Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope

Prepared by Sue B

Our first novel of the year was "our" classic for the year, though, you never know, we may do another! It was Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, which was published in 1857and is the second book in The Chronicles of Barsetshire series, aka The Barchester Chronicles. It is set in an imaginary English Cathedral town. As always, we started with our ...

First impressions

• Loved it. Couldn’t resist also rewatching the 1982 BBC TV series filmed in Peterborough, whose excellent cast did full justice to Trollope’s wonderful characters
• Didn’t finish it because read The warden first. The church background was very complex. It was wordy but witty. The deliberately heavy-handed naming of people was fun.
• Loved the engagement with the reader and the ironic tone but preferred The warden which was sweeter.
• Really enjoyed it. The characters were vivid and entertaining. It was hard to find a Kindle version in English.
• Hadn’t previously read it and found it different to anything else we have read. After reading most of it, listened to the last 25% of an audio play which “coloured” the characters. Preferred the “black and white” of the printed text. Loved it, and felt there was much to unpack.
• Only half-way through and enjoying it.
• Loved the wry comments. Not much plot, and the whole thing revolves around very little. Imagined Salisbury Cathedral. Found it hard to get into at first and glossed over the first few chapters. Grew up in High Church Sydney – it brought back memories.
• Love Hardy, but just getting into this when family events interrupted reading.
• Had read it in the 70s. Different to Hardy is more wordy in his landscape description. Liked the authorial voice in Trollope. Loved the satire and comments on life at the time.

Further discussion

Our conversation ranged widely and jumped around, including the following:

• Why write six novels set in a Cathedral Close? Because it is close to government? The politics of the Anglican Church are prominent in the novel, so it was suggested that a guide to Anglican church hierarchy might help us to understand the structure. Dr. Grantly missed out on being made Bishop because of a change of government. 
• The novel was written not long after the Oxford Movement, which was a religious movement in the Anglican Church which focused on High Church, emphasising its Catholic heritage. It led to Newman and others becoming Catholics. In the novel the High Church faction is represented by Dr Grantly, who recruits Mr. Arabin (who had been a follower of Newman) for support against the Low Church or Evangelical faction represented by Mr. Slope and Mrs. Proudie. There’s not much theology in the book, but much poking fun at the Church politics. We discussed that at that time the church tended to be a career rather than a calling. Mr. Harding’s principles were often amusingly in the way of Dr. Grantly’s pragmatism. 
• The warden and Barchester Towers also comment on the role played by newspapers in manipulating public opinion.

As you’d expect the novel reflects the attitudes of its time. There was some degree of sexism, for example Mrs. Bold being referred to as “a delicate creeper [which] has found its strong wall”, and we felt that Dr. Grantly had been highly mysoginistic in his treatment of her. Yet, the novel also has many strong women such as Mrs Grantly, Mary Bold, Signora Neroni, not to mention the formidable Mrs. Proudie and even Mrs Quiverful. It was clear that while the men held the official positions, their wives worked unpaid at the Sunday Schools and held a lot of power behind the scenes. It was noted that in the Trollope family the author’s mother (the highly successful novelist Fanny Trollope) had earned most of the money.

We also noted some occasional antisemitism.

We enjoyed the humorous descriptions of life at the time. An example is Mrs. Thorne’s garden party where she tries to keep some Feudal traditions going, such as the quintain for jousting practice where Harry Greenacre came to grief. The social hierarchy at the time meant that everyone fitted in their appropriate place, except the appropriately named Lookalofts who were dressed up and determined to dine with the gentry instead of in the field with the other farmers. They're mocked by the Greenacres for being “half nekid’ and wasting money on pianos and silk instead of stock for their farm. Mrs. Bold’s widow’s cap became less obvious over time. A sign that she was ready to get back into life again? Mrs. Clantantram wears a Rocquelore. So much was made of it that we googled to find out that it was an 18th century man’s cloak. Characters were really amusingly described, e.g. Miss Thorne: “Had she not been made throughout of the very finest whalebone, rivetted with the best Yorkshire steel..”

