“‘To have a child is to open an account at the heartbreak bank…'”
Liv makes the above pronouncement one night to her husband Benjamin. They’re on a cruise, and they’re luxuriating in bed, at that moment.
Liv and Benjamin are the parents of two: Penny, an eleven-year-old who possesses the officiousness characteristic of some girls that age, and her younger brother Sebastian, a sweet little boy whose health must be monitored carefully; he is diabetic.
Liv is speaking in the abstract. She has no inkling of the events soon to occur that will affect all of them profoundly. How could she? They’ve dealt with the initial shock of Sebastian’s chronic illness; the entire family is engaged in helping him manage it. The effort has thus far been a notable success.
Accompanying Liv and Benjamin on this South American excursion are Liv’s cousin Nora and her husband Raymond. They also have two children: Marcus, the elder, and little June, often called Junie. Liv and Nora are close, nearly as close a sisters. Nora’s mother has recently passed away, and Liv had come up with the idea of all four of them traveling together, partly as a way of consoling Nora for her deeply felt loss.
At the outset of this venture, everything seems to be fine – not just fine, even great. The adults are nearly as excited as the kids.
On the walk to the buffet, Nora linked her arm through Liv’s and put her head on her shoulder, making Liv feel excessively tall. “I love you,” Nora said. “This was a genius idea.”
And so it would seem. Up to a point. That point is reached when Nora and Liv and the children, along with an Argentine woman and her two teenagers, decide to go on a zip-lining excursion while the ship is docked. A guide, Pedro, arranges things for then. Meanwhile, the men go off to play golf.
What could be more innocent, more conducive to a good time?
I dare not say more. I’ll just quote the final line of the Kirkus review of this brainy and propulsive thriller by Maile Meloy:
Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night.
I was.
The eclipse at our house, with a poetical digression
We were forewarned that in central Maryland, the eclipse would not be total. We weren’t expecting much, and frankly we didn’t get much. That’s not to say we didn’t try. And the sun was, in fact, shining – a happenstance not at all dependable here in the Old Line State.
We didn’t have the special glasses and so did not gaze directly at the phenomenon. We were able to see this indicator, though, as the light penetrating through the leaves of the tree in our front yard provided a sort of pin hole camera effect:
You will no doubt be impressed by the delicately calibrated scientific instrument that we also made use of:
At any rate, here was the sun once again, yesterday morning, being normal in our backyard:
Being of a literary turn of mind (and an incorrigible English major from way back),, I wish to cite three poetical allusions. The first is famous:
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Oh, thanks to thee, Shakespeare, for having words of beauty and meaning for every occasion.
And then there’s John Donne, who in his poem “The Sun Rising”, is not praising the sun but chastising it. (Imagine scolding the sun! But then, lovers can be a pretty cheeky lot):
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.She’s all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
Finally there is W.H. Auden’s meditation on the sad fate of the too-audacious Icarus (and by implication the rest of us, sooner or later). This poem, titled “Musee des Beaux Arts,” was inspired by Auden’s viewing of Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69) [Click to enlarge]
‘Transcendence in Ordinary Domestic Life’ – and a transcendentally beautiful essay
The above painting by Pieter de Hooch is variously titled “A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair” or, more succinctly and less specifically, “A Mother’s Duty.” Made some time between 1658 and 1660, it is currently housed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.
Of the artist, Willard Spiegelman tells us this:
About De Hooch we know little. Born in Rotterdam to a bricklayer and a midwife, he trained (perhaps) in Haarlem, and moved to Delft in 1652, where Vermeer also lived. It’s unclear if they had dealings. In 1661 De Hooch went to Amsterdam. He died impoverished, in a madhouse.
Spiegelman has more to say about the painting itself, which he calls ” a northern, secular version of a traditional Madonna and Child.”
In the course of this eloquent explication, Spiegelman draws a subtle difference between the art of de Hooch and that of Vermeer:
We do not find in de Hooch what we most prize in Vermeer: a mysterious sense of human inwardness, an artist’s interest in the psychological depth of his characters, either alone or in small groups.
Reading this sentence, I felt a light turn on in my mind. So that is it, that is the secret – or at least, part of it – of Vermeer’s uncanny hold on those of us who are transfixed by his art. But Spegelman does not allow us to get sidetracked by Vermeer. The subject of this jewel-like essay is the many virtues of “A Mother’s Duty.”
Spiegelman refers to the dog at the left as an element in the picture that “…increases domestic charm.” In art, the dog is a symbol of fidelity and loyalty. Two of my favorite examples of this usage are the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck and St. Augustine in His Study by Vittore Carpaccio:
(I highly recommend Jan Morris’s delightful little volume, Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation.) 
