Anti-Valentine’s Day: Literature’s Top 5 Failed Marriage Proposals
Posted on | February 14, 2012 | No Comments
An article for Litro Magazine – click here to see the original
Feeling bitter and twisted about the whole chocolate-coated, rose-tinted, heart-shaped Valentine’s behemoth? Fuel your antipathy with a good gloat over five of the top romance fails in literature.
1. Mr. Collins to Elizabeth Bennett (Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen)
Priggish clergyman Mr. Collins is in Hertfordshire “with the design of selecting a wife”. He settles on his cousin Elizabeth Bennett, but after explaining his reasons for marrying (his patron told him to), his reasons for choosing of Elizabeth (he feels guilty for inheriting her house), and her reasons for accepting him (she’s likely to die an old maid otherwise), for some reason Lizzie declines. She would get the prize for literature’s most crushing turn-down (“You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so.”), if only Mr. Collins didn’t keep taking her refusals as flirty come-ons. After all, when a woman says no, she really means yes … doesn’t she?
2. Gabriel Oak to Bathsheba Everdene (Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy)
Gabriel’s hard-sell of the advantages of marriage might be humble (some chickens and a piano, because farmers wives are getting pianos now), but he ends on a high with perhaps the most beautiful vignette of a loving marriage ever written: “at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.” But don’t worry, Gabriel crashes and burns anyway. Bathsheba Everdene’s not keen on being a man’s property, and tells Gabriel in a rather off-hand way that she doesn’t love him. Bathsheba embarks on a disastrous love life before Gabriel gets his second chance
3. St John Rivers to Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë)
St John Rivers is in love with the beautiful Rosamund Oliver, but she’d make a terrible missionary’s wife, so he proposes to plain, hard-working Jane Eyre instead. But Jane gives him the classic ‘you’re like a brother to me’ speech – St John doesn’t love her for a start, and he’s got a wet handshake to boot. Of course, her heart is also elsewhere, across the moors with her moody, mad-wife-hiding pet project Mr. Rochester, whose marriage proposals involve a lot more sweeping to bosoms and chest-beating and whose handshake is undoubtedly crushing. No contest, really.
4. Konstantin Levin to Kitty Shcherbatskaya (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)
Stolid, awkward landowner Konstantin Levin’s is desperately in love with Kitty Shcherbatskaya. Finding her alone, his face becoming more gloomy than usual as he realizes he has no excuse for not making his move, he launches into a proposal that scores points for being gloriously awkward: ‘I meant to say … I meant to say … I came for this … to be my wife!’ Unfortunately, after that promising start, Kitty turns him down, because she’s head-over-heels with the dashing Vronsky. Of course, Vronsky’s not so keen on her (it would be a shorter book if he was), and Levin gets another shot at it later, but for now he retreats to his country estate, devastated.
5. Mr. Stevens to Miss Kenton (Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro)
The build-up for this proposal lasts a whole novel, and when it finally happens at the end … well, actually, it doesn’t. Prim, repressed butler Mr. Stevens is travelling to meet his old colleague Miss Kenton, who has written to tell him her marriage is in trouble. Stevens claims to want to ask her if she will return to her old post as housekeeper at Darlington Hall, but he is also drawn by the promise of a second chance at the most important relationship of his life, one that he sabotaged the first time round because he couldn’t bring himself to admit his feelings. Miss Kenton confirms that she has often thought of how her life might have been better with him. But she will stay with her husband. “…at that moment my heart was breaking”, says Stevens, admitting to his emotions for the first time, and far too late.
Tags: Charlotte Bronte > Jane Austen > Kazuo Ishiguro > Leo Tolstoy > romance > Thomas Hardy > Valentine's Day
The Evils of Spain by V.S. Pritchett
Posted on | February 9, 2012 | No Comments
The Evils of Spain by V.S. Pritchett
A group of old men meet for a meal and remember the day years ago when one of them nearly drowned. The story is a babble of their exuberant, affectionate and chastising voices, arguing over food, over the placement of their table, over their memories, as they retell the tale of Angel’s near-death experience, a story they must have relived at every reunion, time and time again. This is a melancholy and tender elegy for youth, and as the story finishes we want to stay at their table, silent and enrapt, as they ask Angel to explain about the pyjamas.