We discussed Trollope as an author. He was wordy, as were other Victorian authors. One example shared was: "Should the bishop now be re-petticoated, his thraldom would be complete and forever".

He assumed that his audience had a classical education. He also took the audience into his confidence, for example with the plot spoiler that Eleanor would not, in the end, marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. Would we have enjoyed the story more if we had not known this? We thought not. One member said “I love it when the author talks to me”. It was commented that Jane Austen did it too while Dickens did not. Trollope references Fielding in the novel. Did he see himself in that tradition? Fielding had larger-than-life characters but Trollope's are more subtle? Did he kill off John Bold so that Eleanor’s relationship with her father could be the focus?

What did Trollope believe?

We wondered what Trollope himself really believed. Most of the characters are reasonably well-rounded and shrewdly observed. Mr. Quiverful, for example, is torn between being offered the much-needed Wardenship, and feeling bad about Mr. Harding. Mr. Slope and Mrs. Proudie are mostly presented in a very unsympathetic light, but they were right about the Wardenship. Mr. Harding did not need it as much as Mr. Quiverful did.

We were told when they first came back from Italy that the Stanhopes were cold, manipulative people. But they were fun, and in the end behaved with honesty and even kindliness. Did Trollope change his mind about them?

In the last paragraph we celebrate Mr. Harding, “a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach”. Maybe that’s the answer?

Present: 9 Minervans

Anton Chekhov's The lady with the little dog

When organising our meeting schedules, we like to mix it up every now and then. It keeps us fresh and on the ball! And so it was that in July, we did something a little different - a classic short story recommended by a member because it had been referenced in a Quarterly Essay! The short story was Anton Chekhov's classic, "The lady with the little dog", which, as we discovered in our various editions, goes by various names, such as "The lady with the lap dog", "The lady with the dog", "The lady with the pet dog". The Quarterly Essay that inspired our member was Issue 72, published earlier this year, and written by Sebastian Smee. Its title is Net loss: The inner life in the digital age. This was not obligatory reading for the meeting, and there had been an initial mix-up about which work had inspired the Chekhov recommendation, but some did manage to read (or listen to) all or some of it.

Many of us read the Chekhov's story in different editions - including different Penguin editions, and a Pushkin one - which comprised different collections of stories, not to mention different translations.

First impressions

As always we started with some first impressions:

• Enjoyed Chekhov's writing, particularly his understated style.
• Found the link with Smee's article concerning the idea of the "self" and how we define the "self" interesting.
• Read several of the stories, and found many to be funny, about behaving badly; liked the story "Grief"
• Agreed with the emailed comment by one of the absent members regarding Chekhov's use of irony.
• Enjoyed the short concise vignettes of Russian life contained in the stories.
• Not generally a big fan of short stories, but did enjoy these.
• Enjoyed the Conversations podcast in which Richard Fidler interviewed David Gillespie on "How the iPhone rewrote the teenage brain" (which, in the above-mentioned mix-up, had been initially noted as the work referencing Chekhov!)
• Read several short stories, and found them good to read in her post-broken limb "drugged state"! Loved how Chekhov gets us immediately into the stories, establishing his characters with just a few words. Enjoyed the humour in "A misfortune", for example.
• Doesn't really like short stories, but did read this, and watched some of the Russian adaptation of the story via You Tube.
• Was interested in the idea of the "inner" and "outer" life, as expressed by the character Gurov, and taken up by Smee in his essay.

More discussion

The story concerns an adulterous affair between a 40-year-old man, Gurov, and a younger woman, Anna, who meet while holidaying, without their respective spouses, in Yalta. Given the story was recommended because it had been referenced in an essay about social media and the Internet, one member pointed out how much harder it would have been to have such an affair in the pre-digital age, particularly to continue it after both had returned to their home cities. It would be much easier now, said our member, to organise assignations via social media than it would have been then when letters, for example, could fall into the wrong hands!

