Tag: literature

Colette: Flesh, Freedom, and Contradiction

Few twentieth-century writers combine sensual brilliance, personal scandal, and literary influence as completely as the French novelist Colette (1873-1954). Revered in France as one of the great stylists of modern prose, she remains comparatively underread in America. Her life was marked by artistic triumph, erotic independence, moral ambiguity, and deep contradiction, qualities inseparable from the extraordinary vitality of her work.

I hadn’t encountered Colette until I came across reprints of several of her best-known works in the New York Review of Books, including Chéri and The Pure and the Impure. Curious, I decided to begin at the beginning with Claudine at School, the first of her semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, featuring the rebellious schoolgirl whose wit, sensuality, and independence challenged conventional notions of womanhood as passive, domestic, and sexually muted.

The Claudine novels emerged from one of the most exploitative literary marriages of the era. Colette’s husband, the flamboyant Parisian critic and entrepreneur Willy, recognized her talent and pressured her into writing the series, which was initially published entirely under his own name. The books became enormously successful, while Colette remained publicly overshadowed. Her eventual break from Willy marked not only a personal emancipation but the beginning of her emergence as an independent literary figure.

After reading Claudine at School, I turned to Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, a massive and meticulous biography produced from nearly a decade of research in French archives and sources.

Thurman had previously written Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983 and later helped inspire the Academy Award-winning film Out of Africa. She was co-producer.

Her Colette biography became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, while France honored her with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016. She has also been one of the longtime staff writers of The New Yorker.

Yet I suspect many Americans remain only vaguely aware of Colette, even if they have seen Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated adaptation of her 1944 novella.

In France, however, Colette long ago entered the cultural canon, the first female president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, and remains a central figure in the French literary curriculum. Her Claudine novels, Chéri, and Gigi continue to be widely read.

Among her admirers were some of the century’s most distinguished literary figures: Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. William Faulkner reportedly kept her photograph on his writing desk, a tribute from one master stylist to another.

Upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman granted a state funeral, though the Catholic Church denied her religious burial because of her divorces and unconventional private life.

Colette’s writings eventually filled more than eighty volumes: novels, memoirs, journalism, literary criticism, essays on theatre, fashion, cuisine, and animals. During the First World War, she even worked as a war correspondent, visiting battlefields and interviewing soldiers.

Yet one finds little overt political or philosophical argument in her work. What distinguishes Colette is her total immersion in the senses. She does not merely describe experience; she inhabits it, merging the physical world with psychological perception.

One feels physically present in her prose: the ripening of a peach, the texture of a cat’s fur, the shifting power between lovers, the ache of aging, the fierce necessity of independence.

Her evocations of her native Burgundy possess extraordinary sensory delicacy:

“Je redescendais… Le jardin frissonnait encore, les roses étaient froides. J’attendais que le premier rayon de soleil touchât le mur, et alors l’odeur du buis montait comme une prière. Tout était bleu, argenté et nacré. C’était un monde où la rosée n’était pas encore de l’eau, mais une sorte de lait céleste qui adoucissait le monde avant que le jaune cruel du jour ne commence à le brûler.”

Translation:

“I would go down into the garden… The garden was still shivering, the roses were cold. I would wait for the first ray of sun to touch the wall, and then the scent of the boxwood would rise like a prayer. Everything was blue, silver, and nacreous. It was a world where the dew was not yet water, but a kind of celestial milk that softened the world before the harsh yellow of the day began to burn it away.”

She was equally perceptive about aging and female self-awareness:

“Elle regarda son reflet — le cou qui commençait à perdre sa tension, le fin réseau de rides autour des yeux qu’aucune poudre ne pouvait vraiment bannir. Elle ne pleura pas ; elle étudia sa ruine comme un général pourrait étudier la carte d’un territoire perdu. Il y avait une magnificence dans cette défaite. Elle se rendait compte qu’être une femme, c’était être une série de peaux, muées l’une après l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, on ne reste qu’avec les os de son propre caractère, qui sont, après tout, les seules choses qui durent vraiment.”

