Cooking the (Cultural History) Books - Thanksgiving

I exist due to the joint wonders of globalisation and grammar schools. Thanks to them, my father made his way from Leicester to Haverford, Pennsylvania and met my mother, who had just begun to despair of ever making her Mormon relatives stop asking her WHEN SHE WAS GOING TO FIND A NICE HUSBAND. I am, therefore, the unlikely product of the Midlands and the Midwest, the owner of two passports (useful) but someone whom neither the CIA nor MI5 will ever trust enough to hire (disappointing).

The unachievable ideal

I generally consider myself very culturally blessed. I am the inheritor of Doctor Who and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Dr. Seuss and queueing - and, most importantly, I get to celebrate all the great American festivals, which, because Americans LOVE ritual, happen roughly once every two weeks. Thanksgiving, though, is a particular favourite of mine. It's all the eating of Christmas with none of the gift stress, and it goes on for just long enough for you to end up feeling fond of your family rather than sour about them.

This year is my first Thanksgiving cooking solo, a momentous occasion in the life of any American. Granted, the part of my turkey is going to be played by a chicken (we will make it a turkey with the power of belief) and the sweet potatoes are going to be roasted rather than covered with marshmallows (because I am English enough to realise that some American traditions are disgusting), but the stuffing, at least, comes with true American pedigree. It is not, indeed, just any stuffing recipe, because I have been entrusted with Grandma's Stuffing for Turkey. This marvellous and venerable piece of family tradition calls for, among other things, 15 cents of sausage meat. Fifteen cents of sausage meat! It's like a little piece of economic history in my hands.

Cooking from a handed-down recipe is like cooking with your ancestors right there in the kitchen with you, poking the electric scales and making disparaging comments about the price of butter these days. The fact of a family recipe is often much more important than what it actually tastes like - we have one recipe, the gloriously over-titled 'Phyllis's Mom's Icebox Rolls', which is brought out every Christmas morning and makes five trays of rock-hard, over-sugared death buns that then sit in the freezer for the next five months. And yet there's something about the teeth-chipping head-rush they bring that's part of what makes Christmas in the Bird household so special. Or 'special'. Take your pick.

And so, in honour of Thanksgiving, I give you Grandma's Stuffing for Turkey, with added translations by my mother.

Grandma's Stuffing for Turkey
 
1 1/2 loaves of stale bread crumbs (ca. 1 lb)

The onion and celery being softened up

large onion fried in butter
Celery.  Use about the same amount as the onion and chop them up.  Fry them with the onions.
3 eggs
ca 1 Tbsp thyme
2 tsp sage
1 tsp parsley
15 cents worth of pork sausage (!)  I think this is about 1 pound.
(she says onion salt and celery salt, but I don't use these)
pepper
2 level tsp salt

Mix everything together except the eggs.  Pour boiling water over the mixture until it's moist.

When you're ready to cook the turkey, beat the eggs and add 2 level tsp baking powder.  Mix into the stuffing mixture and cook right away.

Too much sausage?

Crumbly bread

I particularly like the way the presence of baking powder is buried in the instructions, like some sort of condiment ninja. The mysterious 15 cents of sausage appears to equate to about eight to ten big sausages (and I suspect this may have been too many, it looked suspiciously meaty). Also, when you crumble up the bread you can use the crusts, though leave out the bits that have gone like masonry. But apart from that, I mixed it up, I stuffed it up the chicken and I cooked that chicken for two hours. And then I cooked the stuffing a bit more outside the chicken to make sure I didn't kill my guests. Done.

And talking about what it says on tins, my family's other great Thanksgiving classic, our pumpkin pie recipe, deserves a mention here too. English friends I feed it to often ask for the recipe, imagining, I think, something involving pre-dawn pumpkin gathering rituals and long hours boiling the gourds down to pulp afterwards.

Er. Not exactly.

What you do is:
1) source one tin of Libby's Pumpkin Pie Mix.
2) Follow the instructions on the back of it.
3) Pie.

The pastry and the pumpkin tin

You can, of course, fancy things up by making your own pastry - this time I used Dan Lepard's sweet pastry recipe. It turned out well, but one thing I will say is: do not be afraid if your pastry looks like goop before it goes in the fridge to chill. Have faith and it will come out perfectly pastry-like and firm.

