In a very peculiar coincidence, I read two excellent, wildly different books written by women in their 30s from 1936 back to back. Winifred Holtby's South Riding (picked up thanks to Backlisted) is a panoramic account of the happenings of a fictional English place in the 1930s. Holtby based the book on her mother's experiences in local politics, and her mother found it uncomfortably real—she opposed publishing it. But when Holtby died in 1935, her friend Vera Britten edited the manuscript and got it into print. When it was published in 1936, it was an immediate success.
In it, local government officials try to build affordable housing, the new principal of the girls' high school deals with insufficient funds and personnel challenges, a local landowner faces the loss of the family farm, a tubercular socialist struggles with the compromised work of making change, a minister tries to hide his sins, a bright girl is hemmed in by poverty and gender expectations, a retired chauffeur doesn't realize his wife is dying, and a salesman's family struggles to hold on to the semblance of middle-class life. There is also a measles epidemic and various love affairs, some thwarted, some successful, some sad, some hilarious. These events jostle against each other, and Holtby lets them jostle without distracting writerly machinations or interpolations, depicting the turbulent flow of ordinary lives with a capacious, unsentimental generosity. It's similar to the magic of Middlemarch but in a quieter vein and less about the unseen good of individual acts than the imperfect but essential good of community. Reading it made me feel a little bitter and wistful, functioning local governments and communities being relics of a vanished past.
Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper, also published in 1936, could not be more different. It is electrifying from the first sentence:
Beginning this book (not as they say book in our trade—they mean magazine) beginning this book, I should like if I may, I should like, if I may (that is the way Lord Phoebus writes), I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, all my beautiful and lovely friends.
And for why?
Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself.The narrator, one Pompey Casmilus, then describes being at a party with her friends:
Suddenly I looked round. I thought: I am the only goy. There was a newspaper man there and a musician and some plain business men. But the Jews. Well all to say about the Jews has been said, so I'll leave it. But then I had a moment of elation at that party. I got shot right up. Hurray to be a goy! A clever goy is cleverer than a clever Jew. And I am a clever goy that knows everything on earth and in heaven. This moment of elation I am telling you about: the only living person in that room, the cleverest person in that room; the cleverest living goy.
Do all goys among Jews get that way? Yes, perhaps. And the feeling you must pipe down and apologize for being so superior and clever: I can't help it really my dear chap, you see I'm a goy. It just comes with the birth. It's a world of unequal chances, not the way B. Franklin saw things. But perhaps he was piping down in public, and apologizing he was a goy. And there were Jews then too. So he put equality on paper and hoped it would do, and hoped nobody would take it seriously. And nobody did.
My proprieties jolted, I kept reading. Turns out this Pompey is the questing and aware literary love child of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, keyed in to the peculiarities, hypocrisies, happinesses, and evils of life for a young white single working woman in 1930s Britain. She is the bolder foremother of lesser autofioctionalists to come (obvious threads from Smith's own life are woven into Pompey's) and the garrulous, erudite, funny, and oblique cousin to the narrator of Anna Burns' Milkman. The novel lopes away with a relentless, singular, off-kilter energy, following Pompey's spiraling thoughts on everything from writing the book (at the office, on yellow notepaper) to work, broken engagements, the problem of marriage, internal hypocrisies, Germany's looming menace, beloved friends, joyous sex, and tigerish aunts. Smith knows who she is writing for:
Reader, I will give you a word of warning. This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand. And the thoughts come and go and sometimes they do not quite come and I do not pursue them to embarrass them with formality to pursue them into harsh captivity. And if you are a foot-off-the-ground person I make no bones to say that is how you will write and only how you will write, And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation. So put it down. Leave it alone. It was a mistake you made to get this book. You could not know.If you are a foot-off-the-ground person, I cannot recommend it enough.
Other books read lately:
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths: Comyns is another foot-off-the-ground writer, though she lulls you into thinking she's not. A young woman's experiences of marriage, work, motherhood, and love in late 1940s London silkily winds the harrowing and the mundane together in one smooth skein, revealing the squalor, sexism, and terrifying precarity beneath the apparent "freedom" of the artistic life. As with all Comyns novels, hilarious and harrowing.