Translation:

“She looked at her reflection—the neck that was beginning to lose its tension, the fine web of lines around the eyes that no amount of powder could truly banish. She did not weep; she studied her ruin as a general might study a map of a lost territory. There was a magnificence in this defeat. She realized that to be a woman was to be a series of skins, shed one after the other, until finally one is left with only the bones of one’s own character, which are, after all, the only things that truly endure.”

She also possessed an uncanny sensitivity toward animals, especially cats:

“Elle restait là, ombre gris-argent, ses yeux comme deux raisins translucides. Elle ne se contentait pas de regarder ; elle humait la chambre. Ses oreilles bougeaient comme de petits radars indépendants, captant le bruit d’une aile de phalène ou le tassement lointain de la maison. Dans son immobilité, il y avait une concentration terrible et belle — l’orgueil d’une créature qui s’appartient tout entière et ne doit aucune explication au monde.”

Translation:

“She lay there, a silver-grey shadow, her eyes like two translucent grapes. She did not merely watch; she inhaled the room. Her ears moved like small, independent radars, catching the sound of a moth’s wing or the distant settling of the house. In her stillness there was a terrible, beautiful concentration—the pride of a creature that belongs entirely to itself and owes no explanation to the world.”

Colette’s private life, however, remains controversial. Her relationships were often transgressive; she had a strained relationship with her daughter, engaged in an affair with her teenage stepson, and continued publishing in journals associated with Vichy France during the Nazi occupation.

Thurman describes Colette’s maternal style as one of “ruthless detachment.” Much of the child-rearing was delegated to a nanny. Mother and daughter frequently quarreled. At one point, returning from boarding school, her daughter reportedly remarked that she wished they were Jewish because Jewish parents seemed more emotionally involved with their children.

Thurman suggests that Colette regarded motherhood as an intrusion upon the artistic life—a conflict that has shadowed many women writers navigating the competing demands of creativity, erotic freedom, and domestic expectation.

Her conduct during the Nazi occupation remains morally ambiguous. Although she used her connections to secure the release of her Jewish husband from internment, she nevertheless continued publishing under the Vichy regime, actions critics still debate. Thurman offers a pragmatic possibility: survival.

In many respects, Colette embodied contradiction, shaped by a conservative provincial upbringing while seeking freedoms historically reserved for men.

Though later embraced by many feminists as a symbol of female independence, Colette often denounced feminism, once remarking that women “deserved the whip and the harem.” In a 1927 interview with Walter Benjamin, she suggested that women wielding power could become “worse than men.” Bisexual and involved in numerous relationships with women, she nevertheless disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism, perhaps knowing the difficulties of gay life, Thurman suggests.

And yet, despite these contradictions, Colette helped redefine what modern womanhood could be. She fashioned a public life of artistic independence, sexual autonomy, and professional achievement at a time when few such paths existed openly for women.

French culture has often shown a greater willingness than Anglo-American culture to celebrate women who combine sensual freedom with intellectual authority, as seen in figures such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Colette belongs within that lineage, though she remains more elusive, less ideological, and ultimately more instinctive than either.

Thurman’s biography succeeds precisely because it resists simplification. She neither canonizes nor condemns Colette, but instead reveals a woman of immense artistic gifts, profound appetites, emotional blind spots, courage, vanity, discipline, selfishness, and brilliance.

Above all, Colette endures because of the precision and sensual richness of her prose. Few writers have rendered nature, animals, desire, aging, and the textures of ordinary experience with such tactile immediacy and lyrical control. Whatever her personal failings, her writing continues to justify the devotion of her readers and her enduring place in French literature.

–RJ

Helen Vendler: Our Last, Best Literary Critic

Reading The Times Literary Supplement this morning, I learned of the death of Helen Vendler, one of our most astute literary critics, who died on April 23, 2024, at her home in Laguna Beach, California, at age 90.

I cannot quite account for how I missed this as she mattered enormously to me, beginning with my first encounter with her splendid elucidations of Emily Dickinson’s teasing, cryptic lines.

