We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Dear Cupcakes,

I was trolling on line about a book I was considering for November: The Sister by Poppy Adams (but it is new, in hardback) and then I read a recommendation about a more obscure novel by Shirley Jackson, her last, written in 1962. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is billed as a short, gripping read about the two Blackwood sisters and their somewhat reclusive life on the edge of a village. Narrated by 18-year old Merricat about her eccentric life with Uncle Julian and her sister Constance, the trio seem to live in a dysfunctional post-Victorian shabby chic. The book sounds suitably Gothic for November.

Long ago I read The Haunting of Hill House, also by Shirley Jackson, known for her American Gothic tales of modern life. It is a classic psychological horror story where you don't know if the house or the minds of those dwelling in it for an experiment are to blame for what unfolds. It was made into an excellent movie in the early 1960s called The Haunting (and remade, terribly, in the 1990s). Jackson is perhaps best known for her famous short story "The Lottery," a part of a larger collection of tales (and new ones have recently been published). I don't know about you but I had to read that story in several English classes along the way and enjoyed it each time.

However, my favorite Shirley Jackson book is her memoir, Life Among the Savages, published in 1953 about her years as a housewife raising four children (or five? I can't recall, but it was a brood) in Bennington, Vermont while her husband, Stanley Hyman, was teaching at the nearby college. She is not sentimental, at all, about the experience and her humor amidst the mayhem of struggling with her own writing while raising her children in a post-War world in a big old house is, well, still quite timely.

From a quick "Search Inside" on We Have Always Lived in the Castle at Amazon.com I see plenty of pantry and food references, too, always a hit with this Cupcake group. And I know we will all enjoy Jackson's wry humor and sharp writing.

Here is an eerily unsettling but descriptive passage about canned foods in the cellar:

The entire cellar of our house was filled with food. All the Blackwood women had made food and had taken pride in adding to the great supply of food in our cellar. There jars of jam made by great-grandmothers, with labels in thin pale writing, almost unreadable by now, and pickles made by great aunts and vegetables put up by our grandmother, and even our mother had left behind her six jars of apple jelly. Constance had worked all her life at adding to the food in the cellar, and her rows and rows of jars were easily the handsomest, and shone among the others. "You bury food the way I bury treasure" I told her sometimes, and she answered me once: "The food comes from the ground and can't be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it" All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women. Each year Constance and Uncle Julian and I had jam or preserves or pickle that Constance had made, but we never touched what belonged to the others; Constance said it would kill us if we ate it.

xoCatherine

O Willa!

I blogged a preview a few months ago on O Pioneers!, our Willa Cather novel for August (goodness, I just checked and I posted that blog at the end of March!). Clearly then I had a New Hampshire summer on my mind--how fast it has gone. I know, I know, it's only the end of July but for us, with the school year starting August 4, it feels like the end of August. Time suspended in a way, especially with all of this packing.

It has been so long since I've read the book that I am anxious to delve into it again. The expansive American frontier and its extremes of weather, including drought and hardship, prevail in the background of this novel. As always, the landscape is a character in Cather's fiction:

The land belongs to the future... that's the way it seems to me....I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while.

Cather seems to have been a born novelist in this passage, also from the novel:

. . . there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

We have had a meadowlark, I believe, singing on our lilac all summer. He likes to sing when we are on our patio and his song is glorious. Not as vibrant in plumage as other birds, he makes up for this lack with his song.

If you have the time in August, you might also enjoy My Ántonia (1918). It will be fun to read Willa in August and Edith in October and in between to delve into some nonfiction garden fare. Studies in land, gardens and domestic interiors, as well as the interior life of the characters. Maybe it is this dreary weather but while packing up books in this house for our move all I want to do is curl up in bed and read them!

Soon enough, after our own pioneer journey back to the frontier, I will. It's been a great summer, Cupcakes, fraught with many things and many peaks. Here's to a more restful August and the quieter autumn months ahead.

We will visit Willa in Jaffrey next summer--it was her favorite summer spot beginning in 1917, the year she published My Ántonia. Sadly, her room with a view of Mount Monadnock is no longer as the historic inn building with its favorite attic room for writing was removed several years ago. But Jaffrey was also her final resting place. She lies buried in a quiet corner of the Jaffrey Meetinghouse burial ground. Her headstone, a line from My Ántonia, states: "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

It comes from a longer passage, early on in the novel, which reveals why I love Cather's fiction and why we should also be reading My Ántonia!

