April 2011 Books

On the non-fiction front I've only read five books. They are pretty varied, ranging from John Stuart Roberts's pretty comprehensive biography of Siegfried Sassoon to Edmund de Waal's multifaceted The Hare with Amber Eyes. The Sassoon biography does make you look at the man with fresh eyes. It explores his homosexual relationships in some depth and his rather crazy lifestyle in the 1920s and 1930s. His later marriage came apart, perhaps because of the nature of his personality rather than anything else. Edmund de Waal's story behind the 264 netsuke that he inherited from his great uncle is extraordinary for it not only covers how they were collected by one member of the family in Paris in the mid-19th century, but then how the passed to another member in Vienna and how, during World War II, a faithful servant saved them while the rest of the house was being looted by the Gestapo. And then Edmund inherited them following his great-uncle's death. And was - and is - utterly captivated by them to the extent that he dropped everything for the better part of two years to research the books about them and their connection to his family. Carol Lee's autobiographical Crooked Angels is about how she fell victim to a strange disease painfully affecting all her muscles. And how she recovered with the help of a masseur who asked the right questions about her past and kneaded the problems out of her until she was back to normal. Joyce Carol Oates's autobiographical A  Widow's Story is heart breaking to read. And yet everyone should read it.

A Widow’s Story, a memoir

Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Collins, 2011; xi + 423

ISBN: 978-0-06-201553-2

This is an extraordinary book that hurts to read. It tells the story of the illness and sudden death of Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, Ray. He was admitted to hospital on 12^th February 2008 with pneumonia in one lung. He was then infected with E. coli in that lung. Five days later he seemed to be recovering well, even though the infection had spread to his other lung. They were even talking about putting him in a convalescent home. Seven hours after she left the hospital, Oates was telephoned to say that he was critically ill. He died in the 20 minutes it took her to reach the hospital at 00.50 on 18^th February 2008.

            The rest of the book is a detailed account of her grief and its affects on her changed over the succeeding six months.

            While she was collecting Ray’s possessions from his hospital room with him lying dead in his bed, she thought ‘a widow is one who makes mistakes’. No one told her what to do or what to think. She was on automatic pilot that night.

            Once back home she was swamped by sympathy deliveries of flowers, plants and chocolate. All she wanted was to be with Ray. She couldn’t sleep nor could she eat more than snacks taken when she was hungry. She says that without Ray the meaning had gone out of her life. The only place she felt safe and comfortable was in their bed where she read and wrote and cried.

            Because Ray had managed their finances, house and garden, she suddenly had to face these without understanding how he had managed them. Good friends helped her get through this.

            About three weeks after his death she decided to return to teaching heer students. This became a lifeline because it forced her to think about something other than Ray and his absence. Over the succeeding months she kept all her appointments to give talks and do book signings and slowly began to surface from her grief. Nevertheless she thought of herself as a personality that collapses when unperceived by others and which immediately reassembled itself like magic when in company. She saw all wives as ‘widows-to-be’.

            A friend had painted a watercolour portrait of Ray after his death. She hung the original in the kitchen and a colour photocopy in every room.

            Her suicidal thoughts started right at the beginning of her grief and continued. They reached the point where she listed all the drugs in the bathroom cabinet. A suicide note scrolled round in her head. And then someone wrote to her saying they’d tried suicide and failed and that she’s never try it again.

            While she was struggling to write anything, others believed that she was writing another novel or, even, a memoir of Ray. An unexpected side of widowhood, she discovered, was a lack of patience and a rise in irritability. When she went to discuss this with her doctor, he gave her anti-depressants which worked.

            Two months after Ray’s death she still felt guilty about being alive. At the same time, in workshops with her creative writing students, she is worried by the number who are obsessed by suicide. She knows that, without her friends, she would have killed herself by now.

