Our First Book

The first book that Dark Puss and I tackled was Marge Piercy’s intense saga from the early 1970s, Small Changes, which we read simultaneously and exchanged comments upon while reading . It plunged us back into the USA on the brink of big social change. From the start this book signals its determined political intent, and musters a fine head of rage towards the spectacle of a culture – a mere 40 years ago – that treated women as second-class citizens, locked in frustrating and thankless roles. The first part focuses on Beth, and opens as she is marrying her high school sweetheart, Jim. Beth is very young and very naïve; she’s getting married because it’s just what women do, and in no time at all, her husband has turned into her jailor. Beth doesn’t like to cook and clean, and she doesn’t want to fall pregnant, all of which infuriates the conservative Jim.

DP: OK, so the writing is much as I’d expect from early Piercy, not too special in itself but clearly she’s building a picture that’s quite plausible and given her early life probably based to some extent on reality. Domestic violence is cleverly handled, with the sexual exploitation of Beth by her husband so neatly expressed when he destroys her contraceptive pills.

L: I was also intrigued to note the way the womenfolk of her family turned against Beth for not behaving in orthodox fashion. The unsubtle message is that women are chattels, possessions in the exchange from father to husband, with no rights and certainly no minds of their own whose greatest use-value is to be found in providing sexual and domestic services. It’s very much a world in thrall to an ideology of domination and submission.

DP: The men are fairly un-redeemed but perhaps that isn’t so unrealistic and this book has a rather black & white approach to male-female relationships. I thought it was interesting that although women are now free to enter into sexual relationships outwith marriage, they are still regarded as subservient in other respects – why on earth they agree to this role of sex plus cooking/washing/mothering is not however clear to me.

I thought this was a good question, and it became one we thought about a lot while reading. Why did women accept a deal that in retrospect looks so poor? Though Piercy’s interest is in depicting a generation of women who can see all the disadvantages and exist on the cusp of rebellion.

In the second part we entered the world of Miriam, an intellectual young Jewish woman whose life improves immensely when she leaves home and undertakes a degree. Her interest is in maths and science and her work is extremely important to her. She falls in love with Phil, a would-be poet and drug addict, and then also with his friend and roommate, Jackson, a man with one bad marriage in his past already. Both men served in Vietnam. They exist in an urban counter-culture and attempt an awkward ménage à trois.

DP: The emotional blackmail used by Miriam’s family is depressingly plausible, though the relationship with her mother seemed a little too stereotypically ‘Jewish Mother’. I shared Miriam’s irritation that her brother is always praised (though he is less academically talented) and is excused the tedious housework just because he is a man. I thought Piercy’s depiction of Miriam’s father Lionel was more subtle; his detachment is a way of coping with a difficult relationship.

I’m interested in the way Miriam is beginning to move away from pure mathematics towards the relatively new area of computing and indeed computational bioscience. I smiled at the mention of the famous DEC 10 which is one of the seminal pieces of computer hardware ever made. It played (in reality) a significant role in places such as MIT so Piercy is spot on in her description here. (Super pictures of it can be seen at this web page ).

L: The thing about the mother-daughter relationships that interests me is the way mothering is akin to moulding; the mothers beg, bully and blackmail their daughters into being/acting the way the mothers feel they should. It’s no wonder that the women grow up co-dependent on others, as their autonomy in the most basic matter of identity has been, if not removed, then severely compromised.

This is the most interesting part of the book for me – the way that nurture is in league with culture. But the results end up in gender rancour. Miriam has never felt loved for who she is, only for behaving the way other people want her to. It’s something she’s fighting against, but the undertow of it is strong. In consequence, love – passionate love – is portrayed as being hard, almost unpleasant to live.

DP: What strikes me is how generically awful the men are! Never helping, always selfish, apparently only motivated by “chasing ass”. On the other side the women seem to be crazily tolerant of some bad/appalling behaviour and extremely nervous of expressing their own opinions – Miriam being the exception.

I believe Piercy is writing a fable here (like Aesop) but I’m sure that sadly much of what happens to Miriam in her attempts to find employment are completely realistic for the time and place. Quite a depressing picture is being painted of the lives of women in and around MIT and Harvard Universities! To be fair it doesn’t look like much fun or reward is being enjoyed by the men in this book either.

