Reading To Save My Mind
As of the start of Lock Down – March 10 here in Maryland, if memory serves – we all knew we were going to have to develop strategies for staying sane. Mine, unsurprisingly, was to disappear into books.
Below are the results:
BOOKS READ SINCE 3/10
Contemporary Crime Fiction
Children of the Street and Murder at Cape Three Points by Kwei Quartey. I’m currently reading the next title in the Darko Dawson series, Gold of Our Fathers. There’s only one more entry; then Dr. Quartey switches to what I assume will be another series featuring a female private detective, Emma Djian. The first entry, called The Missing American, is truly excellent – but I still want more Darko Dawson!
Wolf Pack and The Bitterroots by C.J Box. Set in Wyoming, Wolf Pack is the twentieth entry in the Joe Pickett series: The Bitterroots takes place in Montana and features Cassie Dewell as a sheriff’s investigator. (I have a soft spot for the Wyoming novels, as my son and daughter-in-law got married in that gorgeous place in 2008.)
The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths. This book just won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Novel. I read it; it’s sort of an old fashioned British crime story of the type that I frankly love. The writing was excellent, and the plot was riveting – I had trouble putting it down. But I have to say that the ending – the solution ,to the mystery, arrived at rather suddenly – didn’t completely satisfy me. I was left feeling rather empty. Nevertheless – recommended. (You may have a completely different reaction that I did.) Oh, and the version I downloaded includes an excellent discussion guide.
Trouble Is What I Do by Walter Mosley
Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson
An Honorable Man and The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich
The Last Hunt by Deon Meyer. I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Meyer at Crimefest in England in 2011. He was an excellent speaker and a pleasure to talk to. In preparation for that excursion, I read the suspenseful and absorbing Thirteen Hours; The Last Hunt was even better. One reviewer opined that this new novel should gain Meyer the following he deserves. I certainly hope so.
Classic crime fiction
Signed, Picpus by Georges Simenon. It is my custom to turn to Simenon’s Maigret novels whenever I’m stressed. They always help. This one did the trick, as expected.
Murder in the Mill-Race by E.C.R. Lorac. The British Library Crime Classics series continues apace, with its wonderful cover art and delightful period pieces. This is one of my favorites.
Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie. Being as I’ve been immersed in the lore and history of ancient Egypt lately – a Life Long Learning class in the Art of Ancient Egypt, plus viewing a Great Courses lecture series on the subject with the marvelous Bob Brier – it seemed the right time to read this; it’s Agatha Christie’s sole work of historical fiction.
Birthday Party by C.H.B. Kitchin
The House of the Arrow by A.E.W. Mason
Historical fiction
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel. A fitting conclusion to Dame Hilary’s monumental Wolf Hall trilogy.
Fiction
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Old Lovegood Girls by Gail Godwin. When I first joined the Fiction/AV staff of the library in 1982, one of the first books that my colleagues urged me to read was the new novel by Gail Godwin (of whom I’d never heard), A Mother and Two Daughters. I’ve been enjoying this author’s thoughtful, gracefully written works ever since then. When I saw that she had a new book out this year, I downloaded it at once. That, and the Hilary Mantel, have definitely been sanity saviors!
Nonfiction
Van Gogh: A Power Seething by Julian Bell
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Life of Emily Dickinson, by Martha Ackmann
Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Achorn
Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag
****************
So, what am I reading now? In addition to Gold of Our Fathers, the mystery mentioned above, several other items.
An analysis – at times, a psychoanalysis – of the Snow White story and its different meanings and iterations in a variety of cultures:
This novel is a bit staid and slow moving, but I love the re-imagining of ancient Rome:
I am so loving Bob Brier’s Egypt lectures!! This is rather arcane subject matter, but Professor Brier brings it to life rather nicely:
Okay, well this is about the incredibly destructive, fast moving, and horrifying Camp Fire that occurred in California in 2018 and decimated this most ironically named small city. It’s a slightly odd thing to be reading right now, but all the same, it’s riveting.
This post came about as a result of a reading list I’m compiling for a program of book talks that I’m scheduled to present in July.
Dear Diary…
Dear Diary,
Brain feeling like mush. But I don’t like to absent myself from this space for too long, so here goes.
Went out to get the paper this morning, greeted by a picture perfect day: warm, but with a hint of cool, and intensely green, with a cloudless blue sky. Surely if this is, in fact, the real, the actual world, we cannot be facing an apocalypse?
