Okay, so I've had this post sitting in the drafts folder since February — which I suppose is perfectly appropriate for a post inspired by a book that I really want to read but keeps getting passed over for other ones, for a myriad of reasons and all of them probably quite good. I have long enjoyed watching the "Historical Farms" series which Alex Langlands has done with Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn, and of course traditional crafts are an ongoing interest of mine, so I was delighted to find this his book Cræft — which I understand is not a how-to book, but more of a why-did-they one. I remember, alas, sitting down with it one afternoon, and the door-bell ringing or some other flimsy interruption, and there it still sits on the end table, floating upwards in the stack now and then (as it were) as other books come and go.
This was on the new-books shelf at the public library — Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill. I am quite aware of my tendency towards "cosies" — and I think, the Wikipedia notwithstanding, that it should be spelled in the British manner, at least here since I certainly gravitate to the British ones far more often — and so I decided, standing there at the public library, that since the book sounded intriguing, I would not after all pass it over in favor of a long-put-off Agatha Christie reread, say (tempting though that is ….). I enjoyed the book very much, as it happens, which just goes to show — and it apparently bears repeating, both to myself and to the world in general — that one should extend one's horizons at least now and then. Massey's heroine approaches what I was just recently decrying, those characters in historical fiction who are anachronistically feminist/socialist/whatever-ist but to my relief and admiration does not seem out-of-place, because she is at that turning-point for young women in which the wider world lay before them thanks to higher education but society still resisted letting them enter. The mystery itself is well-plotted and intriguing, and the setting of 1920s Bombay has that remarkable balance between exotic and familiar that goes such a long way towards making us realize that other cultures are really just a lot like ourselves. My only complaint is one that I have had before with historical novels, with characters speaking in a more modern way than they really ought. No one who spoke British English in the 1920s would say, for example, "rushed across the street" or "on Bruce Street" or "I will call her". And perhaps more esoterically, I don't really think that people who are rich enough to drive a Silver Ghost — old-school English people, I mean — would actually refer to it as a Silver Ghost. To my ear, they would just say "the Rolls" or even more casually, "the motor", and only parvenus would be any more particular than that. But certainly I just feel that if a writer is interested enough in a particular time period to set a novel in it, it should be little trouble to expend a little effort to find out how they behaved and how they spoke.
I don't actually get to go to Vroman's a lot any more, but when I do, it's almost always far more than worth the journey. I saw Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires there over the (last Christmas!) holidays, and of course was intrigued — read the first few pages there, and bought the book. (I have learned to be rather skeptical of the usual unstinting praise on a dust jacket — "an instant classic", "riveting", "a new voice in fiction" — but the three on the back of Fraser's book are not only considerably longer than the usual Twitter-friendly bite, but all three came from authors I have read and appreciate in varying degrees, and Elaine Showalter was in fact the subject of my senior thesis.) Fraser's is an excellent book, well-written and perceptive, objective yet clearly regarding the Little House books – and thus Laura Ingalls Wilder – with great respect. I never really took to Rose — she always seemed to have an air of condescension about her, even from the first time I heard her voice, in On the Way Home – but I remember reading The Ghost in the Little House and feeling sympathetic to her as a person, though still more than a bit resistant to the notion that Rose’s hand in the books was so thorough as to tip the percentage so much in her favor as Holtz describes. Who is right? I wonder if it is possible to tell — I wonder if Laura and Rose really knew themselves. I think that Fraser really does try to be objective, because she rationalizes much of Rose’s behavior, her peremptoriness, the incessant house-making and “adoptions”, by offering possible reasons, though towards the end it’s clearly very difficult. (Another writer, from "The New Yorker", offers this: “By the time that Laura published her first book, Rose was a frumpish, middle-aged divorcée, who was tormented by rotten teeth and suffered from bouts of suicidal depression, which she diagnosed in her journal, with more insight than many doctors of the era, as a mental illness.”) And conversely, Fraser tries to explain Laura’s need to smooth out the difficulties of her life, making the book feel that much more careful and objective. On a side note, I was flabbergasted — there is no other word, really — to find that Almanzo had written in Laura’s autograph book circa 1883, “Friend Laura No Pearl ever lay under Oman’s Green water more pure in its shell than thy spirit in thee. Yours Truly, A. J. Wilder”. Here I am thinking of him as a laconic, unromantic farmer — unromantic, little-educated farmers don’t quote “Lalla Rookh”! How is it that I have never heard this story before??
I remember reading, many years ago, a number of books by Beverley Nichols about his house and garden deep in the English countryside, and being delighted with their wit — and then finding much later, when gardening itself began to interest me, that Nichols was apparently regarded by public librarians in general as outdated and not worth keeping — at least not in Southern California — for there was not a one left anywhere. ("I live in a desart, sir, thow it paines me to saye it.") I decided to add the first one, Down the Garden Path, to my wish list, duly received it for Christmas, and began to read. Well, like the curate's egg parts of it are still excellent, but others … not so much, and I'm afraid that this also became for me one of those books that sat around half-read for months — though as it happened Julia read it and says she enjoyed it, but she has a more sarcastic sense of humor than I do, so perhaps she didn't really notice Nichols's frequent cattiness. I didn't realize, in my naive youth I guess, how camp he could get, either. It is entirely possible, of course, that he didn't really hit his stride until later in his writing career — this was the first of some dozen books on gardening, and he was equally prolific in a number of other genres — and so I will recommend it with, as they say, reservations.
