Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“SKELLIG” (first published 1998); “THE FIRE EATERS” (first published 2005); “CLAY” (first published 2011). All by David Almond

            Some years ago on this blog, I wrote a general comment on what are now called YA (Young Adult) books – in other words books for older children and younger teenagers, between the ages of about 8 and 15. My contention was that even the most highly-praised of such books, regardless of their quality, never really match the subtlety and worth of truly adult literature. I made this argument after having read much-lauded examples of the genre and finding them simplistic, often sentimental, and certainly preachy, with their “messages” sticking out a mile. My conclusion was that YA books are absolutely fine for their intended audience, but that the only adults who read them regularly should be their authors and publishers, and teachers (or parents) trying to find something suitable for the kids. Any adult who told me that he or she had been genuinely inspired or enlightened by a YA book would always, to me, be somebody who had a very limited knowledge of grown-up literature.

As you can see, this was robust and provocative stuff, and it triggered a number of lengthy and angry responses. I was accused of profound ignorance of the best examples of YA, and many titles were suggested to me for my reading list. I followed some of them up and – sorry – they did not change my perspective.

If I meet a very good YA book I say “Yes, that’s a very good book… for kids.”

“Where is all this going?” you now ask with mounting impatience.

Recently I was in the North of England for a bit over a week. I did not want to buy any more books, as my bags were already full (I’m ever mindful of airport weigh-ins). So I asked my good host if he had on his shelves something that I could read easily and give back to him before I left. He produced a copy of David Almond’s Clay, with a strong recommendation, he having shared it with his children. It was a YA book. I read it with pleasure, and before I left, I read two others by David Almond, which were also on my host’s shelves.

David Almond (born 1951) hails from Newcastle on Tyne in England’s north.

He began as a writer of novels and short stories for adults, and has written five plays, but he turned to YA fiction with Skellig, in 1998. It won many prestigious awards and was a great hit. Since then, Almond has produced a further sixteen YA books. Many of them have won literary prizes, he is highly-regarded by critics of children’s fiction and (oh dear!) quite a number of his books apparently appear on junior-school reading lists in England. At the very least, I hope you can see that Almond is considered to be in the top rank of YA writers. So judging the best YA work by his books is a fair test. I am not dealing with a bumbler in the game.

            I’ll deal with the books in the order in which Almond wrote them, rather than the order in which I read them.

Skellig (1998) is a fantasy with a very realistic setting. It is narrated by an almost-pubescent boy called Michael. Michael and his Mum and Dad have moved into a new neighbourhood. Their home is semi-derelict, and Dad is trying to renovate it. Michael has a baby sister and Michael is very worried because the baby sister is seriously ill. One day, while he is poking about in the rickety, cobweb-filled, junk-filled, smelly garage, Michael discovers an odd and sick little creature called Skellig – a diminutive manikin who is crippled and racked with arthritis. With his embryonic wings, could Skellig be some sort of angel? Could he help cure the baby sister? That is Michael’s guess. But Michael has made friends with a girl called Mina, who is clearly more middle-class and posh than Michael’s family. Mina is home-schooled, likes spouting William Blake, and has a thing about science. Her guess is that Skellig is some sort of freak of evolution.

To adult readers, Skellig serves as some sort of personification of the boy’s becoming used to the strangeness and complexity of the world that is not within his parents’ control – that strange and wilful world in which the life of a baby girl can be threatened with sickness.

In its plot, this plays out like a dialogue between faith and science, with the author not fully committing to either side. Michael gets to learn about evolution at school and Mina’s view seems to hold sway. But then there is something ambiguous about Mina. Though she is a source of knowledge to Michael, her middle-class manners make her rather patronising towards the working-class lads with whom Michael also likes mucking around. She is a pal, but she is not entirely a source of light.

There are no indications that Skellig is set in any times other than the decade in which it was written (the 1990s). The other two David Almond books I read very clearly indicate their setting as being the early 1960s – that is, when David Almond himself would have been on the verge of adolescence.