(Willard Spiegelman’s essay appeared in the August 19 – 20 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The link provided in the previous sentence may not lead you to the full text. If that happens, the article can be accessed via the ProQuest database. Please see this post for instructions on how to do this through the Howard County Library’s website. Scroll down to the bottom to view those instructions.)
I am deeply grateful for the weekly Review section of the Wall Street Journal, in which literature and the arts have unquestioned pride of place.
‘An act that becomes its own purifying absolution….’ – American Fire by Monica Hesse
It started in Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in November of 2012. It went on for the next five months: the burning down of random empty buildings. The county had an abundant stock of such structures, and someone was apparently determined to take a torch to every one of them.
By some miracle, no one was killed, or even hurt, during this pyromaniacal rampage. But the effort to catch the perpetrator strained law enforcement to the breaking point. Firefighters in particular were hard hit and utterly exhausted. Still, the effort put forth during this siege was enormous and unstinting.
Whispering Pines, a once flourishing motel/resort, had been sitting empty before being set ablaze.
One tactic involved staking out buildings that were deemed to be likely targets. All sorts of electronic surveillance devices, especially motion sensitive cameras, were deployed. Agents of law enforcement huddled in tents at night, some distance – but not too far – from the focus of incendiary temptation.
Sure enough, five months into the investigation, this was the set-up that suddenly broke the case wide open.
Monica Hesse has done a prodigious amount of research in order to bring this stranger-than-fiction tale to life. In addition, she introduces us to a varied cast of characters who live and work – at least occasionally – in the insular community that is Accomack. Some are strong and purposeful; others are quirky drifters. And one, Charlie Smith, is – well, you need to read the book to make your own assessment of Charlie.
Including notes, American Fire is 255 pages long; the experience of reading of it is propulsive. I put pretty much everything else aside as I raced though this narrative. If you’re looking for a page turner, this is it.
The art of the Northern Renaissance, with a side trip to Colmar
I have fallen in love with the art of the Northern Renaissance. Can you blame me? Just look:
Adoration of the Shepherds – Martin Schongauer 1475-1480
Depictions of the nativity, along with other images of Virgin and Child, abound in this period. Many share with this painting a powerful mix of awe and sweetness. Humble shepherds worship together with exalted rulers. Class distinctions have fallen away.
Rest on the Flight into Egypt – Gerard David c. 1510
Madonna in the Church – Jan Van Eyck 1438
Madonna in the Rose Garden – Stephan Lochner c.1440
Nativity at Night – Geertgen tot Sint Jans c.1490
Geertgen’s Nativity at Night is one of the period’s most poetic paintings….Christ’s radiance illuminates Mary, who leans over the manger to adore her son, and the angels….Only rarely at this date had light been the organizing feature of an entire composition….Mary is the universal mother awed by her son’s majesty and haunted by his martyrdom….This humanization of the holy, promoted by the mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and the Dominicans…would be one of the persistent characteristics of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century art.
From The Northern Renaissance by Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Madonna of the Rose Garden – Martin Schongauer c.1473
A great admirer of Schongauer’s work. Albrecht Durer traveled to Colmar in 1492 in the hope of studying with this great master. But when he arrived there, he discovered that Schongauer had recently died. He would have been about 43 years old. (It never ceases to astonish, the poignant fact of the tenuousness of life in those times.)
There was, of course, no stopping the prodigiously gifted Durer:
Self-portrait at age 13, in 1484
Self-portrait, 1498
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498
Praying Hands, 1508
Young Hare 1502
Adoration of the Trinity 1511
Oil painting, wood block print, engraving, silverpoint, water color – Durer did all of them, and did them superbly. He also authored two theoretical works: Four Books on Measurement and Four Books on Human Proportion.
I highly recommend Professor Catherine B. Scallen’s lectures on The Art of the Northern Renaissance. They’re available on DVD on the Great Courses series. If you’re lucky as we are, your local public library will carry these wonderful learning tools.
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Reading about Colmar put me in mind of two things, one artistic; the other, literary. First: Colmar is home to the Unterlinden Museum, which among its other treasures houses one of the most stunning works of the Northern Renaissance, an image of suffering so profound that it can almost seem painful to gaze upon: Matthias Grunewald’s early sixteenth century masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece:
The Isenheim Altarpiece as it is currently displayed in the chapel of the Unterlinden Museum
For more views of the Altarpiece, with an in depth explication, click here.
