Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows

Rebecca West is one of the seemingly limitless number of people who was colossally famous in the 20th century and now seems to be nearly forgotten. As you can see, she was a big enough deal to wind up as the cover story of Time Magazine in 1947. She had a truly remarkable life, living until she was 90. She was a world class journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker, a novelist, a Feminist (she's name checked in Virginia Woolf's a Room of One's Own - I mean, does it get any better than that? Chapter Two, if you're interested), political crank, an intellectual who began her adult life as an actress (her real name was Cicely Fairfield, Rebecca West was the stage name she chose, from Ibsen's Rosmersholm) and all around fascinating person.

Her personal life was equally interesting and varied. She had a decade long affair with the much older H.G. Wells and had a son with him while Wells was still married to somebody else. She feuded with her son their whole lives, one of his grievances being she pretended, in his early years, to be his "aunt". I first saw her when she served as one of the aged talking heads in Warren Beatty's John Reed biopic, Reds.

I'll likely revisit West again on this blog as I read my way through her oeuvre, but here I want to talk about her 1957 semi-autobiographical novel, The Fountain Overflows. I first read it a few years ago and I loved it so much I didn't trust myself. What I mean by that is, I loved it to such a degree I knew I was blinded as to its objective literary worth. I remember knowing after I finished the first chapter, that unless she did something very stupid indeed, this was likely to become one of my all-time favorites. Needless to say, she did nothing stupid whatsoever, so one of my favorites it remains.

If you ask me what it's about, I'd answer: It's about a musical family (The Aubreys) in the first decade of the 20th century with a father who is a political journalist and a compulsive gambler, a mother who is a former concert pianist, three young daughters (one of whom, Rose, is the narrator) and a young son who is some sort of genius and is little more than a baby when the book begins. It is set in the very first years of the 20th century as the Aubrey family moves from Edinburgh to London, and the girls begin to grow up.

I realize this makes The Fountain Overflows sound like the most conventional novel, but it really isn't. If you ask me again what it's about, I would respond: It's about the difference between children and adults and childhood and adulthood, about art and what makes good art and bad art. It's about poverty and how children respond to it differently from each other. It's about women and how they function in a world in which they have very little autonomy, and about how some optimistically make do and how others flail and nearly drown. It's about what it means if one is a real artist and if one isn't. And how hard it is for each. It's about the uncanny and about how men can sometimes simultaneously knowingly destroy their own lives and unknowingly destroy the lives of those who love them. It might be the funniest and smartest book about what people are like that I've ever read.

The twins, Mary and our narrator Rose, are budding concert pianists. Their elder sister, Cordelia plays the violin, and the great tragedy of the Aubrey family is that Cordelia is a terrible musician and does not know it. This is viewed by Rose and Mary as a far worse tragedy than their poverty or their father's inability to hold onto a job. The worst of it is, though she is a competent musician, she just isn't any good. A distinction that is lost on most people, and Cordelia is a pretty little girl who looks charming when she plays, so she receives heaps of praise. This is simultaneously hilarious and awful and is one of the main threads of the story.

Their father is also both wonderful and monstrous. He's a political journalist of very great repute, who gambles and borrows money, who alienates his followers and friends, who cannot suffer fools. His children are all in awe of him and think him the most wonderful man, but there is a thread of nihilism and self-destruction that also frightens them. Near the beginning of the book, when they are all still small, he gives the children a remarkable and magical Christmas in which they receive elaborate toys he's made himself. They love hearing the stories from his childhood, and they watch as strange men come to the house and demand money from their mother for debts unpaid. There is a remarkable passage in which we find out that public opinion has swung against him, and his friends in Parliament think him mad because of a pamphlet he's written in which all the ills of the 20th century are laid out in black and white. It's full of extraordinary passages as Mr. Aubrey's MP friend shares his dismay and horror with Mrs. Aubrey - who knows nothing about politics but everything about music. She tells him that it's possible her husband is a seer because:

"'I am a musician, you know. We find that in the great composers. Much of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven is much more comprehensible than it was when it was first written, or even than it was when I was young. My teachers found Beethoven's later quartets quite baffling. That can only mean he wrote with a full knowledge of a musical universe that was still chaos while he lived.'"