The Fire Eaters (2003) is set in Almond’s hometown of Newcastle in 1962. Again, it has a boy as first-person narrator, Robert (Bobby) Burns. Bobby and his best mate Joe Connor mooch about having rough fun. They live their lives in the shadow of The Bomb, as 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and World War III seems a possibility. A crazy contortionist, fakir and fire-eater called McNulty comes to town. He does public shows in which he performs such stunts as pushing skewers through his cheeks. To Bobby Burns, McNulty is a fascinating but also a rather scary figure. But Bobby’s father tells him that he knew McNulty when they were both serving soldiers in Burma during the war; and McNulty was one of those soldiers who was driven crazy by war. The central symbols of the story, then, are The Bomb and a war-crazed ex-soldier – the scary things from the adult world that can hang over a growing boy.

There are a couple of interesting things about this YA novel.

First, Bobby’s family is clearly Catholic (as was David Almond’s) and the Catholic references are quite overt, although Bobby has a Protestant “girlfriend”, Ailsa, who believes in miracles. Bobby has passed his eleven-plus exam (the old system England used to have, to sort out those children who went to grammar schools and those who went to secondary moderns). But going to a Catholic grammar school is likely to separate him from his less academic mate Joe Connor.

There is the strong sense that the old Northern proletarian ship-building culture is just beginning to pass away. This is especially true when Bobby makes friends with a clearly middle-class classmate, a Southerner, Daniel, whose Dad lectures at a university and is in the throes of producing a photographic book chronicling the lives of primitive working-class Northerners, as if they are an alien species. Bobby gets some pointers about life from an art teacher at school and Bobby and Daniel join forces in opposing corporal punishment.

However, The Fire-Eaters does become very preachy in its later stages, with reflections on how the common and humble folk will endure and war is bad and one day horrible things like corporal punishment will be banned.

Which brings me to the most recent of these three YA book, Clay (2005). Once again a first-person narration by a boy on the verge of adolescence, and once again the working class setting in the North of England in the 1960s. Given that the young narrator has the same name as the author – Davie – it’s hard not to think that the non-fantastic parts are partly autobiographical.

Davie and Geordie are Catholic altar boys, but slightly naughty. They drink altar wine and smoke Capstans stolen from Dad. Being Catholic, they sometimes fight with gangs of Proddies, but this is purely territorial. The Proddies have on their side a ferocious giant “Mouldy” (Martin Mould) of whom Davie and Geordie are scared.

Enter Stephen Rose, who was in the junior seminary but who was expelled for some unspecified reason. Stephen lives with Crazy Mary, a harmless religious nutter, because his mother is dying. Stephen has extraordinary artistic powers, and moulds figures of saints and angels from the clay the boys bring him. But he is a malign and sinister character, apparently bent on controlling others, apparently wanting to accomplish some ill-defined revenge, apparently having hypnotic powers. At least he is able to make Davie see what he wants him to see. The priest whom the altar boys serve, Father O’Mahoney, is a genial fellow who comes across as a voice of reason and moderation. But sinister Stephen Rose is a demonic figure, like all that is alien and fearsome in religion as seen by adolescents.

There is some obvious symbolism in Clay, just as there is in The Fire-Eaters. Classroom scenes have an art teacher talking about the body and the soul; common clay and the immortal spirit, linking with Stephen Rose’s activities and Davie’s fearful puzzlement.

I will not destroy the plot of this YA novel by pursuing it to its conclusion. Let’s just say that a literal monster is made (“Clay”) and there are dire consequences.

The novel works because it taps into a moment in early adolescence where parents’ values and accepted values (whatever they may be) are being questioned; yet the adolescent has nothing but scepticism to put in their place. For Davie, confronting Stephen Rose’s palpable evil, the choice is between God or “nowt”. It’s a great merit that David Almond can convey this dilemma in a credibly young adolescent voice and mainly in short declarative sentences.

And yet, after reading these three YA novels one after the other, I saw a formula emerging. In each there is a male adolescent narrator. In each there is a family crisis going on in the background to the narrator’s adventures. In each the narrator has a sensible “girlfriend” in tension with the narrator’s continuing desire to muck around with his coarser mates. In each there is some class feeling as the narrator’s basically working-class background comes up against bearers of middle-lass refinement. In each there are scenes in the schoolroom where lessons can point neatly to some of the themes of the book (art, evolution etc.). And – most obviously – in each the central action is triggered by the intrusion into a closed community of an extraordinary outsider, fantastic (Skellig), scary (McNulty) or demonically malign (Stephen Rose).

