The Faves of 2017

This year saw a Volume Two of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories come out from the amazing people at Valancourt Books. Because I'm not made of stone, I didn't even try to save it for Christmas itself, but I did read it in December, when there was snow on the ground. I loved everything in it, and ordered another novel by Grant Allen because of the story in here. If I had the funds, I'd buy tons of both volumes, and send the pair to everyone I know. And you'd like it!

Other highlights of contemporary reading from 2017, including two things published this year, which, in my life, is practically unheard of. 

My Best Friend's Exorcism (2016), by Grady Hendrix. Scary, funny, gross, and heart-warming, all at once. I rushed out to read his previous Horrorstor (2014), and also the 2017 non-fiction Paperbacks from Hell, which are both also HIGHLY recommended.

The Essex Serpent (2017), by Sarah Perry. From the blurbs, I didn't even know what genre I was in, and all throughout reading, I had no idea where it was going. It's not horror, but it's certainly full of uncanny atmosphere. I loved it, and look forward to whatever she does next.

Zombies from the Pulps! (2014), edited by Jeffrey Shanks (Skelos Press). Full disclosure: I know the editor, and have been published in the Skelos journal. However, if I hadn't really liked this collection of classic pulp stories about all kinds of zombies (voodoo, mad scientists, sometimes both!), I just wouldn't have mentioned it. As it was, I was a little late getting around to it,  but this was a super-fun read, one of my favorites of the year.

Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird (2017), edited by Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski. The subtitle sounds like a non-fiction work of literary criticism, but it's not. I discovered this when I met the people from Broken Eye Books at the Providence NecronomiCon. Normally (despite some of my above recommendation), I'm not a real fan of short stories, but I was very impressed by this collection of deep-space, far-future sci-fi takes on themes from the Lovecraft mythos. Their earlier collection, Tomorrow's Cthulhu, is on my list for future reading.

All the above, by the way, have very different, but really great cover art. We seem to be in a golden age for that!

And a huge thanks to Tartarus Press for providing me with beautiful new (limited) editions of Arthur Machen's fantastic memoirs. Far Off Things and Things Near and Far are collected in The Autobiography of Arthur Machen, and The London Adventure volume contains many of Machen's additional essays on London life. Plus an also lovely but very affordable paperback edition of his long out-of-print collaboration with A.E. Waite, The House of the Hidden Light, which I recently reviewed here.

Looking forward to the books that the new year will bring.

The Manxman, by Hall Caine

"I know I should like to fight my way in the world as you are doing! But a woman can do nothing to raise herself. Isn't it hard?" -- Kate Cregeen, proving the novel should be called The Manxwoman (p. 203)

There's a quote by Czeslaw Milosz that I think about all the time, that "since the late eighteenth century, literature and art had been steadily forfeiting the ability to represent what I would call the 'multi-layered object'" (from the fantastic The Land of Ulro, p. 211). I'd add that, as the tendency has progressed, the problem has increased dramatically from the 19th century to the 20th. This came to mind when I was trying to figure out why on earth Hall Caine's The Manxman (1894) was so good.

This is another once best-selling book, written by a once famous author -- even later turned into a movie by the super-famous Alfred Hitchcock! -- and both he and the novel have been almost completely forgotten. I threw it in my cart on a whim several years ago, when Valancourt Books was having some kind of sale, and I put it on my Classics Club list because it was still on my shelf. It came up on in the November Classics Club spin, and I said to myself, "Oh, why not?"

And lo! I loved it! Despite an occasional slog of dialect, it was a page-turner, with characters I was deeply invested in, deft psychological insights, a broad societal picture of life on the Isle of Man, and a whole wealth of themes underlying a fairly simple triangle of childhood best friends and the neighbor girl they both love. It's hard for me to even imagine a randomly selected contemporary best-seller, especially on the love triangle theme, that would have so many dimensions.

