A Certain Slant of Light

An unusual bulletin of What I’ve Given Up Reading: I stalled out on Rumer Godden’s childhood memoir A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep a couple months ago, and have at last admitted to myself that I have no desire to finish it. I usually love childhood memoirs! But Godden seems to be going through her childhood and recollecting which incidents later gave rise to books, and it’s like she already got the pith out of them in making up the stories and there’s just not a lot left.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carol Ryrie Brink’s Château Saint Barnabé, a short memoir about a month that Brink’s family spent at a dilapidated chateau-turned-boarding-house outside Marseilles in the 1920s. The book is structured around the tale of an American woman they met there, who had married a French sea captain forty years before and remained in Marseilles even after his death, though she longed to return to America – and yet when Brink offers to help her return to America, she refuses. “I am afraid…” she says; “afraid it might not be in America as I had dreamed it. I would rather keep the dream.”

Full of interesting details about daily life, and also interesting in that it confirms Family Sabbatical is indeed drawing on actual sabbaticals the Brink family spent in France. In fact, IIRC the novels includes a similar story about a woman who wants to return to America, I believe with a happier ending, although my memory is not too clear on this point.

Also Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, which alas cannot quite live up to its fabulous title, which seems to promise that here we are going to examine the works of Roman women writers. We no longer have enough of their works to support a whole book, it seems. But the book is strongest when we do examine women’s own words: an early Christian martyr’s jail diary, a sequence of four poems carved on an Egyptian statue by a court poetess during Hadrian’s reign (one of them, endearingly, is about how beautiful Hadrian’s wife is, presumably to cheer her up while he’s weeping about the recently deceased Antinous), and—this is my favorite—some letters written by the wife of one military commander in Britain to the wife of the commander of a nearby fort, including an invitation to an upcoming birthday party. It’s so incredibly Mrs. Tim of the Regiment! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another Newbery Honor winner! Jeanette Eaton’s A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland. Embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Madame Roland was until I read this book.

And I finished Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Lady of the Linden Tree. All in all an undistinguished collection of original fairy tales, but all the same I’m glad I gave it a try.

What I’m Reading Now

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, and Other Stories, which begins with “The Birds” (still one of the scariest stories in existence; imagine if the birds ever did decide they wanted to kill all humans), and continues with “Monte Verità,” which is best enjoyed unspoiled but concerns an unearthly mountain. You will be unsurprised to learn that Du Maurier is just as good at suspense in short stories as in novel form.

What I Plan to Read Next

My favorite Purdue library is closing for renovation over the summer! I have a bad feeling they are going to purge the children’s section, so I’ve checked out the books on my list: a couple of Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collections of Scottish ghost stories, two books by Susan Fletcher of Dragon’s Milk fame, Susan Cooper’s Victory, and a children’s history of Thermopylae by Mary Renault.

I’m just ripping through the Newbery Honor resources of my hometown. For some reason, this consists mainly of biographies, and somewhat to my surprise, for I don’t usually seek out biographies, I’ve actually been quite enjoying them. These are all at least fifty years old, all intensely readable, almost like novels, without footnotes (I pine for footnotes; I’d like to know exactly which parts of the dialogue are made up) and without any interest in debunking their subjects. Except perhaps Jeanette Eaton’s Gandhi, Fighter Without a Sword, I wouldn’t call them hagiographic, but they’re definitely written in the older biographical tradition where their subject is an interesting person and a role model whose faults will be noted but not emphasized.

And Eaton has the excuse that her biography was published three years after Gandhi’s assassination. The man was freshly martyred! Of course her view was reverent. And Eaton does an excellent job balancing incidents from Gandhi’s personal life (he appears to have been one of those people who makes friends for life about three minutes after arriving anywhere) with the wider story of Gandhi’s part in the struggle for Indian independence.

(At some point I ought to read a biography of Jinnah, because so far everything I’ve read/watched about the Partition is from the Indian point of view and as such Jinnah is always the snake in the garden who destroys the dream of united India.)

Then there's Clara Ingram Judson’s Mr. Justice Holmes is a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, who appears to have been the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of his day, famous for writing dissents. Judson notes that he didn’t actually dissent that often, but apparently some of them were doozies. I say “apparently” because Judson talks very little about Holmes’s cases, and I realize that you don’t want to get into a bunch of dry legalese in a children’s book, but all the same I would have liked a little more detail about the work that made him worthy of a biography.

However, the book is more focused on Holmes’s personal life, in particular his strained relationship with his father (the Oliver Wendell Holmes famous for writing the poem that saved the USS Constitution: “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!”). I particularly enjoyed the detail about daily life in Boston in the nineteenth century.

Constance Rourke’s Audubon, on the other hand, is ALL about the birds. Simply wonderful descriptions of Audubon’s bird paintings (my kingdom for an illustrated edition of this book!) and his travels in the United States looking for new birds to paint. I was devastated when it turned out that he never fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting the Rockies to paint the birds there.

When Rourke wrote, Audubon’s early years were still shrouded in mystery. (In fact, I thought they were still shrouded in mystery today, but his Wikipedia article sounds pretty certain about his origins.) Rourke outlines the leading theories at the time, but her favorite, to which she returns at the end of the book and at length in her endnote, is that Audubon was the escaped dauphin of France, who had been spirited into the Vendee and adopted by Captain Audubon to protect him from the excesses of the Revolution!

Rourke is not quite enough of a crank to assert this as fact or even to wholly believe it. Sometimes she swings toward the idea that Audubon was not the dauphin but believed he was, and rather than wasting away his life in trying to assert this claim, channeled its sense that he was special into his ferocious confidence in his own self-imposed project to paint all the birds of America.

In any case, I found the appearance of this unlikely theory in an award-winning work of nonfiction weirdly delightful - like the time I read M. Scott Peck’s book about the psychology of evil People of the Lie and all of a sudden he was talking about demonic possession. Why not, I guess! There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio!

Finally, a non-biography. Sorche Nic Leodhas’s wonderful Thistle and Thyme: Tales and Legends from Scotland is a collection of folk tales. (The copy I read is evidently a compilation of the original Thistle and Thyme with Leodhas’s earlier book of folktales, Heather and Broom. This edition was published only in England. How did it end up in a library in Indiana?)

This book has maybe the most delightful table of contents I’ve ever seen, because each entry is accompanied by a little note about what kind of story it is or at what sort of occasion it might have been told or how the author came across it: A wedding sgeulachdan from Ardfainaig in Perthshire. It was told at the wedding of a cousin of my grandfather, who told it to my father, who told it to me.

A lovely book if you’re interested in folktales or Scotland or just a good lively story, with plenty of brave clever girls and Fairy Folk. I’m planning to get my hands on more of Leodhas’s work.