A Certain Slant of Light

I’ve been meaning to read Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army almost since I started work on Sleeping Beauty, as I figured it would kill two birds with one stone: it would be Civil War research for Russell’s life, and it would give insight into mid-twentieth-century America, as Catton was one of the most famous Civil War researcher at the time and probably the author Andrew would most likely read when trying to gain insight into Russell.

It’s also a cracking good read. Catton portrays historical figures in lively strokes, so you feel like you know them, which I realize is a quality that can be misleading - but I nonetheless prefer it to reading a history book and going, “Which interchangeable general is leading this charge, again?”

He’s also got a wonderful eye for the human touch in any situation. For instance, after three Union soldiers find Lee’s complete order of battle wrapped around three cigars, he notes, “It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of his affair mention what finally happened to the cigars.”

I also found his battle descriptions clear - well, clear is maybe not the right word, because part of his point is that it’s actually very hard for anyone to tell what is going on during a battle (especially a Civil War battle, when the gunpowder created an oily dark smoke that made it almost impossible to see what was happening). But he’s very good at explaining what the generals meant to achieve, where that plan went wrong (my favorite is the guys who range up and down a creek looking for a ford… when the whole creek is so shallow that you can cross it wherever you like), and what they actually ended up achieving instead.

A couple of passages struck me as particularly useful for my fell purposes. Here’s this one, which perfectly illustrates the different views of war popular in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: “Men would sing [“When This Cruel War Is Over”] and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.”

So you have Russell politely trying to spare Andrew’s innocence by only describing the fun, non-battle parts of war, like mock-battle snowball fights and stealing Rebel chickens for chicken stew, and meanwhile Andrew is already at “It was probably too awful for him to talk about, like my uncle who fought on Iwo Jima.”

The other is Catton’s discussion of the transition from smoothbore to rifled muskets, which happened swiftly over the first year of the Civil War, and began to march of advances in gun technology that ended in the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I.

“It was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress - a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away… But with the rifled musket it just didn’t work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close.”

I’ve been chewing over the question of why World War I was the war that killed the whole dulce et decorum est ideal, when, after all, wars have always been bloody and lice-ridden and generally gross, and it strikes me that this passage suggests one possible explanation: dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.

(Why World War I rather than the Civil War? Civil War technology could mow down a bayonet charge… if the defenders were well-trained, and armed with functional rifled muskets, and had plenty of ammunition. If any of those conditions were not met, and they often were not, bayonet charges still worked. You needed a whole company of well-trained men firing at the top speed of two shots a minute to approximate the later effect of a machine gun.)

It’s also super interesting to consider the differences between Catton’s take on the war and the trends in more recent historiography. Catton only glances at questions of race and slavery (although he may become more interested in the next book, when the Army of the Potomac begins recruiting Black soldiers), but he’s VERY interested in the question of the relationship between a democratic government and its army in a time of total war - a topical question when the book was published in 1951, just after World War I, early in the Korean War, when it was feared the Cold War might turn hot.

“It’s quite like such a man as Faulkner to want a three-cornered household. I think the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married, is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to them; it’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind.”

“Yes, I think you’re quite right there,” I said… and we went over together the list of households we knew in which the husband supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We agreed that it was the innocence of our life that made it so common, but we said all the same that it was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept the husband and wife apart…

I wish that I had read William Dean Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream before I wrote The Threefold Tie, because you’d better believe that I would have had a field day with the fact that a man, his wife, and his intimate friend apparently a common enough household arrangement in the nineteenth century that it had a name: a “three-cornered household.” Mr. and Mrs. March may consider the practice mischievous, but they nonetheless can name a list of such households - a whole list! - and it clearly hasn’t even occurred to them that they might cut the acquaintance. (Recall that this was a time when divorce could force the divorcee out of society: when Marcia gets divorced in A Modern Instance, she basically goes into seclusion.)

Our three-cornered household consists of Douglas Faulkner; his intimate friend the Rev. Mr. James Nevil, “the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner’s side, and which appeared to date back to their college days… very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes”; and Faulkner’s wife Hermia Faulkner (nee Winter), who at first “had been jealous of [the friendship], but now she had got used to it; and though [Faulkner] did not suppose she would ever quite forgive Nevil for having been his friend before her time, she tolerated him.”

