A Certain Slant of Light

My very first fandom - before I was aware of fandom as a social phenomenon, or indeed knew the alphabet well enough to write stories down - was Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a series of five books about tiny people who live in the walls of old houses and get their sustenance by borrowing from the humans who live there. (Later on, they leave the house and live out in the fields, which is also enchanting.)

I LOVED the idea of Borrowers and beguiled many happy hours of kindergarten imagining tiny people living in the walls of the school, and of course moving into nearby Happy Hollow Park during the summer months when there were no schoolchildren from whom to borrow food.

So you can imagine that I was delighted to discover a hitherto unsuspected Borrower book! In the mid-sixties Mary Norton wrote Poor Stainless, which is really a short story and not a novel, but nonetheless I gobbled it right up. Arrietty and her mother Homily are sitting by the grating picking some sequins off some chiffon, and to pass the time as they do chores Homily tells Arrietty a story of the old days, when many Borrowers still lived in the house - and Stainless, a young boy from the Knife-block family, went missing for a week. (The title is ironic; Stainless is a cheerful little monster.) The nostalgic joy of reading a new Borrowers story, and enjoying a new set of beautifully detailed Borrowers illustrations by the incomparable Joe and Beth Krush…

Naturally I popped over to Mary Norton’s Wikipedia page to see if there are any OTHER Borrowers books that I may have missed. Sadly there are not, but there is one last Mary Norton book I haven’t read, Are All the Giants Dead?, which naturally I intend to correct at once.

You know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. And it is even more delicate with a mother and a daughter, both having had mixed experiences of eating, cooking, speaking, and writing. Now that we have not neglected to do the making-up with each other after our last recipe, it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book are mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s.

Next, I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks Americans like better…

Like Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was translated into English by a family member: in this case, her daughter Rulan, with occasional footnotes by Yuenren Chao (who once has dueling footnotes with Rulan). The book is part traditional cookbook, with recipes, but also partly a description of Chinese food culture in the early to mid twentieth century. (The book was published in 1945. For obvious reasons, the Chaos had been stuck in America for a few years at that point.)

Chao mentions, for instance, that although it’s common in China to serve tea throughout the day, no tea is served at meals. In fact, often the only liquid at meals is soup, and people will take spoonfuls of soup to refresh themselves between courses. There’s no dessert at the end of the meal, but at a banquet, sweets may appear at intervals between other courses; the other main use of sweets in Chinese cuisine is as tien-hsin, “dot-hearts,” (tim-sam in Cantonese), which are little meals/snacks eaten with tea - although these are just as likely to be savory, “flour things which are baked, fried, or boiled and may be made sweet or salty.”

I loved the translation “dot-hearts” and wish it had caught on in English; it sounds so much more elegant than “snack.” I also loved the phrase Chao mentions as a description of fine food, “mountain rarities and sea flavors.” Isn’t that so evocative?

In many cases Buwei and Rulan are not just translating from Chinese into English but actually making up an English word or phrase to correspond to the original Chinese. Some of these caught on, like stir-fry (defined as “a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning”); others didn’t, like wraplings for what I believe, based on the description and the line-drawings, English-speakers now call dumplings.

She does have a dumpling recipe - for a New Year Dumpling that is made by concocting a nut stuffing (ground walnut & almond, & sesame), sprinkling the balls of stuffing with water, and then rolling them till coated in glutinous rice flour and then sprinkling then coating etc etc until there are four or five layers of rice flour, and then you boil the whole thing up. If you google New Year Dumpling today, something completely different comes up! Is this because New Year Dumplings have completely changed direction in China, or because the dish Chao describes now goes by a different name in English?

As it’s a cookbook rather than a memoir, it has less forward motion than Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, so I found it a little harder to get into - but the process of translating from one language into another that doesn’t yet have a word or set phrase for the things you’re describing really intrigued me. And the food descriptions kept making me hungry!

I read Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books as if it were a box of bonbons. The whole story is just peak mid-twentieth century America: the boy wonder college president, the brain trust (largely his classmates from Yale!) who picked out the works for the Great Books of the Western World, their absolute self-assurance that this was the best that had ever been written and thought and the almost messianic belief in the power of Art and Culture to save us all.