Cousins Philip and Pete are both grandsons of the local lord of the manner. Orphaned Philip's father was disinherited for marrying beneath him, and while he has no income, he does have a doting, genteel aunt looking out for him. Pete is the current heir's illegitimate son, an open secret unacknowledged by the family, who grows up more rough and tumble among the working classes. The two boys become best friends, dreaming of running off to sea, and as they grow up, both fall in love with their feisty schoolmate Kate.

When Kate's father shoots down Pete's proposal, he goes to South Africa to make his fortune. She (kinda sorta) agrees to wait for him, not taking it too seriously, although Pete, Philip, and her family sure do. In ironic foreshadowing, she insists that she doesn't care about Pete's lack of a "name," and says "when I want to marry I'll marry the man I like" (50). Oh, the certainty of youth! By the next page, though, realizing that everyone considers them engaged, she says "I have nothing to do with it, seemingly. Nobody asks me" (51). Whether she wants to marry Pete or not, the people in her life aren't taking her autonomy into account.

Pete's villainous half-brother, also infatuated with Kate, contextualizes her situation, reflecting their world, in which men with more fortune and social standing are ruined by treating women honorably, and rewarded for abandoning their lovers and children: "A girl like this can never marry the right man. The man who is worthy of her cannot marry her, and the man who marries her isn't worthy of her" (70).

While Pete is gone, she and Philip form a strong bond, eventually blossoming into love, but Philip is constrained by his loyalty to Pete; later he realizes that he's also been held back by the idea that their marriage would repeat his own father's disgrace, and probably wreck his prospects.

The young couple finally gives in to their feelings, just in time for Pete to return a rich man, and preparations for the wedding are underway before Kate can even be sure if she is or isn't pregnant. With no right course before her -- just a muddle -- the characters are all pretty much doomed to misery.

This novel does a masterful job of portraying the environment of its time, and how that influences the characters to do what they do. A lot of the pressure on Kate is emotional and psychological: she doesn't want to hurt the kind, doting Pete, or hamper Philip's career, or disappoint her family. Because of all this, she doesn't assert herself or take her own feelings into account, merely going along with events. But her doing so leads to much worse damage down the line, for everyone. Caine is clearly sympathetic to Kate's position; near the end, both men remember how full of life she was, before being dragged down by love, sex, and motherhood, clearly making a thematic point.

Caine also addresses the societal pressures on her, such as ideas about who can marry whom, with potentially career-destroying loss of status in a wrong choice: Pete wasn't good enough for Kate because of his finances; Kate isn't good enough for Philip because of her social class. Women are in bad positions if they have sex, and especially if they have children out of wedlock, and their enforced subservience leads to avoidable problems. Women aren't supposed to be straightforward about their feelings or desires. While all of this is shown as wrong and unfair, the narrator describes it as if it is all an inevitable part of human nature that could never change.

"The pathos of the girl's position was no accidental thing.  It was a deeper, older matter; it was the same to-day as it had been yesterday and would be tomorrow; it began in the garden of Eden and would go on till the last woman died -- it was the natural inferiority of woman in relation to man" (116).

Now, going on 125 years later, almost no one thinks a woman's life should be over because she has a baby without being married, or that the child should be marked for life by society because of it. or that no man could be a successful lawyer if he married a girl whose parents were in trade. The fact that so much has changed makes the book, in retrospect, oddly hopeful.

The paragraph above is immediately followed by these sentences: "She had the same passions as Philip, and was moved by the same love. But she was not free. Philip alone was free" (ibid). I feel like the light is starting to dawn on even the narrator, as it does to the reader, that her lack of freedom is not the result of anything "natural," but to social conventions that can and will change, after they ruin enough people's lives to make those changes themselves seem natural and self-evident.

For one thing, there's the open hypocrisy of the fact that "a man may sin and still look to the future with a firm face" (202), when a woman cannot, but at the same time, the pressure to marry men they don't love, and have sex with those men, is recognized as "a grim reality of life" (226).  When Kate asks herself, "Why can't I be quiet and happy?" (247), the answer is that she shouldn't! And tellingly, all the constraints put on her as a woman lead to making the lives of the two men who love her as unhappy as she is, so neither gender is served by them.

