July, 1999
Idyllic childhood on an Irish family farm; backbreaking work, plenty of fresh air, surprisingly sentimental care of farm animals. Yet, a depressing place for any adults, especially men, who happen not to want to be farmers. Lone bachelors living in their parents' homes, who simply die one summer. No fuss, no doctors.
Here the last vestiges of day to day medievalism die out in Ireland only in the 1950s. They are still taking their wheat to the mill while dancing to Nat King Cole. Beautiful and strange.
Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1990s. Show all posts
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. by Brian O'Doherty
Wildly dull. So much so that I wonder at the awareness of the author. At some point, doesn't a writer step back from his work and think, "my God, this is going to bore people to death"? We all write dull things occasionally; editors help correct that propensity, usually. The wonder is that this got published even with an editor's help.
Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the sentences grammatical and sometimes artful. The trouble is that the author is trying to tell a story without telling a story. He wants to recreate a real historical incident, about the well-meaning quack doctor Mesmer in 18th century Vienna whose name has entered our language in the term "mesmerize," without actually stooping to any kind of clarity about people, places, or events. The brief tale is told in chapters narrated as memoirs by the handful of main characters -- doctor, patient, patient's father. It seems that one of Mesmer's patients or subjects was a young woman surnamed Paradies, whose father was an official at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa and who was herself an accomplished pianist. She was blind, and at 18 her parents submitted her to Mesmer's care for a cure for this. Mesmer had strange ideas about fluids and "animal magnetism." ("I see it as a luminous sheath of weightless extension which binds the stars and our souls in one glowing substance ....") He believed he could help people suffering any variety of ills by massaging this fluid through their bodies, until they achieved some sort of "crisis," at which point his assistants, hale young men, would bear off the spasming patient to a padded room and close the door on the screams.
This would be terrific stuff in the hands of a good professional women's romance novelist, but O'Doherty, I fear, prefers to be an artiste. Instead of anything that might keep our attention, we get long pages on father Paradies, disappointed in his daughter's cure, wondering how he can pull strings at court to get Mesmer disgraced without seeming petty or scheming himself. Mozart wanders in, because the time frame is right -- although the brief note at the end of the book tells us that in fact Mozart and Mlle. P. actually met, and he wrote a concerto for her (B flat, K. 456). Marie Antoinette lurks on the sidelines, as do the scientists who went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, also because the time is right.
The best chapter is the one told from the point of view of Mlle. P. herself. The problem with Mesmer's cure of her is that it worked. She began to regain her sight, but the overload of new information that this brought her became a worse handicap than the blindness she had learned to cope with. There are very interesting pages here on what it must be like for a person to suddenly face a world in which he is expected to take in knowledge through his eyes. Mlle has no understanding of perspective; objects appear to her as in a Cubist painting, their angles and shadows ever-changing and meaningless. She has no experience associating words with the physical look of objects. To her, a "table" may as well be a "cat" -- she is in the midst of learning a foreign language on several levels, and so her mistakes under quizzing make her look like an imbecile. "To me the Danube looked like a white ribbon that I could reach out and pick up. It had no character of water that I could see."
Her own crisis comes when her new sight ruins her ability to play the piano, which is her meal ticket at the Empress' court and in life. Distracted by the visual chaos of sheet music and by the spectacle of her hands' gyrations, she regresses to such a point that her father removes her from Mesmer's house. Then the story winds down, but ever so slowly. Mesmer leaves Vienna for Paris, and Mlle P. carries on, offstage, playing and earning a living as a teacher. The well meaning quack, at eighty, suffers agonies of guilt for having erotic dreams about her. He massages his fluids.
So there is interesting matter here, but O'Doherty has chosen to spin it out as half a dozen very long winded and overthought diary entries graced by absolutely no conversation nor any other devices to move the reader forward through a story. You'll learn more, more enjoyably, from the jacket flap summary, which has to be about the last thing an author would want to hear about his novel.
Except the jacket flap also says the book is "thriller-like." As the modern vernacular puts it: um, no.
Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the sentences grammatical and sometimes artful. The trouble is that the author is trying to tell a story without telling a story. He wants to recreate a real historical incident, about the well-meaning quack doctor Mesmer in 18th century Vienna whose name has entered our language in the term "mesmerize," without actually stooping to any kind of clarity about people, places, or events. The brief tale is told in chapters narrated as memoirs by the handful of main characters -- doctor, patient, patient's father. It seems that one of Mesmer's patients or subjects was a young woman surnamed Paradies, whose father was an official at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa and who was herself an accomplished pianist. She was blind, and at 18 her parents submitted her to Mesmer's care for a cure for this. Mesmer had strange ideas about fluids and "animal magnetism." ("I see it as a luminous sheath of weightless extension which binds the stars and our souls in one glowing substance ....") He believed he could help people suffering any variety of ills by massaging this fluid through their bodies, until they achieved some sort of "crisis," at which point his assistants, hale young men, would bear off the spasming patient to a padded room and close the door on the screams.
This would be terrific stuff in the hands of a good professional women's romance novelist, but O'Doherty, I fear, prefers to be an artiste. Instead of anything that might keep our attention, we get long pages on father Paradies, disappointed in his daughter's cure, wondering how he can pull strings at court to get Mesmer disgraced without seeming petty or scheming himself. Mozart wanders in, because the time frame is right -- although the brief note at the end of the book tells us that in fact Mozart and Mlle. P. actually met, and he wrote a concerto for her (B flat, K. 456). Marie Antoinette lurks on the sidelines, as do the scientists who went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, also because the time is right.
The best chapter is the one told from the point of view of Mlle. P. herself. The problem with Mesmer's cure of her is that it worked. She began to regain her sight, but the overload of new information that this brought her became a worse handicap than the blindness she had learned to cope with. There are very interesting pages here on what it must be like for a person to suddenly face a world in which he is expected to take in knowledge through his eyes. Mlle has no understanding of perspective; objects appear to her as in a Cubist painting, their angles and shadows ever-changing and meaningless. She has no experience associating words with the physical look of objects. To her, a "table" may as well be a "cat" -- she is in the midst of learning a foreign language on several levels, and so her mistakes under quizzing make her look like an imbecile. "To me the Danube looked like a white ribbon that I could reach out and pick up. It had no character of water that I could see."
Her own crisis comes when her new sight ruins her ability to play the piano, which is her meal ticket at the Empress' court and in life. Distracted by the visual chaos of sheet music and by the spectacle of her hands' gyrations, she regresses to such a point that her father removes her from Mesmer's house. Then the story winds down, but ever so slowly. Mesmer leaves Vienna for Paris, and Mlle P. carries on, offstage, playing and earning a living as a teacher. The well meaning quack, at eighty, suffers agonies of guilt for having erotic dreams about her. He massages his fluids.
So there is interesting matter here, but O'Doherty has chosen to spin it out as half a dozen very long winded and overthought diary entries graced by absolutely no conversation nor any other devices to move the reader forward through a story. You'll learn more, more enjoyably, from the jacket flap summary, which has to be about the last thing an author would want to hear about his novel.
Except the jacket flap also says the book is "thriller-like." As the modern vernacular puts it: um, no.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Jane Austen: a Life by David Nokes
This beautiful thick book with its ecru-lace artwork on the jacket is going to look lovely on your parlor table, beside a roaring fireplace with, preferably, the snow falling outside. It amounts, really, to a seventh Jane Austen novel, being a long, lovingly detailed chronicle of her family life, her visits, and her relations' adventures in colonial India or revolutionary France. Jane writes her novels and dies at the end, at the age of forty-one.
The foregoing will seem the most smug of backhanded compliments, and it isn't meant to be. The book is superbly written, wonderfully atmospheric, and most intelligent. Here, in two sentences, Nokes gives the best summation of an Austen plot I have ever read: "At the end of all her novels, the heroine always married the man she loved, whose comfortable income was a symbol of his frank and manly instincts, rather than a substitute for them. Only the minor characters were condemned to suffer the cynical misfortunes of an adverse providence" (p. 257).