There is a sequence in which Rose visits her cousin Rosamund and her mother in their shabby house and she and her mother discover them besieged by poltergeists. The ghosts or demons or spirits or whatever they are real and awful. But they are immediately and permanently dispelled once the two little girls and their mothers are finally in the same room as each other. Rose's mother, Clare, calls the supernatural a "dirty business" and is not something to be played with. Everyone in the Aubrey family can prognosticate to some degree or another, but it is not viewed as something that should be indulged, and if one does so the after-effects are never good.

Among all the remarkable set pieces in the book is a good old fashioned, Victorian murder. A school friend of the girls' mother poisons her husband and the Aubrey family wind up taking in the little girl and her aunt. The murderess's family are rich, uneducated Cockneys (while the Aubrey's are, of course, painfully over-educated upper class paupers), and West's descriptions of Aunt Lily are very funny. But what's remarkable is that while they are funny, they are neither condescending or sentimental. West manages throughout the book a combination of uncompromising truth telling and extreme kindness that I've never really encountered before. She's never, ever cruel to her characters, though many do awful things or behave badly.

It's really the oddest book. In some ways it's like the books one reads when one is a child, about a family of (mostly) girls, growing up in genteel poverty, who want to be brilliant musicians. I mean, I know that when one describes it, it sounds like a Noel Streatfeild book. And in a surface way it is like that, and I think if I had read it when I was eleven I would have loved it, too, and it's likely one of the reasons for my loving it (and I use that word literally - the things or people I love more than this book I can count on one hand). But as is so often the case when one reads very well at a young age, one misses nearly everything, and I would have loved it without understanding it - which in some ways is so much of what the book is about, as it is as much about being a girl as it is about anything. It has the shape in some ways of a very traditional sort of book written for young people. But, at its core, its a modernist masterpiece with all the pleasures of Victorian fiction. It's not a book for children, but it's very much about what it's like to be a child, and the child narrator is one of the most extraordinary voices I've read. West manages to make her sound the way children feel in their heads, rather than how they are heard by adults. It's often unclear how much time has gone by or how old the children are, it all flows seamlessly without the traditional markers used in more conventional fiction.

Also unconventional is that the book is entirely about the Aubrey family and their home. There are very few scenes which take place at school. There is no romance of a traditional sort in the book. The more I think about it, the more I think The Fountain Overflows might be an extraordinarily complicated, 400 page character study of Clare Aubrey, the girls' mother. Again, in some ways she resembles that perfect mother of our dreams, Marmee from Little Women. He love is what keeps their family from falling into irreparable chaos and misery, and her love and kindness is on offer to pretty much everybody who enters her home, or is swept up in her wake - including a discarded mistress of Mr. Aubrey's and the mistress's husband (meeting whom, causes her to reread Madame Bovary, which makes her forget to be angry at her husband). We see her through her children's eyes and they are fiercely protective of her, as they think they are tougher then she is, as their childhood was far more difficult, but like children reading a grownup novel - they miss the point a bit.

There is a thread of politics that runs through the book, but West is wise enough, or perhaps I only think she is wise as she thinks as I do, that people are more important than politics. And this is book that is about people and about art and about family. Rebecca West writes as well as anybody I've ever read, and better than nearly everyone. Her prose is so clear, so sane and so sharp. Her sentences and paragraphs are long, and like the novel itself, perfectly constructed. As she writes about the Aubrey family and their friends it's as if she's wielding a sharp paring knife, cutting deeper and deeper into the truth of who these people are. Her criticism could be vicious when she was young. Shaw said of her: "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." And here she cuts very deeply indeed, but never thoughtlessly, never unkindly.