We wondered about the significance of the dog, given it plays no significant part in the story. One member suggested it symbolised Gurov becoming her lap dog? That seemed a reasonable idea.

The story is about love, and boredom. Gurov and Anna seek to feel alive, both being dissatisfied with their spouses. Gurov's marriage was an arranged one to someone who sees herself as "a thinking woman" but who "makes love insincerely", while Anna sees her husband as "no more than a lackey" or "flunky" (depending on your translation!). She wants "to live". Gurov initially sees his seduction of and relationship with Anna as a bit of a fling, not expecting to care when she returns home to St Petersburg, but after he returns to Moscow, he realises that he's been touched by her. He finds that his outer life is constraining him, that:

Those pointless business affairs and perpetual conversations – always on the same theme – were commandeering the best part of his time, his best strength, so that in the end there remained only a limited, humdrum life, just trivial nonsense.

At this point, we listened to the opening minutes of the audio version of Smee's essay, which led us to talk about this "inner life", from several angles.

Smee's article is about the incursions of social media into our lives. He starts by suggesting that these apps only know "superficial stuff" about him, that they can't know his "inner life", which leads him to wonder what, in fact, this inner life is - and he turns to a Chekhov quote from his notebooks:

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth - such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club... his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities - all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. (? translator)

One member asked whether we thought we had "inner lives" to which the majority of us said, yes. We all have inner lives, we thought, and further, we also felt that we can never really understand another person's inner life.

We expect to learn about inner lives in literature. We talked about true cores and sham exteriors. One member liked Smee's discussion that the self exists in relation to others:

... domestic life is like, isn’t it? Inner lives rubbing up against one another, for better or for worse.

And so, of course, we talked about social media apps, and how much they really know about who we are from the information we make available to them (that they gather from us by various, sometimes nefarious, means.) We talked about Smee's question regarding whether we are becoming habituated to providing information about, or creating performances of, ourselves, on social media, and whether this will change, fundamentally, who we are, who our "selves" are.  This led also to some discussion of Gillespie's ideas on how social media is impacting the teenage brain.  One shared some research done in which some participants did not access Facebook for some time, while the others did. The outcome was that those NOT on Facebook were happier because they didn't know what they were missing.

We returned to an issue mentioned during First Impressions, which was whether we like short stories?A couple said they don't particularly because they feel that just when they've got into a story, it's over, although one made some exceptions (like Alice Munro's short stories). Others of us liked them for various reasons: for their ability to encapsulate an idea or feeling succinctly and often with real punch; for the fact that they are easy to slot into busy lives with minimal reading time and yet provide that readerly lift that we all like!

A couple of members would have liked to have talked more about the Smee article, and we thought that, in fact, we could consider scheduling a Quarterly Essay sometime, because they can offer a lot of meat for discussion.

The evening started with a delicious vegan meal cooked and served by member Janet, who is soon to leave us for that state south of us. We'll miss her engaged discussions, but it's never bad to have friends scattered over the continent! Thanks Janet, anyhow, for a lovely treat. It was special.

Present: 7 members (with winter escapees and colds, taking their respective toll)

Mary McCarthy's The group

Prepared by Sylvia

Mary MacCarthy’s The group  was a controversial novel published in 1963. It was on the American best seller list for almost 2 years according to Wikipedia. Our ‘group’ of 9 older women (older than the characters, that is) mostly enjoyed it and were pleased to either read it again or for the first time.

SPOILER IN THIS PARA - BUT IT IS A CLASSIC!