Harvard’s first female University Professor, the university’s highest academic distinction, Vendler produced a body of work remarkable in its breadth: essays and book-length studies of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Lowell, and Heaney, among others.

She declined to write on living poets, believing that time was needed to properly weigh their achievement.

With her passing, the great cohort of Anglo-American literary critics has thinned further: Kermode (d. 2010), Bloom (d. 2019), Perloff (d. 2024). Only Sir Christopher Ricks, now 92, remains among the preeminent critics of the last century.

Vendler’s particular gift was guiding readers line by line through the most demanding verse, illuminating rather than overwhelming.

She was a lifelong devotee of I. A. Richards, whose landmark Practical Criticism advocated close attention to a poem’s formal patterns, setting aside authorial intent, reader response, and historical context. Poetry yields its meaning, Richards argued, through how it is shaped; above all, through its diction.

This was also the foundation of the New Criticism as developed by John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks (see Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn and Understanding Poetry).

It is the way I was schooled to read poetry, which may explain why I found Vendler’s skepticism toward deconstructionism and other theoretical fashions so congenial.

Her dictum to aspiring poets, “Write so your mother could understand,” captured her conviction precisely: convolution out, clarity in.

She was not without controversy. Her pointed dismissal of Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry in the New York Review of Books:’”Are These the Poems to Remember?,” drew sharp criticism for what many saw as racial bias in her canonical judgments.

That she apologized to Dove as she lay dying, speaks volumes to her integrity. Her criticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet she loved as a “fastidious aesthete” and “intemperate dogmatist,” illustrates her refusal of hagiography. She evaluated poets on aesthetic terms, not identity, and expected the same rigor of herself.

Her path to that eminence was hard-won. As a Harvard graduate student in the 1950s, she was told by the English Department Chair: “You know we don’t want you here…. We don’t want any women here.”

Pregnancy barred her from teaching. At 34, divorced, she supported a son on child support and the income from four courses, one of them in the evenings. When first offered a professorship she declined it. (She would not accept a position at Harvard until the mid-1980s.).

The irony is that she had not begun as an English major at all, winning a Fulbright in mathematics. But poetry had claimed her early. As a teenager, she had committed several Shakespearean sonnets to memory.

Fluent in reading Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French from her youth, she became, by common consent, the preeminent literary critic of the second half of the twentieth century.

Her honors included the Jefferson Lecture — the federal government’s highest humanities recognition; the presidency of the Modern Language Association; and 28 honorary doctorates.

Her final book, Inhabiting the Poem: Last Essays, published by the Library of America, was written as she knowingly was dying and is a fitting capstone. Yeats presides over it, as he always did for her: “the finest poet of the twentieth century.”

As poet Tom Cook observes in the TLS, “It is hard to imagine a critic of her sheer range and depth, with the time and willingness to share it, emerging again.

–RJ

My Passion for Literature: Reading’s Gifts

My fierce love for books has its ancient beginnings as a seven year old, sprawled on a Philly tenement floor, enthralled with a Christmas gift, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Moments ago I rediscovered this passage from France’s Michel Houellebecq, who has this special capacity to rattle the cages of accepted opinion—daring, provocative, forthright—writing novels you simply don’t walk away from.

I had read his Submission several years ago, an initial novel that launched his fame. His take on literature, a dying indulgence in a digital age, is poignant with meaning for me, for literature has surely been among life’s greatest gifts to me:

“…the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend” (Submission).

I have not found a more eloquent articulation of my own passion for literature and think often of what I would have missed had I not been introduced to literary reads—above all, to see past the literal text and be transported into a galaxy of resonance where words could mean beyond themselves, open new vistas, shaping life, capable of numinosity, a sense that life exceeds appearances, infinite in its labyrinthian corridors, a non-ending conversation with what is, has been, and will endure.

On Reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Serendipitous Find

I’ve been reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, published in 1990 and now hailed as a contemporary masterpiece.

