Impressions of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Impressions of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

an essay by Rich Horton

I can't call this a "review" -- reviews are pointless for a classic a century and a half old. Calling it an essay is probably overblown, but there you are. Just think of this as my impressions. I'll be rambling a bit -- a lot! -- and I'll repeat myself. Apologies! 

Anna Karenina was serialized between 1875 and 1877, and first published in book form in 1878. Tolstoy considered it his first true novel -- note that War and Peace appeared in 1869! Those two novels, of course, are considered among the two greatest novels of all time. William Faulkner famously answered, when asked to name the three best novels, "Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina". Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote many other stories, and works like The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murat are also very highly regarded. He was also a profoundly influential thinker -- a radical Christian, a pacifist, a vegetarian (nearly a vegan). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in both Literature and Peace multiple times, and it seems a crime he never received it, though to be fair it was early days for the award. For all that, I had not read him, at all, and I knew I ought to. And it became clear that Anna Karenina was likely a novel I would have great sympathy with.

I'm not going to worry too much about spoilers -- I knew the (very minimal) basics when I started and I imagine most readers do. And it's not a plotty novel, though there is a plot, and a resolution, probably guessable from about 100 pages in. But I also won't go into details. The novel opens with the famous line "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That's from the en vogue contemporary translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is the one I (mostly) read. The first American translation, from 1887, by Nathan Haskell Dole, reads "All happy families resemble each other, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Constance Garnett's long standard translation renders the first line: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy fmaily is unhappy in its own way." Rosemary Bartlett's long popular translation of the line is the same as P&V's. I'm not sure the point I'm making -- there isn't that much difference here, and there seems to have been a fairly reasonable convergence. I think the line is a nice aphorism, and profoundly wrong, as is even illustrated in the novel. Most assuredly the Karenin family (Anna and her husband Alexei and their son Seryozha) is unhappy; and differently so than the Oblonskys -- Stiva and Dolly and their several children; and differently so than the arrangement Anna and her lover Vronsky and their all but ignored young daughter Annie end up in. But the happy families portrayed (Levin and Kitty and their daughter, and that of Kitty's parents, the Shcherbatskys, and the glimpses we see of one or two muzhik families) are also differently happy.)

Well, no matter. What is the novel about? Well, it's a long novel -- some 800 pages, about 350,000 words -- so it's about a lot of things. Of course it's about marriage and adultery, but it's also about farming, and about war, and about religion (and philosophy in general), and about economics, and about the difference between life in Russia and life in Europe; and, in a large way, about how to live a life, and whether the life we live is the result of our choices, or of fate. There are a great many characters: some important: Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, her husband Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, her brother Stepan Arkadyich "Stiva" Oblonsky, his wife Dolly (Darya Alexandrovna), her sister Kitty (Katernina Alexandrovna) Scherbatsky, Kitty's eventual husband Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, and Anna's lover Alexei Vronsky. And there is a host of lesser characters, some critical, such as Levin's brothers Nikolai and Sergei, or Anna's son, and some minor but beautifully portrayed, such as the lawyer Karenin approaches about a divorce. 

The plot is arranged basically in two threads. One concerns Anna Karenina, unhappily married but a loving mother and an admired society wife, who meets Alexei Vronsky, who had been courting Anna's sister-in-law Kitty Shcherbatsky, and falls head over heels for Anna. Vronsky at first sees her as yet another diversion -- much as Kitty was, though Kitty thought he was serious and on those grounds refused Konstantin Levin when he proposed. (Some people suggest that Anna "stole" Vronsky from Kitty, but it's clear that Vronsky had no intention of marrying Kitty, and that he would have made her a dreadful husband (he's a cad, for one thing, though a charming and superficially accomplished one.)) Anna and Vronsky's affair becomes quite serious -- very much to Vronsky's discomfort -- and a child results, leading to separation from Karenin (but no divorce, a critical point) and to social exile, and for a time real exile to Italy. I won't say how this ends though I suppose most know -- certainly not happily. The second thread concerns Levin, who retreats to his farm after Kitty's rejection, and works on his book about farming, and tries to make the farm a success while treating his workers (who are, after the freeing of the serfs which occurred about a decade earlier, tenant farmers.) But he doesn't forget Kitty, and after a time, and a bit of a crisis in Kitty's life, they realize they should be together -- and they get married and have a child, and all the while Levin -- a happy man, wholly in love -- continues to philosophize about the meaming of life, and about why he, an unbeliever, was brought to prayer during Kitty's labor, and so on.

