Week Fifty Two - Jeanette

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

Recommended by Stuart

            Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

I spent Christmas in Oxford, with Kathryn and her family. We played Yahtzee, we drank Lidl’s knock-off (and far nicer) version of Southern Comfort, we watched The Manchurian Candidate. Spending the festive season there was indeed like sitting at night in a lighted house. Lighted with the mini-bulbs on the tree, and a family’s love.

It’s still Christmas (ish). If I can’t be sentimental now, then when?

I also read Housekeeping. I purposefully kept this as the penultimate Two Readers book because I suspected it would be one of my very very favourites. And so it proved.

Anyone that leans to look into a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them.

Thank you, Stuart Evers. Here he is cooking an egg. (He hates eggs).

Why is he cooking an egg on Battle Of The Pans for charity? Because he’s only an acclaimed novelist with two fabulous books to the good, Ten Stories About Smoking and If This Is Home.

I’ve known Stuart for ages now, way before either of us had a published book. (Always satisfying to say you knew them before they were famous, darling). We met during the post-university social whirl. He was friends with my friends, and a proper looker. I couldn’t fail to notice someone with his kind of louche grace! The first time I spoke to him properly I was about 22, and we were at (the now sadly closed) Rowan’s Bowling Alley in Finsbury Park. Neither of us could bowl but both of us could drink. The former was quickly abandoned for the latter, and we’ve been friends ever since.

He recommended both Jude and I fifty-two books to read. What a guy. Jude chose Georges Perec's Things; I decided to leave my book to the hand of fate. In our modern world, that hand equates to a random number generator on the internet. Although I promised the generator I would read Jack by AM Homes, I immediately broke that promise, because I saw Housekeeping at four. I knew that was the one.

(By the way, I’m keeping Stuart’s list of other novels for future reference. This year has taught me that I need to be far less sniffy about contemporary fiction. Stuart writes an excellent blog, and here is his list of this year’s best books. I shall be delving into that, too.)

Why did mine eye alight on Housekeeping? Partly because I knew it to be an important modern novel, but mainly because I was fascinated by Marilynne Robinson’s approach to fiction. Housekeeping, her first novel, was massively lauded at publication in 1980 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Gilead, her second novel, was massively lauded at publication in 2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Twenty-four years and two masterpieces at either end. I have the hugest amount of respect for people with very high inner critics who will not dish up anything unless they are sure it’s astonishing.

Housekeeping’s power is stealthy. You get to know characters as you would in real life: they don’t dump out the contents of their individual personal history handbag on the table the first time of meeting. They’re guarded, waiting until they can trust you, sure that you understand them. And, because you’ve worked to get to know them, their tragedies become yours.

Ruth and Lucille, sisters and orphans, are well acquainted with loss. Their mother, Helen, committed suicide; their grandfather perished in a locomotive accident; their grandmother, after caring for them for five years, ‘one winter morning eschewed awakening’. They are then passed on to Lily and Nona, another pair of sisters. Uncomfortable with children, they struggle to relate to the introverted Ruth and Lucille.

‘That Lottie Donahue could help. Her children are alright.’

‘I met the son once.’

‘Yes, so you said.’

‘He had an odd look. Always blinking. His nails were chewed down past the quick.’

‘Oh, I remember. He was awaiting trial for something.’

‘I don’t remember just what.’

‘His mother never said.’

Someone filled the teapot.

Lily and Nona aren’t bad people, they just don’t really want the responsibility of bringing up two troubled little girls while in their twilight years. They connive to palm them off to Sylvie, Helen’s sister. Sylvie is a transient, who sleeps with her shoes under her pillow: an enigmatic woman who few people understand (or wish to). However, living with Ruth and Lucille brings her a sense of home, and the girls, at least initially, find solace with her unusual ways.

Not an especial amount happens in Housekeeping until the final fifty or so pages, when separation trauma becomes the primary theme. First comes a deeply upsetting schism between Ruth and Lucille, the latter growing embarrassed by Sylvie’s unusual behaviour – so much that she is prepared to forego her sister and Sylvie's defender. Very realistically, Robinson pulls out the hardness and the pity of how two formerly inseparable people grow apart.

‘It wasn’t the flowers, Ruthie.’

That sounded rehearsed. I waited, knowing that she would go on.

‘It was much more than that. We’ve spent too much time together. We need other friends.’

It isn’t only Lucille who views Sylvie as an unsuitable mother figure. The reader has been used to seeing Sylvie’s housekeeping from Ruthie’s perspective; all of a sudden we see it from a conventional viewpoint. The final act of Housekeeping is a quietly harrowing exploration of how alternative relationships and living situations are seen from the outside. Just as with Robinson’s characterisation of Lily and Nona, there’s no judgement against the people who are not comfortable with Sylvie and Ruth’s lifestyle. Although I felt Ruthie clinging on to Sylvie very strongly, also (and perhaps because I’ve worked in social care research) I understood also how they could not be left as they are. Neighbours don’t only stick their noses in because they don’t approve. There is a genuine, and laudable, desire to protect children from harm. Neglect is the hardest form of abuse to detect and to stop, and the consequences of not listening to that voice that says ‘that family down the street are worrying me’ could result in another Victoria Climbie or Baby P.

The book seems to be called Housekeeping because it looks at how we keep our homes in order: the domestic chores and the emotional well-being. Two Readers has been a sort of housekeeping, too. Reading and blogging on a book a week offers up its routine, while the critical reflection and heartbursts of love for my friends has been its emotional ballast.

