20 Books of Summer, 5: A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson
Journalist and popular historian Juliet Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West’s granddaughter and one of the few remaining guardians of her living memory. This 2015 family memoir chronicles the lives of seven (eight, really) generations of women and travels from Malaga in the 1830s to present-day England. Nicolson acknowledges the inherited privilege that has typified this clan since the time of Vita’s grandmother but prefers to emphasize the roles that place and talent have played. It is enough of a biography of Vita to have won a Bisexual Book Award but, even though Vita only had sons, the focus is on mother–daughter bonds and how values and experiences have recurred across nearly two centuries.
First came Pepita, who rose from poverty in southern Spain to be a legendary dancer (“the Beyoncé of her day,” Nicolson quipped at an online event I attended – see below) and catch the eye of an English diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, at a performance in Paris. Although Pepita was already married to her dancing teacher, she shook off her controlling mother and became Sackville-West’s longtime mistress, bearing him seven children. They could all have been disinherited for illegitimacy, however, had Pepita’s daughter Victoria not secured the link – and access to the family estate, Knole – by marrying her cousin, young Lionel Sackville-West. Vita wrote in Pepita, her joint biography of her mother and grandmother, “My mother appears to have been born with the faculty of attracting the most peculiar and improbable happenings,” such as a proposal of marriage from the recently widowed U.S. president, Chester Arthur, when she accompanied her father to Washington, DC.
Vita is the book’s presiding spirit and pivot point, but I already knew a lot about her from reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography plus two of her novels, so this material was too familiar. The fact that we then leap from daughters to a daughter-in-law (Nicolson’s mother, Philippa Tennyson-d’Eyncourt – these figures are all posher than posh!) is unfortunate as it dilutes the theme. However, Nicolson gives a behind-the-scenes look at Sissinghurst and the marriages between Vita and Harold, loving but also a cover for same-sex relationships for both of them; and Nigel and Philippa, which was a disaster almost from the start. Nicolson is also brave to admit the alcoholism that she subconsciously received from her mother. Philippa died at 58, but by admitting she had a problem Nicolson was able to get help and turn things around. Two generations followed: her two daughters and one granddaughter, who is now 11.
Nicolson sees patterns repeating across the generations: emotional abandonment by parents, “the lack of confidence, the fear of failure, and the seeking of approval where there was none” as well as “writing about the life and work of an earlier generation.” She hopes that with this book she has marked the arrival of “an increasingly tolerant and accepting generation, one that is not afraid to learn from the mistakes of the past and is determined not to repeat them”. (Fun but unrelated fact: Penelope Fitzgerald was one of Nicolson’s teachers.)
On the staircase leading up to Vita’s study in the tower, September 2009.
I visited Sissinghurst in 2009 – I can’t believe I haven’t been back in the past 15 years – and when we briefly lived in Sevenoaks in 2012 we also went to Knole. Both are magical places, especially Sissinghurst. For a few years there I was on a kick of reading a lot by and about Vita (I can recommend No Signposts in the Sea) and I also absorbed a fair bit via Adam Nicolson’s books (that’s Juliet’s brother) and his wife Sarah Raven’s – her recipes are to die for, and she’s kept up the gardens in a way that would make Vita proud. So I’d say it probably helps to have an existing interest in the family, but it should be a reasonably engrossing read in any case. (Free from a neighbour) 
Yesterday I watched “The Inspiration of Vita Sackville-West,” a recording of an RSL event held at the London Library in October that was aired to tie in with their annual Dalloway Day as well as the 95th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (for which Vita was a model) and, of course, Pride Month. The panelists were Juliet Nicolson; trans novelist Shola von Reinhold, whose LOTE (2020) won the Republic of Consciousness and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes; fashion critic Charlie Porter; and writer Olivia Laing. The discussion was expertly chaired by Shahidha Bari, an academic, fashion writer and presenter of BBC Two’s Inside Culture. She opened by asking each speaker to define Vita in one word. Nicolson chose “lover,” which von Reinhold echoed. Porter said “physical.” Laing cheated with a made-up compound word: “androgynous-aristocratic-aesthete.”
And the conversation went on from there. Nicolson spoke of her grandmother as a formidable woman, tall and tobacco-scented, and remembered the exotic treasures she and her siblings found in Vita’s tower study, such as a bottle of emerald-green nail polish. She described Vita as enigmatic and representing duality: she was born a Victorian but has been embraced by modernist and queer studies; she was conventional in some ways, but also a rebel. Porter has written about fashion and the Bloomsbury circle, with Woolf as one of his subjects, so he thinks about Vita mostly as a muse. He read from Vita’s letter to Harold describing meeting Woolf, whom she thought “quite old” and “atrociously dressed.” Nonetheless, she’d lost her heart. Woolf in her turn commented on Vita’s moustache, which was likely a sign of her Spanish heritage rather than excess testosterone as some have theorized.
For von Reinhold, Vita is an early example of androgyny, a precursor to today’s trans and nonbinary identities. Laing, who has recently published a book on gardening, focused on Vita as a garden writer and designer. She said she doesn’t really value Vita’s novels but thinks her garden books (collections of her Observer columns) are extraordinary and read a passage in which she dreamt up the famous White Garden she would create at Sissinghurst (I read a kinda crummy novel about it a few years ago, The White Garden by Stephanie Barron).
