A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maeve Binchy’s The Lilac Bus, a short story collection which also includes the stories from Dublin 4. Binchy is always a pleasure to read, but the short story format doesn’t give her the space to build up the intricate character dynamics which are the best part of her novels.

I also read Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays, which I’m almost sure I read a few years ago, although I can’t find any post about it… Anyway, at the time I must have hated joy, because I wasn’t too impressed by the book and didn’t continue the series. In this book, the four Melendy children agree to pool their allowances every Saturday, so that each week one child can use the money to fulfill some long-held dream: going to the picture gallery or the opera or the circus. As they go, they make new friends, adopt a dog, fall in the lake at Central Park, and are invited to spend the summer at a lighthouse!

And I finished Capt. W. E. Johns’ Biggles Defies the Swastika, in which Biggles and co. end up trapped in Norway when the Nazis invade! Biggles rushes to an aerodrome, hoping to steal a plane so he can escape… only to run into a Norwegian acquaintance, who assumes that Biggles is also a fifth columnist and fits him out with a Gestapo pass.

Then Biggles sets out on a series of desperate switchbacks across Norway as Biggles attempts to find an escape route, dig up some dirt to help the British invasion, evade Von Stalhein (who is of course on his trail), and gather Ginger and Algy in one place so they can all escape together.

All of Johns’ books are action-packed, but the plotting here is particularly impressive: he’s always finding new and exciting ways to get Biggles and his friends into deeper trouble!

What I’m Reading Now

James Baldwin’s Another Country, although I may not finish it, because it’s so grueling to read about such unpleasant people. I should have been forewarned, because David the narrator of Giovanni’s Room is also a horrible person, but there’s a big difference between “the first-person narrator of this story is awful” and “Baldwin’s theory seems to be that all humans are awful, as evidenced by every single character who gets a slice of the rotating third-person POV and also all their friends.”

Do any of them develop any redeeming qualities as the book goes on? If the point is simply that people suck, I don’t need to read the rest of the book to grasp that.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will continue with the Melendy Quartet! Next up is The Four-Story Mistake.

Also delighted to inform you that there is another Worrals story available on fadedpage: Worrals in the Wilds: The First Post-War Worrals Story. Less delighted to tell you that it takes place in Africa, as nothing in my experience of Johns suggests that he will handle this well, but such is life.

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Thus James Baldwin in “Stranger in the Village,” the final essay in Notes of a Native Son - a statement which encapsulates one of the themes that winds its way through the essay collection, that history is inescapable, and that the American identity is rooted in part in a desperate attempt to escape it.

“In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back,” Baldwin comments; “but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

(I suspect Faulkner was coming at it from a very different angle when he said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” but there’s an echo here - a sort of minor key undertow against the main currents of American culture.)

I’ve also been chewing over this quote from “A Question of Identity,” Baldwin’s essay about the American expatriate in Europe.

If the American found in Europe only confusion, it would obviously be infinitely wiser for him to remain at home. Hidden, however, in the heart of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world. This, which has so grandiose and general a ring, is, in fact, most personal - the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him.

This is striking as a general observation (although I wonder to what extent it’s still true that Americans go to Europe to discover their American identity?), and it also, I think, clarifies Baldwin’s technique in his novels, which tend to have lengthy sections about the characters’ histories, and their parents’ histories, and the neighborhoods they grew up in, etc. etc., all built around this realization that you can’t understand “the person apart from all the forces which have produced him.”

And finally, another quote from “A Stranger in the Village”:

I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world - which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white - owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us - very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will - that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sadly, there is no more “I’m buying you a house whether you like it or not” drama in Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, but Rose Wilder Lane remains a spitfire up through to the end. She semi-adopts yet another fourteen-year-old boy, Roger Lea McBride; this one sticks around to the end of her life, which is how he ends up with the copyrights to the Little House book, which is how television got its hot little hands on the property and turned it into the series Little House on the Prairie.

This TV series crushed me as a child because it was so completely unlike the books. I saw about one episode before revolting against not merely this particular show but, briefly, the entire medium of television. Why is their house gigantic? Why do the episodes revolve around Pa rather than Laura? Why doesn’t Pa have whiskers?

It turns out that the answer to all these questions is Michael Landon, who played Pa and was the producer of the series and might be even more self-aggrandizing than Rose Wilder Lane herself, which is saying a lot. Landon turned himself into the star of the series, refused to wear whiskers because he felt he didn’t look good in them, and also did not wear underwear under his britches because he felt that the world deserved the chance to ogle his hindquarters. He also insisted on a gigantic “little house” because he didn’t want his imaginary TV daughters to be, gasp, poor. Clearly the whole point of the books went RIGHT over his head.

