"Lava Cameo" of Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland (1944-  )

On Monday our reading is "Lava Cameo," the first chapter of the Irish poet Eavan Boland's memoir Object Lessons.  The piece tells the story of her grandmother, born Mary Ann Sheils, who died in 1909 at the age of 31 in Dublin, leaving behind a husband and five daughters, of whom the youngest was Eavan Boland's mother. Interwoven with Mary Ann's story is the tempestuous history of modern Ireland. Embedded within these narratives is Eavan Boland's own struggle to find her voice as a poet.  She contends women have always been "objects" of poetry. They've been idealizations (for example, "muses"). As a result, Boland writes, "I found my poetry and my sexuality on a collision course." How is she to transcend that tradition to create authentic poetry, made by a real-life contemporary woman?

"The Smallest Woman in the World," by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

At this coming Monday's meeting, we'll take a look at Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's short story "The Smallest Woman in the World."

I've prepared a visual map of the story. In it you see that Lispector gives us two parallel narratives. They are (1) the story of French explorer Marcel Pretre and his amazing find, a 45-cm-tall and pregnant African pygmy woman whom Pretre dubs "Little Flower," and (2) the reactions of multiple readers of a Sunday newspaper supplement in which a photograph of Little Flower has been published.

My map serves as an x-ray of the bones of the story.  To get a feel for the organs, muscles and skin, we must immerse ourselves in Lispector's lush dense prose.

The comment by the final voice in the story, while "folding her newspaper in determination," is a real zinger at the end, and we'll talk about it.

Here is Tom's "Reader's Aid".  You can click on it to get an expanded view:

Poetry of Lisel Mueller

On Monday evening we take up four poems by the modern American poet Lisel Mueller: "Joy," "The Power of Music to Disturb," "Immortality," and "Into Space."

She was born Lisel Neumann in 1924 in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1939.  In a PBS interview, Mueller stated, "By the time I started writing, English was almost like a first language for me.  I never wrote in German.  This gave me an advantage .... it made me more conscious."  

Mueller won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for her volume of new and collected poems, Alive Together.  Read the interview she gave the NewsHour after the announcement of the prize here.

Join us on Monday evening!

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" elicited many responses from readers when it was first published in the New Yorker in June of 1948. Jackson received about 150 letters that summer alone, and many more in the years to come. The majority of these letters were neither positive nor negative in tone.  They were instead expressions of bafflement concerning the message Jackson was trying to convey.

According to an excellent new biography of Jackson, Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (Liveright Publishing, 2016), a New Yorker staffer named Kipp Orr was charged with replying to these readers. Franklin's book has the following excerpt from the standard letter Orr sent to readers:

"It seems to us that Miss Jackson's story can be interpreted in a half dozen different ways. It's just a fable ... she has chosen a nameless little village to show in microcosm, how the forces of belligerence, persecution, and vindictiveness are in mankind, endless and traditional, and that their targets are chosen without reason."

I love both Orr's use of the New Yorker editorial voice, ("it seems to us") and his assertion of "a half dozen" different interpretations. No more and no less?!?  I'm looking forward to hearing how many we can come up with this Monday evening, at the Huntington Public Library.

Coping in Hard Times: Kawabata's "First Snow on Fuji"

19th-c rendering of Noh drama.

Our May 22^nd meeting was devoted to Kawabata’s short story “First Snow on Fuji,” in which two former lovers, Jiro and Utako, reunite to take an overnight journey to Hakone, located in an area famous for its mineral baths.

Their relationship years earlier during the Second World War had resulted in the birth of a child, who was put up for adoption and then died.  When Jiro and Utako talk about the child on their journey to Hakone, Utako, the mother of the child, appears to have repressed the memory altogether.  Jiro, on the other hand, is ridden with guilt.  At one point in the conversation he blurts out, “We killed that child,” and immediately afterwards regrets having said it.

One of our participants pointed out a moving passage later in the story. During the war, Jiro fled Tokyo and rented a room in the nearby countryside, in Musashino. A teacher of Noh chanting had also relocated to Musashino, and gave lessons to the priest of the local temple. Noh is an ancient Japanese performance art that combines singing, instrumentation, dance, and drama.  Jiro enjoyed watching their rehearsals. 

He tells Utako, “It struck me as peculiar and also as pretty amazing that they would go on hitting drums and playing flutes even as we were losing the war, you know?  I mean – there probably wasn’t anything else they could do, but still … you and I didn’t even have enough willpower left to think like that – to realize that there was nothing left for us to do but play our flutes.” 

Utako replies, “…you and I should have been playing our flutes together. Things ended up like this because we weren’t.” (Michael Emmerich translation)

Yasunari Kawabata

I once heard the great Long Island author Nelson Demille speak at the BookExpo in New York City.  He fielded some questions, and one audience member asked a question about the work habits Demille employed to bring his latest book to light.

“Ah,” Demille answered, “a question about the writing process!”

Monday evening’s discussion will be on the story “First Snow on Mount Fuji,” by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972).  Above is a photograph of Kawabata at work.  Need I say any more about Kawabata’s “writing process”?

Let the photo serve as a clue to the beauty, hidden or otherwise, in this story.

Chekhov's "The Darling"

You are sitting next to a stranger on an airplane. What, according to the self-help experts, is a surefire way to engage such individuals in conversation?  By guiding them along to talk about themselves and what they do!

Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Darling” is a character sketch of Olenka (“Olenka” is an alternate form of the name “Olga”).  She has successive romantic relationships with Kukin the theatrical producer, Pustovalov, the timber agent, and  Smirnin the verterinarian.  Chekhov writes, “she wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason, that would give her ideas an object in life and would warm her old blood.”

Olenka becomes so absorbed with her lovers, however, that she appears to have no self of her own.  For example, after her first husband Kukin dies and she marries Pustovalov, she has no time for the frivolity of the theater, because she has become so immersed in the timber business.  She even dreams about 2 by 4’s!

At our April 27^th discussion of this story, one participant wondered if Olenka is classifiable with a particular psychological syndrome.  Another compared her to Woody Allen’s character Zelig, a person who took on the characteristics of every person with whom he became familiar.  A third opined that Chekhov might be questioning whether it's right for us to esteem original thinkers more than those influenced by the ideas of others.  Olenka has empathy for others, and Chekhov's story shows empathy for Olenka.