The Noel Coward Diaries

I was so impressed by the book of Noel Coward plays I read a couple months ago that I decided to go through his diaries.  (They cover the years 1941 to 1969.  He died in 1973.)

He does occasionally say nice things about other people besides himself.  And he does not always retract his praise a few pages later.  However, he does rate his own talents above those of everyone else . . . even his self-criticisms tend to take the form of "My X is weak, but it's more than made up for by my Y, Z and Q."

Actresses especially are perfect loves until he has to rehearse with them, when they instantly become brainless, egotistical, no-talent cows.  I will say though that the critics always hated his work and the public mostly loved it, which must have been very frustrating, although financially rewarding.

The thing that really struck me is that he was a full-blown British Imperialist, in a way that no one is probably allowed to be today.  His reaction to hearing of Gandhi's assassination was, "A bloody good thing which happened far too late."  During the Suez crisis his first comment was, "We should never have evacuated Egypt," and later on, "The good old imperialism was a bloody sight wiser and healthier than all this woolly-headed, muddled, 'all men are equal' humanitarianism . . . The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment."

Ironically, he was completely opposed to religion in general and Christianity in particular.  (I always think of Western imperialism and Christianity as being synonymous.)  The one point on which he criticized British justice was the criminalization of homosexuality.  That, he knew was wrong, because it affected him and his friends.  Everything else apparently was just fine.

Also, I honestly believed that Cavalcade was an anti-war play, but it appears I was wrong.  Oh well.  Noel Coward:  talented at what he did; almost completely oblivious to the rest of the world.  (But then how could he appeal so much to audiences?  Paradox.)

Language Oddity #5,637,008

Pronunciation:

sweet
sweat
weak
week
break
 

Another Oddity of Language

So, last night I realized something:  when we say, "an American," we mean an American person.  But we don't say "an English" to mean an English person.

A Canadian, Mexican, Italian, Russian . . . but not a French, Irish, Turkish, Polish.  We say "a Pole."  Or a Swede or a Dane.  We say "a Danish" but that doesn't mean a person.

I think I may have heard people say "a Vietnamese" or "a Japanese" but that sounds rather ignorant to me.

And of course, we don't say "Chinish."  We say "Chinese."

Disraeli and Obama

I've been wondering for a while how many similarities there are between Benjamin Disraeli (the first and so far only Jewish Prime Minister of England) and Barack Obama (the first black President of the United States.)  I didn't really know anything else about Disraeli.  Finally I got around to reducing my ignorance by visiting Wikipedia.

Two interesting things struck me:

1. When Disraeli began his political career, it was illegal for practicing Jews to be Members of Parliament.  This was not actually a problem for Disraeli, since he had converted to Christianity, but it indicates the level of anti-Semitism that existed at the time.  In America, because we have freedom of religion, it is perfectly legal for Muslims to hold public office.  But apparently in some people's minds it ought not to be.  (And again, in Obama's case this would not be a problem, because he doesn't appear ever to have been a practicing Muslim.)
2. As I was reading the Wikipedia article, I saw that Disraeli claimed to be of Spanish descent, that he speculated unsuccessfully in South American mines, had the reputation of being a ladies' man and finally married a rich English woman.  "Wow," I said, "he's Ferdinand Lopez!"

 Ferdinand Lopez is a character in the novel The Prime Minister, by Anthony Trollope.  He conceals his Jewish ancestry* (which I don't believe Disraeli ever did), does all the things mentioned above and is not really a very nice person.  According to this article, Trollope created several characters who resemble Disraeli, but it seems to me that Lopez is the most similar one.  I'm quite shocked actually. 

Trollope disliked Disraeli for several reasons:  his successful political career (Trollope attempted politics but failed); his literary career (I'm not sure how successful Disraeli was, but Trollope seems to have felt he was more successful than he deserved and that he himself was a better writer); and possibly his Jewishness.

What does this have to do with Barack Obama?  There's been a lot of discussion as to whether his political opponents are "racist" or not.  And Trollope is an interesting example of someone who objects to a certain person's policies and occasionally uses racist stereotypes to express his disapproval. 

Also, people have devoted quite a bit of time to arguing that Trollope was not "really" anti-Semitic -- because they like his writing and they don't want to admire anyone who's prejudiced.  Personally, I like his writing and I also think he displays some genuine anti-Semitism.  I've also heard that he made a number of racist statements about black people.  He's a little sexist too.  So . . . he was what they call a product of his time. On the other hand, Trollope always displayed a certain amount of sympathy for the underdog (especially if the underdog was female.)  But it seems pretty clear to me that as a white guy he was on top and he wanted to stay that way.  And when it comes to Obama, there's a fair amount of that floating around too.

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* Incidentally, in the Palliser novels (which are pretty much the only Trollope I've read), nobody ever admits to being Jewish.  They are "said to be" Jewish, because apparently it was such a horrible thing that it could only be whispered about behind someone's back.  I don't know how many crypto-Jews there were in 19th-century England, and as I've mentioned above, Disraeli was not a crypto-Jew and Obama is not a crypto-Muslim, but there is certainly an ongoing belief that lily-white Christendom is under attack by sneaking, creeping, hate-filled hordes of darkness.