Each year, I compile a carefully chosen list of books I hope to read. Possession was among them, though I can’t quite recall how I first came upon Byatt.

It has turned out to be an inspired choice—a rare literary mystery centered on a scholarly quest to uncover a suspected love affair, pieced together from newly discovered letters between the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, modeled on the married Robert Browning, and poet Christabel LaMotte, inspired by Christina Rossetti.

If such a relationship can be proven, it would mark a major coup for the novel’s modern-day protagonists, Roland and Maud, who join forces to solve this academic puzzle.

I won’t be a spoiler; I’m still reading, mesmerized by Byatt’s creative brilliance. Drawing on her vast knowledge of Victorian literature, she invents letters, diaries, and poems that feel astonishingly authentic—plausible echoes of Browning and Rossetti themselves.

There’s also a compelling counterpoint: as Roland and Maud pursue their literary investigation, they, too, seem to fall in love. And the suspense deepens with rival scholars competing to uncover the same secret.

Possession won the Booker Prize and became an international favorite, translated into more than thirty languages. A film version followed—all of which amazes me, as I wouldn’t have expected a novel so steeped in academia to achieve bestseller status.

Byatt, an academic for many years and fluent in several languages, left teaching in 1983 to write full time. Gifted with formidable imagination, she could also be intimidating in her intellectual precision and resistance to literary fashion. Critic, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, she produced twenty-five books and, in 1999, was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to literature.

Her prose is detailed, introspective, and resonant—at times, poetic. More than any writer I’ve read, she possessed an extraordinary gift for mimicry, able to write convincingly in many voices.

I’ve especially liked this passage, though there are many others:

It is a dangerous business, reading of the passions of the dead. We try on their feelings, like garments, and for a moment we seem to stand in their light — and yet, as we close the book, we find ourselves once again alone in our own darkness, aware that our borrowed flame is only memory’s trick.

She is the writer’s writer.

As Jay Parini wrote in his 1990 New York Times review, “Possession is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.”

–rj

Noted Author Revisits The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky’s desk

Ove Knausgaard, of My Struggle fame, has often spoken of his admiration for Dostoevsky, who with Proust and Joyce, comprise for him literature’s olympian triad.

While Dostoevsky has always had his admirers that include philosophers Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Camus, he has also had a principal detractor in Vladimir Nabokov who, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed him as a “claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian, suffering from a fundamental “lack of taste,” manipulating readers through pathos.

In his recent New Yorker essay, “The Light of the Brothers Karamazov” (October 21, 2025), Knausgaard offers readers an informative social, cultural, and authorial milieu, helpful in deriving the novel’s meaning.

Knausgaard sees the novel as a chorus of perspectives, resistant to a gradient analysis. In short, the novel is open-ended.

There isn’t anything new about this view, which emanates from Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theory of Polyphony and Dialogism, “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.” 

Some will find Knausgaard’s approach the easy exit from the ambiguity that stalks this classic, each character virtually constructed apropos of a rubric.

Dimitri, immensely proud and of a violent temper, it is the military; for the middle one, Ivan, who is rational, cold, and analytical, it is the university; while for the youngest, Alyosha, who is warm, considerate, always accepting, it is the church. In addition, there is the servant Smerdyakov, presumed to be the illegitimate child of Fyodor and the intellectually disabled Lizaveta, nicknamed Stinking Lizaveta.

There exists the more traditional reading of the novel as a theological and cultural debate between Western and Slavic ways of life; of rationalism pitted against Russian spirituality, as represented in the Russian Orthodox Church.

In this view, Alyosha’s spiritual maturation and advocacy of active love constitutes the antithesis of his brother Ivan’s intellectualism, and clarifies the novel’s intended resolve, one latent with tension as to life’s purpose in the context of omnivorous suffering and evil. As Alyosha remonstrates in conversation with Ivan, “Love life more than its meaning.”

The Brother’s Karamazov is principally a wrestling with the problem of evil, the nemesis of theological belief.