The event gave a very good sense of Vita as a person but not as a writer. Audience questions brought up her poetry (oh God, it’s awful!) and travel books but that was as far as it went, and there was no discussion of the novels. Nicolson mentioned Pepita in passing but mostly talked about Portrait of a Marriage, which was half written by Vita and then finished by Nigel, a publisher (he was half of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, aka W&N). He had the courage to reveal his mother’s sexuality and Nicolson said that she believes Vita’s legacy is courage – to create a garden from scratch as a self-taught amateur, yes; but mostly to be oneself.
Love Your Library, June 2024
Everyone is welcome to join in with this meme that runs on the last Monday of the month.
Thanks to Eleanor (here and here) and Laura (and image below) for posting about their recent library reads! I loved seeing Marina Sofia feature beautiful public library designs in one of her Friday Fun posts. Tom Beer, the Kirkus Reviews editor-in-chief, wrote about the love of books starting with libraries. And Sarah Turley shared this New York Times article (no paywall for the next few weeks) about the history of Black librarians during the Harlem Renaissance, including Nella Larsen.
The computer system was down at my library for a couple of weeks in May–June, such that I had to spend my volunteering sessions shelf-tidying or processing returns rather than filling reservations as I usually do. After the system update, I found that my saved lists had disappeared from my online account. Along with a general list of ~170 books I might want to borrow in the future, I had shelves for short stories, novellas, and Literary Wives. It is annoying that they’re gone, but maybe also freeing. If I hadn’t borrowed a book already, I must not have really wanted to read it, right?
There have also been tweaks to what certain categories are called. “Bestsellers” are now listed as “Short term loan,” which makes more sense for the two-week-loan collection as not all the books are blockbusters. But instead of Young Adult, the call number is now “Older teenage fiction” in the “Young person’s fiction” collection. Rather than School-Age Picture Books, it’s now “Picture books for older readers.” Seems like reinventing the wheel to me, but oh well…
My library use over the last month:
READ
- Piglet by Lottie Hazell
- Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
- Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
SKIMMED
- Languishing by Cory Keyes
CURRENTLY READING
- Death Valley by Melissa Broder
- The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
- Learning to Think: A Memoir about Faith, Demons, and the Courage to Ask Questions by Tracy King
- Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets by Kyo Maclear
- Late Light: Finding Home in the West Country by Michael Malay
- Mrs Gulliver by Valerie Martin
- After Dark by Haruki Murakami
- Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
- Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat by Joe Shute
- Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood (a reread)
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville – It somehow seemed like I’d read this fictionalized family history before. The first two chapters were fine but I didn’t need to continue.
- Kay’s Incredible Inventions by Adam Kay – Silly and insubstantial, yet felt endless. I loved Kay’s Anatomy, his first book for kids, but the sequels have been unnecessary. I read 57 pages. (The other day at church I was amused to see a boy of ~11 years old walk in with this book under his arm. Truly, he is the target audience. I hope it kept him entertained during service!)
RETURNED UNREAD
- Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree – Seemed weird/twee/try-hard.
- You Are Here by David Nicholls – I read a few mini-chapters and thought, meh; I should release this to the 52 other people of my library system who appear to be desperate to read it. I did like the “Accept All Changes” section about the proofreader protagonist’s pedantry (I read a similar passage in a Mary Costello short story recently). If I ever want to try again, I have it on my Kindle from Edelweiss.
- The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota – The first few pages were not just dull but actively awkwardly written, such that I had to go back and read particular sentences two to three times. Even the tiny fraction that I read felt dated and arbitrary: why focus on this situation, this time period, these people? Again, if I wish to try again I have it on my Kindle from NetGalley.
- Quilt on Fire by Christie Watson – I read a few pages and it seemed like this midlife memoir was going to be scattered and cliched.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
The 2024 McKitterick Prize Shortlist and Winner
For the third year in a row, I was a first-round judge for the McKitterick Prize (for a first novel, published or unpublished, by a writer over 40), helping to assess the unpublished manuscripts. The McKitterick Prize is in memory of Tom McKitterick and sponsored by the Hawthornden Foundation. Thus far an unpublished manuscript has not advanced to the shortlist, but maybe one year it will!
On the 2024 McKitterick Prize shortlist (synopses adapted from Goodreads):
Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape, Vintage, Penguin Random House) – “Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music. When Yamaye meets Moose, a soulful carpenter who shares her Jamaican heritage, a path toward a different kind of future seems to open. But then, Babylon rushes in.”
Chidi Ebere for Now I Am Here (Pan Macmillan, Picador) – “We begin at the end. The armies of the National Defence Movement have been crushed and our unnamed narrator and his unit are surrounded. As he recounts the events leading to his disastrous finale, we learn how this gentle man is gradually transformed into a war criminal, committing acts he wouldn’t have thought himself capable.”
