Bookshelf Journeys

Reading Instead of a Letter (1963) by Diana Athill. It’s a fascinating memoir of her youth. The descriptions of her childhood years spent at her maternal grandmother’s magnificent estate, Beckton Manor and its farm are wonderfully idyllic. Although she enjoyed the privileges of her grandmother’s world, to her credit, she is able to criticize that class, including its self satisfied sense of superiority and entitlement. I also admired her candor in freely criticizing her own mistakes and character flaws.

Excerpts

p23: She discusses the classism that she was brought up in.

pp44-45 Her family’s culture of books and reading:

Speaking of living on “The Farm”, a property on her maternal grandmother’s estate:

“While there was a carelessly arranged vase of flowers on every surface flat enough to hold a vase, she (the author’s mother) felt her drawing room pretty, and so it was. It smelt lovely, too, more like a garden than a room, and since most of its untidiness came from the litter of books on chair arms, footstools, and occasional tables, it was an agreeable room to be in.

That accumulation of books silting up the flower-free surfaces in the house: that, at bottom, I owe to my grandfathers. Both were men who took it for granted that a gentleman should have a good library, and my maternal grandfather‘s library was a very good one. In addition to this, my grandmother‘s father had been Master of an Oxford College, which meant that, however, unscholarly his descendants might be, they all esteemed scholarship: they might not read much (most of them, in fact, did), but they considered a house without books in it uncivilized. At the Manor, not only was the library walled with books, but the morning room, and my grandfather‘s smoking room as well, while the whole of an upstairs passage was given over to shelves containing more trivial volumes (delightful shelves, badly lit, from which you might fish a handbook on veterinary surgery or the Scarlet Pimpernel). There was an angle of bookshelves ceiling high in the nursery, and although reading in the bath, in the w.c., or in bed was forbidden to the younger children, everyone knew why one did it.”

Porterhouse Blue (1974) is a fascinating satire of the elite, conservative English college. Pembroke, Cambridge was the author’s alma mater, so the story is rich in college ambience and reads like an exposé. Our protagonist is Sir Godber Evans the newly appointed Master of Porterhouse. He is determined to fundamentally change the college’s policies from those that selectively advance the privileged class and prioritize banqueting and collegiate sports to those that prioritize scholarship including undergraduate admissions based on academic achievement and the introduction of women undergraduates. As one might expect he is met with fierce resistance from the Old Boys, and the ensuing struggle is quite entertaining. Skullion, the college’s ancient Head Porter, is also a fierce defender of the feudal order from the perspective of a loyal servant and is an interesting creation. The story remains sadly relevant today as wealth and personal connections continue to circumvent merit in college admissions. The story was made into a television miniseries, but I have yet to see it.

Excerpts:

Skullion’s view of gentlemen: Not what they were, but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for. P20

Planning to read Colossus (1966) by D.F. Jones. I enjoyed the film version, Colossus : The Forbin Project when I was a kid, and a film critic brought it back to my attention recently in a review of underrated classic science fiction films. The technology and social attitudes are outdated, but it is a prescient work on the unforeseen dangers of AI.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) by Mary McCarthy. It’s a very interesting account of an eventful childhood. McCarthy concedes that some details of the distant past may not be entirely accurate, and some details and conversations may even be imagined, but says the essential elements are real. I was impressed by her intelligence, spunkiness, and candor. It’s an entertaining literary autobiography of the author’s unusual youth. My rating: 3/5

Excerpts:

P13 The sense that one is privileged to be a Catholic: She (Mary’s mother) was proud and happy to be a convert, and her attitude made us feel that it was a special treat to be a Catholic, the crowning treat and privilege. Our religion was a present to us from God. Everything in our home life conspired to fix in our minds the idea that we were very precious little persons, precious to our parents, and to God, too, Who was listening to us with loving attention every night when we set our prayers. It gave you a basic complacency, a psychoanalyst once told me, but I do not recall feeling smug exactly. It was, rather a sense of wondering, grateful privilege.

P23 The danger of Catholic arrogance: From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others, it is too great temptation – a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth. The Catholic religion, I believe, is the most dangerous of all, morally (I do not know about the Moslem), because with its claim to be the only true religion, it fosters that sense of privilege I spoke of earlier - the notion that not everyone is lucky enough to be a Catholic.

P27 For myself, I prefer not to play it so safe (as Pascal), and I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists, Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.

P33 Her paternal grandmother‘s combative brand of Catholicism.

The Adventures Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Bleak House, All Quiet on the Western Front, Middlemarch, South Riding, Cry, The Beloved Country, Disgrace, Of Human Bondage, The Grapes of Wrath, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Indian Horse, Elmer Gantry, The Village, Cider House Rules,

Yet to read:

I started reading Lark Rise (1945), the first of a trilogy of memoirs of the author’s upbringing in rural Victorian England on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border. It’s an interesting primary source of the author’s agrarian way of life and rural customs. The author mentions occasional historical events of the period and sometimes uses archaic words and expressions, and I was glad to have an annotated copy to explain these. The work is loosely organized and is something that can be picked up periodically. I am looking for more drama at the moment and will pause at page 87.

