Spleen, Olive Moore

I'd intended to write about Olive Moore's Spleen last year, but time got away from me and I never got round to it. But even if the time for a proper review has passed, I do want to say something about it before allowing myself to move on completely, because Spleen is the quintessential forgotten book and it deserves to be read.

I bought Spleen several years ago, precisely why I cannot say. No doubt it was in the midst of my full-blown obsession with all things associated with the Dalkey Archive, though it would have been prior to the Big Dalkey Get. I say Spleen is the quintessential forgotten book: Moore is the forgotten writer par excellence. (In fact, I'd pulled the book down from the shelf, its slim volume lost between our several books each by Lorrie Moore and Toni Morrison, to see whether it should be discarded.) She wrote four books ("Olive Moore" is a pseudonym for Constance Vaughan; according to the biographical note in the back of the book, she lived in Bloomsbury, ran in those sorts of literary circles, and wrote an essay about D.H. Lawrence), in the early 1930s, before disappearing, presumably dying around 1970. Dalkey produced a hardcover, omnibus edition of her work in 1992 and the stand-alone paperback of Spleen in 1996. It seems these reissues got good notices, where they were noticed, but I'd wager she's been forgotten again. Even in Dalkey's roster of misplaced modernists and post-modernists, lost writers and otherwise missing books, she seems easy to overlook.

This is a shame, for Spleen, at least, is excellent. The back of the Dalkey edition suggests that Moore writes "in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's". I think this comparison is apt, though if anything, I preferred reading Moore's prose over Woolf's chewier writing. Woolf is a useful formal comparison, too, I think. Things are narrated primarily from the perspective of Ruth, the novel's main character; her consciousness is revealed above all. Where so far Woolf's fiction has struck me as self-consciously innovating--as evidently by a writer conscious of trying something new (no disrespect to Woolf intended at all; I like her), Spleen feels somehow, to this reader, more organic. (For no good reason, I'm sure, I am also reminded of Ann Quin's Three, but my memory of that novel is dim. The reminder could simply be because they're both more or less forgotten English writers, now published by Dalkey.)

The novel concerns Ruth and her self-imposed exile after the birth of her deformed son 20 years earlier, whose deformity she feels responsible for. She meditates on motherhood, nature, equality, class. In her exile, for example, she muses on the pregnancy of one of the local Italian girls:

One day she would return from the beach or from the town with the day's papers, and Lisetta would run out to her with a face of beatitude announcing that Graziella had been delivered of whatever she had had to deliver, and Graziella, completed, would be sitting up in bed, the sweat still on her smiling face, accepting the cup of zabaglione and the figs, and the next day she would be up and about, singing to her infant, feeding it, washing it, ravished with delight in it, and binding it in the mummy-bands of a della Robbia holy child until only its face, surprised and formless, was visible. And from the first to last no fear, no despair, no mental torture. Nothing that was known to colder northern women, over-civilised, over-sensitised, bearing their children in an agony of pain and bewilderment.

As she herself, much earlier, when she had found herself desultorily pregnant, had been bewildered:

For how can one love a thing one does not desire? Perhaps because it is usual to love one's child. Then I am not usual. (How easy to accept this in the darkness of the night when the unreal becomes the obvious!) Because she knew that not wanting the child now she would not want it later. She knew it was not possible to her to love a thing she did not know or had not seen. How can one? Yet I am expected to. All women do. I am a woman. Therefore I do. And if I do not? (And at a movement real or a imaginary within her.) When I breathe, it breathes. When I feed, it feeds also. Against my will. Yet when it had finished using her for its own purpose, she must welcome it and say that it was hers and that therefore she loved it (all women do) at once and without question. When it had had nothing to do with her from start to finish.

