A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ Suburban Sketches, which is a collection of essays about his life in a suburb of Boston in the 1870s. On the whole I enjoyed it less than his fiction, but there was one chapter when Howells starts talking about how some future chronicler is going to read this hoping for salacious tidbits about the nineteenth century Boston theater and YES Howells you have CAUGHT me I am ABSOLUTELY reading this for salacious tidbits about nineteenth century Boston theater, PLEASE TELL ME MORE about all the cross-dressing.

I also finished St. Therese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul; I got sort of bogged down once it moved from childhood memoir to spiritual reflection. Some of St. Therese’s insights about practicing forbearance in the face of the small irritations is very obviously applicable to the social isolation life (nuns: practicing social isolation before it was cool?), but nonetheless it took me a while to wade through it.

And I finished Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which is beautifully written, but I felt it ended a little too abruptly, and ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Back in the saddle with Richard Rubin’s Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count, which is really driving home how little I know about World War I - about military history in general, actually, I don’t think there’s any war where I could reliably give the names and dates of the major battles, let along outline their military importance.

What I Plan to Read Next

Mary Norton’s Bed-knob and Broomstick! Possibly after a suitable time has elapsed since I’ve seen the movie, so I’m not comparing the two directly.

I just finished reading William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance, which was a wild or at least an extremely nineteenth-century ride.

When last we left them, Marcia and Bartley Hubbard’s marriage was slowly disintegrating, while Bartley’s erstwhile friend Ben Halleck (who has fallen in love with Marcia and has grown to despise Bartley) watches from afar and helplessly pines over his lady fair. Desperate to escape the coils of this hopeless passion for a married woman, he flees to South America to aid a Spanish-American friend in an educational project! (Spanish-American here seems to mean South American.) But after two years of hopeless pining in foreign climes, he owns himself beaten by his passion and returns, whereupon he discovers…

Marcia’s husband disappeared two years ago! That heartless rat has abandoned her! And the first word that she receives of him comes in the form of a newspaper notice that he is divorcing her on the grounds that she abandoned him, which pretty much sums up Bartley Hubbard for you right there.

So Marcia, accompanied by her father and Ben Halleck, race across the country to confront Bartley in court in Indiana, home of famously lax divorce laws! Which had just become not-so-lax around the time Howells was writing: you can just tell that someone mentioned it to him and he ripped his hair out and then said to himself, “Let’s be real, Bartley is exactly the kind of bum who would file for divorce in a state with famously lax divorce laws without checking to make sure those laws had not recently been tightened.”

Marcia and Bartley do indeed end up divorced, mostly because Marcia is unwilling to seee Bartley prosecuted for perjury. Bartley, that perfidious snake, jocularly suggests to Ben that he should marry Marcia, she’s always thought so well of Ben, and of course this sends Ben into a tailspin of self-loathing because he’s a nineteenth-century Bostonian and that’s just what they do. How dare he covet a married woman? Sometimes he wished that Bartley would die so he could marry Marcia, and doesn’t that make him a murderer in his heart?? Doesn’t his passion for Marcia undermine the sanctity of all marriages everywhere in its refusal to respect the inviolability of the marriage bond????????

Ben, exhausted by these moral quandaries, falls back on the stringent Puritan certainties of his childhood and becomes a minister in a backwoods congregation where, presumably, they still like a little fire and brimstone. But he and Marcia continue to correspond, and then! A few years later! BARTLEY DIES.

(Bartley in fact gets shot for publishing something a little too scandalous in his paper, which seems like pretty much the way that he would go.)

Bartley’s death finally frees Marcia from her marital bonds - but didn’t the divorce do that, you say? Well, kind of sort of not really, it meant that she and Bartley didn’t have to live together anymore, but apparently to a nineteenth century Bostonian perspective it didn’t actually leave her free to marry anyone else. But now she’s a widow and can definitely remarry! Probably!