This is no sociological treatise, however, but an entertaining page-turner with a lot of local color. Since we are dealing with Victorian melodrama, the novel's major turning points all seem to be timed for maximum coincidence value, rendering the drama a little less "realistic," but I could actually see the usefulness of the convention in highlighting the emotional intensity of those scenes. Using coincidence in this way might not have always been sheer authorial laziness, but a device to create a certain effect, which would have been understood by the readers.

Sidenotes:
I wondered if this novel was the origin of the phrase "for Pete's sake" (65).

There's some unfortunate comments about the natives in South America that will make a modern reader go "Eeeee," but it's certainly realistic to the period.

There are (often amusing) subplots about Kate's father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and his conflicts with other villagers. When told that the rakish heir "has sold himself to the devil," he  replies that "the devil gets the like for nothing," which made me LOL.

But speaking of religion, the beleaguered Pete breaks out in an angry speech near the end: "God doesn't punish the innocents for the guilty. If He does, He's not a good God but a bad one ... you are making Him out no God at all, but worse than the blackest devil that's in hell" (387). Amen, brother.

Caine, Hall, and David MacWilliams. The Manxman. Kansas City, Mo: Valancourt Books, 2009.

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

"I don't see why handsome men should not be run after as much as handsome women."
"But you wouldn't have a girl run after any man, would you, whether handsome or ugly?"
"But they do, you know."
-- Lady Glencora Palliser and Miss Alice Vavasor tell it like it is in Can You Forgive Her? (p. 593-594)

Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the first of Trollope's famous Palliser series of novels, was a bit of a slow starter for me. Once I'd gotten about a fourth of the way through, though, it got faster and faster, and eventually I was reading it in every spare moment until it was done. There are many characters whose thoughts and feelings we are privy to, descriptions of social life and customs, and a whole lot about British politics. The main focus, however, settles on two young women, thwarted and frustrated by their limited options in life, in vaguely similar love triangles.

Financially and morally self-sufficient Alice Vavasor first jilts a handsome, eligible suitor, convinced their temperaments are too far apart for them to be happy. Then, wanting to feel useful and involve herself in politics, she gets drawn into a new engagement with her previous fiance, a cousin with bad money sense and a bad temper, who wants her small fortune to help him run for Parliament. Her friend, Lady Glencora, was  torn from her gorgeous but dissipated first love and pressured into marrying a perfectly fine, but somewhat boring husband, with whom she is mostly miserable, especially when that first love turns up again.

While the narrator seems to think the reader might not forgive Alice for her indecisiveness, breaking up with multiple fiances, modern audiences are probably less likely to forgive her angst about it. When she realizes she doesn't love cousin George, she can just break it off! Why all the punctilio?

It's unladylike for a woman to express her feelings, since she mustn't be perceived as a sexual aggressor; it's ungentlemanly for a man to express his feelings, since he is expected to maintain an air of stoic reserve. Under the circumstances, it's difficult for a couple to gauge their compatibility before marriage, and both heroines think men don't love them, who really do. Given that every aspect of her future life hinges on her choice of husband, Alice's vacillation is understandable. Even with more freedom and more options, it's hard for people to know what they really want.

As everyone knows, I am particularly interested in novels about women's lives in prior eras, and the problems facing even the most privileged women in the 19th century are richly detailed here. The overall effect might not be as obviously subversive as that of other writers (even other male ones like Wilkie Collins and J. Sheridan LeFanu), but Trollope gives his women way more agency and insight into their situations than I had expected.

On that subject, I could quote all day. Alice, defined by almost everyone she meets as the sum of her marriage prospects, is told by her closest friend, "It is you that ought to be Chancellor of the Exchequer" (591). Lady Glencora, thought so childlike by her husband, is described by the narrator as "in many things ... much quicker, much more clever, than her husband" (414), and "I do not know that she was at all points a lady, but had Fate so willed it she would have been a thorough gentleman" (473).

Glencora herself, about to scandalously place a bet at a German casino, expresses her situation with poignant eloquence. "I'll tell you what I want, -- something to live for, -- some excitement ... I'd go and sit out there, and drink beer and hear the music, only Plantagenet wouldn't let me" (653). Most women today take for granted that they can drink beer and listen to music if they want to, but it wasn't that way a hundred years before I was born.