”I’m not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself,” Hutchins said, “but I don’t know anything else that will.” Later in life he became obsessed with creating a one-world government to control the threat of the atom bomb, for which he felt a tormenting guilt, as the first tests that eventually led to the bomb occurred on the University of Chicago campus during Hutchins' tenure as president (on the grounds of the old football field, available for testing because Hutchins had disbanded the football team).

Given this incredibly high ambition, both Hutchins (the boy wonder college president) and Mortimer Adler, his right-hand man, died convinced that they were failures. Beam mentions discussing this with Charles Van Doren, who knew them both, and Beam commented, surely that's not the case?, and Van Doren replies gently, "No, I think they were right." Certainly in both cases their reach far exceeded their grasp.

(And yes, this is THAT Charles Van Doren, who acquired national infamy as a quiz show cheat. After his disgrace, Mortimer Adler stood by him and gave him a job as an encyclopedia salesman to help him get back on his feet, which is a lovely and human moment from the famously abrasive Adler.)

In general, though, most people connected with the creation of the Great Books were phenomenally successful. My favorite is Beam's commentary on Benton, who in 1945 became “assistant secretary of state for what the United States would never call propaganda - he oversaw the United States Information Agency, among other things…”

The Great Books were enormously popular (in the sense of sales if not, perhaps, in the sense of actually being read) through the 1960s, but as the counterculture gained steam they fell out of favor. However, Beam points out, they have had a long, long afterlife, during which they remained a hobby for a fervent though graying part of the population - he describes his attendance at a weekend Great Books conference, where the book discussions sound delightful - and the curriculum (with some emendations) ​at the tiny college of St. John's.

I find St. John's enchanting. A year or two before I went to college, Smithsonian magazine published an article about St. John's, and its eccentricity thrilled me so much (the Johnnies' game of choice is croquet!) that I actually considered applying. But upon further consideration, the book list defeated me. I could have gotten on board with the ancient Greek classics, but I just couldn't with reading Newton and Lavoisier and various other centuries-old scientific thinkers.

(This was apparently a stumbling block for Hutchins' Great Books, too: many, many people, including a large portion of the committee!, thought the inclusion of outdated scientific works was ridiculous, no matter how ground-breaking they had been at the time. Other parts of Aristotle's work might be for all time but his physics certainly were not.)

I still find it enchanting, though, and I did feel a bit wistful about the might-have-beens as I read it. When some Johnnies got arrested during the Civil Rights Movement, they scrawled ancient Greek graffiti inside the jail cells. How cool is that?

This is, of course, more or less the kind of college that Hutchins wanted to turn the University of Chicago into; he had only a very peripheral involvement in St. John's. It is certainly an irony of his life that his vision was realized so fully by someone else. But there is something beautiful about the fact that this vision was realized by someone.

I found Bruce Brooks’ other Newbery Honor book, What Hearts, a dull and emotionally distancing read, so I approached the 1985 Newbery Honor winner The Moves Make the Man glumly. Indeed, I approached it with great trepidation, because Brooks is a white man writing a book about a black teenager who befriends a troubled white boy. “Narrator tells the story of their Troubled Friend who generally dies horribly” is a recognizable Newbery plot and one with a lot of room for unpleasant racial undertones when the narrator is black and the Troubled Friend around whom the story revolves is white.

But our narrator, Jerome Foxworthy, has a compelling and emotionally immediate voice, such a contrast to What Hearts that I actually checked to make sure there weren’t perhaps two authors named Bruce Brooks. The prose is beautiful and the central friendship is convincing and effective, which frankly I NEVER thought I would say about friendship in a Newbery book involving a Troubled Child.

Jerome Foxworthy and Bix Rivers are drawn together because they’re both smart athletes - smart in the sense of book-smart, but also in the sense of a really intense, focused athletic drive, in an approach to their chosen sports that is almost like that of a musician to an instrument. They practice and practice not for applause or even to contribute to a team but out of a respect for the art of that sport itself. I do not care about basketball but the athletic descriptions here are so poetic and evocative and clear that they made me care about basketball.

They are also drawn together because they feel out of place in their high school. Jerome is the only Black kid in school, because the school district grimly followed the letter of integration law by integrating exactly one block of the Black side of town. Bix’s mother is in a mental hospital, and his stepfather is an asshole. They meet as the only boys in the home ec close, which Jerome is taking because his mother had an accident (she recovers. Jerome’s family life contains the usual quotient of sibling irritation but is overall a bright stable spot in his life), and Bix is taking because his mother is in a mental hospital and his stepfather is an asshole who doesn’t look after him.