Mary McCarthy (1912-89) was a Vassar girl who graduated in 1933. She wrote more than 20 books and The group was her fifth. It tells the story of 8 girls who have just graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and are all excited to start their adult lives. It begins with Kay and Harald’s wedding which they all attend. Each girl is discussed for a short period of her life (mostly dealing with their sex lives and their hopes and opportunities) before moving onto another girl. It ends with Kay’s tragic death and her funeral, which the other seven also attend, as does her profligate ex-husband. These girls are dealing with the middle-class problems of their generation – unfaithful men, work, babies, parents. Many of these issues have hardly improved, we felt.

As is our practice, we started with our …

First impressions

• Read it when I was 13 or 14 and didn’t understand it, but now I do
• Loved it
• Characters so precisely done 
• Some difficult prose and unusual words – needed a dictionary  
• Loved the stories coming together with the beginning wedding and closing funeral providing the structure
• Loved the precise grammar
• Loved the episodic nature of the book showing lives of the women
• Very modern in style
• Didn’t expect it to be so witty, even evident in the tragic scenes such as when Kay was being committed to a mental institution by her husband
• Loved the humour
• Didn’t mind that there wasn’t a plot – Kay was the linking character throughout the stories
• Has wonderful characters such as Mrs Davison, and Polly’s father
• Marvellous novel, thought it would be salacious but it was satiric 
• A bit tedious but I really liked a few of the characters such as Lakey
• Some men miss the point in women’s novels, such as Norman Mailer’s criticism of Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy’s memoirs are good reads too: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs .

Characters

The eight women in the group are Kay, Polly, Dottie, Lakey (Elinor), Libby, Pokey (Mary), Priss and Helena. They are based on McCarthy’s own classmates and she claims that she ‘suffered’ for the rest of her life for ‘using’ them. 

These girls were romantic but also naïve.

‘… they had something to contribute to our emergent America …they could see the good that Roosevelt was doing despite what Mother and Dad said;’ (loc 241 in Kindle).

They strove for a path for themselves but sometimes we only see them through their partner’s eyes.

Harald (Kay's husband): an awful character so we loved that he was put in his place at Kay’s funeral. We felt he deserved it. 

Kay: didn’t have talent but she liked to be superior and couldn’t let go. She believed in Harald and thought that he would have a stellar career in theatre. ‘She loved Harald’s risus sardonicus, as Helena Davison’s mother called it.’ (1192 Kindle)

Libby: we felt sorry for Libby when she had an awkward interview with a publisher.  She couldn’t take the hint that she couldn’t write well enough. She was a gossip, and unkind about her friends, such as Dottie, and was also cruel about the lovely Polly. A cold person. We felt she was the shallowest character. However, we were also distressed for her when she was assaulted by a boyfriend. 

Dottie: her deflowering sex scene in chapter 2 caused most of the book's controversy in the 1960s, but was much less shocking when reading it today. McCarthy handles the scene with humour and wit.  

Polly: we all liked Polly best. She is described "a sympathetic soul". We weren't impressed by Polly’s mother offloading her sick and elderly husband onto her daughter, and just sending an occasional box of eggs. 

Lakey: develops confidence in her years in Europe and ‘the group’ also grow to accept her and her evident sexual divergence from them.

Priss: rears a child according to the theories being developed by her paediatrician husband Sloan who uses her as an experiment. We all remembered the horrendous, rigid, methods suggested – only picking up a baby at a set time.

Norine: a Vassar 33 girl too, who is not a part of the group but is friendly with some of them. She is a counterpoint for some of the other characters, such as Kay, and Priss, who discovers their child-rearing practices are diametrically opposed.

We also discussed Helena Davison’s family, particularly Mrs Davison and the butler Hatton who would read the newspaper so he could give the news to Mrs Davison. It reminded one member of passages in Jane Austen.

We discussed how their Vassar education encouraged them to think but society did not allow them to operate as intelligent people. There were a couple of scholarship girls but most of them didn’t have to make a living, so they did volunteer work. Some characters felt that they were ruined by the college education, with Norine saying "our Vassar education made it tough for me to accept my womanly role". We noted how, in Australia at least, women were often not allowed to work once they were married.  