Well, it’s definitely okay if she’s marrying a person who is not Ben. But Ben is afraid that his earlier illicit passion has disqualified him as husband material: does the fact that he fell in love with her while she was still married to another man means that his love is forever soiled and he can never marry her and should just hopelessly pine forever from afar?

He puts this question to his friend Atherton in a letter, and Atherton reads the letter aloud to his wife who thinks the whole thing is nonsense and Bartley should ask for Marcia’s hand, while Atherton is like, no no, Ben is right! His love is SOILED FOREVER. And his wife is like, sweetie, you can’t actually be so heartless as to write that to him, and Atherton can’t decide, and…

That’s where the book stops! THAT’S HOW IT ENDS. Marcia has been freed from her marriage by both divorce AND the death of her husband and it’s STILL not clear if it’s okay for Ben to ask for her hand. (It would be okay, on her side, for her to marry Ben, because she didn’t conceive of an illicit passion for Ben during her marriage, but that doesn’t make it okay for Ben to actually ask. FUCKING BOSTONIANS.)

...I have definitely decided in my head that Atherton’s wife shames him into writing a letter that is at least lukewarmly “Follow your heart, Ben,” which I think would be enough to let Ben ask for her hand - it’s clear from Ben’s letter that he’s basically asking for permission to do something he’s almost decided to do. And then they get married and everyone is happy THE END.

***

So, to recap: Ben fell in love with Marcia while she was still married and this love is so incredibly wrong that he flees to South America to escape it (and also refuses to tell anyone in his family why he is fleeing to South America: his love for a married woman is so shameful he can’t even confess it to his beloved sister Olive!), and even after Marcia is widowed, that shame remains so intense that he’s not sure it’s right for him to ask for her hand. Won’t the illicit circumstances in which he first conceived his passion cast a shadow over their entire married life?

This possibly wasn’t the best book to read while writing an m/m/f novella set in the 1870s, because it has definitely left me with the impression that most actual nineteenth century people would lie down and die at the prospect of the sheer moral turpitude of sexually involving a third person in a marriage. All Ben does is love Marcia from afar and his love is TAINTED for LIFE, can you imagine the actual moral collapse he would suffer if Bartley (an immoral snake, as we have established) suggested some sort of wife-sharing arrangement?

...Actually, I think this is more or less how Ben sees Bartley’s suggestion that Ben should marry Marcia after the divorce. Oh, sure, the divorce dissolves the marriage legally, but can it actually morally dissolve it? Isn’t Bartley, in essence, suggesting that Ben should involve sweet innocent Marcia in an act of bigamy?? And therefore undermining the sanctity of all marriages everywhere?????

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I zoomed through Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, in part because there were a hundred odd people on the hold list for it at the library, but also because it all just flowed so wonderfully that I just kept reading it. I’m not quite sure why, because it’s not exactly what you’d call plotty; in the first half of the book there’s sort of a mystery about what exactly put Maeve and Danny at such odds with their stepmother, but the book doesn’t lean on it for suspense.

It’s also less about the house than you might expect from the title (I must admit that I had some hopes for gothic elements, but that’s not really present); what it is about is about family and family history, and the way that the past shapes the present - and the things that we believe about the past just as much as the past itself.

I also read Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s The Cobbler’s Boy, a novella about young Kit Marlowe, which I enjoyed, but not as much as I expected to. Perhaps I let it languish on my TBR list for a little too long: I should have struck while the iron was hot.

What I’m Reading Now

I have begun Vivien Alcock’s Singer to the Sea God, which kicks off with Perseus walking into the king’s court with Medusa’s head and turning everyone there into stone… including our hero’s sister Cleo. Now our hero has escaped the island, statue of Cleo in tow, and I can only presume he’s going to get kidnapped by Poseidon??? Or so the title suggests.

This is utterly unlike the other two Vivien Alcock books that I’ve read (which were utterly unlike each other) and I’m kind of digging her determination to follow her bliss and write whatever the hell she wants.

