Like spice in a bun it lends a briskness - George Douglas Brown and Scottish

When I conceived the Scottish Challenge, or, really, when I researched it, I began to wonder what, exactly, Scottish literature was.  The Scottish content of Lord Byron or Margaret Oliphant or George MacDonald or Thomas Carlyle seemed perfunctory.  Robert Louis Stevenson’s turn to Scotch literature, in a few novels and stories, was deliberate.  Walter Scott, curiously, made a conscious turn away from Scottish subjects (think, Ivanhoe (1820)), although he never gave them up entirely.  But is even a Scottish subject especially unique?  Is Madame Bovary a Normandy novel?

The tradition that does seem uniquely Scottish, to me, at least, is literature that really uses Scottish dialect.  Scottish in fiction begins with Scott, although his use of it is limited, and is continued by James Hogg and John Galt.  For Galt, the dialect is essential, but it is important to remember that he is writing for the larger English audience.  He had to deftly flavor his writing with cask-aged Scotch without drowning it.  George Douglas Brown adopts Galt’s method.

A sample: 

There had been a fine cackling in Barbie… Not even in the gawcey days of its prosperity had the House with the Green Shutters been so much talked of.

The Canongate Classics edition of The House with the Green Shutters I’m using does not have a glossary, but does it need it?  For one thing, the reader has the internet; for another, “gawcey” is clear in context, not to mention “a fine cackling” – any writer would be happy with that one.

This is the narrator, who mostly uses standard English, with little nuggets of dialect worked in.  Here’s a limited third person example, with the Scottishness not in the vocabulary but the expression:

And here Gourlay had treated him like a doag!  Ah, well, he would maybe be upsides with Gourlay yet, so he might!

And finally, some dialogue, where one might expect a lot of juicy Scottish, and a clue to some of the pride in the Scottish tongue:

"Well, I like young men to be quiet," said Sandy Toddle.  "I would rather have them a wee soft than rollickers."

"Not I!" said the baker.  "If I had a son, I would rather an ill deil [devil] sat forenenst me at the table than parratch in a poke.  Burns (God rest his banes!) struck the he'rt o't.  Ye mind what he said o' Prince Geordie:

[snippet of Robbie Burns snipped]

Dam't, but Burns is gude."

"Huts, man, dinna sweer sae muckle!" frowned the old Provost.

"Ou, there's waur than an oath now and than," said the baker.  "Like spice in a bun it lends a briskness.” (Ch. 21)

That’s it, exactly, like spice in a bun.

The House with the Green Shutters may very well mark the end of the Scottish Reading Challenge for me - 38 books over the last year, more or less, not bad.  This novel, a direct response to the 19th century Scottish novel, but also the beginning of a new tradition, is a logical place to stop.  There are still two months for anyone else to play along.  Good, clean fun.  Or not.  Perhaps my favorite passage from Brown’s novel:

"Deacon Allardyce, your heart's black-rotten," he said at last.

The Deacon blinked and was silent.  Tam had summed him up.  There was no appeal.

Man, you're a noticing boy - George Douglas Brown and imagination

I keep thinking I ought to do something more like a review of The House with the Green Shutters.  It’s an excellent novel easily worth reading, for the non-squeamish.  It is important in that it is the founder of the modern Scottish novel.  I will leave it to others to decide what that means – it doesn’t mean much to me.  The introduction to the Canongate Classics edition points to Brown’s influence on Alisdair Gray, whose books I have leafed through not read (Lanark looks good), and Grassic Gibbon, who has a spectacular name, a pseudonym, I am sad to say.

If The House with the Green Shutters were merely the a blast at the narrowness of small town Scotland, I doubt it would be much.  A well-made jape, useful satire of the sentimental romanticization of Scotland, good for a laugh.

Brown is after something else, though.  He has an argument to make – that the narrowness has a specific cause: lack of imagination.  Strangely, he makes his case through a character who has too much imagination. 

I’m right in the middle of the book.  Young John Gourlay, in high school, is in a train station.  A storm approaches:

The fronting heavens were a black purple.  The thunder, which had been growling in the distance, swept forward and roared above the town.  The crash no longer rolled afar, but cracked close to the ear, hard, crepitant.  Quick lightning stabbed the world in vicious and repeated hate. (Ch. 14)

Brown’s a good descriptive writer, I assume that’s clear enough.  Something else is going on here, though.  Although there’s no way to know it at this moment, the language is hovering somewhere between the narrator and John – “in vicious and repeated hate,” where does that come from?  Or, possibly, the narrator shares John’s overripe sensitivity.  A raindrop strikes John:

It was lukewarm.  He started violently - that warmth on his cheek brought the terror so near.

The heavens were rent with a crash, and the earth seemed on fire.  Gourlay screamed in terror.

John has been infected by his father’s stupeed spitefulness, but he has his own character (his mother’s, it turns out).  His imagination is extraordinarily vivid to the point that it is dangerous.  He notices everything, and imagines more.  Why explain it, since John knows it himself:

Suddenly a blaze of lightning flamed wide, and a fork shot down its centre.

"That," said Gourlay, "was like a red crack in a white-hot furnace door."

"Man, you're a noticing boy," said the baker.

"Ay," said John, smiling in curious self-interest, "I notice things too much. They give me pictures in my mind. I'm feared of them, but I like to think them over when they're by."

I presume that George Douglas Brown is in some sense describing himself, his understanding of his own artistic temperament.  John in fact turns his hand to writing a bit later, with results that are dramatic and ultimately destructive, just annihilating.  His father, his townsmen, all lack imagination.  John has too much.  If The House with the Green Shutters is more than satire, something more unusual and disquieting, it’s right here.

Postscript: Madame Bovary readers may notice a certain kinship between that novel and this one.

Just the stupeedity o' spite! - beginning The House with the Green Shutters

I’m going to keep the magnifying glass out.  The House with the Green Shutters begins obliquely:

The frowsy chambermaid of the ‘Red Lion’ had just finished washing the front door steps.  She rose from her stooping posture and, being of slovenly habit, flung the water from her pail straight out, without moving from where she stood.  The smooth round arch of the falling water glistened for a moment in mid-air.  John Gourlay, standing in front of his new house at the head of the brae, could hear the swash of it when it fell.  The morning was of perfect stillness.

John Gourlay, the tyrant of Barbie, is one of the two main characters of George Douglas Brown’s novel.  That maid is not, but we begin with her.  Actually, the key is that we begin at the Red Lion, headquarters of the enemies of Gourlay and his too-ostentatious house with the green shutters, the house mentioned in the second-to-last sentence.  As usual, if the writer is careful and in control of his material, the beginning packs a lot in.  The first-time reader has no hope of seeing any of this.  I didn’t know who Gourlay was, I didn’t know the “new house” is the house of the title, I didn’t know anything.

The next, short paragraph:

The hands of the clock across "the Square" were pointing to the hour of eight.  They were yellow in the sun.

