autobiography – Kate Macdonald

A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson

I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family rather forces this aspect on the reader.) It uses the Nicolson surname to suggest that the author is a literary personality (this memoir is her fourth publication) who wants her life to be interesting to the public, like that of her father Nigel Nicolson, the former Member of Parliament and co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and possibly also of her brother Adam Nicolson the historian, about whose books I have written here, and here. A House Full of Daughters is also a personal memoir, of the callousness of the English upper-classes when they are really selfish. Thus if you are looking for Bloomsbury spin-off material you’ll be disappointed, though it is rich in Sissinghurstiana, and unhappy rich people’s lives.

The three intertwined stories are: (1) yet more details from the Sackville-West / Nicolson history, (2) the chilly upbringing and tragic life of the author’s mother, Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, and (3) Nicolson’s own story of how she and her mother both battled loneliness and alcoholism in their otherwise comfortable lives. The subtitle tells us that the memoir is about seven generations: Catalina, Pepita, Victoria, Vita, then Vita’s daughter-in-law Philippa, and her daughter Juliet, and Juliet’s two daughters. As an act of recovery of women’s lives in the twentieth century this book is undeniably interesting, but the lives of Catalina Duran and Pepita de Oliva in nineteenth-century Spain have been covered already, as Vita Sackville-West’s forebears, and Victoria and Vita Sackville-West are well-studied figures. The views and experiences of the seventh generation, Juliet’s two daughters, are barely mentioned, and they do not fit into the rather artificial framework that Nicolson creates around what she calls the ‘bargains’ that the six earlier women made with their husbands or fathers to gain the lives they wanted.

These ‘bargains’ are hardly a new phenomenon: women living in a patriarchy have always had to bargain with their bodies and domestic service to make their lives work out as best they can. For this memoir, access to surviving documentation is the real value (though I’d like to know where Nicolson found the intimate thoughts and feelings of her otherwise totally obscure Spanish great-great-great grandmother). The very private family documents that Nicolson quotes from, for example, that reveal the details of her great-grandparents’ exuberant sex life, are indeed a privilege to read, because Nicolson (with her brother) is the administrator of the estate. By using her access to reveal more of the Sackville-West / Nicolson story, Juliet Nicolson does an excellent job of conveying the human predicament of an Edwardian first-time mother determined never to be pregnant again, and of the ‘sexual desertion’ of the young husband suddenly denied access to his wife in every way.

Two generations later, Nicolson deals with her appalling grandparents, Sir Gervaise and Lady Tennyson-D’Eyncourt, most impressively. They were rich, with several homes, but wealth and comfort do not improve a naturally cold temperament. Nicolson describes her grandmother judiciously as unloving: ‘disapproval and contempt were Pamela’s default settings … She was wholly unhuggable and in her own way just as unmaternal as Vita’. I don’t agree that Nicolson’s mother Philippa was born ‘at a bad time to be a daughter’, since millions of other girls her age had wonderful lives. It’s obvious that Philippa was born into a family that didn’t want a daughter, and she suffered accordingly, expected to exist until marriage like every other girl of her class. It was Love in a Cold Climate in real life, but without the loving support of friends and a large family: after she finished school, the poor girl was completely isolated, and seems to have had no inner resources of her own. Philippa then had the additional bad luck of marrying the charmingly selfish Nigel Nicolson MP who wanted a wife to keep his parliamentary constituents happy, and didn’t have any other use for her. When a daughter writes so critically of her parents, and of her grandparents (Harold Nicolson seems to have been the only grandparent of the four who knew how to be nice to people), the effect is startling. The accounts of Philippa’s miseries, and of the scourge of tuberculosis in her life and in her mother’s life also, reflect horrible English class cruelties deriving completely from their privileged setting.

