Just published and brought to my notice by The Guardian, this interesting podcast from The Spectator (and embedded below) informs further on Francesca Wade’s just published first book Square Haunting (Faber, January 2020).
For the curious, the five eminent women are Virginia Woolf (writer, 1882–1941) Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. writer, poet 1886–1961), Dorothy L Sayers (writer, 1893–1957), Eileen Power (economist, historian 1889–1940) and Jane Harrison (classicist, 1850–1928), and the place is Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London. Wade presumably explores the changing role of women at the beginning of the 20th century through these exemplary lives, and in doing so discovers shared aspects of their lives.
Without referring to either book or podcast, off the top of my head I actually know of one obscure more than crossing of paths, being that between Woolf and Harrison. Virginia Woolf’s diaries (favourite often returned to reading of mine) reveal something of the relationship between her friend Hope Mirrlees and Mirrlees’ former tutor and then partner Harrison — their shared domestic and working lives and travels abroad. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in fact published Harrison’s memoirs in 1925.
Also, while Eileen Power may draw a blank with some (or many) I have actually come across Medieval English Nunneries in another context … but there must surely be more to tell, and I am looking forward to reading about it.
Always awaited by me with anticipation, The Guardian‘s annual literary calendar; including anniversaries, adaptations, and of course new book releases – from which I have chosen just some that I am particularly looking forward to.
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade (Faber) (Jan.)
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Hamish Hamilton) (Feb.)
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Picador) (Feb.)
Here We Are by Graham Swift (Scribner) (Feb.)
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate) (March)
A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (Faber) (March)
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder) (March)
The Death of Comrade President by Alain Mabanckou (Serpent’s Tail) (March)
Summer by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) (July)
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak NF (Wellcome) (July)
The Mission House by Carys Davies (Granta) (Aug.)
The Gun, the Ship and the Pen by Linda Colley, NF history (Profile) (Aug.)
Trio by William Boyd (Viking) (Oct.)
Snow by John Banville (Faber) (Oct.)
Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee, NF biography (Faber) (Oct.)
The Mark of Cain by Margaret MacMillan, NF Reith Lectures (Profile) (Oct.)
Alex Preston from The Observer bemoans the mediocre year just gone, but offers good cheer for the year to come. Here are some of his suggestions that particularly interest me:
The long awaited and highly anticipated finale to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwelltrilogy, The Mirror and the Light(4th Estate, March) – under strict embargo!
Hamnet(Tinder Press, March) by Maggie O’Farrell – “an […] imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway.”
Apeirogon(Bloomsbury, February), by Colum McCann “…ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics… If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster.”
Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). “Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.”
“…the final part of Ali Smith’sera-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July)”
KateGrenville’s A Room Made of Leaves(Text, July)(“..which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River” says Preston – let us hope!)
A new essay by Zadie Smith in the current October 24 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books, and for the moment at least online, eloquently argues against a particularly stringent interpretation of cultural appropriation prevalent in the literary world in recent times and the strident sometimes virulent debates that inevitably ensue, and pleads instead for a fiction that dares to presume rather than contain, that is driven by the imagination rather than the manifest self and finds its voice in revealing what it doesn’t know.
How I have longed for an argument along these lines to be so articulated.
I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux. As in the case of Patrick Modiano, my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation – and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience. Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of La Place (“Le Platz”) at my local library; having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews in mostly German media. First published in 1984 (there is a 1992 English translation: “A man’s place”), I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly (or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps “autofiction” is the correct terminology these days, though absent the “fiction” that also doesn’t seem quite right.
La Place is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux’s father – his struggles, disappointments and modest gains – from hard, impoverished circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, through farm and manual labour and two wars to the relative comfort afforded by a small family and “property” – in provincial northern France; reflected upon by the adult daughter now in her twenties, wife and mother, who has returned to the stupefying closeness of her childhood home that she so eagerly fled in her father’s last days. She too has moved on in life, but further, away from the hard-earned “place” in society that her father fought for and won and defended and had pride in. This narrator, this Annie, had no pride in this “place” from where she came, but irritated by her estrangement from her parents and her roots, she speaks to us and to herself from her father’s “place”, attempting to understand the nuances and conventions that erect then maintain the barriers of class. But, as much as the subject here may well be the father, his story is very much just a building block to her own autobiographical quest; in channeling the father, Annie Ernaux is on a journey, sometimes painful, of coming back to herself.