I enjoyed all these books and certainly think they are just right for young adolescents – particularly young adolescent males. But they are the YA world where all things are signalled and conclusions are clear, reassuring and final.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

SENIOR MOMENTS

“Teddy Wilson,” I say as I drive to work. “Steve Coogan. George Crabbe.”

To do this reassures me that my memory is still functioning.

It happened like this. One day I was thinking about the Benny Goodman Quartet, pioneers of racially-integrated music and brilliant exponents of small combo swing jazz. “Ah yes,” I thought, “Benny Goodman on clarinet, Lionel Hampton on vibes, Gene Krupa on drums and….and…and…”

And for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of the pianist.

I trundled through the names of all the great jazz pianists I could think of, from James P. Johnson to Oscar Peterson, without coming up with the right one. I was out of reach of the internet and it took about half the day before the right name, Teddy Wilson, popped into my mind. Naturally it did so long after I had stopped straining to recall it.

It always happens that way when you’ve racked your head to remember something.

As for the other two names, they come from straining, unsuccessfully, to recall the name of the comedian, Rob Brydon’s sparring partner, who plays the role of “Alan Partridge”; and the name of the guy who wrote the poem “Peter Grimes”. Again, the names returned to me only long after I’d given up straining to remember them.

Whenever I lose, like this, some information that I thought was at my (mental) fingertips, I have momentary fears about premature Alzheimer’s or what patronising people call “senior moments”.

Do our memories really become enfeebled as we get older? Even if we don’t have Alzheimer’s, is it the fate of all of us, as we age, to lose things that used to be part of our readily-retrievable information?

Probably.

But I don’t really think I’m descending into forgetful senility, and I have an alternative suggestion to explain loss of specific information. Could it be that we simply try to remember too damned much, and there actually is a limit to what the mind can reasonably recall?

It’s an obvious fact that we none of us remember everything. There was the famous case in Russia a few years ago of a man cursed with a total memory – and curse it was. He could remember every meal he’d ever had, every person he’s ever met, every tree or leaf he’d ever seen, and it totally stultified him as his memory always overwhelmed the present moment. We are not meant to remember everything. For the healthy functioning of the mind, we should remember only what is important to us, only what we have specifically chosen to remember.

And perhaps much that I try to remember is trivia that really doesn’t merit recall.

Even so, as I drive to work I say “Teddy Wilson. Steve Coogan. George Crabbe,” just to reassure myself that my mind is capable of recalling things.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY AT WAR 1914-1918” edited by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, $40)

           

Four months ago (October 2016), I reviewed on this blog Malcolm McKinnon’s excellent and detailed history of the Great Depression years in New Zealand, The Broken Decade. I said, as I so often have, that revisionism is absolutely essential in the writing of history – especially the need to challenge popular and unexamined myths about the past, by presenting factual detail. This is what McKinnon did. I was even more willing to share this idea when I reviewed Steven Loveridge’s equally excellent Calls to Arms in mid-2015. With scrupulous adherence to detail and the factual record, Loveridge succeeded in showing that, alien though it may be to our values one century later, the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders supported participation in the First World War and thought of themselves as British. Effectively, Loveridge disproved the post-war legend that the unwilling masses were pushed into war by unscrupulous capitalists, exploiters and so forth. For New Zealand, despite tragedies, tensions and losses, the war was “popular”.

With all this in mind, I leapt at the chance to review New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918, a collection of eighteen academic essays edited by Steven Loveridge, who also wrote the extensive introduction and collaborated with other writers on three of the essays.

I knew I would be in safe hands.

Hew Strachan’s Foreword judiciously notes that in many areas, the essayists who contributed to this book are not “overthrow[ing] received wisdom”, because there has been “far too little wisdom to receive”. (p.10). In other words, many of the essayists are covering aspects of New Zealand life during the First World War that have simply not been examined methodically before. Strachan does note, however, that New Zealand’s popular memory has sometimes conflated New Zealand experience of the war with Australian experience, as in our adoption (as late as 1939) of the Australian “dawn ceremony” on Anzac Day, which has nothing to do with New Zealand soldiers’ experience at Gallipoli.  In considerably more detail Steven Loveridge’s Introduction gives an overview of New Zealand society before and during the war. He elaborates on the concept that New Zealand – recently declared a “dominion” – was “born modern”, having relative stability and basic social cohesion as well as a comparatively advanced welfare system. But during the war, there were tensions concerning Maori, the Irish-New Zealanders’ views of the war, conscription, exemptions from military service, and some protests about the lack of “equality of sacrifice”.

