A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Winter Cottage, a wonderful book! Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Minty and Eggs are on the road with their sweet but feckless father when their car breaks down… right next to someone’s charming isolated lakeshore summer cottage. As their current destination is the back bedroom of an aunt who emphatically does not want to put them up, they make only some half-hearted attempts to fix the car before settling into the cottage for the winter. (Conveniently, they arrive with a winter’s worth of provisions, left over from their father’s latest failed business venture: a grocery store.) Exactly as cozy as a book with such a premise should be.

I also read Gerald Durrell’s Catch Me a Colobus, because I realized that the local library has a few of his books I hadn’t read and instantly could not survive another moment with a fresh Gerald Durrell book in my life. This one is a bit of a hodgepodge, I suspect because Durrell wrote it swiftly to get funds to shore up his zoo, which is mostly what the first third of the book is about, as he returned from a collecting trip to find the zoo hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. We continue on a trip to Sierra Leone for his first BBC series (this is the bit that the title comes from, as colobus monkeys are high on his list for the collecting trip), and end with a trip to Mexico to collect the rare Teporingo, a volcano-dwelling rabbit in danger of extinction.

Although hopping from continent to continent like this makes the book a bit formless, Durrell’s prose is a delight as always. I love his metaphors, perfectly apt and entirely unexpected: the “slight squeak” of a Teporingo, “like somebody rubbing a damp thumb over a balloon,” or the experience of walking through a forest of massive bamboo stalks, which “creak and groan musically” in the slightest wind; “It must have sounded like that rounding the Horn in an old sailing ship in high wind.”

What I’m Reading Now

Traipsing along in Women’s Weird. In any anthology, the quality is inevitably a bit uneven, but overall it’s quite high. The scariest story so far is May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (a pair of lovers stuck together in Hell for all eternity, even though in life they deeply bored each other); Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol” is a classic spooky ghost story, while my favorite for sheer strength of voice is Edith Nesbit’s “The Shadow.” Oh, props to Margery Lawrence for making a saucepan deeply ominous in “The Haunted Saucepan.” The way it just sits there, boiling, on a cold stove…

I should be hitting D. K. Broster’s story (“Couching at the Door”) next week. Excited to report back!

What I Plan to Read Next

An account of getting distracted by Winter Cottage and Catch Me a Colobus, I have made almost no progress on the books I earnestly desired to make progress on last week. Well, such is the reading life. Sometimes a book comes along that you want to read more than anything else, and it’s best to strike while the iron is hot.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Cooney’s The Little Juggler, which I picked up because I found it shelved next to Susan Cooper’s The Selkie Girl, and I can never resist Barbara Cooney. A charming retelling of an old French story, of a young juggler who was taken in by a monastery, and repined because unlike the monks he had no gifts to offer the Blessed Virgin, until it occurred to him that he might juggle for her.

Cooney’s illustrations are wonderful, as always. In this story, the illustrations are printed in three colors, green and red and blue, and it suggests a medieval flavor, those medieval manuscripts with their rich vibrant colors.

What I’m Reading Now

After firmly intending to begin a book by Ethel Cook Eliot, I started Abbie Farwell Brown’s Friends and Cousins instead. Two children have just returned to their beloved summer vacation cottage, and by happy accident befriended the bashful neighbor children whom they’ve never managed to meet before.

Also working on Women’s Weird (a collection of short stories written between 1880 and 1940, I believe?), Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Fool’s Gold, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Elizabeth Jane Gray’s Meggie MacIntosh, L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon… lots of things!

What I Plan to Read Next

With so many books on the go right now, I really need to finish a few up before I start anything new!

I approached Rilla of Ingleside with a vague formless dread that quickly took on a precise shape as I read. "Ah yes," I remembered, "this is the book that's utterly imbued with the crushing dread of life on the home front, as you await every mail with your breath catching in your throat lest it bring news that your soldier boy is dead."

(In other sources, you'll occasionally find soldiers complaining that everyone back home is having a wonderful time. "The war's just a game to them!" they cry bitterly. This may ironically have been the result of everyone back home trying to keep their chins up so as not to burden their soldier boys with the fact that every moment of every day was consumed with fear over what might be happening in France.)

This is very well-written! Super evocative! You find your own nerves tightening up every time someone receives a telegram! But I don't read L. M. Montgomery to have my nerves screwed up to the breaking point, I read her for hilarious childhood mishaps and numinous nature descriptions that drift right up to the border of fairyland (I've always wished she wrote a novel that drifted right over that border, just to see what she'd do with it), so although the book is from a technical standpoint excellent, I personally am glad to be done reading it.