She goes on, "There are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil, -- when I think it is the best thing to be done ... A man can take to drinking and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit ... All he wants is money, and he goes away and has fling. Now I have plenty of money ... and I never got my fling yet. I do feel so tempted to rebel, and go ahead, and care for nothing" (654-655).

I took a side trip from Can You Forgive Her? to read a little collection of Trollope's holiday stories, Christmas as Thompson Hall, and discovered that he it isn't just this book: he clearly had an interest in the imp of the perverse, and the big problems that could arise from seemingly small communication gaps. Once I get caught up on some more Classics Club reads, I hope to revisit Trollope. Maybe the Barchester series!

Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? London: Vintage Books, 2012.

The House of the Hidden Light, by Arthur Machen and A.E. Waite

"Something is added which gives vastness and a certain splendour and immensity fo the material universe in all its parts, so that when I came down the stairs in this house, I did so with the sense that I passed through immense distances, as if I came down the stair of a cathedral spire. And when I went out into the street, it seemed to me that I saw in a happy and shining air, a new, glorious and unknown city, builded of radiant and living stones." -- Filius Aquarium, a thinly-fictionalized Arthur Machen in The House of the Hidden Light (p. 35)

Finally available again in a beautiful but affordable paperback edition from Tartarus Press, The House of the Hidden Light (1904) is a cryptic tome of metaphysical symbolism, which the introduction, by editor and annotator R.A. Gilbert, plausibly interprets as describing the social lives of its two mystically-inclined authors.

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author of influential weird fiction, most famous for the fin-de-siecle horror tale "The Great God Pan," and for accidentally creating the urban legend about angels appearing above a battlefield in the First World War. A.E. Waite would become one of the most famous occultists of his age, immortalized by his work on the Rider-Waite Tarot, now the "standard" deck, the template of which has been copied by thousands of other artists and writers.

The two men became lifelong friends, with Waite encouraging Machen to join the then-new Order of the Golden Dawn. Characteristically, Machen would be inspired by its rituals to create a drinking club as a similar mock order, and that sort of behavior is on display in Hidden Light. When his wife died after a lengthy battle with cancer, Machen was devastated, and found a welcome distraction in the Golden Dawn and long conversations about metaphysics.

While Waite was offering support and companionship to his grieving friend, he was living a storyline ripped from the kind of Victorian novels I read. He was in love with a woman he thought of as a soulmate and intellectual equal, who married a wealthy older man instead of him. On the rebound, he married her sister, but eventually the two began meeting again in secret. (The introduction implies that this began as an emotional affair that probably turned into a physical one, until they finally broke it off to make a go of it with their spouses). Meanwhile, Machen met a woman in their social circle who made him believe that he could love again.  And yes, all this soap opera is necessary exposition, because apparently the four of them used to meet up for dining and drinking until all hours, with a strong suggestion that the couples went off to enjoy themselves privately.

The literary collaboration contains faux letters making veiled references to these meetings and their relationships with the two women, layered with occult terminology, and focused on the search for a divine Light, an infusion of spiritual joy and meaning strong enough to permeate one's mundane existence. They reframe their experiences into a kind of mythical symbolism, attempting, in a way, to create what contemporary writer Hakim Bey would later call a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Or, in the words of Waite's stand-in, Elias Artista: "two poor brothers of the spirit, friends of God and members of the sodality, having dwelt after the common manner of men in the desert of this mortal life, understanding ill enough what manner of distinction there is between stars that speak and stars that sing, conceived between them the ambition to get on int he world by a right ordering of the mind in respect of the real interests and true objects of life" (3). With that, you probably already have a good idea of whether you'd want to read this.

The romances didn't last, but the experience created a sense of the way love (and probably physical pleasures) can color one's perceptions. After this project of rendering that reality in a divine light, everyday life begins to reassert itself: "the signs are no longer visibly afforded to us ... the lights have waxed dim within the holy place" (93). But since it was an elaborate metaphor to begin with, the insights are not really been lost. Waite continued to dedicate himself to mystical experiences, and Machen's ideas about deeper spiritual realities would remain with him throughout his life, vividly expressed in his series of memoirs.