Poetry Roundup #2

(cross-posted on Facebook)

elephant lore

the elephant sleeps and dreams of home
awakens to find to find itself captive and
often dies of homesickness

therefore the elephant drivers keep their elephants awake

therefore, says the poet,
live in fear
that someday your heart will awaken
and remember its home

(from Wilberforce-Clarke's notes on the 359th ghazal of Hafiz)

---

a misconception

Love is not a reward for good behavior.

It's a function of the universe:

Like sunlight, like rain,
it falls on everyone

Indifferently,

Joyously.

---

Immigration

I said recently, "We are all hyphenated Americans."
We all came from elsewhere (so they say.)

And when we arrived here, the earth said "Welcome!"
It didn't say, "No, go home!"
It couldn't say, "If you're staying, at least don't kill anyone."

It could only say:

"Whatever you put into me will come back to you.
If you sow poison, you will reap poison.
If you shed blood, someday blood will come looking for you."

Design for Living and Cavalcade (Noel Coward)

I recently watched the film Design for Living and I loved it.  I heard that it was different from the original play, so I decided to seek that out.  I've done a lot of thinking about the difference between books and film versions of the book; haven't ever thought much about the difference between theatrical and film versions of a script.

Design for Living is a interesting example, in that the play and the film are quite different from each other, but in my opinion, both very good.  (It's also interesting to note that the play premiered in January 1933, and the film came out that same year.  That seems very fast by today's terms, especially considering that the script was 99% rewritten.)  The play is much more compressed in terms of place and time . . . for example, we don't get to see the first meeting of the main characters, we only hear them talk about it (which is, obviously, not as interesting as actually seeing it.)

Design for Living is about a menage à trois between two men and a woman.  The major difference between stage and screen is the relationship between the men.  In the play, they're allowed to say that they love each other as much as they each love the woman.  Of course, that sort of thing was not allowed in a film.  As it turns out, reducing the importance of the male relationship moves the woman to center stage; and in the film version she's allowed to talk about herself more.  (Well, she talks quite a bit in the original script too, but there she's mostly criticizing herself for "cheating" on one man or the other.)  In the film, she points out that men are allowed to play the field before they get married.  She then delivers the immortal line, "A woman gets to try on a hundred hats before she picks one."  But when it comes to marriage, which is much more important than hats, she's not allowed to sample the merchandise before buying.

Noel Coward wrote this play as a vehicle for himself and his friends, actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.  I don't know just how close their friendship was, but Coward remarked in his memoirs that an early version of the play had them all sitting in one bed for the duration.  "This, however, was hilariously discarded, after Alfred had suggested a few stage directions which if followed faithfully, would undoubtedly have landed all three of us in gaol."

One last note about Design for Living:  The female lead is named Gilda.  The well-known film of 1946, called Gilda, is also about a love triangle.  Although in Design for Living the woman's name is pronounced "Jill-da" and in the other film it's pronounced the other way.

---

Cavalcade was in the same volume as Design for Living, so I read it.  I don't believe there is anything funny about it at all.  The first act is set in England, 1899, when a woman's husband is going off to the Boer War.  She's very afraid for him, but remarks that at least her two young sons will never have to go to war.  Fast-forward fifteen years, when of course one of her sons goes off to fight in World War I, and eventually dies.

The other has already drowned on the Titanic, for good measure.  Actually, we see him and his wife, on a ship, on their honeymoon, talking about how happy they are.  Then the lady moves her cloak and we see the name of the ship.  Was Coward the inventor of this scene?  It's been done many times, I know that.

Possibly Cavalcade was not seen as an anti-war play when it came out, but it definitely seems like one to me now.  The 1930's are actually one of my favorite decades, for literature and film (maybe not so much the visual arts.)  Some of my favorite writers flourished then, and, being favorites of mine, none of them were very keen on war. Of course, most of them didn't know there was another big one coming up.  But they gathered their rosebuds while they might.

Shakespeare Confession

Okay, I admit it: my favorite Shakespeare play is Measure for Measure. Yes, I admire Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet (although I insist that what Lear needed was an appointment with the cluestick.) But Measure is just so weird, and dark, and twisted, and modern. Is it modern? Can I say that? It was written in 1604, after all.

It is officially a comedy, because it ends with a number of weddings, and nobody gets killed. But various people are threatened with death, and most of those weddings are coerced, which makes the classification as "comedy" a bit unsettling.

The action of the play is driven by the ruler of a city (the Duke), who decides to go away, leaving someone else (named Angelo) in charge, and then sneak back in disguise to see how things go.

Angelo is a cold-hearted bastard, who claims to believe, or honestly thinks he does believe, in Justice.  He decides to enforce certain laws against fornication, which have been on the books for some time but mostly ignored.  Claudio, who got his fiancee pregnant, is therefore condemned to death.  Claudio's sister, Isabella, goes to Angelo to plead for clemency.  Angelo gets the hots for her, and suddenly understands why fornication is to attractive.  He offers to pardon Claudio if Isabella will have sex with him.