In her author's note at the end of the book West writes:

"The main theme of the book might be said to be the way human beings look at each other inquisitively, trying to make out what is inside the opaque human frame. Piers and Clare Aubrey loved each other but never really knew how the other one thought and felt. Mary and Rose were divided from Cordelia and watched each other in irritated misapprehension, and were divided from Richard Quinn and looked at him in hope of comprehension. They were all looking for clues to understanding... But I only wrote this book, which is not to say that I am the best authority on what it means."

Whatever it means, I can say I love the Aubrey family and maybe that's enough meaning, really. West wrote two sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, both still unfinished at her death in 1983. She apparently spent years tinkering with them and never thought them ready for publication. However, they have both been published posthumously, and they both sit on my shelf waiting to be read.

Ghosts and Fairies and Witches and Books: Jo Walton's Among Others

I think I've pretty much decided that the idea of dividing various books up into genres is essentially the work of marketers and not something that artists or writers should have to worry about. As one of my favorite and most world defining quotes puts it: "Humans like categories, nature likes a spectrum". That pretty much sums up my opinions on nearly everything. Taxonomy has taken over the world. Why does everything have to be one thing or another?

Which curmudgeonly paragraph brings me to Jo Walton. She's published by Tor, who publish SciFi and some fantasy. Walton's books include Tooth and Claw, a book about dragons that was greatly inspired by Trollope, and a trilogy of cozy mystery novels set in a alternative history dystopia. In other words, she's pretty much my sort of writer. Her most recent book, Among Others, is just as difficult to pin down. It's an autobiographical coming of age story. It's a boarding school book. It's about grief and loss. It's about fairies. It's about magic. It's about family. But more than anything else, it's about books. Books, books and more books.

The book is told through a series of journal entries (we are told they are written backwards, to keep people from reading them, something I used to occasionally do), written by Mor, fifteen. Her twin sister has recently died (either in a car crash or during a cataclysmic battle between good fairies and their evil witch mother or both - take your pick) and she's been sent to her father and his family who are essentially strangers to her. She misses her extended family and the Welsh valley in which she was raised. She's sent to boarding school, where she is bullied for her less than posh accent and for the cane she must walk with after the accident.

The narration is essentially unreliable and Walton's preamble just muddies the water further:

"So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red busses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."

And there are fairies, at least Mor can see them, or Mor writes that she sees them. I've seen one or two reviews of this book complaining about the magic. That they aren't able to tell what is real and what isn't. Does it matter? Or, possibly, that's the entire point. Walton has been awfully cagey in interviews (casting doubt on parts of her wikipedia bio, too), not giving much away, and good for her. It's funny, the parts that are about Mor going to school and dealing with her family (about whom we get a full but gloriously muddled history), and reading and making friends smack of complete documentary truth. They are immediate and detailed and interesting. The parts about magic and seeing fairies sometimes feel a little uncomfortable. But, the caginess feels intratextual. Mor worries people will think she's crazy or make fun of her more. She doesn't want something that means so much to her ridiculed. Or maybe she is making it up. But I don't think so. I think we should take Walton at her word: The fairies are real.

More about the books. Mor reads science fiction and fantasy with untrammeled abandon and concentration. She writes about what she reads constantly, and she longs for someone to talk about books with. This is a particular kind of loneliness that the existence of the internet has somewhat alleviated. No matter what you are a fan of, you can plug a few searches into google and likely find a few likeminded individuals. But back in the analog past it wasn't so easy. Mor slowly makes friends with her school librarian, finds a science fiction reading group at the local library, and the books are one of the few things she and her father have to talk about. Books are so important to lots of young people, more so to them than anybody. I remember so vividly the ache of it. She writes about reading Tolkien so eloquently and about the problem of Susan and about Heinlein and others. She picks up a copy of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and then four pages later apropos of nothing she says, "Who would have thought Richard the Third didn't actually kill the princes in the tower?", and I fear if you hadn't read Tey's book you wouldn't know what she was talking about.