The bald elements of this plot are pretty basic, but there is so much more to this novel -- the devil is in the details. The characterization is remarkable (with, as I suggest, the exception of that of Anna.) There are wonderful brief bits -- Levin at a friend's house, convinced that the friend's wife wishes him to marry her sister, and thus convinced that this pretty sister is wearing a particularly low cut dress just to ensnare him, and yet unable to keep his eyes from her bosom, for just one example. Levin's inner life throughout is utterly convincing to me, and really interesting despite (or because of) the digressions into farming techniques, or agonizing about suicide despite his happiness. (To be sure, Levin is a pretty obvious stand in for Tolstoy, which perhaps made Tolstoy's job easier.)

On the other hand, we see Vronsky's dilettantish approach to practically everything -- his early career in the military, his later stab at painting, his attempt to set up as a country landowner, his horses. He is intelligent and educated, but not truly dedicated, and it's clear that he can be pretty good at things but never really good. And, honestly, that's more or less true of his relationship with Anna. (We presume he's at least good in bed (or on the couch!), though to be honest, after Karenin, maybe anyone would suffice.) I see some readers viewing him as a romantic figure, or even a victim of Anna's, which is absurd. He's a cad -- his purposeful dallying with Kitty with no attention of marriage is the early indication, but we see it throughout -- his hard ways with his workers, his impatience with Anna, his need for her to have a child even after she nearly died bearing their daughter, and his basic mediocrity (in Nabokov's term.) 

As for the question of the place of women, and of wives, in this society -- of course Anna is herself a key figure, but Dolly Oblonsky is maybe the less dramatic but more convincing example. The novel opens with her threatening to leave her husband because he's having an affair with the governess, and (ironically) it is Anna who convinces her to stay. But Dolly is much put upon -- despite his vow to reform, Stiva continues dalliances with dancers and actresses and such (while spending money that puts the household finances in serious jeopardy) while Dolly keeps having children, takes the lead in raising them of course, worries about her declining looks, worries about money ... And then there's a remarkable long passage when she wishes she could have done what Anna did, wishes she had never had children, rages against the place of women in this world -- and ends up realizing she doesn't have an alternative. 

I could go on -- Kitty too is nicely captured, Karenin is a truly pathetic figure, almost one we sympathize with but a mean and  small-minded man, Levin's brothers, especially the academic Sergei, are precisely depicted, Kitty's almost holy friend Varenka, in a small somewhat sad role is believable, Stiva's bonhomie and charm along with his sheer fecklessness is just spot on. 

And then Anna. I've said I don't believe Tolstoy got her inner life. For me, it was easy to believe that her life with Karenin was miserable, and that her love for her son was real. But I was never wholly convinced by her seemingly obsessive love for Vronsky. And what we see -- a fair amount -- of her thought, of her inner turmoil, just didn't ring quite true. She is shown to be a brilliant woman -- at least the intellectual equal and, really, the superior, of both the men in her life. She writes a book! She is ready to help with Karenin with his government duties, but he (20 years her elder) shuts her out -- and later she studies to learn the things Vronsky is interested in -- and he too, without seeming to realize it, shuts her out. Hey, she reads English novels -- early in the book we see her reading a novel that is obviously, if not actually, meant to be by Anthony Trollope. All this I am happy to believe, but it never translates into understanding her disastrous affair. You could say she had bad taste in men, but it's clear that her scheming mother forced Karenin to propose, without any thought of Anna's personal happiness; and once in a loveless marriage her options were limited. 

It's not fair to criticize other's takes on the book too much, but I will say I read one blogger who read the novel in 1000 word chunks, one per day, so the book took a year. Which is fine, mind you. Her take on the novel was basically that she hated it, and that she advocated that you should just read what you like, don't beat yourself up if you haven't read a classic novel like Anna Karenina. Well, that's fine too, even if I think her reading was way off. But if you're going to say "read what you like", and then turn around and make it clear that if what you like is SF or Fantasy, well, you're a worthless stupid reader (perhaps I exaggerate her take, but it sure seemed like that's what she thought) then maybe I won't take you too seriously.

Anyway -- bottom line -- Anna Karenina is a beautiful novel, an absorbing novel. It's worth reading, it's worth understanding, it's worth arguing with. Tolstoy was an intriguing thinker -- but that doesn't mean he was always right! Ranking great novels is a silly endeavor -- all middle range novels are pleasant in a similar way, but all great novels are great in their own way, one might say. Still -- this is close to the top! Does it top, say, Middlemarch in my mind? Maybe not. But it's in the conversation!