In getting down to the roots of an author’s likely intent, a cultural or historical perspective is invaluable in keeping readers from superimposing their opinion on a text. Knausgaard is exemplary in providing this background,

Shortly before undertaking the novel, Dostoevsky’s epileptic son, nearly three years old, died following a three hour seizure. Filled with grief and guilt—his son had inherited his epilepsy— Dostoevsky began The Brothers Karamazov, his eleventh and final novel. The novel’s Alyosha bears the name of his son. Heeding his wife’s counsel, he sought the Church’s comfort, visiting the Optina Pustyn monastery and conversing with the monastery’s elder, Ambrose. Alyosha does the same.

Like the later Solzhenitsyn, and many Russians still, Dostoevsky was deeply devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church, and his Ivan incarnates the antithesis of Russian spirituality—Western in its secular rationalism, ultimately devoid of moral boundary. Dostoevsky is decisively slavophile.

I have been to Russia, visited Dostoevsky’s confining, upstairs apartment in St. Petersburg, where he penned his masterpiece; attended a crowded orthodox mass, where worshippers stood, movingly singing their hymns, a capella. 

I came away from Russia, convinced that Russia is different—neither Western nor Asian—a repository of spirituality reflected in its literature, music and art. Russia cannot be fully comprehended apart from this awareness.

Ivan in his direct assault on Christ via The Grand Inquisitor tale, read in the context of Russia’s rampant human suffering, seems, nonetheless, to have the upper hand, reviving the oft-played notion of John Milton’s being of the devil ‘s party in writing Paradise Lost. 

That the novel is best understood as polyphonous, a disparate coterie of life perspectives, undifferentiated in significance, does injustice to the novel’s complex subtlety that underpins its greatness. 

The novel has its imperfections, as Nabokov noted. Like many readers, I find Alyosha insufficient as a counterweight to Ivan. When we leave off the novel, it is Ivan, not Alyosha, we remember.

Knausgaard informs us that unlike Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dostoevsky labored in poverty to support his family and suffered continuous stress to meet serial deadlines.

In her biography of her husband, his widow Anna indicated he lamented with each novel his inability to find time for revision.

Four months after the novel’s completion, Dostoevsky was dead.

Any final interpretation proves more elusive still in the aftermath of the prolonged stench of the corpse of the saintly monk Zosima, in whom Alyosha had confided. No expectant miracle occurs in liaison with his death.

What lies behind this intentional addition?

Perhaps, it represents Dostoevsky’s understandable lingering doubt, even amidst faith, or as Tennyson put it, “there is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds.”

Knausgaard seems to give ground to the notion of Alyosha’s centrality toward essay end:

…there is no doubt that Alyosha represents an ideal for Dostoyevsky—he bears the name of his dead son, Alexei Fyodorovich, and is the character who, in thought and in action, is most closely associated with the novel’s consistent notion of the good. But in comparison with the presence of Dmitri and Ivan—perhaps that of Dmitri in particular—he pales.

I agree with Knausgaard on the overpowering logic of Ivan’s assault on God’s inadequate justice, but then the problem of evil never evades those of genuine religious sensibility and the novel faithfully reflects this inner, cognitive dissonance.

Knausgaard undervalues the novel’s theistic thrust in embracing divergent narrator purviews, qualitatively equal.  The Brother’s Karamazov, on the contrary, emerges a vigorous theodicy, defending faith in a world replete with anguish.

I am sympathetic with Albert Camus appraisal of the novel as existential, humanity granted freedom to make choices. I agree with his conclusion that the novel, in its final chapters, reaches for a religious conclusion, confirmed by Ivan’s descent into madness. Camus’ view bears semblance to Dostoevsky’s religious sensibility, however troubled.

Others argue that Dostoevsky deliberately destabilized his text, offering no firm resolution to the quandary of faith in a world of evil.

The novel’s resultant ambiguity is its strength, positing the need for repeated reading and, with it, new understanding. And for believers, sober challenge to the veracity of faith.