Housekeeping this blog, and getting them all in before the end of the year, was something I thought I could do. I really did. But today my laptop power pack has broken: I've written my final post, Jude's recommendation of course, and I'm hoping the remainder of the battery will hold while I put it up.

2013, you bloody drama queen to the end.

Week Fifty-One - Jeanette

Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson (1992)

Recommended by Anita

My body is written on.

I have three tattoos. Each is a carefully chosen design, patterns I knew I wanted indelibly inked upon me. The nuances shift, but their core meaning doesn’t: they represent transitions. I got each one during the final element of a pupa stage. They are memento moris of my past lives.

(We tattooed people do witter on about how deep ‘n’ meaningful the things are. Boring bores, the lot of us.)

But, lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s another, less highfalutin' reason for my tattoos. I think it’s also an expression of my background, a branch from the same root as liking amusement arcades and gaud at Christmas. Loads of people I grew up with have them. If you don’t tattoo the name of your child on your arm, well, what kind of mother are you? Don’t you love your kid?

I feel kinship with Jeanette Winterson. She has my name! There are precious few of us Little Jeans around. But, too, she was a working-class girl who found herself running with a different crowd when she went to university. For me, the process had already started before I left Norwich (a schoolfriend accused me of being a class traitor), but it certainly solidified after the age of eighteen. I never thought of it as a conscious denial of my background, although I’m sure others saw it that way. As I wrote in Week Sixteen, there are only two people from my pre-uni days involved in Two Readers.

It's a minor part of the book, but Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit captures this chequered experience well: the excitement and feeling of belonging with your new life, coupled with the sense of loss for the old. 

In her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson revisits the material she drew on for Oranges. Her conflicted feelings about her upbringing (and apart from the class aspect, her family circumstances are very different to mine) continue to be source material for her. Having read those two works, I approached Written On The Body with veiled autobiography in mind.

It was an interesting book to tackle directly after The Pursuit Of Love.

I had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true. I had said them many times before but not to you. I had given them as forget-me-nots to girls who should have known better. I had used them as bullets and barter. I don’t like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don’t mean it then what else am I?

The gender of Written On The Body’s narrator is never revealed, yet (perhaps because of my association of Winterson with memoir) I found myself thinking of that narrator as ‘her’ throughout. I assumed one of the country’s top lesbians must be mining her own relationships with women. But of course it could be a man, or a transgendered person. (There is no Smack My Bitch Up ‘surprise’ twist ending). I also suspect Winterson was drawing attention to the difficulty of expression without gender pronouns, critiquing how binary and constricting those categories are.

We begin by reading of the narrator’s back love catalogue. The prose is graceful, charged and often erotic, although it does sometimes spill into floridness.

I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink under the deep red weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.

I do like it when Winterson gets a bit bawdier, too.

           June. The wettest June on record. We made love every day.

Most of the narrator’s women are flowing-locked anarcho goddesses (‘I had a girlfriend once who was addicted to starlit nights.’ Not addicted to Tetris, then?), but perhaps this is intended to show how the narrator idealises love objects rather than as a parade of unrealistic females. The Helenest of these Helens Of Troy is Louise: the pair embark upon an erotic and emotional odyssey until we discover that Louise’s body is more than honey-filled breasts and love-saturated heart. It has been invaded by leukaemia.

We are beholden to our bodies and, suicide aside, it is the body that has the ultimate control: the power of life and death. (That’s another reason why I decided to get tattooed. The body does enough stuff that you don’t want it to do, might as well get it to do something you do). The narrator now has to come to terms with this, and the book’s interlude, the extended prose poem ‘The Cells, Tissues, Systems And Cavities Of The Body’, explores Louise’s physicality as something more than sexual. It is an expression of the narrator’s love, framed by the new awareness of the cancer spraying graffiti on the inside and outside of Louise’s body.

Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on your portal vein?

Like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace, the narrator roams around: you can hear fingertips running on the corrugated roof of Louise’s mouth. But, when the narrator returns to the corporeal world, the hard fact of Louise’s illness is still there. What is more important, the health of the body or that of the heart?

One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning?

This novel didn’t, for me, have the personal clout of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: the story seems deliberately not as strong, almost as if Winterson thinks that an abstract narrative is a more valid approach to literature. But I really enjoyed getting lost within Louise’s capilliaries, climbing her spine stepladder, being swaddled by her intestines. 

And while we’re thinking of bodies, what body do you picture when you hear ‘mermaid’? Ariel in The Little Mermaid? Daryl Hannah in Splash? Cher in fancy dress? Jerry Hall on the cover of Siren? Chances are it isn’t this…

 

Cryptozoology is a word I had never encountered before I met Anita. It refers to the study of fake or unproven creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and Norfolk’s own Black Shuck. (Look at this fascinating list of cryptids – a Man-Eating Tree!). And then there’s The Buxton Mermaid, that beauty above.

Anita restored her. She is also her ambassador, telling her story to the press and to museums. Her care of The Buxton Mermaid goes beyond a job, and that is typical Anita. She will give her time and her support to those (and crypto-those) who she loves. She’s certainly done it for me. When I was in the midst of a crisis, Anita not only propped me up with words and hugs, she came to my place and did my washing-up. When everything is surreal because sadness is so huge, to have someone who can gently re-orientate your world, so you’re in no doubt it’s still worth living in because you have friends like her… it is a key to recovery.