The composer Paul Hindemith wrote an opera based on the life and work of Matthias Grunewald. Called Mathis der Maler – Mathis the Painter – it is rarely performed nowadays; however, a suite of music taken from it is frequently performed as a symphony and is widely admired as such:
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When I was in high school, I was fortunate in having a French teacher who was a knowledgeable and passionate Francophile. Her name was Gail Davis. She shared with us a short story by Alphonse Daudet called “La Dernière Classe” – “The Last Class.” The time is approximately 1873. Victorious in the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans have decreed that in the schools of the Alsace-Lorraine region, the German language must be spoken to the exclusion of French. In this story, the author describes the effect that this decree has on one small boy and his teacher.
To read, click here.
Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Striking Writing
This post is an addendum to a previous post about this short story collection.
Patricia Highsmith
In “The Heroine” by Patricia Highsmith, Louise is a newly hired nanny in the Christiansen household. The children she is to look after are Nicky and Heloise.
The two children lay on the floor in one corner, amid scattered crayons and picture books.
“Children, this is your new nurse,” their mother said. “Her name is Lucille.”
The little boy stood up and said, “How do you do,” as he solemnly held out a crayon-stained hand.
Lucille took it, and with a slow nod of her head repeated his greeting.
“And Heloise,” Mrs. Christiansen said, leading the second child, who was smaller, toward Louise.
Heloise stared up at the figure in white and said, “How do you do.”
….“Nightfall,” Louise whispered as she went back into the nursery. “What a beautiful word!”
….
She noticed and loved many things: the way Heloise drank her milk in little gulps at the back of her throat, how the blond down on their backs swirled up to meet the hair on the napes of their necks, and when she bathed them the painful vulnerability of their bodies.
Right from the get-go, this story is suffused with a palpable sense of dread. You want to put it away yet are compelled to keep reading. (It reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates at her creepiest.)
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Vera Caspary
She neither spoke nor stirred. In her greens and reds and golds, with the big hoops in her ears, she was like one of those haughty, rebellious duchesses that Goya loved to paint.
….
Every woman at the party envied Phyllis. Gilbert wore his good looks like an advertisement of superior masculinity.
….
Phyllis was being frightfully gay at this time, spending Fred Miller’s money wildly and surrounding herself with good-looking young men. She had become extremely chic. This Mike thought was an affectation. Like so many bored women, she was seeking compensation for the dullness of her nights by exhibiting herself in costumes whose extravagance advertised her loneliness.
“Sugar and Spice,” by Vera Caspary
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Elizabeth Sanxay Holding
Long ago, when he had been a proud and rather pompous little boy, he had heard in Sunday school about Abraham and Isaac; he could still remember the picture he had seen of a thin and resigned young Isaac lying on the sacrificial stone while his bearded father stood over him with a knife.
“The Stranger in the Car,” by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding
How many young people, one wonders, have been transfixed by this terrifying story? And adults too. I recall, in my college seminar in existentialism, having to confront it head on in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
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Charlotte Armstrong
The door of the enormous bedroom stood wide and her sister’s bed, neatly made, shouted that poor Alice was gone. Mr. Brady sampled the little recurring shock. It was not exactly lessening, but it was changing character. Yes, it was going over from feeling to thinking. She could perceive with her mind the hole in the fabric, the loss of a presence, the absence of a force.
….
Maybe Henny felt guilty because, during that seemingly normal afternoon, Henny herself had gone up to the third floor to “lie down” as usual, and had not made even a token resistance to the coming of the angel of death, by being alert to his imminence. Nobody had expected Alice to die–not on Monday.
….
He was a tall man, a bit thick in the middle these days; his hair was graying; his long face had acquired a permanent look of slight anxiety. He was a quiet man, who ran well in light harness, grateful for peace whenever he got it.
“The Splintered Monday,” by Charlotte Armstrong
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Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: stellar stories
This distinctive collection of short stories, meticulously curated by Sarah Weinman, comes as something of a revelation.
The anthology is subtitled, “Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.” In her introduction, Sarah Weinman declares her attraction to contemporary crime fiction written by women. She names several: Gillian Flynn (of Gone Girl fame), Tana French, Louise Penny, Sophie Hannah, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott. She avers that in their fiction, these writers and others have in effect taken “a scalpel to contemporary society,” revealing the moral rot lying just beneath the congenial seeming veneer. In particular, they often portray the struggles faced by women trying, in the face of insidious opposition, to lead meaningful lives.