In the third section, Beth and Miriam try again to find new ways to live. Beth ran away from her marriage, was found by her husband and dragged back and then finally left him to live in a women’s commune and to find love with another woman (not without its own problems). Whereas Miriam gave up the rat race in the office and married her boss. A man who seemed nice on the surface but who, like Beth’s ex, ties Miriam up tightly in the role of wife and mother.

L: I’m feeling actually upset for the women, who are being cornered ever more viciously. I’d put it down to the way power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When men had all the authority in marriage and the work place, there was no way of keeping their own behaviour in check.

Any deviation from a role is seen, not simply as a mistake by a woman, but as a slur on their character, a stain, a loss of value. This is particularly true with motherhood, which I’ve always considered to be the part of female reality that feminism forgot.

What’s distressing is that, the first thing women do when free from men is to police one another. All of them are repelled by the different choices of the others and convinced that their own way is best. Not content to live and let live, however, they all try to bend the others to their will and promote their own choices as somehow ‘right’ or ‘better’. The endless power games are wearing.

DP: I’m amazed that Miriam should have, at the tender age of 26, given in to Neil’s demand for immediate pregnancy. She hasn’t even completed her thesis, something which is extremely challenging if you are working and nigh impossible if you have a small child. I’m found that sudden capitulation unconvincing in this story (but probably not so uncommon in reality in this era). Everyone seems to want to control everyone else and it is almost as if there is a “dressing up box” with cultural roles in it, rather than individual identities, that everyone has had to dip into. After you make your choice you are spoiling the game if you don’t like it or conform to it.

L: Heh, well, I found Miriam’s decision all too plausible. I was a month into my PhD when I gave birth to my son. How could I let this happen, you may ask? Easy! I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It’s interesting; a couple of times you’ve said you found some pattern of behaviour hard to believe, whilst I have found it all too easy. Women’s lives, as far as I can see, and I do hope that’s changing now; I think my son’s generation really IS different – are very susceptible to being enclosed in ‘narratives’ that are very potent.

DP: I finished the book this morning and theme of “I go out to work, you don’t do anything” comes across very loudly from the dreadful Neil. How can he be so controlling? Miriam is trapped by having two very young children and has lost her confidence. I think that is very believable and Neil does nothing to help. He is clever in not becoming visibly angry when criticisng her as this undermines her ability to fight back. Of all the characters in the book I disliked him most even though there is nothing essentially bad about him.

None of our other books provoked quite this much comment! We both agreed by the end that it had been a hard read – long and involved and depressing in places. But the fact that Dark Puss found Piercy’s depiction of the fledgling computer business to be accurate made me feel it was stencilled from life in all ways, even if she had chosen some of the worst gender rancour to portray. We agreed it was a politically significant novel, and I’d love to see this sort of thing read by more young people. It’s worth remembering how things used to be, in the not-so-distant past.

 

Reading with Dark Puss

Several months ago now, Dark Puss and I were having a discussion online about the influence of gender in reading. Dark Puss didn’t believe that there were any books intended only for women, and I thought it would be interesting to challenge him on that. Gamely, he agreed he was up for it, and so I created a list of three books that we would read together – a feminist novel from the 70s, a contemporary novel about love and marriage and a piece of creative literary non-fiction about motherhood.

I have to say it’s been fascinating, comparing our thoughts and reactions as we read along. This week I’ll be posting the highlights of the conversations we had, so you can judge for yourselves to what extent gender plays a part – if at all – in the reading process. Let us know what you think!

 

New Poetry

Some of the most criminally unappealing sentences have been written in the service of talking about poetry. Poems are like wine in the way they can lead their enthusiasts astray in language, and before you know where you are, poetry is reclaiming personal experience, or putting us in touch with the cosmos or singing the universal or celebrating the elemental or goodness only knows what. Which is ironic, given that poetry is there to make us think harder about language and what it can do. The older I get and the more poetry I read, the less I know what to say about it – which is a shortcoming on my part. However, I’ll do what I can for two first collections of poetry by a couple of intriguing poets, Kaddy Benyon and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, which is at least give you a generous offering of their poetry.