She has a lot of tolerating to do, because when Faulkner takes ill, he and his wife head to Europe for a yearlong sojourn - with Nevil by their side. But Faulkner’s decline continues unabated, and by the time they return to the US, where they settle in a seaside cottage near Boston, it’s clear that the end is near.

(This is when the Marches appear on the scene to have the conversation at the beginning of this entry.)

By this time, Faulkner has become obsessed with a recurring dream. The exact content of the dream we don’t learn till near the end of the book, but based on Faulkner’s strange antipathy toward his wife, the reader can guess that the dream suggests she’s moved far beyond mere toleration of James Nevil.

One of the curious things about this book is that a lot of the action is, as it were, subterranean. Mr. March admits, much later, that he and his wife guessed the basic outlines of the dream almost at once. But at the time this lurking suspicion is expressed only in the vehemence with which Mrs. March rejects it: “that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then be subjected to - to anything that people were mean enough to think.”

Anything could mean, well, anything. One implication, made explicit only in the last pages, is that people might meanly think that Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner are having an adulterous affair. Another, never explicitly stated but seething just under the surface, is that people might think the same of Nevil and Mr. Faulkner.

This one comes nearest to breaking through when Nevil gets engaged (to a woman who is not Mrs. Faulkner) just a few months after Faulkner’s death. When Mr. March hears the news, he jocularly “threw myself forward in astonishment. ‘What! Already! Why it isn’t six months since - ’”

The joke is that Mr. Nevil shouldn’t get engaged after Mr. Faulkner’s death till he’s observed an appropriate period of mourning - as if he were Mr. Faulkner’s widow. And Mrs. March certainly understands the implication: “ ‘Basil!’ cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself very elaborately after that…She tossed [the letter] across the table to me with a disdain for my low condition that would have wounded a less fallen spirit.”

The engagement is broken, and after a more suitable interval for their widowhood, Nevil and Mrs. Faulkner get engaged. Then they learn the content of Mr. Faulkner’s dream, and then break up on the grounds that they must have been adulterously in love (unbeknownst to themselves) if Mr. Faulkner could dream about it. March urges the idea that they’re just as morbidly fixated as Faulkner was, and ought to marry and be happy, and in a different Howells book they might be allowed; but as it is, Nevil gets hit by a train, and Mrs. Faulkner dies a year later of a broken heart.

This is an interesting contrast to Mrs. Farrell, where no one dies at all, despite broken hearts all round and equally clear implications of gay passion. It seems to be the shadow of adultery that dooms them here (as it blights Ben Halleck’s life in A Modern Instance, although he lives through the book); that, or the fact that Howells wrote this book right after his daughter Winifred died after a decade-long decline, and may have been in a vengeful mood.

Or perhaps a reflective one, painfully fixed on the unfairness of human suffering. It seems, he muses, “abominably unfair that they should suffer so for no wrong; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some end unknown to the sufferer or the witnesses, and no anguish is wasted… or else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say that they were all three destined to undergo what they underwent, and that what happened to them was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since no wrong had been done, but simply fate.”

Friends! Romans! Countryman! As you may recall, I set out in search of a William Dean Howells' book as slashy as The Coast of Bohemia is femslashy, and I have a lead! In fact, TWO leads! John W. Crowley's The Mask of Fiction helpfully lists two Howells books that feature romantic friendships between men: "Private Theatricals" (later published as Mrs. Farrell, under which title it is available on Gutenberg) and The Undiscovered Country, which does NOT appear to be available on Gutenberg, but never fear! I shall track it down.

Crowley quotes this passage from The Undiscovered Country, which Howells cut before publication. I will have to read the novel itself to decide if Howells cut it because he thought it was Too Much or if he just thought he'd hit the YOU ARE SO FASCINATING note too many times. (Note that fascinating is also Charmian's word for Cornelia in The Coast of Bohemia.)

"And,--I'm fascinating?" asked Ford.

"Oh yes,--to women, and to undecided men like myself. Didn't you know it?"...

"Now you are flattering me," said Ford, with an ironical smile. "Be frank; you don't mean it."

"I'm doing you simple justice," returned Phillips. "And can't you see what an irresistible attraction you must naturally have for a man like me?"