Machen, Arthur and A.E. Waite. House of the Hidden Light. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: The Tartarus Press, 2017.

The Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturlson

"When Odin entered Asgard he spat the mead into the vats. It was such a close call, with Suttung almost catching him, that he blew some of the mead out of his rear. No one paid attention to this part, and whoever wanted it took it; we call this the bad poets' potion." -- from The Prose Edda (p. 86)

Just one of many, many WTF? moments from the slim collection of Scandinavian folklore from which much of our information is gleaned. And seriously, Penguin Classics, why is it "Sturlson" on the cover and spine, but consistently rendered as "Sturluson" within?

Yes, I thought about starting this after every viewing of Thor: Ragnarok, and after the third, finally settled in to read. I read a different, more narrative translation years ago, but I honestly didn't remember how messed up it was.

Just to start with, the Prose Edda (written somewhere around 1220) tells us that the Norse gods came from Asia, specifically Turkey, and even more specifically, Troy. Once their wanderings take them to Scandinavia, even "their language -- that of the men of Asia -- became the native language in all these lands" (8). Yes, sure, this is the result of the tendency to elevate oral legend by tying it in with "historical" facts, but it's still weird. Also intriguing, given the contentious but popular idea of the "Indo-European" language.

There's a related tendency to associate Odin with Jesus, as if the work is reflecting an "intimations of immortality," to quote Simone Weil on the pagans, creating a theoretical framework to fit Jesus into later. For example, "He created man and gave him a living spirit that will never die ... All men who are righteous shall live and be with him in that place ..." (12). Of course, that's followed right up with the question (still really unanswered in the Judeo-Christian world) "What did he do before heaven and earth were created?" and the straightforward reply, "Back then, he was with the frost giants" (ibid). As good an answer as any!

In short, mostly unconnected segments, the Edda tells us about Thor (who responds to every problem by hitting it with his hammer), Loki, the Yggdrasil, the Bifrost, the Valkyries, and, of course, Ragnarok, along with a mind-numbing amount of bit players and names of people's relatives for a book that's only 118 pages long, not counting Appendixes. It's hard to know whether it's intentional or not, but the total untrustworthiness of the gods is a running theme. The giant Fenriswolf is raised by the AEsir, and they seem to get along fine before they entrap him, because "all the prophecies foretold that it was destined to harm them" (40). The more sophisticated, literary Greek writers would have made the cause and effect of fate clearer, but here we're left to wonder if the wolf would cause the end of the world at all if the gods hadn't tricked and imprisoned him.

Similarly, when they gods need a fortress, they get a builder and make the kind of deal with him familiar to us from fairy tales like Rumpelstiltskin. They agree to reward him with the goddess Freyja and the sun and moon, if he can build it in an impossibly short time. When they realize he has the ability to meet their deadline, they "attacked Loki," who's "frightened" into a scheme to hold up the work and get the gods out of their obligation (51). The swindled builder "flew into a giant's rage," at which point they bring in Thor to do what he does best: "Thor paid the builder his wages ... he struck the first blow in such a way that the giant's skull broke into small pieces" (52).

It's because of this incident, by the way, that Loki gets impregnated while in horse form, and gives birth to a colt: "it was grey and had eight feet" (ibid).

Almost needless to say: recommended reading!

Snorri, Sturluson, and Jesse L. Byock. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. London: Penguin, 2005.



(Loki and Svaðilfari (1909) by Dorothy Hardy. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1923.)

The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux

"You do not go back to a tomb and a corpse who loves you ... Perhaps, after all, he was still, if only slightly, the Angel of Music and would have embodied it perfectly, had God made him beautiful instead of clothing him in rotten flesh." -- Christine Daae, in The Phantom of the Opera (p. 148)

I was picking a selection from Phantom of the Opera (1909) to be read at my Halloween program this fall, when I suddenly went, "Wait a minute, I've never read it! How did this HAPPEN? What have I been doing with my life?"