The last story is the very personal one of Juliet Nicolson’s life to date, and dwells on her loving relationship with her father (who seems to have manipulated her just as he did her mother) and her rejection of her mother in favour of the Sissinghurst connection. It is heartfelt, and not comfortable reading. I am also uncomfortable with the way Nicolson joins her own life’s details to the historically documented and well-published accounts of her forebears’ lives, since one will automatically expect comparable accomplishments and achievements, not just a connection by birth. But Nicolson does not inform us about any of her own writing, we hear almost nothing about her professional life, and far too much about her emotional travails, which have meaning only for her personal circle.

The value of this strand of the narrative is in how Nicolson’s life’s trajectory was similar to and yet differed from that of her mother, and how they both dealt with feelings of inadequacy and rejection through alcohol. This story doesn’t depend on who the protagonists are: it would be equally compelling as the story of total unknowns. Their story is about strength of character, the efforts of friends and family that did and did not help them, and why one woman died by her wilful destruction of her liver, and the other decided to survive after a final intervention that made a difference. We don’t need names, or family privilege, or the earlier, celebrated generations, to value this part of the memoir as it deserves. The effect is a patchwork of biography, that reduces its impact of its most meaningful aspects.

Juliet Nicolson, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family (Vintage 2015), ISBN 978-0-099-59803-9, £9.99

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies

I posted a double review of Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies over on Vulpes Libris: An Only Child, and My Father’s Son. I learned a lot about Irish history, Irish literature, Irish convents and army pensions.

Negroland, by Margo Jefferson

Negroland is a memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as an upper-class black girl in Chicago. It’s about race, class, position, white socks, prejudice, hair oil and its stains, integration, politics, fabulous clothes, architecture, representation, style, standards and history. Jefferson mixes poetry and lyrics with historical extracts and retellings of events from daily and national life. It’s not an easy read, though it is extremely absorbing as a subject, because Jefferson’s prose is challenging; the readers are not let off lightly, and have to work to be told what we want to know.

Reading this had a peculiar effect on me, digging back into my past life. I grew up in a white monoculture in north-east Scotland. I hope I grew up free from racial prejudice because there was nothing in place to teach it. I do know that I was utterly ignorant about black lives, until I went to school in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the age of 9 (my scientist father was working at the oceanographical research station for 6 months, so we moved to the US). I noticed over time that all the children in my fourth-grade class who were noticeably, worrying slow at reading were black: that was how I worked out that economic deprivation and not having books at home could also be based on race. My mother volunteered in a day centre for children with learning difficulties, autism, physical and developmental problems, all jumbled in together in a large room in which she was the only white face. My American smallpox vaccination certificate has a ticked box to signify that I wasn’t black. Living in the USA in 1973 was an other-worldly experience. I visited North Carolina again seven years ago, and the smell of the pines and the quality of the heat and dampness in the air came back to me instantly, like a thump of recognition. Jefferson’s book had the same effect on me, in the stories she tells about the segregation her forebears endured, and the heroic toil of black women to make things a little better for the next generation of women.

Negroland 2 — Jefferson’s parents on their engagement

Because Jefferson’s mother was an beautiful, fashionable woman, knowledgeable about style and design, much of this memoir is about clothes. She describes her mother’s elegant, cultured female society, her clubs and sororities, the passionate identification she and her sister had for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, and Audrey Hepburn, and the race politics they learned by watching them in their roles, learning their lyrics, understanding that Dandridge would never get the Hepburn parts, and why she refused to take the servant’s role as well. Jefferson and her sister had to shine under crushing rules for girls’ behaviour, for black behaviour, for ladies’ behaviour, all at the same time

However, as well as the images of smiling black girls wearing white socks standing by their father’s cruiser on the lake, Negroland is fascinating for the details of the practical politics of integration, of learning the power of refusal against those who choose to accept you when it suits them. Jefferson writes about the interstices, the period when integration was being worked out at pavement level, how neighbourhoods changed for the new black neighbours and how the black middle-classes moved in, held their own, established their own culture, but always had prejudice waiting for them, in the unsafe areas and the states and counties still segregated in all but name. All this is largely unknown to foreigners like me, the black history that can’t be taught in schools, the details that need to be explained or acted out in film scripts, the daily details that made Black Power possible as a movement.