"I've never been at pains to formulate you," said Ford. "I don't know what sort of man is like you."

I just!!!! Exclamation points times a thousand!!!!!!!

I am also delighted to inform you that Crowley says that Howells enjoyed romantic friendships himself in his youth. (However, one of his sources is My Literary Passions, which I have read, and I'm not sure I agree with Crowley's assessment of that friendship as romantic. So this perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.) He also details Howells' friendship with Charles Warren Stoddard, nowadays a literary nonentity who is remembered (insofar as he is remembered) for having written a VERY gay book called South-Sea Idyls, which Howells loved and helped shepherd to publication. He also wrote a lengthy and favorable review, which I attempted to look up in the online Atlantic archives, but APPARENTLY the Atlantic has not digitized every single one of Howells' reviews, possibly because they want to break my heart.

(I should note that Howells did this sort of thing for MANY writers in the American literary scene: he appears to have known literally everybody and enthusiastically boosted many of them. He also championed Charlotte Perkins Gilman, personally finding a home for "The Yellow Wallpaper": "I could not rest until I had corrupted the editor of The New England Magazine into publishing it," Howells crowed. Years later he brought it back from obscurity by printing it in The Great American Short Stories, which also included a sketch by Stoddard.)

Stoddard was apparently a favorite of the whole Howells family, and Howells and Stoddard have a cute kind of flirtatious correspondence: "Whenever we feel gay or sad, we say, we wish Stoddard was here. Does everybody like you, and does it make you feel badly? Are you sure that you are worthy of our affection? If you have some secret sins or demerits, don't you think you ought to let us know them, so that we could love you less?" Howells teases, to which Stoddard responds with a LENGTHY account of his schoolboy crush on a classmate: "Me he ignored utterly even while I worshiped silently in his presence and secretly wished that I might die for his sake," Stoddard sighs. He continued to worship until the object of his adoration made some sign of returning his feelings - at which point Stoddard turned him down flat!

Howells replies, agreeing that Stoddard did quite right to turn on his idol. An idol has no business becoming human!

In 1901 Howells wrote a book called Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which cut off chronologically before he met Stoddard, so Stoddard wasn't in it. Concerned that Stoddard's feelings might be hurt, Howells sent Stoddard a poem:

If you are not in this book
My dear Stoddard, turn and look
in the author's heart, and there,
lightening, sweetening all its care,
mirrored in its most sacred place,
you shall see your own dear face.

Now, Howells was married and had three children and also writes about women the way that men who are attracted to women write about women (the mores of the time do not allow anyone to breast boobily, but there are moments when you just feel him posing his women characters and thinking "GOD she's looking fine"). ​He's just, like, enjoying a cute little flirtation with his friend, and apparently reading the resulting correspondence aloud to the whole family, to the enjoyment of everyone. (Stoddard meanwhile was sleeping his way across three continents and BREAKING FRANCIS MILLET'S HEART, as detailed in Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories, not that I'm bitter on Millet's behalf or anything. So Stoddard's not eating his heart out over Howells, but if he WAS, it was a well-deserved taste of his own medicine.) Apparently that was just something that straightish nineteenth century guys did sometimes. The more you know!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nothing! Alas alas! But admittedly I have been rather busy with the move this week.

What I’m Reading Now

After a LONG pause, I’ve picked up Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven again!... only to get bogged down again when Alexander again goes off to war. I realize that Alexander the Great’s reputation rests on conquering the known world, so of COURSE any book about him is going to be a book about conquest, but every time he goes a-conquering I’m thinking about the people who are about to get slaughtered/raped/sold into slavery/etc and then I get stuck again.

This will probably be less of a problem when I get to The Persian Boy, as Bagoas presumably is not in a position to personally decide whether or not he happens to feel like sacking this particular city. (I think it is the personal responsibility for the sacking that is a sticking point for me: I didn’t have this problem in The Last of the Wine, or any of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books about soldiers.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Linda Sue Park’s Prairie Lotus!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Two more Newbery Honor books this week. In Aranka Siegal’s memoir Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944, Siegal records the unraveling of her life as the Jewish community’s plight in Hungary grew ever more desperate. Siegal is very good about recording it as she felt it at the time, rather than through the lens of hindsight: the reader knows where this is going, but the people in the book don’t, and their hope makes it a gut punch when the book ends with the family climbing onto a cattle car to Auschwitz.