Isabella is about to become a nun, which is to say, she places a very high value on chastity.  She says "No!" and rushes off to tell Claudio what happened.  At first Claudio agrees that it would be wrong.  One of the most chilling moments in the play is when he gradually breaks down and ends up begging Isabella to sacrifice her virginity for his life.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
to lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
. . . 'tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
can lay on nature is a paradise
to what we fear of death.

Now the Duke, disguised as a friar, steps in. But he is a very manipulative guy.  Although he has a plan to  save Claudio's life, he tells him "It's hopeless.  Give up.  You're just going to die."  Apparently this is for the good of his soul.  The Duke also tells Isabella, later, that their plan failed and her brother is dead.  He lets her go on believing this for quite some time.

The Duke's actions bring about justice, but he seems to believe that justice cannot be done without tremendous amounts of deception.  That's just weird.  In short, there are no heroes in the play -- that's what makes it seem modern.

Although this particular play is very obscure, like all Shakespeare's work it generated several quotes which have passed into common discourse (depending, of course, on where you get your discourse from.)  "Be absolute for death," "They say best men are molded out of faults,"  "And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies" are all from Measure for Measure.

Good stuff.

Washington Irving

A friend recently loaned me Washington Irving's Sketch Book. She thought I would like it and she was right. I liked it so much that I headed over to Wikipedia to see what the dish on Irving is. Some of this info comes from there.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) is said to be one of the first Americans to make a living as a writer. He created the following items:

• "Gotham" as a nickname for New York City.
• the myth that in 1492, Columbus and his compatriots believed the Earth was flat. Yes, apparently it's a myth.
  
• the tale of Rip van Winkle, which retained its popularity for a long time.
• the tale of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, which also retained its popularity for a long time, and was even made into a Walt Disney cartoon in 1958.
  

He did not invent the two stories listed above; his original contribution was an American setting and, I suppose, his writing style.

He lived in England for many years. As a Jane Austen fan, I have to remark that they briefly overlapped, chronologically as well as geographically. He first moved to England in 1815; Austen died two years later. It seems unlikely that they ever met, but they both worked with the same publisher (John Murray) and it is tempting to think that they had mutual acquaintances (I do not know if a publisher counts as an acquaintance.)

Sir Walter Scott was an admirer of both writers - Austen and Irving - but a personal friend and benefactor to Irving alone. In his preface to the Sketch Book, Irving tells the story of how Scott offered him the position of editor of a magazine. Perhaps because he had tried this before, Irving had to refuse. He quotes from his letter to Scott:

"My whole course of life has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind."

I find it rather amusing that, after having declared himself completely incapable of doing any actual work, he ended up going into the diplomatic service.

Throughout the Sketch Book he portrays himself as a dilettante, a rootless, homeless wanderer and essentially lazy person. This must have been somewhat of an exaggeration. The fact is that he did a lot of writing, which is hard work (especially if he was able to make it seem effortless), and a lot of traveling, which always requires exertion. It seems to have been part of his technique for charming people, to insist that he was not to be taken seriously.

The person who wrote the afterword to this edition of the Sketch Book claims, among other things, that underneath his light-hearted facade Irving was melancholy and obsessed with death. "Underneath" is not quite accurate. The Sketch Book contains many stories about tragic deaths, funerals, and so on, along with such lines as "[I was] indulging in that kind of melancholy fancying which has in it something sweeter even than pleasure." Apparently some later editions of the book removed all the depressing chapters - but that's not Irving's fault, now is it?

As for being obsessed with death: it may seem that way to a modern reader. But people paid much more attention to death in earlier times. It was present for them in a way that it's not for us. When Irving asks, "who is so fortunate as never to have followed someone he has loved to the tomb?" he's referring to ordinary reality. He himself was one of eleven children, of whom three died in infancy. His fiancee died at the age of nineteen (in fact, he never married.) I don't think he would have written so much about death and funeral customs if he didn't think his audience would be interested.

In some ways, he was a very conventional person. Many of the stories in the Sketch Book praise old customs and old writers, lament their passing, and criticize novelty. But he did allow himself a few rebellions. His sympathy for Native Americans was apparently very unusual for his time. He retells from a "volume of early colonial history" an incident in which a group of Europeans surround an Indian village, set fire to it and kill all the inhabitants (mostly women and children, as the warriors had been defeated in a previous battle.) He quotes:

"they were in much doubt then, and afterwards seriously enquired whether burning their enemies alive could be consistent with humanity, and the benevolent principles of the Gospel."

And yet you will note that they didn't discover their doubts until afterward.

Poetry Roundup

(cross-posted on Facebook)

glass three-quarters full

sunlight, oxygen,
water and earth.

without these things to nourish us

free gifts from the universe

where would we be?

therefore I don't believe that evil outweighs good.
if that were true, nothing could live.