The book's structure is, like Dracula's found-document one, unexpectedly modern. In this case, Leroux uses his experience as a journalist to frame the events as if they're a documentary history, based on interviews and current reportage. Even when the events are totally unbelievable, the verisimilitude is there, and it's no surprise that readers tended to believe it was at least based on real events. Especially since the opening sentence is "The Phantom of the Opera did exist," and the second paragraph calmly starts out "When I consulted the archives of the National Academy of Music..." (5).

The plot is mostly familiar from the various adaptations. There's a Phantom (named Erik) at the Paris Opera, promoting a young singer with whom he's obviously in love, and he's willing to ruin or murder anyone who gets in his way, although, in the end, he becomes a figure of pathos. Heroine Christine, gullible even for a pious orphan, seems to really believe that the disembodied Voice that gives her singing lessons is a literal "Angel of Music," thanks to the allegorical mysticism her father used to talk about.

I was surprised that she's a lot more into the Phantom here than I remember her being in the film adaptations (although I know nothing of the musical version, so can't speak to that). Maybe there's a Stockholm Syndrome thing going on, but their connection through music is pretty strong, and the Phantom understands a lot more how important it is to her than does Raoul, the juvenile lead and rival for her affection. Even when he finally kidnaps her and she famously rips of his mask, as she must, she has a lot of sympathy for him. It's obviously not the making of a healthy relationship, though; near death, Erik gushes later that "I ...I kissed her! I did! I kissed her! And she did not die of horror!" That's a low bar, but he does go on about how even "my own poor, unhappy mother ... never let me kiss her -- she recoiled from me and made me cover my face" (172). Despite his numerous horrible deeds, there's a Frankenstein-ish undertone that he may have only become a monster because everyone treated him as one.

Along the way, there's much interesting material about the opera company, including an opera called Le Roi de Lahore, tying into the subplot that Erik had traveled the world, learned the arts of assassination in India, and worked devising torture rooms for a sadistic "sultana," before bringing his skills in music, murder, and secret architecture back to Paris.

The Phantom of the cover of the Penguin Classics edition struck me as rather more dapper and jovial than I expected, but turns out, this was the cover image on the first book publication in 1910, so this mask may be more canonical than the ones I'm used to.

Leroux, Gaston. The Phantom of the Opera. Translated and edited by Mireille Ribière: with an Introduction by Jann Matlock. Penguin Classics: Cambridge (England), 2012.

The Curse of the Wise Woman, by Lord Dunsany

"When I and my memory are gone and all my generation, who will remember these roads? I suppose it will not matter. They will lie sleeping, deep under tarmac, those old white roads, like the stratum of a lost era for which nobody cares. But who cares aught for the past? That pin-point of light called the Present, dancing through endless night, is all that any man cares for." -- from The Curse of the Wise Woman (p. 118)

Although he gets name-checked by all the right people (Howard, Machen, Lovecraft, et al), I always had a perception of Lord Dunsany's influential fantasies as a bit precious and self-conscious for my taste. Eventually, though, I knew I'd need to give him a fair shake, and when I learned that he'd written a 1933 historical novel railing against industrialization and the ravages of progress, I knew I'd found the winner. I do have a theme going, although to be fair, I didn't know how much that would be a part of The Ladies' Paradise when I started it.

With his father on the run from a politically-motivated death threat, the narrator, young Charles Peridore, has the run of an estate deep in the Irish countryside. This enables him to do what he most wants out of life, which is hunting. Now, there are few subjects I have less intrinsic interest in than hunting and shooting, and a large percent of this slim volume is spent describing the joys of the sport, with a lengthy fox hunt, and numerous expeditions after various wood fowl. But the narrator's almost mystical attitude toward the sport and the landscapes it takes place in are rendered with surprising, staggering beauty.