            The garden stared at her. It was growing out of control. Ray used to fill it with brightly coloured annuals every year. She decides that she can’t do that herself, so changes the organisation of the garden by planting perennials. She hires a man to dig over the garden and then she plants her choice of perennials. While she is doing this, she feels that if Ray’s spirit is anywhere, it will be in the garden.

            She ends by saying:

            Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think: I kept myself alive.

            This is an eminently readable book – as you would expect from Joyce Carol Oates – but it hurts to read it. It is full of such important observations and advice that everyone should read it before they become either a widow or a widower. And learn.

For most of my life I have been concerned with the past and, in particular, physical manifestations of it, whether as paintings, earthworks or buildings. Shelby Foote and Nell Dickerson's Gone is a wake-up call to all Americans. They tell us how important their Civil War was - but this book presents hard evidence that the houses the ordinary soldiers came from are slowly disappearing from the face of the earth. It is time someone did something about it. Today would be a good time.

                GONE, a heartbreaking story of the Civil War

                Shelby Foote and Nell Dickerson

                Belle Books Inc, USA; 2011; ix + 53; colour illustrations

                ISBN: 978-1-61194-003-9

This is a book about the American Civil War. At its heart is a short story, Pillar of Fire by Shelby Foote that describes how a detachment of Union soldiers set fire to a Confederate house, having given the occupants ten minutes warning. The Captain had cold-bloodedly and scientifically developed a most efficient method for totally destroying houses by firing them.

            Nell Dickerson is Shelby Foote’s niece. He encouraged her to explore and photograph the remains of houses that were built and occupied during the Civil War.  Her beautiful photographs bear witness to the aspirations of the builders of those houses a century and a half ago. Now, her photographs starkly record that many of them are covered by vegetation while others have half fallen down.

            As Nell Dickerson says in her Afterword we should honour our past; protect our history; respect our ancestors and preserve our own past culture. In the context of the Civil War, that doesn’t just mean preserving battlefields and documents, it also means preserving the houses the soldiers and their families lived in and which lay at the centre of the land they farmed. They won’t survive for a lot longer. And when they have gone, who will be to blame for their loss? YOU, dear reader.

Madness is weird.  I suppose we've all met someone afflicted with it to some degree or other. Only we didn't know in most cases. Catherine Arnold in Bedlam takes us through the history of madness/lunacy as it has been perceived over time and, in particular, how the afflicted have been treated in London's Bedlam. It does not make good reading. I felt very guilty about how my ancestors treated the mentally ill in the past. But I can't actually do anything about it now. Well, I don't think so. William Styron, in Darkness Visible, takes us on his personal journey through his mental illness. And it's not pleasant reading. But it is revealing.

               Darkness Visible, a memoir of Madness

               William Styron

               Open Road Integrated Media, NY, 1990; 2010; 44pp

               ISBN: 978-1-936317-30-1

This is a short book that describes how Styron went through a period of intense depression. It describes how he suffered more in the late afternoon and early evening than in the morning. How this led to a sense of dread, alienation and stifling anxiety. He knew something was wrong, but delayed seeking psychiatric help. He found himself unable to sleep, or only for short spells and so became extremely exhausted. The further this situation developed, the more he thought about death. And taking his own life.

            Some 10% of the American population suffer from depression. What is rarely mentioned is the effect this has on carers, family and friends who have to support the depressive.

            Styron had been abusing alcohol for about 40 years. Suddenly he found he couldn’t stomach any alcohol at all. His body rebelled and he found the experience traumatic. This led to the start of his really bad depression. The drink had kept his anxiety at bay. Now there was nothing to do that. He reached the point when he was unable to write. Which for a writer is a pretty disastrous situation.

            Eventually he began to see a psychiatrist who prescribed drugs. But nothing worked. He describes how the mental pain of depression is unrelenting ‘and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come. Ever.’

            He was hospitalised after seriously planning suicide but realising that he couldn’t actually do it.  What helped him in hospital was the fact that ghere was a stable environment. He thinks that Group Therapy is useless except for passing time and that Art Therapy is organised infantilism. Some people might disagree.

