Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (3 of 3)

 [This is part three of a review begun here and continued here.]

“The Continued Story” is rambling, rollicking conspiracy story. A man turns himself in to the police to get locked up, to escape from his alien hunter. The cop won’t do it, at first, because he doesn’t believe the man stole assembly kits from a toy store that disappears the next day—not to mention kits that create hallucinatory episodes like a Lunar Experience, a diamond mask, and so on. The story switches points of view and the alien pursuer’s target, but it doesn’t explain why this should be since the hunter was supposedly interested in the stealer of kits.

“Brenda” [Weird Tales, also appears in Greenberg’s edition of her Best-of and is reprinted by Groff Conklin, Eric Protter, Roger Elwood, Vic Ghidalia, Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, and Robert Weinberg] is a classic. Like “The Hole in the Moon” it hasn’t been reprinted enough, despite half a dozen appearances. Brenda is a well-behaved, good little girl that none of the kids seems to like. One day she’s pursued by a gray man, stinking of rot. Through a bit of cleverness, she captures the man. But when no one else is interested in seeing her find, she lets him loose. She strangely identifies with (loves?) the creature and the ending is creepy and open-ended.

“Stawdust” starts at a crisis moment—a man and a woman face off on a ship, surrounded by dummies, kidskin stuffed with sawdust of what used to be passengers, with both remaining suspects claiming to be innocent—and then reverses to the beginning when it all started. You’d think you were in a contemporary fantasy mystery, but no. We learn that the ship is a starship (leaping history and genres), and that soon enough the culprit was always known. The initial drama was false. When I was learning the field, I was told never to mix SF and magic, and it seems that St. Clair loves to do this. The title is both a clever and awful pun. The ending does turn the story into a minor irony although a more emotionally powerful ending should have been available.

“The Invested Libido” and “The Autumn After Next” are two slightly humorous and thoroughly competent tales. The first immediately constructs a strange world and the man who chose to use Martian psycho-pharmaceuticals to cure his ills only to find it changing him. Literally. To a squid. He sneaks into an aquarium only to get caught. Under psychiatric supervision, he conforms to other shapes. [This story makes one wonder if it has a meta-fictional purpose of explaining why St. Clair switches point of view so often.]

The next tale tells of a wizard who tries to get a village to do spells properly, but they are lazy and don’t listen. Trying should be their reward, the villagers think. Finally, he comes up with a plan that will get them to do spells right, but the best laid plans....  This is fun and well told, but not among her more ambitious works. It’s available to read for free here.

The final story, “The Sorrows of Witches,” tells of a witch queen who loses her lover and tries to revive him through necromancy. Because she needs an heir, she needs a living lover who will become a stumbling block between herself and her lover. Over time, her writing style seemed to improve with solid entertainments although her scope, imagination and ambitions shrank.

How does St. Clair compare to her contemporaries? Was she short-changed? She was better than Isaac Asimov when it comes to technique, but Asimov had a soaring, large-scale, methodical imagination that benefitted most from accumulated effects (his robot stories and the early Foundation books). Both writers suffered from talking heads.

I dipped into C. M. Kornbluth to prepare for this and for future examinations (namely Mark Rich’s biography, C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary). One story of Kornbluth’s troubles me, but he has a strong, immediate evocation of main character and place (even in his worst, early stories)—his non-Earth societies are rich, lived-in. The one story where she rivals Kornbluth in this is “The Invested Libido”. Where St. Clair outdoes Kornbluth is her better ability to stick the endings and her rare use of dialogue tags and adverbs (“Stop using tags and adverbs to describe your dialogue!” the reader growled at Kornbluth menacingly).

Ray Bradbury, whom Campbell compared St. Clair to, was a better writer in nearly every regard except Bradbury’s later work, which seemed less significant although sometimes he stitched together slight stories to greater effects.

How does she compare? She numbers among the era’s better writers, especially if you like that era’s spare writing style—but only a handful of tales here showcase her talents to their best effects.

Since St. Clair passed in 1995 and her work can no longer be edited with her approval without use of a time machine, what she needs is a Selected Stories, St. Clair Reader or Best collection to highlight her work to best effect. Martin Greenberg edited one, but it’s probably time for another. Three here deserve readers and inclusion: “The Gardener”, “The Hole in the Moon” and “Brenda”. A few cases could be made for the importance of others in this collection.

This collection inspired me to read and reread St. Clair. To follow my progress, look here to see the results of my search to hunt down some of her best work.

Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (2 of 3)

[This is part two of a review begun here. Part three will appear here.]

“The World of Arlesia” [first appearing in F&SF] is another too-complex story that requires rereading to get what has actually happened. (I do love complex stories, but they require more set up.) A couple attend a double-header [Didn’t they called them double features? Perhaps she means to highlight the sports-like nature of what they are attending] “movie” [anticipating virtual reality?] where they go to an underwater world. However, the wife witnesses an entirely different world.