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad: The Odyssey retold by Penelope, Odysseus' wife. After spending centuries in Hades, she is finally driven to share her side of the story, though it is interrupted by the twelve hanged maids killed by Telemachus, who appear like deranged Zeigfield chorines to comment on the proceedings. Marvelous concept bluntly executed.
Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance: A family tragedy set in a small village in the Pyrenees spun and chopped and stretched, with narration from mushrooms and lightning bolts and dogs and the ghosts of seventeenth-century witches. Fun to read, but I had high expectations of glorious deep weirdness and found a trauma plot filigreed with weirdness instead.
Kate Colby, Fruitlands: The blurb on this slim book of poems reads: "In this collection, cultural work is social innovation, and Kate Colby produces and decomposes identity, history, and narrative through fully engaged aesthetic practice." Reading that description shrivels me like a salted slug. But I bought this book anyway, for the cover and title—a picture of the Alcott's house, a nod to their disastrous utopia. And the poems read to me (like most poems I read) as incomplete clues to another mind and its experiences. I liked these because they make me feel pleasantly drugged, or at least how I imagine pleasant drugginess, given that I cannot partake of substances. Happily perplexing, usefully softening my mind, allowing me to see/feel something different. Plus, they made me laugh.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: Hartman's profoundly personal exploration of Ghana's role in the Transatlantic slave trade is, in a word, phenomenal, the sort of book that feels as though it is gently but firmly rearranging your mental furniture. There is a critical (marketing?) move breaking complicated books into algorithmic genre keywords—history, memoir, essay, etc. This book is beyond that reductive nonsense. It is a glorious whole—Hartman's whole self—mind and experience and feeling and research—applied to recalling, reimagining, and reanimating a fraught history full of contradictions and pain. Woven in with recollections of her experiences in Ghana are incisive disentanglements of cherished myths and hard-to-face facts and conjurings of the unrecorded realities. The approach struck me as akin to visible mending—a practice of repair that does not make a hole invisible but calls attention to it while giving something torn new life.
Frog Pond Splash: Collages by Ray Johnson, Texts by William S. Williams: An engrossing love letter from Williams to Johnson, because what is love if not the ability to see who someone else is? Elizabeth Zuba's pairing of text excerpts culled from personal emails and various publications with specific works of art is pure editorial wizardry. One thing I underlined:
One can have the work of art, or one can have its sources. In tracing the work to its sources it is lost, because as analysis disintegrates the whole into parts, the parts lose their meaning, which is the bearing of part upon part in the construction of a unified work of art.
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Clarmont: I have read just one other Elizabeth Taylor novel (Angel), but what wonderful, subtle, surprising pleasures they are. Mrs. Palfrey, widowed and distant from her daughter, moves into the Clarmont, a mid-tier London hotel, to live out the rest of her days in shabby gentility among a tenacious, gossipy little community of older folks. She accidentally meets a young aspiring writer who pretends to be her grandson. Hijinks ensue, but Taylor's marvelous, unshowy writing reveals both the absurdity and bittersweet depth of this characters and their seemingly narrow world.
John le Carré, Silverview: Read this last le Carré about a clueless bookseller and a lovelorn spy in a whirl of bittersweet emotion; slight yet satisfying.
Mick Herron, Slow Horses + Dead Lions: The first two in a series of pacy novels about washed-up MI5 agents; books as television (and better as television).
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail: In 1949, an Israeli commander stationed in the desert near the Egyptian border is bitten by a spider. The bite festers dangerously, but he continues with his mission: to patrol the area, to search for guns. When his troops happen upon a group of nomads, they are massacred, except for one girl and her dog. At first, it appears the commander may protect her—why else would he save her?—but he rapes her, and then his troops rape her, and they murder her. Years later, a jittery young Palestinian woman in Ramallah reads a brief mention of this crime. She unexpectedly becomes fixated on the fate of the murdered girl, who died on the day she was born, and decides to try and find where it happened—a tortuous process of crossing checkpoints and entering hostile spaces. The first story is related in dispassionate third-person, while the second shifts into nervy first-person, amplifying their nightmarish twin-ship. Reading it feels like dreaming a terrible dream that has the cold edge of truth.
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Drawing by Stevie Smith.
Photo of marbleized books by Addyman Books.
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