---

my role models

some people aspire
to reach the top of the heap,
where everyone will recognize their merits
(of course, this requires keeping down the competition.)

but I say:

it is not the favored ones
who can teach me
how to survive

---

On Hypocrisy

The cruelties of Fate I can't deny,
but human cruelty still makes me angry.

Hafiz writes of hypocrisy and wine - almost too much;
but hypocrisy is nearly the root of all evil.

Heaven says, "Everything I am, I am."
Only humans say, "No, that's not me."

I don't seek love; I am not cruel.

---

Written in Red

Last night I dreamed I was writing our story
in red ink
on the inside of my blue shirt.

When I looked at the outside, the letters had soaked through,
and I kept asking myself:

"What am I doing? What if people can read this? Do I really want everybody to see my pain?
Am I ruining my favorite shirt?"

But I kept writing.

---

Speaking of unrealistic goals . . .

the difference is
that if you lie long enough on the Friend's doorstep,
trembling with sincerity,
someday He will take you in.

---

from the footnote to ghazal 93:

my heart was flung into the fire
like a counterfeit coin
it turned black.

one who reaches the Beloved loses everything else,
even love.

---

Introduction to Hafiz

1.

Hafiz takes off all his clothes
and jumps up and down in the marketplace.

Everyone knows you're supposed to hide
your nakedness

2.

The poet says, God is everything.

But still we are drawn to imperfections:
the broken half of the moon.

(written on Facebook, April 9, 2009. Thanks to Tahar.)

The Novels of Thomas Hardy

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite books was A Long Way from Verona, by Jane Gardam. There's a bit near the end where the protagonist is feeling rather depressed, so she decides to take her mind off it by reading all the Classic English Novels in the library. All goes well until she gets to H and discovers Jude the Obscure. According to her, the main point of this book is that nothing good ever happens to anyone, "BECAUSE IT NEVER DOES."

This convinced me that I ought to avoid Hardy, and I have kept that resolution until just lately. One of the things that slowly changed my mind was this comment in the memoirs of an Edwardian gentleman:

" . . . 'romantic love' is ceaselessly vaunted in novels, films, tooth-paste advertisements and in all other available media. Self-deception is widely encouraged and, when marriage intervenes before the rainbow colours fade, couples find themselves in chains. It has often struck me as ironical that Thomas Hardy, some of whose novels movingly illustrate this theme and give such clear-cut warning to romantic lovers, was in his day accused of corrupting young readers' minds! Our parents and grandparents would have done better if they had made him compulsory reading for everyone on the brink of marriage."

Finally, a friend kept telling me that Tess of the D'Urbervilles was a really good book. So I read it. He's right.* I have also read Jude the Obscure, and I highly recommend both of them.

Normally I prefer books with happy endings, but these didn't bother me as much, perhaps because society is different now and people who have sex outside of marriage are not ostracized (in fact, it seems to be accepted that everybody does it.) Of course, in Hardy's day lots of people did it too -- he was condemned only for putting facts in writing.

I admire his commitment to the truth (and the beautiful venom of his rants about his critics in the introduction to Tess, amounting to "only people with dirty minds see things like that in my book.") His style is definitely ponderous, but that makes it clear that he wasn't just writing to titillate. He took these problems seriously. In short, that girl in A Long Way from Verona didn't understand Hardy at all.

---

* Don't you hate it when people have been telling you all your life "You really should read such-and-such" and then they turn out to be right? The same thing happened to me with The Woman Warrior and The Country of the Pointed Firs. Stupid people knowing stuff.

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Mrs. Gaskell was a contemporary of Charlotte Brontë. Although Brontë is better remembered now, Gaskell may have been more popular at the time. She was certainly more prolific (and, not coincidentally, longer-lived.)

I have only read a couple of her books. Wives and Daughters is very long and fairly interesting. It strongly resembles Mansfield Park, being the story of two young women, one meek and self-doubting, the other vivacious and almost too flirtatious for her own good, who are both involved with the same young man. He is, of course, very much taken with the temptress at first but in the end returns to his true love.

In this case, the two young women are stepsisters, which constitutes the other main thread of the novel. Molly's father decides that she needs a mother to assist and chaperone her through adolescence, so he marries a woman, who also has a daughter, without really getting to know her. This turns out to be a mistake.

One of the noteworthy things about the novel is that the "evil" stepmother is not evil at all. She is very frivolous, rather selfish, and not much inclined to honesty. But for the most part her faults are depicted as normal and understandable: she is only human. For example, there is a prolonged description of her struggle to make ends meet after her first husband's death (the only respectable occupation for an upper-middle-class woman at that time was teaching, and she's not very good at it) and her hopes that someone will marry her and relieve her of financial cares.

She also insists on treating Molly on fair and equal terms with her own daughter, unlike the evil stepmothers of fairy tale. There's a fair amount of selfishness in her decision -- she doesn't want people saying bad things about her, and as it turns out, she doesn't get along very well with her own daughter and often praises Molly at her expense.