Review: Across a Billion Years, by Robert Silverberg

Review: Across a Billion Years, by Robert Silverberg

a review by Rich Horton

I am making my way through Robert Silverberg's early ouevre, and I've realized that in a way this stretches all the way to about 1970. What I mean is, Silverberg to some extent abandoned the SF field in the early 1960s, partly because of a collapse in the magazine markets, and he turned to popular science, and to some pseudonymous work in other genres. Some of his earlier work kept appearing in book form until about 1965, but more ambitious short fiction started showing up in 1963 with stuff like "To See the Invisible Man" and "The Pain Peddlers". His first novels that I would called "middle period" came out in 1967. But a few outliers showed up as well -- I think all really YA (perhaps excepting Regan's Planet.) These are The Gate of Worlds (1967), Across a Billion Years (1969) and the diptych Regan's Planet (1964) and World's Fair 1992 (1970). One might also add Time of the Great Freeze (1964) and Conquerors From the Darkness (1965). For my own reasons I think of these as more akin to his early work, largely because, though very professionally executed, these novels just don't seem to have the ambition of his middle period work. But perhaps that's unfair -- perhaps the only real difference is market -- YA versus adult. (And I will say that I greatly enjoyed Time of the Great Freeze and The Gate of Worlds when I read them at age 11 or so, from my junior high library.)  

I believe I also read Across a Billion Years at the same time, but I really hardly remembered it. So I bought a copy, and read it anew. The first thing I'll say is that I call it YA, but it's possible it wasn't really marketed as such. There is a fair amount of reference to sex in the book (including a near rape scene) if nothing explicit. But it features a young protagonist who acts his age, and needs to grow throughout the novel. And it was published by The Dial Press, not Silverberg's usual publisher. And, I have to say, though I thought it a decent read, it clearly doesn't stand with the great work Silverberg did in this period -- work like Thorns, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, A Time of Changes, Nightwings, and more.

The novel is narrated by Tom Rice, a newly hatched extraterrestrial archaeologist, who is recording his experiences on a new expedition in order to send them to his sister Lorie. We quickly realize that Lorie is severely disabled -- confined to a hospital bed. But she is also a telepath, and part of the network of "TPs" that allow faster than light communication in this future. For, in 2375 A. D., Earth and a few alien races form a loosely united polity, and in joint expeditions, they explore relics on other planets. They are mostly interested in the High Ones, a very powerful alien civilization that left traces on numerous planets, roughly a billion years ago. But the High Ones seem to have been gone for 800,000,000 years or so.

Tom's group includes three professors, and eight junior members, mostly humans but with a few aliens mixed in, and one pulchritudinous android (depicted with Tom on the paperback cover above, as they make their great discovery.) They are exploring High Ones deposits on Higby V. Much of the early part of the book includes a bit of background on the High Ones, and what they've left behind, and a lot of description of the odd natures of the alien members, and of Tom's obsession with sex. (As well as his exceedingly uncharitable evaluations of the non-human members of the expedition, all of whom, he is at first convinced, are there just to check diversity boxes.) Tom is aware, of course, that the beautiful android is not programmed to be interested in sex, but soon he's intrigued by the one human woman in their group, Jan, who is about his age. But Jan seems more interested in an older man on the team; and there is another man who is very creepily interested in Jan as well. Which leads to an attempted rape -- with Tom showing little concern about it (he even trots out the old "you can't be raped if you aren't at some level willing" canard.) To be somewhat fair, this is all presented as Tom being an insensitive and rather juvenile jerk, and he does do some growing up. But it's all quite awkward -- I don't know how it played in 1970 but it's kind of disgusting now.

As for the SFnal aspects -- they make a great discovery (with Tom at the center, though really more for random reasons) -- a High Ones artifact that shows detail views of life in ancient High Ones cities, and of a robot left on an asteroid. The team decides to find the robot, which leads to more discoveries, and another trip across the galaxy ... with an ending hinting at transcendence ...

None of this is really original, or, truth be told, all that fascinating. But it is well told, so I read it with interest throughout. But a lot of it is four finger exercises -- enjoyable but never new, with perhaps one exception. The depiction of Tom's relationship with his sister, and his slow understanding of her inner life, is effective and quite moving. 

As to what we learn about the High Ones -- similar ideas are very common in SF. (Andre Norton's Forerunners, for just one example of very many.) And to be honest they work OK as a mystery -- but the mystery revealed almost never works. Silverberg's solution here is -- not bad. It's not amazing, but it's believable and not a cheat. 

In summary -- a minor work by a major writer. Readable, but not really important.

Review: Behold the Ape, by James Morrow

Review: Behold the Ape, by James Morrow

a review by Rich Horton

Behold the Ape is the latest book from James Morrow, one of the SF field's great satirists. Yet to say "satirist" shortchanges his range: he does sharp SF speculation, straight humor, moving and dramatic fantasy ... but, yeah, he's a pretty funny writer, and usually with a wickedly sharp edge. This book is published by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta's WordFire Press, and it's a lovely object, illustrated with a number of cartoons published about Charles Darwin when The Origin of Species first appeared, and also about the Scopes trial.