Still with the town, not with the characters.  Between the Red Lion and the Square, Brown has established the space for almost all of the outdoor scenes of the book.  Then there’s that sun, the beginning of Brown’s recurring joke, that the town of Barbie has the most pleasant weather in Scotland.  Dark deeds under the bright sun.

Those yellow clock hands, the wash-water caught in midair, and then its “swash” – a reader who does not know the 1901 publication date can guess that we are post-Flaubert.  The point of view has a nice fluidity, too.  We see the maid, objectively, but then who comments that she’s lazy?  John Gourlay cannot see the maid, but he can hear the water, and we know that, somehow, since we’re with him, too.  Then back into the Square.  In and out, up and over.  The writer's imagination goes where it wants.

As far as the story goes, in the five pages of the first chapter, we learn that this day, this moment, is the high point of John Gourlay’s life.  By a coincidence of scheduling, all twelve of his wagons (he’s in the carrying trade – cheese, bricks, anything) will leave his hilltop yard, with its new house, and move through town at once, in a massive display of power and contempt.  Massive for this little town.  Everyone comes out to see it.

"I hope they liked it!" he thought, and he nodded several times at the town beneath his feet, with a slow up-and-down motion of the head, like a man nodding grimly to his beaten enemy.  It was as if he said, "See what I have done to ye!"

It’s all downhill from here.  Since the house is on top of a hill, that’s literal.  Is that cheap symbolism, or is the writer who gives it up as too easy a dang fool?

The posts's title is actually from Chapter 2, and could be the title of the novel.

"Puffy Importance" was one of his nicknames - George Douglas Brown describes a character

The House with the Green Shutters (1901) is an extraordinary novel.  I suppose I should try to make that case, and not just assert it.  For now, I’ll just assert.  Anyway, it’s not a novel for everyone, and what novel is.

I want to look at something else.  Descriptions of characters, of people, in fiction: mostly useless?  At its best – as with any element of fiction – description of faces and hands and hair is essential.  Those currently enjoying Madame Bovary will see all sorts of wonderful examples of that.  How often, though, are even good writers at their best?  Thin face, small red mouth, pointed nose, bulging eyes, tiny ears, high forehead, a meadow of green hair – presented in a list like this, what reader really remembers it?  I did not go into it when I wrote about Ivan Turgenev’s novella Rudin, but this was one of the features that made the story resemble a play.  Character enters – describe character in exhaustive detail – never mention a single one of those details again.  Functional, but artless.

What does George Douglas Brown do?  Here’s the Rev. Mr Struthers, a character mentioned earlier but only met "in person" in Chapter 20, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, and never seen again.

He had big splay feet, short stout legs, and a body of such bulging bulbosity that all the droppings of his spoon - which were many - were caught on the round of his black waistcoat, which always looked as if it had just been spattered by a gray shower.

So this is going to be a list.  A page and a half in fact, this first paragraph a physical description, the second mental.  Speaking only for myself, though, this list is memorable.  As if “bulging bulbosity” were not enough, we have the disgusting intrusion of the “droppings,” merely food, I guess.  Somehow the word “gray” really rubs it in – it’s not merely soup and crumbs, but their ancient remains.  The description continues:

His eyebrows were bushy and white, and the hairs slanting up and out rendered the meagre brow even narrower than it was.  His complexion, more especially in cold weather, was a dark crimson.  The purply colour of his face was intensified by the pure whiteness of the side whiskers projecting stiffly by his ears, and in mid-week, when he was unshaven, his redness revealed more plainly, in turn, the short gleaming stubble that lay like rime on his chin.

Is this as good?  I don’t think so.  Maybe moving towards a too-muchness.  The contrast of colors, though, that has to work.  It’s simple, even cartoonish – white vs. dark, whether crimson or purple, and then the whiteness is brought in again.  The stubble, that’s good, too.  The rime evokes different stubble, stubble in a field.  The earlier mention of cold weather (it is actually sunny summertime at this point of the story) prepares the reader’s imagination for the overlay of the frosty field.  Two more lines:

His eyes goggled, and his manner at all times was that of a staring and earnest self-importance.  "Puffy Importance" was one of his nicknames.

All right, that seals it.  This is a great description.  I’m going to remember Puffy Importance long after I’ve forgotten much of the rest of The House with the Green Shutters.

Two more lines from Rev. Mr Struthers, not as evidence of anything:

“[A]t the Day of Judgment every herring must hang by his own tail!” (Ch. 5)

“But perhaps," he added, with solemn and pondering brows - "perhaps he was a little too fond of Hegel.  Yess, I am inclined to think that he was a little too fond of Hegel."  Mrs. Eccles, listening from the Black Bull door, wondered if Hegel was a drink. (Ch. 20)

'Anderson's Sting o' Delight' 's very good - George Douglas Brown pours the strong stuff

Why not spend a week with a little-known novel?  At the end of the week, it might be better known.  It should be.

The grim and pessimistic The House with the Green Shutters (1901) by George Douglas Brown has been the biggest Scottish Reading Challenge surprise since the grim and pessimistic The City of Dreadful Night by Bysshe Vanolis.  Unlike Vanolis, Brown is not any sort of visionary writer, which, to me, makes him more challenging.  The cosmic pessimism of Vanolis exists somewhere down in the depths of the soul, to the extent that it exists at all.  Brown’s grimness is altogether smaller but closer to my daily life.

The House with the Green Shutters is a tyrannical father versus weak son story, subdivision: small town.  The townspeople sometimes function as a petty, mean-spirited chorus.  “Ours is a nippy locality” (Ch. 10) says Brown in a grotesque deadpan worthy of Thackeray.  Sly business tricks, cancer, overweening pride, Robert Burns, and an absolutely astounding quantity of Scotch whisky all play a part in the story.  The Scotch is the good stuff:

"I generally prefer 'Kinblythmont's Cure,'" said Gourlay, with the air of a connoisseur. "But 'Anderson's Sting o' Delight' 's very good, and so's 'Balsillie's Brig o' the Mains.'" (Ch. 20)

Brown warns the reader, repeatedly, that tragedy will ensue, and boy does it.  Chapter 25, near the end, an unflinching portrait of angry abuse, is almost unbearable in its awful tension, hard on the reader, but even harder on the characters.  Perhaps the results are tragic.  I did not find much in the way of catharsis in the end, but who knows.

The novel – all novels, really – should come with a warning label.  This one is not for readers who fear: dialect writing; dry humor; a discomforting view of the world.  The dialect and humor, at least, are essential to the art of the novel. Brown’s style is related to that of John Galt, and the novel is the only clear descendant of The Entail and The Provost (both 1822) I’ve ever read.  Galt’s Scotland is all sunshine and wooly lambs compared to the brutal Brown.  No, strike that – one of Brown’s ironies is that his town is almost always sunny.  Not much of the pathetic fallacy here.  The most shady doings take place in bright daylight.