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

xoCatherine and Charlotte

What, No Butter in Hell?

Yesterday, in truly erudite Cupcake fashion, we discussed Stella Gibbons’ work for about two minutes and then watched the film version of Cold Comfort Farm while snacking on popcorn and sipping iced tea.

While a somewhat tedious novel (all that dialog!) we all agreed that the film version is hilarious. Here are a couple of favorite lines:

“Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!”
– Amos Starkadder

Responding to Ada Doom’s incessant confessions of having seen something nasty in the woodshed, the man from Hollywood is quick on the draw:

“Sure you did, but did it see you, baby?”
– Earl P. Neck

And Mr. Neck was right, Judith Starkadder is too gloomy for the "talkies" or anything else. I suppose this was Stella Gibbons' point, that so many novels of that era were just full of melancholy. She takes a number of witty stabs at the Bronte family, but here is my favorite literary reference:

"Jane Austen and I have so much in common - neither of us can endure a mess."
- Flora Poste

Ann Patchett

Just when I've really had it with the Atlantic, there's an Ann Patchett essay in their Fiction 2008 issue, My Life In Sales. What's a reader to do?

When Britney Spears appeared on the cover of this magazine with such an illustrious literary history, it was too much for me. I called up and canceled my subscription. The customer service representative didn't seem impressed with my reason and I doubt my message got through, but really now.

Somehow, the on-line version still arrives via e-mail, however, and like any good junkie I can't resist at least a peak. Today I was rewarded with a great piece by Ann Patchett on what it's like to go off on book tour. I laughed and I even wept a little. That's Ann Patchett for you.

Now that we know what books Anna Quindlen would save from a fire, here is Ann chiming in with her rescue priority:

"And then there’s this: if my house were burning down, the one thing I’d rush in to save would be my copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, which I had signed at the first author reading I ever attended, the year that I was 16 and the author was 70." -- Ann Patchett

Eudora Welty, that's what did it (the tears, I mean). And I would certainly line up around the block to hear Ann Patchett at this point. Look at the way she is speaking out on behalf of all of us! I admire her for stepping up to defend the books we all love (or not, it doesn't matter!) and for participating in the political circus when it would be so much more comfortable just to be quietly writing.

Here is the link (again) to her speech at Clemson University, and while we're on book lists here is an important one: the American Library Association's Most Frequently Challenged Books. It's definitely not over.

Anna Quindlen

The June 23rd Newsweek article by Anna Quindlen, Attention Must Be Paid, is not to be missed. She is fabulous on the subject of female voters and what kind of representation we want, need and deserve:

"Senator? Senator! I have gray hair and crow's feet and a lifetime of being underestimated. I'm nobody's sweetie. And I vote."

This piece reminded me of an Anna Quindlen treasure published in 1998, How Reading Changed My Life. I remembered a Walt Whitman quote she used as a chapter head, and digging that up gave me a chance to peruse this lovely little volume once again.

Here's the Walt (rather funny after Stella Gibbons' references to athleticism – he really was just asking for it when she parodied his Pioneers ‘O Pioneers in Cold Comfort Farm):

"Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself." -- Walt Whitman

As you might expect, How Reading Changed My Life is all about Anna's life in books and her all-consuming love of reading. As with Michael Cunningham’s Laura, there are those of us who need to be “located” by a book (though we hope we don't go that far). When she writes about re-reading, I know I’ve found a soul-mate. A great admirer of A Wrinkle in Time, she once read that book three times in a row. Yes! I love knowing that about her.

Just thinking about Meg makes me want to tesseract my way right into her world again this afternoon. I knew right where to find my copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir, A Circle of Quiet (1972). Anna Q. would know where to find it, too, as she is the kind of person who delights in which authors end up next to one another on the shelf (Paul Auster and Jane Austen are side-by-side on mine; I wonder how the two of them would get along?).

Putting my hands on A Circle of Quiet again made me think of how the Madeleines paved the way for the Annas. Born in 1918, Madeleine L'Engle wrote so many wonderful books, all while managing a busy household with grace and humor. She stayed true to her writing through thick and thin, and her reports on domestic life are quite wonderful. She and her husband left their New York life for a sleepy Connecticut village “with more cows than people.” They even bought a dead general store at and ran it for nine years amidst children and manuscripts on the kitchen table. And lived abroad. And, and.