Negroland 3 — Jefferson, centre back row, senior cheerleader

Negroland was an enlightening memoir to read in the week when the extraordinary interview of Rachel Dolezal by Ijeoma Oluo was published. It was a rebuke and a magisterial stare across the colour bar that whites had established, with the oppressive, empowering weight of history behind it. Dolezal chooses to self-identify as black, but no black woman or man can choose to self-identify as white, unless (as in Jefferson’s memoir) they have the genes for fair skin and obedient hair to ‘pass’, should they want to. For Jefferson’s aunts and uncles it was only ever ‘passing’, temporary whiteness on sufferance because it was economically and socially convenient, and no white person should forget that, or presume to travel in the opposite direction.

Negroland by Margo Jefferson was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016, and was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. (Granta Books, 2015), ISBN 078-1-78378-339-7, £8.99

H G Wells: Mr Britling Sees it Through

101 years after publication, this week’s Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is H G Wells’s novel Mr Britling Sees It Through. It was sold to a public who really did not know which way this war would go, in a strange category of literature, the in-war novel: neither pre-war, nor post-war. The author does not know the outcome of a war endured and won (or, much less commonly, a war lost. Apart from Jünger’s Storm of Steel I don’t know German, Italian or indeed Austro-Hungarian literature at all, but there must be novels from those literary traditions dating from 1919 onwards about the war that was lost.) Britain has been fortunate – which is a whopping understatement but the best I can do – in not having been on the losing side in war or invasion since 1066, unless you count Dutch William coming over in the late 17th century but that was by invitation. So British literature of war has always been from the winning side’s perspective, which will nuance how we understand Mr Britling‘s first readers’ responses.

The First World War was the first war to really involve the British civilian population directly, in that they could read about the fighting fairly soon after it had happened, they could hear the guns from France in Kent, they knew their fishing fleet and merchant shipping were in greater danger off-shore than ever before, and they could see the wounded and returning soldiers getting off the trains and boats all round the south and east coasts of England. British cities and towns were bombed from the air for the first time in this war. Wells puts this into this novel, but also notes that this destruction and terror and violence was no different from what the British had inflicted on the peoples of Polynesia and Africa.

Mr Britling is the main character in the novel, and becomes the focalising character – the one through whose perspective we see what happens – about two thirds of the way through. His name is a giveaway for his Everyman symbolic role. He represents the British man sending his son and friend to war, and struggling to understand the changes that have overcome his life. Mr Britling is also H G Wells himself, a famous writer and popular commentator, writing books and articles for the newspapers to explain things to the ordinary man, to make his living. And, as the title of the novel suggests, Mr Britling sees it through. He endures the war, as far as it goes, and suffers terrible changes in his life. He also goes through large changes in his understanding of what the war was for and about. The war breaks through Mr Britling’s sense of being in control and well satisfied with the world as he has arranged it, because a very loud and violent thing is breaking through these paper defences.

Mr Britling has a mistress who has been playing him off against a younger man, but once war begins Mr Britling has no patience with her petulant games, and simply forgets all about her. War is more absorbing to him and his family than her demands, and his self-esteem somehow now doesn’t need the propping up and cossetting that she performed. His secretary Teddy goes to war, so Teddy’s young wife Letty takes over his job, perfectly competently. Mr Britling thus has Letty and her child and her sister Cissie on his hands, as well as his own wife, his three sons and a houseful of servants. His eldest son Hugh joins up secretly, a year under age. His long letters to his father about life in camp and, later, at the Front are extraordinary letters for a wartime novel, because they criticise bitterly the conduct of the officers and the incompetence of the army’s grasp of supplies, catering, training, and tactics. Hugh’s superior officer doesn’t believe in maps or measurements. I don’t know if Wells was using the letters sent him by friends, or whether he was inventing them, but Hugh’s letters sound very similar to those in Siegfried Sassoon’s novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published long after the war in full possession of the facts about army incompetence. Yet Wells was able to pass these views to the public tucked neatly inside his story, and evaded the Defence of the Realm Act (which prevented newspapers and other public disseminators from printing information prejudicial to the morale of His Majesty’s forces), for which we should all be thankful.