Brown also has some similarities to Thomas Hardy.  The overbearing father is in part brought down by a younger, more entrepreneurial rival, a subplot that reminded me strongly of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).  Hardy often seems to me to be groping at the limits of his language, attempting to express the inexpressible, like Vanolis in this sense.  Brown is not just more plain-spoken but his ideas almost exclude the transcendent.  Everything gets pulled back into the mud.

Poor George Douglas Brown.  He wrote this novel, its quality I suspect a surprise even to the author, and received some genuine acclaim, and sales.  A year later, he died of pneumonia, age 33.  Brutal.

Let’s see what I can do with a week of The House with the Green Shutters.

The acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time - the spoiled Jekyll and Hyde

This curious item, copied from page 187 of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (1980), depicts the streets and buildings near the house of Dr. Henry Jekyll.  Most of the information presented in the map can be found in the first chapter of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point, a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence.

In the lower left, the arrow representing the “stumping” Mr. Hyde is about to crush, “like some damned Juggernaut,” the arrow representing a little girl.  The scrap is not actually Nabokov’s but rather a “student drawing… with Nabokov’s alterations.”  The handwriting is mostly VN’s – “Freshly painted shutters” and so on.

I want to make one more alteration.  The dissecting room, the hiding-place of the hideous Hyde, is not directly connected to Jekyll’s house, but separated by a small courtyard with no other exits.  Stevenson’s precision, the fact that any good reader can reconstruct this map, is a good part of what makes Jekyll and Hyde the best thing he ever wrote.

The other part is the strength of the “allegory,” as his wife called it.  Hyde’s entrance has “a blind forehead of discoloured wall” and is “sinister,” “blistered,” and “distained.”  It “thrusts” itself into an otherwise pleasant side street.  Jekyll’s house is perfectly respectable, on a main square, and no one knows – no, that’s wrong, no one understands – the blatantly obvious symbolism of the ugly little piece in the back and to the side.

My favorite sentence of Jekyll and Hyde, in which a bachelor lawyer is enjoying “a bottle of a particular old wine”:

In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. (“Incident of the Letter”)

Jekyll and Hyde is filled with transformative potions.  By itself, this passage is merely finely purplish.  It becomes more complex when read against the “compound” of “dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green” that transforms Hyde back into Dr. Jekyll.

How many readers begin Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde without knowing the rudiments of the story?  The characters have become part of the language.  The reader has an opportunity, then, to watch Stevenson's language, and his imagery and structure – to keep track of the “how” of the novel the first time through.  The “how” is amazing.  Obvious, even – of course Hyde’s door is horrible, of course wine is an identity-changing substance.  Obvious once I see how it all fits together, but not before.

Kevin at Interpolations has written about one way it all fits together, about the clever mix of documents we read and documents we don’t that pulls the story along, and how the documents are not just a device, but a theme, another approach to the ideas of the book.  I guess I have turned his well-focused post into another example of what I’m trying to get at here.

This is the Stevenson book I recommend to everyone.  Seventy pages in my Oxford World’s Classics edition.  Culturally significant.  Halloween-appropriate!  And, although spoiled rotten in one way, full of surprises for any careful reader.

Stevenson takes on Scott, and wins - Scottish Stevenson

What have I read, four Scotch novels of Robert Louis Stevenson?  Some Scottish stories, too, none of which were among his best, except, perhaps, the ghost story ”Thrawn Janet.”  One of the novels, Weir of Hermiston, is unfinished.  I wonder if it would have been the last one.  His imagination was settling into the South Seas.  Inspiration struck in strange ways for Stevenson, so who knows.

He had proved his point, though, or at least a point I glimpse in these novels.  Stevenson had deliberately set himself up against Walter Scott, inventor of the Scottish novel, inventor of the historical novel, and, in terms of influence, the Most Important Novelist of All Time.  Stevenson was moving onto Scott’s turf, claiming it as his own.

Kidnapped and Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae are all set soon after the events of Waverley, Scott’s first novel.  The events are the most important of modern Scottish history, the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which resulted in one of the great romantic defeats, the suppression of the Highlands.  Kidnapped brilliantly plunges its young, innocent hero into the middle of the chaos, ongoing after six years.  Weir of Hermiston is linked more closely to Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian.  Stevenson is working with, pressing against, only the best Scott novels, at least.

Compared to Scott, Stevenson’s books are sleeker, faster, uncluttered, while still retaining a mild flavor of 18th century language.  Scott has trouble keeping to his story or getting to his point; Stevenson gets there all too quickly. Stevenson’s books are less ambitious in scope, although not in art, while Scott has a grander reach, which does not always serve him well, either.

In “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), Stevenson writes that, as a child, he “liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards the close of the year 17-,' several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls.”  That’s not quite how The Antiquary begins, but it does start with an inn, a real one (still in “A Gossip on Romance”):

The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.  There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine - in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.  Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the 'Antiquary.'  But you need not tell me - that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.

Hawes Inn was so famous that tourists came to see it, but Stevenson was not satisfied.  Yes, Scott told a story about it, but not the story, or not the right story.  It took a few years, but Stevenson found his own use for the inn in Kidnapped (1886).

I should be clear – I don’t think Stevenson was really competing with Scott in the sense that he was trying to defeat or replace Scott.  Instead, Stevenson was measuring himself against Scott, at the time still widely considered the greatest novelist in English.  Sometimes, like Henry James, I wish Stevenson had wanted to measure himself against, I don’t know, George Eliot, or Henry James.  But Scott, that was plenty ambitious.

I want to point out a post at Lizzy’s Literary Life which has a fine Kidnapped-related photo and other links.  Now it’s Stevenson who draws the tourists to Hawes Inn.

Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties in the kirk - mature Stevenson

Weir of Hermiston – I keep wanting to call it THE Weir, but Weir is a person, a surname, not a title or object or ghost – is a story of a struggling father and son.  The father is a Scottish judge, the son a student; they differ on the death penalty, among other things.  The first page warns the reader that dark deeds lie ahead, but the novel is cut short by Stevenson’s death before anything too ‘orrible happens.  Friends of Stevenson claimed that he told them the plot; it sounds exciting and absurd.

The novel we have gives us the story of the hero’s family, the story of the heroine’s family, a couple of father-son encounters, including a dull debate about capital punishment, and a superb scene of the first meeting of the love interests which by itself is a reason to regret the early loss of this writer.  He was maturing.  This post, in fact, should be rated PG for late Victorian sexual content.

Archie and Christina have heard of each other, but not met.  They both know that the other is single, attractive, of the right age, and so on.  In Chapter VI, “A Leaf from Christina’s Psalm-book,” they spend a church service checking each other out.  I’m modernizing the language in the interest of clarity.  It’s also a perfect Scottish spring Sunday, so sensibilities are heightened.

Hmm, so many good sentences in this scene, even better than any I’m going to include, lovely wandering, intricate things.  I’ll start here, with part of the page or two on Christina’s clothes:

According to the pretty fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it.  Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses.

