A Scent of the Past

By the side of the road ...

... have you ever noticed this?

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time. 

-      Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

A summer visitor who usually comes up from Texas later in the season was enchanted by the woodland wildflowers in May and asked me what would be blooming there in June. Not much, I told her. The spring ephemerals are pretty much finished by June, and the canopy filling in with leaves, shading the ground. But field and roadside and garden flowers come on strong and are so many and so varied that it’s hard to keep track of them.

Viburnum

Campion

Some are, however, easy to overlook. The plant in the three images at the top of this post is an instance of the easily overlooked June wildflowers – or weeds, if you prefer. A scruffy little fellow that sprouts in the dust of driveways and dirt roads, pineapple weed, Matricaria discoidea, is identified by Stan Tekeila in Wildflowers of Michigan: Field Guide as “inconspicuous.” But when I pull over to the side of the road and my tires crush its greenish-yellow tops, releasing their scent, I am once again, if only for a moment, seven years old.

There were pineapple weeds in my grandmother’s dusty driveway in central Ohio. Must they not still be there? And shouldn’t my grandmother still be there, too, feeding her chickens and shelling peas, with little me beside her, eager to help? Will my grandfather be working out in his garden or his large raspberry patch? If a storm is coming, will my grandparents call me down from the swaying fruit trees in the backyard to join them in the safety of the house?

Other easily overlooked June blooms bring other memories.

Clover in the grass takes me back to Barry County.

Daisies by the drive elicit "Thank you, Claudia" every day they bloom.

In Brideshead Revisited, the narrator recounts, from the perspective of World War II, scenes of his adolescence at the end of the Great War, the one not called “First” until the Second arrived. The book opens with his coming unexpectedly upon scenes from his youth:

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

How strange it is to come upon – often out of context -- an old familiar aroma strongly associated in memory with a particular place and time and people. Here it is again, the same as always, that old sense perception, but now absent its old surroundings. Or one comes upon it in the old surroundings, as did Charles, but the familiar place has been transformed and is empty now of all those one remembers in it. 

Hidden creek blooms: Where is the old water ram?

Bridalwreath

How can it be? we ask ourselves. How can those vivid scenes have vanished? They feel so very near at hand that one more than remembers: memory repeoples, reanimates, and reincarnates the past.

The river in Waugh's novel was the Bride, and June is the traditional month of brides. The many white flowers of garden and field seem to honor wedding couples, don't you think?

Always, For Me, Jane Austen

Our “intrepid Ulysses group,” having tackled James Joyce, Dante, Beckett, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner and so on, decided most recently to read Pride and Prejudice together, the first time for about half the group. As for me, I’ve read this delightful novel countless times – really, cannot begin to count my readings, since Austen was my tired-brain-bedtime reading through my first two years of graduate school. Lined up at the head of my futon on the floor were Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Emma; Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion, and every evening when my brain could not absorb one more word of philosophy, I would crawl under the blankets and pull out whichever Austen novel I had closed the night before, opening where my bookmark had been left. Night after night. Finishing one, I would move on to the next, and at the end of the row I would begin again at the beginning. So yes, I know these novels pretty well.

But being asked to lead a group discussion made my reading different this time around. For the first time, I noticed Austen’s incredible economy of language. How much information is packed into the first sentence! We know that we have begun reading a comedy, that the cast of characters comes from a certain class of society, that the story will end in marriage, and that the author looks at her world with eyebrows raised and an amused smile on her lips.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

There it is. This “truth universally acknowledged” is of course not “universal” at all but part of the fabric of a certain class of English society at the time of the novel. The “good fortune” tells us more about which class of English men and women we will meet in the novel’s pages. “Single man” and “wife” aims us toward the marriage market, and the author’s sly wording tells us that she finds much humor in this business of families looking to marry daughters into money. All this in twenty-three words!

I also noticed for the first time how short many of the chapters are and how most of them consist of a single scene. Onstage in the first chapter are Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Basically, we are given two sentences of introduction, then a spirited dialogue between husband and wife, ending with a paragraph summing up their marriage in general. Austen’s ability to convey character through dialogue is well known, and it’s no wonder her novels have been so often adapted for dramatic presentation, but has anyone considered how the English theatre might have been changed had she been introduced into a literary/theatrical milieu in London? What a playwright she might have been!

