It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members' Clubs, which was very good, and absolutely scathing about some of the previous histories; I did think, a bit, that given the broadening of his remit, there were things that should have been there - I thought there was a whole generation missed that was surely the precursor to the sixties phenomenon of satire & sex clubs he does fit it, during the 1920s or maybe (Cave of the Golden Calf?) even before (wot no Elsa Lanchester ahem). But otherwise, pretty sound on the whole topic.

I was less prepossessed with Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century (2022), which I had seen reviews of that made it seem a bit more exciting and revelatory than I found it. Apart from its being rather, I thought, repetitive in its arguments, it did a lot of those things that lit people do that historians, or at least this historian, find irksome. Like citing For Authority Some Historian or Other who is, perhaps, no longer exactly state of the art if not 'OMG not him!' (and I depose that invoking Laqueur didn't in fact particularly add anything to her arguments). Like taking a somewhat narrow view: ehrm, perhaps the economics of smut-publishing were why they trimmed the texts? and perhaps how they did so had something to do with audience? (could not help thinking of Anais Nin complaining about the demands of bloke who commissioned the stories that ended up as Delta of Venus); not to mention the increasing genrefication and narrowing down of erotic narratives into stock porn tropes? (didn't Peakman, cited, mention this?) Okay, I am there for broadening out the canon, and suggesting that people like S Marcus were looking at a v narrow sample (and through a v Freudian lens), and there is a lot to be got out of the constant reissuing of texts over centuries, but. I will go and hang with my book historian mates, I think.

Patricia Lockwood, No-one is Talking About This (2021), which was on Kobo Deals. Not honestly sure what I think of it - very Now?

On the go

Still occasionally dipping into The Absentee but here is Lord Colambre now in Dublin and there is more vulgar social pretension going on, sigh.

About halfway through Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (2022), which is covering much of the same territory as Lipscomb, The Women Are Up To Something, discussed here and here and I was hoping was maybe going to bring a bit more gender-analysis to the mix. It does, a bit, but I am finding it somewhat stylistically annoying (and I will never not be annoyed by Not Appreciating the Amazingness That Was Janet Vaughan - the reason there was a blood donation centre in Oxford at the beginning of the War was almost certainly due to her work, based on her contact with Duran-Jordan during the Spanish Civil War, in agitating for a Blood Transfusion Service).

Still meandering through some research reading.

Up next

It probably counts as research reading, but I wanted to read it anyway, Louise McDonald, Clemence Dane: Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Interwar Years. Though I might try and fit in something a bit lighter first.

This is an interesting piece on whether, historically, more women writers have actually been mothers than the idea that they couldn't possibly have been suggests (article tends to blame V Woolf): Women Writers Have Had Plenty of Babies. Here’s the Data. Another look at a more complicated history.

However, I was particularly fascinated to come across, partway through that article, some data about ages at which women began publishing, and WOW:

For those with no children, the average age at which they published a book was 46; for those with one or two children, it was 48; for three, it was 50. The age dropped down again for those with four to nine children, to 49, and to 48 for 10 or more children. Rather than every child causing a woman writer to lose a book, it might be more accurate to say that every child delayed a book by a year.

Also, of course, what were women writing? Is the discourse focused too much on canonical or wouldbe canonical litfic? - (and given the article authors' praise of Gaskell, am reminded that in one of Amanda Cross's books there's a query about why is Trollope always in the curriculum and not her? and women getting sidelined at the outset). Is it the same for genre?

Are there, in fact, fields in which the married mother is likely to be if anything over-represented? Enter an Archive of 7,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized & Free to Read Online. Okay, in the annals of children's lit, there have been some Extremely Odd Ducks, but it was also an area where it was possible to make a living turning out educational, informative, and even entertaining works for the young.

I saved, or thought I had, a couple of Twitter threads anent the role of publishing in the formation of the literary canon (in the other browser), only one of which actually appears in my tabs and turns out to be from last year.