Patricia Lauber’s Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens is about, well, what it says. Basically I already knew the story this book was telling (volcano erupts! Scientists amazed by the speed with which life returns to devastated area!), but it was fascinating to read about it in more detail. (In fact my only complaint about the book is that I wanted yet more detail. Tell me ALL about those lichens, Lauber!) Lovely photographs.

I also read Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre, which was privately printed in 1906 and one of the first novels that unambiguously portrays a gay relationship between two men that ends happily. This is an amazing resource if you’re interested in the cutting edge understanding of sexuality in the early 1900s; if you’re just looking for an entertaining novel, however, this is perhaps not the best choice, as the longest chapter of the book is a monologue by Oswald, the narrator, recounting his life story and also all his FEELINGS about homosexuality, also referred to as similisexuality and Uranianism. Two years later when EPS published a book about the topic, he called it The Intersexes. Clearly the terminology was still in formation.

After this there is a rather sweet part where the leads finally end up getting together. After Oswald’s confession Imre, who hates writing letters, suddenly starts writing Oswald every day all “I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about you” and “I can’t wait to see you again so I can tell you something I can’t write down” and so forth and so on, and Oswald is all WHAT DOES THIS MEAN…? and then decides it means that Imre’s going to confess that he’s in love with his former best friend’s wife. OSWALD MY DUDE. (But I get why he’s so hesitant to imagine that it means what it does in fact mean, because he’s had a horrible experience in his past where he confessed his love to a different BFF and the BFF was all WE MUST NEVER SPEAK AGAIN, so naturally he’s a little gun shy.)

What I’m Reading Now

The move has taken over my life! No thoughts, head empty.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have discovered an essay collection called The Mask of Fiction: Essays on William Dean Howells which apparently contains an essay detailing Howells’ “friendship with a homosexual,” which seems like a promising lead on that potentially mythical slashy Howells novel. Do I care enough to interlibrary loan the darn thing? I am sorry to say that the answer is probably yes.

Charmian looked at her gloomily. “You strange creature!” she murmured. “But I love you,” she added aloud. “I simply idolize you!”

Cornelia said, half-laughing, “Don't be ridiculous,” and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.”

I read William Dean Howells’ The Coast of Bohemia years ago, but inexplicably didn’t post about it at the time, but I reread it this week and now I intend to make up for lost time.

The thing to understand about this book is that it is braided from three parts, two of which are delightful and one of which is the plot. The delightful parts are the parts about our heroine Cornelia’s life at art school at the Synthesis in New York, and her friendship with her fellow art student Charmian, who in their very first conversation informs Cornelia, “It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?”

Cornelia does not mind Charmian being fascinated with her, although she doesn’t exactly return the fascination. This does not in the least deter Charmian, who has decided that Cornelia is her beau ideal and spends the rest of the book adoring her.

The first time she visits Cornelia in her rooms, for instance, “Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.”

(It should be noted that they saw each other just the day before at the Synthesis.)

Then, the first time that Cornelia visits Charmian at her home, “The man held aside the portière for [Cornelia] to pass, but before she could pass there came a kind of joyous whoop from within, a swishing of skirts toward her, and she was caught in the arms of Charmian, who kissed her again and again, and cried out over her goodness in coming.”

Charmian, you will perhaps be unsurprised to learn, has fitted out one room in the luxurious apartment where she lives with her stepmother to look like her ideal of a bohemian artist’s studio, complete with stretching a cunningly painted sheet diagonally down from the ceiling so that the room looks like a garret. It seems to me that Charmian has missed her mark in trying to become a painter (she is, as she cheerfully admits, not very talented in that line), and ought to attempt set design and costuming.

Around here, however, the plot begins to intrude, and by plot I of course mean Cornelia’s romance. Charmian’s stepmother hires a painter, Ludlow, to paint Charmian’s portrait, and as Ludlow is a friend and mentor of Cornelia’s, he suggests Cornelia should paint Charmian too.