Molly and Cynthia, her stepsister, become close friends. Cynthia, like her mother, is a very well-drawn and fascinating character -- fascinating in her flaws. She knows instinctively how to attract men . . . and very often doesn't know what to do with them when she's got them. She essentially grew up without any parenting . . . her father was dead and her mother packed her off to boarding school in France. In fact, her mother didn't even want her to come to her second wedding. Cynthia is more strong-willed than Molly but she lacks guidance and doesn't seem to have any plan for her life. She often says that she is not capable of love.

As if all this wasn't enough, the book also alludes to pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory, this being the young hero's field of study. His family is very interesting too, but I've gone on long enough already.

Wives and Daughters was Elizabeth Gaskell's last book. It was published in serial form from 1864 to 1866. Gaskell died at the end of 1865, before she could complete the final chapters.

Three Novels by Frances E.W. Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) was a writer and what we might today call a political activist, although she seems to have expressed herself mostly in religious terms. Her novel Iola Leroy is said to be one of the earliest known novels by an African-American. For many years it was believed that she had written no other novels, but three more were discovered and republished in 1994. I haven't read Iola Leroy, but the set of three books impressed me so much that I wanted to blog about them.

They are not only fascinating for historical reasons, but also entertaining to read.

These novels were serialized in a religious magazine. The modern-day editor remarks on the fact that they had almost no proofreading or editing performed upon them (in fact, contemporary subscribers complained about the number of typos throughout the paper.) Nonetheless they are well written. I don't believe I have read better dialogue anywhere.

Harper was devoted to both women's rights and the rights of black Americans. These days, black feminists frequently complain that they feel as if they have to choose between one or the other . . . as if feminism is a "white thing" and racial solidarity requires no complaints about sexism. Harper seems to have felt no such conflict. It's interesting that she also displays no interest in working with white feminists.

Anyway, on to the novels.

• Minnie's Sacrifice (first published 1869) - deals with "passing" and the Reconstruction era, a time of tremendous joy and disillusionment. Those who had lived to see the end of slavery, after so many years, discover that some things still have not changed.

  ". . . when Mrs. Hickman said, 'Well, Sarah, I really pity you,' I saw her dark eyes flash, and she has really beautiful eyes, as she said, 'it is not pity we want, it is justice.'"

• Sowing and Reaping (first published 1876-77) - a temperance story. One noteworthy thing about it is that the race of the characters is not specified at all. I almost wondered if it was set in some future time when racial discrimination no longer existed but alcoholism was still a problem. It shows that Harper cared deeply about many issues.
• Trial and Triumph (first published 1888-89) - Frances Smith Foster, the editor, suggests that there are autobiographical elements in this book. It is the story of an intelligent, socially rather awkward, but tender-hearted girl who wants to make her way in the world, despite relatives who misunderstand her and prejudice from society. I learned from reading this book that only white girls were allowed to work in factories - and now we think of that as being demeaning work.

  ". . . Nor did she lay all the household burdens on the shoulders of the girls and leave her boys to the mercy of the pavement; she tried to make her home happy and taught them all to have a share in adding to its sunshine. 'It makes boys selfish,' she would say, 'to have their sisters do all the work and let the boys go scot-free. I don't believe there would be so many trifling men if the boys were trained to be more helpful at home and to feel more for their mothers and sisters.'"

All of these novels are on Project Gutenberg. Check them out!

If I had written "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Once upon a time there lived a painter. One day he encountered a most beauteous youth. "My goodness!" he said. "You are the most perfect thing I have ever seen. I must paint you!"

"If I am already perfect, why do you wish to add paint to me?" the young man asked. But at length he was persuaded to sit, and the portrait was done.

When the young man saw it, he cried, "Alas! This picture will remain forever young, while I will grow old and lose my beauty."

"My dear boy," the painter replied, "Beauty comes from within. When people speak of 'radiant beauty,' it is the inner light they see. Cultivate that light, and your beauty will never fade, no matter what happens to your looks."

(It so happens that this painter had a friend, who prided himself on his witty sallies. When he saw the portrait, he remarked, "A pretty boy is like a melody." This nobleman made a point of cultivating a languid and thoughtless demeanor, as though his exquisite remarks were produced without any effort on his part. Unfortunately, in truth they required so much exertion that one day he strained an extremely important muscle. Upon his doctor's orders, he was sent to convalesce in a country where no one spoke English, and he himself did not speak any of their languages. Naturally, he was never heard from again.)

The reigning Queen of this country had many children. One of her grown-up sons was notorious for his appreciation of male beauty. Consequently, the painter presented the portrait to him. His Royal Highness soon expressed an interest in meeting the original, and in time the two young men became the best of friends. Neither of them ever married.

One unhappy day, the Queen was informed by some malicious tongue that, not only were the two inseparable, but that there was something unnatural about their friendship. She let it be known that this displeased her, and before many months had passed new legislation was introduced into the country, forbidding excessive intimacy between men. This was all because of the portrait of Dorian Gray.

Dorian chose to leave the country, and settled in France. Since nothing of importance ever happens outside of England, there is not much more to be said about him, except that one day the painter came to visit him and confessed:

"My poor boy, I was the one who blackened your name to the Queen, and what is worse I did it out of sheer jealousy. Can you ever forgive me?"