And that (for now) is the end of the Green Gables saga. Moving on into Emily of New Moon, in which we return to the land of childhood mishaps and lushly evocative nature descriptions! Plus one of my very favorite Montgomery heroines.

I first read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising about a decade ago, and didn’t much like it at the time. “There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about a story where the protagonist fights the Dark by just sort of knowing what to do when the proper time comes, without having to put any effort into learning,” I complained.

So I reread it with some trepidation. But I enjoyed it more this time around, perhaps because I have less narrow ideas about how protagonists are allowed to protag. Must a protagonist have a clear goal and take purposeful action to reach it? Is it not enough, sometimes, to be buffeted in the right direction by the winds of fate, and/or the occult knowledge of an Old One that you don’t know you know until you need it?

And Cooper is, as always, a wonderful evocative writer. I love the ever-deepening snow, the beauty and the menace of it; the scene where Will Stanton and his brothers and sisters go caroling through the village, ending at the manor house where Miss Greythorne receives them all, and time stops as Will is singing “Good King Wenceslas,” and then like King Wenceslas and his page Merriman and Will going walking together, back through time toward an adventure…

Or the scene, just a little earlier, of Will and Merriman and the Lady in the darkened hall, with the darkness pressing ever closer against the firelight. Just a fantastic visualization of the theme.

Having said that, although Cooper clearly intends this to be a classic dark-against-light story, I must confess that this rereading has only strengthened my earlier suspicion that the clash between the Light and Dark is in fact a John le Carre-type fight between two sides which are, in fact, simply two sides of the same coin.

Exhibit A for this theory is Hawkin, Merriman’s liege man, who betrayed the Light for the Dark and then was cursed, by Merriman, to carry one of the Signs to Will. “You changed me from a man into a creature always running, always searching, always hunted,” Hawkin accuses Merriman, when Merriman invites him to return to the Light. “You stopped me from growing decently old in my own time, as all men after their lives grow old and tried and sink to sleep in death. You took away my right to death. You set me in my own century with the Sign, long, long ago, and you made me carry it through six hundred years until this age.”

Hawkin throws the offer in Merriman’s face and returns to the Dark, only to be cast aside when the Dark has no more use for him: literally thrown off a flying horse, so that he breaks his neck in the fall. (The Dark! Also pretty awful!) Lying broken on the ground, Hawkin demands of Merriman, “Will you make me live on, with the worst suffering of all now to come? The last right of a man is to die. You prevented it all this time; you made me live on through the centuries when often I longed for death.”

Merriman mercifully allows him to die at last, and even takes him back to the churchyard in his own time to bury him in his own ground… but Jesus H. Christ! Six hundred years of hopeless, harried wandering! Of course Hawkin scorns Merriman’s invitation. Sure, they may call themselves the Light, but how good is any side that considers six hundred years of unending torment a just punishment for anything?

This Dark Is Rising reread inspired me to check out Susan Cooper’s other novels, which is how I discovered (a) there is a second Susan Cooper, and only some libraries distinguish the two in their catalogs, and (b) the right Susan Cooper has a thriving side gig in picture books.

I started out with The Word Pirates, illustrated by Steven Kellogg (who I knew previously through his folktale retellings of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed; he’s got a very distinctive style). The Word Pirates sail the world, sending their Bumblebirds to steal words fresh off the page so the pirates can eat them! (The crew likes short, crunchy words, with milk.) But one day they learn of “a Word Wizard, a zany New Zealander,” and go off to steal words from her stories, only to discover that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

The Word Wizard wears a rainbow wig when she reads her stories to delighted children. “Is it,” I asked, “Can it be…”

The dedication made it clear that indeed it is! “Dear Margaret Mahy, We made this book for you because you were certainly A WRITER WIZARD. And because we miss you. Love from Susan and Steven.”

Isn’t that lovely? The book was published a few years after Mahy died, and it’s nice to see such a charming story to honor her legacy.

I am sorry to inform you that Further Chronicles of Avonlea was not worth the wait. Like Chronicles of Avonlea, it’s a collection of short stories, and also like Chronicles of Avonlea, they’re pretty clearly mostly stories that weren’t originally written to have an Avonlea connection.