One example of writing infelicity [the guide is trying to con our narrator into becoming one of many recumbent women, although what is happening to the women is never clear—perhaps something Matrix-like]:

“I won’t,” I said. “You’re trying to do something to me, something to my mind. I won’t go in there.”

“Ah, well,” she said. She dropped my wrist and was silent.

So we have a vague menace [“something”] that is easily dispatched. The next time a mad scientist has a vague evil plan or a cut-throat thief tries to steal something he’s not sure about, just say, “I won’t let you” and that will take care of everything. Despite this, it’s still worth a gander.

“The Little Red Owl” first appeared in Weird Tales and was reprinted by Peter Haining. Uncle Charles tells frightening stories to his nephew and niece—a story where the little red owl, their hero, dies. The children, aghast, deny this has happened. The uncle is forbid from telling new stories, but he plans revenge, having professionally made a sweet coloring book that tells the same story.

It is a little spooky, adding a necessary change in point of view that some will take issue with, which also takes the key dramatic moment off-stage. It would probably work best on the screen—an anthology of horror stories like Cat’s Eye or Tales from the Crypt—the trick being to make an owl look both sweet, heroic, and terrifying.

A rather moving and ambiguous piece, “The Hole in the Moon” [first appeared in F&SF—printed and reprinted by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas], is simple yet ambitious. Men have been destroyed by a disease that sits dormant in women, but kills men although one can tell a woman who is diseased by her pitted skin. A machine or robot woman arrives (at least, she suggests this in her description of her “sisters”) and she can only be made real if this man loves her. He is conflicted by wanting to love her and drive her away, threatening violence. She leaves. A narrative gap allows a few different events to have happened—intriguing possibilities. And his decision may lead to a few different consequences—none of which exclude his final, moving decision. The editor, Ramsay Campbell, points out the ambiguity that the protagonist could be insane, but that’s not the most interesting of possibilities. The minor flaw in this tale is that his loneliness and desire should have been set up immediately—not to mention nigh magical nature of her construction (via his desire—see this discussion of genre romance). Still, it’s surprising that this tale has not been reprinted more often.

In yet another genre bar story, “The Causes” [first appeared in F&SF, also appears in Greenber’s edition of her Best-of, and reprinted Darrell Schweitzer, George H. Scithers (an SF bar anthology) and Robert P. Mills] has one character after another describe why the world seems apocalyptic to the “main” character, George—going through Greek, Christian, and other causes. The ending saves the story, but if you aren’t a fan of world apocalypses, it’s skippable. Maybe read the first tale and skip to the ending to get the gist. However, Robert P. Mills seems to beg to differ in the tale’s quality by collecting it in a ten-year retrospective for F&SF. Introducing the tale, he wrote, “No collection of fantasy and science fiction can be considered representative if it fails to include a superior example of the bar-fantasy.” In other words, the above editors all included it because it was a bar story. It is a decent example, but what about superior examples of the Rana pipiens fantasy?

From the pages of Weird Tales, “The Island of the Hands” has an intriguing premise about seeking his wife’s lost ship. His plane goes down at her last coordinates and he wakes from unconsciousness. The island was invented to recreate things lost, so they find people dancing with simulated partners, simulated babies, simulated gems—none of which have much reality. He goes down to the mists to create the wife he lost.... The tale is stirring up until he wanders the mist, and it seems to lose itself there, wandering too long, which seems an unusual lapse for St. Clair. The tale finds itself—or a version of itself—but it becomes something else, ambiguous in a bad sense. Campbell, in the introduction, latches on to secondary characters for what the tale is up to. I also suspect that the true protagonist is not the main character but not the one he selected. If true, it’s a more interesting, ambitious and ambiguous in a good sense although that would mean that island doesn’t have the rules it was said to have (even in a straight reading, where the main character is the protagonist, the island breaks the rule of what it said about the mist).

Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (1 of 3)

Like many SF writers from previous generations, Margaret St. Clair is overlooked. Even all-consuming critics like John Clute miss out on some of St. Clair’s strengths (see his commentary at SFE) although he astutely points out her “work was at times daringly subversive of some of the central impulses of Genre SF.”

In the past, I’ve taken a look at a few classic story by Margaret St. Clair and hope to do so in the future. She is a writer of economy, rarely overwriting—often writing her best work at the short-short or short-story length, a length that is sadly underestimated in the field, baring just enough ice to suggest the berg below. Reading The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales, one realizes that she can cram in that finite space a fine imagination to boot. She may take the germ of an idea for a lesser story and then takes it into several new directions, sometimes implying world’s from mere suggestions. If that doesn’t impress you, her endings tend to stick although the complexity and ambiguities sometimes tangle with too much to wrestle. Occasionally, she could have used a good editor to hash out the ideas.