"Pray, Basil, do not trouble yourself. The weather is lovely here, and one's money goes so much further. I am quite happy. I only wonder if poor old Chumpers was allowed to keep my portrait. Ah! Once I wished that the picture could grow old, while I stayed young. But now I have no regrets. And after all, if it were to show all the marks of experience, it would be as if the portrait itself did all those things, and not me at all."

And so it goes.

The Super Diana Wynne Jones List

Since DWJ is one of my favorite authors, I've been wanting to write about her books for a while. However, I was afraid that the post would either be too short (two words: OMG! Squee!!!!) or too long (expanding those two words almost into infinity.) Here is a compromise: a list of her books with my favorites first, very brief descriptions, and publication date.

First Prize

• Fire and Hemlock (1985) - this is absolutely her best. I like it because it's kind of scary. An adult man takes an interest in a prepubescent girl. He wants to use her for something, but he can't tell her what. She ends up repressing her memories of certain events. I don't believe that it's really about pedophilia, but the hints are disturbing nonetheless. (Usually I don't like horror at all - or rather, this is the kind of horror that I like, very understated.) And you ask why I like it? Because it's also a romance, a mystery, and a realistic depiction of adolescence and dysfunctional families. Plus she crams it all in without ever really telling us what's going on, and still makes it all work.
  
• Howl's Moving Castle (1986) - contains several DWJ specialities: surprise ending, people who have magic powers but don't realize it, people who love each other but don't realize it and have lots of arguments instead, travel between 20th century Britain and other worlds, lots of humor, etc, etc. The movie does not do it justice. Sequels, less good: Castle in the Air (1990 - which I do like), House of Many Ways (2008 - which I haven't read)
• The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) - This is my favorite of the "Chrestomanci" series, because the hero, without realizing it, assists some very bad people to do some very bad stuff. When he does realize, he has to stop them. I think this is kind of rare in a "children's" book, to give the protagonist something to feel genuinely guilty about - and yet make it clear that it wasn't his fault. Other books in this series that I like are Witch Week (1982) and Charmed Life (1977). The Magicians of Caprona (1980) is not very memorable. Conrad's Fate (2005) and The Pinhoe Egg (2006) are two recent additions which are good but not great. Resisting comparison to Harry Potter, of which I only ever read the first book and thought "This is like a cross between Witch Week and The Lives of Christopher Chant, only much worse."
  
• The Homeward Bounders (1981) - I like this one a lot too. The ending is unusual for DWJ - won't tell you what it is.
  
• Hexwood (1993) - another very well plotted book. The tagline on my copy says "Things are never what they seem to be" and that about sums it up.
  

Second Prize

• Eight Days of Luke (1975) - I like this. Similar to Fire and Hemlock, it brings mythology into the present day, without spelling things out until the end.
  
• Time of the Ghost (1981) - another "things are never what they seem to be."
  
• Archer's Goon (1984) - mostly about time travel. The surprise ending is, perhaps, predictable once you've figured out what DWJ endings usually consist of, but I thought it was well done.
  
• A Tale of Time City (1987) - I've written about this elsewhere.
  

Honorable Mention

• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996) - nonfiction, in a sense. Not fiction (unfortunately.) Very funny.
  
• Wilkins' Tooth (USA: Witch's Business - 1973) - this deserves honorable mention because it was her first published children's book. Themes to be developed later appear: magic coexisting with everyday life, dysfunctional families, amusing euphemisms for swear words (this was a trend in her early books, seems to have faded away.) However, she hadn't figured out endings yet. She paints her characters into a corner and has to rip off a fairy tale to get them out. (Why is it that we mind less when someone "borrows" the beginning of a fairy tale and takes it in a new direction, but borrowing endings is seen as cheating?)
• (Updated 10/5/2010) The Ogre Downstairs (1974) - her second published children's book.  Interesting as a preliminary sketch for ideas she expanded on later.  Should be read as a precursor to Time of the Ghost and the short story "Carruthers."
  

Less Good

• Dogsbody (1975) - doesn't really pull it off, in my opinion. Ending was predictable (in other worlds, she does similar endings better elsewhere), hordes of talking animals and a Cinderella/political subplot (yes, that's what I mean) are ambitious but overdone.
  
• The Magid series: Deep Secret (1997) and The Merlin Conspiracy (2003) - good but not great.
  
• The Dalemark series: The Spellcoats (1979), Drowned Ammet (1977), Cart and Cwidder (1975), The Crown of Dalemark (1993) - DWJ's excursion into pure fantasy. I read them but don't remember much about them.
• A Sudden Wild Magic (1992) - I read this a while ago and completely forgot about it until just now. I remember that it has a slightly more "adult" approach to sex than her other books, which shocked me a little at the time.
• The Derkholm series: Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), Year of the Griffin (2000) - again, not memorable, except for a very funny line in Year of the Griffin. A romantic youth opines, "To write poems to a cruel love is the height of artistry." The heartless lady's brother is heard to remark "that that was what they all said." Somehow putting it in the third person makes it funnier, to my mind. Should be read along with The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, since they are set in that "world."