To be continued.

Excerpts:

P34 Their notable virtue of endurance; not flinching .

Reading Warlock (1958) by Oakley Hall. It’s a story about America’s hard bitten southwestern frontier of the late 19th century including the events surrounding the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Warlock was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and is included in Library of America’s collection of classic Westerns of the 40s and 50s. I got to page 124. Much of the story is told in the third person, so it is short on interiority, and the story wasn’t to my taste initially. However, I gradually gained an appreciation for its brooding atmosphere and exploration of the contest between the evil and good elements of American society. The lines between the two sides become blurred by moral and legal ambiguities.

I got to p236 (48%). The miners are mad that their salaries have been reduced, and they unsuccessfully tried to lynch Tom Morgan if the Glass Slipper for killing a fellow miner. Curley Burne has just killed Deputy Carl Schroeder.

From the author’s preface: “The fabric of the story, too, is made up of actual events interwoven with invented ones; by combining what did happen with what might have happened, I have tried to show what should have happened…The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.”

Excerpts:

Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) by Alan Paton. Stephen Kumalo is an old Zulu pastor who journeys from his remote village to the great city of Johannesburg to find his sister, her son, and his own son where they have gone missing. I found the dialogue and interiority in Book 1 unusually terse and formal, and there is a sense of fear and foreboding that may be enervating to the reader. However, I encourage you not to give up in Book 1, because the story becomes significantly more dramatic and eventful in Books 2&3. This is a powerful novel of courageous moral conviction borne of a character’s clear sighted observations and deep learning. As the drama unfolds Paton also provides insights into the white man’s upheaval of native traditional society and their religious, legal, and economic constructs that helped maintain the apartheid state. The novel is of course highly relevant to any country with a white supremacist colonial heritage, because the cruelty, injustice, and fear will continue to adversely affect generations to come on both sides until there is a realization of a shared humanity and welfare.

Excerpts:

P56 Msimangu: The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief - and again I ask your pardon - that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten. It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely, but it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours, and I must speak it, for it is the truth for me. They are not all so. There are some white men who give their lives to build up what is broken. But they are not enough, he said. They are afraid, that is the truth. It is fear that rules this land.

This is reiterated on P179: It was permissible to allow the destruction of a tribal system that impeded the growth of the country. It was permissible to believe that its destruction was inevitable. But it is not permissible to watch its destruction, and to replace it by nothing, or by so little, that a whole people, deteriorates, physically and morally. The old tribal system was, for all its violence and savagery, for all it, superstition and witchcraft, a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention. It is true that we hope to preserve the tribal system by a policy of segregation. That was permissible. But we never did it thoroughly or honestly. We set aside 1/10 of the land for 4/5 of the people. Thus we made it inevitable, and some say we did it knowingly, that labor would come to the towns. We are caught in the toils of our own selfishness. 

P70 The corrupting nature of power.

P105 There are times, no doubt, when God seems no more to be about the world.

P178 it is not permissible to add to one’s possessions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation. It might have been permissible in the early days of our country, before we became aware of its cost, in the disintegration of native community life, in the deterioration of native family, life, in poverty, slums and crime. But now that the cost is known, it is no longer permissible.

P187 the truth is that our Christian civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we do not want it in South Africa. We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply. We believe in help for the underdog, but we want him to stay under. And we are therefore compelled, in order to preserve our belief that we are Christian, to ascribe to Almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, our own human intentions, and to say that because he created white and black, he gives the divine approval to any human action that is designed to keep black men from advancement. We go so far to credit Almighty God with having created black men to hew wood and draw water for white men. We go so far as to assume that He blesses any action that is designed to prevent black men from the full employment of the gifts He gave them. Alongside of these very arguments we use others totally inconsistent, so that the accusation of repression may be refuted. We say we withhold education because the black child has not the intelligence to profit by it; we withhold opportunity to develop gifts because Black people have no gifts; we justify our action by saying that it took us thousands of years to achieve our own advancement, and it would be foolish to suppose that it will take the black man any lesser time, and that therefore there is no need for hurry. We shift our ground again when a black man does achieve something remarkable, and feel deep pity for a man who is condemned to the loneliness of being remarkable, and decide that it is a Christian kindness not to let black men become remarkable. Thus even our God becomes a confused and inconsistent creature, giving gifts and denying them employment. Is it strange then that our civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma? The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate, anxiety, of loving charity and fearful, clutching of possessions.

P191 it is the duty of a judge to do justice, but it is only the people that can be just. Therefore, if justice be not just, that is not to be laid at the door of the judge, but at the door of the people, which means that the door of the white people, for it is the white people that make the law. In South Africa, men are proud of their judges, because they believe they’re incorruptible. Even the black men have faith in them, though they do not always have faith in the law. In a land of fear, this incorruptibility is like a lamp set up upon a stand, giving light to all that are in the house.