Not too too long after St. Clair started published, James Blish initiated his critical article series as William Atheling (see The Issue in Hand). He said that the market was flooded with thirty magazines, publishing a lot of stories without “technique.” This was what he aimed to correct in his series. On the other hand, this created a fine training ground for many writers to grow up in. Undoubtedly, bad writers forever wrote badly, but some improved over time.

St. Clair, in her introduction to her Best of collection—a very humble if too brief recollection of a rough home life highlighted only by two kind uncles (if only she’d shared more so we could compare and contrast her life with her story “The Little Red Owl”)—wrote that the market did not support “humor and characterization,” which may go some length in explaining story defects. But her writing did “mature” through this magazine system.

Her first two stories demonstrate the training-wheels program: “Rocket to Limbo” and “Piety.” The first anticipates the tradition of Galaxy magazine (see also radio programs like X-Minus-One and the popular TV show The Twilight Zone)—projecting the present into the near future in a fun, semi-realistic manner—a now uncommon trend. “Rocket to Limbo” unintentionally photographs its time period more than future, which is most of the story’s pleasure. A woman gets an ad—for her eyes only—that she can get rid of her husband if she follows her instructions. The story begs for a sequel. In fact, despite the ending suggesting something final, it is only starting to get interesting. Observe how the characters behave toward one another. Their response is not the expected one. There’s something intriguing going on between them that is worth investigating in a second tale (plus, we’d learn about this new place). If only I’d been her editor...

“Piety” has a wonderful ending which you may or may not guess, but it goes on too long (despite its brevity) with “human” talking heads who try to pry the secret of immortality out of an alien. You may well guess both endings, which are somewhat satisfying, quelled by a less than stellar technique.

The second pair of stories show promise. “The Gardener” [reprinted by August Derleth and Michael Parry] feels modern. If I supply the initial scenario, you’ll guess the outcome: A gardener chops down one of fifty rare and ancient trees. No one knows why there have always been just fifty. Still, the ending is killer.

“Child of Void” [reprinted by Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov] has a strong child-like voice about a single-parent family that moves to an area where the laws of physics don’t apply, and the boys find a talking egg. You cannot guess this ending, which explains the problem to a degree. As the story has a too-rich complexity that doesn’t gel, so the ending cannot resonate. It’s interesting, nonetheless, and demonstrates St. Clair’s fertile imagination. Both stories were collected in St. Clair’s Best of.

Some readers may like “Hathor’s Pets” [reprinted by Groff Conklin] because the premise is well set up: In a society where women have lost ground societally, a husband and wife have been transported elsewhere (another dimension?). They see themselves as pets, so they come up with plans that will allow them to return to their home. However, the alien treats them as unruly pets.... But it’s hard to distinguish any of the characters. The intriguing set-up resonates with the ending only thematically since one idea does not flow naturally from the other. “Good” politics may not equate to “good” stories, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.

[This is part one of a three-part review. Part two appears here and part three here.]

Review: Knocking the Stars Senseless by Clif Mason (II)

Part II

Note: This is part II of an essay begun here.

This recurring theme [that beauty can enlighten tragedy] returns in “Ghost Music” as it deals with the speaker’s loss of his father: “The singing tongue is cut from autumn’s river.” In essence, Mason’s speaker asks us in his songs: How can we keep singing when the world is full of pain? The answer comes, through much pain, at the poem’s end:

Wind picks his pocket again as he ambles.

It steals again sweat from his body, music from his ears.

It takes again the gait from his legs, the taste from his tongue.

The more it steals, the less he feels bound by gravity.

He laughs as the wind bears him off like a kite.

When I critiqued his poems, I often slammed Mason’s use of “stars” in his poetry as I’d seen too many awful poems written with that in them, but through judicious use and careful building of his motif, he’s made the stars his own. It is in the book title and the titular poem, after all. And it’s cleverly deployed, to boot. The stars could be incandescent dots that candle the night, or those whom society reveres, for whatever reason, or the heavenly afterlife (“to drink from the stars’ chalice / the black anodyne of sleep.”—“Fugue for the Sandy Hook Dead” or in “I Wore the Night Like a Roquelaure” where when a grandmother passes, the speaker’s song becomes “the new star of resolve / in her brain’s core.” That last poem, especially at its titular moment, seems to be the transformation of the speaker who turns grief into something transcendent.). And “senseless” could be unconscious or a lack of meaning. All of these senses fuel Mason’s poetry. (Am I eating crow? Very well, I eat crow.)

In “The Sea Anemone Must Wed Lightning” Mason writes of suffering as a thing we carry, perhaps belongings we should value:

What can I say of this suffering,

except that it is mine? I will carry it

into autumn, holding it over

my head as, crossing a river,

I would a bundle of clothes.

Later, the speaker sings what he wants songs to do:

I want the song that will lift

the moon’s white bone back

into its black socket. I want the song....

that will raise a fallen

child, if only for a day

The final poem, “Thanksgiving Song,” refines this idea of song (brought up in “I Wore the Night Like a Roquelaure” – discussed above) as the magic that words carry in them and the magic that we carry within us:

I can sing with the broken bone

of the yellow half-moon....