Madeleine helped break ground for all of us as readers, writers and creative beings. And Anna is doing the same. She has taken the torch up another another watt or two in these times when women writing at their kitchen tables (or from their cubes) are also informed passionate citizens greatly concerned about representation. I am grateful for Anna Quindlen, that she is a spokesperson during these times of political upheaval. I trust what she is saying and feel she is speaking for me, too.

She speculates on why women read what we read and why it is that women – drawn to creating emotional connection – are attracted to the notion of a book group. I think mostly we like to know that we’re not alone in our passions. Our Talking Cupcakes anniversary is coming up and the “don’t call me Sweetie” is really all about our choice of Cupcakes as a name. It’s sort of a Take Back The Night. Now don’t get me wrong, only you guys can call me Cupcake, but I love it when you do.

Meanwhile, we’ve enjoyed book lists, and Anna has several wonderful ones in How Reading Changed My Life: 10 Modern Novels that Made Me Proud To Be A Writer, 10 Books for a Girl Who Is Full of Beans (or Ought to Be), etc. Here is one of those lists, and of course there is Lily Bart at the end who we'll meet again in October (if I can wait that long):

The 10 Books I Would Save in a Fire (If I Could Save Only 10) – Anna Quindlen

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

"Pioneers! O Pioneers!"

Howdy, Cupcakes -- I'm looking forward to seeing you all next week for Cold Comfort Farm and the annual meeting of the Talking Cupcakes. Look out world!

Sorry you are not enjoying Stella's ready wit, Edie, which I agree can grow tiresome page after page. But all is not lost. Isn't it an absolute hoot that this novel should end up on the docket just before we read Willa Cather's O'Pioneers for August?

Willa, of course, named her now famous novel in honor of a poem by Walt Whitman. I'll paste in a few lines here so we all know why Stella thought it would be fun to parody this rather long poem.

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Since I just got back from Berkley and am fondly remembering all that fun we had marching and seizing the world (bra-less!) I decided on those lines out of many stanzas. But really the poem as a whole can be compared to the education of Cold Comfort's heroine, Flora Poste: athletic and prolonged. Sorry Walt!

Meanwhile, here is a description of Flora's friend, Mrs. Smiling, whose hangers-on are referred to collectively as Mary's Pioneers-O (note the reference to the "bosoms" and her affinity for collecting brassieres):

"She had two interests in life. One was the imposing of reason and moderation into the bosoms of some fifteen gentlemen of birth and fortune who were madly in love with her, and who had flown to such remote places as Jhonsong La Lake M'Luba-M'Luba and the Kwanhattons because of her refusal to marry them. She wrote to them all once a week, and they (as her friends knew to their cost, for she was ever reading aloud long, boring bits from their letters) wrote to her."

"Mrs Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for a perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world, it was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation."

No wonder she had fifteen men hanging around! We're going to Willa's graveside in Jaffrey, NH, soon (or so I hear); I hope I don't get hand-slap from the beyond. I confess I have never read Willa Cather, so I'm looking forward to her version of O'Pioneers next.

Emily Post and Edith Wharton

Laura Claridge's new biography, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, is slated to hit book stores in October. I can't wait!

This book looks absolutely like something for the top of the Cupcake must-read list, particularly on the heels of the lovely tea last Saturday in Hancock. The EP quotes around the house were so wonderful, Catherine, along with the white gloves and other decor. Your elegant home is the perfect setting for such opulence.

Emily Post led a fascinating life and was a novelist herself. Her first book, Flight of the Moth, was published just around the time Lily Bart came to life in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, one of our October book picks (yes, I'm announcing that now, Cupcakes!).

While it might be fun to check out Emily Post's early attempts at fiction before she became the maven of good manners, I'm still smarting from disappointment over Stella Gibbons and Cold Comfort Farm. At this point I don't want to risk another unknown for a book club pick. Maybe there's a reason none of Gibbons' many other novels are not in print now!

Word has it, though, that there is a great film version of Cold Comfort Farm. I think I'm the only one who hasn't seen this movie, which has become a cult hit. Now that I am nearly through the novel I don't know what I was waiting for -- certainly there is no worry of having the book ruined for me. That horse is already out of the barn.

Well at least now I'll get all those Seth and Reuben jokes! And a movie date will be fun, too. There have always been Cupcakes at Bee's Wing Farm.