Elliot’s Reading Week of 5/23/21: Chekhov, Carver, Beattie, Eliot (George)

Elliot’s Reading Week of 5/23/21: Chekhov, Carver, Beattie, Eliot (George)

Chekhov’s famous story The Lady with a Pet Dog (of Little Dog, or Lapdog, depending on the translator) is a story of a doomed romance, but it’s not exactly Brief Encounter, which is a deeply emotional and sad film about two married people who fall in love and are torn by guilt and remorse. Chekhov’s story is far more dark and cynical, in that the man, the central character, is a cad and a nasty person who’s betrayed his wife and family with many different women  and for whom these illicit affairs are stages to boost his ego. The Lady with the Dog whom he seduces while on vacation in the Crimea - what’s up with that? his wife’s not even suspicious of these solo vacation trips? Of course she is! - is about half his age, unhappily married (though her husband has, as far as the story lets us in, is faithful but a bit of a bore, or as she calls him, a flunkey) and she feels guilt when he seduces her - but that quickly abates. They separate as she goes him to her dull provincial town and he to Moscow - but eventually he tracks her down and she agrees to sneak off from her husband - claiming she needs a medical treatment for a “woman’s issue” (some irony there) in Moscow. Thus begins a long period in which they meet in hotel rooms; the most damning passage occurs when the man walks his young daughter to school while he’s en route to a liaison. At the end, he notices that his hair is graying and that he has generally aged. Poor guy. He never has a word of sympathy for the woman who has tossed over her life for him. One mystery of this gloomy story is the dog: What happens to him? What’s his significance? Perhaps that she is to him a lapdog, jumping at his command, knowing her place. 

Raymond Carver’s story Would You Please Be Quiet, Please is a cautionary tale of a marriage in trouble. The couple seem so well suited to each other, especial in the brief summation of their lives together with which Carver begins the story - meeting in college, falling for each other, moving from so-cal to the northern California working-class city Eureka where each takes a job teaching English at the h.s. (how sweet!) and they raise two kids. All looks great until one evening, for some reason, the guy asks his wife about a fight they’d had several years back when he suspected her of sneaking out of a party and having drunken sex with one of their so-called friends. Why does he bring this up? And why won’t he let it go? Should he? Can he? No - he can’t, and he forces her into a confession: It meant nothing, it was just a fling, I was drunk, etc. Was she right to tell him? Would a little lie  and denial have been better? In any event, the guy takes off for downtown Eureka - you can only imagine the desolation, if you’ve never been there - where he spends too much $, gets drunk, gets rolled, slinks back home and is tenderly welcomed by his worried wife. So the message, on one level, seems to be: Leave well enough alone. But the real message, the deeper meaning, is that all (or at least most) relationships have within them lies, fibs, denials, guilt, shame, and recklessness. It’s a story of two worlds, in a way, and it’s obvious that Carver knows the 2nd world, the dark world of saloons and pool halls, much better: The account of the happy family/couple is a bit sketchy and hard to accept, but the account of the husband’s night of misery seems right on the money. We have to know or believe that Carver’s been there. The “open” ending - a story without a true resolution, in the Joyce tradition, may disturb some readers, who want a real answer - but life’s not like that. 