Aoife Fitzpatrick for The Red Bird Sings (Virago) – “West Virginia, 1897. When young Zona Heaster Shue dies only a few months after her wedding, her mother, Mary Jane, becomes convinced Zona was murdered by her husband, Trout, the town blacksmith. As the trial rises to fever pitch, with the men of Greenbrier County aligned against them, Mary Jane and Zona’s best friend Lucy must decide whether to reveal Zona’s greatest secret in the service of justice.”
Greg Jackson for The Dimensions of a Cave (Granta) – “When investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation. As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé – who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared in the war several years earlier – keep emerging.”
Wenyan Lu for The Funeral Cryer (Atlantic Books, Allen & Unwin) – “The Funeral Cryer long ago accepted the mundane realities of her life: avoided by fellow villagers because of the stigma attached to her job and under-appreciated by her husband, whose fecklessness has pushed the couple close to the brink of break-up. But just when things couldn’t be bleaker, she takes a leap of faith – and in so doing things start to take a surprising turn for the better.”
Allan Radcliffe for The Old Haunts (Fairlight Books) – “Recently bereaved Jamie is staying at a rural steading in the heart of Scotland with his actor boyfriend Alex. The sudden loss of both of Jamie’s parents hangs like a shadow over the trip. In his grief, Jamie finds himself sifting through bittersweet memories, from his working-class upbringing in Edinburgh to his bohemian twenties in London, with a growing awareness of his sexuality threaded through.”
The Society of Authors kindly sent me free copies of the six shortlisted novels. I already had The Red Bird Sings and The Funeral Cryer on my TBR, so I’m particularly looking forward to reading them as part of my 20 Books of Summer – which I’ve decided might as well contain, as well as all hardbacks, only books by women.
I was familiar with Fire Rush from its shortlisting for last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The other three titles are new to me but sound interesting, especially The Old Haunts – at 150 pages, it will be perfect for Novellas in November.
My fellow judge Rónán Hession, whom I got to meet very briefly on a Zoom call, wrote: “It is exciting to judge a prize and encounter such a depth of talent. Though [the books] hugely varied in subject matter and style, the writers on the shortlist all impressed me with the clarity of their creative vision and their narrative authority on the page.”
The winner and runner-up were announced in advance of the SoA Awards ceremony in London yesterday evening. As in other years, I watched the livestream, which this year included captivating speeches by the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark Cathedral (where the ceremony took place) and Kate Mosse. And what a thrill it was to see and hear my name on the livestream!
Winner: Wenyan Lu for The Funeral Cryer
Runner-up: Chidi Ebere for Now I Am Here
In the press release announcing the winners, Hession said, “Wenyan Lu has created an unforgettable debut, brimming with personality and written with a sense of consummate ease. The Funeral Cryer is such a funny, warm and original book. An absolute gem of a novel.” I can’t wait to get started!
Other notable winners announced yesterday included:
- Tom Crewe for The New Life (Betty Trask Prize for a first novel by a writer under 35)
- Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush (Paul Torday Memorial Prize for a first novel by a writer over 60 – how perfect for her to win this in place of the McKitterick!)
- Soula Emmanuel for Wild Geese (Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize for a novel focusing on travel)
- Cecile Pin for Wandering Souls (Runner-up for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize; and a Somerset Maugham Award travel bursary)
20 Books of Summer, 3–4: Cheri & All Things Are Too Small
A cancer story that treads the line between biography and fiction, and a set of high-brow essays about popular culture and modern life.
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (2023)
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Claire Keegan helped popularize the trend of publishing stand-alone stories as small hardback volumes. It was my first time reading Beard, and her style does in fact remind me of Keegan, along with Denis Johnson and Ann Patchett. This originally appeared in the literary magazine Tin House in 2002. It is the life story of Cheri Tremble, a real woman who was born in 1950 and died in 1997 via an illegal assisted suicide conducted by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I’d heard a lot about Cheri, but his name was never mentioned – to avoid spoilers, of course, yet it’s key.
Cheri is an Amtrak ticket-taker who’s diagnosed with breast cancer in her mid-forties. After routine reconstructive surgery goes wrong and she’s left disabled, she returns to the Midwest and buys a home in Iowa. Here she’s supported by her best friends Linda and Wayne, and visited by her daughters Sarah and Katy. “Others have lived. She won’t be one of them. She feels it in her bones, quite literally.” When she hears the cancer has metastasized, she refuses treatment and starts making alternative plans. She’s philosophical about it; “Forty-six years is a long time if you look at it a certain way. Ursa is her seventh dog.”
Beard recounts all of this matter-of-factly (“the diminished lung capacity, the clangorous pain”), drawing on what is known of Cheri Tremble’s life and only adding her own stamp by making up memories that fuel flashbacks as Cheri drifts through pain-filled half-waking. One of these, of falling through the ice on a frozen pond as a child, appears early in the book and recurs at her moment of death. Beard also contrasts onlookers’ compassion or lack thereof.