But I haven't read much SciFi and I didn't miss alot I don't think (but I think I may have read more than I realize, particularly of the pre-80s books that Mor is reading). But Tolkien, I get. And lots more. It's a book about the lonliness of a particular sort of adolescence. An alienated book reading one, not the most original premise as so may of that sort of young person grow up to be authors, but they so rarely actually write about the books themselves and entwine it with the life stuff. Add that to the supernatural and there's something special afoot.

Among Others isn't perfect. It feels a bit unresolved and cagy to the very last. I have a feeling, upon reflection, this might be intentional. Mor is so smart and thinks about everything, maybe not giving feeling much of a chance. I think that might be because of the terrors inherent in feeling, maybe feeling is somehow akin to magic. There are tantalizing hints and bits of information about her mother's madness and about what happened, I mean with the devastation of Mor's sister's death. It almost feels unfinished, but I'm fairly certain Walton doesn't want us to know more. It's one of the strangest choices I've encountered in a book in this age of easy pleasures, I don't know whether it was very, very brave, or a complete failing of nerve. I actually don't know what to think. I really liked this book and so much of it made emotional sense to me with it's strange shying away from larger issues in favor of literature. The more I think about it, the more I think that may have been the point. Now all of you must read it so I have someone to talk about it with.

(This is my 300th post! Whee!)

Boo: Mediums and Mysteries

What wonders hath science begot! Men on the moon! Horseless carriages! The telephone! The photograph! Drugs that eradicate all infection! The mystery of the building blocks of life itself solved! Weapons powerful enough to destroy an entire city!

Oh. Wait.

One of the odder things that came into being in the 19th century was the nearly one-hundred year long craze for spiritualism. Begun during the Second Great Awakening in New York State, the Fox sisters claimed they could communicate with those who had "passed over" to the other side. They conducted seances in which (supposed) loved ones of those present communicated by banging and rapping and moving objects and speaking through one of the ladies who acted as a Medium.

I don't think Spiritualism could have come into being without the concurrent advances in science - proponents of the movement weren't conservative - quite the contrary - they were more likely to be abolitionists and believers in women's suffrage. That is to say: Progressives. If germs suddenly existed, if the images of the world around us could be captured forever by using light and glass, why not the spirits of the dead? Why not indeed? How different would that be from that wonder we call the telephone?

Unfortunately, many (I'm being kind. More likely "most", or even "all") Mediums were frauds, and often cruel ones, praying on the grief stricken who would do or pay anything to speak once again with their dead children or spouses or parents. Probably the most famous debunker of faking Mediums was legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. A couple of months ago, Inamorato, his delightful spawn and I, all trekked up to The Jewish Museum to see their wonderful Houdini Exhibit (through March 27), and they had some of his interesting anti-Spiritualist material on display including his faked Spirit Pictures.

As with almost everything else, my first introduction to Mediums and Spritualism was through the writing of Agatha Christie. One of the first books of hers I read was The Tuesday Club Murders, a series of Miss Marple short stories connected via a framing device. It's always been one of my favorites. One of the stories, "Motive vs. Opportunity" stars what may be my first literary medium, Euridyce Spragg. It's not a murder mystery, but a question of a will (in fact, the book was first published under the title The Thirteen Problems). Miss Spragg has wormed her way into the home of the old and vulnerable (and extremely rich) Simon Clode, by conducting a series of seances in which he can hear the voice of his beloved daughter who died when she was a child.

Christie paints Miss Sprague as a complete fraud. One thing that seems pretty consistant in the portrayals of mediums in the popular fiction of the 20th century (and I've read a lot of it) is that they are viewed as a bunch of crass, avaricious social climbers. Issues of class in Christie's books are always extremely dicey for the modern reader as her views aren't exactly progressive. But she really doesn't like Spiritualists and paints them as being cruel parasites who prey upon the bereaved and alienate their affections for their (living) family members - who in Christie's defense, she also paints as being greedy.

Which is interesting only in that Christie also leaves room for the mystical in her writing. She was a devout Christian and I think the idea that some random person could find the key to the infinite via something so silly as a séance was something she found ludicrous. In other books and stories the other group of people who believe in seances are silly old people with too much time on their hands. In one case (as so little in a Christie mystery goes to waste) supposed ectoplasm coming out of someone's mouth was a major clue. It was a pretty common Christie trick to have the most important information be offered by the silliest and most unreliable of her characters.