I like Knausgaard’s close, seemingly coming to terms with the novel’s complexity:

I write this in the certainty that this interpretation, too, will dissolve as soon as you open the book and begin to read it anew. This is what makes “The Brothers Karamazov” a great novel. It is never at rest. 

—rj

A Polarizing Artist: Rudyard Kipling’s Legacy

I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.

The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.

I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.

It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.

Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.

Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.

Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”

Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.

In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.

In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.

Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.

On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”

While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.

Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).

rj

Thoughts After Reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary

I’m almost done reading Virginia’s Woolf’s Diary, 1918-1941. She means much to me ever since Howard Harper, a Woolf authority at UNC, introduced her to me.

Such a scintillating intellect. Writing didn’t come easily to her, frequented with anxiety, sensitivity to criticism, writer’s block, and bouts of depression. Without husband Leonard, I doubt she’d have pulled off her prodigious achievement.

The Diary serves largely as her workbook of creative struggle—getting things right, the interplay of new formulations, the unleashing of her interiority.

The Diary catalogues books she’s reading and plans to read. It teems with recall of literary and artist luminaries she knew intimately, many associated with the Bloomsbury Group to which she belonged—Strachey, Forster, Keynes, and her sister Vanessa Bell among them. Henry James, George Meredith and T. S. Eliot were frequent household guests.

She’s opinionated about several of her rivals, Joyce for instance. She adored Proust: “My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? You can’t go further than that.” And, of course, there were Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and not least, Dante, to whom she turned often.

She read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides in the original Greek and continued so throughout her life. I have her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek.”

Woolf spoke French fluently and read Proust, Gide, Flaubert and Maupassant in French. I hadn’t known until reading the Diary that she read Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Italian.

Largely self-educated apart from courses in the classics taken at the Women’s Department of King’s College (Women were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge), her intellectual achievements are extraordinary.

I introduced my students in Modern Novel to her “A Room of Their Own,” a feminist classic elaborating the interiority of female consciousness and exposing the barriers silencing women’s voices. And then, there was Mrs. Dalloway and To a Light House, now canon staples of English literature.

Nonetheless, in reading the Diary I found myriad passages that grieve me. She could be elitist, contemptuous of the working class; condescending towards blacks; antisemitic: “I do not like the Jewish voice: I do not like the Jewish laugh”; she felt uncomfortable in the company of the disabled.

In many ways, her views were not atypical of the mindset of the snobbish British upper class in the days of Empire.

Despite these faults, I try always to separate the artistry from the life; otherwise, there would be few artists to pursue, given the human proclivity to misbehave.

And so, over the years, I keep coming back to Woolf—her ability to recreate the inner life, to make universal the world of the quotidian; the beauty of her lyrical prose, her experimentations with narrative, her wrestlings with life’s frequent inequities.

Why I’m Still Reading Yeats

I’ve always been a devotee of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, though not of his metaphysics or his politics. Certainly, his reception in Ireland over the years has been bleak, the latest hostile critic, contemporary novelist Sally Rooney piling on, dismissing his politics as fascist, with the takeaway he isn’t worth reading.

Though he flirted with authoritarianism, agitated by the chaos he associated with democracy, he supported the Free State and later repudiated Mussolini, whom he initially admired. He was never the likes of Ezra Pound. In one of his final poems, “Politics,” he expresses his disillusionment with political ideologies proffering easy remedies for society’s ills.

Yeats should not be judged removed from the convulsions that gave birth to an Ireland free of its English masters.

Ireland’s ostracizing of its literary giants has a long history, not only with Yeats, but James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faoláin, and the late Edna O’Brien, all of whom chose exile.

I bristle against censorship and book banning to which it often leads. Things are changing in Ireland, a nation I know well, but old attitudes can find an audience still.

Yeats remains worth reading, his poetry arguing for itself in its craftsmanship, beauty, and relevance. His often quoted “The Second Coming” hovers over us in its prescient warning of autocracy’s sinister reach.

“A Prayer for My Daughter” remains among my favorite Yeats poems—subdued in tone, subtle in rhythm, redolent in wisdom.