However, the paper, once gotten inside, and freed of its plastic covering and my hands happy-birthday cleansed, tells a different and altogether grimmer story.
Anyway, I’ve been reading. Boy, have I been reading:
I have now confirmed my suspicion that I am not the ideal reader of philosophical texts. To wit:
In many cases, James suggested we can falsify ideas, make relatively accurate predictions, answer questions, and reach agreement, by simply being faithful to the facts—realities that repel or reinforce our ideas. Ignoring these realities, or dismissing their interpretation as “fake news,” is to give up on the pragmatic method altogether. Truth happens to ideas only through the ongoing and collective conversation with sensations, moments in the stream of consciousness that either sustain them, wash them clean, or wash them away. In James’s words, “[S]ensations are the motherearth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of the mind. To find sensational termini should be our aim with all our higher thought.”
Umm…. Okay….
Now, I read another book by John Kaag several years ago. In American Philosophy: A Love Story, he describes how, as a newly minted philosophy professor, he undertook a project to save the precious remnants of the library of William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), who in years past was a distinguished Harvard-based philosopher. In the course of this endeavor, Kaag acquires a research assistant. She shares his enthusiasm for the undertaking, then develops an enthusiasm for him, which he joyfully reciprocates. Long story short, after navigating past some obstacles, they get married.
That book came out in 2016. This past February, I encountered an article in the Wall Street Journal by Kaag. Entitled “William James, Yoga and the Secret of Happiness,” it is adapted from his forthcoming book on that august personage. Possessed of pleasant memories of American Philosophy: A Love Story, I’m happily reading along until I encounter this sentence:
This winter—as I slogged through a second divorce at the tender age of 40, recovered from a second heart attack and lamented the state of the world—I reread James’s “Principles.”
WHAT?? Oh no! (I think I voiced my dismay aloud; in fact, I know I did, as Ron called over to ask what the problem was.)
But John, you told such a sweet love story in American Philosophy! I was counting on – nay, assuming – that a Happily Ever After ending would rightly follow. Nope – not this time. Notice I failed to get worked up over the poor man’s health – I mean, two heart attacks at such a young age is quite serious. But the breakup of that marriage seemed to me like the worst possible news. I admit – I took it personally. But I’m sure, not as personally as John and Carol took it.
(This was a second marriage for both of them, plus by the time of the breakup. they’d had a daughter. John briefly mentions the misery of co-parenting with an ex-spouse; having been there, I know of what he speaks, and I sympathized.)
So, you may rightly ask, is Sick Souls, Healthy Minds about the wreckage of John Kaag’s domestic life or the life and philosophy of William James? As you’ve probably guessed, the answer is, some of both, although it’s really much more about James’s philosophical and intellectual endeavors. Much of that material is simply too complex and abstract for me to fully comprehend. I plowed through those sections dutifully, although at many points I felt like crying out, “Enough already! Stop doing all this excessive thinking and theorizing about things that can never be proven anyway and just live your life!”
Is this supposed to be the road to true self-knowledge, even to real happiness? I admit, it just doesn’t work for me.
Kaag gives us a brief summary of the life of William James. It’s clear he was a deep thinker, and this mental habit reinforced a tendency toward melancholy, even depression. And yet, in 1876, he was lucky enough to find just the right woman. Her name was Alice Howe Gibben; they were married in 1878.
James and Alice eventually had five children although they lost a son, Herman, when a case of whooping cough gave rise to a severe bout of pneumonia. James had nicknamed this youngster ‘Humster’ and wrote that he was “the flower of their flock.” Earlier in the book, Kaag says that James was glad to leave all the details of domesticity, including child rearing, in Alice’s capable hands. I found myself curious about just what kind of husband and father William James was. So I guess I’m looking for a good biography of the man. Suggestions welcome.
William James 1842-1910. He fascinates me, both in his own right and because he is the older brother of that other enigma, the novelist Henry James.
Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade
From the last section of Square Haunting:
In a sketch titled “London in War,” [Virginia Woolf] commented on the eeriness and disorientation of living in the city under siege: “Everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob.”
Now, walking the streets was a continual danger, maintaining the house a draining responsibility, the city ruled by an atmosphere of silence and suspicion. London, she wrote, “has become merely a congeries of houses lived in by people who work. There is no society, no luxury no splendour no gadding & flitting. All is serious & concentrated. It is as if the song had stopped—the melody, the necessary the voluntary. Odd if this should be the end of town life.”
