Love in a Cold Climate

Bassano, Nancy Mitford, 1932

By Nancy Mitford, Love in a Cold Climate, Intro. by Flora Fraser, New York: Vintage Books, 2010, p. 245

Once again, Fanny is the narrator.  This novel centers on Polly, Lady Leopoldina Hampton, an only child and deliciously rich heiress who falls in love with Boy Dougdale, her uncle who prefers having sex with young girls.  Boy's nickname is "the Lecherous Lecturer," and after much kerfuffle, Polly marries Boy.  She is disinherited and ostracized from society.  Her place in the family is taken by Cedric Hampton, a flamboyant, glamorous gay guy from Nova Scotia, who like a deus ex machina restores equilibrium to the Hampton family.  The marriage between Polly and Boy has broken down, and Boy happily falls in love with Cedric.  Polly, for her part, falls in love with an elderly duke.  Everyone lives happily ever after.

The Pursuit of Love

Cecil Beaton (looks like Franz Xaver Winterhalter), Nancy Mitford and Friends, 1931

By Nancy Mitford, intro. by Zoe Heller, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 214

There is no American equivalent to Nancy Mitford much less the Mitford sisters.  I encountered her stories by watching Masterpiece Theater in the 1980s, and I was bowled over.  Her upper-crust world of fox-hunting, country manors with names, and Paris flats couldn't be more alien to the San Gabriel Valley I grew up in.  I quickly read all of Mitford's novels that I could find along with her Francophile biographies of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire.  Her aesthetic universe is all artful frothiness, and I was smitten by her grace.  Mitford's style is like that of Anita Loos in its charming wit and dark undertones.  As I revisit her work now, some thirty years later, I'm blinded by class.  Henry Green, another member of the Bright Young Things in inter-war London with Mitford, lived in a world that at least acknowledged the existence of those "down stairs."

Seen through the eyes of Fanny, we meet the Radetts, an eccentric, aristocratic English family.  Uncle Matthew is a blustering tyrant who hunts the children when the foxes are few.  Aunt Sadie is a remote mother of seven children.  Fanny is best friends with one of the daughters named Linda, a beautiful young woman who falls in love with a Germanic Tory, a Communist and a rich French duke.  The Pursuit of Love is the first book of a trilogy that includes Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred. 

It feels petulant to complain that Mitford is an elite snob.  Of course!  I don't hold that against M. Proust afterall.  I think its Mitford's articulation of a code that serves to exclude the "Hons" from the rest that puts me off.  Her stories are life-affirming but she's relentlessly exclusive and intolerant.  Linda doesn't even love her own daughter, Moira.  She's just not a Hon. Mitford's world is shinny bright, but its only for the lucky few.

Middlemarch

William Morris design, 19th century

By George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. with notes by David Carroll, with intro. by Felicia Bonaparte, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 810.

Ooof!  This is my second time reading Middlemarch, and while I developed a richer appreciation of Eliot's storytelling, it is still almost unbearably ponderous.  This history of provincial life is set in a fictitious Midlands town during the 1830s.  The plot centers around three relationships: first, beautiful Dorothea Brooke marries an unhappy pedant Edward Casaubon and upon his death finds contentment with the artist Ladislaw.  Second, pretty spendthrift Rosamond Vincy marries the ambitious doctor Lydgate.  Third, Fred Vancy falls in love with his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth.

What does it mean to seriously consider a great work of art and miss out on the glory?  This is a good book.  The characters unfold and grow throughout the story (rather than in Dickens where the essence of a character is fixed), and the protagonists grapple with the Reform Law and other Big Ideas in the Victorian era.  Yet, wisdom comes at the price of lugubriousness, and Eliot's humor is overplayed by her fans.  Yawn. 