But anyway, that had me thinking that well yes and well no, and what about V Woolf self-publishing by setting type herself as occupational therapy, even if the Hogarth Press rapidly expanded beyond that rather kitchen-table operation. And what about J Joyce's Ulysses being nurtured into print by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co with French typesetters who made Joyce's linguistic playfulness even more bizarre, and moreover being a work you might get confiscated at Customs if you brought it across the Channel? As well as earlier systems of publishing by subscription (C18th Kickstarter/Patreon?) or paying a bookseller on a profit-sharing basis etc, and how many of those works now nestle in obscurity in libraries while a few are considered Gems of Litrachur...

My attention was also drawn today to the British Library Women's Writing Series, which I would be more prepossessed by if I had not looked at the titles in it and frowned and considered that several of them had already been Brought To The Attention Of The Reading Public by Virago or Persephone or other similar endeavours. (Why does no-one ever bring back GB Stern? - except for The Matriarch, sigh.)

(F Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See The Peepshow is hardly a neglected classic. Though I am aghast that the 1973 TV serial version does not appear to be available on DVD - infamy! infamy!)

(I must say kudos to Furrowed Middlebrow because as far as I can tell they are not ploughing a field already cleared by someone else.)

I also came across today this lament for the Mass Market Paperback (a minute's silence, please).

But that made me think about publishers - as it might be, Allen Lane of blessed memory and Penguin Books - who set up an enterprise and everyone tells them they're mad and it will never take off. (And of course now having shelves of Period Penguins is one of the marks of Poncey Interior Design, no?)

But they clearly owed a lot to his taste and were really eclectic, and maybe one sees parallels with other more recent innovative enterprises that after a bit Ye Corporates take over and it all gets a bit bland and homogenous...

What Penguins and other MMPs also had was not just Other Books by the same author but usually other books of a related nature by the publisher listed at the back. Useful.

***

In other news, I am entirely prepossessed by Molton Brown's Vetiver and Grapefruit Bath and Shower Gel

In the stilly watches of the night - there was that thing where I wake up from a perfectly sound sleep and then take some while to get back to sleep - I was thinking about that panic reaction that Some People have that if you add New Names to Literary Canons or the Historical Record or give them Commemorative Statues this means that the existing names will be wiped out as if written upon sand when the tide comes in.

Rather than that they may be viewed in a different way in a broader context, which may mean that they are no longer quite the unique figures they once were.

What brought this to mind was thinking of - I'm not sure it amounted to a Twitter-storm, perhaps a Twitter-spat - in which somebody was very agitated that putting a statue to Millicent Garrett Fawcett in Parliament Square was the first step to the Pankhursts becoming Unpersons and Forgotten By History.

The Pankhursts? Come on. I think not.

But I am for a narrative which is about, there were lots of women, and a not insignificant number of men, fighting for the suffrage and women's rights and most of those would have been doing that with or without Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia. And we can debate over who had the most effective tactics and so on, but the fact is you need charismatic drama queens AND you need low-key determined types beavering away in committees and badgering government departments and getting small necessary concessions.

See also, thoughts I have probably expressed before re Marie Stopes and the wider birth control movement.

And on the literary canon of Dead White Males, is that actually graven in stone anyway? I apprehend there have been changes over time in who is in or out - during a conversation last week we were wondering whether DH Lawrence was still on university Englit syllabi, and somebody said, well, still on the modernism module at their place - and if they can't stand up to the competition, perhaps they are not so great anyway?

I also think about how many of those now set-in-stone Great Canonical Writers were Up From Nowhere and the Margins in their own day - is this not evidenced by the strained attempts to prove that Shakespeare was not really a grammar-school oik from Warwickshire?

Scarlett Thomas: Why I was wrong about children’s fiction.

I do see that she has come to realise that 'children's books: not the easy option',from trying to write one, because have we not, my dearios, seen an awful lot of celebs who think any fule can can write a kiddybook?

But, might we not also see in that article that she seems also to be coming round to the notion that fantasy is Not A Bad (or at least, a lesser, genre) Thing?

The two categories do seem to be somewhat assimilated, even conflated.

And I really don't think you get very far just by replacing one binary with another binary:

Instead of thinking there’s “literary fiction” and “everything else”, or even adult fiction and children’s fiction, I now believe that there are books with magic and without.

I don't think it's that simple, even if she's using 'magic' in its broader sense?

I think there are still some unexamined assumptions around canon and literary value going on there.