But the differences between the boys are also crucial. Jerome’s problems are mostly external, like the asshole basketball coach who won’t let him join the high school team because he’s Black. Bix, in contrast, is an emotional mess.

In children’s books this sort of friendship often revolves around the troubled child’s problems. You have the Troubled Child and Their Friend (usually the narrator) Who Would Do Anything to Help Them. In the Newbery-winning version of this story, it always turns out that Anything is not enough.

Jerome would not do Anything. He likes Bix a lot - in fact, the friendship is far more convincing than many literary friendships involving a troubled child, which sometimes feel as if the author is holding the characters at gunpoint demanding that they hang out in the service of this Very Important Message, dammit. That is not the case here. I absolutely believe that Jerome and Bix like each other and enjoy spending time together.

But Jerome absolutely has limits. He has a lot of things going on in his own life and very little time for Bix’s bullshit. He knows Bix has problems, and he knows he doesn’t really understand those problems; he is sometimes patient and sympathetic, but he’s just as capable of blowing up at Bix if Bix’s bad behavior pushes his buttons.

Bix, meanwhile, has very particular ideas about what kind of help he wants, and it’s generally stuff like “I want you to ref this one-on-one basketball game I’m playing against my stepdad, because I bet him that if I won he would have to take me to see my mom in the mental hospital.”

Naturally Jerome says yes, because he’s a junior high student and that’s exactly the sort of thing that seems completely reasonable when you’re in junior high, even though an adult can see the whole situation is batshit insane.

( Spoilers for the ending )

I will add (in the interests of full disclosure) that I suspect an author today would make different choices than Brooks did about the use of racial slurs. They are not used casually or pervasively, and it feels like Brooks thought about each one. But, at the end of the day, the book is nearly forty years old, standards have shifted in the intervening decades, and the modern reader may wish to go in forewarned.

I meant to read Nella Larsen’s Passing slowly so as to discuss it with asakiyume, but once I started reading I grew so absorbed that I accidentally devoured the book in a morning. In my defense it is very short. The book grabs you by the throat from the very first page, when Irene receives a letter from an old childhood friend: Clare, who is now passing for white.

Although Clare is married to a deeply racist man, which makes any connection with her old life fraught with danger, she yearns to be among Black people again… at least on an occasional basis. Irene remains embedded in the Black community, but, light-skinned herself, she occasionally takes advantage of her ability to pass to use white-only facilities - which is how she runs into Clare, after not seeing her for over a decade: both women are drinking iced tea in a rooftop hotel restaurant in Chicago.

Irene is scornful of Clare’s choice to pass permanently, but she can’t help admiring the moxie it takes to do it… as well as Clare’s sensational, magnetic beauty, on which Irene comments every time that she sees her, which generally happens after Irene has sworn that she will never see Clare again and then goes to see her anyway, because Irene just can’t seem to resist her.

When I bought the book, the used bookstore clerk commented, “I’ve heard really toned down the sapphic overtones in the movie.” I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I can’t comment, but I intend to report back once I do.

( Spoilers )

On the whole, though, an excellent book. Larsen milks the premise for both drama and sociological insight, and it's a pleasure to see a premise so absolutely wrung dry.

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.

You guys, you guys, I've finished William Dean Howells' Mrs. Farrell (originally published in serial version under the title Private Theatricals) and it is TWICE as gay as John W. Crowley's The Mask of Fiction led me to believe, because there is not only a shippable m/m couple but ALSO an f/f possibility!

The potential f/f definitely gets less development over the course of the book, but it starts off with a bang, as the widowed Mrs. Farrell flirts incessantly with her Rachel Woodward, a New England girl with a talent for drawing whom she means to make her protegee. Mrs. Farrell lolls against a boulder, causing Rachel to glance "with a slight anxiety at the freedom of Mrs. Farrell’s self-disposition, whose signal grace might well have justified its own daring.