The first time I read this book I groaned and settled in for the love triangle, but in fact there is no love triangle at all: Ludlow’s affections remain fixed on Cornelia, and Charmian is totally uninterested in Ludlow, possibly because she’s just uninterested in men all around. As she comments earlier in the book, upon observing a spoony engaged couple, “I shouldn't care for the engagement… That would be rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn't hide it or pretend not to be! That is life!”

(I leave it to the reader’s discretion whether Charmian “I love you! I simply idolize you!” Maybough has ever hidden a feeling in her life.)

Anyway, Charmian is thrilled with the romance of it all when Ludlow fails to paint a good portrait of Charmian - because he keeps accidentally making her look like Cornelia. A surefire sign that a painter is in love!

Cornelia, on the other hand, paints a beautiful portrait of Charmian, and Ludlow acknowledges, “She could have a career; she could be a painter of women's portraits. A man's idea of a woman, it's interesting, of course, but it's never quite just; it's never quite true; it can't be. Every woman knows that, but you go on accepting men's notions of women, in literature and in art, as if they were essentially, or anything but superficially, like women.”

Howells is quite aware that this applies to his own writing, too, although it has to be said that he does a far better job of capturing Charmian than Ludlow does. “At first, when I wanted to do her as Humbug, you wouldn't stand it, and now, when I've done her as Mystery, you laugh,” Ludlow complains to Cornelia, who does indeed just laugh at him: she’s been painting Charmian as a human being, with charms and faults, rather than an abstract representation of anything, and that is why Cornelia’s portrait is so good (and why Howells’ portrait is so loveable).

And Cornelia, too, is lovely - outside of the Ludlow/Cornelia romance, wherein she is so trapped by 19th century romantic conventions that she spends most of the book actively fighting against her love of Ludlow. Not because it would get in the way of her artistic career; the book touches on this fact, but it’s not Cornelia’s motivation. She’s acting on a sense of delicacy so very delicate that she thinks she’s unworthy of Ludlow because an odious traveling salesman once courted her. They were not engaged! She was not in love! The fact that he paid court to her and she did not repulse him is, in itself, enough.

Of course Ludlow finds out about this amour in the worst way possible, when said traveling salesman sends him a note that insinuates that Cornelia is far more compromised than she is. Cornelia decides that it is impossible! incompatible with her honor! to clear up the misunderstanding! Charmian solemnly upholds her in this choice.

“Now—now—we can live for each other, Cornelia. You will outlive this. You will be terribly changed, of course; and perhaps your health may be affected; but I shall always be with you from this on. I have loved you more truly than he ever did, if he can throw you over for a little thing like that. If I were a man I should exult to ignore such a thing. Oh, if men could only be what girls would be if they were men! But now you must begin to forget him from this instant—to put him out of your mind—your life,” Charmian exults. “We will take a little flat like two newspaper girls that I heard of, and live together. We will get one down-town, on the East Side.”

But then Ludlow comes round the next morning to clear up the misunderstanding, and Charmian (who really as an excellent wingwoman, quite against her own interests) keeps him around, talking to him about how Cornelia is SO wonderful and truthful and just the soul of honesty, until Cornelia herself comes in and they talk the thing over and Ludlow says what the reader has been screaming all along, which is that the traveling salesman doesn’t matter a bit.

So they marry! Happy end! At least as long as you were not deeply invested in Cornelia’s artistic career, which may or may not continue. The woman’s career ends, the book notes, “in most of the many cases where artists had married artists,” but Ludlow “held that it had happened through the man's selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions.” Will Cornelia beat the odds? Who knows!

But one thing is certain: Cornelia's friendship with Charmian will continue. When the honeymooners return to New York, Charmian throws them a real bohemian supper, although she complains that her stepmother ruined it by taking the ladies away to coffee instead of leaving them to smoke with the men. “I should—if I could only have seen Cornelia Ludlow smoking—I should have been willing to die. And now—now, I'm afraid she's going to be perfectly respectable!”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

For as long as I knew the sky and the clouds, we lived in our white stucco house in the Armenian quarter of Azizya, in Turkey, but when the great dome of Heaven cracked and shattered over our lives, and we were abandoned by the sun and blown like scattered seed across the Arabian desert, none returned but me, and my Azizya, my precious home, was made to crumble and fall and forever disappear from my life.