She had eventually come to an understanding about the unborn baby and decided to try to will something in the world with it, not passively accepting it, but as an active agent, as men presumably are in the world. It is as if she were responding to a message: "Something different, said the message. Something worth having. Something beyond and above it all, said the message. Something new." After which she is radiant, happy; but something went wrong, and she blamed herself--both because of her earlier ambivalence and her later desire to create "something new"--and left. The novel begins with the present of her in exile and shifts back and forth, various details coming to light along the way. We are treated to images from her childhood (free and Edenic, raised by a father with radical educational theories) and her perfunctory marriage (after the father's death, she going along with what comes; her mother-in-law never forgiving her for not being sufficiently grateful for being "rescued from genteel poverty", not understanding "that Ruth was without gratitude because without knowledge of what genteel poverty might be"); descriptions of the beautiful Italian landscapes; conversations with locals; intellectual battles with a certain visiting male artist ("He said things which in her world simply were not said, were not thought: but she had lived too long out of any world to care what was said or thought.") . . .

As I said, this is not a formal review, but I hope I've managed to give some idea of the book and why it might be worth reading. (Another point in its favor, if you're interested in giving it a shot: the novel is 128 pages long.) As should be obvious, I recommend the book, especially--but not only--to admirers of Virginia Woolf and to readers interested in the period of the historical Modernists, and fictional explorations of class and gender.

Thoughts prompted by reading A Room of One's Own

The last post began as an opening to this one, as I considered how to--or whether to--account for my use, or abuse, of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. It went off the rails a bit, so I moved it. I'm still left without a suitable explanation for what follows. So I'll leave it as it is.

There is much in A Room of One's Own that speaks eloquently to my own ongoing concerns, some less obviously so than others. I will try to say what I can. But what are my concerns? I am concerned with existence. Ha! How ridiculous. Have I earned the right to speak of "existence"? But what could this mean? (The right?) What else am I concerned with? Or what does my concern with existence entail? I am concerned, very broadly speaking, with modernity, with capitalism, with time, with politics, with family, with feminism, with literature. It is no surprise to learn that A Room of One's Own should have something to say about literature (and the history of literature and the history of the novel) or that it should be relevant to feminism. So much is obvious. But what kind of feminism? What kind of literature? What else does it have to say? ("I wish to write about A Room of One's Own," I almost began this post, "but ironically, I lack the very things Woolf says are needed for one to write." I faltered, decided the opening is facile. I nonetheless leave it in as a parenthetical.)

Woolf says that what is needed in order to be able to write is, very simply, money and a room of one's own (and not, for example, a common, heavily trafficked sitting room). I'm always complaining about time, but of course, in her formulation, money very clearly equals time. She means money free and clear. Time free and clear.

(How much falls by the wayside if we simply have time? If we had the time we needed to be ourselves, not forced into some kind of soul-crushing work, to spend countless hours away from the practice of living, free from the abstracted effort of making a living. If this were true for all of us, what then? What might we do?)

Being a good partner and a good parent also requires time, it would seem to go without saying, though our society is structured around the refusal to allow people the time needed. Woolf notes that, if the ancestors of the women of the 1920s had made money, amassed wealth (had they even been allowed to), enough wealth to endow scholarships and universities, in short if they had done the kind of fortune-building work done by men, then the women of the 1920s she's talking about would not have existed. For women were busy doing other things, namely bearing and raising children, and if they were not doing that, those things would not have been done. Everything stops.

Woolf, more than once, uses the word "civilized", and of course she means it as a positive attribute. We are many decades since Benjamin in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" wrote "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." It's become something of a cliche, and a truism. We might observe, calmly, from the quiet of a sitting room, or in front of a computer monitor, that the countries of Western civilization have engaged in appalling brutalities. That calmness, that quiet, depends on those brutalities. Our way of life, our privileges, depends on the privations of others. Others must suffer so that I may--what? So that I may sit in comfort, sit in front of a television, in front of a computer, at all hours of the day or night, with electricity at my fingertips, with light, so that I may walk at my leisure into my kitchen and open a refrigerator, so that I may have a refrigerator, and open it at any and all hours, with the expectation that it will be there, that it will work, that it is endlessly replaceable, so I may open it and pull out a soda, some wine, some cheese, meat, processed meat, pounds and pounds of processed meat (or perhaps cage-free organic chicken, because we are not monsters, we're environmentally conscious, are we not? we're liberal-minded, we wash the guilt away and go on), anyway all of it at hand, always available, always wasteable, always replaceable. (Isn't this what Obama means when he says we will not apologize for our way of life?) (Are we prepared to give up anything so that the suffering of others may be diminished? Are we even prepared to give up anything to lessen our own suffering? Can we realize that our lives must change?)