Now in the last days I have finished reading Mémoire de fille , in German of course as “Erinnerung eines Mädchens”, and also from my wonderful locallibrary. Published in original only in 2016, (and not yet in English) it fills in gaps, things touched upon but not fully explained in her 2008 and critically acclaimed work Les Années (Ger. “Die Jahre” Eng. “The Years” both pub. 2017). Not having read that work (yet!), I can only relate from other sources that it was there that Ernaux conjures (for the first time I think) this very particular voice that also characterizes Mémoire de fille. I must say I was a few pages in before I realised that the “I” (“ich” “Je”) was absent. She takes herself out of time and place; as a third person viewer to her own biography. She objectifies herself so to speak. She hovers over this eighteen year old that she once was and is both detached and intimately involved, as irritated and sympathethic as any reader may be. She is both unforgiving and non-judgemental of this her former self. The time span is not great; Ernaux approaches a memory of a just a few weeks in the Summer of 1958 that was consequential and a brief snap shot of the immediate couple of years that followed, dissects the shame that wasn’t there until it became memory, tests the boundaries of belonging, rejection and reconciliation. This literary feat of disassociation that Annie Ernaux achieves in her writing is a triumph over the demons that haunt us all.
I didn’t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted Les Années, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux. Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith in The Guardian in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “… and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”– that doesn’t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia alerted me to this excellent piece in The Paris Review by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about.
Perhaps I have just read over it, but I don’t recall an explicit mention of (calendar) time in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The best I could come up with is about 2014, and that being based on Michael having been present at the Deepwater Horizon explosion which occurred in April, 2010, and it seems to have been not so long after, traumatised and unable to find work in the region, that he falls into drug addiction and related criminal activities presumably leading to a conviction and interment in Parchman. Kayla doesn’t seem to have been born when he leaves, so given that she is now three, this seems a reasonable enough guess.
A Dedeaux oak in Jesmyn Ward’s hometown of Delisle, Miss. The sight of such Leonie associates with Bois – and then she sees Esch and Skeet.
Which of course got me thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage and how it may have changed between Salvage the Bones, defined by Katrina in 2005, and the time in which Sing, Unburied, Sing is set. It seems to me, a lot can happen in what must be almost a decade, both to people and to place, and especially in a a very special fictional world that has evolved out of a very real one. Now of course even if I wasn’t wondering madly over this, Ward sort of invites one to do so with a neatly placed reference as they drive back into Bois at journey’s end, the road journey anyway. Leonie narrates:
Two people walk in the distance …a man, short and muscled…[leading] a black dog… next to him, a skinny little woman with …cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies…Skeetah and Eschelle…The siblings walk in sync…Esch says something and Skeetah laughs…
To be deduced: Esch and Skeetah are in their mid-twenties now, and they are in Bois where we left them immediately after Katrina; with Esch awaiting a child, and Skeet still unreconciled to the loss of China. One wonders about the extended Batiste family, Daddy and the kids and their friends: who has gone and who has stayed? are they well enough? I hope so, for how I loved this chaotic troupe, and Leonie’s envious reaction “…jealousy twins with anger…”(ending with Kayla being severely slapped and a vague imagining of how different it may have been for her had Given lived) seems to suggest at least these two are doing okay. For Skeet, what times – good and bad – lay between that radiant white China and this black beast now on parade? Does the colour tell a story? Esch’s baby would now be almost ten (a Jason or a Rose?), and I dare to imagine, armed with Medea and the love of family, that she salvaged some good out of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, and that her fine, kind mind has been given the chance it deserved to bloom, that she is a good mother, and all the fathers Big Henry promised were there for her. Wearing still, and proudly, her wild crown atop her head makes me happy and gives me hope. (While Leonie’s maternal failures may more than irritate, that she sees a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” where others would see a “dishevelled mop” says much.)
Somethings we do know. The prevalence of cannabis and cocaine has been superseded by the scourge of crystal meth, oxycontin and god alone knows what else. White privilege spares not – just ask Michael or Misty. Prosperity is there alongside the desperate, and race defines as ever; in ways subtle and not so, and boundaries drawn accordingly – you can be up the Kill (where white folk live) or in the Pit (where the Batistes lived); transgress at your own peril.
Bois Sauvage has survived; not capitulating to the most powerful forces that Nature could muster, nor to the deprivations formented through mortal weakness and depravity. Against all laws of Nature, the Delta draws sustenance from the vast river of human waste salvaged as it flows from its history into each moment.
In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.
For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.
And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.
The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.
A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?
Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.
Though coming late to Marilynne Robinson, I was immediately captivated by her narrative form, the power of the characters and the moral integrity that rises above moralising.
Having written several posts during 2018-19 in respect to Robinson’s Gilead trilogy, I have taken the time to experiment a little and put together an edited collection; compiled in LaTeX and available in PDF from my Downloads page.