An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine

Sigmund Freud and William Halsted

By Howard Markel, New York, Vintage Books, 2012, p. 314

I'm interested in the history of addiction and specifically how the scientific understanding of the causes, cures of addiction have changed over time.  Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan and a medical doctor, has written a wonderful history of drug addiction among two leading doctors in the 1880s.  With careful and engaging scholarship, Markel examines how cocaine addiction influenced the work and life of Sigmund Freud and William Halsted.  Freud, of course, is the father of psychoanalysis and William Halsted was, arguably, the most innovative surgeon of his time and the first Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University.  

In brief, cocaine was heralded as a wonder drug that would treat depression, indigestion, addiction, neurasthenia, and  assorted aches and pains.  It also functioned as a powerful anesthesia. In the 19th century, doctors prescribed opium, morphine, and laudanum (opium in 50% alcohol) to control pain, and the concept of "illegal drugs" did not exist.  Both Freud and Halsted experimented with cocaine on themselves and became addicted.  The addictive properties of pain medicine were not understood.  Drug addiction at this time was defined in moralistic terms: cocaine was not addictive in itself, and addiction was a vice.  The person who suffered from a substance abuse problem possessed "an addictive personality."  Addiction was an evil habit to be overcome, and only those favored or forgiven by God had a chance of success.

Freud compulsively used cocaine from 1884 to 1896.  Markel denies an easy causal relationship between Freud's cocaine use and his theories of a universal mind.  He notes, however, "In some sense, Sigmund's cocaine abuse represents a pharmacologically induced, perverse object lesson about the power of uninhibited expression for gaining access to deeper, unconscious levels of psychological meaning."  

Markel is a careful historian and clearly lays out what his primary source documents will and will not tell him, and, therefore, he portrays a more nuanced portrait of William Halsted than Freud.  Halstead's story is the core of this text.  The historical record of Halsted's struggles with addiction is complex.  Colleagues and students wrote secret memoirs that detailed their observations of his behavior.  Halsted's affliction was present to those trained to recognize symptoms, yet the politics of accusing such a respected surgeon-scholar of drug abuse were prohibitively difficult.  Halsted's reputation would be destroyed, Johns Hopkins  standing would be affected, and the accuser himself risked his own standing in the medical community. 

Halsted's dependence on cocaine was treated with morphine, and this caused additional problems that lasted his entire life.  He took morphine daily and struggled with periodical lapses of cocaine abuse.  Once at Johns Hopkins, Halsted was enormously successful: he developed new surgical procedures, created a surgical residency program, and authored innovative papers.  He elaborated an extremely time-consuming, exquisite manner of operating called the "School of Safety."  Its amazing that Halsted could rise above his drug addictions to achieve real greatness.  

Halsted's demons, however, took their toll on him both personally and professionally.  He was a deeply unpleasant man: he had a remote demeanor, was frequently rude, and acted from a position of privilege secure in the knowledge of his own genius.  Markel's description of Halsted's determination to participate in medicine despite his afflictions moved me to tears.  Summarizing his thesis in the book's conclusion, he writes, "In defiance of the malady that nearly destroyed them, or perhaps because of their struggle to overcome it, neither man ever lost his zeal for delivering his healing gifts to the world."  Halsted's intellectual  prowess and unabashed ego (Markel claims that he had "a controlling personality of epic proportions" ) joined with an empathy for the sufferings of others.  

A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922

Interior, Musee Jacquemart-Andree, Paris

By Richard Davenport-Hines, London, Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 358

This is a love letter written to Proust that's framed by a dinner party held at the Majestic, a chic Parisian hotel.  Organized by Violet and Sydney Schiff, cultured socialites from London, the party was attended by Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, and Diaghilev.  Proust and Joyce didn't click: each had not read the other's work and their conversation didn't proceed beyond monosyllables.  A well-written, insightful text that is an excellent intellectual history to accompany anyone's reading of Proust.  Davenport-Hines persuasively argues that Baron de Charlus is the main protagonist of Remembrance of Things Past and he shows how unprecedented Proust's treatment of homosexuality was in literature. Davenport-Hines aptly summarized some of the major themes in Proust, and, for me, clarified some ideas that have been bumping around inside my head.  For example, he beautifully describes Proust's moral universe:

[According to Proust] we should never bear ill-will towards other people, should never judge them by the memory of some act of malice, for we do not know all the good that, at other moments, their hearts may have sincerely desired or realized.  Though evil is recurrent the heart is far richer than that.