This worthwhile introduction over, we launch into the eighteen essays, and here I am going to adopt the unbelievably boring and cloth-eared procedure of commenting on each in turn.

John Crawford’s essay on the Defence Department has the singular merit of not patronising bureaucratic procedures from one century ago, and basically comes to the conclusion that the department was very efficient in gearing the country up for war.

James Watson’s essay on parliamentarians during the war (ironically called “The Continuation of Politics”) presents the basic argument that despite the wartime coalition of Joseph Ward’s Liberal Party and prime minister Bill Massey’s Reform Party, and despite the postponement of elections for the duration, political issues piled up and were debated fiercely in the house, especially when the matter of the conscription of married men cropped up late in the war. There was also the irony (noted on p.53) that while Ward was the deputy prime minister for the duration, he was also (and incongruously) still the official leader of the opposition.

Peter Cooke’s essay on the territorial soldiers and cadets emphasizes their “citizen soldier” status, as they became part of the social fabric of certain towns and communities.

Regrettably I found Roger Openshaw’s essay on New Zealand Education during the First World War to be unsatisfactory. Openshaw tells us about the shifts of personnel in schools; about the struggles university colleges had to maintain their international connections; and about the “patriotic” spirit that was encouraged in schools. But he appears not to have heard of private or church-run schools (he doesn’t mention them) and he speaks of the “triumph of progressive education”. I am always wary when educationists use the term “progressive”. I also note that he erroneously assumes that the University of Otago was part of the University of New Zealand (p.78).

Richard Hill’s essay on wartime policing is to be praised for its straightforward prose and clarity of expression. Hill basically argues that by the time war broke out, the New Zealand police force had evolved away from overtly coercive and quasi-military “frontier” style of policing, and adopted a more “velvet glove” community-based consensus style. However the war (and the depletion in numbers of the police force, with officers going off on military service) meant a return to some overt coercion. This was especially true in the matters of restraining militant “patriots” who rioted or wanted harmless aliens punished; and in tracking down and prosecuting those who had defaulted from military service. Their hand also fell heavily of socialists who circulated anti-war literature.

David Littlewood’s essay on Military Service Boards is an excellent piece of myth-busting. He argues (a.) that military service boards bent to the will of central government in tending to lenience when it came to men who objected to, or wished to be exempted from, military service; (b.) that boards were made up of a real cross-section of the community from farmers to trade-unionists; and (c.) that while there were controversies over whether watersiders or Catholic seminarians should serve in the military, boards either approved of exemptions or postponed appeals in such a way as to exempt applicants anyway. Littlewood is able to prove his claims statistically.

Ian F. Grant’s account of New Zealand newspapers in the war shows that newspapers largely supported the war, the only mild dissenters being the scandal-sheet Truth (which did much advocacy reporting on soldiers’ complaints) and the socialist Maoriland Worker (which wanted Capital to be conscripted). But, notes Grant, in sheer column space, the war itself did not dominate newspapers. Dependence on cable news from Britain and the failure to get accredited New Zealand correspondents to the battlefronts meant there were great delays in important news reaching New Zealand and there was also heavy censorship.

Erik Olssen’s essay on the union movement shows that the great majority of unionists supported the war, but many opposed conscription or were susceptible to calls for equality of sacrifice and the conscription of wealth. Olssen paints a picture of “moderates” having taken over most of the union movement after the defeat of the Red Feds and “Wobblies’ in 1912-13; but the militants gradually clawed their way back in, which means that by 1917-18 there was a great rise in industrial action. Olssen notes that the coalition government prevented much strife, and took the wind out of the militant’ sails, by exempting from conscription many of the categories of worker who had been most militant – such as miners, watersiders and seamen.