I love conversing with Anita about books. (She's Tim's sister, equally as erudite as he) and as the year, and this project, has written itself on my body, I've realised I have my Two Readers friends to thank for more than just their book recommendation. It’s talking about the posts, sharing thoughts on the books in person, and to hear other interpretations of the stories and ideas that has been so incredibly inspiring, and the motivating factor in getting me to book fifty-one out of fifty-three.

Hold on to your hats. There are two amazing works coming down the Two Readers bridleway before midnight on the 31^st of December, 2013.

Week Fifty - Jeanette

 The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)

Recommended by Katherine

When I moved into my present flat (helped by Katherine, as well as Sharron, Nik, Tim, Kathryn, Rupert and the still-to-come Anita) I didn’t have much furniture. What I need, I said to Katherine, is not really a bed or a table. It’s a lovely vintage writing bureau.

‘I’ve got one of those in my garage,’ she said. ‘You can have it if you want.’

Since that beauty took up residence in the corner of my lounge, I cannot imagine life without it. Not having separate sections for creamy high gsm envelopes and the pound-shop jobbies for sending off the council tax? Pure savagery. (That sounds sarcastic if you don’t know me, but if you do, you’ll know how absolutely in earnest I am.) But, more importantly than even the correct ordering of stationery, I cannot imagine life without Katherine as my friend.

Last time I saw her, for a Christmas drink, our natter flitted between the effect of topography upon memory and the pantos we have known and ‘loved’; literary stylings and how Jem and the Holograms dolls were overpriced compared to Sindys. (Plus her husband comes from Norfolk. She’s as wry about the place as I am.)

Katherine is only a bloody qualified librarian, too! That’s the Red Rum (winning horse not backwards prophecy) of literary suggestion, right there. That’s why I wasn’t worried when I picked up The Pursuit Of Love and it had a hot-pink, Sophie Kinsella reader-friendly cover and praise from the Daily Mail on the back. I also wasn’t worried because I knew that Nancy Mitford was big mates with one of my revelations of the year: the prickly prince EvelynWaugh. And I certainly wasn’t worried when I started reading her cut-glass prose.

Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us children.

The children include our narrator, Fanny, and her cousin (the book’s protagonist) Linda. A dramatic youngster, Linda attempted suicide by yew-berry at the age of ten (because of a dead dog). They both love Oscar Wilde and long for adulthood, because they presume it will be all social whirls and Grand Love.

While Fanny quickly gives up on the latter and settles for the up-down-four-square Alfred, Linda keeps her idealism and it, naturally, leads her to missteps. Seventy years ago, people generally married these missteps. First up for Linda is the Conservative MP, Tony Kroesig, son of the Governor of the Bank of England. I found the characterisation of the Kroesig family brilliant but extremely depressing, because it is exactly analogous to the Tory attitude of today.

The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial qualities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him as a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.

It doesn’t work out with Tony.

Next, Linda throws herself into marriage with a Communist, Christian. His bad points are of a different hue.

‘I’m always saying to Christian how much I wish his buddies would either brighten up their parties a bit or else stop giving them, because I don’t see the point of sad parties, do you? And left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.’

It doesn’t work out with Christian.

Linda’s refusal to settle leads to Paris and to a man named Fabrice (‘she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love’); but, for some of her social circle, her swelling heart doesn’t matter. She should have stuck with Tony or, at a push, Christian. She’s judged as superficial, reckless and selfish, quick to bugger off at the first sign of trouble to look for a pipe dream. Yet, the reader is led to a far kinder conclusion. Linda is pursuing love, and second best is never enough: you’ll do much better, baby, on your own.

Since we’re quoting Madonna, I re-watched Who’s That Girl lately, and it popped into my head while reading The Pursuit Of Love.

Now, I’m making no claims for its cinematic qualities (it’s quite crap). I bring it up as a point of comparison that’s easy to forget when you largely live in a literary fiction and arty movie bubble. At the end of Who's That Girl, Griffin Dunne jilts his dullard fiancée for the unconventional Madge, which is a textbook example of a standard and extremely common dramatic device. From the breezy chimes of Busted’s ‘Crashed The Wedding’ to the more textured The Graduate, those who pursue love (especially by taking drastic action) are treated in one way and one way only. They are rewarded. In real life, they’re generally not. For a start, we usually take the hint that we’re not wanted when our darling gets married to someone else. In popular fiction, the heroes and heroines are so thick-skinned that they see the nuptials simply as another hurdle to leap, and no-one will be upset, or angry that the thousands spunked on a wedding is wasted.

What I really liked about The Pursuit Of Love was that, even while it uses some of the expected structure of romantic comedy, there’s a strong discomfort about happy-ever-after. For when Linda does find love with Fabrice, she is put off by his apparent commitment to someone else (a dead woman: how can anyone compete with that?). It is not at all clear that when Linda finally has her strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness that it will result in anything like a conventional relationship, or even a relationship at all. In this way, it is very similar to the other major work I’ve read on l’amour this year, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera. Unlike ...Cholera, though, The Pursuit Of Love’s épée to cut through love’s cliché is not philosophical intensity but sharp wit and brutal social observation. It has a light comedic touch and firm location in a contemporary setting.

