Books of the Last Few Weeks

One reason that I stop blogging is because there are lots of things I want to write about, but actually doing so seems too big a task. Eventually I need to either spend a few hours writing all those imagined entries, or just forget them all and start anew.

As a compromise, here are some capsule thoughts on the books I've been reading.

"Every Man for Himself" by Beryl Bainbridge

It's the story of one man aboard the Titanic, from the moment of departure to its eventual sinking. Being a Bainbridge novel, the story is more about the man and his relationships than it is about the actual boat, and the man himself is such an unreliable and odd character that you can't trust anything he says.

The book is wonderful and appears, primarily, to be a meditation on the modern aristocracy; those lucky folk on the upper decks who survived so much more reliably than those below. Bainbridge doesn't romanticize either of the classes on the ship, but she certainly draws a distinction between the witty game-playing amongst the rich, the invisible-ness of those in steerage, and the rough pride of the crew.

As much as I liked the book, though, I felt that it pretty much ignored what being on a ship is LIKE. Even during the capsizing of the Titanic -- a monumental situation -- Bainbridge is more concerned with the thoughts of the protagonist than describing the situation itself. So, to learn more about boats and sailing, I read a book I'd picked up at last year's Unitarian Church book sale:

"Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

A highly detailed account of the author's two-year stint as a merchant seaman during the 1830s, it gives a complete blow-by-blow of the nature, traditions, problems, and hardships of such trips. He says at the beginning that he refuses to explain the nautical terms (because people read such books all the time without needing to understand those things), but I found myself swamped by repeated passages such as this:

From the fore top-gallant yard, the men slid down the stay to furl the jib, and from the mizen top-gallant yard, by the stay into the maintop, and thence to the yard; and the men on the topsail yards came down the lifts to the yard-arms of the courses. The sails were furled with great care, the bunts triced up by jiggers, and the jibs stowed in cloth.

A+ for accuracy, Dick, but does anybody really care? A fair proportion of the book is written like this, perhaps to support the central point that going to sea is not a romantic occupation full of breath-taking adventure and spectacular sights...it is primarily an endless series of watches, furling, unfurling, cleaning, staring at the horizon, and then more cleaning. Dana says often in the book that "a boat is like a woman's watch: always in need of repair." I didn't realize that until I read this and it's a point well-taken.

At one point in the book, Dana describes his joy when, in the middle of the voyage, he came across a copy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel "Paul Clifford." I thought it would be interesting to seek out and read this book for myself, to better get the feel of what Dana was reading on that ship. I found copies on abebooks and ordered the cheapest and most local copy I could find...and imagine my surprise that it's an 1835 edition! This beautiful little book is very much like the one that Dana himself read...neat.

"Salt Water Taffy" by Corey Ford

Anyway, more on that later. Another impetus for this "nautical" theme was from a review of Corey Ford's "Salt Water Taffy" in the June 15, 1929 New Yorker magazine. Accompanying the glowing review was this beautiful advertisement...click for a larger version.

Once again I went to abebooks and found myself a copy, and it's absolutely hilarious. A parody of Joan Lowell's "The Cradle of the Deep" -- a tall-tale autobiography which turned out to be absolutely false -- it's the story of how "June Triplett" is born on a boat, captures a pet waterspout, learns about sex from a female shark, tries to become a virgin on the Virgin Islands, and eventually writes her autobiography while swimming back to New York...as ridiculous as the book it's parodying, apparently.

The best thing about the book are the dozens of goofy pictures. Some of them are taken aboard a real boat, while others are crude cut-outs of the actors, pasted onto stock footage. These actors don't get any credit in the book itself but the advertisement above mentions that they are Heywood Broun, Reinald Werrenrath, Neysa McNein, Frank Crowninshield, Harold Ross, Donald Ogden Stewart, Frank Sullivan, "and other literati and the like." In short, a bunch of cynical and artsy New Yorker goofballs.

"An Awfully Big Adventure" by Beryl Bainbridge

First "Harriet Said," then "According to Queeny," and now "An Awfully Big Adventure." Beryl Bainbridge has a real facility for troubled, unreliable, inscrutable, dangerous, and somewhat sociopathic pubescent girls.

Since I discovered her writing last year I have been slowly collecting her work...a used book here, a reprint there. Something has kept me from devouring them all in one sitting, as though each one must be read at exactly the right time and long after the previous one. Each of the three novels I've read have left me totally satisfied and a little stuffed; they're delicious dinners, the kind you don't want to eat every night.

"An Awfully Big Adventure" is amazing. Bainbridge has a touch of Vladimir Nabokov to her, an art of setting up a logical sequence of characters and props, and then allowing them to operate quietly behind the main action of the book. The perceptive reader catches glimpses of these background objects and tries to guess their trajectories, and it seems that when everything comes together in a Bainbridge novel it must be a tragedy, but a PERFECT tragedy; something that the victims, two hundred pages ago, should have seen coming.

Let me try to describe this better: these books are beautiful, witty, vicious, and true. They're about the unreliable memories of others and ourselves. They're about the disconnect between what people say and what they actually feel, and the effect this disconnect has on other characters (and the reader).