Each name sings

light needles into ebony dusk....

we are all

yes, each & every one, the last

least, best unexpected thing.

This poem—with a few rivals for being the best in the book—deserves to be anthologized in a dozen or two good anthologies. Poet Patrick Hicks also singled out this poem. Forgive the excerpt as only the whole poem can do it justice.

Judith Sornberger writes that his work is “Incantatory as Whitman” which you’ll find in a poem like “Depression”:

All the harvesters are falling apart, shaking & shuddering

& collapsing before they can leave the fields.

All the luxury automobiles are falling apart

in garages & shops & on the street

All the bridges & skyscrapers are falling apart

falling to rust & poisonous dust & bent & sheered rebar.

These excerpts and examinations should more than adequately suggest why you should acquire this book for yourself (or get your library to do so, if you cannot afford it).

What makes these poems stand out above most contemporary poetry: His poems tell you why you should read them. The images and sounds—even interesting philosophic content—suck the reader in. Not the particular political stance as if poetry were more about politics than aesthetics (although, yes, Mason toes the line of the politically correct), not the surreal inscrutability (although, yes, Mason uses some of that), not a bolus of images that are hard to swallow (although, yes, Mason’s imagery astounds and confounds), but he uses his silvery tongue to get us to leap after, to travel to this strange land we tread upon and intriguing scenarios, or some other spark of interest to keep us reading and rereading.

For example, “Darkfall” opens with intrigue and mystery:

For centuries we seeded the cemeteries

so it was no surprise the soil

grew nothing but headstones.

How can those lines not get one to read on? This is part of what makes this book rise above its peers. If poets and poetry readers aren’t flocking to this book this year, then there’s too little justice in the world, but at least it exists and we the lucky, who have read it, can lift it over our heads as if crossing a river and call on others to hear these songs.

Review: Knocking the Stars Senseless by Clif Mason (I)

Clif Mason and I met at a poetry workshop, not quite a decade ago, and he was an excellent poet then. An English professor and Dean of Humanities, he is gentle, soft-spoken and rounded out by insight. This is a man who writes poems whose speaker stands before a stuffed otter in a museum and mourns its passing (see “The Otter”).

What poems was he workshopping? If you have Knocking the Stars Senseless in your hands, then you have some of them. I have the sense that he’d been working on these poems long before we saw them. He kept working on them after they were published.

So when I read people being amazed at Clif Mason’s suddenly being “prolific” because he has had three different poetry books released from three different presses within a year, I feel his pain. He has been agonizing over these for perhaps more than a decade—a handful maybe twice that. So prolific? No.

He wasn’t just adding and removing commas, either. Merciless as Ming, he’d quarter poems to stubs or stretch them on the rack beyond their original form. They’d appear in form, aligned as a stone army, and be stripped out of uniform to throw them into cubist arrays. He was tireless in his revisions.

I review books—of friends, strangers and people who chose to be enemies—as subjectively as possible. There are nigh glowing reviews here of people sharpened themselves into daggers and sweet dismissals of candied personalities. I try to review as if I’m friends with the reviewee and the people looking for good books to read. As a matchmaker, I don’t want to let either down.

Moreover, Mason’s voice is a new voice that needs to be heard. Have you devoured the sounds of Ocean Vuong’s words? Does your heart quicken at the submerged wisdom and surreal images carved by W. S. Merwin? Then savor Clif Mason because their sauces flavor his volume’s stew. Until I read the other two volumes, I’m not yet willing to concede that he is a major writer—he may be, but time will have to decide that, anyway. I will say that his voice (not to mention this volume in particular) is one that needs to be reckoned with.

To get a sense of the book’s trajectory, peer into the opening prose poem, “Double Narrative: This Waking Life”:

When I yearned for the incense of candle & canticle, I sought the fulcrum of trance & tragedy, hawk & hook.

           

The book I wrote unwrote itself as I typed. Characters disappeared as if kidnapped.

This is both true in his personal life and in the larger world. The personal, literal truth is how, as I mentioned earlier, the book has gone through its own radical changes, but in the larger sense Mason laments violence—such as Sandy Hook and Auschwitz—where people did “disappear,” lives brutally brought to an end. He writes in “Day of the Dead”: “Have you found the trunk of moldering toes? // This is the age of amputation // We learn to live with less & still less.”

“This Waking Life” from the title has its own double hook. “Waking” suggests that we are awake, but also that we are still asleep, in need of being roused—a perpetual state.

In “Nightwalk in the Republic” the poem is more or less a palindrome of lines—the same forward as backwards, except for tiny alterations you have to pay close attention to. The speaker fears sleep as the news of another mass shooting torments his dreams—a perfect scenario for this poetic form. The opening/closing change are perhaps the most potent. It opens (I had to stop myself from quoting more—just one thing, you said):

Owl calls on a cold night—

solemn, commanding hoots.