Were the girls as different from their parents as they had hoped when they left Vassar in 1933? They varied in their politics, some being more Democrat and some more Republican.

The American poet Robert Lowell thought that these Vassar girls were ‘pastoral girls’ and ‘cloistered’. He wrote to Mary McCarthy that 

“we were dependable little machines made to mow the lawn, then suddenly turned out to clear wilderness”. Leave it to the poet to know an elegy when he sees it. Flowers of the culture, these young women, but shot from a gun.’ (Vanity Fair review, 2013)  

Some felt that the main "group" in the book was Polly’s "group" – one of her communities - and that the eight were only the Vassar group when it suited them? Was there a lot of contact outside of the wedding and the funeral? It wasn't completely clear.

Some of the characters exist to be counterpoint to others, like Norine, who isn’t part of the group. This shows how people are multi-faceted.

McCarthy deals with universal themes – jobs, love, marriage - so that although it's an old book now, it doesn't appear dated.

Similarities with other novels

A comparison was made with Edith Wharton who wrote about young women living in New York in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Her young women, like McCarthy's, were striving for satisfying lives but were constricted.

Another member saw a similarity with Frank Moorhouse’s Grand days - the idealism of the Roosevelt days versus the idealism of the creation of the League of Nations.

Other comments

We noted the smoking scenes – even in hospital! So much change in half a century!

One member particularly liked the ‘bagging’ of the Freudian analysis done on Kay. McCarthy was also admitted to hospital by her partner, Edmund Wilson, in a similar way to Kay’s admission. 

Mary McCarthy had a tough childhood living with her grandparents. She developed a close relationship with her female Latin teacher. Mary was an intensely bright girl and tried relentlessly to do well. She was inspired by her teacher to compete and became very driven. (This is shown by her amazing output of novels and of literary criticism). She made money from her novel The Group, and in fact made more money than Norman Mailer, her fierce critic.

In one review McCarthy was praised as an acute novelist, like Doris Lessing, but others criticised the book for not having a plot and attempting too much. 

One reader also commented that the author reminded her of the Australian academic Jill Kerr Conway who worked at Smith College in mid 20th century and wrote the revealing memoir Road from Coorain.

It was recommended that we watch the Mary McCarthy program, Vassar Girl 1933-74 on YouTube.

Present: 9 members

Howards end by E M Forster

Nine of us gathered to talk about the classic for 2018 – Howard’s End by the English writer E. M. Forster. This book was televised in 2017 and has been in print since its first publication in 1910.

The story concerns a family of siblings, Margaret and Helen and brother Tibby, whose parents are deceased but the children are fortunate to have independent means. They live in London. The novel revolves around their relationships with a rich family, the Wilcoxes and a young poor man, Leonard Bast.  It is the Schlegel’s connectedness with various strata of middle class society that interests the author. The main characters treat the young man with varying degrees of care and acceptance. They treat the rich family as inferiors in intellect but learn over time to accept them as they are and Margaret, the eldest sibling eventually marries the widowed Henry Wilcox and lives with him and her younger sister, Helen at Howard’s end. It is not a usual romance but comments on Edwardian society. There is a lot more going on than just the story of the romance.

The general opinion from our group was of enjoyment but with reservations for some readers. One felt it was quite stodgy. One member felt it was like looking at the society from the top. Another reader was disappointed that she had watched the TV serial first before reading it as that influenced her images of the settings and the characters. Some members believed that their expectations were so high that the relationships didn’t seem convincing. This was particularly the relationship of Margaret to Henry Wilcox. What did she see in him ?

The discussion mainly revolved around two main subjects – the involvement of the period in the text and similarities with other novels.