In this novella the main character is Sonya Orlov, a young woman who has become a queen of low-budget horror films. She's making a good money, she loves her work, and she has a pleasant relationship with a screenwriter, Homer. Her brother Vasily is a lot less stable, however, and now he's a sort of self-taught surgeon. She's supported him financially, and now he wants some more direct help. For his latest surgical effort was to transplant a human brain into the skull of a gorilla. More specifically, he's transplanted the left hemissphere of Charles Darwin's preserved brain into a gorilla named Zorlag. But he's having regrets after finding that Zorlag is being forced to work as a sideshow exhibit run by a fanatical opponent of the teaching evolution. Long story short -- Sonya, Vasily, and company manage to kidnap Zorlag, steal the other half of Darwin's brain and finish the full brain transplant, and voila! -- Darwin is resurrected in an ape's body, and of course he's horrified at the anti-scientific messages he was forced to promulgate.

The story continues with Sonya and Darwin collaborating on a series of Ape Woman movies, with the two of them playing both halves of a Jekyll and Hyde ape character -- combining scientific messages about evolution with lurid horror plots; thus making great use of both Sonya and Darwin's talents. But their fundamentalist opponents are not ready to give up, and they continue to threaten the Ape Woman franchise. When Sonya pivots to a movie based on Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau, just as Pearl Harbor is on the horizon, the stage (or screen!) is set for a wild climax.

The story is a good deal of fun, between jokes at the expense of Scopes Trial era protesters, affectionate hommage to '30s horror movies and other pre-Code delights, and implausible biological hybridization. It's not as satirically potent as Morrow's Bible Stories for Adults, or novels like Towing Jehovah -- the targets are sort of fish in a barrel -- but it's enjoyable, funny, sweet, and sometimes quite moving. 

Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith

Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith

by Rich Horton

I last read Cordwainer Smith's only novel, Norstrilia, when it was first released in its "full" form, back in 1975, so almost 50 years ago. And I must confess, I remembered almost nothing -- Rod McBan from Old North Australia (Norstrilia), C'Mell, stroon ... that's about it. I had intended to reread it for a long time, and, happily, my book club chose it as one of our readings this year. Which finally got me off the schneid.

I went ahead and bought the NESFA Press edition, which is by a wide margin the best one to get. This version takes the 1975 Ballantine text, and adds some material from both the novella length magazine publications ("The Boy Who Bought Old Earth" and "The Store of Heart's Desire") and the two short novels expanded from those (The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople), in the process smoothing over some discontinuities introduced during the complicated road to publication. This edition also includes an introduction by Alan Elms, and an appendix giving the alternate texts from the other versions, and detailing the way in which the various texts were stitched together. There is also a 2006 Baen collection called We the Underpeople, which comprised the three key stories related to Norstrilia ("Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons", "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell"), the novella "The Dead Lady of Clown Town", and Norstrilia itself. I do not know what text the Baen edition uses.

I'll discuss the textual variations between the various versions in more detail later, but first let's get to the novel itself. John J. Pierce put together a speculative timeline for Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind future history. Pierce places Norstrilia at right about the most critical period of Instrumentality history: The Rediscovery of Man. It's part of a cluster of five stories set in about 16,000 A. D. (I use the abbreviation A. D. advisedly -- Smith was a committed (if somewhat heterodox) Christian, and the Instrumentality stories ultimately had quite overt Christian themes -- noticeable in Norstrilia if muted, but more explicit later.) These five stories are "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons", "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", Norstrilia, and "A Planet Named Shayol". Two of these ("Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell"), along with Smith's first story, "Scanners Live in Vain", are my three favorite Cordwainer Smith stories.

Roderick Frederick Ronald Arthur William McArthur McBan the 151st, hereafter called Rod, is the heir to a wealthy estate on the planet of Old North Australia, or Norstrilia. Norstrilia's wealth is derived from stroon -- the immortality drug that an only be produced there. As the novel opens, Rod is 16, or perhaps 64, as he has lived the first 16 years of his life four times, in the hopes that his congenital defect will be cured. This defect means he cannot "spiek" or "hier", which is to say telepathically communicate. Otherwise he's pretty intelligent young man. And this is his fourth chance at the test which will determine if he lives or dies -- for on this somewhat inhospitable planet the population is rigorously controlled. It is thought that his handicap will doom him -- but his examination goes in an unexpected direction. However, there are still people who think he ought to be killed. The only solution seems to be to leave Norstrilia -- but those who leave cannot return. But with the help of an ancient computer, Rod finds a sort of loophole -- he plays games with his enormous wealth to buy the entire planet known as Manhome, or Old Earth.