I wander, lost, full of midnight’s wanderlust

and closes:

as I wander, lost, full of midnight’s wanderlust

& command solemn hoots

from the owl calling on a cold night.

Note the owl, in the first instance, lacks an article (a, an or the), which makes it more mythic—a name, perhaps—the owl of all owls, the god of owls, the original progenitor. The owl could be a symbol of wisdom or of its power, its predatory nature. Perhaps both.

(All of the above do seem to apply. The poem “Insomnia” confirms and further sketches the owl’s nature: “Night is the owl’s kingdom....//The owl rules the world of shadow & hazard.”)

The owl “calls on” which could be a simple sound, or it could be visiting or asking help from the cold night. The commanding hoots helps determine its powerful intentions, hinting at a supernatural nature that gets the night to do its bidding.

When we return to these images, the speaker now commands. He is no longer powerless, but his powerlessness, his lostness, his lust for midnight’s wandering have become a kind of power as he demands the owl to call. Given the voice, we assume he can do this in this transformation although one is free to question that ability. We would have two very different poems, depending on which one chooses.

Strangely, both do seem to apply to the situation. This duality applies to the opening poem (seen above, such as the “candle & canticle, fulcrum of trance & tragedy, hawk & hook”) and throughout the book. The poet sings in a beautiful melancholy voice as he raises a candle to shed light on our place in the world. It is a fine balancing act since it calls on beauty to enlighten our tragedies.

[review continued here]

The Romance of Romance (II)

 

[For the beginning of this article, go here.]

So I subscribed to Audible Escape and have read several to get a sense of their structure. Also, a female poet and I are collaborating on a book about a relationship that evolved over time. This structure might be worth knowing to follow or to buck. I didn’t know how to tell which writers were good, which not, so I skipped around, sometimes looking at popularity, sometimes brevity to get a feel for the genre.

In romances, the above barriers are often just initial hurdles to appreciating these books. I really like Debbie Macomber’s [Debbie Macomber?] Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, which is about a man who owns an ailing vineyard and has neglected his wives in the past but will turn around here. The title refers to not only a Bible verse, but also three angels [angels? can a good book be written about angels?]. But it unfolds a sweet, lovely tale with a semi-sophisticated theology along the lines of the prodigal-son parable. Its closest literary kin would be “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens.

Cassie Edwards wrote a few with the word Savage in the titles, which I had no idea what they meant. Maybe a primitive or “violent” love, but instead it referred to a racial slur about Native Americans and turned that into steamy romances about falling for Native American men in the Old West, which repurposes something negative into something positive although some may still balk. Caucasian cowboys tend to be the bad guys.

Often, both protagonists are struck by the “thunderbolt”—an unreasoning, unreasonable love-struck state that Mario Puzo described in The Godfather (discussion here). However, since there are often a good guy and bad guy who both are struck by the thunderbolt—why should one thunderbolt make her fall in love but not the other? Sometimes in the novels it’s sheer persistence (if she has only one suitor), which men aren’t supposed to do any more. If she says no, then that’s supposed to be it although some romance novels suggest otherwise, especially if it’s an opposites-attract type.

A number of romances—especially from decades prior to #MeToo, which went from confession to a political movement—involve the male pushing physical boundaries, not simply pursuing with words. The man presses her lips with a kiss, which if she doesn’t melt immediately, she will eventually. You can glimpse it even in literary speculative fiction like John Crowley’s Little Big, so it seems to have been a literary expectation in romances. In fact, it is often male desire that initiates female desire. I read an article that romance writers vowed not to write this way, anymore, but I’m guessing, given the nature of the humanity’s distribution of tastes and attributes being cast along bell curve, it will continue to be written.

Not that I’m taking feminist stance, but romance stories without reason were most striking from a “scientific” or objective study of human nature, but I’d be more interested in tales about like minds uniting—a type I never found in my forays across the genre (undoubtedly, they exist in a dusty library alcove). Often, the couple’s reaction is immediate and without logic. This isn’t to say that love isn’t like this, but why aren’t there stories where people slowly fall in love, taking tentative steps forward? Yes, this seems right. No, I’m not sure about that....

You’d think caution would be reasonable since the commitment is supposed to last, as the novels often conclude with this being “forever” or “always.”

Usually the couple are of unlike minds; bizarre circumstances thrust them together; and the couple accidentally fall into each other’s arms and unable to resist falling in love. There sure are a lot of alpha males out there with money breeding in their pockets.

In some stories, the male protagonist is conveniently contrived to know exactly what’s happening in the female’s mind, which would be nice, but highly improbable, especially if he’s an alpha. If he’s a beta, he may well have the ability to sense emotion, but not read minds.

Think about it. One type takes action. The other observes. Which will be more likely to read? But there are exceptions to any rule—probably someone who has spent time in both categories.

