Some great scenes from 2014 - Will you look at this! - that is all I am trying to say

Although respecting ancient tradition I made a list of best books, the fact is that I only read books incidentally.  I actually read words and lines and so on, arranged in ways that suggest scenes or characters or ideas.  I wish I were better at remembering lines and words.  What I remember are scenes.

Here are some good ones from books I read this year.  From books not mentioned yesterday, to add an arbitrary rule.

1.  Émile Zola worked in a way I understand: write big scenes and minimally fill in the connective matter.  Chapter 3 of L’Assommoir (1877) is one long working class wedding scene.  The guests gather at a bar, because of the rain they mill around, drinking, finally they wander off to the wedding dinner, where they spend many pages eating, and drinking, and eating some more.  In the middle of the chapter the guests spend four pages lost in the Louvre, baffled by the art, or laughing at it.  Not a kind scene – not a kind novel – but a good one.  “’Will you look at this!’ Boche kept saying.”  Exactly.

2.  Another party, Midsummer’s Eve, from Chapter 18 of Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle the Conqueror (1906).  Pure joy in a grim novel. “It had been an incomparable day for Lasse and for Pelle – making up for many years of neglect.  Too bad that it was over instead of just beginning.”

3.  Mary Delany for the first time looks at a flower and realizes that she could make an image of it out of colored paper.  She is 72.  In the next decade, she follows that one with 984 more flower portraits.  Molly Peacock, describing the scene in The Paper Garden (2010), can place Delany’s tools around her – ink, glue, scissors, paper – and can describe the flower, but not the mystery of inspiration.  

When the Duchess came in to check on her friend, shocked that she had taken apart her new scarlet geranium, then delighted that what Mary had composed were the petals in paper replication, the first of the great work had begun.

“I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.”

Right then Mary Delany’s friend of more that forty years supplied exactly what was necessary: applause.  (p. 309)

4.  Goethe’s Roman girlfriend, a waitress, “accidentally” spills wine on the table.  From Roman Elegies (1795).

5.  Moomintroll glimpses the spirit of winter, the Lady of the Cold, one of the strangest of many strange scenes in Trollvinter by Tove Jansson (1957).  A horse made of snow comes to life.  One of Jansson’s rare gifts was a mythic imagination.

6.  Not all memorable scenes are even scenes.  A paragraph in Johann Peter Hebel’s “Unexpected Reunion” that shows the passage of time by listing historical events has an uncanny, sublime effect that is hard to describe.

7.  Similarly: the part where Sebald visits Rousseau’s Swiss house.  Or where Eduard Mörike can’t stop writing, or where Gottfried Keller can’t stop writing, or where Robert Walser can’t stop writing.  This is all from W. G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country (1998).  The chapter on Walser ends with the writer floating away in a balloon (pp. 162-4).  Literary criticism conducted by means of scenes.

I could keep going.  I guess that is what I mostly do here.  But now it’s vacation time.  I’ll return in January to goof around with Italian literature.

Have a good holiday!

The Paper Garden: an 18th century artist, and a biographer who gets in the way

The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010) is a biography of the 18th century English artist Mary Delany by the American poet Molly Peacock.  Delany’s form was paper collages of flowers, portrayed with a botanist’s attention to detail.  Botanists would send exotic specimens to Delany to “sit” for a portrait.  It was almost a relief to learn that she would at times use a little bit of paint, but every shape and almost every shade of color is cut from paper.  The book is printed on thick, creamy paper designed to show off the numerous images, but nothing can duplicate the texture of the originals.  I would stare at the prints.  Just paper – impossible!

The collages, now owned by the British Museum, would be extraordinary objects under any circumstances.  The book’s subtitle tells the rest of the story.  Delany invented the form at the age of 72, and over the next decade, before her eyesight dimmed, she made 985 flower portraits, individual, innovative, and strangely personal.  Glue, scissors, black ink for the background, and a portfolio of colored paper, and of course a subject, say the winter cherry on the left, which to add to my amazement also incorporates, in the lower right, an actual seed pod skeleton.

Mary Delany’s biography would be of high interest even if she had never made the collages, but the sudden emergence of Delany as a fine and innovative artist puts a frame around her entire life.  How, I want to know, did she get there?

Just the question Molly Peacock asked when she discovered the flowers and conceived of this book.  The biography is organized chronologically, with one of the flowers made to imaginatively connect to the stage of Delany’s life.

Winter Cherry is an analogous name for Mrs. D.’s whole enterprise…  a self-portrait of the artist as a single stalk of a plant, showing her at four of life’s stages: the green lantern of childhood; the fully dressed, bright orange one with slight hip hoops – young womanhood; the lower lantern with part of the dress removed to show the interior of the plant – increasing maturity; and the last lantern, the heart of the aged woman.  The fine ribs of the plant material make the skeleton of the former lantern into something like a rib cage, with the cherry beating inside.  (318-9)

Note the clothing theme; it runs through the whole book.  Some, perhaps much of this is fanciful.  The author is a poet.  She takes some wild leaps.

The wildest is the inclusion at the end of each chapter of her own memoir.  Awkward teen, parents, divorce, first poetry (late, but nowhere as late as 72), happy second marriage.  Some of these episodes have a parallel with her subject’s 18th century life, but obviously not all of them.  Yet Peacock often creates links between her own life and the flower portrait that heads the chapter, sometimes different, even unrelated links.

But artworks let us leap centuries.  Artwork to artwork, hand to hand, time falls away in the presence of the marvelous.  (229)

Well, sometimes.  The metaphor elides the effort, or strain, required.  There is some strain.  The memoiristic parts are always at the end of the chapter, and have their own heading.  They could easily be skipped or skimmed.  Why does the biographer weave her own life in with that of her fascinating subject?

I found the answer in Chapter 11, which is not about Mary Delany but about her great-great-great-great-great-great niece Ruth Hayden, author of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Flowers (1980), the book that brought Delany’s life and work back to public attention.  Hayden was 58 when she completed the book.  Her formal education had ended when she was twelve.  Here, then, is another woman finding her “life’s work” at a late age.  Her story is not as remarkable as that of her distant aunt’s, but whose is?

How we have three women who took up significant creative and intellectual work at an unusually late age.  By pursuing a poetical conceit, Peacock is making an argument about the nature of creativity.  Some kinds of creativity, at least; her own, Hayden’s, and Delany’s. 

Who doesn’t hold out the hope of starting a memorable project at a grand old age?  A life’s work is always unfinished and requires creativity till the day a person dies.  (5)

Peacock describes her book as “a narrative collage in response to her visual collages” and makes clear that she did not set out to make a particular argument but rather discovered it along the way – “unconsciously Mrs. Delany’s invention of collage would seep into my own writing process.”  I am quoting from a letter Peacock sent to the book blog Alison’s Book Marks.  Is that not cool?

The Paper Garden  is a terrific book.  If Peacock’s autobiography were absent, I would not miss it, but I likely would, then, miss some of the larger meaning that can be taken from Mary Delany’s story.

The book has a website, with lots of links, including to the British Museum collection.

Also, see Rohan Maitzen’s review of the book, the kind of personal response for which the book is made.  Maitzen used the winter cherry, too.  It is irresistible.