Full Disclosure?

I don't really see how one can attack a collection of letters, except on two terms: the first, maybe you don't like reading letters; the second, the letters are boring. As my entries of late have made clear, Decca: The Collected Letters of Jessica Mitford was hardly boring. This book was absolutely enthralling, and Mitford's letters found their way into my dreams. Epistolary dreams! You can't fathom it. This was such an absorbing book, a twentieth century overview, and a record of one absolutely fascinating life. Jessica Mitford was a complex, exasperating, difficult woman, but she was brilliant, funny and sharp, and I have never before gained such an intimate understanding of character from a book as I did with this one.

And so, when one takes a collection of letters that are decidedly not boring, the plan of attack must be through character. Fine, I suppose. Though that seems to me a strange approach for a book review, and probably inappropriate. And no doubt, Jessica Mitford herself would not disagree with Daphne Merkin's review in Slate that she was neglectful mother, that "vitriolic archness was her first and last defense", or that empathy was not always her forte. Etc. etc. (though I think this reviewer simplifies her character considerably-- eg. why she "airbrushes" her deceased son from her memoir, because she could not bear to relive his death through writing about it).

What is inexcusable, however is for a reviewer to write such a review, with its snide attacks, and not mention that she herself is rubbished in the book, perhaps underlining her perspective? Decca, page 706: Sez Decca: "[Did you read the] New Yorker women's issue? Some good, some awful. One of the worst was by someone called Daphne Merkin, v. long and all about how she craves to be whipped (she's a masochist) with nary a joke in it. Marina looked up "Merkin" in the OED-- says it means "a pub*c wig".

So perhaps Ms. Merkin had a bone to pick, but shouldn't she have been a bit more honest about picking it?

Decca

Now reading Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. Though, indeed, it is ever-so-popular to dislike the Mifords (because, really, grumpy people must find it within themselves to hate anything the least bit fabulous lest the universe be disturbed), I've been a fan since I read The Mitford Girls in 2003. Though by no means are their stories comfortable, they're undeniably storied stories and I love them for that reason. Anyway, Decca's letters run long and of course with my appetite for fiction, I'll only be able to read them in dribs and drabs by my bedside. Like treats to savour. In celebration I will reshare with you my favourite poem I ever wrote, Mitford-inspired or otherwise.

Extremism was so fashionable that first season

“Why must all my daughters fall for dictators?”
~ Lady Redesdale (Sydney Mitford)

Extremism was so fashionable
that first season.

At the races my daughter won herself a diplomat
and my husband and I my husband and I
concerned with crashing stocks had our veritable sigh
and we folded our hands and nodded then,
as he stood on a box and took up his pen
because she looked on so loving
I couldn’t help but be pleased,
in spite of his wife, in spite of their life
and his radical politics leaning far right.

There was the matter of war in Spain
which (she said) was just a prelude.

This was the littlest daughter, always contrary,
“I will run away, you’ll all be sorry.”
When she finally fled, it was to throes of war
and she didn’t bring a stitch to wear,
to fight for the reds or marry for love
just to be where the action was happening.
She had to deny her former life
to prove her worth as working-class wife,
they came back to fight for the cause from their home
on the slummier side of South London.

The man of the year was a small man
seeking room to grow.

My middle daughter found him on her travels
my sullen, silly girl, by his words became so serious
when she sang them in her own voice
we consented, it was her choice
but he was such a charming gentleman
when he had us all to tea.
(But this is when the trouble starts, as you will see)

Solidarity was demanded on the homefront
but for us, this was impossible.

My golden older daughter and her lover- now her husband-
the coincidence of their ideological proximity
translated to sympathy for the enemy
and this daughter of mine, fond of long days and wine,
spent war years charming the Holloway Prison for Women.

The littlest one fled to America, still wedded to her cause,
kept her affiliations testifiable, and sincerity undeniable-
she had rallies and babies and books to write and
for seventeen years she refused to cross the line,
she fought the fascist front known as The Family

My husband and I- my husband and,
as his opinion of the Germans was established years before
when he’d lost a lung fighting in the First World War
and he could not abide by the company
of the leader with whom I’d had the pleasure of tea.

Especially not while the world was coming apart
at its bursting Versaillesian seams.