I think I said all I wanted to say about love in relation to the Marquez work. When I wrote that – my favourite post of the year – I was in the eye of a perfect storm, and that book was my lightning rod. Now it’s Christmas Eve, I have three books left of Two Readers, and a real storm is raging outside, pulling trees from their roots and causing brick walls to tumble down.

            ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’

            ‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’

Week Forty-Nine - Jeanette

The Autobiography Of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) (1965)

Recommended by Sarah

A little over a year ago, Sarah and I were in Egypt.

We weren’t just arsing about in the pyramids (although we did that, too): we were working as part of the TEMPUS project at the universities in Cairo and Assiut. We were there at a turbulent time. President Mohamed Morsi had granted himself unlimited power, and there were sweeping protests against this. If you remember the story, you probably recall UK news emphasising violence and disorder.

That contradicts what I saw. Sarah and I went to Tahir Square with our Egyptian host. Yes, there were some disturbing embers of conflict – rubble, tanks, streets closed off – but the protests we saw were non-threatening. They had a message to be heard, the people were determined, but the method was intelligent serious debate and not aggression. Protesters even organised the street clean-ups. This politically engaged attitude was also present in the students Sarah and I met at the universities. Apathy wasn’t on the table. Incredibly inspiring, and something Sarah and I talked of over the crazy sludge that is Egyptian coffee (which I got rather addicted to).

As the first time Sarah and I had spent much time together, I found that she herself was pretty inspiring. She is involved directly in the campaign for women bishops. I recently went to an event that she organised, and was saddened and shocked at the depth of opposition within the Church of England hierarchy to women bishops, while also being supremely impressed with the fire of those working for progressive change.

With her willingness to stand up and be counted, it makes sense to me that Sarah studied, and retains a very strong interest in, African-American history and those who fought for political and human rights.

Malcolm X is a divisive figure. While everyone (everyone non-racist) can feel comfortable with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X is often accused of ‘reverse racism’. That, in his anger at the oppression of African-Americans, he espoused an uncompromising solution: complete segregation of black and white. He had a penchant for calling white people ‘devils’ and was especially suspicious of any who supported civil rights and integration.

I very much respect Malcolm X. From my relatively privileged position, I still get so worked up over inequalities that I want to throw paint at things; fuck, if I was a black person in post-war America I’m sure I’d be angry, feel that white people were devils, and distrust their efforts to ‘help’.

My mother, with the baby in her arms, just made it into the yard before the house crashed in, showering sparks. I remember we were outside in the night in our underwear, crying and yelling our heads off. The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned down to the ground.

The Black Legion, a local version of the Ku Klux Klan, set that fire. A white man raped Malcolm’s grandmother (resulting in her pregnancy with Malcolm’s mother). White men murdered Malcolm’s father, the Reverend Earl Little, because of his vocal support for Marcus Garvey. As a child, the Little children were called ‘nigger’, ‘darkie’ and ‘Rastus’ so much ‘we thought those were our natural names’. Malcolm, academically top of his class, was told to give up any thoughts of being a lawyer and to be a carpenter instead.

Yes. I’d be really fucking angry, too.

Malcolm Little (the X came slightly later: it symbolises the true African family name that an African-American could never know) responded, at first, through hustling, drugs, pimping, crime and, as he terms it, being ‘mentally dead’. He is hard on himself for collaborating with racist America by exploiting other black people (selling drugs) and trying to ‘whiten’ his look by straightening his Afro hair. He ends up in prison, and begins to read, everything from rare anthropology texts to the dictionary itself. His curiosity is piqued as to how and why slavery and exploitation occur.

First, always ‘religiously’, he [the white man] branded ‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’ labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war. […] Europe’s chancelleries for the next century [19^th] played a chess game of naked exploitation and power from Cape Horn to Cairo.

It is during this period when he becomes taken with the Nation Of Islam (NOI), led by Elijah Muhammad. NOI teachings draw from mainstream Islam – there is no God but Allah, total adherence to the Qur’an, prohibitions on alcohol and pork, for example – but have a specific American cultural context. For instance, the ninth platform of NOI reads:

WE BELIEVE that the offer of integration is hypocritical and is made by those who are trying to deceive the Black peoples into believing that their 400-year-old open enemies of freedom, justice, and equality are, all of a sudden, their friends.

Also not a part of mainstream Islam, and far more dubiously, NOI holds its own creation myth. White people were the result of genetic engineering. Over six thousand years ago, when all humankind was black, the scientist Mr Yacub (the biblical Jacob), was embittered towards Allah. He holed up on the island of Patmos and created a ‘bleached-out white race of devils’ (the Jews). This white race stirred up trouble, until they were exiled to Europe; they remained in caves, living savagely, until Allah sent Moses to ‘civilise’ them.

This I find very troubling. I don’t have a problem with African-Americans calling white people ‘devils’ on account of their collective racist behaviour. I do have a problem with a bogus scientific explanation for devilishness that specifically targets Jewish people. We all know where that can lead.

As well as this ‘Dr Yacub’ business, the other big gripe I have with Malcolm X is his frankly atrocious attitude to women. He casually and routinely comments on a woman's attractiveness, and how women in general are manipulative, have little purpose but  to support a man and family, and should basically be treated as babies or pets. It's worth noting that this attitude predates his NOI days (although the organisation didn't exactly stop his misogyny).

Malcolm X rose through the NOI ranks very quickly, and helped membership and visibility. His rousing and inflammatory speeches brought the race debates in America to a new intensity; he explained and challenged racism on TV and in print, often in the face of stupid and insulting interviewers.