The Edwardian period

Forster is truly insightful in regard to class in England pre World War 1 and how regimented it was even in the halcyon days of the Edwardian period.  For instance, the very formal (somewhat tortured ) relationship between Mr Bast and Helen and Margaret. He just wants a bit of romance in his life -- to think about books and to take his mind off the daily grind of work while they keep wanting to talk to him about the practical realities of his life.  They don’t have to experience mundane work as they are wealthy women. There is an inherent conflict between the parties from the moment Helen absentmindedly picks up his umbrella at a concert. It starts the fractured relationship. Strangely the relationship with the Wilcoxes also gets off to a rocky start with Helen again starting it by visiting this family and doing the wrong thing by falling in love very suddenly with the young son. All too quick and too spontaneous and without due regard for society’s norms. She is lucky though to have an elderly aunt to spring to her defence. Although that ends in humiliation for all concerned.

Women’s suffrage was a current obsession in the early 1900s and the two main women were not actually involved but were aspiring young women, keen to have an opinion on matters. Margaret in particular is often credited with being intellectual. We all appreciated the handling of gender in this tome. Women were beginning to run their own lives and the young Schlegel women certainly did. They had agency as they had money unlike the girls in Sense and Sensibility.

One member thought the new developments in art and culture at the time such as the Art Nouveau movement affected middle class culture and sensibilities. People were beginning to express themselves in new ways.

The rich could have various houses and an arrogance to live their lives as they pleased, including treating their kids harshly.  The historic world of England with very set classes was vanishing.

Another feature of life at the time was the love of all things German – particularly music and philosophy and for Germany itself. The main characters are the children of a German army officer who migrated to England and they first meet the Wilcoxes during a visit to Germany. Their main interests seem to be German music and an intellectual life through reading and discussions with like-minded people. Helen lives in Germany for a period while she is estranged from her family.

The issue of class is of prime interest through the novel. Some of us felt it was tongue-in-cheek at times, especially in regard to the lower class:

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only approachable by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk. (Chapter 6, p. 46)

The issue of homosexuality is also in this novel. Forster was a gay writer but of course it was hidden from public view. Now we can see it more clearly. Apparently he was a virgin until he was 34, living with his mother. We decided that Tibby was not gay but that is debatable. There is little evidence either way.

One member was knowledgeable about the origin of the house in Howard’s end – it is based on a house called Rooksnest in Hertfordshire where Forster lived from 1883 to 1893, which was owned by a family called Howard.

More information can be found in Wikipedia. 

Similarities with other novels and helpful texts on the period

E M Forster was part of the Bloomsbury set and understood his characters well.  One Minervan was keen for us to know about a couple of books about this group of authors and intellectuals. One useful text is A S Byatt’s The children’s book and the another is: The world broke in two by B Goldstein (and published by Bloomsbury).

We discussed the way intellectuals and people in this period were often very formal in their relationships, even with their children, and often neglected them and their care was left to nannies or boarding schools. At least two of us had fathers who were treated in this fashion in their youth. This reminded one member of the new film Vita and Virginia (2018)

  

Similarities with other writers were seen with Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Marianne does share traits with Helen Schlegel – both flighty, romantic and dreamy while Margaret Schlegel is the practical one somewhat similar to Elinor Dashwood. There are some silly co-incidences too which also occur in Austen’s novel. These explain some of Margaret’s motivations.

Forster was criticizing the ‘intellectual class’ in a subtle way. Leonard Bast was the most problematic character reflecting changes of attitude. He is a result of urbanization and the lack of access to education by people living on the edge of the middle class. We concluded that Bast is a case study. His untimely death was symbolic. England needed to deal with these people. We were astonished that Charles Wilcox thought he could get away with the killing but his father realized that would not be the case.

This novel reflects England and the changes happening. Bast and his wife are not fully developed as characters. We thought it was ironic that Helen Schlegel made money from her shares after offering the money to Lionel Bas who refused to accept it.