Of the 61 chapters of Pride and Prejudice (the final chapter being a summary exposition of the future of its characters, without dialogue), three stand out from the rest -- for me, at least -- in their startling dramatic impact: Chapter 19, the extraordinarily ridiculous proposal of marriage from Mr. Collins and Elizabeth’s spirited refusal of same; Chapter 34, another proposal of marriage, this time issuing reluctantly and haughtily from Mr. Darcy, and Elizabeth’s even stronger refusal; and finally the marvelous, irresistible scene between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Chapter 56. Surely Lady Catherine could hold her own onstage beside Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell! Which one do you think would come out on top?

And oh, that Eliza Bennett! Who can help loving her? She is well read but no showoff bluestocking, musical without the heaviness of genius, not a ravishing beauty but slim and attractive, with bright, lively eyes, dark and beautifully expressive. Her sense of humor is irrepressible. She loves long country walks. She will not marry without love, even if it means remaining an old maid, and she is determined to be recognized as a “rational creature.” 

Not for Elizabeth the wit of the staircase, l’esprit de l’escalier, thinking too late of the retort she should have made. No, Eliza is never at a loss for words (except when spoken to by her sister, Mary, who has none of Elizabeth’s quickness or sense of the ridiculous). Our heroine’s regrets are of a very different order, regret for what she said rather than what she did not say, regret that she let herself be prejudiced against Mr. Darcy and in favor of Mr. Wickham for no other reason than the former’s initial coldness and the latter’s easy charm, the one offending and the other fueling her own pride. The conclusions of all reasoning rest on the soundness of first premises, and this charming "rational creature" had some hard lessons to learn before reaching her happy ending.

I put forward to the group the following hypothesis: Mrs. Hurst, Bingley’s married sister, is crucial to the story by giving Miss Bingley an audience for her cruelest observations on the Bennett family. Without Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley’s character would not be so readily revealed. Mr. Hurst, who does nothing but eat and sleep, is useful in taking his wife out of the marriage market so that Bingley does not have two sisters competing for Mr. Darcy.

One question our group has not yet resolved is Mary, the pedantic Bennett sister. What is her function in the story (or drama, as I now think of it)? Does she have one? Any thoughts?

Not generally a great reader of secondary sources, I did venture into a couple other writers’ researches and views of Austen. I picked up some interesting facts but also found a couple of opinions that had me spluttering. How in the world can Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them, say that Mr. and Mrs. Bennett had a happy marriage?! Did she read the last paragraph of the first chapter or the first paragraph of the forty-second chapter? “Close reading,” the method Prose recommends to writers, certainly fell down on the job here! And Nigel Nicolson, in his book, The World of Jane Austen – how can he say that Austen looked at houses only as evidence of characters’ wealth, not of their taste? Here is a description of Pemberley and Elizabeth’s response to it:

It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills – and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

Does that sound as if only wealth had been on display or noted by the heroine or author? Nicolson advances “evidence” for his claim that Austen did not care for a certain contemporary architect by quoting lines of dialogue from another of her novels – but the character who advises throwing out the architect’s plans is a shallow fop! Who on earth would take Robert Ferrars as a mouthpiece for the author?

But there were nuggets of information in the little secondary reading I did. For example, I learned that the four novels published during the author’s lifetime were published anonymously ... that her brother acted as her agent ... that her posthumous reputation was very great when her brother revealed her identity ... and, most heart-piercing nugget of all to my mind, that Jane Austen never in her life met another writer. It is one thing to live in a small village or in the countryside and to have a limited circle of acquaintance but never in her life to have met another writer? How I wish I could invite her to my bookstore to meet my writer friends! Imagine the exchange of views, the “spirited critique” of society and literary fashion!

Book Review: THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

By Kristopher Jansma

NY: Viking, 2013

$26.95

[Caveat: I am not now nor have I ever been an “English major,” and I have scrupulously avoided reading any reviews of this book before writing my own. Literary critics will be able to analyze the elements in this work much more thoroughly than I can do. I am merely a reader and a bookseller, writing here for other readers.]