As in The Ladies' Paradise, set in a world that is different in almost every way, the destructive side of progress -- embodied in an industrial concern that plans to strip-mine the bog for peat, which all agree will "tear the very soul out of the bog" (145) -- appears inevitable. Here, though, the changes are openly mourned by many, and actively fought against by Mrs. Marlin, the elderly wise woman of the title, who has the reputation of a witch and considers herself the protector of the bog.

The men who are busy building roads and factories near her cottage in the wild behave with realistic modernity. One of the locals admits "She might curse their souls a bit ... but they'd think more of business" (117), and when questioned,  the foreman lightly dismisses the idea that her mutterings might have any effect: "She's only enjoying herself. They know she means no harm by it" (158). Nonetheless, alone against "huts and machinery and so much Progress ... all the blight that there was in civilization," the wise woman may in fact be in touch with "a power ... that is hid in the heart of the bog, that is against all their plans" (104).

The whole novel, framed as the recollections of a much older man working in a foreign country, far from home, is colored with melancholy. Looking back on lost friends, and a youthful romance, both entwined with lore about Tir-na-Og, a mythic land of eternal youth and beauty, he vividly recalls "the belief which we both held firmly, that this radiant youth of ours would be with us always, and that the longings our hearts had then would never pass away. Time was then a grey spectre that other people had seen, like the phantom told in a ghost story before a pleasant fire, but not a power whose lightest finger had touched us, or of whom we had any fear" (74).

Along with those poignant subplots, there's a whole interesting thread about the events befalling the narrator's father, starting with the Christmas Eve assassination attempt that kicks off the story proper. The boy is matter-of-fact about hired killers turning up on his doorstep, and later lies readily to the police about his ability to identify them, accepting without angst that doing so would only lead to his own murder. Over time, he develops a bond with one of these men, who had once been willing to kill him, if necessary, but comes to be a sort of background guardian angel to him. This all comes across as uniquely realistic, that over time, loyalties can change, and people are complicated.

Now I'm hugely interested in reading more of Dunsany! I have to give kudos to Valancourt Books for their (as usual) beautiful paperback edition of this book, which has an introduction by my fellow Friend of Arthur Machen, Mark Valentine.

Dunsany, Edward J. M. D. P, and Mark Valentine. The Curse of the Wise Woman. Richmond (Va.): Valancourt Books, 2014.

The Ladies' Paradise, by Emile Zola

"Wasn't she once more going to assist the machine which was crushing the poor? But it was as if she was being swept along by some invisible force; she felt that she was not doing wrong." --from The Ladies' Paradise, by Emile Zola (p. 231)

I've read plenty of books because of Downton Abbey (including Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I don't know WHAT Anna and Molesley would have made of). So I may as well admit that I picked The Ladies' Paradise (1883) as my Zola novel because of Mr. Selfridge, since it features a similarly lavish Parisian department store. Oddly, this is a sequel to Pot-Bouille, which I read years ago, in an edition with a cover showcasing its saucy themes, and under the title Piping Hot, but I don't remember enough of the plot to make the coincidence useful to me.

Innocent, orphaned Denise and her young brothers come from a provincial small town to Paris, where she finds a job in the ever-expanding dynasty of the Paradise. She struggles with poverty, corporate policies and workplace politics (including her competitive, mean-girl coworkers) while, Pamela-like, she catches the eye of the owner, Mouret, with whom she ends up on a romantic collision course.

Denise is enamored of modern attitudes and technology, even though she's a victim of them. She dedicates herself to improving the "machine" and making it more efficient, despite that fact that it has no soul or heart, and is perfectly willing to throw her out in the street to starve. It is the impractical, inefficient, now poverty-stricken old-school businesspeople who help her and her brothers, because they aren't motivated solely by the profit motive. That's why they can't compete with Mouret and are, it appears inevitably, destroyed by the endless appetite of the larger store's expansion.. But in the end, Denise still prefers Mouret and his ways. It's realistic, especially since the character was always one for whom "beneath her attacks of sensitivity her common sense was always at work" (121). It was still kind of depressing, and it doesn't 't seem like that much of an achievement when she convinces Mouret that he should treat his employees with human decency because that's better for business.