It’s a potent portrait of everyday suffering and heroism and, in its way, an argument for assisted dying, which mustn’t be cloaked in secrecy as it was for Cheri – “They leave under cover of darkness, like duck hunters or criminals” to meet ‘Dr. Death’ in another state. I finished the story feeling underwhelmed; maybe I’ve simply read too much around the topic, but I couldn’t see how granting the subject interiority (which is what fiction is all about, yes, though the best biographies can do it, too) was enough to set it apart. (New purchase with birthday voucher, Hungerford Bookshop)
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (2024)
Rothfeld, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book reviewer, is on hiatus from a philosophy PhD at Harvard. Her academic background is clear from her vocabulary. The more accessible essays tend to be ones that were previously published in periodicals. Although the topics range widely – decluttering, true crime, consent, binge eating, online stalking – she’s assembled them under a dichotomy of parsimony versus indulgence. And you know from the title that she errs on the side of the latter. Luxuriate in lust, wallow in words, stick two fingers up to minimalism and mindfulness and be your own messy self. You might boil the message down to: Love what you love, because that’s what makes you an individual. And happy individuals – well, ideally, in an equal society that gives everyone the same access to self-fulfillment and art – make for a thriving culture. That, with some Barthes and Kant quotes.
The writing has verve, from the alliterative word choice to the forcefulness of Rothfeld’s opinions. But in places her points of reference (from classic cinema, especially) are so obscure that I had no way in and the pieces felt like they would never end. My two favourites were “More Is More,” in which she’s as down on fragmentary autofiction (Jenny Offill et al.) as she is on Marie Kondo; and “Normal Novels,” about how she finds Sally Rooney’s self-deprecation and communism problematic. I knew the subject matter well enough to follow the arguments here, even if I ultimately disagreed with them.
The U.S. cover featuring a Bosch painting is so much better!
Rothfeld is worth reading as a cultural critic, at least in small doses. She is clearly not interested in being a personal essayist, however, as the intimacy she keeps discussing in theory is almost completely absent. A piece on mental health, “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” opens with one tantalizing autobiographical line – “My first year of college, I attempted suicide and was promptly hastened home by an ominously smiling administrator” – then proceeds to poke fun at meditation for most of its 40 pages. It was interesting to see her fan-girl over her favourite novel, which I would even try if it wasn’t 480 pages: “I want to be reading Mating [by Norman Rush] constantly; I want to have been reading Mating forever, but always for the first time; I want everything in my life to be Mating and nothing but Mating”. Keep an eye out for the sequel: Actually, Moderation Is Cool: How I Learned to Temper My Expectations.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Blog Tour)
Catherine Newman’s second novel for adults, Sandwich, takes place during a week on Cape Cod, a popular Massachusetts beach resort. Rachel, nicknamed “Rocky,” is a fiftysomething mother to two young adults, Jamie and Willa. She and her husband Nick have been renting the same cottage for their family’s summer vacations for 20 years. Although Rocky narrates most of the novel in the first person, in the Prologue she paints the scene for the reader in the third person: “They’ve been coming here for so many years that there’s a watercolor wash over all of it now … pleasant, pastel memories of taffy, clam strips, and beachcombing.”
Also present are Maya, Jamie’s girlfriend; Rocky’s ageing parents; and Chicken the cat (can you imagine taking your cat on holiday?!). With such close quarters, it’s impossible to keep secrets. Over the week of merry eating and drinking, much swimming, and plenty of no-holds-barred conversations, some major drama emerges via both the oldies and the youngsters. And it’s not just present crises; the past is always with Rocky. Cape Cod has developed layers of emotional memories for her. She’s simultaneously nostalgic for her kids’ babyhood and delighted with the confident, intelligent grown-ups they’ve become. She’s grateful for the family she has, but also haunted by inherited trauma and pregnancy loss.
There couldn’t be more ideal reading for women in the so-called “sandwich generation” who have children growing towards independence as well as parents starting to struggle with infirmity. (The contemporary storyline of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which coincidentally is about a character named Willa, is comparable in that respect.) Newman is frank about Willa’s lesbianism and Rocky’s bisexuality, and she doesn’t hold back about the difficulties of menopause, either. Rocky is challenged to rethink her responsibilities as a daughter, wife and mother when she’s surrounded by equally strong-willed people who won’t do what she wants them to. The novel is so quirky, funny and relatable that it’s impossible not to sympathize with Rocky even if, like me, you’re in a very different life situation.
I like the U.S. cover so much more!
One observation I would make is that Rocky is virtually identical to Ash in Newman’s debut, We All Want Impossible Things, and to the author in real life (as I know from subscribing to her Substack). If you read even the most basic information about her, it’s clear that it’s all autofiction. That’s not an issue for me as I don’t think inventing is inherently superior to drawing from experience; some authors write what they know in a literal sense and that’s okay. So, for her fans, more of the same will be no problem at all. But it is a very particular voice: intense, scatty, purposely outrageous. Rocky is a protagonist who says things like, “How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies, Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” (A companion nonfiction read would be Nina Stibbe’s Went to London, Took the Dog.)
In outlook Newman reminds me a lot of Anne Lamott, who is equally forthright and whose books similarly juxtapose life’s joy and sorrows, especially in this late passage: “this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel.”
This is a sweet, fun, chatty book that’s about a summer break – and would be perfect to read on a summer break.
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Doubleday for the free e-copy for review.
Buy Sandwich from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to help close out the blog tour for Sandwich. See below for details of where the other reviews have appeared.
Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (Virago Anthology)
Books that dwell on family bonds often spotlight mothers and daughters, or fathers and sons; it seems a bit less common to examine the relationship with the parent of the opposite sex. In advance of Father’s Day, I picked up Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (1983; 1994) and read the first third. As I once did for Mother’s Day with another Virago anthology, Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, I’ll end up reading it across several years. Where that was a short fiction collection, though, this is all autobiographical pieces.
The section I’ve read so far contains seven essays counting editor Ursula Owen’s introduction, plus a retelling of the fairy tale “Cap o’ Rushes.” Most of the authors were born in the 1940s or 1950s, so a common element is having a father who served in the Second World War – or the First (for Angela Carter and Doris Lessing). There’s a sense, therefore, of momentous past experience that will never be disclosed. As Lessing writes of her father, “I knew him when his best years were over” – that is, after he had lost a leg, given up his favourite foods due to diabetes, and undertaken a doomed farming enterprise in colonial Africa.
Freudian interpretation seems like a given for several of the memoirists. Anne Boston was a posthumous child whose father was killed in the last days of WWII; in “Growing Up Fatherless,” she explores how this might have affected her.
I’ve always tended to discount the effects of being without a father – quite wrongly, I think now. There were effects, and they continued to influence my entire life, if anything increasingly so.
Among these effects, she enumerates a lack of proper “sexual conditioning.” Anthropologist Olivia Harris, too, wonders how a father determines a woman’s relationships with other men:
How far do women choose in their spouses, encourage in their sons, the ideal remembrance of the father? Am I, but not being married, refusing to exchange my father, or am I diffusing that chain of being?
Two authors specifically interrogate the alignment of the father with God. In “Heavenly Father,” Harris compares visions of fatherhood in various cultures, including in Anglican Christianity. Here the father, in parallel with the deity, is something of a distant moral arbiter. Sara Maitland felt the same about her father:
he really did correspond to the archetype of the Father. Many women grow out of their father when they discover that he is not really like what fathers are supposed, imaginatively, mythologically to be: he is weak, or a failure, or dishonest, or uninterested, or goes away. My father was not a perfect person, but he was very Father-like.
Unknown, aloof, a disciplinarian … I wonder if those descriptions resonate with you as much as they do with me?
In between pieces, Owen has reprinted 1–4 quotes from novels or academic sources that are relevant to fathers and daughters. The result is, as she acknowledges in the introduction, “a sort of collage.” She also remarks on the fact that it was difficult for more than one contributor to find a photo of herself with her father because “Dad always takes the photograph.” The essay I haven’t yet mentioned is a sweet but inconsequential two-pager by 13-year-old Kate Owen; it’s just occurred to me that that’s probably the editor’s daughter.
I’ll be interested to see how Michèle Roberts, Adrienne Rich, Alice Munro and more will clarify or complicate the picture of father–daughter relationships in the rest of the volume. (Secondhand from a National Trust bookshop)
Reading the Meow, Part II: Books by Bernardine Bishop and Matt Haig
This is my second contribution to the Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, after yesterday’s review of Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy. One of the below novels is obviously cat-themed; the other less so, but the cover and blurb convinced me to take a chance on a new-to-me author and I discovered a hidden gem.
The Street by Bernardine Bishop (2015)
Prices are so cheap at my local charity warehouse (3/£1 paperbacks) that I recently did something I almost never do: bought a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d never heard of, and then (something I definitely never do!) read it almost right away instead of letting it gather dust on my shelves for years. Bishop’s biography is wild. As a new Cambridge graduate, she was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, then published two novels in her early twenties. She married twice, had two sons and a psychotherapy career, and returned to writing fiction after 50 years – prompted by a cancer diagnosis. Unexpected Lessons in Love was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2013, while this and Hidden Knowledge were both published posthumously, after Bishop’s death in 2015.
So: there is a cat on the cover and the blurb mentions it, too: “a beloved cat achieves immortality.” (I should have realized that was a euphemism, but never mind.) The novel opens with news of the death at 90 of formidable Brenda Byfleet, who’d been a Greenham Common woman and taken part in peace protests right into old age. Neighbours quickly realize someone will need to care for her cat Benn (named for Tony Benn), and the duty falls to Anne and Eric, who have also taken in their grandson while his parents are in Canada.
What follows is a low-key ensemble story that moves with ease between several key residences of Palmerston Street, London, introducing us to a couple struggling with infertility, a war veteran with dementia, an underemployed actor who rescues his wife from her boss’s unwanted attentions, and so on. Most touching is the relationship between Anne and Georgia, a lesbian snail researcher who paints Anne’s portrait. Their friendship shades into quiet, middle-aged love.
There are secrets and threats and climactic moments here, but always the reassuring sense that neighbours are a kind of second family and so someone will be there for you to rely on no matter what you face. (I can think of a certain soap opera theme that expresses a similar sentiment…) Bishop’s style reminds me most of Tessa Hadley’s. She is equally skilled at drawing children and the elderly, and clearly feels love and compassion for her flawed characters: “Everything and everyone in the street was bathed in a blessed ordinariness.”