Soon, far more people knew his name than that of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X writes that he remained loyal to Muhammad, even when scandal broke over the latter’s fondness for impregnating his secretaries. He even massaged his speeches in light of Muhammad’s indiscretions. 

I began teaching in New York’s Mosque Seven that a man’s accomplishments in life outweighed his personal, human weaknesses. I taught that a person’s good deeds outweigh his bad deeds. I never mentioned the previously familiar subjects of adultery and fornication, and I never mentioned immoral evils.

However, like the character Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, who is eliminated because he ‘sees too clearly and speaks too plainly’, the eloquent and high-profile Malcolm X is expelled from the NOI. Relationships deteriorate quickly. Malcolm X tries to regroup – he undertakes a pilgrimage to Mecca, spends much time in Africa, and converts to Sunni Islam – but, by the end of the Autobiography, the mood is very sombre indeed.

I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form.

He didn’t. Nation of Islam members murdered Malcolm X in February 1965.

I felt very galvanised reading The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, just as I was when I saw those Egyptian protests. For we need people who are not going to sit down and shut up.

It’s how shit gets done in this troubled world.

Week Forty-Eight - Jeanette

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

Recommended by Tim

Tim came round for dinner on Saturday. As the last time we’d see each other before 2013 shut its eyes, our shared mood was reflective. I was taking stock of Two Readers, and talking of my impression of Between The Acts.

I thought Between The Acts would be one of the more challenging recommendations. I had read To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, and retained no great affection for either. I did admire Virginia Woolf’s stylistic ambition, but the books themselves were fairly unloveable: similar to my thoughts on Joan Didion, you can appreciate writing for the achievement it is without ever wishing to read the fucker again.

In our Saturday conflab, Tim described Woolf’s non-page turner Mrs Dalloway succinctly as ‘all people preparing for dinner parties.’ Still, and certainly as one of my best-read friends, Tim felt he needed to persist with Virginia Woolf. He felt uncomfortable with dismissing an important novelist as only concerned with the bourgeouisie arranging flowers. And it was, with Between The Acts – Woolf’s final novel before her suicide – where he found satisfaction. This was the first reason for his recommendation.

In a note that precedes the text, Leonard Woolf (her husband) writes that Between The Acts was a complete novel, but Woolf had not ‘finally revised [it] for the printer’ before her death. I wonder if this was a reason why Tim, and I, reacted better to this novel. Perhaps, because there wasn’t that last opportunity to ruthlessly weed out what she considered sentimental, Between The Acts is a warmer book. It wasn’t half as much of a slog as I feared.

At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we.

Concerning a play (actually, calling it a ‘play’ dignifies it: it’s more of an am-dram dickabout), Between The Acts’ most obvious theme is performance, and especially the relationship between an audience and the action in front of it.

‘Reality too strong’, she muttered. ‘Curse ‘em!’ She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience – the play.

Tim knows acting fascinates me (and that’s the second reason he recommended this book). This isn’t because I want to act myself, but rather because I’m intrigued by how acting translates into everyday life. If you can convince people that you feel emotions as part of a constructed performance, what’s to stop you using those skills in real life? Manufacturing deceit, onstage and off, is a longstanding interest of mine.

              We all act. Yes, but whose play?

The play in Between The Acts is written and directed by failed actor and ‘lady of wonderful energy’ Miss La Trobe. It is an annual event, almost a ritual, and the community comes together to watch and participate in the pageant. Rather than create a coherent work of fiction, La Trobe’s work is an anthology, stopping at different eras of British history. She creates not individual characters, but the nebulous and shifting character of national identity. Thus, it is less like (e.g.) a well-crafted Ibsen psychological drama and more like a Mummers’ play.

What Mummers’ plays and Miss La Trobe’s pageant (and, perhaps, Woolf’s novels) have in common is that they’re not that interested in dramatic tension. Each looks at archetypes (folk and mythological characters, representations from British historical periods, the contemporary mannered upper-middle classes) and reproduces them. The audience has a prior knowledge of what to expect. The drama instead comes from random factors: will it rain, who’s gossiping about whom in the audience, will the cows’ lowing drown out the dialogue. What happens, indeed, between the acts.

Miss La Trobe’s play is performed a mere few weeks before the outbreak of World War II. Woolf obviously knew that, soon, all existing community rituals would be shattered, replaced by the new ones of blackouts and air-raids. But, still, in 1941 the full horror of Nazism was yet to come: the Final Solution had not been implemented, with the first industrial extermination taking place at Auschwitz in September 1941, six months after Woolf's death. She could not know how fully even humanity itself would be torn apart. Still, it is said that the horror of the war (and her house being bombed in the Blitz) contributed to the re-emergence of her depression and her decision to drown herself.

Although it’s tempting with a carefully constructed book like this to get all lit-crit on yo' ass and disappear in a cloud of signifiers and discourse (read the introduction for an ample example of that), it seems equally possible to enjoy it as a storytelling snapshot. I found Between The Acts often surprisingly direct in its imagery.

There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive-green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round.

Even if that’s a metaphor for the futility of war or a comment on the impasse between the genders, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a striking passage that perfectly captures the mood at that point in the book. Between The Acts has several such images, which don’t necessarily have to be pored over, because in and of themselves they are evocative of that very moment. This includes impish as well as violent moments. This book is probably the closest Woolf ever got to serving up the LOLs.