One fascinating aspect of life in wartime rarely covered in fiction of this period is how household finances were affected. Mr and Mrs Britling were of the leisured classes whose income comes mainly from investments placed carefully in banks all over Europe. The war stops payment on many of these. His profession as a pundit suffers when the wartime newspapers and magazines change their editorial policies, so he publishes a great deal less, and makes less from his books than before. His gardener has long gone to a better-paying job, so he is not replaced, the garden is neglected, which affects the impression of prosperity and sufficiency that the Britling world has always had. Not that Mr Britling just sits in his study doing nothing: he is as busy in wartime as he was in the days of peace, but not for pay. He patrols the lanes at night as a special constable, which gives him a lot of time for thinking, and then writing long drafts of a new way to explain the war and to prevent war in the future. Wells’s also wrote long letters to the newspapers complaining about the things that the novel complains about, so there is an obvious connection between his concerns, and how he filled the plot of this novel. Both men are very anxious to work out why this war had happened, since it seemed to have arrived on the doorstep without any warning.

This was a brave book to have published in the midst of war, when the typical British attitude was belligerent, itching to fight back and take revenge of the dastardly enemy who were killing our boys. Wells populates the community of Matchings Easy – the Essex village where Mr Britling lives – with types who represent England and the English. The most noxious and repellently loud of these is Lady Frensham, a great lady of the district,. She is titled, rich, and quite accustomed in the Victorian manner to saying what she thinks and expecting everyone to agree with her. She is intensely, patriotically jingoistic in a bellowing right-is-might sort of way. Her rants about what is really happening in the war, and about the conduct of those around her who do not agree with her views, are stunningly appalling. She is rude, inaccurate, ignorant, demanding, poisonous and violently abusive. She may be the first example of The Jingo Woman in First World War literature – the character who hands out white feathers to any man not in khaki, taking it on herself to apply public humiliation from the safety of her own self-righteous opinions, and knowing that she will never be called on to die for her country in uniform.

Lady Frensham’s views about the Germans are objected to violently by Mr Britling, because he has a different relationship with ‘the Germans’. He had had a lovely summer holiday with German families before the war. He has employed Heinrich, a young German tutor for his younger sons, as a long-term guest in the Britling household. Heinrich is a bit of a joke when the novel begins – so earnest, so organised, so obsessive, and yet so anxious about the prospect of war because it will interrupt his planned trip to an Esperanto conference in Boulogne. Heinrich is obedient and dutiful, and knows that he must study philology because it is what he is expected to do by his professors and parents. He returns to Germany at the beginning of the war in great distress: he does not want to fight, he sees no reason why Germany should want a war, but it is his duty to return. Poor Heinrich is always asking for explanations, but no-one gives him any.

Heinrich is not the only foreigner caught up by the war. The bemused American visitor Mr Direck, who arrives at Matchings Easy in early August to visit Mr Britling, gets thrown out of Germany when he attempts to conduct a private fact-finding mission, and ends up joining the Canadian army because the American army is not planning to fight at the present. His sub-plot is the most conventional part of the novel, with an arrival, a falling in love, a development in character, and a resolution, but that way lie spoilers so I won’t go any further in that direction. Let’s talk about Winston Churchill instead.