Still pondering over the implications of a reported remark by a literature lecturer that there is no definitive post-World War II British literary canon.

50-60 springs are little room, I suspect, for canon formation - look at how long it took for the standard Vict-lit canon to be established - was there not a period when George Eliot (George Eliot!!!!) was in the critical doldrums? EM Forster has a whole riff on how MAJOR George Meredith was in his young day, yet how he had faded by the 1920s (possibly one or two works have snuck back into the canon or near-canon, e.g. Diana of the Crossways?? - suspect that Gissing, gloomy ol' George, is more there these days.)

But I was also given to think about the Towering Geeenyus theory of art, and whether people who look like towering geenyuses may do so because, not much competition?

Also am far from convinced that all we need are Towering Geeenyuses - was mightily pissed off, many years ago, by one of Aldous Huxley's riffs on the subject and why it's really not worth bothering composing unless you are Beethoven, even if you happen to be Brahms (wot, he be dissing on Brahms????).

Anyway, possibly what we have now are more generally competent writers and books that have a certain amount of staying power -

- though, as I have already remarked, let us consider the track record of those books and writers that were BIG AND IMPORTANT in their day, and have faded like fadey-things, O HAI CP Snow.

Not to mention that there are plenty of books with obvious staying power which may not be GRATE LITRACHOOR but are still read with pleasure (and also plenty that I think still could be read with pleasure if only people knew about them and new editions got published).

(And is this another version of the whole best-selling vs gets prizes, critical repute vs popularity thing?)

O dear things already fading, so much happening!

Saturday evening: parties! good but blurred.

Sunday: after prebooking for next year...

Lunch with coffeeandink and truepenny, which was lovely.

Green room slot for which I had forgotten to provide myself with a book... and it was fairly quiet even if it was just me on duty.

Panel on the Politics of Posterity which was v good even though on reflection I felt it was pulling in at least two different directions - on the one hand canon formation on the other preservation of sf writers' papers and related materials, and although there is a connection there are canonical writers who are not well documented (HAI, Mr S of Stratford!) apart from their, you know, actual works. And that you can sometimes reconstruct quite a lot about a person (as I should know, hem-hem) even if you don't have personal papers. And there are issues about judgement about who belongs in the, or a, canon. But, on the prehensile tail, I also think that there are issues and movements which have been given undue significance because there are substantial (and accessible archival materials whereas other strands and trends are less well-documented.

Plus, I did a certain amount of I R ARKIVIST, I SHOW U MI KNOWINGZ (oursin bores for Europe, while the shade of Sir Hilary Jenkinson claps politely).

This was followed by panel I was moderating on the Historical Novel, which I think went quite well even if there was possibly a touch of late afternoon lethargy: the panelists were all good and articulate and enough audience members were interested to the point of intervention that there were no embarassing silences. Also, I did not need to bring into play all the get-things-going questions I had written down, but I did get to mention Mitchison.

Pleasant walk with commodorified to look at the statue of Lincoln, via the lake and interesting architectural features of the university campus.

Batmoot at the Irish Pub - jonquil alas unable to attend due to sickness, but commodorified and damned_colonial both present. commodorified suggested that it may have been a bit subdued by Bat standards as no-one left the pub, but I pointed out that we were sitting outside, which might have influenced this. And that the people on the table next to us did in fact leave while we were still there, though it might just have been because they had finished their meal/drinks.

Parties not really happening yet when I went to look, spent some time in the bar with veejane and cofax7 and others including teckelvik, where I risked a second margarita, from which, hey, no ill-effects, WIN (unless I've forgotten stuff best not remembered...).

Parties! Rather fuzzy, funny about that.

Better night's sleep than I might have anticipated.

Nearly ended up on the wrong panel this morning due to misreading room name, but instead of talking about porn I did end up talking about tricksters, sola for the first 5-10 minutes as only mod and I were there, other panel members did turn up and starkeymonster is much better equipped to talk about tricksters than I am, fortunately, because I was already wildly tapdancing and vamping. Audience interested and raising various points, comments, questions.

Brunch with commodorified, fairestcat, ellen_fremedon, olivia_circe, aria and damned_colonial.

Ran into various people to whom said fond farewells and regrets that, as always, Wiscon is over before one has had all the long conversations one would have liked to have had.

