Down the Garden Path

How can you resist a memoir that begins like this:

I bought my cottage by sending a wireless to Timbuctoo from the Mauretania, at midnight, with a fierce storm lashing the decks.

I couldn't.  But, then, I already knew what I was getting when I purchased Down the Garden Path by Beverly Nichols.  Years ago I had read his memoir trilogy in which he described his efforts to rehabilitate the house and gardens at Merry Hall:  Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn.

I'm not a gardener but even I loved his accounts of gardening exploits and English country living in the years after World War II.  I was excited when I saw that my favorite little local bookstore carried the Merry Hall trilogy.  When I realized that they were carrying even more of Nichols' books I decided to treat myself to Down the Garden Path, his initial foray into garden writing. 

Published in 1932 it unexpectedly became a great hit.  Nichols was already an established writer who had a reputation throughout the 1920's as a partying playboy, friends with Noel Coward and Anita Loos. So it was somewhat of a surprise when he published a book about gardening.   He expected it would be mostly ignored, but it wasn't.  According to the new forward, written by Nichols' biographer Bryan Connon, The Gardening Club of America declared it "one of the most delectable and diverting garden books ever published."

Nichols has a wonderful way with words, although his turns of phrase are old fashioned early 20th Century phrases.  And of course he is describing another time, 1928-1931, a time when master-servant relationship existed, when people like Nichols had to deal with "the servant problem".   By the time Nichols wrote the Merry Hall books, World War II was over and upper class Britons were more or less resigned to the fact that life had changed.  (They didn't know how to move on to "post-servant"  phase, but they realized they were going to be servantless.)  But at the time this book was written the landed class was still in denial.

I'm not much of a gardener (ok I'm not at all a gardener) but even I could have a beautiful garden if I could employ ... a gardener.   Nichols has a gardener to do the heavy lifting and that leaves him time to putter in the garden.  And write books about it.  Which is marvelous for we readers.

I've already lent it to my best friend H who is the possessor of the complete set of Merry Hall books.  It probably will make the rounds of the book club too.

Cold Comfort Farm/Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

One of the problems with having a love of reading but no formal education in literature is not knowing how to classify novels within genres.  To the extent that we covered genre in my high school literature courses or my college freshman English courses (which I actually mostly took in high school), it was only in a cursory way.  So I tend to classify literature in a cursory way.

What I've found is that "real" English majors are always correcting me when I try to classify novels.  Cursory isn't good enough for them.  I understand that; it's how I feel about generalized discussions of the law.  But since, most of the time, the genre really isn't necessary for what I want to talk about when I talk about novels (and since the "correction" often takes the form of an extended lecture that forms a huge digression from the topic at hand) I tend to avoid mentioning genre.

But that's hard to do when talking about novels that fall into genres like, for instance, satire. 

I'm just going to admit right off the bat that I know next to nothing about satire as a genre.  I recognize that there are all kinds of genre classifications that may fall within satire or may well be slightly (or majorly) different from satire.   I've never figured out how those classifications work and, inevitably, whatever I decide to call something, I'm told it is WRONG! 

Maybe that's why I think I don't like satire.  I do think that I don't like satire.  I don't think I hate it.  But I do think I don't like it.

So with all those caveats ...

As I said the other day, I was not fond of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.  I remember that, mostly, I was bored by it but I kept reading because "everyone" said it was so great.   It took me a while to figure out that it was supposed to be satire and that was partly because it didn't seem all that over-the-top to me, a girl from the midwest.  As far as I was concerned, people from New York really were like that and the things that happened to them really happen to people in New York.  Where was the satire?  Eventually I got it.  But I didn't like it.

My formal introduction to satire (wasn't everyone's?) was Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal.  But I had read Huckleberry Finn before that.  I liked Huck Finn. No one told me it was satire but I understood that Twain was playing with me.  On the other hand, I've never wanted to re-read Huck Finn.  I've never wanted to re-read A Modest Proposal.  I've never wanted to re-read anything satirical that I can think of.   The way I look at it, once you "get it" there isn't any point in reading it again.  And that's how I've always looked at satire - as something that is meant to convey a message (usually with blunt force) and once I get the message I can discard the medium.