When Weinman went in search of those who may have preceded the current wave of women authors of crime fiction, she made a surprising and disconcerting discovery; namely, that there was “an entire generation of female crime writers who have faded from view.” Troubled, Daughters, Twisted Wives is the start of an effort to rectify that situation by bringing these forerunners – “trailblazers” as Weinman rightly calls them – and their intriguing, sometimes idiosyncratic works back into public view.
There are some familiar names here: Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson being among the most notable. Vera Caspary’s fame rests mainly on her novel Laura, which was made into one of the great noir films of the 1940s starring Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews. Margaret Millar is known primarily as the wife of the great Ross MacDonald, but she deserves to be recognized in her own right for the fine writer that she is. The prolific Dorothy B. Hughes, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1978, wrote In a Lonely Place, which also became a distinguished noir film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.
Other names in this collection were barely familiar – to me, anyway – or not previously known at all: Nedra Tyre, Barbara Callahan, Helen Nielsen, Joyce Harrington, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding. It would be difficult for me to name a favorite or favorites in this collection. I thought they were all, in varying degree, very much worth reading. So much so, in fact, that I intend to read them through a second time. (Weinman provides a page or so of valuable material about the author’s life and work before each story.)
Taken together, these stories evoke a vivid picture of a lost mid twentieth century America. You had to wait around to place a long distance call and then calculate the cost of it. Everyone had servants, even families of modest income. Men oscillated between exploiting women and protecting them (and making a show of protecting them). Men were schemers and so were women. Civilization sometimes seemed a perilously thin veneer, poised on the knife edge, always threatening to topple over into chaos. The past is a different country, for sure, but on the other hand, the more things change….
Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives came out in 2013. Two years later, with Sarah Weinman as editor, the Library of America brought out Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s. The authors featured in this two volume collection are Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (1940s); Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, and Dolores Hitchens (1950s).
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of hearing Sarah Weinman speak at the Sisters in Crime Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration. She spoke about her work as an editor and a critic in the field of crime fiction, where she’s making, as you can see from the above, an outstanding contribution to the field. (With her efforts to bring worthy writers back from undeserved obscurity, I see her as a sort of American counterpart to Martin Edwards.)
In the course of her talk (which alas I had some trouble hearing in its entirety), Sarah Weinman extolled in particular the virtues of the following: Celia Fremlin (in whose Edgar Award winning novel The Hours Before Dawn I’m currently engrossed), Marie Belloc Lowndes, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, and Dorothy Salisbury Davis. Lowndes wrote The Lodger, a famously chilling thriller made into a silent film in 1927 by a neophyte director named Alfred Hitchcock. 
Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, whose story “The Stranger in the Car” I found especially effective, authored a novel called The Blank Wall. After hearing Weinman discuss it, I’m very eager to read it.
As for Dorothy Salisbury Davis, her story “Lost Generation” was one of the shorter ones in the collection, and also one of the most powerful. Sarah Weinman enthused about the fact that she’d had the opportunity to meet and talk with Ms Davis. At the time of the publication of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (2013), Davis was 96 years old. She passed away the following year.
Celia Fremlin
Shirley Jackson
Patricia Highsmith
Dorothy B. Hughes
Margaret Millar
Vera Caspary
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Sarah Weinman at Sisters in Crime
Sarah Weinman in better focus!
“Flight” by Tessa Hadley – something about this story…
Two sisters, Claire and Susan, have been estranged for a number of years. Their lives have evolved very differently. Shuttling between Philadelphia and London, Claire, who is single, is a busy professional woman. Susan, also single since her husband’s desertion, works as a carer for elderly and disabled persons. She has four children, two of whom are grown and living on their own. Ryan, the youngest, still lives at home. So does Amy, who has just had a baby. Also living with all of them is Amy’s boyfriend Ben, the baby’s father.
The arrival of the baby represents a tipping point for Claire. It’s time, she believes, to end the hostilities between Susan and herself. She decides to show up unannounced at the house in Leeds, which had been the childhood home for both of them. (This house, in fact, is at the heart of the dispute between the sisters.)
When Claire arrives, Susan is not at home, but she is warmly welcomed by Amy and Ben, and later by Ryan when he gets home. As for the baby, Claire finds herself gripped simultaneously by feelings of love and pity:
The sight of his weak flailing baby limbs and the reddened swollen navel tugged painfully at Claire – he startled fearfully once, jerking his whole body with grimace and lost cry as if he were falling through empty space.
Meanwhile, all three have been awaiting Susan’s return from work. They do not know how she will react to Claire’s completely unexpected presence.
They are soon to find out.