Thinking about my post earlier this week on dead white male poets and the need to interrogate the concept of the canon, and reading coffeeandink's post here. and the comments, about some AmLit type still fighting the battles of the 70s about how Dreadful and Oppressive more inclusive curricula are (with particular reference to writings by African-Americans) and claiming that people are only doing this (after 30+ years!) in order to be 'trendy'.

Which made me think that people must do this out of a deep sense of insecurity and a lack of trust in their own judgement. If they are in Literature Departments they will doubtless have been told, or picked up by osmosis, what is good important significant canonical literature and what works may suitably be studied, and who are, in terms of Stephen Potter's Lifemanship, the OKAY names to drop. We certainly saw this in that article about poetry and women poets in which the names dropped as her influences were the dreariest of safe okay names, they pushed no boundaries, had no left-field (what does this mean, by the way?) quality at all.

Whereas if they are being, as this guy seems to be implying, forced to approach works outside the Great and the Good who are universally, or at least by influential dead white males in Lit departments, deemed Worthy, how can they know what they should be looking at and what their response should be? Woez, woez, they might invest time in studying, and even publish on, someone who is Not Among the Truly Chosen, and people will point and laugh.

My general sense is that these are people who, had they been Elizabethans, would have regarded the theatre more or less as the modern equivalents regard soap-opera, or if Victorians, would have regarded Dickens as doubtless an entertaining popular writer, but not for the ages.

Which leads me to some further points. The tendency of new fields to start setting up their own canon of people who are worked on (as non-EngLit person with a fair knowledge of C19th-C20th women writers, am often given to muttering about the Approved List of New Woman novelists upon whom everybody who works on the New Woman is working, and its startling omissions, and why so little attention paid to e.g. Naomi Mitchison?)

Might be one reason why people have problems with writers like Rebecca West, and indeed Mitchison, who didn't stay inside safe boundaries, could not be easily categorised and labelled.

Goodness knows I see rather similar things going on in history, where people would rather follow the marked paths already trodden by numerous scholars' feet, instead of making a sortie into the wild jungle of untapped archives that lie all around.

In the wake of reading Julie Phillips' extremely excellent James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (which I am reviewing elsewhere, so This Is Not a Review, merely a recommendation), I have been thinking various thoughts about women and writing and women and being able to pursue a trajectory in life which doesn't conform to the marriage-and-babies, name only mentioned in the papers at birth marriage and death model. And what facilitates or does not facilitate this. Particularly family matters: Phillips specifically cites V Woolf's great sigh of relief that her father had not lived (unlike some of his relations) to an enormously great age, because of all that such a lengthy paternal lifespan would have implied for her own and her sister's lives. And novels about women who, being unmarried, were expected to be dutiful daughter at home, probably constitute an entire subgenre of their own. (Quite apart from any less tangible effect the presence of living parents may have.)

Which also evoked for me the possibility that (or similar events) opened up for women to leave home, to move from stuffy Kensington to boho Bloomsbury or from Coventry to London, and to set up households that didn't replicate the ones they were brought up in. Even for much of the C20th it was probably quite unusual for families to be both financially able and willing to provide the kind of support that Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain got for setting up in a flat, with housekeeper, in London, to develop their careers. It surely remained quite rare that women did not have to marry to get away from home (I've known women of my own generation, even with degrees, who felt that the only legitimate excuse for quitting the parental roof was marriage.)

It also made me think about support within the family. The kind of situation that pertained in Jane Austen's family circles (who were an enthusiastic but not uncritical audience for her works) seems really quite rare. The Bronte sisters supported one another, but managed to keep their secret writing lives just that, until the Rev Patrick discovered that 'Charlotte has written a novel, and it is much better than likely.' He also seems to have been quite okay with them going off to Brussels. Virginia and Vanessa were able to support one another in their flight to freedom.

I've also been considering the question of female role models for writing and whether or not there would be UK/US differences here. Since it is very difficult to produce even a very strictly canonical list of Great British Writers that doesn't include several women. And texts which manifest (according to their early critics) 'hunger, rebellion and rage' against the accepted lot of women. But my impression is that this, or at least was, not the case for Canonical US Lit?