However, it would be wrong to say this was an easy read. Woolf was a modernist writer, and Between The Acts is a modernist work. Despite being one of her gentler artistic experiments, it does require concentration and is not simple to grasp. A pioneering approach of hers was to try to replicate the mayfly that is the mind, often dislocating thought from speech and physical action.

Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation, so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak.

The third reason that Tim recommended this book, I think, is because much of it deals with the inner world. Woolf’s prose claims that outer action and spoken words are opaque signs as to what’s really going on in our psyche; sometimes this is meant to mislead (as in acting), but often it’s an automatic and quite prosaic process. We don’t unpick every step of our thoughts that flit from stale bread to Italy, yet we’re there, while our conversational partner has gone from clock-watching to brooding on a miserable grudge.

I would argue that it is when you’re really close to someone that you let them in to the way your mind works rather than just revealing the contents of it. With Tim, I have had some of the longest and deepest conversations I have had with anyone. Yet, more than that, I think we have an understanding of each other’s inner narrative construction, and we can spend a good while disentangling our cerebral journeys with each other.

Let's go back to Saturday night (we’d emptied the mulled wine by this point). Tim was talking of the difficulty in finding an appropriate radio station to wake up to. I knew he wouldn’t go for Radio One, and he’d already expressed frustration with Radio Four for his early morning hello. ‘What about Classic FM?’, I asked. ‘It’s alright if you want to buy a Saab,’ he said.

‘What about Radio Three?’ Well, he explained, the classical selection they play is far too random. Sometimes it hits the wake up just right with a Debussy. But sometimes, he said, it was full on military music at 6am: ‘and I wake up and think there’s been a coup.’

We debated for at least another ten minutes. He eventually detailed a convulted plan where the field recording of a chaffinch plays for ten minutes before the radio switches on.

Phoney coups.

Chaffinches.

Sharing thought processes.

You can see why I love this man so much.

Week Forty-Seven - Jeanette

Maus by Art Spiegelman (1980-1991)

Recommended by Matt

The Holocaust.

How can art deal with it?

Talking or writing about The Holocaust, even in a low-key blog such as this, is a fraught experience. It feels, especially as a non-Jew, that I must instantly qualify myself: state upfront about how enormous it is, that it is a unique event, how we must never forget.

This says more about the author than it does about The Holocaust. Doesn’t every thoughtful person, who’s not an idiot or a bigot, know that it is an enormous unique event that we must never forget? Yet, still, I introduce Maus this way. My own fear of being seen as, at best, a Vichy France (and at worst an Adolf Hitler) if I don’t is too strong. But the risk, when we expend our energy and words in repeating such indisputable statements, is that we don’t afford the event much, or even any, complexity. That our own neurosis hobbles the ability for analysis, and we end up with a piece of writing that browbeats the reader with banality.

With tragic irony, it seems that in more recent times – The Reader, and the critical rehabilitation of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl spring to mind – fictional and real Nazis have been afforded that very complexity (and even sympathy). Compare this to The Boy In The Striped Pajamas. I was really quite angry when I saw this movie, for it was so very saccharine. I asked myself, is such colourless characterization of those in the camps, as so unrealistically angelic and always seen from the outside, actually damaging? Does it simply reinforce the 'them and us' rhetoric used by the Nazis?

Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, Art Spiegelman’s father: not only does it narrate Vladek’s Holocaust experience, but also his current life as an older immigrant man living in America, his (difficult) relationship with his wife Mala, and his attitude to Art and Art’s comics. Vladek’s numerous quirks and flaws may have something to do with The Holocaust; or they may just be who he is. The first challenging concept of Maus is that not every disagreeable trait in a survivor’s personality is a result of The Holocaust.

Vladek, a Polish Jew, marries Anja (Art’s mother) in the mid 1930s. Anja is from a wealthy family and the couple has a good lifestyle, although Anja is vulnerable to bouts of depression. Vladek tells us of how life began to get difficult for Polish Jews at the outbreak of World War II. What is most striking about the first book of Maus is not in itself the shrinking sphere that Jews are forced to function in (via seizure of businesses and property, and the acts of violence and murder): these processes of discrimination by the Nazis are well-known. But Vladek’s story brings an insight into the ad hoc nature of this time, so different from the image of steely calculating Nazi enforcers. Sometimes Vladek would be released when he was clearly committing an executionable offence, but sometimes he or the family would suffer with not even a thin excuse given. This inconsistency (while clearly on an overall curve towards genocide) creates both looming dread and grim pockets of hope. The reader is able to root for Vladek: he does not allow himself to be a victim easily. He works hard, he is clever and resourceful, he has wealth to exchange for favours, and he is prepared to hide or collaborate when necessary.

But Auschwitz was the fate for over one million Jews, and so it is for Vladek. Book Two of Maus concentrates on Vladek’s time in the extermination camp. Vladek mentions little of the gas chambers (it’s not from ignorance: all the prisoners know that they are there, and that they are used), but rather he concentrates on the day-to-day: the hunger, the lice, the relationships with camp supervisors, and the cumulative effect of smaller humiliations.