Why not a romance where, strangely enough, the characters might be able to gauge emotions, but not know the reasons behind them? Or maybe they mistake emotion “X” for curiosity. Perhaps this is too literary and complex for a genre romance—much as male lovers of thrillers want definite good guys and bad.

Romances seem to be more wish fulfillment than an attempt to mirror reality, which carries no shame. That vein is the same men mine from James Bond, especially the early films. Whether or not a romance story stretches credulity throughout, most seem to be sweets for those weary of a dismal life and dismal news reports.

(I may or may not revisit this topic as I finish this Audible Escape trial. My plans include more, ahem, Debbie Macomber, Georgette Heyer (Kij Johnson recommended her, if I recall correctly), and the usual literary suspects, and anyone else who comes recommended.)

The Romance of Romance (I)

 

When I worked on a dredge ship as a lad, I had a boss who recommended that I read romances so that I could understand the feminine mind and woo them. I didn’t (see four reasons why below)—at least, none but the Pulitzer-winning Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and literary classics like those by Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, etc.

I recently reread Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, which is labeled as a romance although I’m not sure why. A man abandons his wife for a younger woman who has been living with them—a cousin whose father and former wealth have both passed on. What makes the novel powerful is not the ill-fated couple’s love despite a wife who tries to separate them, but that of long-suffering wife’s who by the end is suddenly thrown into new light by the foolish impetuosity of the other two. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) If it is a romance, then the modern romance seems to be riddled with tragedy.

See also Henry James’s DaisyMiller, which is also lumped into this category. Two men fall in love with a woman, and she doesn’t seem to love either although she seems to love them being in love with her. And then she [Spoiler redacted. See link for spoilers un-redacted.] This is a love story?

Maybe just the fact that someone is in love with someone else—requited or not—is enough to qualify a story to be a romance. In other instances, the romance seems merely pleasant, not involving romantic love at all. So maybe in some instances, a romance could be a story with a happy ending.

Four things barred my interest in the non-literary romance.

The first being their covers. Bare-chested men—or otherwise, a hunk. Women with wind-blown hair. Sometimes together, sometimes separate, with nothing more to indicate their complicated situation. The covers are often fluffy, brightly colorful and designed to catch the feminine eye. I like the kind of cozies and locked-room mysteries that Agatha Christie wrote but so many modern covers of this ilk are littered with dogs, cats, prettily colored cottages. The mind reels. Make the sign of the cross, to protect yourself.

The second are the openings. The characters are way too idealized. This perfect woman meets that perfect man, but the imperfect community strives to keep them apart (or the man is imperfect until she reforms him). Despite being the lead characters, too few have imperfect women like Gone with the Wind. Although Scarlett may have been a little too imperfect, she eventually makes herself admirable. And spoiler alert, she doesn’t even get the guy. Is that romance?

(It is interesting that readers of these books long for the idealized view of people, rather than a realistic picture. Maybe men are the same: idealizing men as unflawed, conquering heroes, battling mastermind criminals, but I don’t think most men see themselves in place of such heroes but rather wished they could be that flawless. I’ll discuss James Bond in a different post.)

Third, the initial scenarios are hard to buy. Jennifer Blake’s Roan starts enticingly enough: A woman is kidnapped but she escapes with a gun only to be shot at by the police, thinking she had Stockholm syndrome like Patty Hurst. [Consider the rest of this to be spoilers although it’s necessary to establish the length the genre goes to stretch credulity.] Her shooter is a rugged cop who lives in the beautiful country and takes her to be a prisoner under house arrest in his own home because the prison is full of evil men who might touch and leer at her, which of course the cop does when he makes her a prisoner, but it’s ethically okay because he’s a handsome cop and one of the good guys. She, of course, is a rich heiress which she cannot tell us or the cop until toward the ending when they happen to bump into her former fiancé.

Finally, the writing at times is awful. Some passages may be nice enough description, but it’s awkwardly done: Why would the character be studying her house now? Why is she looking in the mirror to observe her over-looked beauty? It’s almost as if she knew the reader was present and she’s trying to sell us on all her good points while at the same time pretending to be modest about her good points.

Last February, Audible had a free two-month trial of their Escape program, one of which was James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues, which I wanted to read anyway—possibly his best book. His main character, Dave Robicheaux seems to embroil himself with men still haunted by Vietnam, twenty years after the war, but here he has lost his wife and his job and is trying to clear himself of a crime he didn’t commit all while trying to raise a young orphan. Somehow not being chained to being a cop frees the book to become a literary mystery, which I suspect has been his aim. There has always been an element of this in his books, often digging into character pasts to realize them, but here the characters pop out. Go read it. (I’m not sure why it is bundled with romance books except maybe his love of wife and child is almost idealized, but the usual genre awkwardness is eschewed.)

