Lady’s Maid, Margaret Forster
Found in our community library across the road and brought home because I’d read Fiona Sampson’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (see this blog) which included references to Elizabeth Wilson, Elizabeth’s maid. This is a fictionalised account of Wilson’s life. Beautifully written and I enjoyed the first section, set in England and focussed on Wilson’s introduction to the Barrett household, very much. But based on the Sampson biography I was disappointed in the later life in Italy as imagined by Forster. She skates over Wilson’s big decision which was to be a witness at Elizabeth and Robert Browning’s wedding which effectively burnt her bridges with the Barrett family and probably her career as a lady’s maid in England. Which meant she really had go with the lovers to Italy. I thought more could have been made of this. Another problem was a lack of internal consistency about Wilson’s character. On the one hand she is imagined as extraordinarily empathetic and efficient in managing Elizabeth’s illnesses. But later she seems to fall apart. Including taking an odd attitude to her Italian husband. It is all quite interesting and the novel impelled me to try and find out what is actually known about Wilson, some of which I found here . Overall I felt the life of the maid imagined by Forster was too grim, but it is nice that she has been recovered from obscurity. Disappointing.
Precious Lives, Margaret Forster
Another book from across the road. I was interested in this because I’m certain I’ve read Hidden Lives, but I can’t find any record of having done so. I just remember that I thought it was terrific. The story of her working class family. This is in a similar vein. It’s a searingly honest account of her experience supporting two people as they deal with their own mortality. In the case of her father Arthur he surprises the expectations of his children and lives well past the ninety years he aspired to. Working class, uncommunicative, dictatorial all his life, he furiously defended his independence resisting attempts by his children to make improvements to the family home to make it safer for him and furiously resisting any notion of moving into a smaller more suitable place let alone a retirement home. All very familiar. Three siblings sharing troubled oversight of their cranky old Dad through visits and phone calls. All vividly described – the old, dangerous furniture, old inefficient white goods, excruciating visits desperately searching for conversation topics and begging time pass. Final two years in the dreaded nursing home where surprisingly he’s a hit with staff – so old his curmudgeonly ways attract humour not scorn. In alternate chapters we experience with the author the shock and then horror of watching her much loved sister-in-law face terminal cancer. Painful, soul-destroying treatment followed by complete dependence on carers. The rapid, compared to Dad, diminution of faculties. The impact on friends and family – how you are expected to behave, what the focus of all this attention really wants. Forster is interested in what they experience; what’s it like preparing to die. She doesn’t really discover much. But the question is interesting. Beautifully written.
The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman
These two little thrillers were good fun. Set in a retirement home where clever old codgers pass the time of day trying to solve cold case murders. Like Arthur Forster being in the retirement home suits them. The set up reminded me strongly of Elizabeth Is Missing which was a great read. Each took me a single day to read each – a perfect pastime in these enervating 30 plus degree days. Very inventive plots and appealing characters.
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, Lea Ypi
Wonderfully evocative description of growing up in Albania in the 1980s. A closed socialist dictatorship under Enver Hoxha, or Uncle Enver as young stuffed pepper as she was called by her father, later brigatista. Rarely the simple Lea! I found the names very hard to follow: father Xhaffer Ypi known as Zafo, grandfather Aslan away at university for 15 years, grandmother Nini who spoke French. We see everything through the eyes of the young Lea starting at age 7 or 8 up to later teens. She tells it as she understood things. A family’s biography determines their status – what they can study, what they jobs they get, what sort of housing, whether they can join the Party. Teacher Nora is her guide to life and her admonitions to the class about religion, socialism, communism, capitalism, reactionaries, bourgeois attitudes and so on are gospel. The way of life – queuing for basic goods, the lack of choice, communal celebrations, misconceptions about life in the West – a Coca Cola can plays a pivotal role in a friendship between families – all is faithfully recorded. Young Lea was a faithful adherent to the Party line, loyal to Uncle Enver and Stalin to the end. Hence her total confusion when it all came crashing down in December 1990. She’s especially confounded and feels betrayed when family secrets about the family biography are finally revealed – although the alert reader is not as surprised as our narrator. Part Two is about what follows – the novelty of free elections and the associated political chicanery; ham-fisted interventions by the West – well-meaning NGOs, the World Bank. There’s lots of humour throughout but given recent experience in Afghanistan we should weep. But the author has a serious message – those who don’t make the effort to understand history are doomed to repeat the errors of the past. Lea Ypi now lectures in political theory at the London School of Economics and concludes her story thus: if there is one lesson to take away from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, ‘What you had was not the real thing’, applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologise and learn. Great book, highly recommended. A terrific overview of the book, which actually gives you the whole story so I don’t really recommend you read it until you have read the book, is found in this review.