We learn Vladek’s story as Art learns it: with digressions, arguments, and frustrations. The present-day Vladek is extraordinary. He throws away Art’s trendy coat and gives him a horrible old one of his to replace it; he returns half-eaten cereal to the store (‘The manager helped me as soon as I explained to him my health, how Mala left me, and how it was in the camps’); he fakes a heart attack to get attention; he thinks all black people are thieves. At times, Vladek is so difficult that Art worries he is actually stereotyping Jewish people as miserly and intolerant, thus giving fuel to Nazi sympathizers.

We hear of, by the process of creation, the author’s own upbringing and history. His mother, Anja – who also went to Auschwitz and survived – killed herself when Art was twenty. Spiegelman wrote a frankly amazing short comic strip about it in 1973, Prisoner On The Hell Planet (reproduced in Maus).

The strip is a piercing scream of grief: we are left to wonder how far Anja’a suicide was a legacy of Auschwitz, how far it was her own depressive nature, and how far it was her unhappy familial relationships. She kept diaries but, to Art’s fury, Vladek threw them out. We only ever know of her through Vladek and Prisoner On The Hell Planet. But, yet, Anja haunts Maus: she glides between the frames, whispering her own story.

The other highly original thing about Maus is its use of animal metaphor. The Jews are mice; the Nazis, cats; the Poles, pigs; the Americans, dogs; the French, frogs. Spiegelman’s metaphors initially seem to say that we are not all just the same people underneath our racial and national identities: that they define us, and so far so that they manifest in fundamental differences as strident as those found between animal species.

However, by emphasizing difference rather than minimizing it, Maus highlights the philosophical claptrap that The Holocaust drew oxygen from. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to read any of the mouth-foaming ‘theorists’ Hitler subscribed to, or any of Mein Kampf itself (which is so muddled it’s like slogging through hateful wet cement), you’ll know that these texts might as well be saying cats should get pigs and frogs to collaborate with them in order to kill mice. That’s how logical they are. At the same time, through using cats and mice especially, Spiegelman is able to visually evoke the power relationship between Jews and Nazis, and also to refer to, and undermine, the Nazi propaganda that equated Jews with rats (as seen in 1940's The Eternal Jew).

An incredibly important book, this, I think. And, still, within it, there is room for laughter. Not hurtful or ambiguous dark laughter, but real, beautiful big belly laughs.

Matt and I were born within a few days of one another. There’s something quite lovely about meeting someone of your own school year when you’ve left your childhood behind. We have very similar cultural tastes: Kate Bush, All About Eve, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Robyn, Love And Rockets… and it’s not only what we like, but how we like. There’s a lot of geeking about b-sides and quoting from scripts.

But, as with all friends, shared taste only gets you so far. Extremely caring, he works in HIV prevention and awareness, and his efforts helped the campaign The HIV-Hop win a national award last year. PLUS he’s a talented artist, and is prolific without compromising on quality – that in itself is an inspiration to me. Matt, with his artistry and his kindness and his passion, well, he makes me feel that I can weather any shit, and then come out of it with a Bette Davis hair-toss.

I’m unsurprised that Maus is one of Matt’s favourite books. He is moved by oppressive circumstances, and despises any form of prejudice: but he is uninterested in simply doling out platitudes. And that’s the essence of Maus.

I want to understand The Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean that I can understand The Holocaust.

Week Forty-Six - Jeanette

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)

Recommended by Sharron

The Cuckoo Sister, The Secret Garden, Moondial, The Children Of Green Knowe, the decidedly patchy Dramarama… I loved the one-off and short-run children’s TV dramas of the 1980s. Even the ‘school programmes’, the ones ruined by puppets teaching you what a consonant was (How We Used To Live, Dark Towers, The Boy From Space) – all amazing.

Many of these shows had a spooky sci-fi element to them, so it’s no surprise that John Wyndham had a foothold in this market. While The Day Of The Triffids was a big(gish) budget thing on the BBC at 9pm that I wasn’t allowed to watch (‘Muuuuuuum… how scary can it be?’ ‘You won’t like it. You’re scared of the Smash advert aliens’), Chocky, and its sequels, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge, were on at squash-and-Club-biscuit time. I watched all three.

It’s surprising that The Chrysalids never got made into a kids’ TV drama, too. It has all the golden elements of that era – psychic power, a future dystopia, social comment about tolerance – and a very believable boy hero. I can picture the title sequence; a neon green BBC Micro font over a Lidl Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.

The Chrysalids is set generations after the world has suffered Tribulation (a Nausicaä-style environmental crisis). Much of the earth is now uninhabitable; the Badlands are barren, while the Fringes are full of semi-feral beings. In the supposedly civilised areas, society is strongly theocratic. People believe (or at least are told) that the Tribulation was dealt directly by God.

This God is a vengeful God, and nothing apparently riles Him more than irregular flora and fauna. Genetic deviations occur far more frequently now than they did before Tribulation, and this brave new world is anti-evolutionary and eugenic. If any animal, plant, or person, is deemed physically nonstandard then it is immediately culled. The reasons for this are never explicitly stated, but it seems partly as a method of societal control, partly out of a pragmatic but misplaced concern that allowing different takes on humanity will weaken it, and partly out of a genuine religious impulse.

There is a Definition of Man that every citizen is expected to know off-by-heart.

‘…and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail…’

I was reminded of H.G. Wells’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau. In that, sad vivisected animals have it drummed into them that they are human. In The Chrysalids, recognisable humans have it drummed into them that, because of something as minor as a hairless head, they are not. In both of these books, humanity is fluid. It is in itself a man-made concept, defined according to the requirements of society. What we may think of as fundamentally natural – our very status as people – can be successfully cast aside by ideological regimes.