 

When the Title Took Its Life

 

My saddest lines

wish to know how they left

this pen

 

and why I imprison them

in corridors

along margins. Abbreviated

 

but exhausted from labor.

 

Tonight they wreak revenge

On my mortal hand –

 

Erase me.

 

Write “I don’t know

why I am sad.

Night is long. Like an empty house

with annexes of silence.”

 

Or bar with a slash

words like “bleeding”

“persecution,” “exile,” and “loneliness.”

 

Like a blind judge, these lines

doubt my sincerity.

Here is not life.

 

The sickle moon looks down.

 

What does it know? The storm

I heard when I meant

to be writing.

 

This comes from Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s collection, My Funeral Gondola. These are cool, spacious poems, often with a lot of white space to do your thinking in. Elegant or evocative sentences feel like they’ve been plucked by tweezers and laid on a white cloth for inspection. But there’s also a stark drama to many of her lines, and a little capsule of enigma left rolling about in them, too.  One of my favourites is entitled ‘Digesting an Academic Symposium, Some Months Back’ and it was a delightful mixture of the wry, the ironic and the observational. Here’s an excerpt:

 

To conceal jealousy, he wore dark glasses, took

pictures with a pen camera. To be posted

on a blog, in a third-person account.

 

Is Foucault in season?

 

The most interesting lectures, from those who

chose to stay the peripheral sort.

 

For instance, an American who studied nature.

 

Or the Irish dramaturge in awe of Brecht

and Buddhist grottoes.

 

A professor emerita

trying to seduce with her foxy hairstyle

 

a clique of amis

who could handle theoretical smiles.

 

By contrast, Kaddy Benyon’s poems are darker, earthier, more sensual and much more tightly packed:

 

Strange Fruit

 

Sometimes I have an urge to slip

my hands inside the soiled, wilting

necks of your gardening gloves;

to let my fingers fill each dusty

burrow, then close my eyes and feel

a blush of nurture upon my skin.

 

Sometimes I am so afraid my hurt

will hack at your figs, strawberries,

or full-bellied beans, I dig my fists

in my pockets and nip myself. Sometimes

I imagine the man who belongs to

the hat hanging on the bright-angled

 

nail in your shed. I think about you

toiling and sweating with him;

coaxing growth from warm earth;

pushing life into furrows. I am curious

about what cultivates and blooms

there in your enclosed, raised bed –

 

yet I want no tithe of it for myself.

Sometimes I just want to show

you the places I’m mottled, rotten

and bruised; I want you to lean close

enough to hold the strange fruit

of me and tell me I may yet thrive.

 

This comes from the collection Milk Fever, where there is a clear preoccupation with close relationships, unusually tight and mysterious ones like mother and child and lovers, who are bound together by tangled strings of emotion. This is an altogether more intimate voice, more insistent on the mind, recklessly pushing fragments of images onto the reader, bringing us up closer than is comfortable to the bodies, scents, experiences and perceptions in the poems. Where Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s poems are gently cloaked in spiritual ideas, Kaddy Benyon’s are grasping at disquieting feelings. I loved the start of ‘Undone’:

 

We had to run for the bus after confession,

where waiting for Mother’s silence

I’d made imaginary idols of saints, illuminated

 

by twenty votives I paid for with flickers

of prayer. We’d no time for my litany

of lies and spite and rage so the priest winked

 

and told me Next time. I reached for Mother’s

hand, already crammed with beads

clacking together: a metronome for OCD.

 

I wish I could recall where I read an explanation of the literary as being ‘the place where the material is filled up with the ineffable’. For that seemed to me the perfect description of all poetry. I found so much to enjoy in both these collections and particularly those moments of reading poetry where you pounce on a line as if it were an especially gorgeous shell on the beach. ‘My skin takes thoughts/away from light’ stayed with me for a long time from My Funeral Gondola. And in Milk Fever, of a baby’s cradle cap: ‘I want to pick him clean: to preserve/him protected/from the ravenous urge to love.’ Gorgeous stuff.

That Difficult Next Book

I knew I’d have trouble finding the right book after She Left Me The Gun. What I wanted was something not too long and not too serious, amusing if at all possible, written necessarily by a woman, and this proved extremely hard to find.