And there’s more of this – a hat of “chipped straw” and so on.  How does Stevenson know so much about clothes?  “Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child.”  What thing?  A cute ambiguity there.  He admires her breasts; she knows he’s doing so, and actually begins to panic, reaching for a handkerchief, her psalm-book, a piece of candy:

Last she put a ‘sugar-bool’ in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step. It was such a homely-like thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties in the kirk; and, in a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high. At this signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense of his ill-behaviour. What had he been doing?

Now both parties are flushed and uncomfortable, but at least “[i]t seemed to [Christina] that she was clothed again.”  The really deft thing Stevenson does here is slipping from character to character, giving us their solipsistic conversation, imaginary in some sense, real in another.  They’re not looking at each other, but might; then they are; then they’re not; and how can we meet again after church?  All in six or seven pages.  Not all of Weir of Hermiston is so clever.  I have a suspicion that a couple of the chapters are less finished than others.  This one was ready to go.

More rounding up - Robert Louis Stevenson's novels

For all of the Robert Louis Stevenson I have read in the past year, I have perversely avoided writing about his novels.  I read all of the most famous ones, all, except for Jekyll and Hyde, for the first time, but not a peep about them – except for The Ebb-Tide, which is not remotely well known and as a result was a great shock.  What I’ve read:

Treasure Island, 1883
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886
Kidnapped, 1886
The Master of Ballantrae, 1889
Catriona aka David Balfour, 1893, sequel to Kidnapped
The Ebb-Tide, 1894, co-written with Lloyd Osborne, Stevenson’s stepson
Weir of Hermiston, 1896, unfinished

And there are six more novels, of which one is unfinished, and three co-written.  Eleven novels and two substantial fragments in twelve years, along with numerous stories, travel writing and essays.  The quality of Stevenson’s writing given that pace is startling, but perhaps we have here a hint about my uneasiness with Stevenson’s novels.  They’re narrow, by which I mean they do not always do much.

Most of these novels are boy’s books, adventure novels.  By itself, the genre puts a severe limit on the scope of the novel.  Treasure Island and Kidnapped must be among the dozen best boy’s novels.  Individual scenes – the battle in the rigging in Treasure Island, or the entire beginning of the novel, really, in the inn, or the siege of the ship’s cabin in Kidnapped – are unsurpassable.  Whatever Stevenson chooses to do with his novels, he does as well as almost anyone.  Honor, friendship, tolerance, integrity – the stories explore meaningful subjects.  They just can’t go too far, or they become something else.

Catriona, for example, is, ethically, quite a bit richer than Kidnapped, and becomes something else.  The political plot may be a bit too complex, actually.  As an adventure novel, it’s succeeds only sporadically, a good thing, as I see it, since it demonstrates Stevenson extending his reach,* with a strong payoff in the South Seas fiction, and, to the extent that one can judge from what we have, Weir of Hermiston.  Poor Stevenson – he died at a creative peak.

Treasure Island has, essentially, no female characters.  No women in Kidnapped, either, or Jekyll and Hyde, or The Ebb-Tide.  Stevenson had trouble writing women, and knew it.  One solution – write about pirate ships and the like.  Another – work on the problem.  I’m almost sad to report that the two women in Catriona are as interesting and alive as the men, and the heroine of Weir of Hermiston promises to be as good.  Why sad?  Because I think Stevenson had genuinely solved the problem, just before his early death.  So now his best female creations are in 1) a fragment, and 2) a little-read sequel.  What bad luck!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an exception to everything I have said.  Form, style, and subject blend as nowhere else in Stevenson’s fiction.  The Ebb-Tide is a different sort of book, too, an anti-adventure novel.  And they’re all dang good, every one I read. Like I expect every novel to do everything!  Henry James was almost irritated by Treasure Island, irritated by such good writing and imaginative power put in the service of something he was not sure was worth doing.  But he genuinely, publicly, admired Stevenson’s writing and creativity, and so do I.

* Catriona also contains my favorite Scotch dialect piece of Stevenson’s, a first-rate ghost story.

It was also in part in play - R. L. Stevenson's "The Sea Fogs"

Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.

Newlyweds Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson née Osborne, like many new couples, took their honeymoon in Napa Valley.  Tourists like other tourists, they explored a petrified forest and sampled Napa wine, “still in the experimental stage.”  The bed and breakfasts of 1880 were not what they are now, so the Stevensons set up house in the office of an abandoned silver mine on the side of Mount Saint Helena, overlooking Napa Valley.

Far away were hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of the precipices and poured into all of the coves of these rough mountains.  The color of the fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.

The Stevensons lived on the mountainside because of R. L.’s lungs.  So many of his decisions were based on the state of his fragile, faulty lungs.  He certainly could not vacation on the Pacific shore:

It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains.  And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.

Stevenson follows the path of an eagle over the fog.  He watches landmarks disappear into the rising sea.  He learns to identify the motion of the cloud.  He imagines that he is witnessing the flood of Genesis.

Had this been indeed been the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have been similar in kind.  I played with the idea, as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his fancy.  The look of the thing helped me.  And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.

This last idea – the sheer fun of the sublime – is the closest thing to an idea in Stevenson’s encounter with the salty fog.  Otherwise, “The Sea Fogs,” a seven page chapter of The Silverado Squatters, is just a piece of nature writing.  Stevenson watches the fog come in; he climbs the mountain to stay above it; a wind blows it out.  The metaphorical conceit is to confuse the fog with the sea itself, and look for incongruities – “the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man.”

A marvelous piece of writing, almost my favorite of Stevenson’s, hidden in a little-known book.  But not unknown.  You can, if lucky, follow Stevenson’s path and see the fogs for yourself at Robert Louis Stevenson State Park in Napa and Sonoma counties.

A little Robert Louis Stevenson travel writing roundup

How about a Robert Louis Stevenson travel writing roundup?  Well, how about it?  As long as it doesn’t go on too long.  I hear ya.

My list, books I done read:

An Inland Voyage, 1878, a canoe trip with a college chum on the rivers and canals of northern France.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1879, a well-titled book.

The Amateur Emigrant, 1895, a badly-titled book, Stevenson crosses the Atlantic to the United States, second-class, itchy and ill, and thankful every day he’s not in steerage with the rest of the Scotch immigrants.

“Across the Plains,” 1883, Stevenson on the immigrant train, from New York City to San Francisco.

The Silverado Squatters, 1884, another terrible title, about Stevenson’s honeymoon in the ruins of a northern California silver mine.

Unread is In the South Seas (1896), another posthumous book, clearly titled.  Stevenson’s South Seas fiction is so good that I have no doubt his non-fiction is enlightening.  Someday.

The first two travel books are also Stevenson’s first two books.  He took the trips through France with the intent of writing books about them.  They are self-conscious in their search for material.  Stevenson was young and inexperienced, and a sort of undergraduate jokiness mars both books, An Inland Voyage especially.  A year later, though, in the donkey book, he is writing like this:

On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the dust.  The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment.  I returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and listening.  The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a deal of freedom.  (“The Donkey, the Pack, and the Pack-saddle”)

Modestine is, of course, the donkey.  Stevenson is already a master of the complex-compound sentence. Enormously enjoyable, to me, and the romance of wandering through the French countryside with a donkey is indisputable.  In terms of content, a minor book; in terms of ironic high spirits and charm, a masterpiece.  Much vivacity, yes.  A good part of the charm is veiled.  Stevenson, poor fellow, wandering with his donkey, was in love, a fact that somehow leaks out once in a while.