From Brenda onward, Georgia’s rhetorical question hangs over the short novel: “What is a life?” The implied partial answer is: what is remembered by those left behind. The opening paragraph is perfect –
“Sometimes it is impossible to turn even a short London street into a village. But sometimes it can be easily done. It all depends on one or two personalities.”
… and the last page has kittens. This was altogether a lovely read. Dangit, why didn’t I also buy the other Bishop novel that was on shelf at the charity warehouse?! I’ll have to hope it’s still around the next time I go there. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
To Be a Cat by Matt Haig (2012)
This was a reasonably cute middle-grade fantasy and careful-what-you-wish-for cautionary tale. On his twelfth birthday, Barney Willow thinks life couldn’t get worse. His parents are divorced, his dad has recently disappeared, he’s bullied by Gavin Needle, and evil head teacher Miss Whipmire seems to have a personal vendetta against him. His only friend is Rissa Fairweather, who lives on a barge. Little does he know that an idle wish to switch places with a cat he pets on the street will set a dangerous adventure in motion. Now he’s a cat and Maurice the cat has his body. Soon Barney realizes there’s a whole subset of cats who are former humans (alongside “swipers,” proper fighting street cats; and “firesides,” who prefer to stay indoors), including Miss Whipmire, who used to be a Siamese cat and has an escape plan that involves Barney. I felt the influence of Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett, but Haig doesn’t have their writing chops. Apart from Rissa, the characterization is too clichéd. I’m sure I would have enjoyed this at age eight, though. (Little Free Library)
#ReadingtheMeow2024 and 20 Books of Summer, 2: Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy
Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, and the second annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to pick up some more. Tomorrow I’ll review two cat-themed novels; today I have a 2002 memoir that I have been meaning to read for ages.
I discovered Piercy through her poetry, then read Woman on the Edge of Time, a feminist classic that contrasts utopian and dystopian views of the future. Like May Sarton (whom Piercy knew), she devotes equal energy to both fiction and poetry and is an inveterate cat lady. Piercy is still publishing and blogging at 88; I have much to catch up on from her back catalogue. A précis of her life is almost stranger than fiction: she grew up in poverty in Detroit, joining a teen gang and discovering her sexuality first with other girls (“The first time I had an orgasm—I was eleven—I was astonished and also I had a feeling of recognition. Of course, that’s it. As if that was what I had been expecting or looking for”) then with men; had a couple abortions, including one self-administered, then got sterilized; honed her writing craft at college; married three times – briefly to a Frenchman, an unhappy open arrangement, and now for 40+ years to fellow writer Ira Wood; and wrote like a dervish yet has remained on the periphery of the literary establishment and thus struggled financially.
Political activism has been a constant for Piercy, whether protesting the Vietnam War or supporting women’s reproductive rights. She and Wood also nurtured a progressive Jewish community around their Cape Cod home. Again like Sarton, she has always embraced the term feminist but been more resistant to queerness. A generational thing, perhaps; nowadays we would surely call Piercy bisexual or at least sexually fluid, but she’s more apt to dismiss her teen girlfriends and her later affairs with women as a phase. The personal life and career mesh here, though there is more of a focus on the former, such that I haven’t really gotten a clear idea of which of her novels I might want to try. Each chapter ends with one of her poems (wordy, autobiographical free verse), giving a flavour of her work in other genres. She portrays herself as a nomad who wandered various cities before settling into an unexpectedly homely and seasonal existence: “I am a stray cat who has finally found a good home.”
I admired Piercy’s self-knowledge here: her determination to write (including to keep her late mother alive in her) and to preserve the solitude necessary to her work –
I know I am an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself. Convictions, causes jostle in me. My appetites are large. I have learned to protect my work time and my privacy fiercely. I have been a better writer than a person, and again and again I made that choice. Writing is my core. I do not regret the security I have sacrificed to serve it.
and her conviction that motherhood was not for her –
I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn’t feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. … I liked many of my friends’ children as they grew older: I was a good aunt. But I never desired to possess them or have one of my own. … I have never regretted staying childless. My privacy, my time for work … are precious. I feel my life is full enough.
“There were no role models for a woman like me,” she felt at the end of college, but she can in her turn be a role model of the female artist’s life, socially engaged and willing to take risks.
As to the title: There is, of course, special delight here for cat lovers. Piercy has had cats since she was a child, and in the Cape Cod era has usually kept a band of five or so. In the interludes we meet some true characters: Arofa the Siamese, Cho-Cho who lived to 21, mother and son Dinah and Oboe, alpha male Jim Beam, and many more. Of course, they age and fall ill and there are some goodbye scenes. She mostly describes these unsentimentally – if you’ve read Doris Lessing on cats, I’d say the attitude is similar. There are extremes of both love and despair: she licks a kitten to bond with her; she euthanizes one beloved cat herself. She wrote this memoir at 65 and felt that her cats were teaching her how to age.
There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. … The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious.