His troubles are hardly over. Such wealth makes him even more of a target, on Norstrilia, on Old Earth, and in between. He does have allies, and they find a way to sneak him to Mars, and then, in the disguise of a C'Man, married to the beautiful girlygirl C'Mell, he gets to Earth, along with a number of robots disguised as him. And here on Old Earth, he will find his heart's desire, meet E'Telekeli, the most powerful of all the animal-derived "underpeople", escape multiple attempts on his life, get psychiatric treatment, live a long life with C'Mell, and finally realize his real destiny.

I don't really want to say more about the plot. There is at the same time a lot going on, but in an odd way not. Some of it seems a bit arbitrary, some doesn't quite convince, and some is fascinating. But still at all pretty much works. The novel isn't at a level with Smith's greatest works, but parts of it are. At time it reaches the incantatory heights Smith could achieve, and it hints throughout at a really important story -- the story of the Underpeople (which is also central to "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", and which perhaps is ultimately key to the entire Instrumentality future history.) But Rod isn't an Underperson (though of course C'Mell and E'Telekeli are), so that story is kind of told in the margins. We like Rod, but he doesn't shake the universe, in a way. This is a good novel, and it's an important part of the future history created by one of the oddest and most powerful SF writers of all time. But to fully grok Cordwainer Smith, you need to read his short fiction -- and for doing so you will be richly rewarded.

I promised a bit more about the textual history of Norstrilia. It was written as a single novel, but Smith couldn't sell it in whole. He divided it roughly in half, and cut versions of each half were published in Frederik Pohl's magazines Galaxy and If. (Pohl was Smith's primary editor.) The two novellas were published in the April 1964 issue of Galaxy ("The Boy Who Bought Old Earth", about 38,300 words) and the May 1964 issue of If ("The Store of Heart's Desire", about 23,300 words.) Paperback editions of both novellas, expanded to short novel length, appeared from Pyramid: The Planet Buyer (1964, about 53,000 words) and The Underpeople (1968, about 42000 words). These books presumably restored cuts to Smith's original manuscript that had been made to fit the magazines' space restrictions, but also included additional material to make each book stand alone to some extent. Alan Elms' introduction implies that Smith's manuscript was about 75,000 words. The combined length of the novellas is almost 62,000 words. The Pyramid paperbacks come to about 95,000 words. The NESFA edition is about 89,000 words, based on an electronic count kindly supplied me by Jim Mann of NESFA, not counting the introduction or the appendices, and the Del Rey edition is about the same. I suspect my estimate for the Pyramid books is off just a bit, and the two books probably are similar to the complete Norstrilia, after accounting for the additional text added to each to smooth out the transition between the two volumes, set against a somewhat restored text from Smith's manuscripts (or so I assume) that is found only in the "complete" version. 

My suspicion is that Smith's original manuscript was about 90,000 words, and was cut significantly for the magazine publication, and mostly restored (plus some bridging material) for the first books. Alternately, Smith wrote a 75,000 word version first (as Elms suggests) but expanded it later to the final 90,000 words, hoping to sell it as two novels. (At Pyramid in particular, novels of 45,000 words or so were not uncommon.) It would be interesting to know for sure which of these two possibilities is true, and if so which parts were added later. It is worth noting that The Underpeople didn't appear from Pyramid until 1968, while The Planet Buyer came out in 1964, just a few months after the novellas. Smith died in 1966, so it is at least possible that he made some revisions after the first publication of The Planet Buyer.

Review: Hope-in-the-Mist, by Michael Swanwick; "Paris", by Hope Mirrlees

Hope-in-the-Mist, by Michael Swanwick; "Paris", by Hope Mirrlees

a review by Rich Horton

A couple of years ago, at a Kaffeeklatsch at Boskone I think, Michael Swanwick discussed (among many other things) Hope Mirrlees, and in particular her poem "Paris". I read Mirrlees' novel Lud-in-the-Mist a couple of decades ago and thought it wonderful, and so I was intrigued by "Paris", which Michael described in part as a modernist poem in the mode of "The Waste Land", and possibly an influence on that poem. (Mirrlees absolutely knew T. S. Eliot well, and it's very plausible that Eliot read "Paris" as he was composing "The Waste Land".) I also discovered that Swanwick had written a short biographical piece on Mirrlees, called Hope-in-the-Mist, and published in 2009 by Henry Wessells' always intriguing small press Temporary Culture. ("Paris", to be sure, was also published by an enterprising small press, Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. So was "The Waste Land", by the way.) So I bought that book, and found a copy of "Paris" online (there are many.))

I finally got around to reading Hope-in-the-Mist. It's a nice looking book (as I expect from Temporary Culture.) There's a delightful foldout illustration by Charles Vess, an introduction by Neil Gaiman, useful endnotes, and "A Lexicon of Lud" -- an explanation of many of the terms used in Lud-in-the-Mist.