Ann Beattie’s story Janus plays a little trick on us. The story is about a realtor who’s running a successful business and is in a prosperous and seemingly happy marriage (cf Would You Please Be Quiet) - no mention of kids, as I recall, though they do have a pet dog (cf, Lady with a Little Dog?). The story, strangely enough, is about her enchantment with a bowl that, as she notes, would be unlikely to draw much attention at, say, a crafts fair; the bowl is attractive, though, and enigmatic, seeming to throw different shades of color in varying light (cf the realtor herself). The realtor is obsessed with this bowl, and uses it in as part of the “show” setting that she creates for every house visit for prospective buyers - she attributes almost magical powers to this bowl, and brings it home each night - even though once she forgot and returned to quickly retrieve her prize possession (cf the realtor’s marriage?). At the very end of the story, final 2 paragraphs I think, do we get the reveal: The bowl was a present from the man w/ whom she’d had an affair - brief? - some years back; the affair, it seems, is over, but not her feelings for the man. Keep in mind the title: Janus, the god who looks “both ways,” past and future, as with this character and this story - but also the god who is double-faced, which this woman, who stages houses and who hides things from her spouse, is Janus-like herself. So we see another story about an affair (quite different from the recently read Chekhov and Carver stories: one a lifelong sad relationship, on a drunken one-night fling, and this one a significant relationship but of the past, except for lingering feelings) and, in particular, about secrets kept from families, partners, spouses, children. All of these secrets can lead, it seems, to disaster - and in these 3 stories we see varying ways in which the secrets can be suppressed (Chekhov), revealed (Carver), and hidden in plain site and always in danger of being “cracked open” (Beattie). 

Prompted by recent excursions into short stories, I re-read Chekhov’s “A Visit to Friends,” in which a 30-something man with a successful law practice in Moscow agrees to visit a set of friends he’s known since you: a woman and her husband, the woman’s sister, and a 3rd friend. They used to pal around together; now, the relationship is tainted because the woman (Va?) is soon to be forced to sell her estate; the man (I wish I could remember these names!) has for years helped them out of various financial straits, but the husband is a hopeless libertine and spendthrift. There is longer any way that the an can help these friends out - and the husband, whom he particularly dislikes, keeps pressing him for a loan, which they both know will never be repaid. Meanwhile, the 3rd woman, Na?, seems to be a likely match for the man, and in some beautiful passages we see how stands outside in the moonlight, and the man struggles with the idea - should he come over to her? What would this lead to? And, eventually, he turns away from this offer of love and slinks back to Moscow and to his work. Has he wasted his life, or avoided a terrible mistake and inevitable heartbreak? We have to believe, in today’s terms, that he’s “just not into her.” But “matchmaking” was quite different then (1898); the social network was narrower. There’s a beautiful and similar scene in Tolstoy’s AK, when, if I remember, a man and a woman are part of a mushroom-hunting excursion and everyone expects the man to propose to her and he doesn’t, and the two life courses diverge (to her sorrow, it seems). 

The third “Book (of 8) in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is titled Waiting for Death, and this section is framed (sort of) by the illness/deathwatch of two totally different characters/personalities: the elderly Causubon, now back in England after the disastrous honeymoon post-marriage to Dorothy Brooke, discussing her desire to play a more vital part in advancing his going-nowhere scholarship, has an apoplexy and seems to be near death. D. summons the new, dynamic, advanced-thinking (i.e., the exact opposite of her husband) Lydgate to manage the case (by-passing the long-established, barely competent docs in the region - which makes L really uncomfortable as he tries to follow protocol and not make enemies in the profession); it’s obvious that L and D have sparks, but for the moment D is simply frightened about her husband’s malady. At the other end of this section, the wealthiest guy in town, the miserly and miserable Featherstone, is on his deathbed - naturally attracting a hive of visitors, mostly relatives whom he hasn’t seen in years. He pretty much refuses all their overtures; many of them camp out at his estate (Stone House, or something like that - hard and unmoving), eating the ample comestibles. The only person he’ll see is Mary Garth, the young, somewhat sharp-tongued woman who’s like his caretaker - the most mature and sensible character aside from Dorothy, maybe more so when we consider D’s disastrous marriage; F commands her to destroy his will and retrieve a secret will that he’s signed and stashed in the closet; he also tries to give her a purse full of gold. Wisely, she refuses these commands - as she’s already hated by the jealous relatives who fear the worst from her. the character she seems destined for is Fred Vincy, the charming spendthrift - and we see him in the first pages of this section engage in some preposterous scheme to trade one horse for another and sell the 2nd at a big profit - but he’s a kid and sort of a dope and playing with pro horse traders - so of course he loses his shirt, and as a result stiffs Mary Garth’s nearly impoverished family on money he’d borrowed. What matters so much to them is of indifference to him. Nice guy - but charming. His sister, Rosamond, is the town beauty - and she becomes engaged to Lydgate, and we can see where that’s headed: She is no intellectual match or companion for him, and everyone but he can see that. On a side track, Causubon (and Dorothea) receive word that C’s nephew, Ladislaw, the errant poet and painter, is coming back to England; D fears the effect this might have on her weakened husband and, to make matters worse, her father, a local pol., invites L to stay with them and hope to make him a candidate for office: So what effect will this have on the unhappily married D? Or on the nearly defunct C? Or, for that matter, on the proper match for D., Lydgate? 