****************Woolf wrote movingly in her diary of the surreal quality of the blacked-out city, which seemed “a reversion to the middle ages with all the space & the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses”: “Nature prevails. I suppose badgers & foxes wd come back if this went on, & owls & nightingales…”
And nowadays, Kashmiri goats, too…
Anyway, I wanted to begin this review by quoting the above passages (and sharing that video) because I thought they seemed strangely relevant to the present moment.
**********************
What a wonderful book this is! A delight for both the sense and the intellect, Square Haunting tells the story of five women as they struggle to find their place in the realms of academia, publishing, and public life in general. This endeavor has as its chief backdrop the tumultuous era between the two world wars. The author’s delineation of this fraught period is one of the book’s great strengths.
Here are the five women. in the order in which their stories are told:
Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., 1886-1961, poet and novelist
Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, 1893-1957; she was also scholar of religion and French and Italian literature. She wanted very much to be known for these latter accomplishments, especially her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy
Jane Ellen Harrison, linguist and classicist, 1850-1928
Historian Eileen Power, 1889-1940
Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941. This my favorite image of her.
At one time or another, each of these women lived in Mecklenburgh Square, an area of London located within the Bloomsbury District in London’s West End. It is this happenstance that caused Francesca Wade to group them together in this book. Although there was little, if any, interaction among them, they faced many of the same challenges, both in their professional and personal lives.
Also, they all produced trenchant and insightful prose.. Here is H.D. upon entering her war-damaged apartment:
“We came home and simply waded through glass,” she recalled, “while wind from now unshuttered windows made the house a barn, an unprotected dug-out. What does that sort of shock do to the mind, the imagination—not solely of myself, but of an epoch?”
********************
Wade gives us this description of Dorothy L. Sayers’s experience at Oxford:
Sayers’s contemporaries remembered tepid water, unpleasant food, and a general atmosphere of restriction, since their academic and social behavior was under constant scrutiny from opponents eager to cite the slightest misdemeanor as ammunition to demand a revocation of women’s place at Oxford. A female student recalled a don who began his classes “Gentlemen—and others who attend my lectures,” and another who insisted that the women sit behind him so he didn’t have to see them as he declaimed. Articles in the press constantly feigned concern that women were overworking, and that their minds and constitutions were not geared to such intensive toil.
This was the battle – or, one of the battles – Sayers was fighting when she wrote Gaudy Night, the culminating novel in the Wimsey/Vane series. These are the thoughts entertained by Harriet Vane, as she approaches the precincts of Shrewsbury College, Oxford, her alma mater:
They can’t take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University;… a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence.
Indeed, so.
Meanwhile, of course, she’s trying to reconcile her life as a writer and scholar with her life as a possible wife – and to a Lord, no less:
(I recommend Jill Paton Walsh’s continuation of the series.)
****************
Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of Jane Ellen Harrison. She is a person well worth getting to know – a path breaker, a brilliant academician, and a fearless crusader for the right of women to nourish their legitimate intellectual hunger.
In her essay “Scientiae Sacra Fames,” Harrison wrote of the “delight of learning for learning’s sake a ‘dead’ language for sheer love of the beauty of its words and the delicacy of its syntactical relations…the rapture of reconstructing for the first time in imagination a bit of the historical past.” Women’s education had so long been constructed around its practical application to the life of a wife and mother that choosing a subject for pure stimulation felt like an act of delicious daring. Harrison considered “freedom to know” to be the “birthright of every human being”; she was furious when it was implied that any realm of knowledge should be considered “unwomanly.”
Among here many accomplishments, Jane Harrison mastered the Russian language and encouraged the translation and appreciation of Russian literature. This of course immediately endeared her to this Russophile – Спасибо вам большое, Jane Harrison! (Thank you so much, or literally, ‘a big thanks to you’).
***************************
As with Jane Ellen Harrison, so with Eileen Power. Like Harrison, Power made her contributions to historical scholarship in the context of academia, in this case, Girton College, Cambridge. Power’s specialty was the Middle Ages, especially the lives of ordinary people during that era.
Eileen Power’s life is the story of her attempt to forge a new image for a woman intellectual, and create a way of living for which there was little precedent: not as the stereotype of a dowdy bluestocking, but as a professional who could entertain an international reputation while also enjoying fashion and frivolity, whose public status was defined not by her family but by her work.