Tags: 100-word reviews > Reviews > short stories > V.S.Pritchett
John Christopher’s dystopian futures
Posted on | February 6, 2012 | No Comments
The news that the science fiction author John Christopher died this week at the age of 90 has had me thinking about the influence his books had on me. The Tripods and the Sword of the Spirits trilogies had a huge effect on me when I read them as a teenager. They helped to shape my tastes in literature for life, and I still have vivid memories of them.
Coincidentally, I picked up my old copy of The White Mountains, the first book in The Tripods trilogy, the other day and started to re-read it for the first time in years, unaware that John Christopher had died. The Tripods are huge alien machines that rule the earth at some time in the not-too-distant future, keeping the human race subjugated with mind-control caps that are fitted to teenagers as they come of age. A group of boys escape their cappings and begin a journey that will lead them to discover who controls the Tripods, and what they can do to overthrow them. Many people my age will remember The Tripods from the excellent 1980s BBC TV series that was made (although never completed).
John Christopher had the knack of creating complex, believable post-apocalyptic worlds dominated by authoritarian power structures. That was fascinating to me as a teenage reader, just forming my own views on the power structures of family, society and state in our own world.
To celebrate his writing, I’ve started reading his adult science fiction novel, The Death of Grass, which has just been published in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
The Verger by Somerset Maugham
Posted on | February 5, 2012 | No Comments
The Verger by Somerset Maugham
This is a short story with a point to make. It’s a tale your granddad might tell, with a moral twist, but a charming one that slips by you almost unawares.
The precisely drawn character of the Verger is a joy– a fastidious former butler who keeps his worn-out verger’s gowns in brown paper in the bottom of his wardrobe and thinks he has a job for life. The new vicar discovers he is illiterate, and the verger chooses to leave rather than change his ways. The ramifications of his decision build to the final smile of the last line.
Online text of The Verger by Somerset Maugham,
Tags: 100-word reviews > reivews > short stories > Somerset Maugham
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
Posted on | January 25, 2012 | No Comments
A prospector in the Klondike
“When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire”. In abrupt sentences, as stark as the icy landscape in which it’s set, Jack London tells the story of a prospector walking a deserted trail over a frozen river in the Yukon gold-fields.
It’s cold – so cold that spit freezes before it hits the ground, and any area of nose or cheek left uncovered goes numb. Accompanied only by his husky dog, ignoring the advice of the old-timers that at fifty below, you should not travel alone, the man falls into one of the deadly ‘traps’ set by the extreme cold, and with feet soaked in icy water, is suddenly dependent for his life upon the ability of unresponsive and quickly freezing fingers to complete the simple task of striking a match. It’s a gripping battle.
I love this story: you can’t help willing the man not to drop his last matches in the snow as you feel his limbs slowly freezing. There are echoes of London’s own extraordinary life-story here: he himself joined the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897, and saw landscapes like these first hand. But this is more than a simple adventure story. London pits his protagonist against the elements, but the man has no chance of winning against forces so enormous and desolate. In such extreme cold, the body itself becomes no more than a set of mechanisms, puny and ineffectual against the ice. It’s not just snow he’s up against, it’s the universe, as the “cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet”. And the universe will always win.
Jack London
There’s an added layer of interest here for writers too, because the best-known version of the story is actually a re-draft of a piece London had published six years previously, early in his career. Comparing the versions is fascinating: the first is a simple man-against-nature adventure story, well-told but ultimately thin on character and theme and lacking in literary stickiness. Given six years to develop as a writer, London takes the same tale and turns it into a stark musing on man’s place in nature.
You can read the better-known 1908 version of “To Build a Fire” online here.
You can also compare the earlier, rougher version of the story from 1902 here.
Three Christmas Ghost Stories
Posted on | December 13, 2011 | No Comments
For a bit of fun this Christmas I’ve written three Christmassy ghost stories and published them on the Kindle. You can download all three for 89p, and all profits will be donated to the charity for single homeless people, Crisis.
A visit from the mother-in-law at Christmas takes a sinister turn, a Cathedral choirboy finds something nasty in the crypt, and a city high-flyer hears something coming down the chimney, but it’s certainly not jolly.
Download the collection from Amazon here.