David Kherdian’s The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, the 1980 Newbery Honor winner, is sometimes shelved as biography and sometimes as a novel. It’s based on Veron’s memories of fleeing the Armenian massacres as a girl in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and told in the first person as if narrated by Veron, but given that Veron’s original narrative only filled eleven pages, her son must have added to it considerably.

Still, it’s a fascinating book, and very informative if (like me) you didn’t know a whole lot about the Armenian genocide. I was particularly distressed to learn that smaller massacres continued for years after 1916, which I’ve generally seen listed as the end date for the genocide. Veron nearly dies in a massacre in Smyrna in 1922.

There are definitely distressing parts of the book, but overall I didn’t find it a distressing read. As one of Veron’s teachers tells her, Veron is blessed with a good disposition, which gives her the ability to focus on whatever is good in the current situation instead of dwelling on the tragedies of the past.

I continued the Newbery Honor theme with Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. I know lots of people love Raskin’s work (particularly The Westing Game, so I was hoping that this book might prove my entry point into her oeuvre, but alas, I still find her writing style distancing. This book is trying to be whimsical and serious at the same time and the balance just doesn’t work for me.

Old Yeller I didn’t expect to enjoy, but actually I quite liked it! It tells you right on the first page that the hero’s going to have to shoot the dog in the end, which I feel is a good place to give readers a chance to bail out, and I enjoyed all the adventures where the hero and his folks nearly get killed by one wild animal or another. (As littlerhymes and I have remarked many times while reading the Little House series, it's amazing anyone survived the nineteenth century.)

Moving off the Newbery theme (this week has been a bonanza of books), I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. It has certain charming and Snyder-typical qualities (the California setting; the imaginative heroine), but I can see why it’s not one of her better-known books, because ( Spoilers )

Last but not least! I finished Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, a rollicking, tongue-in-cheek adventure novel with a plucky heroine and an EXTREMELY 1920s romance, with a hero who is repeatedly compared to a caveman. Nothing says “I love you” like the possibility of thunking your girl over the head and dragging her off to your cave, I guess! Normally I find these romances aggravating, but here it was oddly charming, perhaps because Christie seems perfectly aware that it’s ridiculous and is revelling in the ridiculousness of it all.

Although about half the book takes place in Rhodesia, our heroine Anne Beddingfield informs us rather warmly that there will be NO local color in this book, and she’s absolutely right; there’s a whole entire background revolution in which the book has no interest at all. My impression is that this is and remains about par for the course in Christie’s handling of race throughout her career, so I may henceforth confine myself to her books about people dying in that most deadly of English customs, the country house party.

What I’m Reading Now

Approaching the end of Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad. This week in petty Nazi fuckery, when the Nazis realized that they were about to lose the battle, they gave their soldiers one last chance to write home - then destroyed the letters. The only reason Beevor can quote the letters at all is that they were originally quoted in some bureaucrat’s “We should destroy these letters! They’ll be bad for homefront morale!” report.

Once the battle was lost, the Red Army captured twenty-two German commanders, including one who had ordered his soldiers to fight “to the last cartridge but one” (the last bullet of course is meant for the stalwart warrior to kill himself at the last: death before surrender!). The other generals are ribbing him about it and he’s all, well I tried to kill myself but my chief of staff prevented me. SIR. Do you think the stalwart warriors of old let their chiefs of staff get in the way?

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m coming up on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan on my Newbery list. Do I need to read A Wizard of Earthsea first? (I tried to read A Wizard of Earthsea in my youth and Did Not Care For It, but I suppose by now I might have outgrown that aversion.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was in elementary school my friend Micky and I bonded over our mutual loathing of Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, so it was with some dismay that I realized I was enjoying the sequel, A Solitary Blue. Who even am I as a person? Maybe it’s just that I’m an adult now; maybe Voigt is one of those children’s book authors adults tend to enjoy more than children.

A Solitary Blue gives us the backstory of Dicey’s boyfriend, Jeff Greene. Jeff’s mother Melody abandoned the family when Jeff was seven, leaving Jeff with his emotionally distant absentminded professor father and a boatload of abandonment issues. A few years later, Melody invites Jeff to come stay with her for the summer, and at first Jeff is bowled over by her warmth and charm and ability to make him feel like the center of the universe just by looking into his eyes. Slowly, however, as instances of Melody’s selfishness and unreliability mount, Jeff realizes that the ability to make someone feel seen and loved in the moment is not the same as actually seeing and loving them as a whole person, and that Melody does not and perhaps cannot love him that way.