[See part II here, available on Wednesday, early]

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Set Up (summary):

The story begins in Vevey, Switzerland where “in the month of June, American travelers are extremely numerous; it may be said, indeed that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics of an American watering place.”  The protagonist, Winterbourne—not the narrator who remains an unnamed first person—meets Daisy Miller, an American free spirit, unencumbered by societal rules. Winterbourne falls for his countrywoman while abroad and tries to educate her in the customs of Europe, which she ignores. At first, she seems to insist on his attending to her, perhaps suggesting her interest, but that changes when an Italian, Giovanelli, courts her without a chaperone, which is scandalous to everyone except Miller’s family. There are hints that maybe if her father had left Schenectady with his family, this would not have occurred, but that’s hard to say. It may be just Winterbourne’s jealousy or the narrator’s opinion.

Discussion with spoilers:

Daisy Miller seems to string both of these young men along although initially she seems to have no interest in Winterbourne. Once she secures Winterbourne’s interest, she mostly ignores him but even then she would entertain both gentlemen at the same time. Although she spends more time with Giovanelli, he doesn’t think she ever loved him, either—at least not enough to marry.

She gets sick and dies. The narrator, Winterbourne, and perhaps Giovanelli himself to a degree think this is due to taking her out on the town during late hours. If only she’d been chaperoned....

This could be read as a morality tale: Follow the ancient customs of the foreign land you find yourself in. In fact, some critics put James into that category, pointing out that the author defended writing about customs:

“[I]t takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion – a proposition that seems to me so true as to be a truism. It is on manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured & established, that a novelist lives – they are the very stuff his work is made of.”

But this doesn’t take into account the frame story. Why develop the frame story at all? Keep Winterbourne the protagonist and have him lament at the funeral. Instead, there’s more complexity here. Furthermore, just because an author prefers European customs in his fiction doesn’t mean he has to follow them in his theme.

The narrator’s identity is shrouded, but perhaps he is not American and/or not young, saying of the protagonist: “in whatever fashion the young American looked at things.” At one point, describing details about the protagonist, he writes, “I hardly know” although later writes commandingly about the details. He speaks for instance of the man’s friends who would say he is “studying” at Geneva—the narrator’s quote which suggests he knows the young man intimately although intriguingly. He writes:

“When his enemies spoke of him, they said—but, after all he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked.”

It’s possible that Winterbourne has no enemies, but consider his name and that Daisy Miller found him “stiff.” Perhaps the narrator knows what the enemies would say and catches himself and feigns that Winterbourne has none. Certainly, the author wants us to catch the hiccup or he’d have cut this from the story (unless James were too lazy to edit, which seems improbable for a writer held in high regard).

This dialogue with Daisy Miller’s young, little brother suggests his family’s attitude toward Europe or at least a key interpretive passage (Winterbourne has just told the child to be careful with his teeth, eating sugar):

“I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and came out right afterward. She said she’d slap me if any more came out. I can’t help it. It’s this old Europe. It’s the climate that makes them come out. In America they didn’t come out. It’s these hotels.”

How do we take this? Is this a natural process that would happen anyway, no matter where he was?  Given that his sister dies due to climate, does the boy have a grain of truth? Yet he says “I haven’t got any teeth to hurt” while admitting he still has seven teeth. He, perhaps like his sister, discounts his own actions as having an effect on his predicament.

James himself discussed the story with people who spoke of the Daisy-Miller type. It seems to surprise him that his character has been typed. Sociologically, it’s interesting that Miller typified the behavior of some other women—perhaps a woman unready to settle into a marriage but very keen to develop multiple admirers (see Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind although Scarlett did have a man she wanted to marry, but was more than willing to encourage multiple admirers)—but James’s reaction seemed more surprised that his character was not a character but a type, suggesting that the morality was not necessarily his aim.

Giovanelli, for instance, thinks she was “innocent.” This seems likely in multiple senses since when she first encounters Winterbourne she hates European society and doesn’t understand why she didn’t have all the attention she received in the U.S. Like her brother Randolph, she doesn’t see how her actions affect her reception. Before she passes, she tells her mother to tell Winterbourne that she wasn’t engaged to Giovanelli. The mother doesn’t know why that was important to share. There are two possibilities: 1) She realizes belatedly that Winterbourne was the man for her all along, or 2) Winterbourne is her moral conscience and she wants to be remembered as innocent.

The latter seems more likely since she never really seems fully invested in Winterbourne. When she first meets him, she keeps looking around for something else—perhaps the society she has been looking for. Interestingly, at this encounter, Winterbourne is willing to bend the rules of etiquette to pretend they were formally introduced so that he can talk to her (which suggests that breaking societal rules is not really what killed Daisy):

“It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented.”

The narrator says that Winterbourne’s real reason to be in Geneva was being “extremely devoted to a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself.” What is meant here by “foreign”—American? Swiss? neither? Could it be referring to Daisy Miller at this point? Or someone else? This is also how the novel ends: “he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady.” Is this the same foreign lady or a different one? Again, what is “foreign” to an ex-pat living abroad? He does say, “I have lived too long in foreign parts” (yet continues to do so). This indicates that foreign to him is anything not American, perhaps.