Have a look at my small plays
Posted on | November 13, 2011 | No Comments
Found me through the Arthur Recreates blog and looking for something else diverting to while away a few minutes? Check out my Small Plays About My Day blog. They’re tiny plays that happened to me when I worked in a secondhand bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London. They’re all true. Here’s a taster:
Sea Stories: A Small Play About My Day
Man in Denim Jacket: Ah, hello, yes, you’ve got a book in the window, it’s called, um… it’s …
Emily: Which window is it in?
Man in Denim Jacket: What was it called now …
Emily: It’s easiest if you tell me which window it’s in, then I can get it for you.
Man in Denim Jacket: It was something about the sea. Sea Stories, that was it.
Emily: Right, I don’t know the book, so if you just tell me where it is in the window…
Man in Denim Jacket: Oh I know where it is. It’s here.
Emily: This one?
Man in Denim Jacket: No.
Emily: Maybe if you go outside and point to it, then I can find it.
Man in Denim Jacket: Oh it’s this one. No, that’s not it. It was called Sea Stories.
Emily: If you point to it from outside…
Man in Denim Jacket: I’ll point to it from outside.
(Exit man in denim jacket. Pause. Enter man in denim jacket.)
Emily: You didn’t point to it.
Man in Denim Jacket: It’s that one.
Emily: Spa Towns of England?
Man in Denim Jacket: Yes, I’ll take it.
Emily: Right.
Man in Denim Jacket: I was thinking of Bath Spa. Bath water. Sea water. It’s funny, I’m usually good with words.
More plays here – www.smallplays.com
Mad Scientists and Literary Experiments
Posted on | April 9, 2011 | 1 Comment
Aldous Huxley reckoned science and literature were alike because both observe the world and attempt to interpret it in words. Fair enough, but when science is described in literature, there’s some pretty poor methodology on show. If real scientists ever behaved like their fictional counterparts, Dolly the Sheep would have headed up an ovine clone army intent on world domination.
Some dubious experiments crop up in early literature, like Icarus testing his dad’s aeronautical design with scant regard for health and safety guidelines, or Dr Faustus deciding that after nailing all the academic subjects, his next step should be to try summoning a devil (I’d like to have seen the funding application for that one).
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, 1931, Paramount
The Enlightenment brought about a revolution in scientific method, and nothing was off-limits to the enquiring mind. Authors like Jonathan Swift sent up the hubris of the harebrained experimentalists. Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado on his Travels, where bearded boffins carry out ridiculous experiments, from extracting sun from cucumbers to “an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food.”
Mad scientists were soon getting down to business, meddling with incomprehensible forces and unleashing uncontrollable evils with wild abandon. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein made his appearance in 1818, for some reason under the impression that reanimating a corpse might turn out alright. Frankenstein is the daddy of many crazed fictional offspring, from unhinged vivisectionist Dr. Moreau to wild-eyed time machinist Doc Emmett Brown.
The Victorian era saw the appearance of a plethora of fictional scientists whose methods would make a peer-review panel blush. In Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll goes for the trusty experimental method known as “downing the stuff yourself to see what happens”.
Jekyll manages to separate out the dark, animalistic part of his character with such success that it needs its own moniker and a separate entrance to his house. Unfortunately, instead of refining the civilised part of the human soul too, Jekyll is eventually destroyed by Hyde. (Never would have happened if he’d done trials on mice first.)
In H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man, Griffin discovers the secret of invisibility, a condition which sends him mad. Although, just how sane he starts out is questionable: laughing in the face of the concept of controlled clinical trials, he also decides that the most effective way of proving his theory is to try it out on himself.
Raving researchers aside, science and satire have remained close companions: in 1925, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Professor Preobrazhensky implants a human pituitary gland and testicles into a stray dog in The Heart of a Dog. The mutt Sharik turns into a human, but with his dog’s habits intact, he’s coarse and boorish with a terrible taste in ties (and if dogs wore ties, they would surely be terrible ones). Sharik becomes a send-up of Communism’s grand experiment to transform the proletariat into New Soviet man.
- Ghost Hunting with the Happy Mondays, ITV2
The temptation to mix pseudo-scientific experiment and the supernatural has been too much for some authors to resist. Experimenting on spectres never turns out well, as a rule. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a Dr Montague (where he got his doctorate is never specified), decides it would be a good idea to choose his researchers based, not on their scientific credentials or academic publication record as you might expect, but on their state of mental imbalance, reasoning that the needy and unstable are more likely to see ghosts. (An approach later adopted by the production team of ITV2’s Ghost Hunting with the Happy Mondays,who came up with the genius idea of locking Sean Ryder in a haunted cellar with a camera.)
