Recent reading

[regshoe]

The Diaries of Anne Lister, volume 1, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1816-24, published 1988). I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and decided now was the time to get round to it. It is absolutely fascinating! Anne Lister writes about all sorts of things in her journal, and it's full of terribly interesting and useful historical detail on e.g. the practicalities of travel, details of food, the unstable political situation of the period, the social life of early-nineteenth-century Halifax and York, etc. etc. A lot of the detail she includes is not the sort of thing that often made it into fiction at this time, so that even the non-coded sections of the journal feel very immediate and down-to-earth in a way period writing written for publication doesn't tend to. And then there are the coded sections, of course! Really, really fascinating stuff—both the personal details of the relationships described and the generalities of how Lister managed to live in the world as a lesbian in a way that made sense to her and which she made legible to the women she was interested in, and also her thoughts on the subject as a whole. I was surprised in a few places by how 'modern' some of her ideas and reasoning seemed, and yet they are very much of their time, and the journal really is an invaluable source on how people in the past thought and talked about these things even when they didn't normally write about them. Sometimes Lister is annoyingly vague about exactly what happened or what was said, at other times she's startlingly detailed. Occasionally the editing annoyed me—it's not really clear just how much selecting and cutting Whitbread has done, but it's obviously quite a lot, and at times she steps in to summarise things that I'd quite like to have read in detail in the original—but mostly I'm just impressed by her achievement. On the other hand, reading this has confirmed me in my opinion that Anne Lister was really not a very admirable person, either generally or in how she conducted her relationships—the volume opens with her seducing her girlfriend's sister while they're both accompanying the girlfriend on her honeymoon, which is more or less representative; she's frequently dishonest and duplicitous, a pretty massive snob and, despite her own socially unconventional life, extremely conservative politically (I think her particular outlook/set of ideas is a very interesting one, but it's not a good one). Nevertheless I enjoyed reading about her life, her thoughts on it and her emotional experiences, aside from the historical aspects of the journal. I look forward to the second volume!

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951). Another one I'd had on the to-read list for ages, and finally managed to find at the library recently. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange little novella about an eccentric, reclusive woman who opens a 'café' (it seemed more like a pub to me, with the evening opening hours and the alcohol—are American bars not normally like that?—but never mind) in her tiny Southern US town with the help of the hunchbacked cousin who turns up mysteriously one day, and how ruin and tragedy eventually overtake them. The whole story is written in a fairytale-ish style, and told with very much a fairytale logic, and I loved it—McCullers makes that fairytale logic make perfect sense in a fairly modern American setting, and does so with a constant compelling strangeness which is really rather beautiful despite the equally strange tragedy of the story itself. And Miss Amelia herself is a highly memorable character who I liked a lot. Collected together with it are various shorter stories, which I didn't like so much—they're very good, but tend to focus on unpleasant and depressing aspects of life in a style that reminded me of some of the other mid-twentieth-century American stuff I've read and generally react to by just thinking I'm not interested in reading stories like that, and they're not at all in the same style or mood as the title story.

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of my Early Life by W. H. Hudson (1918). Something a bit different! I'd previously enjoyed some of Hudson's nature writing about the wildlife and countryside of England, where he lived in later life; this is his account of his childhood on the pampas of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century, and the various human and animal sights and dramas surrounding him. He spends a lot of time describing the wildlife of the pampas, especially the birds, and I enjoyed these sections the best—Hudson has such a talent for vivid, imaginative description of the natural world and for finding the significance and beauty in descriptions of wildlife. But the historical stuff was also interesting—he describes the general state of life and society in nineteenth-century Argentina, both the remote countryside of his home and Buenos Aires as experienced on visits, and how some major historical events like the ongoing civil wars and the overthrow of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 appeared to him as they happened. I knew nothing about any of this, and it was interesting to read about a new historical setting, brutal as some of the details were. I could have done without the racism, and the book is rather amusingly poorly paced (at one point Hudson says, whoops, I should have included this in an earlier chapter but I forgot, it'll have to go here instead; apparently editing just wasn't an option for him?), but on the whole a very enjoyable read.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Someone on twitter maybe summarised Lister (from the show) as "Okay, but maybe THIS Tory land owner with bad hair has a point." which I have not been able to shake, lol. I keep thinking of reading the book, but like you haven't gotten around to it.

[regshoe]

XD Oh dear... I tried the first episode of the show a while ago but didn't watch any more—partly because of how unlikeable I found Anne, partly from feeling that a modern TV dramatisation wasn't how I wanted to approach this bit of history. But I'm very glad I got round to reading the book!

[muccamukk]

Yeah, I made two episodes for the same reason, lol.