            Once he had recovered he saw how depression had always been on the outer edge of his life for many years.

            This is an extraordinary account of one man’s experience of a severe spell of depression. Anyone who has suffered from depression will recognise their own experiences. This book will help anyone who is living with a person suffering from depression.

            The book ends with a series of good photographs from Styron’s life.

I've managed to read a few novels this month. Two are fictionalised biographies of  authors and both are pretty good reads. Jay Panini's The Last Station which is about the last year of Tolstoy's life. It brings the life the stresses and strains in his household. Colm Toibin's The Master makes you look again at Henry James's life. Ali Smith's Accidental left me adrift, to be perfectly honest. It's well written and the characters have life, but somehow I got lost. Gunter Grass's The Rat, which I know is a golden oldie, is still a pleasure to read. And then I read Gretchen Craig's short story collection, The Color of the Rose.

The Color of the Rose

Gretchen Craig

2010; v + 26 + 17 pp author information

There are three stories in this collection, the first two of which are linked. They are all set in the Deep South of America.

            In Afternoon Tea Josie, aged 6, has a doll as a present from her wealthy father. She is playing with Cleo, also aged 6, her slave half-sister dressed in a sacking dress. When a black servant, Bibi, comes in to serve tea, the mother deliberately makes her spill the tea. She shouts at her and then beats her. He, however, sweeps up the two young girls and takes them to his room where he sits them on his knees. It is clear that he has been having an affair with Bibi and that his wife is aware of it.

            We return to the same family fifteen years later in The Color of the Rose. Cleo is now a house slave who has annoyed her mistress. As punishment she is made to hoe over the rose garden. She continues to work the rose garden all summer long after she has completed her housework because she found that she enjoyed the work.  It was certainly preferable to emptying spittoons and ‘night jars’. She is, nevertheless, worried that she will be sunburned as black as the field hands because of her exposure.  She loves the colour of the roses which are mainly red, but her favourites are yellow.

            Josie’s mother is determined to get her married off. One morning Cleo is told to get flowers for a corsage and two buds to put in her hair. Because a gentleman is calling for her later in the day.

            Cleo does this and takes a yellow bud for herself. In her room in the evening she put it in her hair and studied herself in the mirror. She knew there would be no gentleman caller for her. She crushed the rose and blew out the light.

            Summer heat on the other hand is set on a small farm in the great depression of the 1930s. A mother and daughter, Etta, 24, attempt to manage the farm following the death of the husband out in the fields.  Etta had taken charge of the kitchen and cooking when she was 15. Her mother effectively did nothing about the house or on the farm. All she liked was listening to President Roosevelt and hymns on the radio. She hated Etta listening to anything else, especially modern music.

Then, one day, a man passes by asking for work in return for a roof and food. Etta gives him the work her father used to do, a bed in the barn and meals on  the kitchen step.  In time, she made a pot of coffee for them to share after supper. He told her about the places he’d been and things he’d done. As is only to be expected, mthey fall in love and made love in the barn in the dead of the night.

Etta’s brother Earl appears on the farm at heir mother’s request. He takes  the man away with him to the nearby town where he lives. Etta is heartbroken.

            Several weeks later he reappears. When Etta sees him she runs down the road. He carried a present for them of a 40 lb block of ice. Her brother had got to know him and had found him work.

            After supper, he and Etta went indoors and listened to the radio and danced quietly.

These are three very different stories. The third is about family closeness and distrust of outsiders, while the first two are about slavery and the bad treatment of slaves. All three are eminently readable.

           

  I've only read two collections of poetry this month, which makes me feel rather guilty. I re-read Siegfried Sassoon's Counter-attack and other poems written about his experiences in the trenches in World War I. The second, Karen Shenfeld's My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish was a delight.