But the heart of the book of course is Michael Swanwick's mini-biography of Helen Hope Mirrlees, which is 60 pages long. She was born in 1887, and her family was quite wealthy. She attended Newnham College at Cambridge, and studied Classics. There she met Jane Harrison, a very important Classicist, almost 40 years her senior. They became very close, and in the years after Mirrlees left Newnham, she and Harrison began living together, on and off, mostly on, until Harrison's death in 1928. Swanwick considers the question of whether or not they were lovers, and wisely chooses to be agnostic. Certainly both women came fairly close to marrying men (Harrison at least three times); and there is plenty of evidence that for Harrison, financial reasons might have been sufficient to choose to live with a wealthy and sympatico friend. But we really cannot know one way or the other.

Swanwick's book engagingly follows Mirrlees' life, at first concentrating on her literary efforts, which in essence comprise four significant works: "Paris: a Poem" (1920), and three novels: Madeleine (1919), The Counterplot (1924), and Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). Apparently she was under contract for one more novel, but it's not clear how much of that she may have written. After Harrison's death she worked primarily on two biographies: one of Harrison, which she never finished; and one of Robert Bruce Cotton, of which only the first volume has ever been published. She also privately printed a couple of very short books of poems.

Swanwick is very interesting on Mirrlees' literary work. Madeleine doesn't sound like a novel worth reading, but I admit I'm intrigued by The Counterplot. The Cotton biography sounds excessive, and her late poems seem negligible. But Lud-in-the-Mist is wonderful -- and I really do need to reread it. And "Paris" -- well, I'll get to that in a bit.

Hope-in-the-Mist also discusses the rest of Mirrlees' very long life (she died in 1978 at the age of 91.) Lin Carter, when he reprinted Lud-in-the-Mist in 1970 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, wasn't aware that she was still alive, though he apparently tried to locate her, but published the book anyway, as it was in the public domain in the US. And to be fair, this reprinting was vital to bringing Mirrlees' work back to attention. Mirrlees had moved back and forth between France and England, spending much of the war years in London with her mother -- and also with T. S. Eliot, who boarded with them (and wrote much of the Four Quartets there.) Later, Mirrlees moved to South Africa for a considerable time. 

She seems to have been in many ways a difficult person, but also intriguing. She was quite a beauty as a young woman, but it is repeatedly said that she "lost her looks" as she aged. Swanwick's book includes anecdotes and other testimony from friends and relatives, that present a portrait of an interesting and rather contrary individual. As noted, she largely stopped writing -- certainly stopped writing interesting stuff -- after Jane Harrison's death. Swanwick suggests, plausibly, that her relative financial security, due to her family's wealth, was a reason that she didn't have to write. At any rate, it's a loss for readers that she never wrote anything more after producing something as wonderful as Lud-in-the-Mist. But -- nobody owes us readers anything. Also central to Mirrlees' life was her conversion to Catholicism in the late '20s.

Now, to "Paris". I have read it through a few times. It is a long poem, at about 600 lines. And it is undeniably a work that will remind any reader of "The Waste Land". It is thoroughly plausible that it influenced Eliot, or at least that it sprang from the same wellsprings of inspiration. Which is not to say that it's about the same things, or that either poem is a copy of the other.

"Paris" is a fascinating read, definitely worth the time of any reader of poetry. There are arresting lines:

"Paris is a huge home-sick peasant,

He carries a thousand villages in his heart."

Or this passage, which struck me just now as I am reading Anna Karenina:

"Désouvrement, 

Apprehension; 

Vronsky and Anna

Starting up in separate beds in a cold sweat

Reading calamity in the same dream

Of a gigantic sinister mujik....

Whatever happens, some day it will look beautiful:

Clio is a great French painter,

She walks upon the waters and they are still.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand motionless

and plastic mid the flames."

It's also full of typographical experiments, and experiments with noise. It's a poem that's trying to be special, and new, and often succeeds. I don't think it's the equal of "The Waste Land", but that doesn't really matter.

Review: Peace, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Peace, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

What to say about Gene Wolfe's Peace? That's a difficult task. The last time I "reviewed" a Wolfe novel my post was called "Random Notes on The Shadow of the Torturer" and I suppose this one might have been called "Random Notes on Peace" except that such a title might easily be misinterpreted. This review comes from my recent reread of the book. I won't reiterate what I have said before about Gene Wolfe, but I will leave this link to my obituary for him.