We first meet the narrator of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards in an “Author’s Note” that appears to precede but almost immediately reveals itself as the beginning of the novel itself. In the brief “Note,” the narrator describes a time in his boyhood when he was not much more than eight years old (“not yet” a writer), and he tells of the first story he wrote -- and lost -- at about that time. Clearly, his young self was the “unnamed boy detective” in his childish story, but clearly, also, the story is invented: the boy detective solves a mystery, turns black marketeer, becomes rich, and secures for himself the friendship of wealthy siblings Xavier and Yvette. The reader has no reason to accuse the narrator of being “unreliable” for presenting the synopsis of what was clearly a fictional tale – a fiction within a fiction, of course, a story made up by a character in a novel. After all, fiction itself is not generally “unreliable.” We accept its world as if it were real, not because we believe every event in a novel is fact.

The best novelists make you believe, as you read, that their stories are real. You hold your breath as Raskolnikov approaches his neighbor with a raised ax. You weep when no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral. And when you realize you are being so well fooled, you love the author all the more for it.

And what young child, left in the casual care of airport shopkeepers until his mother, an airline attendant, returns from her job – what young child in those circumstances would not make up stories to comfort himself?

. . . It is important to be comfortable when you’re just a small boy, alone in a big place. He’ll change, but this fact never truly will. He’ll go on, day after day, unsure if he’s all that different from the day before. Later he’ll look back at the things that are happening now and he’ll think they are almost like something he read about.

For the writer -- for any writer -- fiction borrows from life and invades life in turn.

In the first chapter of the novel proper, the narrator meets his iconic “rich girl,” Betsy, and in the following (freshman year of college) becomes acquainted with his wealthy, eccentric, gifted, lifelong friend and literary competitor. Julian, it turns out, has a close female friend, one who is almost a sister to him, and when Evelyn appears she is the reincarnation of the first chapter’s Betsy. Throughout the book the triumvirate meets at various exotic world locales, their names changing but their identities constant as the narrator continually reinvents himself and reinvents his friends, in search of a way to turn their conjoined stories into literature. And at the same time, Julian is doing the same thing. Who will succeed at best capturing their real lives in a literary work?

Have I made this novel sound too much like a writer writing about writing? That’s a major theme but not the only one, for the various fictions within the fiction are themselves entertaining romps. It cannot be an accident that the female character aspires to the stage. Are all three acting for each other in scene after scene? 

After a while I stopped thinking of Jansma’s novel as postmodern and began to see it as harking back to the English tradition typified by Henry Fielding’s picaresque Tom Jones. Like the character Tom Jones, the narrator of this novel is a social outsider who falls in love with an apparently unattainable girl/woman, but -- also like Tom Jones -- his love for the rich girl does not stop him from becoming involved with other girls and women more easily within his reach. Jansma’s narrator is clearly more rogue or trickster than classical hero; he undergoes many trials and has a great many adventures; the plot is complex, and the humor swings through the gamut from comedy through farce to satire.

And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? . . . How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? . . . How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with the unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lies.

So far I have left untouched the question of an “unreliable narrator” and whether or not this central character fits the bill. Jansma's narrator is not delusional or brain-damaged or too young or naive to describe his world, and even as the novel proceeds and he presents himself to others with borrowed names, backgrounds, and credentials, we the readers are privy to the deceptions he practices. We are not taken in by his lies.

The airport, the gold watch, the absence of clocks in Terminal A and the wall of clocks in Terminal B, and a lost manuscript: Here is where we enter the house of mirrors, and here, again, is where we leave the narrator and his nested, changeling stories. Are we right back where we started? Between beginning and end are many games of checkers, as well as references to leopards with unchangeable and undetectable spots. Can the characters learn without changing?

I found the ending satisfying, but to understand why you will have to read the book yourself. If you are up for a crazy ride through a house of mirrors, jump on this train!

And now, excuse me. I've committed myself to these words and am now giving myself permission to read what others have written about The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.