The Haunting of Hill House is a genuinely unsettling book, uncovering more about neurosis than it does about spooks. Dr Montague’s experiment doesn’t prove the existence of ghosts, but it does prove that locking four unbalanced people in a house produces unpleasant results. And for all their similarities, that’s where science and literature part company. Scientific experiments attempt to prove things about the world around us, whereas the literary experiment is more interested in what’s inside.
Tags: Articles > dr faustus > frankenstein > ghost stories > litro > science > shirley jackson
Can Fiction Give Life To Childbirth? (Guardian.co.uk Books Blog, March 2011)
Posted on | March 3, 2011 | No Comments
What does giving birth feel like? It’s become a pressing question for me, as I’m due to do it myself in five weeks’ time. No one can give me an answer. “Oh, it’s an unforgettable experience,” mums coo. Then add, “I can’t describe it; you forget the pain.” Make your mind up!
Can literature provide an answer? Surely one of the greats has nailed it, and can explain how an event can be simultaneously unforgettable and impossible to remember?
My antenatal teacher claims the best description of labour in literature was written by a bloke. The birth of Kitty’s baby in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is such an accurate portrayal of the transitional stage of labour (when we start swearing at men for getting us into this mess, demanding back-massages and shrieking when touched) that Tolstoy must surely have based it on personal experience of the births of his 13 children.
The father-to-be, Levin, is mystified as his wife swerves from screaming agony to peaceful tranquillity. She cries out in pain then starts knitting, grabs his hand then pushes him away. “‘Don’t leave, don’t leave! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid! … Mama, take my earrings. They bother me. … No, it’s terrible! I’ll die, I’ll die! Go, go!’ she cried, and again came that scream that was unlike anything in the world.”
Convinced she’s dying, Levin sees her grief and joy as “holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed”.
If Tolstoy’s labour scene is beautiful, ending with the appearance of the baby “like a small flame over a lamp”, elsewhere in literature, birth gets nasty. In the unforgettable opening paragraphs of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, a woman squats under a fish stall in stinking, fetid 18th-century Paris, pushes out a “mess”, a “thing”, and leaves it for dead. It’s not such a surprise that the child grows up to be a serial killer.
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy also suffers a traumatic birth; the doctor crushes his nose with forceps. In fact, the whole book is a painful labour to push out a life story. Tristram can’t decide where he begins, literally. Never mind birth, what about conception? The character of your parents? He finally gets round to the labour in volume III, and the book ends four years before he’s conceived.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contains a kind of male labour for Victor Frankenstein, whose “toils” and “agony” bring his creation to life with “a convulsive motion”. But it’s no natural birth, and Shelley makes sure we get her point by killing off mothers left, right and centre. Ask too many questions, mess with the secret of life itself, and the results aren’t pretty.
Or there’s Sylvia Plath, who hints at post-natal depression in her poemMorning Song. Here birth isn’t joyful, it’s a harsh, mechanical process, beyond a woman’s control: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch. / The midwife slapped your footsoles”
Other female authors have explored the ambiguities of birth and ownership. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, set in the American South, birth is part of a human production-line: slaves don’t own their babies. But the traumatic memory of giving birth on the run from slave-catchers, the baby “face up and drowning in its mother’s blood”, itself becomes a possession, passed on to a new generation. “Some things you forget. Other things you never do.” Humanity has been infertile for 25 years in PD James’s Children of Men – so when a woman finally becomes pregnant, birth becomes a matter of power. In a scene with biblical echoes, the expectant mother, on the run from State police, is forced to give birth in a remote shed, delivering a potential saviour of the human race. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, meanwhile, fertile women are forced to produce babies for a sterile ruling class. In a bizarre birth scene, the wife of a Commander sits with legs either side of a labouring handmaid, ready to take possession of the baby. The women don’t even own the pain of birth: “…who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow…”
I’m not sure any of this is answering the big question, but these beautiful words from Charlotte’s Web – “Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch” – stick with me as I wait for my own life-shaking event. EB White’s classic starts with the birth of the piglet Wilbur, who faces death by the farmer’s axe before he’s a day old, and ends with the demise of the wise spider Charlotte and the hatching of her 514 children. Birth and death, loss and joy … it’s not so far off Tolstoy.