Peace (1975) is narrated in the first person by Alden Dennis Weer, an old man living in a huge rambling house somewhere in the Midwest. (Feels like northwestern Illinois to me, actually.) But almost everything I just wrote is in question, including the word "person". Not to mention "house", and "narrated" and "old" ... The novel's somewhat famous opening sentence reads "The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge's daughter, fell last night." We learn later that Eleanor Bold planted trees on the graves of her friends, and there is an old legend that when a tree planted on one's grave falls, the ghost of the person in the grave is released. One assumes, then, that the elm tree that has just fallen was planted on Weer's grave -- which tells us too that this narration is likely decades if not more after Weer's death, which gives another spooky glow to the book.

So -- and this, I think, is all but inarguable, especially as Wolfe himself confirmed it -- Alden Dennis Weer -- called "Den" (as in "den of the wolf"?) -- tells the many stories in this intricate book after his death, as he wanders through the nearly endless sequence of rooms in his "house". His house, of course, is a sort of memory palace. It is also, a passage late in the novel suggests, co-extant with his skull -- and his skull may be in the hands of a far future archaeologist. I will say that on first reading I missed much about this novel, but I did realize that Weer must be dead. (However, I say "all but inarguable" because I have found people who disagree that Weer is dead.)

Weer tells us his life story, then, from the vantage point of his house -- but this house is as I said a sort of memory palace, containing a vast series of rooms based on rooms from his past -- rooms in his grandmother's house, his Aunt Olivia's house, his apartment later in life, his office at work, doctors' offices, and so on. His narrative moves back and forth through time. He tells us he has suffered a stroke, and indeed he visits, in his memory, a couple of doctors for advice.

His first visit to a doctor's office there are four other people in the waiting room -- all people we will meet again in this novel: Margaret Lorn, Ted Singer, Abel Green, and Sherry Gold. It being a waiting room, there are magazines (Life, Look, Today's Health, and Water World.) Weer says "There is (as a matter of fact) a whole pile of Lifes before me, and I play the old game of trying to arrange them chronologically without looking at the dates, and lose." On first reading that meant nothing to me but on rereading its significance is obvious -- and certainly (among other things) it reflects the structure of the novel. Note too what the Nurse says of the four people in the waiting room, all younger than Alden Weer, when Alden says he must see the doctor, as he is dying. "All these people are ahead of you." Are they -- and some of them are much younger than Den -- all going to die before he does?

Over the course of five long chapters, Alden Dennis Weer tells his life story -- or some of it. At first glance it appears a discursive account of the childhood -- and later adulthood -- of a man living in a small Midwestern town, in the early 20th Century, extending by the end of his life to about the time of writing of the novel. Alden grows up with his parents until about the age of 9, then with his Aunt Olivia, his parents having spent several years in Europe. He goes to college, and at some time gets a job in the orange juice factory founded by Olivia's husband -- and in time takes over management of the factory. We see details of small town life, of working in the factory, of a couple of Den's ultimately not terribly successful love affairs ... 

We also hear numerous stories. Stories told by Aunt Olivia, by her three suitors and by the fourth man (Julius Smart) who ends up marrying her. Fairy stories, particularly from Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book, which Alden receives as a gift when a boy. Stories about books. Stories about carnivals. Stories about a mysterious Chinese egg. And lots of stories about death.

There are also a great many lacunae. Very few of the stories actually come to an end, certainly including stories Weer tells about himself. There is essentially no information about his life in the couple of decades after he leaves college. We hear nothing about his father. We don't learn why he never married Margaret Lorn, whom he was in love with in high school. We don't learn much about Aunt Olivia's death, except that she was run over by a car. We don't know why Alden's leg is injured. We don't know who some people who seem to be very important, such as Doris, actually are. 

The closer we look, however, we do see how many people close to Den have died. Bobby Black, who fell down the stairs at age 5 in an accident seemingly caused by Alden. Aunt Olivia. Lois Arbuthnot. A co-worker at the juice factory who was locked in a freezer. Doris. Mr. Tilly. Julius Smart. Alden's parents. And in the end, the question arises -- with how many of these deaths was Alden Dennis Weer directly involved?

Definitive answers are hard to come by. Weer was nowhere near Mr. Tilly nor Doris, for example, when they died. What evidence there is points to someone else causing Olivia's death. Alden was only 5 when Bobby Black was injured. But darkness pervades the book, and the Alden Dennis Weer who tells us the story does not seem a happy man, nor a happy ghost. 

Peace is a book that I will need to read again to make more progress comprehending what really happens. But every reading is a joy -- it is mysterious, fascinating, dark but beautiful, and very rereadable. The depths in this novel may be endless -- but they are fruitfully deep. It is a book with a very high reputation among Wolfe aficionados, but in many ways it is not a well-known novel, perhaps partly because of its ambiguous genre status. Most of Wolfe's novels are unambigously, indeed exuberantly, SF or Fantasy, but this novel can be read as general fiction, and even when it is read as a ghost story it does not otherwise (in any overt way) depart from mainstream traditions. It may still be a novel that needs to find its true audience. But it is a book that you ought to try.