And David Nokes has done his research painstakingly; it must have been a joyous experience to hold Jane Austen's (clergyman) father's parish register in his hands, and to see the corrections and updates she penned herself, including the names of otherwise anonymous Hampshire countryfolk which she then lifted for characters in her books. He must also have had great fun in deciding to begin his biography in an unlikely way, in Bengal in 1773, with the problems of a colonial official who turns out to be -- if I understand this -- Jane Austen's father's brother-in-law.
The trouble underlying all the atmospherics and the fine writing is that, as I remember reading about authors once, most writers lead uneventful lives. This is what gives them time to write. In Jane Austen: a Life we see confirmation of this remark. Her relatives sailed the seas, married French counts, went to gaol briefly for theft, and had a dozen children. She wrote books. There isn't much more to expose about her; if she had wanted to provide a subject to probing biographers (and maybe we all do), she might have done other things besides write the books which are freely available for all to read anyway.
Early on, Nokes says that he does want to expose new things about her. Her sister Cassandra burned many of her letters, and her first biographers were her own nephews and great-nephews, who lived in a different time. He wants to make it clear that Jane was not a Victorian sugar plum, but rather a child of the eighteenth century, in all its eating, breeding, and farting glory. Also she was a bit of a snip. Unmarried herself (she turned down two proposals, one of which would have set her up for life) she spent a lot of time acerbically noting all the pregnancies and births going on among the dull neighbor women -- Mrs. Digweed's eighth or ninth, can you imagine! Comparatively poor until Pride and Prejudice gave her a little money and quite a bit of fame, Jane also heartily resented the good fortune and fine houses that seemed to come effortlessly to all the Austens except Cassandra and herself. No gouty uncle remembered them in a legacy.
But all in all, there wasn't much she did. She lived and wrote, so to speak, transparently: there seems little to investigate or ponder in her writings, as there is -- and this will sound comically innocent, but here goes -- in the Iliad or Shakespeare. Perhaps she didn't write -- perhaps women tend not to -- about life's whys. (As in: why do her novels still fascinate, even though they are all about women trying to get married in rural Regency England? It may be because Jane, and her characters male and female, occupied a strange, tense place in their world. Neither rural farmers nor urban shopkeepers, neither peers with tenants' income nor completely impoverished dependents, they were a class who faced three choices in the scramble for money to live on: for the men, there was military service or the Church, for the women, marriage. Jane and Cassandra contemplated schoolteaching as a last resort, but the idea loomed as sheer hell. The career girl of the future steps timidly upon the stage, almost before the career man ... and yet this was still a class which could not do without servants.)
Her novels all written and four of them published, Jane Austen died of some one of the complaints which seemed to carry off people for no reason in the days before modern medicine. Before antibiotics, of course, any illness or injury could be quickly fatal. But is also seems that in those days, you died very much because any illness, especially if it was puzzling and lasted more than a month or so, prompted your relations to expect you to die. Everybody exchanged pained looks, and they propped you up on the sopha, and talked of a journey to somewhere more healthful. Jane suffered languor, and fevers, and pains in her back. If it was something recognizable like cancer, Nokes does not say so. ("In this biography I have sought to present each moment of Jane Austen's life as it was experienced at the time, not with the detached knowingness of hindsight.") After months of this, her " 'final struggle' " -- and that was what people called it and were ready to call it -- occured between 6 pm and 4:30 am over the night of the 17th to the 18th of July, 1817. Ten and a half hours is a long time to be about the work of dying, especially when, as Cassandra recalled, the body is still strong. (It still shocks that Jane was forty-one.) "I perceived no material diminution of strength," she wrote, and Jane "complained of little fixed pain." She simply lay with her head off the bed on someone's lap, until it was over.
A beautiful, snowy-day book. Unless you really wildly want to know exactly when and how often Jane Austen visited Manydown or Godmersham in 1811, and what was the third ship her brother was posted to after his promotion but before he got married, then I suggest this is a book to dip into, not necessarily to assault from page one.
The foregoing will seem the most smug of backhanded compliments, and it isn't meant to be. The book is superbly written, wonderfully atmospheric, and most intelligent. Here, in two sentences, Nokes gives the best summation of an Austen plot I have ever read: "At the end of all her novels, the heroine always married the man she loved, whose comfortable income was a symbol of his frank and manly instincts, rather than a substitute for them. Only the minor characters were condemned to suffer the cynical misfortunes of an adverse providence" (p. 257).