               My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish

                Karen Shenfeld

                Guernica Editions Inc, 2010; viii + 61

                Essential Poets Series 179

                ISBN: 978-1-55071-330-5

 This is a fascinating collection of poems which celebrates the tiny things of daily life as much as the big, unanswerable,  questions of life.

            Land of Milk and Honey appears to be about the production of these materials from farms (or the Jewish Promised Land), BUT

            No groves here,

            but herds of cars,

            row upon row

            of promised bungalows.

            Sprinklered lawns greener than

            the Galilee.

Many of us would recognise the description of Living Room as one we might have seen in our grandparent’s house. One set aside for BEST.

            Sofa and chairs sealed from touch

            (lampshades also plastic-wrapped

            like your lunch-box sandwich)

            For Special Occasions Only.

A tour of Brighton Street takes you down the entire street, identifying the occupants by the colour of their front door. An ingenious variation on that Welsh problem of everyone called Jones, so it’s Jones the Milk, Jones the Cheese, Jones the Butcher.

            But you are brought up short by the next poem, In a Country called Canada, which suggests almost a touristy subject. It is, however, chillingly, about the area of Auschwitz set aside for sorting the piles of possessions taken from those about to be murdered by the SS. A cold, stark piece.

            The Sanding Prayer names the ten men making up the quorum in a synagogue and describes how each one prays.

            Israel prays with his eyes closed,

            the pages of his pearled book

            turning on the breeze of his breath;

            …..

            Nathan prays out loud,

            his recitation, a river,

            washing over polished stones;

            ….

Having discovered each of the men at prayer, the poetess shows her place

            (I pray where I cannot tempt

             And I cannot be counted,

            My praises and petitions, my thanks,

            heard and not heard, like those of all the rest.)

The title poem, My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish, is a touching account of his last days and hours and his belief in God.

            My father’s hands spoke in Yiddish,

            ….

            Ever in motion

            they argued with themselves.

What a wonderful picture she paints!

There are two poems about the Bathurst Golem. In the first the Golem is instantly recognisable:

           

            The tall, silent one,

            long hair, love beads, an embroidered

            Indian shirt and jeans,

            the draft dodger,

            up from New York State.

Who

            Holds his prayer book,

            backwards and upside down.

In the second, The Golem and the Rabbi’s wife, the Golem catches the scent of the Rabbi’s wife ‘as he bent to do her will’.

            The Infinite Daily Things is a celebration of all those tiny things you see everyday and don’t really notice:

            These infinite,

            daily things –

            like the man you

            live with,

            but no longer see,

            until you open

            your astonished eyes.

This is a theme that runs throughout the collection.

Ode to Coffee is just that, reminding us what coffee does to us both during its preparation and its consumption. Canoeing Song is about companionship, pleasure from the physicality of paddling and listening to the silence of nature when drifting on the current.

 The Ring, the very last poem in the collection, tells the story of how she dropped a ring which slipped between two floorboards. She’d bought the ring in Addis Ababa and worn it for years. She had always imagined how it had passed from mother to daughter over the generations. Now someone else could start a similar speculation when they recovered her ring from between the floorboards.

This is a superb collection of poems that takes you deep into the poet’s understanding of the world she lives in.

  And, finally, a delightful children's story with a gentle moral in it.

               I am Tama, Lucky Cat

               A Japanese Legend

               Wendy Henrichs

               Illustrated by Yoshiko Jaeggi

               Peachtree Publishing, 2011; iv + 18

This is an excellent children’s story with a gentle and caring cat as its hero.  First, it finds and then looks after a poor monk living alone in a dilapidated temple. Later, in a thunderstorm, a warrior is about to turn away from the temple because it is so dilapidated when he sees the cat and moves forward. A moment later, a huge branch of the tree he had been sheltering under, crashes to the ground. He takes this as a sign. He and his family repair the temple which becomes rich and helps the poor.

The illustrations by Yoshiko Jaeggi form an integral part of the story, for they provide the emotional aspects of the story. A true union of storyteller and illustrator.