Elliot’s Reading Week of 5-9-21: McGuane, Graham Greene

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 5-9-21: McGuane, Graham Greene 

Just a brief note here on the excellent Thomas McGuane story in the current New Yorker, Balloons: McGuane has quietly in his long career has been building a record as one of the best American short story writers, in particular with his late-life focus on the changing Western landscape and culture, as California Hollywood/Technology/Entrepreneurial money has flooded into Montana, create a whole new social class - the Range Rover ranchers (my coinage) - that has displaced and in some sense corrupted the very culture that drew McGuane to this land in the first place: outdoors, jovially self-sufficient, hard-drinking, in other words the Hemingway of his Idaho years with a strange admixture of progressive independence and right-wing conspiratorial. The current NYer story is narrated by a Montana physician who gets word that a woman w/ whom he’d had an affair has recently died, leaving her long-time ex-husband in a state of alcoholic despair, with which the narrator has little empathy. The story is short and compact, as is typical of McGuane’s late style, and has a surprising, gut-punch ending, which I will not reveal: definitely worth your reading. 

I’m about half-way through (re)reading Graham Greene’s 1051 novel, The End of the Affair, and my overwhelming feeling about the book at this juncture is that the narrator, Maurice, is about the most despicable narrators in modern literature. He has a blatant affair with the wife of his friend Henry, makes no attempt at discretion, in fact takes relish in humiliating Henry, a true literary sad sack, and then wallows in self-pity when the woman breaks off with him and resumes her marriage. Moreover, as the novel begins, the narrator hates Henry (for no good reason as far as I can see other than jealousy perhaps) and goes so far as to hire detective to see if Henry’s wife (sorry, I forget her name) is seeing another man; good for her if she is! Improbably, the detective, a good comic figure, absconds with the woman’s diaries, which he provides to the narrator; reading them makes the narrator/Maurice seem like the sexiest and most intelligent man alive - a bit of self-aggrandizement there? All told, both she and him are immoral and unlikely and I don’t know why I liked this novel (and the film based on it) at one time. Maybe there will be some twists in the second half that can make this novel more palatable? 

And in the end … Graham Greene’s 1951 novel, The End of the Affair, doesn’t get any better, in fact, maybe worse. Seriously: The narrator of this story has a two-year relationship, primarily sexual, with the wife of one of his neighbors/cronies; when the woman dies of some kind of cold caught during a rainstorm, the narrator becomes friends and eventually roommate or tenant, of her widowed husband. There is little likelihood to any of this story ; the wife and the narrator are pretty nasty characters, and the widowed husband is just a schmo, a pathetic guy who was unable to satisfy his wife sexually or otherwise and for who we feel sorrow and pity but also contempt. The last 50 pp. or so focus on the narrator’s guilt - not for his despicable behavior toward the duped husband but because he thinks that the deceased wanted to be given Catholic rites at her death - and we go through 50 or so meandering pages about whether she was baptized a Christian at birth - Green even raises the possibility that the deceased is working miracles from beyond. Oh, please; would this novel ever have been published had not GG earned a loyal readership through many better novels and had there not been some kind of interest in what made GG convert to Catholicism some 30 years back. Today, who cares? 

