After the death of her grandmother and guardian, Mariana Clare moves from South Carolina to New York City. Secured by a “small income� she sets about After the death of her grandmother and guardian, Mariana Clare moves from South Carolina to New York City. Secured by a “small income� she sets about seeking to have her poetry published. At a newspaper office she meets Sigrid Armstrong, who takes her on a walk through the city’s “Jewish quarter�. From this point through most of the rest of the novel Mariana is a mainly passive person, taken by friends to various parties and performances, staying home otherwise. She has sex with and then marries the first man who persistently courts her despite her seeming indifference. This passivity is hinted at in a prologue, but seems rather surprising in light of her drive in moving north and seeking publication. (view spoiler)[This alteration of a bold move followed by passive acceptance of her new situation is repeated near the novel’s end, when she leaves her husband to live alone in the Catskills. (hide spoiler)]
There are a number of well done scenes in the book, evocative descriptions of events and places, among them the song of a Harlem chanteuse, the fog and traffic of London, the landscape of England’s west country, and an artists� costume party / picnic in the Catskills. But these seem like a series of events without a sense of progression, stages of neither an education nor a pilgrimage.
(view spoiler)[In the end, the novel is a story of balancing freedom and isolation; Mariana gains her independence but suffers frequently from loneliness. The price she pays to relieve her loneliness is to have sex with a series of men she likes but does not want to have sex with � the novel ends with two such encounters which the reader assumes are the first and second in what will be a life of serial promiscuity. (hide spoiler)]
There are some interesting psychological moments. At one point, Mariana thinks about her husband Alan, "he was like a perverse Peter Pan who could not bear to grow up." (169) This may be the earliest use of Barrie's creation in naming this male behavior. At another point, Alan thinks of Mariana as neurotic, but this is primarily projection on his part as, later in the book he displays the most neurotic behavior, simultaneously not wanting a child but secretly criticizing Mariana for not wanting to bear his child.
Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the book occurs the night before Mariana enters the hospital. She goes to a Russian restaurant with a friend, Jack Hasty; it is nominally an anniversary celebration but at the last moment Alan refuses to attend. She performs a kind of aria while listening to a balalaika orchestra and looking at the restaurant's decorative paper lanterns:
“These lanterns are, almost of all things I have seen,� she said, “the most perfect symbol of man’s pathetic evening gaiety. They glow like artificial man-created moons, they tear if you touch them, and catch fire and char and are spoiled; they shine with all our longing for gaiety, for romance which is unattainable. We have cried for the moon and they have given us a paper lantern.� Hasty caught her half articulate feeling. “Yes,� he said, “other things from the same evanescent country are toy balloons � so light on the air and so brightly coloured. They escape and go rising out of sight, or they break. Many a child must have had its first inkling of the nature of the world when a toy balloon burst in its face.� “Bubbles are different,� Mariana went on, speaking from some almost unconscious depth whose images floated up to the surface because her physical weakness thinned the barriers between the regions of her mind, between the dreamer and the waker. “Do you remember how a bubble appears just before it breaks, how the colours grow deeper and brighter, and gradually begin to swim around and around its surface, faster and faster, until suddenly it breaks and they are gone, and there is nothing but a spray of tiny drops in your face and a little water in your hand? But it never was sad. The turning colour was a consummation, and it was complete when the bubble broke: then you blew a new one and it all began again. “What extraordinary happiness bubbles gave you when they rose up over the wall and disappeared into the sky! but almost more � I don’t know why � when they fell if you were blowing them from some high place, from a balcony, or out of a window. They fell towards the ground so lightly, so slowly, in a kind of miracle, as if they would go on falling for ever, descending, world after world.� (204-206)
This would be rather heavy-handed in retrospect if it proved to be some sort of foreshadowing � but it is not; it is simply a moment of poetry at a stressful and uncertain moment in the story.