Even those unfamiliar with Piercy’s work might enjoy reading a perspective on the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. This was right up my street because of her love of cats, her defence of the childfree life, and her interest in identity and memory. Because she doesn’t talk in depth about her oeuvre, you needn’t have read anything else of hers to appreciate reading this. I hope you have a cat who will nap on your lap as you do so. (Secondhand, a gift from my wish list)
20 Books of Summer, 1: Company by Shannon Sanders
I started the summer’s reading right with Company. Shannon Sanders’s energetic debut novel-in-stories traces several generations of the Collins clan, whose experiences at once exemplify African American gentrification and evoke timeless patterns of parental legacy and sibling jealousy. Sisters Cassandra, Fay, Lee and Suzette grew up at their parents’ Atlantic City jazz club before going their separate ways: Cassandra to a PhD and provost position at a college, Fay to painting and the role of family spirit-keeper, Lee to her own brood of four and a no-good jazz musician husband, and Suzette to music and a too-early death. With roots in Mississippi, they have dispersed to Atlanta, New York City and Washington, DC.
We revisit relatives at different points in their lives, mostly between the 1990s and the present day. There are 13 linked stories here, 10 in the third person and three with a first-person narrator. Each focuses on a different individual or set of characters. Celebration scenes make for memorable moments. “Bird of Paradise” is set at the party to commemorate Cassandra’s new position. There’s a Black president at the time and people can’t stop comparing her dress to Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball attire, while she can’t stop fretting that she and her nieces will live up to stereotypes of Black women’s bodies. Later, “La Belle Hottentote” revisits this evening from the nieces’ perspective as they ponder where the family’s money came from. In “Rioja,” Cassandra’s daughter Cecilia, visiting her boyfriend Cole’s family for Thanksgiving, tries not to embarrass him with any pretentious or avant-garde behavior.
The title story, which is among the stand-outs, is the only one to feature the grandparent generation – though Opal and Centennial are but ghosts commenting on the begrudging welcome Fay offers when her niece Aubrey turns up on her doorstep in New Jersey. Fay is the sole sister without partner or children, but she got the family home as a sort of consolation prize and fills its walls with symbolism-heavy portraits of four sisters. My other favorite, alongside this and “Bird of Paradise,” was “The Opal Cleft,” in which Lee’s son Theo hosts his cousin Cyrus (Cassandra’s son) while the latter performs his drag queen act in the area.
I was reminded by turns of Danielle Evans, Kim Coleman Foote and Deesha Philyaw, while final story “The Everest Society,” about Lee’s daughter Mariolive’s desperation to impress the social worker who has to okay her and Dante adopting, recalls Sidik Fofana with its composite picture of their apartment building’s residents. In a few cases I felt that Sanders might have extended the sphere too wide by moving outside the family: “The Gatekeepers” I assume is about a co-worker or neighbor of Cassandra’s; “Mote” is about Cole’s cousin and his partner (and makes the one white woman in the book evil…); and “Dragonflies” features that cousin’s colleague. It’s not to say that these aren’t good stories, but I wondered why they couldn’t have starred extended family members instead.
Trying to get pregnant and the early days of motherhood are recurring concerns, as is the distribution of talent and wealth around the family and beyond. As these characters reach toward the upper middle class, they keep in mind the struggles they came from. Although the family legends morph over the years, shared habits and heirlooms make connections across the generations. Sanders is strong on characterization, scene-setting and social observation; I would happily have spent even longer with the Collins family. I’ll be keen to follow her career in the years to come.
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the free copy for review.
Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” & Why I Acquired My First Smartphone at Age 40.5
Wendell Berry is an American treasure: the 89-year-old Kentucky farmer is also a philosopher, poet, theologian, and writer of fiction, and many of his pronouncements bear the timeless wisdom of a biblical prophet. I’ve read his work from several genres and was curious to see how this 1987 essay – originally published in Harper’s Magazine and reprinted, along with some letters to the editor in response, plus extra commentary in the form of a 1990 essay, by Penguin in 2018 as the 50th and final entry in their Penguin Modern pamphlet series – might resonate with my own reluctance to adopt current technology.
The title essay is brief, barely filling 4.5 pages of a small-format paperback. It’s so concise that it would be difficult to summarize in many fewer words, but I’ll run through the points he makes across the initial essay, the replies to the correspondence, and a follow-up piece entitled “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” (1989). Berry laments his reliance on energy corporations and wants to limit that as much as possible. He decries consumerism in general; he isn’t going to acquire something just to be ‘keeping up with the times’. He doesn’t believe a computer will make his work better, and it doesn’t meet his criteria for a useful tool (smaller, cheaper and less energy-intensive than what it replaces; sourced locally and easily repaired by a non-specialist). He is perfectly happy with his current arrangement: he writes his work by hand and his wife types it up for him. He is loath to lose this human touch.
The letters to the editor, predictably, accuse him of self-righteousness for depicting his choice as the more virtuous one. The correspondents also felt they had to stand up for Berry’s wife, who might have better things to do than act as her husband’s secretary. This is the only time the author becomes slightly defensive, basically saying, ‘you don’t know anything about me, my wife or my marriage … maybe she wants to!’ He doubles down on the environmental harm caused by technology and consumerism, acknowledging his continued dependence on fossil fuels and vowing to avoid them, and unnecessary purchases, where possible.
If some technology does damage to the world, … then why is it not reasonable, and indeed moral, to try to limit one’s use of that technology?