Warning: this is a novel that may test your tolerance for lengthy descriptions of fabric and retail displays. Zola could really go on and on about silk. However, in its mass of detail, it creates a 360-degree picture of a business and a workplace. The everyday hard work that resonates with the modern world, which still uses some of the same tactics and techniques in business competition, and manipulating customers into "yielding to the need for all that is useless and pretty" (75).

Zola, Émile, and Brian Nelson. The Ladies' Paradise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

"Of all wretched women I am the most wretched, and amongst the unhappy I am unhappiest." -- Heloise (p. 129)

"Logic has made me hated by the world." -- Abelard (p. 170)

"If the whole world kept silent, the facts themselves would cry out." -- Heloise (p. 111)

I read selections from the letters of theologian Peter Abelard and Heloise, his former student, in high school, in my prized Portable Medieval Reader. Based on that, I've always thought of  Abelard as a condescending jerk, and Heloise as someone who deserved better. Knowing that Abelard was assaulted, castrated, and more or less forced into a monastery, I have felt bad about that. However, my teenage judgment was only reinforced by reading their complete surviving correspondence, edited by Betty Radice in the Penguin Classics edition, along with Abelard's autobiographical essay about his "calamities." Heloise (d. 1164) comes across as an intelligent, passionate, forward-thinking woman at odds with her world and her time. Abelard (1079 - 1142) comes across as charismatic but irritatingly pompous, and it doesn't seem surprising that, while he finds people who admire him everywhere he goes, he alienates even more of them.

Both young and attractive, and turned on by each other's intellects, the two began an affair that ended as they could have expected. When she gets pregnant, they secretly marry, and Heloise hides in a convent from her disapproving uncle. She thinks neither of these responses is a good idea, telling him outright that "We shall both be destroyed" (74). She's correct, and after it goes disastrously wrong, she continues to do what he asks, and in a gesture of self-sacrifice becomes a nun. (Their son, christened Astrolabe, is little heard of again).

Years later, when his account of their affair and its aftermath is circulating, she writes to him with some reproach, giving her side of the story. She says that the memory of their pleasures "can never displease me" (133), and famously declares "the name of wife may seem more sacred  or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, of, if you will permit, that of concubine or whore," (113) and "I would have had no hesitation, God knows, in following you or going ahead at your bidding to the flames of Hell" (117).

In return, he chastises her for "your old perpetual complaint" about having been pressured into religious life without a vocation (137), and bemoans that "I took my fill of my wretched pleasures in you, and this was the sum total of my love" (153). He also reminds her that "I often forced you to consent with threats and blows" (147). Eeee. After a few letters, seeming to realize she's not going to get anything better from him, Heloise settles down to writing him as a nun to her male superior in the church, and he replies with letters of instruction that she clearly doesn't really need. Since I had written "he's a pontificator!" in one of the margins, I was amused in the course of this when he quoted St. Gregory  about the necessity for brevity when using words (189-190).

About these "Letters of Direction," I'd like to note that, in posing some theological questions, Heloise includes several quotes and makes points that Abelard later uses in full in his responses. Is he plagiarizing her to her face? I almost hoped his was making some kind of point by doing so, that she might have understood. For example, she talks about wine on p. 168 - 170, and his response on p. 231 - 234, he uses the exact same quotes she used, and makes mostly the same points, although with more words.

I also think Heloise was making a point about the absurdity of repudiation and self-mortification in her discussion of why or why not men and women in religious orders should refrain (or not) from wine and meat, and how ascetic they should be. She quotes one's of Paul's letters, 1 Timothy 4:1-5, which says: "The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer" (NIV). Since they're in religious orders that forbid them to marry, with restrictions on food, and since she has never been ashamed of her sexuality or its expression, this certainly has some subtext.

Overall, I can't believe I waited so long to read this, but it was very enlightening about the history of women's places in the world. It's a shame that someone like Heloise had such a limited scope within  her time and society, but it's lucky for us that her powerful voice and subversive opinions -- crying out in the wilderness, in a sense -- were preserved

Abaelardus, Petrus, Heloise, and Betty Radice. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. London: Penguin, 1974.