What does this have to do with A Room of One's Own? I know I haven't sufficiently accounted for it. The previous paragraph sounds like so much liberal guilt, and this post is not approaching what I mean to say. One problem is that I have not yet taken the time to explore in writing my current conflicted thinking on civilization and technology and work and time, though several of my anti-capitalism (and financial crisis) posts hint towards some of what I might say. But it's too much to hang on a single reading of an unrelated essay. So I will leave these thoughts as they are for now. I will have to return.

Novel Thoughts

While I've read a number of novels since In Search of Lost Time, I probably won't get around to writing much about them. But that doesn't mean I don't have anything to say about any of them, however brief or truncated. Here are notes on some of them; other novels have their own posts.

Molloy, Malone Dies, & The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett:
Gabriel Josipovici has written in a few places about how, as a young man feeling urgently the need to write, he felt overwhelmed by the examples set by such writers as Tolstoy, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot. Their works seemed complete, hermetically sealed, sure of themselves. It was writers like Proust and T.S. Eliot who helped show him the way out of his problem, with their inclusion of, awareness of, failure in their work. Beckett, too, of course. "Fail better", and so on. I've felt a twinge of recognition in reading Josipovici's words. As I've said here before, my problem was even more acute: I refused to even acknowledge the need to speak. There were however times when words would occur to me, formal ideas perhaps, and I'd immediately discount them as invalid. Which brings me to Beckett's prose trilogy. I actually read these before finishing Proust. Where I'd previously said that I didn't want to read any other fiction till I'd finished In Search of Lost Time, I found myself bogged down, unable to get started with the fifth volume, The Captive. With none of my available non-fiction doing it for me either, I opted for Beckett. It was just what I needed: I quickly read Molloy and Malone Dies, though The Unnamable was somewhat slower going, as might be expected. I feel a great affinity with his writing, in a way that's hard to describe, so I won't try to cram it in here. But there's something familiar here, a recognition. I'll be reading a lot of Beckett in the coming years.

Bartleby & Co. and Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (both translated by Jonathan Dunne): It's uncanny: here is a writer seemingly addressing the very things I've been thinking about, perhaps without my always knowing it, though certainly the correspondence with what have been ongoing concerns here is obvious. Lars is right, of course, there are no models. But it was nice, semi-inspiring even, to come across such assemblages of writers confronting these similar types of problems. Writers of No; refusals; the sickness of literature, literature as sickness. I must, however, admit that my attention flagged while reading both, and the second was in particular a slog for me to finish. Almost as if he'd made his point, and I grew increasingly weary of the elaboration (though no doubt he needed to see his conception through, and can I blame him?).

To the Lighthouse and Orlando by Virginia Woolf:
Ten months into the year, and I've only read two books written by women? Wow. Woolf was long one of those writers, like Joyce, who represented for my imagination "difficulty" in literary Modernism. This, of course, was without reading a word of her writing. Mrs Dalloway changed that slightly, some years ago. These even more so. They were a great pleasure to read, particularly To the Lighthouse. In both, I especially enjoyed the short passages describing the artist's vision and process, one of which I excerpted elsewhere. Other than The Waves, which is already on my to-read list, what else of Woolf's fiction should I read? All of it?

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee:
I'm with Waggish and Steve on this one. Actually, in this case, I suspect I will have more to say about it. For now let me just say that I'm amazed that readers still insist on assuming that the "opinions" in this book are necessarily held by J.M. Coetzee himself, and that their content have much to do with the success or failure of the book.