Steven Loveridge’s and James Watson’s essay on business interests during the war argues that under the “commandeer” economy, primary industries (dairy, meat, wool) and their service industries (shipping) and their investors profited greatly. This meant that there were great tensions in society between those who saw these enterprises as profiteering. This tension, he contends, stands behind the rise of industrial action later in the war.

Greg Ryan’s essay on sport may at first seem to be the essay dealing with the most frivolous topic, but it has a strong sociological point to make. Ryan notes the divide between those who saw sport as promoting the martial skills necessary in war; and those who complained that organised sport was a distraction and misuse of resources in wartime. Horse racing was most often criticised and condemned. In most codes (rugby, cricket etc.), the main clubs limited their activities or closed down for the duration of the war. However, schoolboy sport flourished as never before.

Peter Lineham’s contribution on the churches in wartime (called ironically “The Rising Price of Rendering Unto Caesar”) shows that on the whole, mainstream Christian churches in New Zealand stood behind the war effort, and vied with each other to show their loyalty by the number of members of each denomination who had volunteered for service. There were tensions over how many chaplains of each denomination were allocated to the fighting forces. Some more marginal churches had apocalyptic visions of the war bringing about a great revival of religion in a society that was secularising. This didn’t happen. And then, in the later part of the war, there was the rise of a virulent sectarianism with the Protestant Political Association. This is a good survey essay, but I do have one query. Did the Catholic Bishop Cleary actually lecture an Anglican group on their duties in war, as reported on p.196? He may have done so (for his times, Cleary was proto-ecumenical), but it still surprises me.

One area of New Zealand life during the war, which I had never considered before, is covered capably in Margaret Tennant’s essay on charities. She paints a picture of great and dedicated industry among those who raised funds patriotically for assistance to soldiers and for relief to refugees from the occupied areas of France and Belgium. It is amusing to read of the extent to which people had to be reminded of what it was appropriate to send soldiers overseas. It is also sobering to note that some people, even at the time, were aware that there was a certain “glamour” in contributing to charities supporting servicemen overseas, which meant that contributions to charities supporting New Zealand’s own poor and needy sometimes fell off.

I enjoyed very much David Grant’s essay on pacifists, whom he calls jocularly “peacemongers”. His is a very nuanced argument, showing that even in “militant” (and certainly in “moderate”) wings of the labour movement, previous anti-war sentiment faded away after war was declared in August 1914. Society – including unionised labour - became overwhelmingly pro-war. Grant deals with real pacifists – that is, not with those who simply opposed conscription when it was introduced in 1916, but those who opposed armed conflict of any sort. Hence, as he deals with cases of socialist and Christian and other pacifists, Grant is aware that he is dealing with a very small minority. (The same was true in the Second World War – see my review of The Prison Diary of A. C. Barrington.)

I take no issue with Brad Patterson’s essay on the Protestant Political Association – the group under Howard Elliott that, late in the war, stirred up sectarian strife with its violently anti-Catholic rhetoric. Patterson looks impartially and intelligently at the extreme claims that were stirred up and provides a good overview of a group that ran out of steam in the 1920s and deflated into extinction by about 1930. Personally, my only problem with this article is that it deals with matters in which I am already well versed from previous research. Hence it told me little that was new to me – but it is an excellent introduction to the topic.

Then there are the two essays that would now cause most unease. Graham Hucker deals with the “Woman’s Anti-German League”, as rabid a bunch of harpies as has ever been assembled in New Zealand, who spent their time vilifying people with German names, sometimes stirring men up to “anti-German” action, and generally doing little for the good of the community. Such things one can do in “patriotic” times! Steven Loveridge’s and Rolf W. Brednich’s essay on Germans in New Zealand gives a more sober view of the more notorious cases of victimisation of Germans.

We conclude with Steven Loveridge’s and Basil Keane’s account of the Maori connection with the Great War – how some iwi were willing to participate, some were opposed, and one prophet preached opposition – and Jeanine Graham’s muted account of New Zealand children during the war, mainly concerned with welfare and the growing influence of the Plunket Society.

No real historian would be so foolish as to claim that a history book is “definitive” and final. There are always new resources to be found, and new perspectives to explore. Even as I read New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918, I was aware that currently a new multi-volume official history of New Zealand in the First Wold War is being prepared under the editorship of Glyn Harper. It will include a very capacious volume on the Home Front.