Perhaps this indicates that Daisy Miller was more exciting to him than the foreign lady—that he abandons her yet returns when Daisy passes. Perhaps Daisy is the only remarkable episode in his life.

Who is Daisy Miller? She’s a simple flower, ground up and/or who grinds others up. Perhaps they are all ground to a useful purpose to become flour. However, it isn’t clear that these events made anyone wiser.

Reading William Wordsworth (III)

“Ruth” is a moving poem and would be merely tragic except for this idea of maintaining the wonders of childhood. It draws on the conclusions of “Nuns Fret Not” and “My Heart Leaps up”. It begins in her childhood and skips to her falling for a man from America, who seems to have tamed the wilds of the West, but he abandons her, so that she has to be placed in mental institution, but she gradually regains the practice of her youth of living in Nature. One might argue that she has merely gone insane, but not for Wordsworth. It is a bleak comfort for her and for himself that she who has lost so much can regain comfort in the world outside.

When Ruth was left half desolate,

Her Father took another Mate

It could be that Ruth’s mother took off (which would mirror her spouse’s abandonment), but it sounds like her mother died. Nor does it sound like the child was paid much attention to once the father remarried, calling her “slighted,” so she turns to nature “In thoughtless freedom, bold.” She makes a straw pipe playing sounds that mimicked nature’s winds and floods. She plays there enough until it’s as if she were born there, her natural habitat:  “an infant of the woods.” In her father’s she only “seemed to live” while “Herself he own delight; / Pleased with herself.”

Interestingly, she doesn’t grow to become a woman but “grew to woman’s height” which might be a good thing according to Wordsworth. She marries the American, is abandoned and goes mad in this awful yet wonderfully worded way:

with many a doleful song

Made of wild words, her cup of wrong

She fearfully caroused.

She becomes a vagrant, begging for food, living in nature or in a barn during the winter and, to cheer herself, plays a flute made of hemlock stock (hemlock is a poison, so it’s bittersweet), until

Among the fields she breathed again:

The master current of her brain

Ran permanent and free

The Lucy poems together constitute a lyric sort of narrative that many have found sad yet pleasing as the speaker mourns the death of Lucy. The poems are largely self-explanatory. I’ve seen them arranged differently, so it’s hard to tell their best arrangement. However, “Strange Fits of Passion” seems to suggest the speaker merely imagines her dead: “If Lucy should be dead!” which is the last line which may explain the first: “Strange fits of passion.” He imagines her dead and so the horse quickens its pace. It isn’t clear, though, if the pace quickens because of the speaker, of the horse (eager to get home) or of the horse sensing the speaker’s passion.

Alternately, if Lucy dies prior to the speaker’s being told and he senses it somehow, that would be strange—even supernatural.

Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer

 

You will know from the first paragraph whether you’ll want to read this book or not:

Mother used to call it change of life, but Larque never expected to change quite so much. Gender, for God’s sake, which is really basic, the first thing anybody notices about a person. Then, becoming not only male but gay—what a way to do the big Four-Oh, when all along she thought she was quite happy.

This won the James Tiptree award, which is all about gender examination, and this is a tour-de-force of such an examination. So if you believe in two genders, or immutability of sexuality (especially by puberty), read no further.

The strange gender extrapolations is the novel’s strength. The narrator is a painter in her mid-life and suddenly to the chagrin of some of her family undergoes changes and gains a doppelganger named Sky who says, “Boogers” upon meeting our protagonist. The doppelganger is a youthful version of the protagonist:

“Who are you?” 

“Traitor,” the kid shot back, “you should know. I’m you.”

Sky is Larque’s adolescent escort not only through the changes of life, gender, and sexuality but also through adolescent difficulties—high expectations from her mother, abandonment of her father once her mother divorced him. There’s also Shadow, the cowboy animus, who knows the male side of her.

The weakness is the voice, which feels more light-hearted YA than adult, although perhaps that can be explained by the narrator going through a second puberty—a time of confusion. It isn’t just the colloquial expressions but the reactions. Examples:

“for God’s sake.... Childhood’s a bitch.... Adolescence was hell.... She’s a twerp.”

and

Sky snorted like a pony and got up from the table. “Look what you turned into,” she muttered. 

“Look what I was to start with,” Larque shot back. 

“You like this place you’re living in? Looks like a dump to me.” 

Larque felt all the attractiveness of child abuse as a life option. Yet, the obnoxious kid spoke truth. The place was in fact a dump. Dog hair rolled everywhere.

and

[Hoot, her husband, inquires about her doppelganger’s abilities:] “Does [Sky] walk through doors?” 

“I don’t think so.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Reasonably sure.” Actually. I don’t know and I don’t really care. Give me a break.
 

and

“Liar. You lie all the time.” 

Larque slapped the brat.

If you like many extrapolations and playful YA, you may well like Larque on the Wing. It takes lots of risks.