I’ve also continued on with William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance. Bartley and Marcia have eloped and moved to Boston! (asakiyume, every time they mention a landmark that we saw - and this happens more often than you might think from a novel published in the 1870s - I get so excited. “I’ve been there!”) Marcia is wracked by jealousy every time that Bartley talks to another woman for too long, right now without reason, but he gave her reason before their marriage and I strongly suspect that Bartley’s going to give her a reason again sooner or later.

What I Plan to Read Next

I got Jennifer A. Jordan’s Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes & Other Forgotten Foods from the library, so I’ll probably read that soon, although it must be admitted that I currently have MANY books out from the library because the library is switching over computer systems this month and what if I ran out of books while the system was unavailable???

...I have an entire shelf of unread books that I actually own, so I would have been fine, but nonetheless I checked out a lot. So we’ll see what I read first.

William Dean Howells’ A Foregone Conclusion is a weird book. The “foregone conclusion,” possibly, is that befriending Catholic priests always ends in tears, for the priest more than anyone else. At any rate, that’s certainly how things work out in the book.

Alternatively, the internet tells me the title is a quote from Othello, and there are points where the story echoes that play: the Venetian setting, the theme of jealousy. But on the whole, it’s certainly not close enough to call a retelling.

The story is a love triangle between the American consul to Venice, Ferris, who is also a painter; an American expatriate girl, Florida Vervain (named after the state of her birth); and Don Ippolito, a skeptical Venetian priest who would really rather throw over his priesthood and go to American to invent things.

( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished William Heyliger’s You’re on the Air, which is about a young man who tries to break into local radio. ( This book reminded me of E. Lockhart’s Dramarama )

What I’m Reading Now

William Dean Howells’ A Foregone Conclusion, in which an American consul to Venice during the Civil War (Howells was the American consul to Venice during the Civil War) befriends a Venetian priest, who first visits him because he’s invented a cannon that he hopes might be of use to the United States government in its fight against the South Americans. The consul gently explains that in fact the US is not at war with the entirety of South America, but only the American South, and also inquires if the good priest has any practical experience with cannon? Or firearms of any sort? Well, no, alas.

But the consul’s interest is nonetheless piqued by the priest-inventor, and they become friends, and the consul has helped find the priest a job as tutor in Italian for a young American lady. If the priest weren’t a priest, I would expect the Foregone Conclusion of the title to be a romantic rivalry over the young lady between the two friends, but as it is that seems somewhat unlikely so I really have no idea how the story will develop. We shall see!

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden would make a delightful anime. Our heroine, Frankie Stein (the name is an unsubtle hint at the books theme), gets a bit of primordial goo from her brother, which gets struck by lightning and begins to grow into a… well, a monster: that’s Frankie’s first reaction. It’s a strange, blob-like, gelid, red-eyed creature that grows at an alarmingly rapid rate.

And yet Frankie comes to love it, and see it as lovable and cute in its very strangeness, and there are a bunch of adorable scenes where she learns how to read its body language (when it’s happy, it sometimes forms its mouth into a figure eight, for instance) and watches it explore its environment. The book is in fact an answer to Frankenstein: “What would have happened if Frankenstein loved his monster?”

I also finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which really hits its stride in its final chapter, when Gates offers his interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt to push back against white supremacy through art and go some way to undoing the Redemption, in which white supremacists “redeemed” the South from Reconstruction by reinstituting white supremacy policies.

“Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture… There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”

I suspect there’s a general human tendency (God knows you can see it in some of the sillier revolutionary pretensions of fandom) to believe that whatever we personally happen to be involved in is not merely important, but the most important thing there is. Gates’ summing up is a useful corrective to this tendency: “While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”

After watching Downton Abbey, I felt such enthusiasm that I snagged Jessica Fellowes’ murder mystery, The Mitford Murders, from the library. (Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes, who created Downton Abbey.) Unfortunately, I found it rather a disappointment: most of the Mitfords are still children for most of the book and don’t seem to have grown into their personalities yet (mind, I don’t know a great deal about the Mitfords, but I know enough to know that they should all have personalities rather than just being an indistinguishable mass of children), and the mystery plot relies on too many coincidences. Won’t be continuing the series.