I sometimes think that the reason I avoid satire is because I'd rather just "get it" by reading a book of non-fiction and really learning about the subject.  The kinds of satire that I like are the short humorous kind that make me laugh.  A Modest Proposal, for all it's cleverness, isn't going to make anyone guffaw.  The Onion, on the other hand, makes me laugh quite often.  But I wouldn't want to read a novel-length version of an Onion story. And is The Onion satire?  I think it is.  But it is also a parody. 

I like parody. And here we get into deep waters because I have no idea if parody is a sub-genre of satire or is it it's own genre or is a technique that is sometimes used in satire?  I'm sure someone will enlighten me.  

I think I like parody because the key to understanding and "getting" parody isn't knowing any fact about society in general (political or religious etc.) but knowing something about the works that are being parodied and what their strengths and weaknesses are.  The Onion is a parody of a newspaper.  It may satirize the news, but it only works because people are familiar with newspapers. The Daily Show  is wonderful because it is a parody of a news broadcast.  It uses that parody to satirize the political news of the day but it only works because people understand news broadcasts and their strengths and weaknesses.

Most parodies that I like have nothing to do with politics but are strictly parodying a particular type of work of literature or film or television.  For instance, I thought the film Galaxy Quest, a parody of the Star Trek franchise, was fabulously funny.   There are certain elements of parody in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make the entire concept work.  As far as I'm concerned, a good parody is written by someone who loves the underlying work being parodied and is enjoyed most by people who love that underlying work too.  I think that's why I liked the film Australia but other people didn't.

That leads me to Cold Comfort Farm, which is a parody. (Is it also satire?  Google it and you will see it associated with satire.)  I read Cold Comfort Farm because a number of people recommended it.  It took me a while to realize it was a parody and not just some other form of 1930's comic novel (although I was fully on board with the fact of parody by the time that the protagonist got to the farm). 

Cold Comfort Farm is the story of Flora Poste ("Robert Poste's daughter") who is left an orphan after finishing an expensive education that prepared her for nothing.  She has not enough money to support herself so she decides to do what all orphans do in novels, go live with relatives.  She chooses some mysterious relatives who live at a place called Cold Comfort Farm and who owe her father some mysterious debt.  When she arrives she finds that she has stepped into a situation much like a 19th century novel not only in the living conditions but in the mindset of the inhabitants (or, apparently, much like early 20th century popular British fiction).  This pleases her because she can work to change the lives of the people for the better.  And she does.

I never read the popular British novels of the day that Gibbons was parodying, but I have read the Brontes and DH Lawrence and that was enough to "get it".   One of the interesting things to me was that Gibbons wrote the novel in the 1930's (obviously before World War II) and yet the story is set at a later date (the early 1950's?) while the life of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm is right out of Lawrence or Bronte.  This gives the novel an unpredictable feel that is, I think, essential to keeping the reader turning the pages.  I kept being pulled into the 19th century aspects of Cold Comfort Farm only to be jerked away by the appearance of telephones and aeroplanes and chevy vans and "talkies". 

I think this is important because one of the reasons I don't go out of my way to read parodies is because I fear being bored.  If you are familiar with the underlying work that is being parodied then you essentially know what is going to happen.  Humor can only go so far in keeping my interest.  What I need is a "new" problem for the author to solve.  And in Cold Comfort Farm the problem that Gibbons set for herself was how to integrate this "modern" woman into a 19th century setting without destroying the subject that was being parodied and while still keeping the woman "modern". 

I think she succeeded in part by making Flora Poste (the heroine) not really very likeable.  I didn't become invested in Flora for a very long time.  In fact, at the beginning, I wondered how I was going to tolerate her long enough to follow her through a novel.  But Gibbons uses some of the characteristics of Flora that could be annoying (her self-assuredness, her insistence on having things her way, her refusal to listen to naysaying) as a counterpoint to the people at Cold Comfort Farm who are stuck in their 19th century life simply because they can't bring themselves to act to change their lives.

In 19th century and early 20th century novels the heroine who brings change to the people "set in their ways" doesn't do it through force of character.  Jane Eyre is constantly described as quiet and unassertive.  Mary in The Secret Garden gets nowhere when she is assertive in her temper tantrums, it is only when she becomes a "good child" that she is able to work change.

Flora has no interest in being like those kinds of heroines.  She is a "modern" woman. And that is what makes this an interesting parody.  She is, in some ways, a parody within a parody.