In Chronicles of Avonlea, however, Montgomery gave it a good college try to tie the stories into the Anne of Green Gables series, with frequent cameos by Anne and friends. In Further Chronicles of Avonlea, she seems to have given up trying. There’s one story told by Anne Shirley (in first person POV, which is discombobulating; she really doesn’t feel Anne-like to me), plus a couple of brief mentions of her, but otherwise the Avonlea connection is often extremely tenuous.

This wouldn’t matter so much if the stories were stronger, but unfortunately on the whole I found them pretty weak: forgettable, or memorable for the wrong reasons, like the story about the man whose sweetheart married his best friend… and they have a daughter together… and when the daughter is ten, the best friend dies, so the man decides to take charge of the daughter’s education…

“Don’t marry your sweetheart’s daughter,” I begged.

Reader, he marries her.

This is the price of doing a complete read-through of an author’s works. Some of them are less well known for very good reason, as it turns out. Ah well. Onward and upward! Up next is Rilla of Ingleside.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple more Rumer Goddens. The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle is delightful retelling of a folktale with enchanting illustrations by Mairi Hedderwick, including a cross-section of the “vinegar bottle,” that is to say, the cylindrical two-story cottage, one room on top of the other with a thatched round roof on top. I love cross-sections (one of my favorite ever Brambly Hedge illustrations is the cross-section of a tree trunk that is a mouse palace) and this one is infinitely appealing in the small perfect snugness of the house.

Also Mouse House, illustrated by Adrienne Adams, in which a little girl is given a little house with a couple of boring little mouse dolls… only eventually the mouse house ends up in the cellar, where a real mouse family moves in, and Mary sometimes goes to the cellar to watch them frolic. Cute! Will probably forget this book in its entirety.

I also read Doris Gates’ A Filly for Melinda, the sequel to A Morgan for Melinda, which suffers as sequels often do from a drop-off in quality from the first book… However, the drop-off is not severe here. I still enjoyed Melinda’s voice, and it was nice to revisit her and her family and her horses (now supplemented by Merry Jo’s baby filly, Little Missy); it just felt inessential.

What I’m Reading Now

In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, ( spoilers )

Meanwhile, in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat, America has entered World War II. White seems positively relieved by this development, which I understand: it’s much easier to deal with an actual disaster than to live indefinitely in its impending shadow.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Daphne DuMaurier’s The Flight of the Falcon, about which I know nothing except that Daphne DuMaurier wrote it. In fact I’ve been eyeing DuMaurier’s extended oeuvre, as you might say, by which I mean the books beyond Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn. Any recs or anti-recs?

Although this series of posts is entitled 100 Books That Influenced Me, some of the posts are definitely a bit sketchy on the whole question of influence. (In fact, you can really see a progression in my book review skills over the course of this series.) I don’t think it’s that the books in question didn’t influence me, but that I sometimes struggled to articulate just what influence, for instance, The Perilous Gard exerted on me.

(In retrospect, of course, Kate and Christopher’s romance-through-bickering was formative, as was the book’s picture of the fairy folk – the alienness of the fairy folk, even though in The Perilous Gard the fairy folk are in fact human.)

However, there is nothing difficult to define about the influence of Elaine Corn’s Now You’re Cooking: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know to Start Cooking Today. I read it as a baby cook, sighing over the vision of independence implied by the book’s assumption that one had one’s own pantry, which one needed to stock, and many of the habits it suggested became my own. In particular, Corn advocates that cleaning up as you go, so that there are only a few dirty dishes at the end of the meal rather than a dispiriting mountain. So helpful.

But I didn’t just pick up a few specific tips: the book affected my attitudes more generally. “Instead of cooking, it seems we’re filtering the essence out of our food in an attempt to save time, fat, and calories,” Corn muses, and throughout the book, she gently but insistently returns to the theme that your ultimate aim in cooking is to make something that you would like to eat, even if that demands five extra minutes and a tablespoon of butter.

“I use salt. I use butter. I use cream. Olive oil shows up. So do eggs,” Corn says, breezily invoking all the nutritional bogeymen of 1994. I found this attitude deliciously bracing, and although the bogeymen have changed since then (are carbs still evil, or have we moved on from that too?), the basic insouciance has held me in good stead. Fat is not evil, carbs are not evil, food is not your enemy. Go into the kitchen and make a mess (and clean it up as you go!) and make something. If you start with good ingredients that you like, probably you’ll end up with something tasty. Dig in!