Elliot’s Reading week of 5-2-21: Proust biography

 Elliot’s Reading week of 5-2-21: Proust biography 

George D. Painter’s definitive biography of Marcel Proust - Proust: The Early Years (1959) - is definitely a not a book meant to introduce Proust to new readers; it’s a book only for those who have read (and loved) Proust’s novels. And for those (of us) who have, it’s a tremendously rewarding read.  Yes, we get more detail than we’d ever imagined, more than we thought any biographer could assemble and master — All of Proust’s family members and friends, all of the hundreds (it seems) whom he’d encountered on his social cycle: It’s hard going at times, keeping all those titled members of the nobility in mind. But we get the overall picture, which in some ways surprises us. Yes, Proust was a spoiled rich kid who spent far too much time and money trying to rise in social class and to observe the mechanisms of the intellectual and social life of the French nobility ca. 1900. Yet: It’s also clear that Proust paid close attention to everything and everyone and spent the latter half of his life (accounted for in vol 2 of this bio) re-creating the scenes, moments, quips, terrors, insights of his youth. In other words, whether he (or his beleaguered parents) knew it or not, he was always working. A few of the great insights in Painter’s work include: Proust didn’t just “draw on” the people and places of his youth, but re-created, re-imagined, and re-constructed all the time. Each character in the Search is based not on one person alone but on elements drawn from many. Similarly, none of the people MP knew in his youth is the source for one character only: All of the people of his youth provide elements for many Search characters. It’s extremely difficult to explain the precise qualities of the Search, but Painter makes a few attempts, and he does particularly well in thinking about Proust and Time, discussing - briefly and almost aphoristically - how for Proust memory is not a matter of description but of evocation: a scene, a moment, and object from the past, when recollected, allows the writers, and reader, to pass through a portal and perceive the world in a new way: the steeple seen at sunset in the distance, the famous Madeleine and tea, the red shoes of the duchess. He neither wasted time nor did time waste him, to paraphrase another author. Further, it’s amazing how hard MP did work on his writing, even before he retired to his bedroom to write the Search: He wrote several books (early passes at the Search) plus much criticism and journalism. The Search, to my surprise, didn’t come all of a piece from an amateur author: MP was a professional for many years. Also, the range of people he knew in his youth - including a # of famous authors, painters, composers (Mallarme, Debussy, et al) - is amazing, and shouldn’t have been surprising but did surprise me. Also, the suffering he endured - not only built and uneasiness about his sexual desires but also, and primarily, his serious breathing problems, his constant need for attention, coddling, and pity - all very sad. The image of him in layers of fur and thick scarf at his brother’s wedding is terribly sad. Painter’s work is also valuable for capturing and preserving numerous quips and examples of the extremely dry wit of the drawing room (and of the Guermantes). And what a riot Proust must have been!- entertaining his friends from his bed/dressing room, as he worked or talked through the night and slept in daylight (at one point getting up very early, at 2 in the afternoon). It’s obvious that Proust had many insights that he shared with friends about all of the arts and, to some degree, about current events (and much gossip). He must have been great to know - and we do know him, through the Search obviously. Also, he traveled quite a bit within the Continent, and we can see in certain passages how he transformed his family locales to the famous imaginary settings of Combray and Balbec. And the brief account of MP’s hilarious interlude as a librarian - a job he held for years without ever, it seems, putting in a day’s work - is insightful and sounds like a page from Borges. Has any other writer come close to what Proust achieved? I have a lot of respect for those who today write auto fiction (have read the complete Knousgaard), and they are moving and insightful, often, but without the complexity and psycho- physiological insights that we get from Proust; the closest to him, oddly, is I think Seabald, who understands how scenes, moments, places can open us up to undiscovered and elusive modes and passages. I’ll cite, though, two shortcomings in Painter’s: First of all, it’s sad to see his many references to Proust’s homosexuality as a perversion, as if it’s a malady or illness from which he should have tried to recover; Painter doesn’t make a big deal about this, and I sense he’s softened his own view to make this volume perhaps more likely to be published (a la Proust), but still - these passages are disturbing today, 60 years down the line. Also, any contemporary biography of this magnitude today would have much more and much better selection and use of photographs, including perhaps some taken to illustrate places today, and much better use of maps, of Paris, Illiers, and other Proustian locales.