Please note the scrambled publication order of the last three items in my list.  I put them in the order of actual events.  Stevenson’s lady friend, in California, finally gets a divorce.  Stevenson travels from Scotland to California to marry her, nearly killing himself in the process.  They – Stevenson, new bride Fanny, and her teenage son Lloyd – honeymoon in Napa.  Napa, in 1880, was not quite the luxury destination it is now.  That’s right, the Stevensons honeymooned with a teenage boy.  Yes, Stevenson immediately published a book about his honeymoon.  This is odd, right?

Stevenson got some material out of the trip, as well as an entire family – a book and a pile of magazine writing.  His editors removed a good part of what a modern reader will enjoy most – repulsive smells, skin disease, anti-Chinese prejudice (not Stevenson’s, but his fellow railroad passengers'), that sort of thing.  If at all possible, this material should be read in the restored text, From Scotland to Silverado (1966), ed. James D. Hart.  Anyone interested in how immigrant travel worked will find these short books to be appealing, lively and forthright.  Anyone not so interested should probably not bother.  Except, except, except.

These are all minor books.  They contain any number of fine passages and keen, if small, insights.  One of those passages is better than fine – it’s the second-best thing Stevenson ever wrote.  See back here for the third-best.  Tomorrow for the second.

She is probably wasting valuable time - surprised by Peter Pan

Launching the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge, I predicted that I would be sick of the whole thing in August, which was pretty much spot on.  I’ve kept on, though, with Margaret Oliphant and Thomas Carlyle and, now, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.  Please don’t let my waning enthusiasm stop anyone – my commitment to read along is good until the end of the year, three and a half month from now.  Three and a half long, long months.

I’m a little surprised no one has jumped on Peter Pan yet.  It’s popular, isn’t it?  Maybe everyone thought they basically knew what was in it, so why bother.  I’ll admit I read it partly out of a sense of – not duty, exactly – but completeness.  Well, I was wrong.  I mean, I knew a lot of what was in the play.  But I've never seen a play like this:

WENDY  He is chaining Nana up.

    (This unfortunately is what he is doing, though we cannot see him.  Let us hope that he then retires to his study, looks up the word ‘temper’ in his Thesaurus, and under the influence of those benign pages becomes a better man.  In the meantime the children have been put to bed in unwonted silence, and Mrs Darling lights the night-lights over the beds) (I.300)

Now, I see how some of that can be made visible on the stage, but I have doubts about other parts.

Here, Peter Pan and Wendy are trying to catch a mermaid:

WENDY  (preserving her scales as carefully as if they were rare postage stamps)  I did so want to catch a mermaid.

PETER  (getting rid of his)  It is awfully difficult to catch a mermaid.

    (The mermaids at times find it just as difficult to catch him, though he sometimes joins them in their one game, which consists in lazily blowing bubbles into the air and seeing who can catch them.  The number of bubbles Peter has flown away with!  When the weather grows cold mermaids migrate to the other side of the world, and he once went with a great shoal of them half the way)

They are such cruel creatures, Wendy, that they try to pull boys and girls like you into the water and drown them.

WENDY  (too guarded by this time to ask what he means precisely by ‘like you,’ though she is very desirous of knowing)  How hateful! (III.20-5)

Barrie certainly packs a lot of whatever he is doing into those stage notes.  Whatever influence that last one has on the actor playing Wendy, it must be pretty subtle.

One more, just because they’re so much fun.  Tinker Bell, who is just a light, is in her little home, where:

She is probably wasting valuable time just now wondering whether to put on the smoky blue or the apple-blossom. (IV.30-2)

“Probably” is one of Barrie’s favorite words in Peter Pan, despite, or because of, the utter improbability of the whole thing.

Peter Pan has a baffling textual history.  The first performance was in 1904, but Barrie was a tinkerer, so the versions proliferated.  I’m using the 1928 edition, as published in Peter Pan and Other Plays, Oxford World’s Classics, 1995.  The book cover is from Barrie's novelization of his own play.

An almost total want of arrangement - all courses had been confounded - tasty Sartor Resartus

As I plan out my writing, I realize I’m working with a concept: it’s Books Few People Should Read Week.  Thank goodness it’s not Blog Sweeps Week, or I’d be sunk.

I’m not sure about Friday’s entry, but Sartor Resartus is a great Book Few People Should Read.  The reader has to care about prose, though, about prose and rhetoric.  The argument of the book is, roughly, an attempt to bring Kant’s ideas into the English-speaking world.   Who cares.  I’ve learned plenty from Carlyle, but why do I really value him?  It’s how he writes.  How does he write?

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement.  In this remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of Time produces, through the Narrative portions, a certain show of outward method; but of true logical method and sequence there is too little...  Many sections are of a debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnamable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invited to help itself. (1.4)

If everyone wrote like this, I would give up literature for scrimshaw, but with books as with food, I am a gourmand.  Variety, please.  But this dish may be too rich for some diets.  It is fat-full, gluten-full, and was processed in a facility that contained at least one nut.

The passage is immediately preceded by the scene where Herr Teufelsdröckh laughs, the single time the editor observes his laughter “tears streaming down his cheeks, pipe held aloft, foot clutched into the air.”  The editor continues with the theme, anatomizing laughter – some do not laugh but “wear an everlasting barren simper,” others “produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool: of none such comes good.”  I believe Carlyle is defining his ideal reader.  He wants readers whose laugh is “not of the face and diaphragm only, but of the whole man from head to heel.”

The book ends with – Stefanie noted this yesterday – a "friendly farewell" to Carlyle's “irritated readers.”  Yes and no.  How many other writers wrote with such a wild spill of words, such wastefulness, even?  How many wanted to make sure there was something interesting in every sentence he wrote?*  How many vowed to exterminate the prosaic?

I’ll bet bibliographing nicole can think of one more.  Tomorrow, Books Few People Should Read Week joins up with the Clarel pilgrimage.

* I mean, to be clear, how many writers of Carlyle’s time.  Rabelais, The Anatomy of Melancholy, A Tale of a Tub, Sir Thomas Browne, Tristram Shandy, a number of Germans – Carlyle has predecessors.  And what predecessors!

Produce! Produce! - Thomas Carlyle and the slogan of Wuthering Expectations

Since I started Wuthering Expectations, I’ve had this mass of overheated gibberish dragging along at the bottom of the blog:

I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin.  Produce!  Produce!  Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!  'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.  Up, up!  Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.  Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.

This is Thomas Carlyle, the end of Book 2, Chapter 9 of the literary staple Sartor Resartus (1833-4).  It’s the, or a, climax of the book, the point where Herr Teufelsdröckh, having said No! to the EVERLASTING NO, says Yea! To the EVERLASTING YEA.