Medieval People, an early work by Power, is available as a Kindle e-reader. I’ve only looked at the first few pages but it appears to be eminently readable.
****************
Perhaps mindful that so much has already been written about Virginia Woolf, Wade concentrates most particularly on her experience of the early days of World War Two, both in her and Leonard’s London flat and at Monk’s House, their home in the countryside. I’ve quoted some of that material at the beginning of this post. It comes from her journals, letters, and various writings; it is vivid and compelling. And I was pleasantly surprised by it, as I’ve never been able to get through any of her novels. I did, however, read A Room of One’s Own. Wikipedia says of that work:
An important feminist text, the essay is noted in its argument for both a literal and figurative space for women’s writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.
Woolf was bitter about the effort and expense involved in sending her brothers to boarding school and then to Cambridge, while she and her sister Vanessa received virtually no formal education. (Vanessa became a painter of great distinction. She was married to the at critic Clive Bell. One of their sons was the writer and art critic Quentin Bell; his son is Julian Bell, artist and writer and author of the biography of Vincent Van Gogh that I recently read and greatly enjoyed.)
*****************
A poignant final note about Virginia Woolf and Eileen Power. It is fairly well known that Virginia Woolf battled what was probably bipolar illness and other conditions causing emotional anguish and mental instability for much of her adult life. She committed suicide in 1941, leaving this note for husband:
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
She was 59 years old.
*************
As for Eileen Power, she married Michael Postan, a Russian emigre who was both her colleague and her student. She was 37; he was ten years younger. They were deeply in love but their time together was cut tragically short by her untimely death. Her last letter to him is eerily reminiscent of Vieginia Woolf’s final missive to Leonard:
“Thank you my own darling…for making me as happy as a human being can be made and if I never see you again remember that no one could love you more.”
**************
Please know that there is so much more in this book than what I have herein covered. Give yourself a rare treat and read it.
Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, final movement
I was working on something else when I came upon this. By the time it was over, I was in tears, and not fit for much else, for a while.
Thank you, Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony musicians, for this rare and precious gift.
Art Love: Paintings that currently enchant me
Virgin Among Virgins in a Rose Garden by the Master of the St. Lucy Legend, 1475-1480
Garden in May by Maria Oakey Dewing, 1895
Georges de La Tour Peasant Couple Eating, ca. 1620
Road in the dunes by Salomon van Ruysdael
Astronomer by Candlelight by Gerrit Dou, late 1650s
Young Bull by Paulus Potter, 1647
White Horse by John Constable, 1819
The Princes of Orange and their Families on Horseback, Riding Out from The Buitenhof, The Hague by Paulus van Hillegaert, 1596
Cardsharps, fortune tellers, and other dubious (but secretive fun) pursuits
It began, as did so much in Baroque painting, with Caravaggio:
The Cardsharps, 1594
“With this petty crime scene, Cardsharps, the young Caravaggio invented a genre of trickery pictures.” (from Caravaggio.org)
Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, by Georges de la Tour, 1630-34
The Cardsharps, by Gerard van Honthorst
The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen, 1622
The Proccuress by Johannes Vermeer, 1656
The Fortune Teller, by Caravaggio, 1595
Fortune Teller by Georges de la Tour, 1630
Fortune Teller with Soldiers by Valentin de Boulogne, 1618-20
These pickpocket paintings brought to mind this number from the musical Oliver!
Why should we break our backs
Stupidly paying tax?
Better get some untaxed income…
Gerrit (Gerard) van Honthorst, Dirck van Baburen, and Hendrick ter Brugghen were the primary exemplars of a group of artists that have come to be known as the Utrecht Caraviggisti. Caravaggio had no workshop and did not deliberately seek to pass on his distinctive artistic proclivities. Nevertheless, his unique, revolutionary style – the use of models from everyday life, their up close, in your face presentation, and above all, the heightening drama of darkness and light – had a profound influence on his contemporaries and immediate followers.
I’ve saved Hendrik ter Brugghen’s Gamblers for last:
This is because I want to share with you this delightful bit of street theater staged in music. I believe it was conceived as an accompaniment to Utrecht, Caravaggio, and Europe, a special exhibit at Munich’s great Alte Piankothek. It was staged last year. Oh, to have seen it!