Short Stories

• "Carruthers" - good
• "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" - good
• "Everard's Ride" - novella, good, not in her usual style
• "The Fat Wizard" - funny
• "No One" - I liked this
• "The Plague of Peacocks" - funny, liked it a lot
• "The Sage of Theare" - A Chrestomanci story - pretty good
• "Little Dot" - pretty good, based on opera(!)
• "The True State of Affairs" - good, scarier than her usual stuff

Ones I didn't like as much:

• "Aunt Bea's Day Out" - funny
• "Carol O'Neir's Hundredth Dream" - A Chrestomanci story, not bad
• "Enna Hittims" - not very good
• "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool" - not very good
• "The Girl Who Loved The Sun" - interesting but predictable
• "The Green Stone" - somewhat funny, set in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland world
  
• "The Master" - a bit scary, not her best
• "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy" - a bit funny, not her best
• "Stealer of Souls" - A Chrestomanci story - pretty good
• "Warlock at the Wheel" - A Chrestomanci story - not bad
• "What The Cat Told Me" - not bad

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë

This book has been following me around for a while. I kept looking at it on the library shelf and wondering if I wanted to read it. Then I saw a copy at the book sale, passed it by, went back for it -- alas, it had already been covered by the shifting sands. So I finally had to check it out.

It is noticeably different from the work of other Brontës. It might even be a better novel. I found it much more realistic in the depiction of relationships.

The hero and heroine are still authentically Brontëan -- passionate, unconventional, and short-tempered. But we get a certain amount of explanation as to why they behave that way -- Jane Eyre, for example, or everybody in Wuthering Heights, just seems to have been born cranky.

While reading Wildfell Hall it occurred to me that other Brontë protagonists don't seem to believe that anybody else is real. There's very little objectivity in those novels. I found Wildfell Hall to be better at describing other people's points of view, and although it's also narrated in the first person, like all Brontë novels, the approach is quite different.

The first and last sections of the book are narrated by the hero. He spends most of his time describing that mystery woman, the heroine -- and because she is a mystery, and they don't like each other very much at first, we get a certain amount of distance.

The middle section of the book is the heroine's journal, depicting the destruction of her marriage. She has no objectivity; she keeps believing everything will work out for the best . . . but because we know she ended up separated from her husband, it's heartbreaking to see how much she idolized him in the beginning. I don't believe that Charlotte or Emily would ever have allowed one of their heroines to be so completely mistaken. In fact, their novels arguably subscribe to the notion that erring souls can be saved by love alone. Anne seems to have known that it ain't so.

Anne was the youngest of the Brontë siblings. She died in 1849, at the age of 29. Both of her novels were published under the name of "Acton Bell."

"My little penwiper's lying on the beach all alone!"

(to continue the Tove Jansson motif)

My laptop had to go in for repairs, and I miss it the way the character above missed his penwiper. But I pulled my old desktop out of the closet, so blogging can continue unabated. There are two things to be learned from this:

1. It still works. The laptop is only three years old. I bought the desktop used, six years ago, and it's still plugging away. Slowly of course, but surely. I have heard that laptops are less reliable.
2. The screensaver on my old computer consists of one word: "Events." I remember why that is. Someone once asked a British prime minister, "What is the most troublesome thing about being prime minister?" and he replied, "Events, dear boy. Events." I created that screensaver over three years ago, and events are still hounding me.
   

From Science Fiction to Fantasy: Lois McMaster Bujold

Update (July 6, 2009): I used to like Bujold's books a lot. After finally reading her clueless comments from a couple months ago, I have lost most of my respect for her. Good writing is still good writing, but the things it leaves out are important too.

---

Some people write science fiction, some write fantasy, some write a blend of the two. But I can think of very few writers who have gone from writing one to the other. Lois McMaster Bujold is one of them. She became known for her science fiction series about a person named Miles Vorkosigan. A few years ago she started writing fantasy novels, set in and around the country of Chalion. It might not be quite accurate to say that she writes "hard"SF, but when I discovered her fantasy novels I was very curious as to whether or not they would be any good. The short answer is "yes."

What does it mean to go from writing about spaceships and advanced technology to writing about castles and horses and magic? Do the two worlds have anything in common? Take tactics, for example. You would think they'd be very different, but Bujold handles them equally well in space and across country. That surprised me a little.

Bujold's Vorkosigan series focuses on a planet whose inhabitants live under a strict feudal system, despite their advanced technology, and are just starting to think about new ways of doing things. Feudalism is definitely a part of many fantasy novels . . . and yet Bujold doesn't overplay the feudal bit in her Chalion books.

I think the biggest difference comes with magic, which in this context also includes religion. Science fiction novels all seem to be written from an atheist point of view. I don't believe that all SF writers are in fact atheists, but either there are no gods, or what appear to be gods are simply advanced lifeforms . . . and magic can't exist because there are "rational explanations" for everything. (Put like that, it makes me wonder why I like science fiction at all.) I don't recall Bujold ever mentioning gods or theology in the Vorkosigan series. But they are omnipresent in her fantasy books, and she has some interesting things to say about them.