I also read James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, which I might have skipped if I had realized it revolved around a false rape accusation, although it becomes clear ( spoilers )

And finally, I finished Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical! The exclamation point is part of the title, but it also feels like appropriate punctuation for this sentence, because this is a hefty book. I suspect ultimately that this is a book meant to be dipped into (“What was it about those Judy Garland/Andy Rooney musicals?”) rather than read straight through, but I did end up with a long list of musicals to watch this way.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom. I feel like Yaffe is maybe trying a little too hard to dissociate herself with the Austen fans who were drawn in by the wet shirt scene, but nonetheless it’s interesting reading about all the different ways that Austen mania manifests itself.

I’ve also been rereading David Blaize, as research for a story I’ve been poking at (I’ve been poking at a lot of stories this month, I can’t seem to settle down for one) which actually takes place entirely after boarding school, but our heroes originally met in boarding school so obviously it’s important for BACKGROUND. Then they trooped off to fight in World War I, lost a limb or two, reconnected in a convalescent home etc., banged in a cottage on the coast of Cornwall.

What I Plan to Read Next

littlerhymes and I have been discussing what to read after we finish the Swallows & Amazons series (although we’re only on book six, so this eventuality is a long way off). I commented that we’ve done England (Swallows & Amazons), Canada (two L. M. Montgomery series, Anne and Emily), and Australia (Billabong), so maybe New Zealand next… if we can find an early to mid twentieth century series of beloved New Zealand children’s books. Or even a single book, if no series is in the offing. Anybody have a suggestion?

I mentioned in the Wednesday Reading Meme that I wanted to read some James Baldwin, and my own particular library branch happened to have Giovanni’s Room on hand, so I checked it out… and now I have read it and I am crushed and emotionally compromised.

(Although the Everyman’s Library edition has a black man on the cover, the main character and in fact the entire cast is white. The introduction quotes Baldwin’s comment, “I certainly could not possibly have - not at that point in my life - handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.” I feel a cover with two white guys staring at each other in an intensely homoerotic yet antagonistic manner would more closely fit the book’s actual content.)

The novel, set in the 1950s when it was written, tells the story of David, an American who has gone to Paris in order to run away from/embrace his homosexuality. These are, you will note, opposite actions; he oscillates between the two, and does both badly. (And it should be noted that by “embrace” I don’t mean “emotionally accept,” I definitely just mean that he keeps banging guys.)

This sort of doubling is shot through David’s character. He is attracted to Giovanni, and hence repulsed by him (because repulsed by his own attraction to men); he loves Giovanni and hates him, he wants to stay with him and feels that he is suffocating in Giovanni’s room. Although the effect is most pronounced in relationship to his attraction to men, this alienation from his own feelings - alienation is maybe not strong enough; it’s a loathing, an antagonism, and it infects everything else in his life, all his relationships, all his actions, his ability to feel anything wholeheartedly or sincerely.

Giovanni’s Room put me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another book with a narrator so crushed by his own internalized homophobia that he can barely admit even to himself that he’s attracted to men. (Also, the boyfriend character in both books is about 10,000 times more in touch with his emotions than that narrator, and in particular more capable of experiencing genuine joy when the circumstances allow.)

But Giovanni’s Room is much darker (and The Goldfinch is not exactly a walk in the park!) In The Goldfinch, the other characters realize that Theo is an adorable human dumpster fire; in Giovanni’s Room, both Giovanni (David’s boyfriend) and Hella (his fiancee) have nothing like this level of insight into David. They take him as he presents himself, and because he has fragmented himself so aggressively, this gives them nothing like the complete picture.

Hella does not know that David is gay; he is, after all, trying very hard to hide it. Giovanni, meanwhile - well, Giovanni is the bartender at a gay bar where David goes because he is “intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion.”

But of course Giovanni isn’t aware of this tortured rationale. He figures that David’s just looking for a boyfriend, a take that David seems to corroborate by moving into Giovanni’s room and making love to him and basically mooching off him all summer. (This is especially egregious because David comes from an almost infinitely more comfortable background than Giovanni, who is barely scraping by.) Only far too late does Giovanni realize that David will not and perhaps cannot love Giovanni for more than the most fleeting of instants, when that feeling overwhelms David’s carefully constructed armor.

This all makes David sound absolutely awful, and, let’s be clear: he is awful. You can’t even trot out “Well but he’s even WORSE to himself than to other people,” because as awful as he is to himself, the consequences of David's awfulness are far worse for Giovanni than anything that happens to David. (This isn’t a spoiler; we learn that Giovanni’s about to be guillotined on about page three.)

But at the same time, David is so vividly, mercilessly drawn, this mixture of harshly repressed tenderness and self-protective cruelty, that I found the book terribly compelling and… not hard to put down, exactly, I did keep putting it down because it was hard to read about such sadness. But I kept having to pick it back up.