[sovay]

(I think her particular outlook/set of ideas is a very interesting one, but it's not a good one)

In what ways is it interesting?

[regshoe]

That's a tricky question... I think it's partly a certain sympathy with the temperamental (not the social or political) aspect of the conservatism of the time in general, which is really much easier to sympathise with from that angle than modern conservatism, and partly fascination with what looks to us today like a somewhat contradictory set of views (and is somewhat contradictory, really; Lister will talk about how absurd and unattractive she thinks intellectual women are, while devoting herself to her own classical and mathematical studies) and how that could in fact exist in a time when political boundaries and groups looked very different to how they look now.

[osprey_archer]

I wonder if this is a mid-century or perhaps particularly American South use of the word cafe? Because yes, most Americans would call a business with evening opening hours that serves alcohol a bar, not a cafe.

Anyway, the story sounds really interesting! I've been meaning to read McCullers' A Member of the Wedding for a while; I really should get on that someday, and maybe this book too.

[regshoe]

Possibly! The title and setting reminded me for a bit of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which IIRC was definitely more what I'd think of as a cafe.

Anyway, definitely an author to try! I also have The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on my vague to-read list, and will get to that at some point.

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Oooh, the Lister diaries sound absolutely fascinating, both in terms of historical detail and from a queer history perspective.

Your review is also solidifying my desire to read some Hudson-- I've been meaning to for a while. I've read a couple of similar memoirs of colonial childhoods (mostly set in India/Egypt) and there's always this very frustrating balance between "interesting historical facts about a setting I don't know much about" and "egregious racism and imperial apologism, which call into question how much the author can actually be trusted on said facts".

[regshoe]

Hudson's writing is absolutely lovely, both here and in his more general nature books. But that is true about the politics—he doesn't do a lot of the long-winded political justifications, but there's certainly enough to suggest a somewhat untrustworthy general outlook. Perhaps I should find some other nineteenth-century Argentinian authors to read to get more of a balance.

[liriaen]

I love the Carson McCullers story to bits; her take on Southern Gothic has such grit! (Then again I also love Flannery O’Connor, there’s certainly a trajectory…)
Her unflinching dust bowl grimness may be an aquired taste, true. :)

[regshoe]

I don't know anything about Southern Gothic as a genre, but—grimness notwithstanding—I certainly enjoyed this one, if it's an example!

[liriaen]

We read the "Ballad" in school, in secondary edcuation English, late in the 80s... and I recall engaging discussiona in our course about the relative sense of queerness that Miss Amelia exuded. At least 2/3 of the course were convinced she was lesbian (and felt duly disappointed when she fell in love with Cousin Lymons). (But was it love? Was it not rather a from of emotionally stunted co-dependency where Amelia thought she found support and affection with another human being who was equally marginalised?)

Oh, yes, this is very much Southern Gothic at its finest. :D To just quote a bit from wiki, "warped rural communities replaced the sinister plantations of an earlier age"... "the representation of the South blossomed into an absurdist critique of modernity as a whole." ... "Southern Gothic particularly focuses on the South's history of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, violence, a fixation with the grotesque, and a tension between realistic and supernatural elements"... that kind of thing. :D

[regshoe]

I definitely agree both about Miss Amelia's queerness (funny, to me she read less as specifically lesbian—I mean, there's not really any suggestion of an actual relationship with another woman—and more as very easy to understand as queer in the context of her general oddness and the general sense of her as someone living sideways-on to social expectations and 'normality', as it were) and about the nature of her love for Cousin Lymon. I think one of my favourite things about the story is how McCullers makes those elements fit so naturally and logically into the lyrical fairytale-ish shape and style of the thing (it's called 'ballad' for a reason, I suppose).

That all sounds fun!... I shall have to try some more examples :D

[liriaen]

I think reading her as lesbian was just the knee-jerk reaction of 1980's teenagers aged 18 in suburban Germany - there was no LGBT queer terminology available to them, to us, and the type of deviance that Amelia lives and embodies... well it's peculiar how that would have been read as "so outsidery she's gotta be lesbian, right?!" But that's how a lot of the kids reacted, and they must've gotten that idea from home: that a woman who doesn't conform, who is "other", has to be, well, "that". I'm glad times have changed.

I'd suggest some Flannery O'Connor, but oh my she IS bleak. :)

[regshoe]

Yes, that makes sense! And I think reading her as lesbian is perfectly possible, after all.

Hehe, I'll keep Flannery O'Connor in mind if I'm ever in the mood for something a bit gloomy :D

[oursin]

I've just had a communication with info about digital Radclyffe and Una project:

While the couple’s leanings toward far-right ideologies complicate their legacy as groundbreaking queer writers today...