'Rachel,' said Mrs. Farrell, subtly interpreting her expression, 'you’re almost as modest as a man; I’m always putting you to the blush. There, will that do any better?' she asked, modifying her posture. She gazed into the young girl’s face with a caricatured prudery, and Rachel colored faintly and smiled."

Soon, however, two young men interrupt this idyll. They are Easton and Gilbert, who fought together in the Civil War and have retained ever since a tender attachment to each other. Easton, Gilbert tells his sister-in-law, “is a man’s man, you’re right; he’s shyer of your admirable sex than any country boy; it’s no use to tell him you’re not so dangerous as you look.”

Howells repeatedly compares Easton and Gilbert's friendship to a love affair. Literally: when Easton tells Mrs. Farrell the circumstances of their meeting in the army, she replies, "it’s quite like a love-affair.” There's also a scene where Gilbert drops by Easton's room after Easton has gone to bed, and Howells notes that "the bright moon would have made [the room] uncomfortable for any but a lover." Gilbert, notably, appears perfectly comfortable.

(He does, however, leave the room at the end of the scene: they're clearly not sharing the bed. Howells also singles out the moment when "Gilbert came and laid his arm across his shoulder—the nearest that an American can come to embracing his friend," as a somewhat unusual display of physical affection. Lovers they may be, but "lovers" in the Victorian "I would kiss your footprints but scarcely dare to touch your hand" sense, clearly.)

And then you've got this exchange between Mrs. Farrell and Gilbert, which I think I've got to quote in full, because there's SO much going on here.

“How very droll!” said Mrs. Farrell. Then she said, looking at him through her eyelashes, “It’s quite touching to see such attached friends.”

Gilbert stirred uneasily on his block, and answered, “It’s a great honor to form part of a spectacle affecting to you, Mrs. Farrell—if you mean Easton and me.”

“Yes, I do. Don’t scoff at my weak impressibility. You must see that it’s a thing calculated to rouse a woman’s curiosity. You seem so very different!”

“Men and women are very different, in some respects,” calmly responded Gilbert, “but there have been quite strong attachments between them.”

“True,” rejoined Mrs. Farrell with burlesque thoughtfulness. “But in this case they’re both men.”

“Nothing escapes you, Mrs. Farrell,” said Gilbert, bowing his head.

“You praise me more than I deserve. I didn’t take all your meaning. One of you is so mightily, so heroically manly, that the other necessarily womanizes in comparison. Isn’t that it? But which is which?”

“Modesty forbids me to claim either transcendent distinction.”

But this attached friendship is not to last: Easton and Gilbert both fall for Mrs. Farrell's lustrous beauty and wanton habit of draping herself over rocks. Or rather, Easton falls in love with her. Gilbert, despite scoffing that Mrs. Farrell's "flirtatiousness is vast enough for the whole world," falls against his better judgment into a lust for her so passionate and unreasoned that he attempts to woo Mrs. Farrell away from Easton while Easton is too ill to rise from his sickbed. GILBERT. DUDE.

(Mrs. Farrell, no angel, but a better man than Gilbert, ultimately begs Gilbert's sister-in-law to use her influence to make him leave before any more mischief can be wrought. Exeunt Gilbert, much wroth.)

"At the best," Howells muses, "love is fatal to friendship; the most that friendship can do is to listen to love’s talk of itself and be the confident of its rapturous joys, its transports of despair. The lover fancies himself all the fonder of his friend because of his passion for his mistress, but in reality he has no longer any need of the old comrade..." And so forth. Passionate male friendships were seen as a specific life-stage thing: they're sweet for young men in their teens and twenties, but they're meant to be set aside when as young men grow up and get married. ​

( Spoilers for the ending )

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!”

I've finished Lyn Macdonald's The Roses of No Man's Land, which focuses on the English and American medical teams at work during World War I. The title comes from a song about the nurses, but the book itself also includes reminiscences from doctors, ambulance drivers, wounded soldiers, etc. Rather than simply quote from these reminiscences, the book interleaves them with the text: there will be a few paragraphs explaining about, say, the then-novel technology of blood transfusions, then a reminiscence by a doctor who pioneered the technique, and another reminiscence by a soldier who gave blood to save another soldier's life (at the time apparently they couldn't store the blood; you had to have a donor right there).

Sometimes actually I did want a little more analysis, but it is really effective to read about it in the words of the people who were there - sometimes reminiscences years later, sometimes excerpts from letters or diary entries they wrote at the time.