Old Bestseller Review: Olivia, by Olivia (Dorothy Strachey Bussy)

Old Bestseller Review: Olivia, by Olivia (Dorothy Strachey Bussy)

by Rich Horton

This book was written in the 1930s but not published until 1949, when it had quite a success. It was made into a movie in France in 1950, also called Olivia. The book was published as by its main character, Olivia, but the author was Dorothy Strachey Bussy (1865-1960), who was connected to the Bloomsbury Group though apparently somewhat tangentially. 

Olivia is a very short novel -- a novella, really, at just over 25,000 words. It tells the story of the title girl, who at the age of 16 is sent to a posh boarding school, Les Avons, in France. It's told by the older Olivia some decades after this time, which seems to have been in the late 1800s, parhaps about 1880. As in fact the author was born in 1865 and went to a posh boarding school, Les Ruches, in France, and wrote this novel decades later (in the 1930s) we can be forgiven for assuming it's a fairly autobiographical novel. 

Olivia had been at English schools for her previous education, and had not liked them. On coming to Les Avons she is delighted by the somewhat freer nature of the tuition.And she is immediately and especially enchanted with one of the two headmistresses, Mlle Julie. She considers her a wonderful teacher, and a gateway to certain sorts of literature (French tragedy seems a lot of it!), and also inspiring in other ways. And before long Mlle Julie quite openly makes Olivia her favorite, placing her in the prlvileged seat next her at dinner, singling her out for notice in class (though Olivia seems but an OK student), reading privately to her in the library. Olivia, on her part, develops an extreme crush on Mlle Julie, which seems to be reciprocated (though it doesn't seem that there is any physical consummation.) 

The other headmistress is Mlle Cara. Mlle Cara is an invalid, doing relatively little actual work at the school. It seems that Julie and Cara started the school together, with Julie's money but Cara's expertise, a couple of decades before, and were partners, certainly in business but surely sexually as well. But there has been a falling out, and as a result the school is divided. Each woman has a very close ally on the staff: an Italian woman called Signorina for Julie, and a German woman, Frau Riesener, for Cara. And the students too sort themselves into camps (and Cara seems to greatly resent that Olivia gravitated to Julie's camp.)

So things go through the school year, Olivia becoming more and more infatuated, being invited on trips to Paris, and eventually hoping that Mlle Julie will come to her bedroom -- but Julie seems aware that to start a physical relationship with a student might get her in real trouble. We meet some of the girls in Olivia's circle, including a very beautiful American (who is angling to marry a Duke and, we are told, eventually does) and, on a visit, Mlle Julie's previous favorite, a level-headed woman named Laura. But things come to a head late in the novel not because of Olivia but rather due to a final break between Julie and Cara, leading to a somewhat melodramatic conclusion. 

It's really a very nicely done slim story -- just about exactly the length it needed to be (it would have worn out its welcome had it gone on longer.) Olivia's 16 year old feelings seem real, and her reactions honest. The prose is graceful and effective. Evidently the book was first written in French, then translated to English for its first publication, and retranslated back into French for French editions. How much of this is directly from the author's life is up for question: Dorothy Strachey, later Dorothy Bussy, was bisexual, married and had a child, and had affairs with both men and women. Bussy herself wrote to her close friend André Gide: "I hope you didn't think that my entire story was true. A large part of it was, but an even larger part wasn’t." (Apparently her letters to Gide were written in French, and his to her were written in English.) The somewhat famous headmistress of her school, Marie Souvestre, seems likely to have been a lesbian (though Wikipedia dances gingerly around that question): she had a partner at her school, and after a breakup started a new school, eventually living with a former student. Indeed, Dorothy Strachey later taught at Souvestre's school in London, Allenswood, and indeed she taught Eleanor Roosevelt there. (Roosevelt kept up a correspondence with Souvestre until the latter's death.) 

The Stracheys are a rather famous family, particularly Dorothy's brother Lytton, who was part of the Bloomsbury Group and wrote respected biographical and critical works, such as Eminent Victorians and a biography of Queen Victoria. One of the earliest Stracheys wrote an account of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda which is regarded as some of the source material for The Tempest, and which for that matter was the impetus for establishing a colony on the till then uninhabited archipelago. The family line includes numerous civil servants, some artists (including Dorothy's daughter Jane Simone Bussy), an important songwriter, a major computer scientist, etc. But they produced surprisingly little fiction. Olivia was Dorothy's only story, and her niece Julia Strachey wrote two (quite good) novels (which I review here) and some short stories, and that's about it. (And so I've read all the novella or novel length fiction the Stracheys have published!)