Written in 1919 in the context of Ireland’s incipient nationalism that would spark a civil war and the country’s ultimate partition, the poem expresses Yeats’ hopes for his new daughter in a less turbulent future.

A poem abundant in symbolism, Yeats prays she shun hatreds, value inner over external beauty, find solace in tradition and ceremony.

I value the poem, not least, for its relevance to our own time.

Excerpt:

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

This last stanza obviously alludes to Maude Gonne, who had become a strident voice of Irish nationalism and to whom Yeats had twice proposed marriage, but was rejected.

In 1990, I was privileged to meet and converse with Anne, the daughter in this poem.

Whatever our views on artists such as Yeats, or antisemite T.S. Eliot, or Chilean fervent communist Pablo Neruda, I subscribe to the autonomy of art. It’s narcissistic to think artists must share our views.

rj

A Teacher Who Changed My Life

I don’t know if he still walks the planet. He’d be at least 85. I tried looking him up on the Internet, but there were hundreds with his name.

He was just a young prof teaching an evening course, Introduction to Literature, at Eastern Michigan University. He would change my life.

The course featured Oedipus Rex, Gullivers Travels, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms; short stories by Mansfield, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Jackson.

He had a unique way of teaching, like a language teacher, parsing a verb cluster, focusing on verbal inflection. Literature became electric, pulsating with nuance.

It was beautiful! It was inspiring.

He taught me to see behind the literal—that good writers, like their poet kin,
weave multiplicity; that the literal isn’t the text. It’s what lies underneath. Hemingway critics dubbed it “the iceberg technique,” three quarters hidden.

Words were never simple things. They were latent with connotation.

He taught me the subtlety of irony, the discrepancy between statement and meaning, expectation and event, appearance and reality; the role of symbol in undergirding theme and prognosticating outcome.

In short, he taught me how to read: Good readers were translators. Literature exhibits its own grammar of codes and rules, imposing a specific exegesis.

He and I clicked. He had wanted me to take a creative writing course with him, but I had other priorities then.

He urged me to pursue a Ph. D. and join the profession.

Two years later, I began the long journey that would define my life.

Being an English prof won’t get you riches, but making hoards of money was never my life acumen. Ironically, the money pursuit may make us poorer.
Saul Bellow, my favorite novelist, conveyed my aversion to the Faustian wager aptly in Seize the Day: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’​​​​​​t have it you were a dummy, a dummy!”

I owe considerably to a young zealous professor with Keatsian fervor for the aesthetic dominion, who gave me entrance to “the milk of Paradise” (Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”).

Thank you, Franklin Case!

–rj

2020 Draw-Bag Reading List

I can’t believe it! Another year has passed. Last year, I drew up my first annual Draw-Bag Reading List (2019). Happy to say, I’m glad I did it, as it structured my reading. While I didn’t get to read every book, I did read many and the plan kept me motivated. This year I’ve had better sense to list authors alphabetically, along with annotated commentary to remind myself just why I should read a particular book. There are so many wonderful books out there that I had difficulty choosing which ones should make my list.

I can’t say when I learned to read, but it was early, nor who my teachers were that taught me how, but I’m grateful. I am so much an offspring of the books I’ve read that I can’t fathom a life without them. In the witness of others, we find community and with it, both solace and wisdom.

A Happy New Year to all of you, filled with many hours of good reading.

FICTION:

Aciman, André. Call me by Your Name. (Coming of age novel by famed Egyptian writer)

Adiche, Chimanda Ngozi. Americanah. (Prize-winning novel by a Nigerian immigrant to U. S., who discovers what it means to be Black in America.)

Akhmatova, Anna. You Will Hear the Thunder. (Shafak says this is a book that makes her wish she could speak Russian.)

Alameddine, Rabih. An Unnecessary Woman. (Nominated for National Book Award, tells story of a 72 year old divorced woman who translates literature in her Beirut apartment.)

Atwood, Margaret. The Testaments. (The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.)