As with real-life fascism, the most powerful tools of government are not its soldiers. It’s the everyday zealots and the quiet majority. Joseph Strorm, father to the book’s sensitive boy narrator Davie, is all Piper-Laurie-in-Carrie: a God squadder who skirts over the be-kind-to-the-unfortunates aspect of religion and uses his faith to dominate his family. In one memorable scene, Davie is struggling with a task, and shouts in frustration.

                             ‘I could have managed it all right by myself if I’d had another hand.’

My voice must have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.

[…]

I was aware that the rest had stopped gaping at me, and were now looking apprehensively at my father. His expression was grim.

‘You – my own son – were calling upon the Devil to give you another hand!’

Joseph Strorm soon has bigger problems on his (two) hands. Genetic mutations are not only physical, it seems. Davie and his baby sister Petra have extraordinary mind powers.

                              ‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.

‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are – well, sort of shapes.’

Those with this mental variation are able to communicate with each other, undetected by others. The second half of The Chrysalids concentrates on the relationships within this group of psychics, and of the increasing danger of discovery.

I liked the second half less than the first. I wonder why.

It’s nearly as well-written, however there do seem to be a few more portentous speeches, and some tiresome dashing around the Fringes, which didn’t hold my interest. But I think it’s more to do with the way the telepathy itself is brought out.

I’ve discussed the unexplained a little with Sharron, who goodness me is only Sharron Kraus, one of the country’s finest and most consistently evolving folk artists.

When I first met her, it was in an Oxford graveyard. I interviewed her there for Seasons They Change. As we discussed the influence of cinema and literature on her music, she talked about magic in everyday life. This wasn’t in a Harry Potter­-esque childish fantasy way, or couched in spaced-out hippy lingo, both of which are easy to dismiss. Rather, she has both an academic philosophy background, and a reflective nature which is happy with ambiguity. She is interested in the way that the dark mysteries of thought processes, of the natural world, of emotional connections, manifest themselves. Some things, she said to me, they just may make the most sense as a magical phenomenon. This is an influence on her, and funnily enough I hear it most in her wordless songs.

I remember the next time I saw her, which was just after submitting the Seasons manuscript. I went to Wales to stay for a wonderful few days. Our natters really rambled free. For instance, we discussed Lady Gaga at length. Her manipulation of image – did it mean anything? Did its very hollowness mean anything? Was the sexual element really that confrontational, when Gaga has a very conventional celebrity body type? After eighteen months of using my brain almost exclusively for psychedelic folk, this conversation was the mental equivalent of a weekend away in Paris. And that it was with someone else who dealt in psychedelic folk made it even sweeter.

Sharron lives in Sheffield, now! I get to be both her friend and her fan. We talk and drink red wine and listen to music lots, plus I get to see her perform live regularly. The picture below was taken a couple of months back: as part of the Sensoria festival, Sharron sang with the lovely Nancy Wallace, and Sharron and I were on a panel discussing folk music. The event took place in a disused department store! We saw a mummified bat, arsed around pretending to be mannequins, and then I kicked a hole in a wall.

Anyway. Away from spooky abandoned shops and back to spooky dystopias. The Chrysalids depicts people with real telepathic ability, and the other characters accept this power unquestioningly (they are either afraid or in awe of it), even though, for the most part, they don’t see it. In some ways, this fits squarely with a monotheist religious society: any competing mythical concerns are rooted out as viciously as a potential earthly rival. However, I think the odd skeptical voice would have worked well with Wyndham’s realistic depiction of human behaviour. You try telling a neighbour you’re telepathic; chances are you’ll not be deemed a deity or a devil, but get a derisive snort and a cup or tea to sort yourself out.

I also think it was a bit of a missed opportunity, given how Wyndham explores evolution and human mutation, to explore why this ability has developed in this society. Let me tell you something, and promise me you won’t respond with a derisive snort.

I have – only once – had an ‘out of body experience’. I felt myself lifting from my flesh, whirring away to somewhere else, seeing that somewhere else as if I was actually there, then bumping back into my bones. Now, I don’t think anything supernatural actually happened – for instance, I don’t think that my soul left my body and travelled, or that what I saw in the ‘travelled-to’ place was really occurring – but I do know that I experienced this at a unique time in my life. It was at a point when I literally wanted to be in two places. My mind was split like never before, and therefore it powerfully hallucinated, making me momentarily feel that my body was split, too.

And that’s I suppose what I’m interested in in terms of psychic phenomena, and what I would have liked to have had more of in The Chrysalids: Wyndham exploring telepathic ability as a potent reaction of the mind to a situation, rather than as a randomly bestowed paranormal gift. Davie and his cohorts live in an oppressive society, and it would be fascinating to consider whether this ability evolved as a result of that tyranny. Perhaps it’s there implicitly – Davie and Petra have it, and they are particularly subjugated by their father – but developing this strand more would have been very satisfying. As it is, the telepathic component of The Chrysalids seems similar to a number of other works that deal with the subject.

Having said that, this is a very brief book that tries to do a lot, and the amount it does squish in is impressive. It’s almost Orwellian in its success as both a powerful critique of conformity, and as a great read. It is unafraid to comment on destructive regimes and powerful vested interests.

‘They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils…’

Dystopian books. We need to pay attention to them, for they are never about the future.