What I’m Reading Now

I could easily have finished William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions, but I’ve actually slowed down reading it because I don’t want it to be over yet. Not only am I enjoying spending time with Howells, but his literary reminiscences have added a number of books to my Gutenberg list, too. Of course many of the books he talks about are classics that I was already aware of (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens), but he also waxes lyrical about a few nineteenth century authors who are no longer widely read. I’m looking forward to trying out Ik Marvel’s Dream Life.

I’ve also been reading Paul Watkins’ Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England. Paul Watkins is the real name of Sam Eastland, author of the Inspector Pekkala books, and I am beginning to suspect that Watkins felt drawn to Stalinist Russia because its arbitrarily punitive atmosphere reminded him of the days of his youth in an English boarding school.

What I Plan to Read Next

Has anyone read Alys Clare’s The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully at the library, but on the other hand I’m not sure I need another Victorian mystery series. The setting might invite unfair comparison to The Most Comfortable Man in London, a.k.a. the Charles Lenox mysteries.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At last I have finished William Dean Howells’ Venetian Life! This experience was moderately spoiled by the fact that the free ebook I was reading cuts off in mid-sentence, evidently a few pages before the end, but it was free so I suppose I can’t complain too much, and anyway it’s a few pages before the end of the afterword written seven years after the book was first published so the book itself, I suppose, is still intact.

Howells can be very droll - he comments, with regard to a fight about to begin between gondoliers, “I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s heads” - but on the whole I would recommend his fiction instead.

I also read Mick LaSalle’s Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, which is an interesting book, although fatally flawed in one sense: he rarely managed to interest me in watching any of the films he discussed, because he rushes through them all so briskly that there’s rarely much time to build up any investment. I suppose that is in the nature of things when you’re trying to write an overview.

I also disagree with some of his assertions about the nature of nineteenth-century masculinity - it wasn’t all respectability; there was a real rabble-rousing side - and about the underlying causes of certain differences between silent films and Pre-Codes. (Pre-Code means specifically sound films before the implementation of the Production Code in 1934.) I mean, sure, the decrease in smiling and flamboyant gestures as silent films give way to Pre-Codes may indeed reflect changing cultural mores - but on the other hand, it strikes me that there’s a clear technical reason for this. In a silent film, actors’ gestures have to do the talking for them - and this is especially true because silent films deployed far fewer close-ups than movies do today. So of course those gestures are going to be bigger.

However, his main point is that the Production Code did a lot of damage to American cinema, particular the social conscience thereof, and this he proves fairly handily. He presents such an interesting array of Pre-Code movies - often, from the point of view of someone largely familiar with post-Code 1930s films, startlingly frank in their approach to social injustice, sex, criminality, and various other things - that it’s hard to disagree with him.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on The Black Count! It got shunted aside in favor of Dangerous Men so I haven’t made as much progress as I otherwise might have done.

I’m also reading The Lions of Little Rock. In 1958 Little Rock, Marlee makes friends with her new classmate Liz … only to lose her when Liz is kicked out of school because she’s not actually white. Naturally (for a book heroine), Marlee decides that this can’t be the end of their friendship.

I decided to read this book because the premise seemed to offer some crazy intense friendship, and there’s nothing I love like crazy intense friends who fight to keep each other despite the obstacles, whether the obstacles be family feuds or brainwashing or the bitter weight of societal prejudices. But I’m not feeling the intensity nearly as much as I want here.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert is the next thing on my Kindle. I’ve forgotten what this one is about - in fact I may never have known; I may have just gotten it because it was a free ebook by Sara Jeannette Duncan. So it will be an adventure!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s The Lady and Sada San, a sequel to The Lady of the Decoration, in which the Lady returns to Japan for complicated plot reasons and, on the voyage, befriends young Sada - who is the product of a mixed-race marriage between an American man and his Japanese bride, who unfortunately were washed away in a tidal wave when Sada was but a babe, so she was raised in Nebraska by a missionary lady (who found baby Sada in the ruins of her washed-away village in Japan, but had to move back to Nebraska because of her own failing health).