I want to write a book about Proust and trauma.  Proust finds a heaven in spontaneously reliving moments from the past, yet trauma is currently defined as the unwanted intrusion of the past in the present.  Proust would seem, then, to to be the flip side of trauma.  Proust experiences so much pain (e.g., his mother not kissing him goodnight, Albertine's possible sexual treachery, and his wild yearning for Madam and Mademoiselle Swan).  Davenport-Hines writes, "Proust was a child of apprehension: he lived always at an unbearable pitch of anxiety and always saw the world with piercing, discomforting insight."  Not all pain is trauma, of course, but I wish I understood Proust's psychology better.

Lives of Girls and Women

Sally Mann, Holding Virginia, 1989, The Art Institute of Chicago

By Alice Munro, New York, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 277

Alice Munro is a masterful writer of short fiction.  This is her only novel and, unsurprisingly, it reads as a series of interrelated tales.  Del Jordan of Jubilee, Ontario is a young woman coming of age in the 1940s.    Its a bildungsroman, the story of how a writer became herself.  Munro's poetry lies in the closely observed details of everyday life in small towns.  She investigates individual subjectivity and shows how social relationships impact the formation of personality.  The net result is a fully developed sense of place.  Her work has a lovely tone of quiet modesty.  

Located on the Canadian frontier, Jubilee was founded in the 19th century and features a town hall, a post office, and a small selection of mostly Protestant churches.  Elegant buildings dot its main street, and flat farm land and snaking rivers surround the town.  Del grows into adolescence and finds herself attracted to a lumberjack, Garnet.  This relationship distracts Del from her studies and she fails to win a university scholarship. Smiley notes that Garnet functions as a pivot: Del escapes conventional expectations, in the form of upward mobility through intellectual achievement, and turns toward her artistic vision.  The world of Huron County in Ontario is Munro's project.  I was appalled by Del's test performance.  All I could think was "Run, Del, run!  You're going to be buried alive in the middle of nowhere!"

Munro's work shows a special sensitivity for the freighted relationships between mothers and daughters. The interactions between Del and her mother are carefully wrought.  The opening sentence of the short story "Friend of My Youth," for instance, is simply brilliant: "I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same."

Zeno's Conscience

Rene Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

By Italo Svevo, New York, Vintage, 2003, p. 437

Some novels are so easy to love, and Zeno's Conscience feels as cozy as a mug of hot chocolate.  Go figure!  I have nothing in common with the protagonist.  Zeno is an upper-middle class Austrian-Italian businessman in the years before WWI.  Yet his sensibility feels, magically, like a heightened version of my own.  This book is high modernism at its most delicious.  Written at the behest of Zeno's psychiatrist, the novel is as a first-person memoir that tells five linked stories: Zeno's attempt to quit smoking ("LC" stands for Last Cigarette); the death of his father; the story of his marriage; the love he bears for his mistress; and his entry into psychoanalysis.  Zeno's memoir is published by his psychiatrist in revenge for Zeno leaving treatment.  

Like Proust, Svevo is concerned with the subjective experience of the passage of time and the unfolding of an individual's consciousness.  While Proust is lyrical and expansive, Svevo is crisply humorous with a flat prose style. Zeno discovers that meaning adheres to memory.   Life experienced in the present tense is a confusing bungle.  One's experiences come to have meaning retroactively; we uncover the significance of events only when they are arranged into a history.  In this book, Zeno places himself on the couch for us.  He explores a painful memory by following feelings backwards in time and mapping out the actions, thoughts, and associations related to those feelings.