But on top of all that the stories are GOOD stories, they're well-formed and satisfying. Like, "An Awfully Big Adventure" may be unconventional under the surface, containing layer upon layer of translucent meaning, but on top of it all it's about second-rate actors in a scruffy British reperatory theater, coping with postwar shellshock and unrequited love and...well, I won't say anything more. You should just read it.

I notice that the local video store just got the movie adaptation in, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. I have a feeling I'll hate it, but I'll watch it anyway.

"According to Queeney" by Beryl Bainbridge

Typically, I'm falling in love with Beryl Bainbridge during a time when most of her books are out of print. It seems strange that this woman with a knighthood could be so unknown and so often passed over for awards, but that's probably part of her charm; if Oprah promoted her she'd seem a little less radical.

I read "Harriet Said" on a total whim, and immediately scooped up the few used copies of her books that I could find. I'm treating them like rich delicacies that I don't want to eat all at once, only reading them when I need to rekindle my enthusiasm for books.

After a maddening attempt at reading John McPhee's "Annals of the Former World" (which was like digging through a mile of shifting sand in order to find a few pieces of loose change and a rubber band) I desperately retreated to my Bainbridge stash: "According to Queeney," a 2001 novel about Samuel Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale and her daughter Queeney.

I know very little about Johnson -- "The Life of Samuel Johnson" is next on my list -- but it seems like Bainbridge has taken various accounts of his life, mashed them up a bit, introduced the inconsistencies you'd expect to find in a wide selection of primary sources -- Queeney's after-the-fact recollections both clarify and obscure the events in the narrative itself -- and then hung a pall of doom over all of it. In the book, Johnson and his friends are obsessed with death, the macabre, and the grotesque, all the more disturbing in the otherwise pastoral setting. None of the characters seem able to get any pleasure out of life unless the events are tainted by bizarre tragedy.

I don't know if this is an established aspect of Johnson's life, but it certainly seems to be part of Bainbridge's general style. From the first "flash-forward" pages, with Johnson's corpse being dissected under a flayed dog which is hung from the ceiling, to the repeated motif of deformity, passive cruelty, injury, and missing buttons, you feel like you're facing 18th century fears as they really were, not as the glossy stereotypes that producers of historical dramas would present.

Visiting France in 1775, Bainbridge's version of Hester Thrale has these main impressions:

She watched the scarlet streaks flooding the darkening sky and thought of other things: of the Queen's gown made of gauze adorned with flowers and of the pearl bracelets on her wrists; of the French way of cruelly whipping their horses over the face; of the infants in the Foundling Hospital pining away to perfect skeletons and expiring in neat cribs with a bottle hung to its neck containing a milk mess , which if they could suck on they might live, and if not, would die; of the anniversary of her wedding day some two days past and of Henry presenting her wifh flowers and stammering she had been a good wife to him. That she had never been in love was not a great deprivation, for what one had never known was scarcely to be fretted over.

The darkness of Anna Kavan, but readable and superbly written. It doesn't make me happy to read "According to Queeney" but it sure makes me swooney.

"Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge

Sometimes I pick up a book in order to fill a gap in my reading habits. Recently I have been buying and reading random books by female authors, because I've realized that a disproportionately large number of the books in my collection were written by men.

During one of these "expand my horizon" sprees I bought "Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge, knowing nothing about the author or the book. I'm happy to say that the book was brilliant and that I'll DEFINITELY have to read more of her work.

While reading all of John Barth's books last year I finally understood the benefit of a "show, don't tell" approach...but I've been wondering exactly HOW skilled authors manage to "show" without "telling." Bainbridge's approach in "Harriet Said" is to give us an unreliable narrator -- a painfully awkward 13-year-old girl -- and subtly reveal the disconnect between her perception and her reality. Since we supposedly understand the world a little better than she does, we can draw our own conclusions about the story based on what she tells us. Sweet.

This girl is the perfect depiction of a type of confused, malleable teenager searching for identity, ready to be influenced by anybody strong enough to guide her. In this case her unfortunate guide is Harriet, a brilliant, manipulative, attractive, popular, and borderline sociopathic peer.

During a summer vacation in postwar England, Harriet proposes a secret project: to "humble" an unhappily married man who they call "The Tsar." We see everything that occurs -- including Harriet's ambiguous and multi-layered schemes -- through the eyes of the narrator as the three of them engage in increasingly dangerous games.

The brilliance of the book comes from the spot-on characterizations of all the characters, particularly as modified by the perception of the narrator herself. This girl's world is a terrible, changeable place, and though she herself doesn't understand the motivations of herself or others, WE do, and from this comes the sense of cloying menace that gradually builds and then -- at the climax -- crashes down. Particularly awful is the inability of the narrator to see the terrible events coming; she is far more concerned about other people's opinions about her than she is about the terrible things she's doing.

This book made me feel goosebumpy and sick, as it spells out all too clearly the reasons why certain types of people end up doing bad things. If you like a careful character study laid thickly over a thriller plotline, you should definitely find a copy of "Harriet Said."

But don't read it if you have a suspiciously-indrawn teenage daughter, or you might begin to wonder what sort of dark thoughts she's harbouring.