After a long hiatus, littlerhymes and I swung back for one last crack at C. S. Lewis before moving on in our buddy read. (We’re doing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quintet next.) We wrapped up with The Screwtape Letters, which blew the top off my head when I first read it in college. I keep the book on my bedside bookshelf.

I keep it there, first, because it’s so funny. Lewis’s Screwtape voice, the voice of a pompous devil mentor writing to his protege (only protege is the wrong word, isn’t it, because Screwtape wouldn’t lift a finger to protect Wormwood from anything) is pitch perfect in all its particulars; the model, it occurs to me now, for the voice that I adopted in “How to Be a Better Dictator,” except of course Lewis does it ten times better.

Secondly, I keep it at my bedside because so many of Lewis’s observations about human nature are spot on. He’s so good at recognizing the little evasions that people use to convince themselves that their own behavior is good and righteous, the fuzzy-mindedness that allows them to believe six contradictory things before breakfast.

Thirdly, I like to keep the book handy because just when you are sinking mostly luxuriously into the soothing bath of Lewis’s prose, he will say something so completely barmy that you sit up shrieking, “What?” Nothing in The Screwtape Letters comes quite up to the level of the bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis is all “There are seven space genders! Also, women should give up their dreams and have babies instead,” but generally whenever he gets started on gender you know something about to blow up.

This is a useful quality in a spiritual teacher, because it reminds you not to swallow everything whole. Just because Lewis (or someone else) said it doesn’t mean it’s right! You have to think for yourself, consider the evidence, make up your own mind.

Although Lewis might prefer that I would agree with more of his actual opinions, I think he would also understand that serving as a spur for critical thinking is also a valuable service. He comes back again and again, like Orwell, to the importance of clear thought, precise language, because fuzzy formulations and cant phrases allow people to blind themselves to the true moral nature of our actions—not just when we are perpetrating horrors, but also to the smaller unkindnesses of our lives.

And some of Lewis’s specific ideas have affected my own thought profoundly, most particularly what Lewis calls the Historical Point of View. “The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true… To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”

The Historical Point of View is closely allied with what Lewis elsewhere (in Surprised by Joy) called “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Or, as Screwtape crows: “Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge,” and in doing so, have made it difficult to criticize any change except by sputtering that the change is a move backwards.

The theory of chronological snobbery took such deep root in my mind that it eventually sprouted The Sleeping Soldier. Some changes are good! Some changes are bad! But a lot of changes are just changes, neither good nor bad. One era may love gingerbread, and another chocolate cake, but that doesn’t mean that gingerbread has been discredited. Fashion just moves on, because that is what fashion does.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sorche Nic Leodhas’s Gaelic Ghosts, a collection of Scottish ghost stories. The preface is as charming as the stories themselves, for Nic Leodhas reminisces about where she learned the stories: this tale of a ghost dog from an uncle, the tale of the Lady’s Loaf-Field from a great aunt… a peek into an oral tradition.

Also D. E. Stevenson’s Amberwell, a family saga that starts in the 1920s and stretches till just after World War II. Amberwell is the name of the family estate, and Stevenson is so good at writing about places in a way that makes you see them; and so good, too, at writing characters who feel like real people, some of them nice and some of them dreadful (the parents in this book! Their motto is “never explain,” which tells you just about everything you need to know about their parenting style), but vivid and lively and a pleasure to spend time with. Reading her books is like going on a visit.

And also Hilary McKay’s Lulu and the Dog from the Sea. One of the delightful things about deciding to read through an author’s entire catalog is that it leads you to wonderful finds, like this series of easy readers about Lulu and her cousin (and best friend) Mellie, who are always getting into scrapes on account of Lulu’s love of animals. I don’t usually read easy readers, but McKay combines a simple writing style with a cracking good story about befriending a stray dog on a seaside holiday. Highly recommended as a present for a child learning to read, especially if the child loves animals.

What I’m Reading Now

This week in Sir Isumbras at the Ford, I’ve reached the end of book two. ( Spoilers )

Also continuing on in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. We’re in May 1939 now (these essays were originally written as columns for Harper’s) and the threat of war hangs in the air like a fog, its tendrils winding through the cracks even into White’s chicken coop.

What I Plan to Read Next

The sequel to Amberwell, Summerhills. I shall have to put an interlibrary loan on it, so it will be a bit... but on the other hand the Purdue interlibrary loan office was EXTREMELY on the ball with Mary Stolz's Go and Catch a Flying Fish (about which more anon!), so perhaps it will be here soon!