‘If you’re lookin’ for a miracle open your eyes; There was one this morning just about sunrise…’
We’ve had day after day of wet, sunless, raw weather – suitable to the current mood of the world, I guess you could say. And then, this morning, this:
And this beauty, everyday yet extraordinary, unfolding against a clear blue sky:
The title of this post comes from the lyrics to “This Island Earth.” Sung bt the Nylons, this has long been one of my YouTube favorites:
“When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths.” Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson
Peter Swanson and his novel, a gift to us lovers of crime fiction
That title makes it sound like a right blood bath, doesn’t it? But it actually refers to a list of crime novels:
The Red House Mystery (1922)- A.A. Milne
Malice Aforethought (1931)- Francis Iles
The A.B.C. Murders (1936)- Agatha Christie
Double Indemnity (1943)- James Cain
Strangers on a Train (1950)- Patricia Highsmith
The Drowner (1963)- John MacDonald
Deathtrap (1978)- Ira Levin
The Secret History (1992)- Donna Tartt
The list was compiled by one Malcolm Kershaw, part owner and proprietor of The Old Devils Bookstore in Boston. He placed this list on the store’s blog, and it created something of a stir among mystery aficionados. By far the most notable and bizarre reaction to it is that of a dedicated murderer who has apparently decided, by means of his own depraved methods, to replicate the scenarios set forth in each of the titles on the list.
Eight Perfect Murders is exceptionally well plotted, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader thoroughly engaged. To a degree, the book is about the mystery genre itself, and why so many of us love it. Especially toward the beginning, the author is tossing out titles and authors left and right – there’s something for everyone. When he casually mentions to the fact that Ruth Rendell once presented a reading at The Ole Devils, I just wanted to cheer! But soon enough, things begin to get somewhat grim….
That said, Malcolm Kershaw does have his flippant moments, such as this one, when he’s describing the plot of The Red House Mystery:
There’s a rich man named Mark Ablett who lives in a country house, the kind of English one that seems specifically designed to have a murder occur in it.
(Now the fact is, that after you’ve read as many country house mysteries as I have, you start to feel as though the whole purpose of the English country house is to serve as a setting for a slaying.)
Before he took on The Old Devils, Malcolm had worked at a bookstore in Harvard Square. He recalls that the owner’s wife had given him a list of her favorite books, almost all of which were mysteries:
Besides Malice Aforethought, she’d listed Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the first two Sue Grafton books, The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman, and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, even though she said she’d never finished it (“I just love the beginning so much”). Her other favorite book was Bleak House by Charles Dickens; I guess you could say that it has mystery elements, as well.
Well, of course, I can’t see a list like this without putting in my two cents, as it were. In general, I think it’s pretty good, although I’ve never been able to warm to Faye Kellerman and I couldn’t get through The Name of the Rose. On the other hand, I revere Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter novels, and I love, and miss very much, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series. The Daughter of Time is Josephine Tey’s most famous book, but not, in my view, her best. That accolade, I think, should go to two of her other titles: Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair.
Finally I’d like to note my surprise at the rather dismissive attitude toward Bleak House. I’ve not read it – though I keep meaning to, alas – but I did watch the superb 2005 BBC miniseries. (Who could forget the lowering evil of Mr. Tulkinghorn, so masterfully portrayed by Charles Dance?) There is indeed a significant “mystery element’ in that novel; it is present in the person of Inspector Bucket. On the Victorian Web, there’s an excellent essay entitled “Inspector Bucket Points the Way.”
I do have several reservations about this book. First, it seems a bit of a stretch – to me, at least – that Malcolm Kershaw makes such a good living from The Old Devils Bookstore that he’s able to employ two full time assistants there. Second, I don’t recall a single mention of the advent of e-books, an issue looming so very large in the book business right now and affecting it in every possible way. (No mention – or if there is, it’s very cursory – of Amazon, either.)
Toward the end of Eight Perfect Murders, Malcolm Kershaw talks about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. This 1926 novel, the third to feature the suave Belgian Hercule Poirot, caused something of a sensation because of the ingenious and wholly unexpected twist at the end. Kershaw, alas, gives it away in his brief summary. If you haven’t read or seen The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you’ll want to skip over that (very brief) portion of Eight Perfect Murders. That denouement in the Christie novel is much more fun if you come upon it completely unprepared, as I was lucky enough to do when I first read it. 
These are minor cavils, really. Over all, this novel was a very enjoyable and immersive read. It kept my mind off a certain nasty bug currently lying in wait, and for that, I am very grateful.
Books to the Ceiling 