daughter and to Wyndham – how did those relationships go? Was she able to able to financially help her daughter – something she repeatedly regretted not being able to do? Most of all, how did acclaim, awards, sales, etc. affect her? Did she find some degree of happiness? And was she able, finally, to find a pleasant place to live? (A warm one – the last words she writes in the last letter of this book are “It’s so cold.”) Since matters that I wanted to know about are omitted, I consider this collection to be a disappointment. Last bit of advice: If you haven’t read Sea – and you should – do it before you read these letters. Rhys wasn’t one of those writers who believe that you “shouldn’t talk about it.” She talks about it at length.

 

Novels, Tales, Journeys - Alexander Pushkin (Russian)

I read a few short pieces in this collection of Pushkin’s occasional “descent into prose” (his words). I found them pleasing, so I turned to the novels. The Queen of Spades revolves around an unscrupulous character’s efforts to get a magical formula that would enable him to identify three cards in a row – and thus garner a fortune. The imperious old countess who holds the secret (and appears near the end as a ghost) was the only character that captured my interest. The story struck me as a dalliance on the part of Pushkin – a feeling that was reinforced by the slapdash Conclusion that wraps things up. But I liked the simple, clear, direct prose – though Pushkin has an imposing reputation, he’s very easy to read. So I moved on to The Captain’s Daughter. More to my taste, as there were no supernatural happenings. It’s set in a remote region of Russia beset by rebel uprisings, and involves military matters; there’s a love story, but it’s weak because the girl isn’t fully developed. Dubrovsky is the longest and the least known of the three, but I found it to be the most enjoyable. Revenge for injustice drives the plot, and the love aspect is more convincing because the woman is given room to grow. What stuck me about the last two novels is that they read like boys’ adventure yarns. I think that if Pushkin had lived longer – he was killed in a duel at age thirty-seven – he would have become more serious about his prose and we may have gotten a major work.