This article appeared on the Guardian.co.uk Books Blog.
Tags: Anna Karenina > Birth in literature > Guardian Books > Margaret Atwood > P.D.James > Sylvia Plath > Tolstoy
Writing as if you’re telling the story: Once Upon a Wartime at the Imperial War Museum
Posted on | February 20, 2011 | No Comments
It’s the first time I’ve been to the Imperial War Museum since I was 11 and I’m a bit disorientated, so I ask a member of staff where the Once Upon a Wartime exhibition is. “See the Sherman tank in the corner?” he says, pointing to a monstrous tank surrounded by kids with clipboards. “Just behind that.” It’s a good introduction to the idiosyncrasies of the museum’s collection of weapons and war and the constant stream of school parties of shrieking kids moving between them.
Once Upon a Wartime is a new exhibition at the IWM exploring the themes of loyalty, separation, excitement, survival and identity in children’s war literature, with a focus on four classic books: Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, Bernard Ashley’s Little Soldier, Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War and Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword.
In the way of the modern museum exhibit aimed at children, the exhibition seems rather sparse to adult eyes. It’s beautifully presented, and has a lot to interest kids, but perhaps is a touch style over substance for older visitors.
But the best bits, from the point of view of anyone interested in literature, are the sections on the writers themselves. There are recordings of each talking about their work, and glimpses into their writing processes in the form of notebooks and manuscripts. Michael Morpurgo writes his stories by hand then reads them aloud to a friend, who types a manuscript, a page of which is on display, with Morpurgo’s corrections. You can see Bernad Ashley’s pocket-sized ideas notebook, and Ian Serraillier’s “plot book”, where he kept notes on his characters and on the complex mess of war-torn Europe he had to navigate them through, and the school exercise book from which Robert Westall read The Machine Gunners aloud to his adolescent son in an attempt to win his attention, changing bits if he found them boring.
What comes out of the exhibition is the ability of great children’s literature, especially when dealing with a subject as visceral as war, to forget for a while that it’s meant to be children’s literature at all, and simply become literature, ageless, plain and powerful.
Michael Morpurgo says that “I try to write as if I’m telling the story … as if I’m telling my best friend,” and it’s a quality all these books share – an immediacy of narrative and a vibrancy of experience that many adult novels lack. I’m working my way through them again, revisiting the vivid scenes of Bawden’s Druid’s Bottom, Westall’s Garmouth and and Seraillier’s Warsaw that I remember so clearly from my childhood, and enjoying War Horse and Little Soldier for the first time.
It’s easy to forget the label of children’s literature as I read. The Machine Gunners hardly seems like a children’s book at all, beyond the fact that some of its main characters are kids. Shot through with the constant threat of death on the Home Front, it hints at the harsh realities of bereavement, orphaned children, prostitution and cowardice.
In the exhibition, Robert Westall talks about his lack of that clichéd “sense of wonder” as a child. “To me [...] the wonder was in the adults. I wanted to be an adult from the age of 5.” This is also the grim effect war has on children in The Machine Gunners, making them more grown-up than the grown-ups around them, until they end up robbing corpses, stealing and opening fire with a real gun. It’s a harrowing read, and I’d recommend it, whatever age you are.
What Once Upon a Wartime also achieves, sometimes brilliantly, is to show glimpses of the reality behind the fiction. There’s a letter on display addressed to Lord Kitchener, written during the drive to requisition horses for the war effort. It’s from a little girl called Frida, who is, she says, “…writing for our pony which we are very afraid may be taken for your army. Please spare her. [...] It would break our hearts to let her go. We have given two others and three of our own family are now fighting for you in the Navy.” (A good sense of priorities in her list: the horses, then the family members serving.)
It’s a relief to see a scribbled reply from Lord Kitchener’s office, reassuring Frida that “no horses under 15 hands shall be requisitioned.” I imagine Betty the pony safe in a quiet field on an English farm, the war to her only the distant rumble of passing planes.
Once Upon a Wartime is on at the Imperial War Museum London until 30th October.
Tags: Brian Ashley > Events > Ian Serraillier > Imperial War Museum > litro > Nina Bawden > Reviews > Robert Westall
Twitter @EmilyCleaver
Subscribe
Subscribe to my blog posts.