I have read three of her fantasy novels (which is not all of them I think) and they all have the same theme: gods, or other supernatural beings, getting involved with the human world. It really is the exact opposite of the science-fiction worldview. She starts from the premise that the gods cannot directly intervene; they have to work through human beings, and always, as far as I can recall, with human consent. Her human characters often refuse consent, which adds to the suspense.

Of the three, I think her first fantasy novel, The Curse of Chalion, is the best. The other two are still good -- I don't believe that Bujold is capable of writing a bad book -- but the language is not quite right. In the later books, she suffers from that common flaw of fantasy writers: creating awkward turns of phrase and believing that they must be right just because they are different from modern speech. It's hard to achieve the "right" fantasy voice and stick to it. She is such a good writer that it's possible to ignore these gaffes. In fact, even though I don't recall any such awkwardnesses in The Curse of Chalion, it's quite possible that there were some such and I just didn't notice them. In the later books I did notice.

I wonder how long she has been thinking about theology, and how she managed to keep it out of her SF work. Personally, I find magic and religion to be much more interesting than science. But all of Lois McMaster Bujold's books are very good. Read them!

Joan Aiken does Jane Austen

(or, JA does JA)

The late Joan Aiken is one of my favorite authors. For the most part, I have only read her children's books. I adored The Wolves of Willoughby Chase when I was very young. Later my favorite of hers became (and still remains) The Whispering Mountain.

Recently I discovered her Jane Austen sequels. She handles the language pretty well,* which makes sense because many of her children's stories are set in the 19th century--specifically, an alternate 19th century in which the Hanoverians never came to the English throne and the Channel Tunnel opened in 1832 instead of 1994. She takes a similar "alternative" approach in these novels, which might be described as "Austen Through the Looking Glass." Aiken's style also tends to be dark--or rather, light on the surface with dark shadows clearly visible. This is not entirely incompatible, in my opinion, with Austen, but Aiken dares to go where Austen never could.

Here are my comments on specific books (listed in the order in which I read them):

• Jane Fairfax: a retelling of Emma from Miss Fairfax's point of view, so technically not a sequel. In fact quite a bit of it is a prequel, depicting Jane and Emma as children. In the original novel, Emma gives the impression that she and Jane barely know each other, but Aiken tells us that they were once close friends, until parted by an unfortunate incident. This gives great poignancy to their later cold interactions. Although Jane is poor and orphaned, she ends up getting to live in London and travel abroad. When she goes back to the village of Highbury, she's struck by how parochial it is, and in fact she pities Emma, who despite her money and popularity is stuck in this narrow little world. (Might this not also be Aiken's comment on Austen?)
  
• Eliza's Daughter: a sequel to Sense and Sensibility. This one differs most from the original novel, not only because the main character never appeared in the original, but also because when original characters appear, they are for the most part depicted quite differently, and, perhaps most important, the main character is someone who I don't believe Austen could ever have based a story on. Eliza's daughter is the illegitimate child of an illegitimate child; as such, she can never enter "good society." She's raised by peasants, in a village which seems to make its living by caring for respectable people's bastards. In time she goes to visit Elinor and Edward. Readers of the original novel tend to be shocked by the depiction of this couple. They live almost in poverty, Edward is a complete prig, and Elinor has faded away. Sense and Sensibility is one of my favorite Austens, and I was certainly shocked, but I can't entirely disagree with Aiken's approach. Here is another interesting detail: Eliza's daughter (also named Eliza, by the way) is sent to live with an aunt of Elinor's, a well-to-do lady who was once charged with shoplifting a piece of lace, priced at five shillings. The penalty for this heinous crime was either death or transportation: she was jailed for a few months, then tried and acquitted. I assumed that Aiken made this up, but apparently it really happened to Austen's aunt.
  
• Mansfield Revisited. I think this was the first Austen sequel she did, because it starts off with a near-apology for the "presumption" of attempting to write a new Austen novel. Ironically, her later sequels got a lot more presumptuous. I was hoping she would turn Mansfield Park on its head; alas, no. I may also remark at this point that I rarely find Aiken's heterosexual romances to be convincing.
  

* It's not completely authentic, but then people don't want authentic. It's too hard to read. As a further digression, authors who attempt to write in the style of the 19th century often seem to end up doing Dickens, even when their stories are set in the Austenian (known to some as the Napoleonic) era. The excellent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is another example of this.

Seen at the Supermarket

Dried grapes. Not raisins, you understand. Dried grapes.

(grumbles) What is the world coming to?

Overheard (mythology)

I recently listened to a little boy and his mother (I assume it was a little boy, and his mother) talking about a book on Greek mythology.

"What is she the god of?"
"That's Athena. She's the goddess of wisdom."
"What's that?"
"It's like science."
"What is he the god of?"
"That's Zeus. He's the king of gods . . . and men. He's the head honcho. Like Optimus Prime."