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. (You’ll never see an urban landscape the same way again. Written by a superb intellect and rebel.)

Brookner, Anita. Hotel du Lac. ( Brookner’s novels center on intelligent, marginalized women attempting to find themselves in a society where the greedy and shallow often win out over the kind and generous.)

Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise. (Love between teens at a performance school meets teacher intervention. Pulitzer nominated.}

Clegg, Bill. Did You Ever Have a Family? (Nominated for Booker Prize, what happens when life throws you a curve.)

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. (One of the most beautifully told family sagas treating issues of identity.)

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. (About aging, memory, solitude, loss, and art set in post war Japan.)

Johnson, Denis. Twain Dreams. (A novella of the American West that captures the ending of a way of life and the unfolding of a new America.)

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. (The classic novel that propelled Kafka to fame.)

Lerner, Ben. 10:04. (“Lerner captures what it’s like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past,” —Publisher)

Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. (Poet Gary J. Whitehead wrote a screenplay adaptation.)

Mitford, Nancy. In Pursuit of Love. (Sardonic portraitures of upper class English life, mirrored on her own.)

Obreht, Téa. The Tiger’s Life. (Set in an unnamed Balkan country, a story of love, loss, and legend and novel debut by a Serbian-American novelist recognized as one of our most talented young writers.)

O’Brien, Edna. Country Girl. (Her debut novel that shocked Ireland with its sexual frankness. O’Brien considered one of the greatest living Irish authors.)

Robinson, Marilynne. Lila. (Girlhood lived on the fringes of society by one of our finest contemporary novelists,)

Rooney, Sallie. Conversations. (Remarkable debut novel by an Irish 26-year old that has rocked the literary world.)

Rooney, Sallie. Normal People. (Rooney’s most recent second novel many say is even better than Conversations. On Obama’s 2019 reading list.)

Rushdie, Salmon. Quichotte: A Novel. (Rushdie delivers with wit and humor reminiscent of Don Quixote}.

Shafak, Elif. The Bastard of Istanbul. (Good intro to Shafak, in my view, one of our foremost women authors.)

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. (Perhaps America’s best female novelist, Wharton’s 1905 portrayal of upper class mores remains timely and brilliant.)

NON-FICTION

Ackerman, Diane. One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing. (Ackerman endures as one of my favorites. This book narrates what happens in a loving marriage when your spouse undergoes a devastating illness.)

Amanat, Abbas. A History of Modern Iran. (One of the best places to begin.)

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. (Baldwin’s first book (1955), a collection of ten riveting essays still relevant by a remarkable writer.)

Boska, Bianca. Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste. (Sensory, fascinating exploration of wine aficionado expertise.)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. (The early classic that would initiate environmental consciousness.)

Epictetus. The Enchiridion. (Stoicism, with its philosophy of rational living and quest of virtue, begins with this ancient work.)

Goldstein, Joshua S. and Steffan A. Qvist. A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow. (Some countries have replaced fossil fuels. We can do the same by mid-century if we have the courage.)

McKibben, Bill. Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (“As climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.”)

Montgomery, Sy. How to be a Good Creature. (National Book Award finalist. Book features 13 animals from whom author has x learned life lessons.)

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Ground-breaking history and analysis of capitalism and its contemporary contribution to rising inequality.)

Rich, Nathaniel. Losing Ground: A Recent History. (In 1979, we knew about global warming and how to stop it. This book tells of those who risked their careers to convince the world to take action before it was too late.)

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (Essays in Wanderlust, or of wandering, getting lost, and exploring new vistas and relationships.)

Stein, Murray. Map of the Soul—Persona: Our Many Faces. ((I knew Murray and his family well in my early youth. Murray went on to become a leading Jungian, the famed Swiss psychiatrist who influenced me profoundly.)

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: New A Story of the Future. (The consequence in our near future of our not taking action to mitigate climate change.)

Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. What They Feel and How They Communicate. (The title says it all. You’ll never look at a tree the same way again.)

–rj