The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld (translated by Jeffrey Green):
This is the first Appelfeld novel I've read that takes place after the Holocaust. I'm sorry to report that I have very little to say about it at this time.

Noted: Virginia Woolf

From To the Lighthouse:

Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmoreland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said "Pretty--pretty," an odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up across the bay among the sandhills.

[. . .] Begun long ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmoreland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.

Noted: Virginia Woolf

From To the Lighthouse:

The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr. Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, transparent. Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

Checking in

I've been tired. . . busy. . . just a brief reading update.

I finished reading Time Regained the other day, thus coming to the end of In Search of Lost Time. What can I say? I won't get into too much just now, though it's funny: people--friends, co-workers--congratulate me on having finished it. Like it's an accomplishment. To be fair, I tell these people I've finished it. And I had, over the last several months, reported on my progress. Why? Is it simply a pointless boast? I'd like to think not! (Is it substantially different from blogging?) People are curious. They like to talk about what they read, too, and they've heard of Proust, see me with whichever volume I'm reading, want to know something about it. But what can I tell them? I like it? Will anything I say convey anything of interest about the book? Maybe. And, yeah, it's long. But, the thing is, Proust isn't difficult to read, not really, not in the manner of some writers. Blah blah blah. . . Anyway, it feels weird now, not having Proust to read. Granted, I wasn't reading the book exclusively--and there was quite a big gap of time between volumes 4 & 5--but there was always it to return to. I could just read it again, of course, but I'm not going to, not right now. I mentioned earlier that it felt wrong to read any other fiction while in the midst of In Search of Lost Time, and I meant it. Then I was having trouble getting started on The Captive (mostly because I was so often exhausted and having a hard time focusing on Proust's rhythm through the fog). Several passes at the opening got me nowhere, hence the big gap. But I felt the need for some narrative. I pulled books down from our shelves, looking for something worth breaking my self-imposed rule. Finally, Molloy was just the ticket to get me moving again. More on that experience, and the experience of reading Beckett's prose trilogy, in another post.

I made some noise about reading Blanchot's The Space of Literature. Naturally, since then I haven't made it much further into it. However, on recommendations from Mark and Steve, I picked up a copy of Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought and am, unexpectedly, finding it much easier going than Blanchot. Which is not to say it's an easy read. Far from it. But there's a lot to chew on, and I know I'll be having something to say about it here. (And, yes, I will be returning to my Blanchot reading and notes.)

Months ago, I packed up a lot of my books into storage in anticipation of the arrival of the baby, and more of them will be going into storage soon. I made a small pile of books that I thought were most likely to be read over the next several months. From this pile, I've begun reading Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co. How many of us are bloggers of the No? (Not enough of us?) It turns out that this is the perfect time for me to be reading this book. I hope to be able to explore some of my thinking on it here. Time permitting. On the fiction reading horizon: Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady, of course, but then some women. I've noticed that every book I've read this year, fiction or not, was written by a man. Now, in fiction, with Proust and Beckett as my major projects for the year, that's understandable, but still. Anyway: perhaps some Virginia Woolf? I have not read Orlando (acquired years ago, after I read an enthusiastic passage or two on the novel by William H. Gass) or To the Lighthouse, both of which we have on hand, plus a re-read of Mrs. Dalloway may be in order. I expect I'll be reading a fair amount of Marguerite Duras, with six titles awaiting me. And Carole Maso. I've always liked Carole Maso, and it could finally be time for AVA.

But then, maybe I'll just scrap it all and read Capital along with David Harvey. . . if the introductory video is any indication, it's really worth it (link originally via From Despair to Where?, but also via ReadySteadyBlog... ). Which of course reminds me of all the political posts I haven't written (apparently there's some election campaign on), all the food- and oil- and war- and housing- and money-related articles I've meant to link to and write about, but haven't. . . (summary: things are mess)