This novel was printed in proof in 1930, but not published until 1987, having been withdrawn by the publisher, supposedly for fear of prosecution for obscenity. Readers looking “for something scandalous to read on the train� had nevertheless better look elsewhere, as it’s hard to see what might have been considered obscene in this novel, even in the 1930s.The word “lesbians� occurs once, an unnamed character in one scene is in the hospital due to an illegal abortion, birth control is practiced though referred to so vaguely it is hard to tell whether it involves a physical apparatus or some obscure mental discipline, sexual intercourse occurs frequently but is described in vague terms, often by the confusing euphemism “embraces�, the heroine has one verified orgasm, though after the first additional ones are occasionally, but infrequently, hinted at. (view spoiler)[The heroine herself has an abortion, but it is medically indicated and fully legal, performed by “one of the most famous surgeons in his field�. (hide spoiler)]
Perhaps the most obscene events in the book go almost unremarked by the heroine, and I suspect would not have raised any prosecutorial ire at the time. Modern readers will unequivocally see several sexual encounters in this book as constituting rape, though neither author nor character use the term and I found it difficult to tell whether they would have shared anything like today’s attitude about the incidents. Certainly the heroine does not avoid the men after these incidents (Reader, she married one!) and the act of crossing the line into rape seems almost an abstract problem of weights and measures: the woman’s disinclination is not as strong as the man’s insistence, and he therefore gets his way without dealing blows or issuing threats.
Since I complained that in Stoner John Williams never indicated that the books the protagonist read and devoted his life to contributed to his outlook on life, I will say here that Woolsey presents Mariana’s perceptions as undoubtedly those of a person who is a dedicated reader and who makes her readings a part of her mental furniture. I don’t want to suggest that the novel is packed with literary allusions, but they occur regularly in relevant contexts. Here are three examples:
There was a butcher’s stall almost opposite, and the butcher owned a large, middle-aged white bull terrier � the kind of dog that Bill Sikes has in Cruikshank’s illustrations for Oliver Twist (117)
In the hospital before surgery:
She remembered a sentence from Llewelyn Powys� Skin for Skin. “It is only very rarely that even the most clear sighted of us grasp the actual terms of our existence, each tremulous, intellectual soul being set shockingly apart to endure as best it may its own destruction.� (210)
And the most surprising to me, when Mariana retrospectively outsources to Molly Bloom her reaction to losing her virginity.
Long afterwards when she read Ulysses she was to recognize for the first time what something in her sad, young mind kept saying as she stiffened her body and bit her lips not to struggle or cry out against the strangeness and the pain. For the small, wise voice of her mind kept saying sadly � “It might as well be he. It might as well be he.� (56)
Gamel Woolsey was half-sister to Justice John M. Woolsey whose opinion in The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses� used to appear (does it still?) at the front of US copies of Joyce’s novel....more
[image] This is a moving story of a love affair told with cool, modernist detachment. The author manages to persuade the reader to love Martin as well,[image] This is a moving story of a love affair told with cool, modernist detachment. The author manages to persuade the reader to love Martin as well, and to understand and ultimately excuse his faults. She also presents a complex character, simultaneously admirable, hateful, and comic, in his Aunt Eve, the jealous and possessive patroness who controls the financing for the literary magazine that is Martin's main reason for living. Hannah, the point of view character and, according to the afterword by Doris Grumbach, barely fictionalized stand-in for the author, is almost an embodiment of moral conflict: whether to stick with Martin and live out their love, knowing this deprives him of essential economic support, or to cede him to his aunt, breaking two hearts in the process, but granting him a longer, if less happy life. I never quite got an understanding of Hannah. There seemed too much not told about her: her American past, her relationship with the French husband she quickly abandoned at what might have been (but wasn't) a whim of Martin, or exactly why she felt it necessary to except her three dogs, only one of which seems to have a name, in entirely abandoning everything else about her past life in order to live with Martin....more
This is primarily the story of Nelly Jordan, growing up in the town of L., Germany in the years 1933-45, at the end of which period she is 16 years olThis is primarily the story of Nelly Jordan, growing up in the town of L., Germany in the years 1933-45, at the end of which period she is 16 years old. In concentrating exclusively on the inhabitants of and events in L. during these years, Wolf presents the history of the Third Reich in microcosm. The main events are here, presented on a small scale: the cult of the Führer, the euthanasia of the ”feeble minded�, Kristallnacht, the mobilization for war. These events are presented in a kind of double vision: primarily from the viewpoint of Nelly who, knowing no other existence, sees all this in terms of the National Socialist viewpoint in which she is educated by school and society, but the reader, informed by both maturity and history, can understand the reality behind the external events and understand the words and reactions of adults which are often misunderstood or discounted by Nelly. Not that the adults are necessarily significantly less naive than Nelly. Wolf writes of the family:
Their ignorance allowed them to feel lukewarm. They were also lucky. No Jewish or Communist relatives or friends, no hereditary or mental diseases in the family (Aunt Dottie, Lucie Menzel's sister, will be mentioned later), no ties to any foreign country, practically no knowledge of any foreign language, absolutely no leanings toward subversive thought or, worse, toward decadent or any other form of art. Cast in ill-fitting roles, they were required only to remain nobodies. And that seems to have come easily to us. Ignore, overlook, neglect, deny, unlearn, obliterate, forget.