When I first began looking, short wasn’t a problem. So I thought I might try Marian Keyes’ latest novel, The Mystery of Mercy Close (which clocks in around the 500 page mark, but has biggish type and is in any case marketed as quick reading). In my head the notion of ‘chick-lit’ attaches itself essentially to two authors: Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes, and they live together under the chilly light of my general disinterest. For women’s writing month I wanted to try all sorts of different books, and I thought that maybe my impressions weren’t fair. However, I have to say I didn’t last long with Marian Keyes. I could see objectively that it was written to be funny with exaggeration and un-subtle class conflict, but by the time the main protagonist, a down-on-her-luck private investigator, has an old boyfriend conveniently door-stepping her with wads of cash to track the missing member of an Irish boy band… Well, I wasn’t in the mood to be quite that far away from any recognisable reality, no matter what the blurbs on the front said about the wonderful honesty and true-to-life qualities of Keyes’ writing.

So I tried again, this time a novel I’d been offered a couple of months back for review. This was a dual-time novel, based primarily in the present day and the life of a young married woman who had recently suffered a miscarriage. The emotional repercussions of this had caused great strife in her otherwise happy marriage. And then, as in the way of so many narratives, a bundle of letters from the estate of her husband’s grandmother turned up in the post to distract her. The letters dated back to the Second World War and were sent to the grandmother from her friend in London. This friend had decided to visit the National Gallery every month to see whichever painting was on display (the rest of the art having been taken away for safekeeping). So our narrator decides to go see the pictures too, following the paper trail. There was an awful lot of description of the paintings, and I just sort of knew that stuff would happen and eventually the married couple would reconcile over a new pregnancy. Not that it was a bad book; I just wasn’t in the mood for that, either. Not after incestuous abuse in South Africa, it felt too much like a fuss over nothing.

So then I found myself hauling lots of books off the shelves and rejecting them one by one. Maine by Courtney Sullivan was by now too long. The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger had had such mixed reviews (I still want to read it!), The Darlings by Christina Alger looked good but I’ve already reviewed a couple of books about the banking collapse in recent memory. Similarly, Sara Paretsky’s new novel, Breakdown, was appealing, but I’ve reviewed her before and I wanted someone new for women’s writing month. Sometimes I wonder whether having too much choice actively brings this mood on: this feeling that nothing is quite right, nothing hits the spot.  I was five pages into Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter and loving it, before realising with chagrin that ‘Jess’ in this case was a man.

But then I finally did settle down with a novel that wasn’t particularly amusing or non-serious, but which had at least engaged my attention with the writing style I wanted: clean, engaging, unpretentious. This book was The History Room by Eliza Graham. Meredith Cordingley has returned to teach at Letchford, a gorgeous private school in the Cotswolds where her father is headmaster, after her army husband has been seriously wounded. The loss of his leg has turned Hugh in on himself, focused on the long process of healing and unwilling to have his wife around him. Meredith’s mother has recently died, and whilst she is hoping to help her father as he grows accustomed to running the school without her, it’s not quite the sanctuary that Meredith had hoped for herself. And then a disturbing prank takes place in the history room, and it seems as if someone in the school is determined to make trouble. Meredith finds herself drawn into the mystery, and realises that it’s personal, involving the history of her own family and her father’s escape from Prague in 1968.

This was, finally the good palate cleanser I’d wanted. It’s an easy and undemanding read but the set-up is intriguing and although the villains are relatively easy to spot, the way in which people are involved with one another is not clear until the very end. Like so many recently published novels, the ending is a tad sensational (note to authors and editors – power is created in fiction by the reader understanding and identifying with the emotions of the characters, and being uncomfortably aware of the way that events will affect them; sensational events are flashes in the pan, with rarely any lasting effect). But I’d really enjoyed it, even if it wasn’t perfect. I’m a sucker for stories set in schools, and the army husband part rang true and was very interesting, plus that early prank was genuinely chilling.

At least now the way ahead is clear. I’ll be reading some poetry for Friday, and then next week will be given over to the joint reads Dark Puss and I have been enjoying. At the end of that week, it will be time for the next creative non-fiction book, and it will be Ghosting by Jennie Erdal, the memoir of her time as a ghost-writer.