Ready to blind-bake

Blind-bake said pastry at about 180 C for 10-15 minutes, until the bottom of the pie base is firm (pro tip: don't use red lentils like I did, they're too light and it won't have the proper effect), and then whack the filling ingredients into the bowl as follows (I'm copying from my trustly Libby's tin - obviously if you don't have Libby's and you do have time you can substitute your own handmade pumpkin paste - find a recipe for it anywhere on the interwebs):

Cheat's Pumpkin Pie

Filling goo in all its glory

2 eggs, lightly beaten
425 g Libby's pumpkin filling
6 oz sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 pint (284 ml) Carnation evaporated milk - this is about 2/3 of the tin you get in supermarkets.

Put it in your pastry case, put that in the oven at 170 C and cook for 40-50 minutes. Leave to cool and then serve with whipped cream. And then have a heart attack.

The finished pie.

So, happy Thanksgiving, Americans and those who love them! If you haven't eaten your body weight by the time the day's over then you haven't really been trying.

1001 Books Review - Orlando

1) The lovely people over at Writersdock have re-published two more of my reviews, of 1984 and Angels and Insects.This is very kind of them and makes me extremely delighted.

2) My latest blog for Litro is all about old men in hot pants, the word lentor and my criminal inability to learn languages.

And now, a 1001 Books review with a difference.

The difference is, I'm sorry to say, that this is a cheat. Not only have I read Orlando at least three times before, but I am only reading it now for one of my MA modules, and didn't I tell you I would never subject you to my MA books?

Nevertheless.

Orlando is one of my all-time favourite, love-of-my-life books, one of those pieces of writing that, for me, that only gets better and more astonishing each time I go back to it. This time around I started Orlando at ten thirty a few nights ago, intending to read the first chapter. At one o'clock in the morning, on page 150, I came to myself and realised that I should probably go to sleep at some point.

Re-reading something that means as much to you as Orlando does to me is like meeting someone you love at International Arrivals. You see them and you're overcome with ridiculous joy and recognition, almost irregardless of the merits of the person in question - but, in this case, I think that all the praise I can give it is entirely deserved. Orlando is an astonishing, virtuoso piece of smart, funny, poetic wordplay from a writer who understands the language so well that she's able to do things with it that ought to be entirely impossible. Virginia Woolf can sometimes be so technically high-flown that she's almost entirely impenetrable (read The Waves and see if you can understand more than about half of it), but in Orlando she reigns herself in just the right amount. Unusually for a novel by a high Modernist writer, there are distinct characters and an actual linear plot(!) as well as beautiful images of rubies and falling leaves, and the result is an insane, delightfully out-of-left-field gallop through the last 500 years of English history and literature. Written as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Virginia Woolf's friend (and girlfriend) Vita Sackville West, it's the maddest biography you'll ever come across, a completely ridiculous story set in a world where literally anything can happen.

Orlando is unbelievably believable, full of brilliantly tall tales of villagers turning to stone during particularly cold winters and cats being mistaken for coals and put on the fire. It's got the most casual attitude to time travel and eternal life you'll ever come across - in it, some people just go on living for four hundred years, not aging, without it being remarked upon at all. I read a Guardian article in which Ursula Le Guin said that Orlando was one of the books that made her want to become a science fiction writer, and I think (as usual with Ursula Le Guin) she's absolutely right. Orlando (with a charming wink in the direction of the audience) turns most of the physical laws of the universe upside down and ties the rest of them in knots. Hours can last years, you can see all of England from the top of a hill and people can change their sex at the drop of a pair of trousers.

This is where Orlando is at its most outrageously clever and witty. Women dress up as men, men act like women (or are they actually women in particularly good disguise?) and the main character, Orlando, lives the first two hundred years of his life as a man before going to sleep for seven days and waking up a woman. Physical gender becomes something like the ridiculous paper hats you might put on at a party - you swap them round, you wear two at once, it's all a bit of a joke and none of it means anything anyway.

Orlando really is a very funny book (though it's laugh-in-the-head rather than laugh-from-the-stomach), a joke at the expense of great authors, high-minded biography and boring history. Worse than that, it enjoys itself immensely, it was clearly written for the sheer jolly love of it, and there are pictures. All of this makes critics terribly nervous. Great Literature should not be funny, it should be full of people sobbing and dying and giving birth under haystacks while it rains, and unspoken conventions like this are why I sometimes get very tired of academics.

In this case, they are wrong, and Orlando is right. In fact, Orlando is wonderful. You should all read it five times in a row and be amazed. It's possible I'm biased, but the nice thing about reading is that it's entirely subjective. I'm free to love this no matter what the critics say.

5 stars.

1001 Books Review - The Leopard

Housekeeping again:

If you are assuming I have not been posting very much lately because I have been hard at work on my MA, you are very sweet and I admire your belief in human nature. Obviously, you are right. Yesterday, for example, I went to the British Library, where in the course of some very serious essay research I read the following sentence:

In February 1847, two elephants performing at Astley's Amphitheatre were presented with lots of bouquets. The elephants, we are told, had rather hoped for carrots and turnips.

(This is, in case you are interested, taken from The London Stage in the Nineteenth Century by Robert Tanitch, and I HIGHLY recommend it to you if you're interested in theatre history. It is not only factually fascinating but also delightfully snide). And if you are interested in what else I found out about the weird and wonderful on the London stage, you can read all about it over here.

During my time off from all this strenuous academic activity, though, I have been doing NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what this is, I have handily written a Litro blog about it. As of today I am 18540 words up and someone just died, so things are Going Well in that respect.

In the interests of linked-in completeness, I have also recently blogged about your furniture coming to life and eating you and written a (scathing) review of Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde. Enjoy! Oh, and I also read a book! Look at that. I haven't been totally wasting my time.

I have to admit, though, that I had a very major case of Not Getting Along with The Leopard. I could probably have finished it in a few days, but I'd read a few pages of it and then realise that BY GOD the bathroom could do with a clean and I needed to bake bread for lunch and how about that essay due in next week. I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading this for fun.

I think this is a prime example of the huge difference that exists between knowing that something is written well and actually liking it on a personal level. With the English MA student side of my brain I can see that The Leopard is meant to be a haunting evocation of the beauty of a vanished system and the transience of an individual life, but what I actually thought when I finished the novel was that Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa is kind of tiresomely self-indulgent, and that keeping a badly stuffed dog beside your bed for fifty years is gross.

Part of this has to be that The Leopard's atmosphere - and the novel is practically all atmosphere - really annoyed me. The whole thing takes place in an overwhelming state of rococo decay. Whenever characters appear they have to fight their way past profuse mountains of rotting roses and moulting silk sofas and five thousand Blessed Virgins with their paint coming off; and doing battle with all this scenery means that the poor things are exhausted and morose before they even begin to talk. Add to this the fact that they're in Sicily, where it's exhausingly hot all the time, and it's not entirely surprising that most of the scenes are variations on the theme of one character turning to another and saying, "Dude, I can't. Let's go lie down."

The plot of the novel is basically Prince Fabrizio (the Leopard of the title) not doing things, and then feeling sort of morose about it, but not morose enough to do anything except lie down. Occasionally he lies down with whores, and then he feels vaguely bad about it, which makes him have to lie down, which makes him realise that he is OLD and THE LAST OF HIS KIND and DOOMED TO DEATH, which is coincidentally a lot like LYING DOWN FOR EVER. Woe.

It's possible that I'm not that sympathetic to the Sicilian mindset (it was very heavily stressed that this attitude to life is Very Sicilian). It's also possible that I suffered from not understanding what on earth is going on historically - I just about know that Garibaldi was a man as well as a biscuit, a state of ignorance in a reader that obviously never occurred to Lampedusa. There are very few handy hints about historical background, and to make it worse Lampedusa has sort of half-assed an attempt to make the novel a knowing piece of post-modernity. What this means in practice is that the text will be totally immersed in the idioms and references of the 1860s and then all of a sudden a character's state of mind will be explained by reference to a MOTORWAY or an AIRPLANE or something equally weird and out of place. I think Lampedusa was going for a 'clever and humorous' angle, but to me it just felt awkward and half-way-to-nothing, like a fish with a human face stuck on it.

I'll admit, there were some moments that did work - there's a chapter about a weird erotic game of hide-and-seek through an enormous house that I thought was gorgeously written - but overall The Leopard just didn't do it for me. People are, of course, perfectly entitled to say that it's the greatest Italian novel ever, but I am likewise entitled not to agree with them at all.

Anyway, thank goodness, it's over now. One more 1001 Books book down! Only hundreds and hundreds to go! And for my next trick, I'm going to read something fun.

2.5 stars.

Book review - Angels and Insects

Housekeeping first - my maiden blog for The Other Place is up, dealing sensitively with why Shakespeare, if he was alive in 2011, would be an internet troll. I hope you like it.

And now, on to your regularly scheduled review.

This year A. S. Byatt has come out of almost nowhere to become one of my favourite writers. For quite a while after I read Possession I was afraid to read anything else by her, in case she was only pretending to be amazing, but then I took the plunge with Ragnarok and then The Children's Book and it turns out that A. S. Byatt is always amazing, consistently so, until it's almost depressing. I think I've said this before, but the woman does not let up.

I'm not sure if I'm more in love with her style or the things she chooses to write about. She's got a fierce eye for colour and a weird, intricate turn of phrase that makes the reader really able to see the mad things she imagines - in the two stories that make up Angels and Insects, for example, we get a girl with a dress covered in live butterflies and a supernatural visitation from something like a giant glass vase on fire. She creates these fantastic pocket universes, boiling over with life, each of them full of stories within stories, and tiny little stories within those, like Victorian curiosity cabinets. There's so much to look at in her books, and so much to think about, too.

Byatt (who is interested in everything, almost exhaustingly so) likes to go both enormously big and incredibly small, just to keep you on your toes, and Angels and Insects manages to be about Natural Selection and an anthill, the whole of the Afterlife and a drawing-room seance. Byatt loves the Victorians  - for everything that was strange and wrong about them as much as for everything they did right - and (luckily for me) her idea of their greatest hits is very similar to my own. Animals and ghosts! Tennyson and ferocious jungles full of lurking wild beasts! Sex and death and really great dresses!

The two stories that make up Angels and Insects - 'Morpho Eugenia' and 'The Conjugal Angel' are two gorgeous pieces of Victoriana, but Victoriana with teeth. In 'Morpho Eugenia', about a naturalist who falls in love with his patron's whiter-than-white daughter, the characters aren't just compared to insects. In an undefinably creepy way they actually become them. Eugenia, object of William's affections, begins as a butterfly and then morphs into an enormous Queen of the Ants, with the house itself her anthill and all the other female characters her workers.

'The Conjugal Angel', meanwhile, tells the story of a medium and a seance, but a seance where the supernatural beings the characters call up are disgustingly real. Apart from the burning vase-creature, there's a ghost who appears to the medium in her room, 'his brows and lashes caked with clay', a nasty image that sticks in your head because it makes an uncomfortable amount of logical sense. If ghosts are a manifestation of the dead, and the dead are rotting away in the ground - well, you see where this is going. When the angel appears at the end of the story, it's not an attractive Biblical being but an unpleasantly literal representation of Plato's idea that each person is half of an eternal whole. One half of it is shiny and bird-like, and on the other -

On the other side, turned into the shadow, it was grey like wet clay, and formless, putting out stumps that were not arms, moving what was not a mouth in a thin whisper.

Nightmares for days.

There are plenty of stories like 'Morpho Eugenia' and 'The Conjugal Angel' written during the Victorian Era, or at least written about the same topics, but at the same time you won't find anything with quite the same slant to them. They're Victorian pastiches, sure, but at the same time they're a lot more than that. Byatt's adept at using Victorian writing styles, which is impressive enough, but you always know you're not just reading another Victorian novel. In Angels and Insects, Byatt has taken two not-particularly-original ideas and used her incredible imagination to turn them into stories that are both lively and unexpected. There are several twists in each tale that I won't spoil you for, but if you know your Victorians you'll be delighted and if you don't - well, you'll still be delighted.

Can I get an A. S. Byatt altar set up in this blog already?

4.5 stars.

1001 Books Review - 1984

Two rather nice announcements first.

1) I've been given an internship at Litro magazine, a literary magazine that's big into giving exposure to new writers. It's well worth a look if you're a writerly type - here are its facebook, twitter and real-world subscription pages for your convenience. So from now on I'll be splitting my blogging between there and here, which is quite exciting and only slightly daunting.

2) The lovely people at Writersdock have been kind enough to publish my Animal Farm review on their site. Look at that! My words on someone else's website! Isn't that nice?

But anyway, on to the review, which today (aptly enough) is George Orwell's 1984. Here goes.

Last night I finished reading 1984. I'm quite proud of myself. After all, I only began it 10 years ago.

You can blame my thirteen-year-old self for this. The me that bought my copy of 1984, way back in 2001, was still coming off a childhood filled with books in which Good Triumphed, Bad Failed and Love Conquered All, and I believed in this. And then came 1984.

I started to read 1984 under the vague impression that Things, although bad at the beginning, would be All Right In The End, and I must (judging from what seems familiar on my second attempt) have gotten almost to the end of Part I, before something made me decide to turn back and read the Introduction. (This experience, by the way, is why I am heavily against scholarly introductions at the front of books. What are they doing there? Why, since they describe what happens in the book, aren't they at the end where they belong?) Of course, it spoiled me horribly. I found out the entire plot of the novel - and, most importantly, what happens to Winston.

I remember feeling utterly tricked. I don't know why I was so upset - self-preservation, as a concept, always made a lot of sense to me. I used to get very annoyed with the Christian Martyrs because I couldn't work out why they didn't just worship Zeus a bit, with their fingers crossed, and then go back to Jesus on the sly. Being holy, in my view, was no consolation for being dead. Somehow, though, I couldn't extend this to 1984. Love was a thing that I very much (theoretically) believed in, and I think I had assumed I was reading a love story - but of course, much like poor Winston and Julia, I was being had.

I won't give you the details (I'm not as cruel as Ben Pimlott), but suffice it to say that 1984 - the dystopian story of Winston Smith's struggle against Ingsoc and its leader Big Brother - does not end well. In a way this is nicely realistic - because, really, how likely is it that one man could actually bring down the evil empire? It's a lovely idea, and one that's very familiar to us but, er, it's not particularly feasible. (If you look carefully, by the way, there is an interesting bit at the very end of 1984 that does hint at the eventual downfall of the Ingsoc regime, but you've got to really squint to feel optimistic.)

But if you're looking for uplift in your sci fi, why the hell are you reading George Orwell? He's got a brand of pessimism that strikes me as remarkably British - his image the future is not only depressing, but incredibly detailed in a way that's both brilliantly clever and extremely pedantic. It's also, of course, fondly rude about the British people. In 1984, we as a nation have become ugly, puny boozers who hate ourselves. So nothing's new, then.

I think that's part of the reason why we've taken 1984 to heart as much as we have. In my Animal Farm review I remarked on just how many slogans and ideas from it have seeped into our cultural mindset, and, if anything, it's even more astonishingly true in 1984. Big Brother, Room 101, Newspeak, Thought Police, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime - for a crazy dystopian vision of the future it's bizarre how far it has shaped how we see our own present-day society. But while 1984 is sharply, embarrassingly right about a lot of things, I'm still not sure that I buy its bigger vision of the future. That's not because I have great belief in human nature - on the contrary, I think that humanity's saving grace is its immense and charming essential laziness.

Extreme evil, like extreme good, seems to take an awful lot of effort, so much so that I don't think most human beings are up to it in the long term. Sure, they'll try it for a while, but show them a boot stamping on a human face for ever and they're liable to wonder whether the person doing the stamping gets a lunch break and if they can do it sitting down. Why bother? Why not just have a cup of tea? This, I think, is why both Fascism and Communism were always bound to fail - they require people to be EXTREMELY WORKED UP, ALL OF THE TIME, and that, in practice, is exhausting. Human beings just want to muddle along, and that's the natural level that they'll always return to. At least, I hope so.

Ten years on, I actually ended up enjoying 1984. I must be more hardened to emotional betrayal in books these days, because 1984's version of it hardly bothered twenty-three-year-old me at all. I thought it was clever (isn't Orwell always?) and acute, if a bit idealistically overblown. It's definitely a better story than Animal Farm - Winston, thank goodness, is a person as well as a symbol, and so it's much easier to spend time with him than Manor Farm's animal-shaped politicians. Because I didn't have to read 1984 theoretically, I found myself more willing to do it - and, as I've said, I think what 1984 has to say is very interesting, even if I don't totally buy into it.

So, in conclusion: I liked it, I'm glad I don't live in Oceania, and Room 101 was extremely badly named.

3.5 stars. 18.48% of the list completed.

National Poetry Day: Have a Poet and a Poem

Aw hell, it's National Poetry Day today! Nobody tells me things. But anyway, in the spirit of this day I am going to do something I've been meaning to for a while, and introduce you to a very much forgotten poet, James Elroy Flecker.

I'm very fond of Flecker, partly because no one else seems to be interested in him at all. Here he, is in his Edwardian get-up, with a small and charming dog (I think it's a dog. Unless it's a very small sheep?). Note particularly his fabulous moustache. He wrote some poems, he wrote a play, he married a lady and then he died of TB when he was 30.

Flecker, bless him, was an Aesthete and very into saucy exoticism, and his poetry can be quite full of wafting roses and naked marble statues and ladies with naughty eyes. He's also apt to tip over into rather overblown teenage emotion, but at the same time I think there's something quite lovely about him. He tries, and though sometimes it all goes a bit wrong, sometimes he really does manage something pretty great. Career-wise, he seems to have come in at exactly the wrong time, when Tennyson, as A Thing, was way over and even Swinburne (who is like a later Tennyson but with added whips and chains) was a bit passe, and because of that he's very much ignored. I'm not saying he deserves a retrospective Laureateship, or anything, but there are plenty of far worse poets who have managed to stick around like mould and so I always feel a little sad about how very much Flecker doesn't get a look in.

I first came across Flecker in the epigraph to an Agatha Christie novel, Postern of Fate - which, it turns out, is a quotation from his poem 'The Gates of Damascus'. So off I went to find this unknown poem, and I found it on the internet, and then it blew my teenage mind.

What I thought at the time - and still think now - is that 'The Gates of Damascus' is an amazing fantasy novel that happens to have been written as a poem. It's just so weird and mad and full of things that you don't understand but want to. At times it tips over into complete fever-dream territory and you get lines like

Have you heard
That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?

I mean, what is that? That's terrifying! That's a Doctor Who episode in waiting, is what that is. Actually, the whole first section of the poem is like that, with mad stalking bird men and people dying of various inventive causes and awesome, gruesome lines like

The Sun who flashes through the head and paints the shadows green and red,
The Sun shall eat thy fleshless dead, O Caravan, O Caravan!

And then you get to the second section and things get even better, if possible, because we're off to sea for an adventure. At this point Flecker comes up with my all-time favourite description of the sea:

The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,
The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white-and-blue-flower foaming sea.

Not only does it scan beautifully, but it's full of booze and sea monsters. And on these mythical-creature infested waves Flecker goes and makes up his own creepy, crazy version of the Odyssey, which features not only pterodactyls and bleeding rocks but also ROBOTS:

Beyond the sea are towns with towers, carved with lions and lily flowers,
And not a soul in all those lonely streets to while away the hours.

Beyond the towns, an isle where, bound, a naked giant bites the ground:
The shadow of a monstrous wing looms on his back: and still no sound.

Beyond the isle a rock that screams like madmen shouting in their dreams,
From whose dark issues night and day blood crashes in a thousand streams.

Beyond the rock is Restful Bay, where no wind breathes or ripple stirs,
And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Do you see yet why I think it's a fantasy novel in disguise? I had a year or so when got obsessed with it and made several awful and luckily abortive attempts to write the book hiding in it, because the book hiding in it would be amazing.

Things sort of tail off after the sea-shanty part, excitement-wise, and we get a bit about saucy Eastern commercialism and then another bit about emotive Eastern mysticism, but all the same, I love this poem. I love it ridiculously and unreservedly and despite the undeniable fact that it's bloody weird. Actually, that's why I love it. That, and it sounds really nice when you read it out loud.

So there you have it: 'The Gates of Damascus' by James Elroy Flecker, my favourite book-that-isn't.

And a happy National Poetry Day to you.

Review - Howards End (AKA: Douchebags in Romantic Literature)

Gertrude Stein and her ego

I have come to a decision: if I read a book for my MA course, I do not have to review it on this blog. This is to prevent me from ending up in a gibbering heap of madness, hiding behind Watson the lizard's cage, and to prevent you from having to hear my thoughts on books with titles like Gendering the Natural: Virginia Woolf and her Use of Root Vegetables as Phallic Symbols in To The Lighthouse. (Actually, if I do ever read that book I will certainly write about it. It sounds great.)

Therefore, I do not need to take any more notice of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas here than to remark on the absolutely enormous size of Gertrude Stein's ego. It bursts up through the pages of the book like a rapidly inflating airbag and leaves the reader lying in a stunned heap upon the floor. Although maybe I would be like that if Picasso, Matisse and Man Ray had all done portraits of me. I don't know.

Crazy blurb edition

But anyway, I did read E. M. Forster's Howards End (yes, no comma), and that was not for my MA, and so I am now going to review it. So here we go.

My copy of Howards End is a Penguin from the 60s, era of charmingly hilarious back-cover blurbs (my all-time favourite is the back of The Waves, which informs the reader that 'Virginia Woolf is the wife of Leonard Woolf'. How times change), and true to form this one begins by cutting straight to the heart of the matter with the immortal line 'Mr E. M. Forster is not a prolific novelist.' How interesting. Did he perhaps like cheese? What was the name of his dog? This is all so relevant. Tell us more.

The blurb goes on to say that

An attempt to outline the story of Howards End would do paltry justice... to the delicate pattern of its composition.

Which, like most literary brown-nosing, is nonsense. Howards End is about the two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen (and their brother Tibby, but no one really talks about him) and their relationships with the Wilcox family, who are kind of assholes. When Mrs Wilcox (not a Wilcox by birth, so not actually an asshole) dies, she leaves a written request for Margaret to be given her beloved country house Howards End, but of course, because they are assholes, the living Wilcoxes ignore this. The rest of the book is a series of cosmic coincidences that end up with (you guessed it) Margaret and Helen getting possession of Howards End and the Wilcoxes being karmically punished for their assholitude. Simple.

Shut up woman get on my horse

Reading books like Howards End makes me realise just how very glad I am to have been born in the 1980s, into a world where the Pankhursts have already been and gone and made their point. It's true that there is still a long way to go in terms of women getting equal pay and not getting groped and laughed at for no reason, but all the same those 90+ years since 1918 have done absolute wonders for the mental state of eligible males as a group. It's fairly sobering to realise that, until really quite recently, men like Monsieur Paul and Mr Wilcox were, without a hint of irony, the good ones. If you wanted a husband pre-1970 you appear to have had to hope like hell that the one you found would just call you stupid and disagree with everything that came out of your mouth, rather than ignoring you, taking all your money or chasing you round and round the room with a stick.

Basically (giving the plot away somewhat, but Howards End isn't exactly a thriller), at one point Mr Wilcox falls for Margaret and proposes to her. Margaret's considerations on the subject go something like: "OK, so, he hates everything I stand for, and I disagree with him, and he's a soulless ass, and his forehead is weird, but hey, it could be so much worse." And so she marries him.

You can't tell, but she's barefoot and pregnant too

I can't really decide what E. M. Forster thinks about all this. I read A Passage To India last year and I was completely astonished by how balanced and understanding he was about racism and the effects of imperialism. But when it comes to The Woman Question things get a bit more dodgy. There's just an uncomfortable amount of "Women don't need the vote! They should simply be influencing their husbands with their eyes and breasts! Also most of them are stupid." I don't know E. M. Forster's life - and to be fair to him, Margaret and Helen get a hell of a moral victory on Mr Wilcox at the end of the novel - but there's still something that doesn't feel right about his attitude throughout. I guess that's another confirmation of my point: when you have a society that legally treated half of its members like drooling imbeciles, even good, sensible guys end up with idiotic opinions. And what's worse, those opinions tend to stick around.

It's interesting to read the big feminist books of the 60s and 70s (think The Golden Notebook and Lady Oracle) in light of this obvious but somehow easily forgotten point. Once you do, you realise that a very big part of the reason why all of the women in them are so horribly depressed all the time is because although they've bettered themselves, and accepted new ideas, when they start looking for a mate they realise that ALL THE MEN ARE STILL BUSY BEING ASSHOLES. They've got nothing else to choose from. Essentially, they're screwed.

I'd like to think in 2011 that we're (mostly) out of that dark, dark place. I possess two (male) housemates and a (male) boyfriend, all of whom have high-level cooking, cleaning and washing-things-up skills and, because they grew up in a world where women were seen as basically rational, functioning human beings, tend to treat the women they come across in the same way. At the very least, I don't think any of them would even consider unironically arriving at their mistress's house at ten o'clock at night and screaming WOMAN WHERE IS MY POT ROAST (this happens in The Golden Notebook, more or less). Call me crazy, but I find that sort of thing not particularly desirable in a man.

So hooray for Pankhursts (junior and senior) and also all the non-Pankhursts (both those run over by horses and those not), and thank god I don't need to marry a Mr Wilcox any more. Margaret, he's all yours. Have fun.

3 stars. And 18.38% completed.