Something about this story affected me deeply. Its cumulative power had me suspended in time. I had no notion how things would play out. I only knew that it mattered to me very, very much.
“Flight” can be read online here, but I recommend getting Hadley’s collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories. As a writer of short fiction, she is, in my view, right up there with Alice Munro.
Say it isn’t so, David Mamet!
A piece appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal the title of which was sufficient to make me sit up and take notice:
“Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up.”
David Mamet
Say it isn’t so, renowned playwright and screenwriter David Mamet! (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, Wag the Dog, and much more besides.) But, alas, Mamet surely does suffer from a serious Dickens aversion, to wit:
Dickens’s characters are cardboard cutouts, even in their names: Inspector Bucket, the Brothers Cheeryble, Jerry Cruncher. They are mechanicals. His prose is turgid and, less forgivable, tortured. Here’s his rendition, in “Dombey and Son,” of a sea-captain’s dialect: “It’s an almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling.”
Mamet sums up: “What a load of bosh.” He adds that in his view, the public’s love for the works of Dickens is “sententious and perhaps even self-congratulatory.”
Well, that’s me, congratulating myself all over the place. Knowing I’m not alone eases the pain, though.
Here’s how Bleak House begins:
CHAPTER I
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting
in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in
the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of
the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn
Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown
snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of
the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;
splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one
another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing
their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other
foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke
(if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust
of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and
meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers
of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping
into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales
of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient
Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog
in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,
down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of
his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the
bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog
all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the
misty clouds.Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as
the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman
and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their
time–as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling
look.The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in
his High Court of Chancery.
Turgid? Seems more like magic, to me.
When I retired in 2007, one of my short term goals was to read Bleak House. I regret that I have yet to accomplish this. In fact, the only Dickens novel I’ve read in recent years is The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was, I have to admit, a bit of a struggle, though periodically enlivened by sprightly passages like this one, in which the denizens of a pantry are brought vividly to life:
Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of that noble family. The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament, and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy, like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum-cake, and various slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed.
Charles Dickens 1812-1870
Mamet gives grudging approval to A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. As for me, the experience of reading David Copperfield – several decades ago, admittedly – was nothing less than life changing. It is a towering achievement in world creation, and will always will be one of my favorite works of art.
Mamet far prefers Anthony Trollope to Dickens. I too am a Trollope fan. Many years ago I read Barchester Towers and was so vastly entertained that I resolved to read The Barsetshire Chronicles in its entirety. (Of the six novels that comprise the series, I’ve read the three starred below.)
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* 
*
Again, this was many years ago. I recall Barchester Towers being a bravura performance in novel writing, in equal part hilarious and outrageous, while Doctor Thorne was an exceptionally poignant love story. (For an excellent appreciation of Anthony Trollope, read Adam Gopnik’s “Trollope Trending” from the May 4 2015 issue of the New Yorker.)
Mamet also offers words of praise, albeit somewhat grudgingly, to several other favorites of mine: George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1835-1915
George Eliot 1819-1880
Anthony Trollope 1815-1882
Wilkie Collins 1824-1889
(In my review of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, I make reference to both The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.)
Ah well – enough. Everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion in these matters – although I do have to consciously remind myself of that truism from time to time…
The Wall Street Journal keeps most of its content behind a pay wall. There is another way to access that content, though, and it’s through the public library database called ProQuest. Allow me to walk you through the process:
First, get on the library’s site: hclibrary.org. Next, scroll down until you see the words “Stream. Download. Learn.” They’re in a blue rectangle above the picture of a lady gardening. Click on that.
Scroll down to the three green circles. the one in the middle is the one you want. It contains an arrow pointing down, with three terms underneath it. The third is “e-newspapers.” Click on that. Scroll down to the ‘Wall Street Journal 1986-present.’ You’ll then be required to authenticate yourself with your bar code and pin number.
Voila – you’re in. I strongly advise that you use the ‘advanced search’ option located directly beneath the search box. Type ‘Mamet’ in the top box and select ‘author ‘(au). In the box below, your need only type in ‘Charles Dickens’ and select ‘title’ (ti) in the box to the right. The article should appear directly.
This is the set-up at Howard County Public Library. Other library systems probably offer similar facilities for online research.
More praise for The Shepherd’s Life, courtesy of a letter to the Washington Post
Kudos to Ann Massey for her letter which appeared in this past Saturday’s Washington Post. It’s entitled “Add this to your reading list;” in it, she sings the praises of The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. 
I’ve done likewise in this space, on several occasions.
Books to the Ceiling 