Until that volume appears, however, New Zealand Society at War 1914-1918 gives as broad an account of New Zealand’s Home Front in the First World War as we yet have. 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“UNE VIE” (“A LIFE” – sometimes translated as “A Woman’s Life”) by Guy de Maupassant (first published as a serial in the newspaper Gil-Blas in 1883; then in book form as L’Humble Verite )

            I’ve visited Paris in each of the last three years, and each time I have done so, one of my delights has been trawling through second-hand bookshops – not just those book booths on the left and right banks of the Seine, but also the excellent purveyors of livres d’occasion around the Place Saint Michel. I also like the habit some booksellers have in France of placing well-preserved second-hand books among new books, marking them for customers’ convenience with a special yellow sticker.

            Now for some reason on each of my visits, one of the many books I have snapped up has always been a novel by Guy de Maupassant (1850-93). Why should this be so? I’m really not sure. Perhaps it is the general simplicity of his style (I’m one of those people who has to look up a French-English dictionary for a few words on each page when I am reading a novel in French). Perhaps it is the straightforwardness of his aims. Or perhaps it has been sheer chance. Anyway, on my second visit I bought de Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean (about which I’ve already commented on this blog, as I have on his Fort Comme La Mort) and on my most recent visit I bought his Bel-Ami, about which I will doubtless one day inflict a commentary upon you.

But on my first visit it was Une Vie which I bought and to which I will now turn my attention. This was the first full-length novel de Maupassant wrote (excluding such accomplished novellas as Boule de Suif) after already having launched his better-known career as a prolific writer of short stories.

It was his first novel and – I think – it shows.

Une Vie is, as its title says, the story of a life: the whole life of a woman – or at least most of her life, from buoyant youth to sad late middle age. As such it is “plotless” in the sense of allowing one event to follow another, sometimes in the haphazard fashion of real life. And it has its jolts of sensation. As has been noted, de Maupassant inserted into it episodes which he had previously used as the basis for short stories.

The daughter of Norman gentry, young Jeanne is delighted to at last be free of her convent education: “libre enfin pour toujours,” it says on the opening page, “prete a saisir tous les bonheurs de la vie dont elle revait depuis si longtemps”. “At last free forever, ready to grab all the joys of life about which she had dreamed for so long.” She joins her parents the baron and baroness on their estate in Normandy and her head is filled with vague romantic notions. But the tale shows her repeatedly thwarted by reality – and by nasty men. Thinking she is in love, she is persuaded to marry Julien, the young Vicomte de Lamare, even though alert readers can readily see that Julien is mainly interested in advancing his own wealth and prestige by marrying into her family. Before the wedding, Jeanne’s father advises her “N’oublie point ceci, que tu appartiens tout entiere a ton mari” (Chapter 4): “Never forget this – that you belong completely to your husband.” A wife is a husband’s property.

The Corsican honeymoon of Jeanne and Julien is idyllic enough. But Jeanne has her first shock when she has sexual intercourse and finds it disgusting and at odds with the vague romantic ideas of love she had had as a virgin. Physical sex is to her “quelque chose de bestial, de degrandant, une salete enfin” (“something bestial, degrading and finally dirty”) (Chapter 5). She comes to believe that men have nothing in common with the desires of women and that her husband’s sexual demands are at best something to be endured. She prefers to sleep separately from Julien.

Worse follows when she returns to cold, windy, rainy, depressing Normandy (Guy de Maupassant’s homeland). One day while dressing Jeanne’s hair, her faithful young maid Rosalie falls down and gives birth to a baby. It turns out that the baby was fathered by Julien, who warmed Rosalie’s bed whenever Jeanne cold-shouldered him. Jeanne momentarily considers throwing herself off a cliff but (dutiful daughter that she is) is restrained by the thought of how her mother would grieve. Rosalie is taken care of by being married off to a trusting peasant and everyone (including the complaisant local priest) persuades Jeanne that Julien’s behaviour should be forgiven on the basis that “boys will be boys”. So Jeanne forgives him.