And my silly daughter could not abide by bursting seams
to choose between England and the man of her dreams
on September first, nineteen thirty-nine
she put a gun to her temple in an attempt to stop time.

My outspoken daughters had been drawn to men
who could outspeak them.

They dared to defy us with dictators- an original act of rebellion-
typical; no middle men, they loved instead
their moustaches and regalia their marching men with unbending knees
Prussian fortitude, Yugoslavian ingenuity
and all those ideals that had the trains run on time.
I could not raise a shallow woman; my daughters
my twentieth-century casualties, there was a time
behind every powerful man was a good woman
and I had birthed nearly all of them.

The Mitfords Edited by Charlotte Mosley

Here is not a book for the common reader: you have to know and "get" the Mitfords in order to appreciate Charlotte Mosley's collection of their letters The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. My journey towards such knowing and getting began about five years ago when I read Mary S. Lovell's biography The Mitford Girls. I'd plucked it off a shelf in Waterstones one day whilst on a lunch break, and I can't remember now what possessed me to do so, but I was enthralled by these sisters, their family and their story. Nancy, the lady novelist; Pamela, who had her Aga custom-painted to match her blue eyes; Diana, who married a Guinness heir and then left him for the leader of the British Fascists, was fond of Hitler and never repented; Unity the Nazi, whose own fondness for Hitler led to her suicide attempt two days after England declared war on her beloved Germany in in 1939, where after she lived brain damaged until her death in 1948; Jessica the Communist, who ran away to the Spanish Civil War and then to America where she made a career for herself as a "muckracker"; and Deborah, who would become the Duchess of Devonshire.

Only England could have made them, and only in the twentieth century at that. Their story is the century summed up, from society balls to "Well Lady, the inevitable has occurred, Dinky is going to have a baby by a black man". Their relationships best understood by the phrase: "I naturally wouldn't hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary... but in the meanwhile, as that isn't necessary, I don't see why we shouldn't be quite good friends." I've written plenty here about my Mitford leanings. How I've loved the other volumes in my Mitford library since the Lovell: Nancy's novels, Jessica's memoirs, even Debo's book (I visited in Chatsworth House in 2003 and would have enjoyed it much more had I not been terribly ill at the time and having to keep collapsing on the grass amidst sheep poo). I read Decca's letters earlier this year and absolutely adored them.

This collection of letters is essential, and I found them fascinating-- though I didn't enjoy them as much as Decca's. Perhaps a collection between six people wouldn't have the same narrative arc? And also that Unity's and Diana's letters were so disturbing, the latter right up until the very end as she perpetually viewed herself as victim (though the years she spent imprisoned during WWII for her relations to the Germans must indeed have been traumatic). But I learned so much new stuff here, about Debo and Pamela in particular and how interesting (but not inter-esting) each one was in her own right. Debo is also as fine a letter writer as her far more literary sisters. That though Jessica and Nancy were terrible liars, this trait was not unendearing somehow. That the homeliest sister turned out prettiest in old age (I think, at least-- Pamela). How impossibly hard is one life, and any life, even one which is most extraorder.

What an amazing bond is sisterhood, which these letters demonstrate. The jokes, secret languages, grudges, traumas, and joys. Collections of letters also manage to represent death like no other literary form I've encountered (as I found when I read Carol Shields' letters in June) --the absolute silence of a writer's cessation is incredibly powerful, and real. With Nancy's and Pamela's in particular, and then in the end that blank page. To think of all the life that created these, which is as palpable as the page upon which they're printed.

New Arrivals

The Voyage Out and Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf from Mum and Dad England
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose from my Mom Stateside (or thereabouts)
Decca: the Letters of Jessica Mitford from Bronners
Two volumes of Buddha by Osamu Tezuka, which actually came into my husband's life but we share lives
The Hunters by Claire Messud which I found for a dollar in a bookshop
Similarly, I got a hard cover copy of Love Story by Erich Segal for a dollar too. I bought it to replace the school library book I stole in grade seven, and subsequently read to pieces. I believe this novel might just be godawful, but I have always loved it. And sometimes (often?) love does mean having to say you're sorry-- for having terrible terrible taste.