You’ll probably know Churchill’s name as Britain’s Prime Minister in the Second World War, but possibly not that he was First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, which meant that in the first years of the war he was the politician in charge of the most senior military command. Lady Frensham criticises him roundly for his apparent failings, as did many people in real life, which Wells considered to be simply personal spite. It’s true that Churchill was sacked from his post during the war, though his modernising suggestions for sea and land equipment were later adopted. At one point in the novel Mr Britling whispers to himself, trying to give himself hope that Britain will win this terrible war: ‘We shall fight them in the air … We shall beat them on the seas’. Does that ring a faint bell? In H G Wells’ published letters there is a letter from Winston Churchill congratulating Wells on Mr Britling, which he had just finished reading. In the Second World War one of Churchill’s most famous speeches, on becoming Prime Minister, contains the famous line ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, and also ‘we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air’. It may be that both authors were drawing their declamatory style from earlier sources, possibly the Bible, maybe Shakespeare, but not Latin literature, since Wells did not have that kind of upper-class education. But I contend that Churchill borrowed from H G Wells.

Mr Bitling Sees It Through ends with a powerful essay by Wells, or Britling, that begins as a letter to Heinrich’s parents in Pomerania. But there is simply too much to say, and the letter grows into what Mr Britling calls with exasperation, a dissertation: academic, sweeping, impersonal. He keeps trying again, trying to find the words to write to these German parents whom he has never met when he sends back Heinrich’s violin, to express what he feels about the war. It’s a powerful ending because the casualty figures were rising rapidly in 1916, and thousands of British soldiers were coming back from the war with permanent physical damage, visible war-damage on the streets and in neighbouring houses all around. How can a message of mutual understanding and reconciliation have had any effect at that time? This is not a war book: it’s an anti-war book. Mr Britling’s desperate search for war work, and for a way to explain the war to himself, turns into a personal mission to stop war ever happening again. Teddy’s wife Letty devises a terrible punitive campaign by the world’s women to kill all the generals.

I love this novel because it is so human. There are many wonderful conversations between characters who need things explaining to each other, thus allowing us, one hundred years later, to eavesdrop on what people might have been thinking at the time. I would so much rather read Mr Britling than any modern novel about the war which has been written with the inescapable knowledge of hindsight, as well as modern preoccupations that the Edwardians would never have thought about.

On Poetry, by Glyn Maxwell

This is the prequel, or preceding companion to Maxwell’s fantasy creative writing course Drinks With Dead Poets, in which Maxwell writes urgent, obstreperous essays about how to read, write and think about poetry. On Poetry feels like a book written for practitioners at all levels. It’s certainly a hugely useful teaching book, full of admonitions and exasperated noises, as well as passionate explanations of the how and the why of meter and rhyme. I was reading it while teaching poetry boot-camp to my first-year students and came across a passage vehemently refuting the things I’d been teaching the day before. It’s from the chapter called ‘Chime’.

As we saw – or heard – with meter, it’s clear that the shorter the meter the more evident or present is the form. With rhyme what matters is the distance between rhymes, so that couplets – two lines together that rhyme – have no interest in concealing their effect, whereas a more complex stanza might separate rhyming words by six, seven, eight lines, in which case the impact of the rhyme is subconscious, kin to musical motif. As Joseph Brodsky writes: ‘In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.’

Some poets say about their work or someone else’s that they use a lot of ‘internal rhymes’ – rhymes that are not at the ends of their lines – when what they mean is that some of the words sound quite like each other. I don’t think, by the way, one can ‘use enjambment’ either – that is, a line flowing without punctuation to the next line. For one thing, as I said before, the line-break is punctuation, it’s just white instead of black, and for the other, some effects ought to be subconscious in a poet, and I think enjambment and internal rhymes are things you say you’re doing but can’t help doing. The same goes for anything you call ‘assonance’. I imagine I get through a shed-load of assonance.

I gave that to my students to read in their next class. I have no idea if they liked it or not, but a bit of contradiction will be good to stimulate their minds for the exam.

On Poetry is not an instruction manual. It’s a set of opinions and heartfelt beliefs about how poetry works and why. It’s also a loosely-formed story about four creative writing students of whom I would be terrified in my own class, so attitudinal and know-it-all are they. There isn’t much theory, and hardly any of the scary big words that give prosody a bad name. (Stephen Fry and The Ode Less Travelled, I’m looking at you, you great lunk of show-off wordery.) Maxwell is not prescriptive. He blunders about in an expert’s scruffy working clothes and shows us that he knows his stuff. Good for enough for anyone.

Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012)

Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

Hem 1 This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. He is a giant of American literature, and of masculine writing. He wrote men’s books about manly subjects: war, bullfighting, deep sea fishing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Islands in the Stream was published after his death, in 1970. It was put together from three fragments of novels found in his bank vault in Havana after his death. They were intended by Hemingway to form a larger work, but his widow and literary executor put the pieces together. You’d never think it was cobbled together at all. It’s a stupendous novel, and I loved it.

Hem 2 It’s also chillingly tense. Hemingway’s narrative style is famous: he called it the iceberg technique, or something like that, because all the work was done below the surface of the words. So we have plain, pared-down prose, no words wasted, nothing exuberant or decorative, which gives the rare instances of enthusiasm, passion, pleasure, etc, real power, because they stand alone without fuss. The effect is similar to encountering a large rock in the middle of a desert plain. It gives the impression of being bigger than anything else around, because it’s the only one of its kind, but if it were surrounded by equally large-sized rocks, we wouldn’t pay it any particular attention. The effect of such restraint in the writing is that we really feel the undercurrents of emotion. More importantly, we can feel the stuff that’s not being said, and the approach of terrible things a long way off. The tension mounts, and it just keeps on mounting. But because Hemingway’s writing is so controlled, you can feel sure that the catastrophe won’t be sprung on you out of the blue. There will be warnings, and you will have to wait for the warning to happen for the awful, or dangerous, or risky thing to happen. When it does happen, it’s a relief, because now we can get on with it, and not sit there imagining ‘he’s going to kill them’, or ‘they’re going to be washed overboard’, and so on.

Hem 3 Tension is a peculiar thing in a novel. If you think about it rationally, the reader can put a book down at any time during a tense-making episode, and it will wait for you. Nothing will change the outcome on the page. You can change how you respond to the outcome by being in a different frame of mind, or wait to have the right kind of time to devote to reading it. You can go to sleep and read the resolution of the tension with a clear mind and full attention on a different day. So what is it that makes us succumb to the tyranny of the plot and keep reading past midnight, or miss a bus stop, in thrall to the story? In Hemingway, I think it’s the hypnosis of the small plain words and the steady encroachment of story and character in tiny, incremental steps. He likes the character, and we like the character, so we don’t want anything bad to happen to that person. Emotional investment in a character binds us to their fate. The more an author encourages us to feel good about a person, the less we are likely to not be too bothered if that person does something horrible, or has something horrible happen to them. So it’s in an author’s interests to make the readers feel invested in some way – good or bad – in the characters so the book will be read. This will work for the situation too, if the situation is bigger or more interesting that the people.

Hem 4 So, back to the novel. Only one of the characters in Islands in the Stream populates all three of its parts: Thomas Hudson, a famous artist, a former habitué of 1920s Paris, where he lived with his first wife and son Tom. Now he lives on Bimini, an island of the Bahamas, 50 miles off Florida. He paints, and he drinks. This is apparently not too much, but the amount he and some of the other men sink daily, often starting at breakfast, made me blench. I’m not a spirits drinker, but they certainly were. Hemingway wrote this novel in 1950-51, and it certainly has a feel of Ian Fleming about it, with the details of men’s lives, and how they saw women. Hemingway and Fleming wrote with detailed precision about what their characters ate and wore, and the drinks descriptions are basically recipes without quantities. Thomas Hudson – and here’s an interesting thing, which I’m sure Hemingway critics have explained to their own satisfaction, but it was new to me – Thomas Hudson, when referred to by the narrative voice, is always called ‘Thomas Hudson’. Not Thomas, not Hudson, always the two names together. When he’s referred to by characters, its Hudson or Tom or Tommy, but the narrative voice sets itself apart with the formality of the full name. There is another Tom, his son, called Young Tom or Tommy at different times, but often just Tom. But the painter is given his full name, as if he were a brand of rum.

Hem 5 Thomas Hudson lives on Bimini in his house. He has a cook / major-domo / housekeeper and trusted friend and native Biminian called Eddy, and a houseboy called Joseph. The novel opens when Thomas Hudson has finished work for the day, and spends the evening drinking with friends on the quay, where things get a little out of hand, and there’s a fight. His friend Roger Davis, a novelist and screenwriter, comes back to Hudson’s house to gets his wounds doctored and to sleep, and to stay, since he needs to find quiet to start writing again. And, of course, the boys are coming: Hudson’s three sons, Tom, and David and Andrew, by his second wife. The five of them have a wonderful summer on the beach and in and out of the water. This novel is apparently praised for its nature descriptions: it certainly has tremendous descriptions of fishing, sharks, and eating. Some visitors to the island arrive, one of them being a girl who’s come to find Roger, which he is very glad about. That’s the last we see of him, because he takes her off to Hudson’s ranch in Idaho, to start writing again.

Hem 6 This is set a few years later in wartime, in Cuba, which isn’t very far south of the Bahamas, in Hudson’s house in the countryside outside Havana. There he has a vast number of cats and dogs, and three or four staff to keep the place running in his absence. He is absent a fair bit, because he’s converted his boat into a survey vessel for the US Navy, and he’s scouring the Caribbean coastline looking for U-boats. When this episode opens he’s just come back from an exhausting trip, and his favourite cat, Boise, is ecstatic at Hudson being home again. Hudson spends most of this section of the novel drinking, or fretting about whether the cats are eating enough. Boise eats fried eggs, and accepts a little champagne. Hudson tells stories in a bar to Honest Lil, an old prostitute friend, and allows himself to recall some very exciting episodes from his past with a princess on a boat going through the Corinth Canal. This is Lil’s ploy to make him forget a recent sadness, and to get him warmed up by recalling the princess’s sexual appetites. But out of the blue, a woman no-one expected to see walks into the bar, and Hudson and she have an ecstatic reunion, which fills Hudson’s slightly fuzzy mind with unfettered joy. It probably isn’t joyful for Honest Lil, because we don’t see her again. The drinking in Havana is prodigious, I lost count of the frozen double daiquiris that Hudson consumed. But just as we’re thinking, at last, he can be happy again, just for a bit, Hudson gets an emergency summons from the Navy and he has to go back to sea.

Hem 7 The third part of the novel is spent largely at sea, hunting for some German seamen who escaped their wrecked U-boat, and made the mistake of massacring some islanders when they stole their turtle boat. Hudson’s ship has a crew of irregular sailors, mainly smugglers and fishermen and a discharged Marine, as well as a Navy man who has been given to Hudson to make sure his ship stays in radio contact with naval authorities on Havana. This is one of the thin threads attaching the third part of the novel to the war: another thread concerns Tommy the younger, and other people in Hudson’s life who are also serving in the war. I did wonder when reading this section, why did Thomas Hudson not go straight into the army or navy? Why did he become an irregular pirate for hire? Could any of this stuff have really happened? It’s plausible enough as a novel for me to not want to bother checking out the history: the romance of the plot is quite satisfying enough.

I can’t see this free-living and hard-drinking artist and big-game fisherman submitting to uniform and military rules, and possibly he was too old as well. Instead, we get a truly exotic idea of Cuba and the Floridian islands, the Bahamas, all of the Caribbean, as a modern refuge for terrible pirates who prey on the locals and kill ruthlessly. Islands in the Stream is very Dr No, very sun-kissed and hard-drinking, and very, very hard-man American hero. It reminded me strongly of the Commando comic books I read as a child, where the war was simply a setting for personal heroics and dramatic tension involving guns and the occasional guttural swear word. As a story of eight men cooped up in a boat together in the heat, getting frustrated by not being able to catch their prey, and feeling just a little bit edgy about one or two of the others, this last part of the novel should glue you to the very last page, no matter what else you should be attending to.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

In a review posted this week on Bustle, E Ce Miller gave us a list of the 50 great / important works by women we should all read. Imagine my feelings of smug self-validation when I found that I’d already read about a third of them, and that I was in the middle of reading (actually, galloping through) another: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

I knew about Alison Bechdel from her culture-changing idea of the Bechdel Test, that thing you ask of films, books and other cultural productions. If two or more women are having a conversation, if it about something / someone other than men? If the film or book can answer ‘yes!’, then it has something to say to more than one segment of the population and has a fair chance of not being gender biased. She was also awarded one of the 2014 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Awards, to allow her to keep writing and creating. Fun Home is far more than a graphic novel, because it’s a memoir, not fiction at all. (It was also made into a smash hit musical.) It’s painful, beautiful, poetic and symmetrically chilling. It’s about Alison Bechdel’s childhood in Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 1970s, during which time she grows to realise that her father is more than an obsessive house renovator and the grim community mortician (Fun as in Funeral). He oppresses his family, but he also loves them, and he loves boys too, though is too closeted to come out. Thus the circle of escape, obsession, dictatorialness and unexpected admissions of pleasure continues. The story moves back and forth in time like a weaving shuttle, so the reader experiences layer after layer of story, with each new layer gaining texture and resonance from its foundation.

The sad and ordinary fact of Bruce Bechdel’s death, hit by a truck as he crossed the road, is examined again and again for clues and for answers. He took the children camping, he took them to stay with friends in New York (where he could go cruising at night on Christopher St), he had them cleaning and doing chores every day, he taught them to swim. Helen Bechdel, a former actress who gave up her dreams to be the mother of a family, endures her husband’s erratic ways and endless, casual affairs with angry endurance. She retreats into acting and a thesis, while he is in a world of his own, sourcing chandeliers and Victorian glassware, and foolishly buying beers for underage boys. The children separate as well (the renovated house certainly has enough space), so isolation and private experiences become normal.

When Alison goes to college she works out the name and the meaning of her own sexuality, which adds another layer to her relations with her father. She had loved men’s shirtings and suits as much as he did, and she fetishised the lines of a man’s body, wanting that shape for herself, as much as he wanted their bodies. The artwork tells more than half of this complex, shifting story, with frames repeated to silently show that yes, there was more going in here, in this particular exchange or event, than the younger Alison had noticed. Although the seven episodes of the book move back and forth in time in a patchwork of recollections and linked stories, the language of the narration begins simply, increasing in complexity as more understanding emerges. When moments of comprehension surface in the small or adult Alison’s mind, the effect is stunning: word and image working together simply and beautifully to hit the reader for six.

You can read this as a memoir of family life with an unusual proximity to death and its processes (I’ve barely mentioned the family funeral home business: that’s an entirely separate story). You can read it as a sad story of closeted homosexuality (Bruce), or as a satisfying and wryly self-deprecating memoir of an out lesbian at ease with herself and her life. You can read this as a book about the importance of reading the right book at the right time to realise the truth about sexuality, in all its manifestations. You can certainly read this book as a pointed rebuke at the pretentiousness of college English literature tutorials, and the dangers of obsessing over one particular text (Bruce was also a high school English teacher). We don’t read a lot about Alison’s brothers as adults, and perhaps that was by their wish. At the end of the book, her first acknowledgement is to her mother and brothers for ‘not trying to stop me writing this book’. Her portrait of her mother is understanding but also unsparing: Helen was an expert mother and an understanding woman but not warm or friendly. Those children lacked hugs. That family lacked warmth. It was not a fun home, by any means.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), ISBN 978-0-224-08051-4, £12.99

Category: autobiography

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