As with any writing by Carlyle, this passage is at once serious – I mean, I think it contains some genuine wisdom – and ridiculous, self-mocking.  A Worldkin?  Or that “Produce! Produce!”  Laughable.  And the wisest wisdom is borrowed:

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work (John 9:4, both from the King James Version)

The red ink in my Bible reminds me that the last line is spoken by Christ himself, so Carlyle has bent the idea just a bit.  Or perhaps not.  Carlyle’s favorite rhetorical methods in Sartor Resartus are paradox and, his own word, nonsense.  The book is deliberately packed with joyous nonsense.

Stefanie at So Many Books has just written about Sartor Resartus, as a Scottish challenge book, and as part of her continued study of Emerson and his world.  Her description of the book is exactly accurate.  She provides a list of predecessors – Sterne, Goethe – which is also correct, and a logical place to look for help with such a strange, difficult book.

I’ve now read Sartor Resartus twice, and parts of it several times.  Thirty pages or so were assigned in my Brit Lit II class, many years ago, the pieces in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, Fifth edition.  I’m looking at them now.  I dutifully read each word and turned each onion-skin page, and was surprised, irritated, to discover, at the end, that I had understood nothing at all.  An insight, a new one to me: I began again.  I reread the assignment.  Ah – a young man has a spiritual crisis, but is somehow able to rouse himself enough not to discover meaning but to reject meaninglessness:

‘What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death?” (Book 2, Ch. 7)

Meaning follows, but slowly, imperfectly, always imperfectly.  Produce!  Produce!  I really do say that to myself, on the days when I’m wondering not just what to write, but why.  So I produce something now, my pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, and save the meaning of it all for later.  The struggle against Chaos is never-ending.

Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate - a review-like post

Geez, I take a break and I can’t write a word.  Wait, here I go.

Margaret Oliphant wrote most of her books in the middle of the night, after all of her children and deadweight relatives had gone to bed.  And this was her income!  With that kind of constraint, she was able to crank out a novel as good as The Perpetual Curate (1864), a novel AGAT* - it’s extraordinary.  And here I am dithering over a dang blog post.

The young, virtuous Perpetual Curate of St. Roque’s church in Carlingford is too poor to marry.  He comes from a wealthy family, but is, unfortunately, not only the fourth son, but the second clergyman, so the family living is unavailable.  His three maiden aunts own another living, and everyone assumes that it will go to the nephew once the current elderly occupant expires.  Except the Curate is a High Church Anglican, and the aunts are Low, and they are all principled, and stubborn.

One might pause here and note that, looked at in a certain way, the mid-19th century Anglican church appears to be hopelessly corrupt.  For the Curate, however, this is simply a fact to be faced.  He thinks he can’t marry Lucy on his current income, and the only path to a more money is a violation of his conscience.  How much is love worth, not in pounds, but in principles?  Should the Curate compromise with his aunts on religious matters in order to be able to marry?  Our hero is not so sure himself.  Nor was this reader.

This single conflict was sufficiently interesting for me, although it has to be expanded in various thematically relevant directions to fill out the book.  Another clergyman, that older brother, decides to convert to Catholicism.  Then another brother entangles the Curate in his dissolute life.  Church politics, town gossip, death, gardening – what else could I want from a novel?

It’s an easy book to recommend to anyone with any patience for Victorian novels, its humor a nice balance of sly wit about human weakness and some real sweetness.  The plot is genuinely clever in places - there are several fine reverses and small twists.  It is, like Trollope, image-poor, but also, like Trollope, character-rich.  It would make a good BBC telepic.  Jeremy Northam would be perfect as the Curate, except he’s now too old.  One of the aunts is, no, must be, Judi Dench.  Those aunts are hilarious.

Rohan Maitzen, writing about a later Oliphant novel (Hester), said it left her “feeling that thematic or philosophical interpretations are somewhat beside the point.”  I’m guessing that The Perpetual Curate is richer than Hester, but Rohan is correct.  I want to write about The Perpetual Curate for the rest of the week, but I have not the slightest interest in or insight about Oliphant’s themes or meaning.  I’m just going to write about craft.  The craft is a thing to behold.  This is a well-written novel .

A while ago, I expressed doubt that there could be eight Margaret Oliphant books worth reading.  Now, having read two, the existence of six more seems not just plausible, but likely.  But can any of them be as good as The Perpetual Curate?

* AGAT = As Good As Trollope.

A parsonage with roses, and church bells, and nice old women bobbing in the lanes - who wrote that? Who wrote The Ebb-Tide?

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Ebb-Tide with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.  Stevenson was forty-four, and would soon die; Osbourne was twenty-six.  The Ebb-Tide was the pair’s third novel, and Stevenson’s last completed book

I was poking around in a university library, curious about what scholars were doing with Stevenson.  What was hot, if anything.  Stevenson’s Polynesian books are hot, it seems, or at least lukewarm, as part of the strong current interest in colonial literature.  That’s how I was led to The Ebb-Tide, a novel with minimal previous reputation.  Didn’t hurt that the book is only 130 pages in the Edinburgh edition.

The Ebb-Tide turned out to be so good, comparable to Stevenson’s Scottish novels, that I wonder why it is not better known.  Does the co-authorship hurt it?  Co-writing is a sign of hackwork, right?  A violation of the Romantic principle of the autonomy of the artist or some such thing?  Stevenson was a great writer, however narrowly, while Osbourne was a non-entity.  The other Stevenson and Osbourne novels, The Wrong Box (1889) and The Wrecker (1892), seem to have retained their low stature, for now, as has the book Stevenson co-wrote with his wife, Fanny.

The co-authorship may introduce all sorts of complications to the usual tools of analysis.  Students of early modern literature, though, have to be used to this by now.  The Age of Shakespeare features the only “name” team in the English canon, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the detailed linguistic analysis of every scrap of Elizabethan dramatic writing suggests that co-writing was as common as not.  Who knows what hefty chunk of the lines in my fat volume of Shakespeare are by someone else. 

Still, confronted with this:

He aspired after the realisation of these dreams, like a horse nickering for water; the lust of them burned in his inside. (119)

or this:

Upon the Sunday each brought forth his separate Bible - for they were all men of alien speech even to each other, and Sally Day communicated with his mates in English only, each read or made believe to read his chapter, Uncle Ned with spectacles on his nose; and they would all join together in the singing of missionary hymns. (48)

I have a pretty good idea who wrote those, and ‘tweren’t  no one named Lloyd.  That last one especially, that’s pure Stevenson, not just in the clear but unfussy details, or the keen wit of “made believe,” but the flow of ideas in the clauses in the complex sentence.  By the end of his short life, Stevenson’s instrument was supple.

How about a sample of Kurtz, I mean, Attwater:

'What brought you here to the South Seas?' he asked presently.