Post in books

My love of post is so unabashed, and I've still got that tremendous crush on our mailman, even though I am sure it's unrequited because during my previous incarnation as student/ housewife I used to meet him at our door each morning wearing track pants. But I don't care much-- I get excited at Canada Post vans, I covet pen pals, I subscribe to far too many periodicals, I make out with postboxes in airports, I've got an in the post label here on my blog.

On Sunday I sent out my Christmas cards-- 43 of them, and at least one to every continent except Africa (where unfortunately I don't know anybody), and when I say every continent I really mean it. What a treat indeed to post a letter to The South Pole. Doesn't post make the world so delightfully small and in a way not even the internet could ever manage?

At Crooked House Stephany Aulenback has been celebrating postalness lately, in particular the very best thing since "books in the post" which is, of course, "post in the books." I'd never made the connection before, between my love of mail and how much I enjoy reading collections of letters (which I've only really discovered in the past year actually with Decca and A Memoir of Friendship. ) But there clearly is a link, and Stephany has made me think back far to the postal books I've been loving for a long time. The Jolly Postman, of course, but also Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr. Henshaw which I read over and over again when I was little. When I first moved to England I found a book called Dear Exile in my hostel (and stole it, I think) and loved this story of friends separated by continents. I am very much looking forward to reading A Celibate Season, the epistolary novel by Blanche Howard and Carol Shields. "For Esme-- with Love and Squalor". Stephany mentions the wonderous 84 Charing Cross Road.

It's not really such a stretch, is it? That those of us who love books and love letters might be the same people in the end?

~She is always delighted by the arrival of the post, though it ought to be routine by now because the postman comes each day at three. But no, she anticipates the tip tap of his shoes, the thunk in through the letterbox and the footsteps' retreat. A bundle of ephemera waiting on the floor. There is always something, a stack of something.~

Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label

I had book trauma this weekend. I don't mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I've nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.

First, I'm now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain't the tinternet grand?) I've not read Macaulay's novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English "Catchwords and Claptrap" (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It's simply lovely.

And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).

Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can't think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it's a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn't get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we've renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn't have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.

The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.

The Myth of Justice

A recent overdose of Decca had a detrimental effect on last night's sleep. I've never dreamt in letters before. To do so is rather maddening. I'm starting Middlemarch today; Bronwyn's reading it too.

The Guardian World Literature Tour in New Zealand: fascinating to read the discussion in comparison to Canada's which turned in to an all-out internecine CanLit hatefest. Here for literacy initiatives. The usual suspects for Britain's favourite books. Here for Granta's best American novelists.

Our beloved Curtis's birthday plans were waylaid last night due to a ferocious winter storm. An emergency birthday party was thrown together with some success. Cake was devoured. Excellent. Bonne fête.

A Memoir of Friendship by Howard and Shields

The thing about a book of letters is that it's usually going to end with someone dying. And perhaps there is no better metaphor for the death of a writer than the blank page which follows the end of her text. That that writer's voice has been inside your head for 400+ pages at her most natural and free will only have that page's silence resound. This week reading A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard, I had the same problem I had with Decca. Both were big books I was intending to read in in bits and morsals but somehow the chronology, the voices, the spirit proved too sweeping and I was entranced. Reading became a race to an ending I knew very well would be a sad one, but the story was too good to take slowly. And that one blank page could be so devastating is certainly a testament to what came before it.

For nearly thirty years Blanche Howard and Carol Shields exchanged letters, beginning in 1975 when Shields wrote seeking advice on a book contract from the more experienced novelist Howard. Of course both women had a particular flair for the written word, and their relationship grew around such commonalities, including their love of books, their interest in CanLit in particular, feminism, politics, marriage and family. As the letters progress, the women become grandmothers, never stop being mothers, discuss aging, seek "the meaning of life", exchange book reccomendations. Typewriting, to PCs, to email. Shields comes to achieve enormous success as she takes home one literary prize after another, while Howard's own career progresses more slowly, and she often struggles to get her work into print. Her husband begins a long decline with Parkinson's Disease, and later Shields is diagnosed with the cancer she died of in 2003. And amidst all this life, overwhelmingly, there is such joy. Inevitable, I suppose, from two women doing what they loved best (writing) and sharing their ideas all the while with an old, loved, cherished friend.