The technique is particularly devastating in the last chapter, which interleaves ​headlines and reminiscences about victory celebrations with recollections about nursing victims of the Spanish flu. (Like Covid, the Spanish flu was a global pandemic that was also strikingly local: there were hot pockets where people were dying in droves, and other places not even very far away almost untouched by flu.) ​

A couple of more specific notes:

Later in the war, forward medical officers were instructed to stop diagnosing shellshock at the front, but to send those men to hospital with the note Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous). In other sources I've seen this presented as more or less a conspiracy to screw over the shellshocked (as Macdonald notes, some medical officers at the time saw it this way, too), but Macdonald argues that the policy was a response to the fact that most frontline medical officers simply didn't have the training to tell shellshock and sheer exhaustion apart.

Actually, it might not be a lack of training, but simply that in the early stages you can't tell those things apart, at least not in battlefield conditions where there are so many casualties that there is literally no time to spend on anyone who is not actively in danger of dying right that minute.

Although the book focuses mainly on British & American experiences, it notes in passing that the French medical organization was so inadequate that more French soldiers died of wounds than illness. Not because the French were particularly good at treating illness, mind, but because they were SO bad at getting wounded soldiers off the battlefield in a timely fashion. The more I read, the more baffled I become by the French army's priorities. Both the English and the German armies were so concerned for the health and safety and amusement of their soldiers, and the French army just doesn't seem to have given a shit?

Also, in a fun moment of synchronicity with D. K. Broster's Flight of the Heron (I've just gotten to the part where Ewen takes a projectile to the chest because it MIGHT have hit Lochiel otherwise), this book contains a cameo appearance by another Lochiel, as described by his adoring subordinate: "His name was Robertson and he was in the Cameron Highlanders, and his main topic of conversation when he began to get better was his commanding officer, Cameron of Lochiel. No one ever had, or according to him ever could have, such a wonderful man to command them. Robertson simply worshipped him."

Apparently people are just Like That about the Camerons of Lochiel.

I picked up George Alexander Hill’s Go Spy the Land: Being the Adventures of IK8 of the British Secret Service because the advertisement promised juicy details about Arthur Ransome’s time as an English spy in Russia right after the fall of the tsar and through the rise of the Bolsheviks. This is clearly a case of false advertising, as there are only a couple of pages concerning Ransome.

We do get this charming story: Hill’s hotel room had a bathtub, and Ransome’s did not, so Ransome would use Hill’s bathtub. As he bathed, they would argue about politics from room to room. (Apparently Ransome was politically very radical at the time, which I wouldn’t have guessed from Swallows and Amazons. Possibly longer acquaintance with Bolshevik excesses put him off radicalism for life.) When disagreement grew particularly vociferous, Ransome would rise up for the bath, whacking himself dry in a frenzy of disputation.

Lack of Ransome aside, this is a jolly good spy memoir. Hill seems to have spent the whole war going from front to front getting in and out of scrapes, like the time he and a compatriot arrived in Sebastopol to discover that the townsfolk wanted to kill Hill and co. on the grounds that they were undoubtedly there to lay groundwork for a British sea invasion. (Fortunately Hill’s colleague talked down the mob.)

Or the time he ran someone through with his sword stick, and afterward considered the blade with interest (he had never run anyone through before) and discovered it was only lightly filmed with blood.

Or the time that Hill’s train was stopped by a band of marauders, led by a woman in her twenty named Marucia, who suggested that Hill should become her lover and add his shiny new train engine to the strength of her brigands. Hill talked his way out of it by proclaiming his undying love for another woman, whom he could not, alas! betray, enchanting though Marucia was… His comment is something to the effect of “She was very pretty, but I’d heard too much about her viciousness to feel it was very healthy to have an affair with her.”

Later on Hill actually has to go undercover in a Russian, hiding out in a house with two English girls ALSO undercover as Russians (plus one actual Russian), where they narrowly escape death when they share some flour with their street monitor and in return he tells the Cheka searchers (who are just searching the whole street for funzies!) that no one lives there but some quiet over-worked seamstresses, no need to search that house... on the very night they have an unregistered guest (one of their couriers!) staying with them.

All in all, a very engaging account of derring-do.