Arrow In The Blue, Arthur Koestler
I think I read this in my twenties but I had no recollection of it at all. I really enjoyed it at first. I liked how it was arranged – his life put in context be describing what was in the papers on the day of his birth, the story of his forebears and then concentrating on turning points. In his case, the times when he burnt his bridges. There are three such occasions. I especially liked, and want to remember his insights in a chapter devoted to the pitfalls of autobiography. The rationale behind doing so he describes as the desire to share one’s experiences with others … to transcend the isolation of the self. And this to meet two distinct objectives: the Chronicler wants to record external events, Ecco Homo wants to preserve the uniqueness of their inner experiences. This makes writing one full of pitfalls resulting in either the starchy chronicle of the stuffed shirt versus the embarrassing nakedness of the exhibitionist. I can think of lots of examples of both!
Other problems Koestler identifies are: the Nostalgic Fallacy – warm memories of childhood days are fascinating only for the subject; which facts to select – apparently irrelevant facts yield the most important clues to a life; the Dull Dog fallacy – when authors are afraid of showing off hence underplay their role, The virtues of under-statement and self-restraint make social intercourse civilised and agreeable, but they have a paralysing effect on autobiography. A final issue is to decide who you are writing for – Koestler was clear that he was writing for the unborn, future reader. I suspect he would be disappointed about how few there are these days, and unlikely to be many more in future years.
Taking his admonitions seriously, he certainly avoids rose-coloured nostalgia about his early days – lonely, full of guilt and agonisingly shy. All very unsentimentally described. I also liked what he calls digressions where he jumps to things in the future to put something in context. As when he talks about what makes a person adopt a particular political position. I suspect these views are very much influenced by his communist party membership. He says our political views are not determined by rational considerations; all evidence tends to show that the political libido is basically as irrational as the sex drive, and patterned, like the latter, by early, partly unconscious experiences- by traumatic shocks, complexes, identification repressions, and the rest. Early emotional conditioning plays a decisive part; the arguments which justify and rationalise the credo come afterwards. This is only the first phase in the development of your political libido – which most people don’t move past meaning their political loyalties remain in the state of infantile fixation. Food for thought given my lifelong adherence to the Australian Labor Party! I wonder whether I went through Koestler’s desired second phase when critical reasoning asserts itself over emotive belief.
This discussion in the book He’s talking about his own support for the Hungarian Commune – which I knew nothing about and he doesn’t go into details which is a common ailing in the book overall, he assumes a knowledge of lots of things. And later his wholehearted support and enjoyment of the Jewish student fraternity he was involved with in Vienna, with a digression about his later joining the communist party which he attributes to half remembered images from the commune but of course now passed through the filter of reasoning.
He’s very hard on himself throughout the book – avoiding being a dull dog, but rather coming over as a neurotic much of the time. Someone else has underlined this sentence in my borrowed book: about his student days in Vienna he says: In short, during these years I was as happy as it has been given to me to be; and, when all is said, three years of happiness out of forty-six is not such a bad ratio in our time. I’d say it was a pretty poor ration – but there you go I am one of the pampered baby boomers!
The book fell away at the end. It finishes in December 1931 with him joining the communist party. He refers obliquely to his womanising which was well known and bits and pieces about his time as a communist but that’s all in his second memoir which I’m not going to read. He’s had his day I reckon. I remember all the fuss about his and his wife’s suicide and went back to Wikipedia to revisit that. An unpleasant fellow really.
Meredith says
Thanks for these latest whispers Jen. Fabulous as ever. I am interested in your thoughts about The Lady’s Maid which I think I won’t bother hunting out now. Precious Lives however sounds well worth while and clearly written with a lot of empathy for Forster’s sister in law and insights into the experience of trying to assist an elderly relative if not quite so much empathy for the actual relative.
I’m definitely going to read a Richard Osman – mum has one that recently arrows part of the book club selection my sister has organised for her to get each month. I was interested in Koestler’s involvement in the Hungarian commune and would like to find a good book about that era. The Hungarian experience of Nazi collaboration and resistance was followed by a terrible time under their Russian overlords and there were fantastic exhibitions cum tourist attractions about it in Budapest when I was there last.
Meanwhile your review of the Albanian history/autobiography is fantastic and reminded me of the descriptions of life in the Czech Republic under communism that a beau I had for a while grimly depicted to me. He eventually fled and got to Australia as a refugee having been refused permission to do further uni studies because his father had not been a favourite of the regime.