I suspect that there is something about my gender which makes me particuarly fond of collections of letters. It's the same thing that makes me an assidious evesdropper, missing my streetcar stop, for example, so as not to miss the end of a stranger's conversation. I find something so delicious about other people's lives, but when these people's lives are extraordinary, and when their expression of their lives via the written word is so particularly vivid, the resulting book can't help but be gripping. And bookishly speaking, what a thrill I get being privy to the genesis of their own works, to their exchanged thoughts on Margaret Drabble's "latest" The Radiant Way, Shields' response to Joan Didion's "On Keeping a Notebook", to their critical admiration for M. Atwood, and feelings toward other giants in the CanLit scene.

Howard, along with her daughter Allison Howard, has edited these letters wonderfully. Divided into approprate chapters introduced by Howard, and interwoven with other relevant writings to flesh out the context, there is a wholeness to this work. Functioning on so many levels, truly it is a celebration. And not just of Shields and her powerful voice (whose power is undeniable here), and its silence too soon. But a celebration also of engagement with the world, of women, their lives, and, most of all, their friendships.

Injurious Reads

Everyone is right. Disgrace is wonderful. And Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford is impossible to take in morsels-- I keep binging. Now reading Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin. Upcoming: The Library at Night.

I had a reading-related injury today when I read whilst brushing my teeth, paid too little attention to the latter activity, brushed too hard and and now my poor sweet gums are ailing. Reading is a dangerous business really. Sometimes holding the book makes my elbow ache.

I just came back from a splendid dinner at the beautiful new home of Natalie Bay whose fine company made the evening fly by. We've lived in all the same countries and so we spend most of our time talking about things no one else can stand to hear about. Which suits us well. And we're off to Peterborough for the weekend, and the temperature calls for brass monkeys.

Further, Tide Simple Pleasures has rendered our apartment redolent with something slightly synthetic, but we like it. It smells better than we do. And, all real pleasure this week has been brought to us by crumpets.

Point Form

Anansi's 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.

A new Mitford book is out today-- a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can't wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca's? On here for how "no one will ever write letters like this again".

Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: "In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub."

I used to enjoy Maud Newton's Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she'd published an interview with Sara O'Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children's books I've ever seen.

Pickle Me This Picks of '07

These are my picks, my favourites, which is why I don't feel bad that so few were authored by men (though does it count that another author has a man's name?). I don't claim that they're the Best books of 2007 (though they might be) but just my best. I did try to read more books by men this year, by resolution, as I'd so been neglecting that poor gender. And I'm better for it, but still the books women write seem to be the ones I like the very best, however diverse they might be amongst themselves. What follows are such books, listed in the order in which I encountered them.

New Fiction

• Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert (From my review: "a startlingly original novel... What do you do with the past once it's over?")
• The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (From my review: "her achievement is creating a novel so truly beautiful out of some of the ugliest stuff the world has on offer.")
• Certainty by Madeleine Thien (From my review: "...ultimately it is the sum of these stories which provides the "certainty" amidst uncertainty: meaning is evident, and beauty abounds.")
• The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (From my review: "Here is a summer book through and through, all the while substantial, well-written.")
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (From my post-review: "has been positively haunting me since I read it.")
• Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls by Danielle Wood (From my review: " Rosie Little is "the next Bridget Jones" for which we've been longing for ten years.")
• Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (From my review: "This book feels too whole to have been created... [A]n entity unto itself, its own world, and a truly magnificent literary achievement.")
• Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani (From my review: "The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.")
• The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (From my review: "The Thames freezing is a perfect example of an extraordinary moment in time... and Humphreys links these moments together in this small beautiful book.")
• The Great Man by Kate Christensen (From my review: "There is joy here, and there's goodness, and the whole wide world, which is certainly something for a book.")

New Non-Fiction

• Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
• Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford by Jessica Mitford
• The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
• Cake or Death by Heather Mallick
• 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa by Stephanie Nolen
• A Memoir of Friendship: Shields and Howard by Blanche and Allison Howard (eds.)
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
• Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong
• Ambivalence by Jonathan Garfinkel

Not New but Glad I Discovered

• Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
• Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff