Long Notes about 20th Century Literature and 21st Century Prejudice

Today, after inhabiting a long black hoodie and a green corduroy skirt I've worn since I was thirteen years old for a few days on end, and spending the last two days immersed in an audiobook of Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors, I took a lovely shower and went outside!

After realizing that my anxiety lately has been having ill effects on my work, I've been reading and experimenting a little. While breathing deeply and regularly for three minutes works, I've also had success with other 'slow' activities, like the piano.

But I also have been dosing myself with audiobooks that have an accessible writing style and a guaranteed happy ending. I can immerse myself in these for hours and tune out all duties and responsibilities, and think or feel my way into a more relaxed rhythm. These are maybe the best way I've found to calm down.

As far as this Pride and Prejudice retelling (from the year 2019) goes, which is set in California and has as its main characters the neurosurgeon daughter of an Indian-American royal dynasty and a cook who grew up in London, it has 'sweep,' which I like.

But I do think that the rapport between the main characters falls short of the romantic, so that pairing them up is as awkward as if a child were smushing the faces of its dolls together. And the political career of the heroine's brother felt more interesting than many other threads of the story. While there is a great deal of discussion about what one does not enjoy in politicians, idealized portraits of politicians are quite rare. (Except in disaster films and thrillers where the fictional US President bravely faces the worldwide tornadoes, interplanetary asteroids, or the freezing of half the hemisphere.)

And with this author I am always interested in how she 'dresses up reality'; there is soap opera panache in her plots and characterization.

Her characterization and details are not entirely surefooted, but she has clearly done volumes of research.

What I also like is that, unlike the dramatic malfeasance of a Hollywood film — although in Sonali Dev's book the malfeasance is dramatic, it is also nice (for lack of a better word) to encounter a truly villainous character who word-poisons people, in a book where this character ends up not getting his or her way. I've mentioned before how brilliant I think that Jane Austen's character of Mrs. Norris is, and that I think we need more villains like her.

Aside from audiobooks, I have been trying to 'tempt' myself to pick up paper books by reading the first paragraphs of books on the bookshelf. Right now a lot of these happen to be 20th century classics, some of those from our Aunt Nora or possibly from her mother, and some of those books from my father and aunt.

The first book I picked up is Tender is the Night, and I think — but didn't get far enough into it to know for sure — that this is a book where people are too amoral for them to be villainous in any fictionally-satisfying way. If they 'word-poison' people, that's just a fact of life.

(As a semi-hermit, I can say with a slightly lower risk of hypocrisy, that where people talk far more than they think, read, or self-reflect — and have few grains of philosophy or religious ethics to nourish them — I think there's a tendency to feel that the duty to be moral lies in being willing to criticize misdeeds in others. Because there may be no mention of the Bible about it, it may be felt not to be sententious or preachy; but I think in a way it's just the same thing that many self-identified Christians were doing when it was more fashionable to be Christian: someone always wants to be the gatekeeper of society's mores, in a way that's the most convenient for one's self. Needless to say, I believe this interpretation of ethics is neither philosophically nor ethically valuable. And it makes it far easier to assume the worst of each other, because then we feel that we are 'off the hook' and don't need to behave well ourselves. I think that this semi-amorality exists far more than undiluted amorality.)

That said, Tender is the Night was written in a lovely style, so I had qualms about putting it down.

Then I moved on to Ernest Hemingway, after having favourable recollections of The Old Man and the Sea (in Opapa's collection, I think) and another work.

But I found the first page of Death in the Afternoon nasty. I read a page of The Sun Also Rises next — and saw a 'joke' about Jewish noses. I decided that I should not force myself to read anti-Semitic tripe for leisure; if I ever wanted to research the early 20th century or something like that, maybe then, but I will postpone the evil day. So Ernest Hemingway was out.

Then I read a few articles about D.H. Lawrence in a college student's critical edition. I imagine that Lawrence in the syllabus was a more popular tool to épater les bourgeois in the 1970s than it is now; at any rate, unlike my parents' generation because it looks as if one of my father's housemates and my aunt had to read him for class, I never encountered him on a university syllabus except for one or two of his poems.

While his books are famously 'not safe for work,' I read about him mostly in the context of Bertrand Russell's autobiography. That reading was ~17 years ago. But what I recall from Russell's characterization — I think they were forced into an uneasy alliance because both were not in favour of the war, for different reasons, and they were at times the only people who would still talk to each other — is that he was an amoral fish who was not nice toward women, not warm in any of his relationships, and indifferent to national loyalty or national welfare in equal measure. Perhaps this is unfair.

Anyway, I was interested that in the British periodical Athenaeum and elsewhere, Lawrence's contemporaries generally found him ingenious, but unsound in his psychological theories and far too fond of explicit scenes. Their criticism grew even fiercer during World War I because his wife was a German woman. (I think that anyone who knows anything about D.H. Lawrence will already know this, but I wanted to repeat it anyway.) Lawrence roamed around the world after a while and may have had greater unaccountability elsewhere.

A year or so ago, I watched a Lucy Worsley television show about love in British literature, and I liked the way she contextualized Lady Chatterley's Lover. I guess this is still Lawrence's most important work? I've read critiques of several films that have appeared over the years, and there must have been articles on the anniversary of Lawrence's libel trial.

That said, I am never too fond of stories where individual people (even fictional people) are seen as avatars of an idea or of a thing one desires for one's self. And it has seemed to me like this novel does tend to 'fetishize' (for lack of another word) upstairs-downstairs relationships. So just like the rest of D.H. Lawrence's works outside of one or two poems, I think I will leave Lady Chatterley's Lover unread.

In the end I landed with Letters From an English Judge to an English Gentlewoman. Even before reading it on the internet, I was pretty sure that these letters were not genuine, but in fact written by the 'English Gentlewoman' herself. They're written maybe a decade or two before Indian independence, so in the 1930s, and they are extremely well-meaning — about social hierarchy in Anglo-India and about the perfidy of racism. They also mention a lot of local details of the houses etc.

***

But lastly, I said that I had gone outside.

So the details: my mother went per bicycle to a nearby park, my brother and I jogged part of the way and walked the rest. The horse chestnuts have been in flower and are now shedding dry debris on the paths, the purple lilacs fragrant, and iris spears rising from the flower beds like Myrmidons. Pink and white rhododendrons were either clad in their flower frock already, or on the way there; and the graceful columbines, with their blossoms like cupolas, are out in pink and purple. The May lilies are ringing their bells in the dips beneath trees. Late daffodils, grape hyacinths, hyacinths in white and pale blue and pink, and even a spindly species of snowdrops, are still flowering. And blood-red tulip flower petals were languishing on their stalks in Roman decadence.

While strips of white and red banded plastic hang from playgrounds here and there, these are now open to the public again; and ping pong tables, tennis tables, teeter totters, etc., resounded once more with the clamour of vox populi. What I enjoyed less — seeing the closed playgrounds caused me to ache a little every time I saw it, so I was really happy to see that the need for that had lessened — was the three or more medical masks that had been abandoned on the sidewalks.

This synopsis doesn't even capture a fraction of what we saw. But suffice it to say that it was summery — despite the clouds that drifted overhead; there is a welcome front of rainy weather that has been reviving the barren terrain of Berlin and Brandenburg, and reducing the forest fire danger, for the past few days.