And David Nokes has done his research painstakingly; it must have been a joyous experience to hold Jane Austen's (clergyman) father's parish register in his hands, and to see the corrections and updates she penned herself, including the names of otherwise anonymous Hampshire countryfolk which she then lifted for characters in her books. He must also have had great fun in deciding to begin his biography in an unlikely way, in Bengal in 1773, with the problems of a colonial official who turns out to be -- if I understand this -- Jane Austen's father's brother-in-law.
The trouble underlying all the atmospherics and the fine writing is that, as I remember reading about authors once, most writers lead uneventful lives. This is what gives them time to write. In Jane Austen: a Life we see confirmation of this remark. Her relatives sailed the seas, married French counts, went to gaol briefly for theft, and had a dozen children. She wrote books. There isn't much more to expose about her; if she had wanted to provide a subject to probing biographers (and maybe we all do), she might have done other things besides write the books which are freely available for all to read anyway.
Early on, Nokes says that he does want to expose new things about her. Her sister Cassandra burned many of her letters, and her first biographers were her own nephews and great-nephews, who lived in a different time. He wants to make it clear that Jane was not a Victorian sugar plum, but rather a child of the eighteenth century, in all its eating, breeding, and farting glory. Also she was a bit of a snip. Unmarried herself (she turned down two proposals, one of which would have set her up for life) she spent a lot of time acerbically noting all the pregnancies and births going on among the dull neighbor women -- Mrs. Digweed's eighth or ninth, can you imagine! Comparatively poor until Pride and Prejudice gave her a little money and quite a bit of fame, Jane also heartily resented the good fortune and fine houses that seemed to come effortlessly to all the Austens except Cassandra and herself. No gouty uncle remembered them in a legacy.
But all in all, there wasn't much she did. She lived and wrote, so to speak, transparently: there seems little to investigate or ponder in her writings, as there is -- and this will sound comically innocent, but here goes -- in the Iliad or Shakespeare. Perhaps she didn't write -- perhaps women tend not to -- about life's whys. (As in: why do her novels still fascinate, even though they are all about women trying to get married in rural Regency England? It may be because Jane, and her characters male and female, occupied a strange, tense place in their world. Neither rural farmers nor urban shopkeepers, neither peers with tenants' income nor completely impoverished dependents, they were a class who faced three choices in the scramble for money to live on: for the men, there was military service or the Church, for the women, marriage. Jane and Cassandra contemplated schoolteaching as a last resort, but the idea loomed as sheer hell. The career girl of the future steps timidly upon the stage, almost before the career man ... and yet this was still a class which could not do without servants.)
Her novels all written and four of them published, Jane Austen died of some one of the complaints which seemed to carry off people for no reason in the days before modern medicine. Before antibiotics, of course, any illness or injury could be quickly fatal. But is also seems that in those days, you died very much because any illness, especially if it was puzzling and lasted more than a month or so, prompted your relations to expect you to die. Everybody exchanged pained looks, and they propped you up on the sopha, and talked of a journey to somewhere more healthful. Jane suffered languor, and fevers, and pains in her back. If it was something recognizable like cancer, Nokes does not say so. ("In this biography I have sought to present each moment of Jane Austen's life as it was experienced at the time, not with the detached knowingness of hindsight.") After months of this, her " 'final struggle' " -- and that was what people called it and were ready to call it -- occured between 6 pm and 4:30 am over the night of the 17th to the 18th of July, 1817. Ten and a half hours is a long time to be about the work of dying, especially when, as Cassandra recalled, the body is still strong. (It still shocks that Jane was forty-one.) "I perceived no material diminution of strength," she wrote, and Jane "complained of little fixed pain." She simply lay with her head off the bed on someone's lap, until it was over.
A beautiful, snowy-day book. Unless you really wildly want to know exactly when and how often Jane Austen visited Manydown or Godmersham in 1811, and what was the third ship her brother was posted to after his promotion but before he got married, then I suggest this is a book to dip into, not necessarily to assault from page one.
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