The treatment of Helen’s baby reminded us of The strays by Emily Bitto based on the lives of John and Sunday Reed in Melbourne and their property called Heide. Here artists lived selfish lives and allowed children to be neglected. Forster is not interested in Helen’s child, it is just symbolic. He concentrates on the Schlegels and Wilcoxes. Margaret and Helen are delightfully English in their slight eccentricities, intellectually arty and creative. So there are many aspects of Forster’s own life in this novel.

Other features

There are long passages about the English countryside. Forster contrasts the Wilcoxes who bought property without much care versus the romantic environment as shown by Howards End, a house originally owned by the first Mrs Wilcox. This house was picturesque and romantic and attracted the Schlegel girls with its big wych-elm tree. Here is a lovely description of the country:

Margaret was fascinated by Oniton … the rivers hurrying down ... the carelessly modelled masses of the lower hills, thrilled her with poetry. The house was insignificant, but the prospect from it would be an eternal joy… (Chapter 26, p. 227)

Margaret is the romantic who loves poetry and connects country living with that concept while the Wilcoxes are prose oriented and more oriented to the town. It also has to do with emotions – prose versus pastoral poetry. Although Forster was sympathetic to the Schlegel’s view of cultural life he is also disenchanted with it. Someone has to do business so it is the more practical Wilcox family who supply the money and the stability provided. So Forster humanizes Business.  

We also talked about the original Mrs Wilcox – did she know about Henry’s affair with Jacky who later became Mrs Bast. In the film production Mrs Bast is depicted as a black woman.

This reminded us of Aunt Juley and her arrival at Howards End at the beginning of the novel which turned out to be embarrassing for all concerned, but especially for Helen Schlegel. The timing was exciting.

During this train trip we get a glimpse of the countryside and how it was just on the edge of the urbanization of London. 

She traversed the immense viaduct whose arches span untroubled meadows and the dreamy flow of Tewin Water. She skirted the parks of politicians. At times the Great North Road accompanied her more suggestive of infinity than any railway awakening after a nap of a hundred years, to such life as is conferred by the stench of motor-cars… (Chapter 3, p13).

The Wilcox family were the pragmatic developers of nations – as evidenced by Henry’s wealth coming from rubber in Africa.  At the end of the novel Margaret takes control of the terrible situation – Charles’ murderous action and Henry’s collapse. Margaret had played the submissive wife until that point. The younger generation were taking over.  We felt that Charles had always been bullied by his father and so was not a true representative of his generation. His father had constantly asserted his authority over him. His wife Dolly though was a great character and was the surprising one who told the Schlegel women the truth about Howards End and how it had been bequeathed to Margaret.

We were charmed by the fairy-like nature of Miss Avery and how she set up the house with the Schlegel books and furniture and the sword which proved so dangerous. We felt that Howards End house gave the book a sense of place and was a connection to place, whereas life was in flux for the Schlegels in all the other places they lived. They were very sad to leave their London house in Wickham Place as they had been raised there.  It was also a sign that London was changing. 

One member was keen for us to see all the references to grey in the novel – grey skies, grey economic future and grey showing spiritual poverty – metaphorical of course.

We all appreciated Forster’s succinct and masterful language. He was extremely good at ‘nailing a point’. One prime example was when he is talking about moving house in chapter 17. 'The age of property holds bitter moments even for a proprietor...' (p 156)  

We completed our discussion by talking about Margaret and Henry and their relationship. She turned out to be the strong one and very loving and she could also be uplifting. He was the decisionmaker and grounded her.  

PRESENT: 9 members

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow

Tuesday 26 June 2018

Nine of us, a surprisingly large number for mid-winter, gathered for this discussion. The book, Randolph Stow's The merry-go-round in the sea, is semi-autobiographical, and concerns an extended family on sheep stations, especially in Geraldton, Western Australia. Rob is just six years old in 1941 when his adored cousin Rick leaves to join the army. Rick returns from the war much changed, and Rob is changing too. Most of us had read the whole book, and almost all of us loved it. Our initial responses included: “Delightful, fantastic, immersive”; ”Old fashioned, Rob seems too aware for his age”; “Beautifully structured”; “felt very alive – good read”; “All your senses are engaged”. It certainly gave us a great deal to talk about.