'Many things,' said Attwater.  'Youth, curiosity, romance, the love of the sea, and (it will surprise you to hear) an interest in missions.  That has a good deal declined, which will surprise you less.  They go the wrong way to work; they are too parsonish, too much of the old wife, and even the old apple wife.  Clothes, clothes, are their idea; but clothes are not Christianity, any more than they are the sun in heaven, or could take the place of it!  They think a parsonage with roses, and church bells, and nice old women bobbing in the lanes, are part and parcel of religion.  But religion is a savage thing, like the universe it illuminates; savage, cold, and bare, but infinitely strong.'

And say these are somehow from the pen of Lloyd Osbourne.  What do I care?  I can still read the book in front of me.

Oddly, the New York Times Book Review just featured another Stevenson and Osbourne collaboration, The Wrecker, on the grounds that it was the favorite Stevenson novel of Jorge Luis Borges.  Note that Rivka Galchen does not even mention Lloyd Osbourne’s name, which is one way to deal with the problem.  Also note the hilarious, preposterous goo of the last paragraph, which Borges seems to bring out in a lot of people; I’ve been guilty of it myself.

Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease - reading too much R. L. Stevenson

Why read sixteen books by Robert Louis Stevenson?  I ask this, because I have done so, more or less in the last six months.  Are there sixteen books worth reading?

No, not really.  I have read too much.  Later this year I’ll do a Stevenson omnibus and sort him out a bit.  Preview: the second-best thing he ever wrote is buried in one of those books that is not (otherwise) worth reading.

If I had not read too many Stevenson books, I would never have gotten near The Ebb-Tide (1894), a short novel about Englishmen on the bum (or “on the beach”) in colonial Polynesia that turns out to be intelligent, exciting, complex, intense, and on like that.  It’s excellent, even aside from its most shocking feature.

The three layabouts luck into a ship.  The cargo turns out to be a little complicated.  They stumble upon an unknown atoll, full of pearls, that is ruled by Kurtz.  You know, Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, which was published five years later.

Attwater is not exactly Kurtz, obviously.  He is openly religious (“a fatalist”), a missionary turned pearl-fisher.  He is not dying, although his employees or slaves are, from smallpox.  His empire is a lot smaller than Kurtz’s swath of the Congo jungle.  But the similarities are obvious – the larger than life tyrant who governs through some combination of magnetism and violence.  As with “The Beach at Falesá,” The Ebb-Tide shares some similarities of voice with Conrad, even if Stevenson’s purpose is not so close to Conrad.

I don’t want to put too much on the Conrad connection, although I have no doubt that Conrad knew Stevenson’s Polynesian stories, including this one (and please compare Stevenson’s anarchist bomber in The Dynamiter (1885) with The Secret Agent (1907)), it hardly matters.  Petty tyrants like Kurtz and Attwater and “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) presumably established their little fiefs all over the colonial world, and the symbolic and narrative benefits of exaggerating their power would have been obvious to any decent writer.  While reading, I had to actively ignore the parallels, because The Ebb-Tide, although hardly as powerful or thematically rich as Heart of Darkness, is excellent in its own right.  A sample, a first glimpse of Attwater’s eerie, uninhabited empire:

The place had the indescribable but unmistakable appearance of being in commission; yet there breathed from it a sense of desertion that was almost poignant, no human figure was to be observed going to and fro about the houses, and there was no sound of human industry or enjoyment. Only, on the top of the beach and hard by the flagstaff, a woman of exorbitant stature and as white as snow was to be seen beckoning with uplifted arm. The second glance identified her as a piece of naval sculpture, the figure-head of a ship that had long hovered and plunged into so many running billows, and was now brought ashore to be the ensign and presiding genius of that empty town. (70)

Besides some clear symbolic functioning, that figure-head is also a nod by Stevenson to his difficulty creating women characters.  The Ebb-Tide is another example of his specialty, the novel without women.

I’ve been cheating a bit.  The Ebb-Tide was not written by Robert Louis Stevenson, but by “Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne,” a complication I want to touch on tomorrow.

I read the Edinburgh University Press edition of the novel, eds. Peter Hinchcliffe and Catherine Kerrigan, 1995.  The title of this post is the first sentence of the novel.

My absurd Margaret Oliphant reading list

Let's say that I, newly converted to the pleasures of Margaret Oliphant, wanted to put together an Oliphant reading list.  What do the People Who Have Read Oliphant think I should read?

The Doctor's Family and Other Stories (1861), so that’s one down
Salem Chapel (1863)
The Perpetual Curate (1864)
Miss Marjoribanks (1866)
Phoebe Junior (1876)  - these are all Carlingford novels.
Hester (1883)
The Beleaguered City and Other Stories (1880) – ghost stories
The Autobiography (1899), posthumous.

Only Miss Marjoribanks (Penguin), Hester (Oxford), and Phoebe Junior and The Autobiography (both Broadview) seem to be in print now. So that’s one snapshot of the Oliphant canon.  Time to get reading.

Hang on a minute.  I’ve gone from not really being sure I should read Oliphant at all to eight books, five of which are fat three-volume novels.  Can this possibly be right?

My copy of Treasure Island, an Oxford World’s Classics edition from the early 1990s, has a page in the back listing Oxford’s then-current offering of Anthony Trollope books.  They had thirty (30) Trollopes in print.  This is distinct from those attractive orange paperbacks Penguin was publishing at the same time, a set of fifty-three (53!) Trollope books.  Can there possibly be thirty good Trollope books, thirty still worth reading?

The standard Trollope list includes the six Barsetshire novels, the six Palliser novels, He Knew He Was Right, The Way We Live Now, maybe Orley Farm, and possibly An Autobiography.  So the pared-down Trollope is sixteen books.  I’ve read the Barsetshire set, and an abridgement of the travel book North America (historical interest: high, literary interest: low), which means if I read them all, and I’d like to, I’m up to seventeen books by Anthony Trollope.  And still out there: Cousin Henry and Is He Popenjoy? and Mr. Scarborough's Family ("A masterpiece of legal fiction," the undiscriminating back of the Oxford paperback informs me).

I have read seventeen books by how many writers?  Almost none.  Two, I think: William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabokov.  Close: Richardson (Clarissa counts as nine books, right?), Goethe, Balzac, Dickens, Calvino, John Banville, and I should say that for some of these writers, I have read too much, books that are at best marginal, and occasionally pretty bad.  My new addition to the list is Robert Louis Stevenson, sixteen or so books in the last six months, which in terms of page count probably amounts to a third of those seventeen Trollope books.

Even my ”eight book” list, which might someday include Margaret Oliphant, is quite short, and puzzling.  Why on earth have I read eight books by A. N. Wilson?  Why have I read only eight books by Penelope Fitzgerald?  I am probably forgetting some childhood writers – I seem to have read eight novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, and I would not mind rereading some of them.  The Antiquary was my seventh Walter Scott novel.  Seven by Jane Austen, John Galt, Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon.  What should my highest priority be: my eighth Trollope book, my second Oliphant, my thirty-second Balzac nouvelle?  Or Middlemarch (Eliot #4) and The Portrait of a Lady (James # 2 or 3) and The Magic Mountain (Mann #2), genuinely important books, and, very likely, better books, that I haven’t read? 