As that portentous mention of Aunt Dottie indicates, Wolf doesn't pull surprises in this narrative; practically all major events, deaths, or survivals, are mentioned in advance, so that the reader does not share the characters' suspense when the events are narrated. Finally, in the cold winter of January 1945, the always victorious German armies are somehow in hasty retreat and the population of L., including Nelly and her extended family abandons home and property to flee westward. That the family's naivety is deeply entrenched is shown in a later scene, when Nelly's mother, encamped with her family and a vast number of other refugees in an open field in 1945, shares a meal with a concentration-camp survivor. The mother speaks first:
They obviously put you through hell. In case it's no secret, what did they accuse you of? I'm a Communist, said the concentration-camp inmate. Nelly was to hear all kinds of new sentences that day. How important were the fires burning in the dark with impunity compared to this man who openly accused himself of being a Communist? I see, her mother was saying. But that wasn't reason enough to put you in a concentration camp. Nelly was surprised to see that the man's face was able to change expression. Although he was no longer able to show anger, or perplexity, or mere astonishment. Deeper shadings of fatigue were all that remained accessible to him. He said, as though to himself, without reproach, without special emphasis: Where on earth have you been living? Of course Nelly didn't forget his sentence, but only later, years later, did it become some kind of motto for her.
The telling of the events of 1933-45 is inspired and structured by a July 1971 weekend trip the author (the adult Nelly, never explicitly identified as Wolf herself) makes with her husband, younger brother, and teenage daughter back to L., her first visit since the war. L. is now G., a town in Poland � here the past is literally a foreign country. The narrative follows the group around G. over two days, place becomes memory, and the author recounts the events of her childhood.
On top of the events of the Third Reich and 1971, Wolf further layers the years 1973-75 and the actual writing of the novel we are reading. These layers of time and narrative are not mere meta-fictional games, but convey the idea that there is no place outside of history from which to contemplate and document historical events; the thing we are being told about is also the environment in which it is told. I took this in part as a coded statement by the author that, in a novel written and published in East Germany in the 1970s, the entire truth about the events of 1945 could not be explicitly told.
Note: As I finished writing this review, I saw the following on Twitter:
Today in #History: 3 October 1990, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik ceases to exist...
The novel gets off to a slow and uncertain start as, in the first chapter, we see things mainly from 16-year-old Marian Coleman's point-of-view, but oThe novel gets off to a slow and uncertain start as, in the first chapter, we see things mainly from 16-year-old Marian Coleman's point-of-view, but occasionally slip into the mind of her enigmatic suitor / mentor Bruce. Issues with POV soon sort themselves out, though, and stories are told exclusively from the perspective of Marian and her family: grandmother Mrs. Gorman, brother Albert, and mother Lucy. "Stories" in the plural as, at first, this seems to be a collection of vignettes, including a chapter where Albert attends a cockfight that could easily stand on its own. A novel gradually emerges from the stories: its plot concerns Marian's maturing into adulthood and coming to terms with her relationship to her mother. Supporting characters are sharply and memorably drawn: the servant Hattie, Marian's college acquaintances Gertrude and Florence. It is a strength of Hardwick's art in writing from Marian's point-of-view that the figures whose characters are less easily grasped - Bruce, Marian's father Ted, and especially her mother - are those whose role Marian herself has difficulty in defining; this is one reason it seems such a slip to give us glimpses of Bruce's thoughts in the first chapter....more
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