Some of us found the use of racist language disturbing. The book was published in 1965, many years after the Second World War, and language and attitudes to Aborigines and people of other races were already changing. We wondered if Stow put the harsh words in the mouths of his characters repeatedly to contrast them with Rob’s more sympathetic attitude to some Aborigines he knew, for example older children that he admired. They talk about the “Hand Cave”, and on questioning, even Rob’s Mother’s attitude seems much more moderate than the language she uses to describe Aborigines. While necessarily reflecting the language used at the time, is the author subtly calling the racism to account? Stow, and Rob, seem to love the landscape of Australia while deploring some of the values. “If I had Convict or Aboriginal blood I’d be related to everyone in Australia” “Except the Italians!” There seems to be a similar subtle questioning around the casual killing of animals which was very much part of rural life at the time.

We all loved the poetic writing and detailed descriptions and felt that the landscape was part of the emotional language of the book, giving a vividly strong sense of place. One of us was reminded of Camus’s The outsider - at one with the environment and with a deep sense of the person. The way that the description of landscape underlies the mood of the book was described as masterly, for example the landscape is very bleak when the family wonders whether Rick has been killed in the war. We were grateful for the brilliant, detailed, involving description of the droving trip, an iconic Australian experience which seems distant now.  We also loved the quotes of poetry from the school books and the popular music of the time which really grounded it in the period.

The humour was appreciated. Auntie Kay is knitting socks, and is “aware of the sock situation in outlying parts of the family”.

The book was felt to be satisfying as a coming-of-age story, but seemed much more complex. Rob, a precociously aware six-year-old, certainly matures considerably and along the way we get many insights into the maturing process. We discussed the relationship between Rob and Rick. One commented that Rick was all the more important as a role model for Rob as Rob’s own father seemed to suffer from Depression and was emotionally distant, except for one powerful scene. Rob agonises over the criticisms aimed at Rick when he returns, damaged, from the War, almost as though they are criticisms of Rob himself. Is Rob the young Randolph or is it Rick? It was decided that they are two parts of the author’s self. Rick seems to be in a dark place towards the end of the book, and Randolph Stow had a nervous breakdown while in New Guinea.

Why was Rob often described as “the boy” and his mother as “the mother”? Was this a way of universalising their experience?  In Tourmaline the narrator is known simply as “the law”.

One of us found the scenes between Rick and his girlfriend unconvincing, but then the relationship didn’t survive. Randolph Stow was gay, which usually wasn't talked about in the 60's any more than during the war.

We noticed the relatively restrained descriptions of the prisoner of war experience by today’s standards, and wondered whether this reflected the characteristic reticence of returned prisoners at the time. Maybe there was less understanding of what they had experienced than came out later? At the time POWs were not considered heroes, one of many things which seem to eat at Rick.  As the second son he was not needed to run the farm, and his decision to leave the country, while it came as a shock to Rob, was not uncommon among tertiary educated youth at the time who found Australia stifling.

Was the Merry-Go-Round a symbol of no change? Rob wanted things to stay the same even as he could see that things were changing. Is the Merry-Go-Round metaphor echoed in the quote from Donne which Rick wrote in Rob’s autograph book when he returned home after the War? He had been much affected by the post card which Rob had sent him, the only post that he received at all during his imprisonment:

Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I began

By the end of the book Rob’s imagined Merry-go-Round in the Sea has crumbled into the sea. One commented that the ending was a bit clunky compared to the rest of the book. Many of us felt that Randolph Stow is underrated these days, and want to read Tourmaline now.

PRESENT: 10 members (the tenth arriving late!)