By this stage, Jeanne herself is pregnant. When she gives birth to her son, Paul, he becomes the complete focus of her life, giving it such meaning as it has. It takes Jeanne an awfully long time to understand that her husband has embarked on another affair with the wife of a local squire. Even when she does know this, she inveigles Julien into sleeping with her again a few more time so that she can have another child. And then Julien dies. A new and fanatically puritanical priest (as a fervent anti-clerical, de Maupassant always produced negative portraits of priests) tips off the husband of Julien’s new mistress about the couple’s adulterous affair. The husband dispatches his wife and her lover in the most melodramatic way de Maupassant could devise – he pushes over a cliff the shepherd’s hut in which the guilty pair are swiving.

Hearing the news of Julien’s death, Jeanne miscarries her second child.

And Jeanne’s fortunes go down and down. When her mother dies, she discovers letters showing that this apparently righteous woman had lovers just as her father had mistresses. The family inheritance is lost. Rather than living in the chateau in which she was brought up, Jeanne is reduced to living in a drab house in town. Ironically, as she grows older she is looked after by the now-widowed Rosalie and her bastard son. But Jeanne’s consolation is her boy Paul upon whom she dotes, whom she spoils, and whom she visits obsessively when he is sent off to college.

The trouble it, Paul turns out to be a real shit, who runs off, gets involved in shady business affairs, shows no consideration for his mother and indeed exploits her for money. The character of Paul, according the Francis Steegmuller’s literary biography of de Maupassant (published in 1950), was based on de Maupassant’s scapegrace younger brother Herve, who, like Guy de Maupassant himself, ended up insane.

Where does it all end? It ends with Jeanne in late middle age, pathetically clinging to the idea that her son will one day come home and return the love she has lavished on him, when we know full well that this will never happen.

So Une Vie has shown a trusting, innocent and rather sentimental woman being exploited and deceived by a series of men – the father who arranged for her to marry a philandering husband and helped persuade her to forgive his behaviour; the husband who saw her as a source of wealth and prestige only and frequently betrayed her; the two priests who each gave the worst possible advice; and the thankless son.

Now here is part of my problem with this novel, and part of the reason I think it does not work.  By calling the novel Une Vie, de Maupassant is suggesting that the sad life of Jeanne is somehow typical of something. But typical of what? Jeanne is throughout blazingly naïve, sometimes even downright stupid. She knows her husband cheats on her once and yet she is still surprised when he cheats on her again. She is shocked to find that her parents share the loose sexual morals of their social peers. She continues to trust her son when it has been made clear again and again that he is untrustworthy and will never keep a promise. At a certain point I found myself asking – when is she going to wake up? I can think of only one episode in the novel in which she asserts herself, this being when (in Chapter 7) she overrules her father and gets poor Rosalie to confess, in front of the priest, who was the father of her baby. Perhaps a proto-feminist theme could be squeezed out of the novel. It is possible that de Maupassant was commenting on how little power women had in marriage; and how young gentlewomen who had closeted educations were rendered incapable of handling their lives realistically. It is possible that he was deliberately showing minor aristocrats as a dying breed, without the practical savvy of the bourgeoisie or even the peasants. Even so, we have a huge problem in reading this novel of a shallow, one-dimensional protagonist who is bereft of much will or intellectual power. She becomes a bore.

Further to this, there is de Maupassant’s habit of spelling everything out. In most chapters, and every time Jeanne feels joy or woe, there will be a paragraph or two telling us that she bubbled with naïve romantic dreams or that her heart was desolate and broken as she wailed tears of grief. There is a recurring motif, too, of Jeanne going to the window and reacting emotionally to the dawn.

As a sidelight I note that while the novel does move from adolescence to late middle age, it is interesting that most of it takes place well before the 1880s in which the author was writing. In an early chapter, a man refers nostalgically to Napoleon and regrets that he is now locked up on St Helena (which means the time must be before 1821). In the second-to-last chapter, Jeanne finds the railway a novelty (and rather scary) when she travels from Le Havre to Paris on a vain quest to find her son. I would therefore guess that even the later scenes are set quite some time before the novel was written. Perhaps this retrospective view is part of de Maupassant’s view that domineering landed gentry were getting to be things of the past.

            Francis Steegmuller says Une Vie caused some controversy when it was first published. Its indelicacies – especially in its airing of the loose morality of the French squirearchy – caused one powerful bookselling chain not to stock it. The matter reached (very brief) debate in the French parliament, although the book was not banned or subjected to censorship. It is easy to see why some things in the novel (especially its sexual references) would once have been thought objectionable, although they are discreet and mild from our perspective.

