Nothing

Stanley Spencer, The Sisters, 1940

By Henry Green, n.l.: Dalkey Archive, 2000

Green is an intriguing, witty author and reading Nothing only makes me want to revisit Living, Loving, and Party Going.  There's little background or context in Nothing.  The novel is composed almost solely of dialogue.  Set among upper-class Londoners after WWII, I initially felt bored and confused by the story.  What, exactly, I wondered is going on here?  The talk was so trivial and posh that this world was totally unintelligible to me.  I kept thinking of the cliche that England and United States are two cultures separated by a common language.  

Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret are former lovers who are reunited when their children--Philip and Mary, respectively--decide to wed.  Jane dislikes John's daughter, Mary, judging her to be penniless, plain, and dim.  Jane works to end Philip's relationship with Mary while convincing John that his best interest lies in marrying her.  Jane persuades John to send Mary off to Italy and then spreads the rumor that Philip and Mary are actually half-siblings. John looks up at the end of the story and finds he is hopelessly in love with Jane.

The novel's tone and style, what I admired in Green's other works, felt alien.  The characters spend most of the novel in French restaurants breezily chatting about "nothing."  For example, here is Jane telling John that her former boyfriend--Richard--and his former girlfriend--Liz--are now dating:

"D'you actually pretend you hadn't heard my dear?" she cried.  "Why I thought everyone knew!"

"Knew what?"

"Just that they've started the most tremendously squalid affair. In one way I'm so glad for Richard, even if I do pity the poor idiot."

"Nonsense" he said.  "I don't believe a word. And why are you glad?"

"You ask simply anyone" she replied. "But as to Richard in some respects he's even dearer to me than myself. I'd give almost anything to see the sweet man happy."

"Then is Liz the only future for his happiness?"

"John dear you are so acute.  D'you know I'm really rather afraid she is."

"I thought his allegiance was elsewhere" Mr. Pomfret suggested and gazed hard at Mrs. Weatherby.

"Oh no" she admitted with a cheerful look.  "All that became over and done with ages back.  Isn't it dreadful?" she giggled.

Who are these people? Mrs. Weatherby recalls Patti LuPone as Mama Rose in Gypsy Rose Lee.  She's a vicious mother.

Great Expectations

James Lawson Stewart, The Courtyard of Barnard's Inn , 1890, (book illustration)

By Charles Dickens, ed. and notes by Charlotte Mitchell, London: Penguin Books, 2003

Another late novel by Dickens, the orphaned Pip receives an inheritance and proceeds directly to London  where is job is to become a gentleman.  Freaky Miss Havisham living year after year in her wedding dress is my favorite character.  OK, Dickens is over!  Tick!  On to the next book!

Our Mutual Friend

John Tomson, The Flying Dustman, c. 1877, Museum of London

By Charles Dickens, intro. Richard T. Gaughan, New York: Modern Library, 2002

A deliciously bitter satire about the lure of money in Victorian England.  This is Dickens's final full novel that includes a very complicated plot with a diverse cast of characters.  The newly enriched owner of a dust-heap is the kind Noddy Boffin, called "the Golden Dustman."  Dickens's protagonists are bizzare.  His world just doesn't pull me in.  Mr. Boffin reminded me of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There:  black comedy ensues when innocents gain access to filthy lucre.  

Dombey and Sons

George Townsend Cole, Henry Thomas Lambert, Sailmaker, of 307 Wapping High Street,  1858

By Charles Dickens, ed. with intro. by Andrew Sanders, London, Penguin, 2002

Paul Dombey is a selfish businessman for whom commerce is all.  The plot centers on a family--and by extension a society--run into the ground by an empty-hearted capitalist.  This novel is not destined to be a Tea Party favorite.  I really don't like Dickens.  I feel like The List is turning into a catalogue of classics I find distasteful.

The Idiot

Hans Holbein, Christ in the Tomb, 1521

By Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. by Alan Myers, London: Oxford U Press, 1992.

I want to love Russian literature and this novel in particular.  Proust was deeply influenced by The Idiot.   MAF, my former companion in all things psychological, used to proclaim, "Oh, that is so Russian!"  But, alas, I did not enjoy the experience of reading Dostoevsky.  He is very much a soup to nuts novelist (and sometimes there are too many courses in the dinner).  Dostoevsky tells a complex tale and includes lots of interesting tidbits such as an exploration of the moments before an epileptic seizure and the thoughts of a political prisoner in advance of his scheduled execution.  All fascinating but I found myself yearning for the novel to end.

The theme of the book is that money determines one's social value.  The title's eponymous character is Prince Myshkin, a Christ-like figure whose honesty and humility disrupts the artificial world of 19th century  Russian society.  Holbien's horrific Christ in the Tomb hangs in the parlor of Rogozhin, a fabulously rich ex-merchant, and Prince Myshkin ironically proclaims, "A man could lose his faith looking at that picture."  

Dangerous Liaisons

Fragonard, Blond Odalisque (Marie-Louise O'Murphy), 1752

By Choderlos de Laclos, trans., with notes Helen Constantine, London: Penguin Books, 2007

I saw the movie Dangerous Liaisons in 1988 staring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, and shortly thereafter read the book.  This story introduced me what Pre-Revolutionary courtly culture long before I ever took a history class on 18th century Europe.  I could have done worse.  The Vicomte's betrayal of Madame de Tourvel because he is afraid others are laughing at him confirms the truism that Vanity is the enemy of Happiness.  A novel about cruel willfulness.  Told in letter form, the text is crafted by an "editor" and a "puplisher" but not an author.     

Don't Tell Alfred

Bill Brandt, Maid at a Window, 1947

By Nancy Mitford, Intro. by Selina Hastings, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 229

The final installment of Mitford's trilogy, Don't Tell Alfred, opens in the years following the World Wars.  Fanny, the confident wife of an Oxford don, Alfred, is the narrator and main protagonist.  Alfred is appointed British Ambassador to Paris, and Fanny struggles to cope with the beau monde in Paris and politics within the embassy.  Her goal is to solve problems without attracting the attention of her husband ("Don't tell Alfred" warn the characters.)  

This book lacks the zip of the earlier novels.  In the first two books, Mitford presents a sophisticated aristocratic milieu cut free from the narrow bourgeois norms of domesticity: for example, women freely discard lovers in search of their heart's true desire, homosexual liaisons are accepted, and children are raised by a wide circle of care givers.  Here, in Don't Tell Alfred, the post-war society leaves Fanny in the dust.  The contours of privilege have shifted, but Fanny seems stuck in the old order. Mitford's trilogy begins with tales of amusing eccentrics and end with stories of  mass culture overtaking the protagonists. The post-war era saw the rise of consumer society, and during this time, cultural impetus shifted away from valorizing members of high society and towards a shared, pop culture.  

In the wake of WWII, Americans were newly prominent abroad, and Mitford takes a few swipes at the unwanted presence of Americans in European capitals.  To Mitford, France represented the very best of Western Civilization and America was a land of loud-mouthed barbarians.  As an American all I can say is that's OK, babe, Americans may be louts, but unlike some of  your family we're typically neither fascists (Diana Mitford) nor BFFs with Hitler (Unity and Diana Mitford).