I admit that it took me about half of the novel to really begin enjoying it.  It was only when I saw that Flora really was going to follow through on her intention to force changes that I became interested in what was going to happen and how she was going to make it happen.  I feel that it is a novel that I will read again some day because I know that I missed a lot on first reading.  But when I put it down I didn't think much about it and I did not intend to even write about it.  (Partly because of the whole parody/satire connection /dichotomy.)

Then I picked up Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.  As Fforde says, fiction is "strange, unpredictable and fun!" 

In this novel, there is an agency known as Jurisfiction that patrols BookWorld and keeps plots in order and stops rogue fictional characters from leaping from novel to novel or worse, leaping out into the real world (or Outland, as it is referred to).  As an Outlander, Thursday Next works with fictional characters (mostly from books that are seldom read anymore, because those characters have more free time to do other things).  They meet in locations that are "back story", for instance the ballroom of the Dashwood estate in Sense and Sensibility.   It is a difficult concept to explain but by this, his fourth book in the series, it is understood by his readers.

Think of books as you think of them when you read them - as a small universe that you enter and that really exists.  Or at least exists in the sense that a television set with actors playing the characters exists.  In Fforde's fiction a few chosen people really can enter into books and walk among the characters, as long as they stay in the back story so that the reader doesn't "see" them.

But a book in Bookworld doesn't have all the detail that readers imagine when they read a book.  As Thursday ponders:

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so.  When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the author might have died a long time ago.

In Bookworld, each book floats in the great Nothing in which text cannot exist.  But the books also exist in clumps (maybe like galaxies) that are composed of genres. (Groan.  Genre again) Characters have learned how to communicate and jump from novel to novel (except no one can get into Sherlock Holmes yet) and they have, collectively, formed their own type of government complete with a legislature and an enforcement branch.  Thursday and the fictional characters on her team do the monitoring as well as keeping the peace between genres.

For instance, in this novel one of the subplots involves a border dispute between the Racy Novel genre and its neighbors, Feminist and Ecclesiastical.  The senator for Racy Novel reveals they have developed a "dirty bomb", a "tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature" and threatens to detonate it.  This is of great concern to the Feminist and Ecclesiastical genres. As Thursday  explains:

A well placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitive nature right into the middle of Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't really classify Fforde's novels.  They are fantasy.  They are comic.  They are mysteries.  Are they parodies?  Maybe Fforde tries to answer that in this novel.   

At one point Thursday is cast out of her own Thursday Next novel into the great Nothing.  Because she is not text she can survive where a fictional character cannot (that part of the novel is a graphic novel - no text, get it?) and she eventually manages to make her way to the next book ... Cold Comfort Farm.   (Where she incidentally discovers there really is something nasty in the woodshed.)

So Cold Comfort Farm and Thursday Next. Neighbors.  Linked by genre. At least in the mind of Jasper Fforde.   Is it because they are both in the parody genre?  Or is it because they parody multiple genres?  As I said, I avoid those discussions. :)

By the way Thursday Next was one of the books I was going to read this year in What's in a Name Challenge.  Two down.

Olive Kitteridge

I decided to read Elizabeth Strout's book, Olive Kitteridge, because it won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and despite its description as a novel of stories. I'm not a big fan of short story and I suspected that this would be more short story than novel.

I think it was. And I think that anyone who enjoys short stories might really enjoy this book. It is composed of thirteen chapters that each could stand alone as a separate story. Olive, the main character, is not necessarily the subject of each story and in one of them she makes only a perfunctory appearance walking into and out of a restaurant with her husband, noticed by the woman who plays the piano in the cocktail lounge.

Maybe approaching Olive this way is the best way because Olive is a difficult character. She's not very likeable but I did end up having deep empathy for her. Her husband Henry, a Jimmy Stewart character complete with the "aw shucks" language, is a very nice man and it is never completely clear how he ended up married to Olive. Her son Christopher, who suffers from depression, is overwhelmed by her so much that he doesn't seem real through much of the book. The other people in the town who know Olive do not, in general, seem to like her although they often notice moments of deep (and unexpected) kindnesses that she performs.

Strout is at her best in describing the lives of the other town people and yet, for me, that was a problem. Her story, for instance, of the life of the cocktail pianist is deeply moving and yet ... I wanted more. And at the same time I wondered why I was supposed to care about this character who has almost no interaction with the Kitteridges and who doesn't really appear at any other point in the story.