More surprisingly, Steegmuller notes that de Maupassant’s first novel was greatly admired by Leo Tolstoy, and was once placed on a list of  “France’s ten greatest novels” by a committee including such illustrious names as Francois Mauriac, Andre Gide and Jean Giraudoux.

It makes me uncomfortable to disagree with such worthies, but disagree I do. It is not merely the plod of events and the repetitions, but the doggedly one-dimensional nature of the protagonist (and her unconquerable naivete) that defeat me. Of course this is one of those books one should read to fill out the card of well-known nineteenth century male writers who chose to produce studies of women protagonists (de Maupassant’s mentor Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; George Moore’s EstherWaters etc.). But I do not believe La Vie is the equal of others in this line, even if it has sometimes been compared with Madame Bovary as a study of provincial manners.

            Naughty and puerile footnote: De Maupassant in this novel often uses the verb “penetrer” when he refers to the relations of the sexes and how men do not “penetrate” the inner thoughts and feelings of women (and vice versa). But the use of the word is so insistent that it is hard to believe he did not want us to interpret it in a more literal sense.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

ECCENTRICITIES OF GREAT ART GALLERIES

I’ve recently returned from an extended holiday in Europe, and I am once again pondering a cultural question that has often puzzled me.

Why is it that some of the great art galleries and museums are happy to allow tourists to take photographs, while others totally forbid the practice?

Based on experience of three trips to Europe in the last three years I draw up the following scorecard. In Paris, the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Musee d'Orsay and the Musee de Cluny are perfectly happy for snaps to be taken, although they do warn against using flashes. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh are all similarly tolerant of photographs. But Holyrood House and Edinburgh Castle are not. The London National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam forbid photos. Meanwhile in Madrid, the Prado forbids photography as does the Reina Sofia museum of modern art. But Madrid’s third great gallery, the  Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, permits photographs. One hour’s train journey from Madrid, the Escorial (palace and basilica) also forbids photography, despite all the El Grecos and Velasquez’s on the walls.

Tally them up and you will see nine of these establishments allow tourists to click away, while in seven, raising a viewfinder to one’s eye will provoke stern glares from curators.

Why this discrepancy? Obviously works of art in the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum are just as precious and valuable as those in the Prado and the London National Gallery, so it's not a matter of conserving the paintings.

Is it, my cynical heart thinks, a matter of preserving the lucrative sale of postcards in the gallery shop? (And, truth to tell, those professional postcards that reproduce artistic masterpieces will usually present better images than most tourist cameras can capture.)

Or could it be an aesthetic preference? In this day and age, when most people use silent digital devices, taking photographs does not produce the loud click of the old Kodak or Leica. So crowds of tourists taking photographs will not produce an irritating racket. But having people stopping and lining up sights will impede the progress of crowds, and in many cases will cause other viewers to get irritated as the photographers in front of them block their sight of a masterpiece by lingering too long in front of it.

These are, of course, just idle specualtions of mine.

I am still genuinely puzzled by the lack of uniformity in this matter.

Personally, I like the freedom to snap away at the Assyrian antiquities in the Louvre.

Or at the preserved and over-opulent quarters in the Louvre that once housed Napoleon III and his empress Eugenie.

I like to stand beside Braque’s Pink Tablecloth in the Thyssen-Bornemisza and be photographed admiring it.

As for those museums and galleries that forbid photography, they provoke in me the bolshie habit of taking bootleg photos anyway, when the curators aren’t looking.

How could I resist taking, in Edinburgh Castle, a snap of the room in which Mary Queen of Scots reputedly gave birth to James VI of Scotland (James I of England)?

           

            I refused to forego the opportunity of providing photographic proof of how under-patronised, and therefore more delightful for us, were galleries in the Prado in the off-season, which I now believe is always the best time to view canonical art.

            As for the Reina Sofia, why should I deny my friends the pleasure of seeing that the main aesthetic delight of conceptual art is the delight of enjoying the space of an empty room?

            I have a very bossy friend who has rebuked me for this surreptitious habit, but I think I will continue to indulge it until such time as somebody can explain to me why the museums and galleries make such different rules.