The rest of the book is about Jeff slowly learning how to trust and reach out to other people again. It’s also about Jeff’s father realizing that he’s been emotionally absent from Jeff’s life, and learning how to be present. He has a dramatic wake-up call when he almost fails to notice that Jeff has come down with a virulent fever, but his reformation afterward is understated. He simply begins making an effort to be present, to pay attention to Jeff, and he does this so calmly and quietly and reliably that slowly both Jeff and the reader come to understand that this change is here to stay.

I also knocked off Wayne Vansant’s The Red Baron: A Graphic History of Richthofen’s Flying Circus and the Air War of WWI, which was meant to be research for… a book I am not writing right now after all… but time spent reading about World War I fighter pilots is always time well spent, I suppose.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic! I’ve had a long Mary Stewart hiatus, because I save Mary Stewart books for trips (that way I know I’ll have something enjoyable, fast-paced, and reasonably light to read on the journey) and of course there haven’t been many trips for the past year and a half… but over Labor Day weekend I went to Tennessee to visit a penpal, so Mary Stewart has returned! This book is set in Greece, and I always think that Stewart’s books in Greece (The Moon-Spinners, My Brother Michael) are particularly strong. She must have found the country inspiring.

For a few months I took a break on Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, because I couldn’t handle anymore about the poor civilians of Stalingrad (the evacuation, such as it was, was extremely late and half-hearted), but now I’m back in the saddle. The tide of battle has turned: the Soviet armies have encircled the Germans, who are clinging to the thought that Hitler will save them by Christmas, unaware that Hitler doesn’t even intend to try.

What I Plan to Read Next

On my trip I spent a happy hour trawling a used bookstore, and found Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. A Zilpha Keatley Snyder I haven’t read yet! So excited.

The moment you have all been waiting for! I have finished D. K. Broster’s The Flight of the Heron! Which I cannot discuss without spoilers, so ( behind the spoiler cut we go )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, which ends on the cheery image of General Pershing gazing thoughtfully at a map of the battle lines just before the armistice and musing “What a difference a few days would have made.”

This is one of those tempting “What if?” moments in history. What if the Allies had taken a few more days and thrown the German army right back across the border into Germany, maybe even followed them a little way across the border just to make it REALLY CLEAR who had won the war? If the Allies had insisted on unconditional surrender rather than an armistice, could World War II have been avoided, and the Treaty of Versailles created a peace as lasting as the Treaty of Paris in 1815, which lasted ninety-nine years?

Of course, if the peace following the Treaty of Versailles lasted 99 years, that would probably put us… smack in the middle of Alternate Universe World War II right now. Hmm.

After that I needed a little break from the war, so I read Bette Greene’s Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe. (You may be familiar with Bette Greene as the author of Summer of My German Soldier.) It’s probably just as well I didn’t read this when I was actually in the target age group, as Philip Hall would have driven me up the wall, as he is one of those boys who expresses his crush on the narrator mostly by teasing her. I am old enough now to recognize the artistry of the book… while also still wanting to drown Philip Hall in a bucket just a little bit.

Also, my roommate bought the first two volumes of Kousuke Oono’s The Way of the Househusband, which I’ve been hearing about all over the place, so of course I had to give them a try. They’re cute! But I don’t think I’m invested enough to seek out the rest of the manga.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun E. M. Delafield’s The War-Workers, which is one of Delafield’s earliest novels, but as far as I can tell she appeared from the head of Zeus fully formed as a writer: it’s just as well-written and gently trenchant about human nature as her later work.

I’m also reading Brian Matthew Jordan’s A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army, which is about an ethnically German regiment from Ohio in the American Civil War, and quietly weeping about my own stupidity in making Russell German-American in Sleeping Beauty. Did I just WANT to make this book extra hard for myself? Did that just seem like a good IDEA?

What I Plan to Read Next

Yours Cheerfully, the sequel to A. J. Pearce’s Dear Mrs. Bird!