One reason I don't like short stories is that I dislike getting attached to a character only to see them disappear while there are still hundreds of pages in the book for me to read. When the story of a character is over I want to put down the book and pick up a new book. Maybe that's why I do better reading short stories that appear in magazines rather than in bound collections.

But, since this wasn't really a book of short stories, I kept reading. And I eventually got to the chapters written from the point of view of Olive herself. And that was worth the wait.

What all the stories in this book have in common is not really Olive. Strout has written a book that is, above all, a meditation on aging and end of life. Death and the thought of death pervades the stories but they are balanced by births and marriages and joy. With thirteen stories to work with, there is much to think about after this book is finished.

La Boheme

It has been more than a week since I went to Opera Theatre of St. Louis to see this year's production of La Boheme and I'm still somewhat in shock. This is at least the fifth production of Boheme that I've seen. It might be the sixth but I'm not sure. And that doesn't count watching PBS productions.

It is hard not to do a decent production of Boheme. First, it has a simple but moving story. Mimi, a seamstress, lives in Paris supporting herself with her needle. In the same building live four men living the Bohemian lifestyle of artists. They have not much money but they are happy. The writer, Rudolfo, meets Mimi when her candle has gone out and she comes by their place for a light. They fall in love. Lots of beautiful love songs ensue. They are happy. Lots of joyous cafe music ensues. But Mimi is ill (tuberculosis) and of course eventually dies. Lots of beautiful sad death music ensues. The story is easy to follow, the music is gorgeous. How can any production go wrong.

I've been a season ticket holder at Opera Theatre since 1986. I've seen some fabulous productions (the La Traviata done a few years ago comes to mind; Billy Budd in 1993 was magnificent). I've seen only a few dogs (Under the Double Moon is the standard for dogs.). And I've seen good solid productions. I'm seldom disappointed. There is almost always something good I can say about the production (except Under the Double Moon which was horrible in all respects). I walked out of Christopher Alden's production of Marriage of Figaro because I didn't like the staging (I've seen Figaro a million times and I've never seen it staged where the count holds a knife to the throat of the countess, one of only a number of problems with that production) but I did think that the singing was beautiful.

But.

I am at a loss to find anything nice to say about this year's La Boheme. The biggest problem was the voices. Through all these years I've sat in the same seats except when I've occasionally had to switch tickets. They are on the side in a theater with a thrust stage . I'm well aware that the sound is not as good as the sound for those that sit center. But I've always found that this is a good way to figure out just how far the singer is going to go. If they can sound fabulous to me in my seats - they are going places. If they can sound merely good that means they are fine singers. But sitting where I sit also shows up every flaw of technique and diction and I can tell when a singer needs work.

Derek Taylor as Rudolfo simply did not have a big enough voice for this production. Perhaps in a smaller production with a smaller orchestra he would have been fine. Perhaps he was having allergy problems. Perhaps I caught him on a bad night. Whatever. It was very difficult to hear him over the orchestra from my seats and that was a HUGE problem during moments when his arias are supposed to soar.

Alyson Cambridge (who was wonderful in Carmen a few years ago) was definitely having allergy problems the night I heard her. She has a lovely voice, but it was just not at its best that night. Amanda Majeski as Musetta got all the notes right and that's about all I can say for her. Timothy Mix as Marcello was actually fine when he sang alone. Unfortunately Marcello doesn't sing alone all that often. And that was the biggest problem. Whenever there was a duet or trio or quartet, the singers just did not seem to be together. Their cutoffs were sloppy, their voices did not blend. I blame the conductor.

What a disappointment. But it might have been mitigated by good acting or brilliant staging. The acting was pedestrian. There was no chemistry that I could see between Mimi and Rudolfo. And Majeski's portrayal of Musetta was so annoying that I wondered why anyone would have been attracted to her. The production is supposed to be a revival of the 2001 production. I saw the 2001 production and thought it was magical. Somehow the magic was lost in this production. The cafe scene especially just seemed ... crowded.

At the first intermission I turned to the people I was with and said I really wasn't liking it much. One of my friends, in relief, said she thought it had just been her, that she was just not in the right mood, but she thought it was a mess. At the second intermission we all decided to leave. We decided it was the worst La Boheme we'd seen and there was no reason to stay. We'd all seen it enough times; why leave a bad taste in our mouths?