Now Sada is returning to the beautiful land of her birth, confident that all shall be well! You have probably read enough fiction to guess that it will not be so simple.

So if anyone ever wants to write a novel with a mixed-race white & Japanese heroine in the deepest Midwest in 1911 - you can now point to this book as an unimpeachable source if anyone complains about your historical accuracy.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for later, on the grounds that one shouldn’t binge read a new favorite author’s entire oeuvre and then be left without anything else by that author to read (I did this with Jane Austen when I was a teenager, oops) buuuuut then I went to the library and it was in and I just couldn’t resist. It’s not grabbing me quite as much as his other books - the man-versus-nature aspect is what really got me in his other books and that’s not really present here - but Krakauer is still Krakauer and it’s still fascinating.

William Dean Howells Venetian Life, a travel book about Venice - where Howells was American consul during the Civil War - and Howells’ first book. The writing doesn’t flow as well as his later books, either because it is his first or possibly because long, ornate, multi-clausal sentences became less fashionable as the nineteenth century wore on. In any case I’m finding it rather slow going - but vivid - his description of the Venetian winters made me shiver. (And it seems the stereotype of the comfort-loving American who is baffled by the poor heating in other lands was already in place by the 1860s.)

I’m also working on Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby, but sloooowly. For whatever reason it’s just not grabbing me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will the library ever get me Fire and Hemlock? WHO KNOWS. I had better start haunting used bookstores in quest of it, I think.

I have also discovered that American Girl has a new series out, set in Hawaii in 1941, but they have broken my heart TOO MANY TIMES and I am reluctant to read it.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, which is reasonably entertaining but not one of her best. (Rose in Bloom will now and forever be my favorite Alcott book.) But it did do a good job showing Jo and Professor Bhaer as a well-suited match: I just can’t see Laurie running a school with Jo, or indeed living a life active and varied enough to suit her.

Also William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells is unusual among nineteenth century American writers in that he writes comedies of manners, like a male gaze-y version of Austen (which I suppose would make him an American Trollope…) I find his books mildly entertaining on the literary front, but fascinating for their vision of nineteenth-century American life among the settled middle classes: he’s like a grown-up and less blatantly moralizing version of Alcott.

What I’m Reading Now

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I’ve wanted to read this since reading The Paris Wife, but put it off because another book - sadly, I can’t remember which - said that A Moveable Feast was vicious and score-settling, particularly with regard to Gertrude Stein.

So far, however, Hemingway’s tone toward Stein is if anything bemused. She was clearly a complicated and sometimes exasperating person, who did not so much talk as pontificate, even when she was talking about things she didn’t actually understand. It would be easy to write a vicious caricature, and instead Hemingway writes about her with affectionate amusement. It seems like he still doesn’t know quite what to make of her, forty years later.

(On the other hand, he also describes someone - I forget just who, but he does tell us the name - as having the eyes of a “failed rapist.” I can only assume the man was dead by the time the book was published, because talk about character assassination!)

I’m also reading Judith Flanders’ Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, which is about the four MacDonald sisters and their illustrious marriages. I really enjoyed Flanders’ later book, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, but this is clearly more of a journeyman effort. It’s not precisely boring, but the prose (and the people) don’t come to life like they do in Inside the Victorian Home. I keep getting Agnes and Louisa (and their respective husbands) mixed up. They have no distinguishing features.

Also continuing in The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp. Tara has just met the boy she had a huge crush on when she was ten, only to discover that he doesn’t remember her and that he’s gotten kind of full of himself. WOE.

What I Plan to Read Next

Probably Garth Nix’s A Confusion of Princes. For years he never published anything I found interesting, and now he’s gone and put out not only A Confusion of Princes (space opera), Newt’s Emerald (magical mystery Regency romance), and Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures (magical adventures, aimed at adults).

Oh, and! Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Witch’s Brat.