To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd. … can we do something directly to solve our share of the problem? … Why then is not my first duty to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?
If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer one is not to use one.
He even appears to speak prophetically to the rise of artificial intelligence:
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. … And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. The danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress’ is the degradation and obsolescence of the body.
Certain of his arguments felt relevant to me as I ponder my own relationship to technology. I compose all my reviews on a 19-year-old personal computer that’s not connected to the Internet. I don’t listen to the radio and have seen maybe three films in the past two years. We’ve been television-free for a decade and I have never regretted it (Berry: “It is easy – it is even a luxury – to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation.”).
I find it so hard to adjust to new tech that my reluctance may have shaded into suspicion. I’m certainly no early adopter, but I’d also object to the label “Luddite”: since 2013 I’ve been using e-readers, which are invaluable in my reviewing work. But for 15 years or more I have been looking at other people and their smartphones with disdain. I prided myself on my resistance. Stubbornness seemed like a virtue when the alternative was spending a lot of money on something I didn’t need.
Receiving my first cell phone in July 2004 (with my dad at left; at Dulles airport).
Two months ago, though, I finally gave in and accepted a hand-me-down Motorola Android phone from my father-in-law, after nearly 20 years of using an old-style mobile phone. As we were renegotiating our phone and Internet contract, I got virtually unlimited minutes and data on this device for £6/month, with no initial outlay. Had I been forced to make a purchase, I think I would still be holding out. But I had gotten to the point where refusal was cutting off my nose to spite my face. Why keep martyring myself – saying I couldn’t make important household phone calls because they drained my pay-as-you-go credit; learning complex workarounds to post to Instagram from my PC; taking crap photos on a digital camera held together with a rubber band? Why resist utility just for the sake of it?
To be clear, this was not a matter of saving time. I’m not a busy person. Plus I believe there is value in slowing down and acting deliberately. (See this book-based article I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018 on the benefits of “wasting time.”) Mindless scrolling is as much a temptation on a PC as on a phone, so avoiding social media was not a motive for me; others with addictive tendencies may decide otherwise. Nor did I view convenience as reason enough per se. However, I admit I was attracted to the efficiency of a pocket-sized device that can at once replace a computer, pager, telephone, Rolodex, phonebook, camera, photo album, television screen, music player, camcorder, Dictaphone, stopwatch, calculator, map, satnav, flashlight, encyclopaedia, Kindle library, calendar, diary, Post-It notes, notebook, alarm clock and mirror. (Have I missed anything?) Talk about multi-tasking!
Out with the old, in with the new?
I would still say that I object to tech serving as a status symbol or a basis for self-importance, and I’d be pretty dubious about it ever being a worthwhile hobby. Should this phone fail me in future, I’ll copy my husband’s habit of buying a secondhand handset for £60–80. I wouldn’t acquire something that represented new extraction of rare resources. Treating things (or people) as disposable is anathema to me, something about which I know Berry would agree. I’m naturally parsimonious, obsessive about keeping things going for as long as possible and recycling them responsibly when they reach their end of life.
It’s one reason why I’ve gotten involved in the Repair Café movement. I volunteer for our local branch, which started up in February, on the admin and publicity side of things. The old-fashioned, make-do-and-mend ethos appeals to me. It’s the same spirit evoked in the lyrics of American singer-songwriter Mark Erelli’s “Analog Hero”:
He’s the fix-it man, the fix-it man
If he can’t put it back together, then it was never worth a damn
Maybe he’s crazy for trying to save what’s already gone
Now it ain’t even broken and we’re going for the upgrade
Nobody thinks twice ’bout what we’re really throwing away
It’s out with the old, in with the new…
I can imagine Wendell Berry still pecking out his words on a typewriter on his Kentucky farm. He’s an analogue hero, too. And he doesn’t go nearly as far as Mark Boyle, whose radical life experiment is recounted in The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books in 2019.
I have pretty much made my peace with owning a smartphone. I have few apps and am still more likely to work at my PC or on paper. I’ll concede that I enjoy being able to post to X or Instagram wherever I am, and to keep up with messages on the go. (I used to have to say cryptic things to friends like, “once I leave the house, I will be unavailable except by text.”) Mostly, I’m relieved to have shed the frustrations of outmoded tech. Though I still keep my Nokia brick by my bedside as a trusty alarm clock – and a torch for when the cat wakes me between 2 and 5 each morning.
Ultimately, I feel, a smartphone is a tool like any other. It’s how you use it. Salman Rushdie comes to much the same conclusion about the would-be murder weapon wielded against him: “a knife is a tool, and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral” (from Knife).
Berry’s argument about overreliance on energy remains a good one, but we are all so complicit in so many ways – even more so than in the late 1980s when he was writing – that avoiding the computer, and now the smartphone, doesn’t seem to hold particular merit. While this pamphlet will be but a quaint curio piece for most readers (rather than a parallel to the battle of wills I’ve conducted with myself), it is engaging and convincing, and the societal issues it considers are still ones to be wrestled with.
My copy was purchased with part of a £30 voucher I received free from Penguin UK for being part of their “Bookmarks” online community – answering polls, surveys, etc.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 