But what a disappointment. I've never come out of a production of La Boheme ever before that I wasn't humming and excited and upbeat despite the sad ending. Not until last week.

Here's a nice version of O Soave Fanciulla I found to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Niche Books?

Booking Through Thursday asks:

There are certain types of books that I more or less assume all readers read. (Novels, for example.)

But then there are books that only YOU read. Instructional manuals for fly-fishing. How-to books for spinning yarn. How to cook the perfect souffle. Rebuilding car engines in three easy steps. Dog training for dummies. Rewiring your house without electrocuting yourself. Tips on how to build a NASCAR course in your backyard. Stuff like that.

What niche books do YOU read?

Books on North American French Colonial History. Mostly.

I also read travel books by women writers.

Is Steven Harper reading The Gift?

A story on Quill and Quire reminded me of something I've known for a while. Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi has been sending books to the Prime Minister of Canada for the last two years. He has chronicled his gifts (and the lack of response from the Prime Minister) on What is Steven Harper Reading? I came across the website last year and thought the whole idea was interesting, but then I forgot about it.

The Quill and Quire story was about the fact that after almost two years of silence Martel started, in April, receiving acknowledgement letters from one of the Harper's staff members. He doesn't know why and the letters don't indicate that Harper has actually read the books.

What caught my eye was that one of the most recent books that Martel sent to Harper was Lewis Hyde's The Gift which I blogged about extensively last fall. Martel writes a cover letter with each book explaining why he chose it. He also inscribes the book. He then publishes the inscription and letter on the website. I was interested in what he wrote to Harper about The Gift so I went and looked.

He wrote (among other things):

Art is at the heart of The Gift. Hyde sees every aspect of art as a gift: creativity is received as a gift by the artist, art is made as a gift and then, rather awkwardly in our current economic system, art is traded as a gift. That certainly rings true with me. I have never thought of my creativity in monetary terms. I write now as I did when I started, for nothing. And yet the artist must live. How then to quantify the value of one’s art? How do we correlate a poem’s worth with a monetary value? I use the word again: it’s awkward. If Hyde favours the spirit of gift-giving over that of commercial exchange, it’s not because he’s a doctrinaire idealist. He’s not. But it’s clear what he thinks: we’ve forgotten the spirit of the gift in our commodity-driven society and the cost of that has been the parching of our souls.

He ends his letter with the most appropriate sentiment:

One last point, made in the spirit of Hyde’s book. I have now sent you fifty-five books of all types, and there will be more to come, as long as you are Prime Minister. I imagine these books are lying on a shelf somewhere in your offices. But they won’t be there forever. One day you will leave office and you’ll take with you the extensive paper trail that a prime minister creates. That trail will be placed in hundreds of cardboard boxes that will end up at the National Archives of Canada, where in time they will be opened and the contents parsed by scholars. I would feel sad if that were the fate of the books I have given you. Novels and poems and plays are not meant to live in cardboard boxes. Like all gifts, they should be shared. So may I suggest that you share what I have shared with you. One by one, or all together, as you wish, give the books away, with only two conditions: first, that they not be kept permanently by each recipient but rather passed on in a timely fashion, after they’ve been read, and, second, that they never be sold. That would keep the gift-giving spirit of our book club alive.

I wonder if Harper has read any of the books Martel has sent him. What a joy it would be for some of us to receive books chosen by a novelist by Martel. And yet through most of this period Harper has not even had a staff member acknowledge the gifts. This one was acknowledged:

May 22nd, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent correspondence.

Thank you for writing to share your views with the Prime Minister. You may be assured that your comments have been carefully noted. For more information on the Government’s initiatives, you may wish to visit the Prime Minister’s Web site, at www.pm.gc.ca.

Your sincerely,

L.A. Lavell

Executive Correspondence Office

How sad.

So, you've always wanted to be an artist ...

The brain is an amazing organ.  49 year old Alan Brown had a stroke.   Here's what happened:

...Brown was still recovering from his surgery when he realized that his doodles, once limited to stick men, had become strikingly more realistic.  Brain surgery can cause significant changes in behavior and abilities. Luckily for Brown, his change was for the better. He began painting (examples of his work can be seen here) and eventually quit his day job to open a gallery, where he displays and sells his art.

His art is dark.  But definitely not stick figures.  Click that link and see.