Lister was probably not particularly out there for her class and period: Hall and Troubridge were 'Yay Fascism!!!'

[regshoe]

Oh dear. No, she comes across as a fairly typical Tory landowner of the post-French Revolution period, as far as I know about them in general—it's the combination of that and the 'groundbreaking queer writer' thing that's interesting in a way.

[luzula]

The Lister diaries sound fascinating, although as you say, not a particularly sympathetic person! Any particularly interesting examples of historical details of everyday life?

[regshoe]

There's all sorts! I especially enjoyed Lister's descriptions of getting books from the circulating library—the library was expanding and moving into new rooms, of which she criticises the arrangement; apparently you had to climb a ladder and 'creep up thro' a square hole cut in the floor above' to get into the main library from the entrance—and of attending public lectures in Halifax (and chatting up girls there). At one point she and her aunt visit the Lake District and she gives details of the meals they eat at the various inns they stay at along the way and how good or bad the food is. At the coronation of George IV Lister, like a loyal pro-monarchist, details that all the farm workers, domestic servants and other people employed on the Shibden estate got a shilling each, 'a good additional quantity of beer to drink the king's health', a bowl of punch and a supper of roast beef. There are lots of specific details of how much she paid for this or that item, or what the arrangements were for travelling to such and such a place, which I think would be very useful for anyone writing fiction about the period.

[luzula]

Interesting! That does sound like an annoying layout for a library…

[theseatheseatheopensea]

That fairy tale-ish vibe is one of my favourite things about "The ballad of the sad café"!! And I think it's really interesting that McCullers gave it a less typical happy ending--Miss Amelia doesn't exactly come out as the winner of the story, but she gets to decide how to go on afterwards, in her own terms, and that's a really important thing, and I find it very realistic. And even if McCullers usually writes about depressing stuff, she also adds all those little, beautiful details that make things be not entirely hopeless. And I also love that strangeness that's all over her work, and her memorable female characters! And her writing is so queer overall, and so dedicated to showing the way queerness, disability and the experiences of minorities overlap, many times with a realistic, honest sense of humour. She's such an amazing writer! <3

And I think Hudson is at his best when he writes about nature stuff--some of his stories about the people he knew are sweet and funny, but the racism pokes its head a lot, and it's pretty annoying! :( I remember enjoying this book a lot as a kid, though! I liked the random, back and forth style of narration--I think it's charming, and it feels very natural, it reminds me of oral narration, which has no editing, so it's very spontaneous, which I love!

[regshoe]

That is a very good point about the ending—I had interpreted it as being meant very bleakly, but I suppose you're right that she is making her own decisions, even if the circumstances of that are rather tragic.

I really enjoyed the queerness of the story, as well! As I said to liriaen above, I found myself kind of reading Miss Amelia as queer in a nebulous sort of way that fits in with her general 'oddness' and the sense of her as someone existing sideways-on to (straight) social standards of normality. And the story of her 'marriage' is certainly an impressive and memorable example of a woman not fitting into the heteronormative role at all... Disability is another interesting aspect of the story, although I wasn't really sure what to make of Cousin Lymon either from that angle or in general—I suppose we don't see things from his perspective as much as from Miss Amelia's.

Heh, the randomness of Hudson's writing is rather charming in its way, and I do think it went well with a book of reminiscences—that's true that it feels more like a story he might be spontaneously telling to the reader.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

That is a very good point about the ending—I had interpreted it as being meant very bleakly, but I suppose you're right that she is making her own decisions, even if the circumstances of that are rather tragic.

That may be just me, after reading her stuff 10000000 times XD but I feel that even her saddest, unhappiest endings show her characters keeping their dignity, even if they are living in tragic situations, and choosing how they deal with that tragedy. I think her endings feel very real because of this.

And definitely!! Miss Amelia is "queer in a nebulous sort of way"--many of her characters (and McCullers herself, I think) exist in that place between "normality" and "queerness", and the way she writes about people's experiences navigating between them is fascinating to me, and again, feels very real. Also, she writes a lot about people with disability trying to fit in in a world that doesn't want them, and I think Cousin Lymon is an interesting example of that... but I think she did this even better in "The heart is a lonely hunter", which is so impressive, because it was her first novel! It shows the way disability and queerness overlap, and how people try to fit into the "normal" world, with various degrees of success and failure, and it's just an amazing book!

[regshoe]

Dignified tragedy, yes, I see what you mean—well, clearly I'll have to read her other books and see how their endings compare :D And The Heart is a Lonely Hunter sounds really good...