A friend gave me Kory Stamper's Word by Word, knowing that I love words, their evolutions and etymologies, their solidity and liquescence. (!) Stamper writes dictionaries — yes, somebody actually does that, sits down and researches what a word means, where it came from, when it was first used, whether its usage has changed or remained the same over the years, and then decides how best to distill all of that into a manageable "definition". Stamper's enthusiasm for her wonderfully geeky job is infectious and engaging, as well as often hilarious, and I would recommend it without hesitation for word-lovers of all ages were it not that her writing is also pretty salty at times. English is a richer language for the four-letter words, to be sure, but I still would rather they weren't sprinkled throughout everyday conversation when they are only modifiers, not topics of study themselves. But that is my only beef with the book, to be sure!
I picked this up at Vroman's too, caught by the Barbara Pym chapter — What She Ate by culinary historian Laura Shapiro, essays on six seemingly-disparate women throughout relatively-modern history, each of whom intrigued Shapiro by her connection with food, some positive, others not so much. Pym, it turns out — whom friends have been telling me for years I should read, and whose diary I long ago galloped through, finding her no small kindred spirit — Pym used food in her novels as a way of showing character, that the meals her "quiet women" heroines ate or made for themselves were not the drab, lonely stereotypical white sauces and cold shapes that had already gone a long way to giving English cookery its bad reputation — or that those who do serve dry rissoles and "stringy cabbage" are, if not to be censured — for Pym I think rarely has villains per se — then certainly to be quietly pitied. Shapiro spends some time looking at a particular meal, cold chicken in white sauce, because not only does it play a large part early in Pym's novel Some Tame Gazelle but is in remarkable contrast to one recalled with horror by Julia Child in the 1950s, and appears in a popular 1935 cookbook not the way Child describes it, but the way Pym does, with its "sharpness added by the slices of lemon". I admit that I had not paid much attention to how novelists use food as a way of revealing character — if indeed they do at all — only perhaps the way that Laura Ingalls Wilder, used as she often was herself to hard times and making-do with little, contrasted to those her husband's boyhood meals where the table practically groaned with buckwheat cakes, oatmeal with cream and maple syrup, sausages and gravy, and pie, just for breakfast. Shapiro is an excellent writer, and all of her essays are worth reading — the six women are Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis (the inspiration for "The Duchess of Duke Street"), Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, and Helen Gurley Brown, some of whom admittedly I would not have given a second glance but whose stories have opened my eyes to a different way of looking at people and their relationships to food.
I'm pleased to say that Shapiro's book also prompted me to dash over to the library, where I chose Jane and Prudence from the rather-appropriately few books left of Pym's, plain and easily-overlooked, entirely appropriate to what Shapiro calls Pym's "minor-key world located well back from fiction's cutting edge". I enjoyed the book quite a lot, and the next one I chose, No Fond Return of Love, though I will say that it took a little while more for me to feel involved with the latter, but perhaps this is because I found the object of Dulcie's quiet obsession to be rather repulsive — though I suppose this can also be a credit to Pym, for who has not been either in that position or that of the friend looking on, who finds the passion incomprehensible? I had the feeling even early on that Pym might be "Austen-like", as so many readers describe her, in no small part because it is in the re-readings where her humor blooms most fully, when one knows what is coming and savors the anticipation.
Penelope Lively's memoir A House Unlocked is one that I'm afraid got jumped over quite a lot, and it deserves better, though I suppose the format Lively chose allows the reader — unlike with, say, a mystery novel — to read a chapter and set it down and come back to it some time later without much difficulty, for instead of a traditional memoir, what she has done is to take objects and rooms from her grandmother's house, where Lively herself spent much of her childhood after moving back to England from Egypt at age twelve, and use these not only to remember the family members and their way of life around the turn of the last century, but also to consider more sociological and philosophical aspects that the various objects lead her to think about. This sounds rather dull on the face of it, but the effect is like having tea with a great-aunt — a widely-read and thoughtful great-aunt — and listening to her talk, ostensibly about her childhood, but leading from there, as so often does with thoughtful people, to all sorts of topics. Her own bedroom at her grandmother's house, she begins in one chapter, had formerly been her late grandfather's dressing room, and this leads to ruminations about the domestic arrangements of middle-class marriages in her grandparents' day, and the differences between their marriage, with their almost-completely separate spheres, and Lively's own more modern one, and from there to the ways of raising children that her grandmother and her contemporaries espoused and the post-Freudian, post-Dr.-Spock way that we do now — and Lively is not judgmental here, either, for while she recognizes the benefits of modern marriage and parenthood, she regards the "old-fashioned" ways with a gentle if somewhat bemused tolerance. (I wonder myself sometimes, if that post-Freudian, post-Dr.-Spock philosophy doesn't make us too selfish, that in a way our lack of self-control and consideration for others that so many decry now as "just 'manners'" leads people to believe that their own needs come first over anyone else's, from running red lights to shooting people one doesn't even know. This is not to say, of course, that things were always better in the "old days," for intolerance and racism are not new inventions.) The effect of Lively's style and format isn't really "chatty" — more discursive, I think, and somewhat elegiac, but fascinating if you don't mind rather slow-moving digressions and philosophical meditations, which I don't!
Maybe I will get back to Cræft soon …!