I don’t normally think about books quite in this ludicrous way.  Making the Oliphant reading list emphasized the issue.  The horrifying truth is, those eight Oliphant books, at least, are probably all worth reading.  They are, I presume, well written, contain genuine insights about human behavior, have funny moments, and are instructive about their time and place.  Same with those thirty Trollope books.  I don’t expect to find the equivalent of Anna Karenina or Bleak House (both of which, to add another priority, I should read for the third time) among them.  But, give me enough years, and I bet I’ll read 'em.  Not the thirty Trollopes – I mean the sixteen.  And not – well, that’s enough of this.

Next week, a reason or two to keep reading, let’s say, too much Robert Louis Stevenson.

Nothing in the least like her had ever yet appeared before Dr Rider’s eyes - The Doctor's Family and Oliphant's Carlingford

Margaret Oliphant’s first three Carlingford stories – The Executor, The Rector, and The Doctor’s Family, all published in 1861 – are more interesting as a group than separately.  I am surprised how few characters she needed to fill the town.  Compare Carlingford to the Hungarian town in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark, crammed with folks.  Carlingford in more like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, in which the town without men turns out to not have more than a half dozen women, either, as long as we’re talking about a narrow class.

Who does Oliphant need to tell three stories about Carlingford?  The prosperous Dr. Marjoribanks and his still barely marriageable daughter Miss Marjoribanks, who will return in Miss Marjoribanks (1866).  The Wodehouse family, who we met in The Rector, with two daughters.  One of them may or may not marry the perpetual curate:

Ah me! And if he was to be perpetual curate, and none of his great friends thought upon him, or had preferment to bestow, how do you suppose he could ever, ever marry Lucy Wodehouse, if they were to wait a hundred years? (“The Rector,” p. 38)

All of which is presumably resolved in The Perpetual Curate (1864).  In these first stories, Oliphant was apparently preparing for a shelf of novels.

The Doctor’s Family stars a doctor with whom Oliphant spent a few pages in The Executor.  In that story, he botched a chance at a good marriage, so here he gets to try again.  Since we last saw him, his useless brother Fred has moved in with him.  The brother, also, nominally, a doctor, smokes, and sits, and smokes some more.  A story about the conflict between the two brothers, one having given up on life, the other not exactly a ray of sunshine but still active, would be good enough, yes?  But then the doctor comes home to find two young women in his house:

She was not only slender, but thin, dark, eager, impetuous, with blazing black eyes and red lips, and nothing else notable about her.  So he thought, gazing fascinated, yet not altogether attracted - scarcely sure that he was not repelled – unable, however, to withdraw his eyes from that hurried, eager little figure.  Nothing in the least like her had ever yet appeared before Dr Rider’s eyes. (75)

Who are these women?

There was a momentary pause; the two women exchanged looks.  "I told you so," cried the eager little spokeswoman.  "He never has let his friends know; he was afraid of that.  I told you how it was.  This," she continued, with a little tragic air, stretching out her arm to her sister, and facing the doctor -- "this is Mrs Frederick Rider, or rather Mrs Rider, I should say, as he is the eldest of the family!  Now will you please to tell us where he is?"

The doctor made no immediate answer.  He gazed past the speaker to the faded woman behind, and exclaimed, with a kind of groan, "Fred's wife!" (76)

Throw in three children, about whom the doctor knew nothing.  Now, this is the doctor’s family, and plenty of activity for a 140 page domestic novel.  Oliphant’s best insights come from two sources: the perverse psychology of useless people, and the even more perverse psychology of useful people.

I’m not sure that The Doctor’s Family has a single scene as good as the Rector’s crisis with the dying woman, although there’s another death scene that comes close.  Still, this short novel is my favorite of the Oliphant I’ve read.  She has a chance to stretch out her use of the town, but without needing any of the senseless plot mechanics Penelope Fitzgerald found in the longer Carlingford novels.

Recommended, easily, to anyone who enjoys Trollope or Gaskell or perhaps Jane Austen.  The more I read bloggers on Austen, the less sure I am of what they’re getting from her.  But that’s a topic for another day, or never.

Something mounted to her head like the fumes of wine - Margaret Oliphant, anti-feminist

I’ll slip away from Carlingford today.  Fay of Historical / Present has been filling me in on the hostility of some early feminist critics towards Margaret Oliphant.  It’s all sort of hilarious.  Oliphant’s feminist credentials were not in order.  She did not support women’s suffrage consistently and was shocked by Jude the Obscure and wore silk.*

This sort of thing is highly useful, because it gives later scholars something to do.  By using the advanced critical technique of Actually Reading Oliphant’s Work, or AROW, scholars have discovered that Oliphant might have had something interesting to say about women, and might havedone so in aesthetically interesting ways.  Although I am not a scholar, and risk misapplying the AROW technique, I discovered much the same thing.

Rohan Maitzen recommended I read the Oliphant short story “A Story of a Wedding Tour”**.  A pretty orphan, “young , and shy, and strange,” trained to be a governess, is lucky enough to attract a wealthy husband.  Or maybe, she discovers on her French honeymoon, not all that lucky.  Accidentally separated from her husband due to confusion over a train schedule, she is surprised at her sense of relief, or happiness, or even bliss. And then:

She spread them all out, and counted them from right to left, and again from left to right.  Nine ten-pound notes, twelve and a-half French napoleons – or louis, as people call them nowadays – making a hundred pounds.  A hundred pounds is a big sum in the eyes of a girl.  It may not be much to you and me, who knows that it means only ten time ten pounds, and that ten pounds goes like the wind as soon as you begin to spend it.  But to Janey!  Why, she could live upon a hundred pounds for – certainly for two years; for two long delightful years, with nobody to trouble her, nobody to scold, nobody to interfere.  Something mounted to her head like the fumes of wine. (431)

I’ve omitted, so far, how explicit the story is about sex, about the husband’s lust and Janey’s repulsion, and the consequences of sex.  Janey runs off, finds a hiding place in a Mediterranean French town, bears and raises her son, and lives.  Anything here a feminist critic might find interesting?

How about an Amateur Reader?  To return to the passage about the money:  the doubled counting is a sharp touch, just how a sensible woman like Janey would confirm this unbelievable change.  The “fumes of wine” invoke the honeymoon, even if most of the wine was imbibed by her husband.  The mock world-weariness of the authorial intrusion is funny, the "you and me" especially.

With the help of AROW, the pleasures and insights of Margaret Oliphant seem considerable.

I read “A Story of a Wedding Tour” in Nineteenth-century Short Stories by Women: A Routledge Anthology, ed. Harriet Devine Jump, Routledge, 1998.

* See the suitably irritated Elizabeth Langland, “Women’s writing and the domestic sphere,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900, ed. Joanne Shattock, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 137.

** I’m not sure of the date of publication. Late 19th century, I think, long after the Carlingford books.