Also written in the 1920s, E.F. Benson's book, Lucia in London, the fraudulent medium is mostly played for laughs. The residents of Riceholme become avid fans of "automatic writing", assisted by a spirit guide named Abfou, and get duped and taken by Olga, a very competent con artist. In an earlier book they were all taken in by a guru who turned out to be a curry cook. Benson will be featured in a later post, but he was a great popular writer who has fallen into an unjust obscurity. His Lucia books make fun of the gullible leisure class and are completely hilarious, but he is also one of the greatest writers of ghost stories.

It's interesting to note how after a solid few decades of pure reason, ghosts and the spirit world are one again in vogue, and once again the pathway to the infinite is forged by the trappings of science (as opposed to, like, actual science). Any watcher of basic cable knows the popularity of ghost oriented shows. In Ghost Hunters, a group of young "experts" walk around the haunted tourist destination of the week, recording ambient sound and taking night vision pictures and jumping at noises. TV is full of these shows and they're all incredibly entertaining, but no more real than the ladies in their drawing rooms with clackers taped to their thighs.

Please take a look at the January edition of the Agatha Christie Blog Carnival.

Sleepy Hollow is Still Clearly Haunted

We humans have been artificially scaring ourselves since we were tiny little people who sat crouched in caves telling each other stories waiting for Woolly Mammoth season to begin. The human psyche differs from the animal one most in its ability to comprehend abstractions, which leads to the ability to be both frightened and to know (or at least reasonably assume) that no actual harm will befall one. That's the theory, anyway.


This is the season of plastic masks and candy and slutty vampire nurse costumes all doing service to celebrate what started off as the Celtic celebration of the end of summer, Samhain and the Christian All Saints Day. In other words, it's all about death. Leaves fall, it grows cold and the long winter months begin. Even if you don't find the idea of ghosts and vampires particularly scary, the thought of a rural 16th century winter should scare the bejesus out of you. Like I said, it's all about death.



But back to this, the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. My dashing inamorato and I have been feeding ourselves a steady diet of monster movies, spook houses (well, two) and have an action packed Halloween weekend ahead of us. But mostly I want to talk about the town of Sleepy Hollow and the Horseman's Hollow haunted spook walk. As all of us know, Sleepy Hollow is the small town in the Hudson Valley that was the site of Washington Irving's famous tale of cowardice, bullying and - most importantly! - headlessness. Sleepy Hollow, just north of Tarrytown, is a forty-five minute rain ride from Grand Central Station. There is a 17th century church with vast and beautiful cemetery in which both Washington Irving and Katrina Van Tassel are buried. Across the road is Philipsburg Manor, a 17th century estate. Which is, from what I saw, inhabited by all sorts of spooks and ghosts and devils and tortured souls. And, of course, a horseman without a head.



The Horseman's Hollow "haunted experience" is both spooky, scary and period perfect. The production design, whether it was accomplished by supernatural means, or otherwise is impressive. The walk is also nicely paced. Trav and I went fairly early in the evening and we saw very few of the other people walking through, until there was a slight bottleneck after a (very scary to this easily startled clausterphobe) maze. All the spooks and monsters were a creepy assortment of dead Red Coats, eviscerated farmers, blacksmiths, schoolmasters and 18th century devil worshippers. And things that have no name. Sometimes they are right in front of you cackling with the hollow laughter of the damned. And sometimes they sneak up quietly behind you. I don't think I need to tell you which is scarier.



As you can see above, Trav was nearly eaten by evil Jack Pumpkinhead. The whole thing was absolutely loads of spooky fun and more than worth the $20 admission. I don't want to say too much as half the fun was being constantly surprised. One thing that particularly impressed me is that there weren't any dead (see what I did here?) spots. When one was walking between the major installations, there was always something to look at. You never had the feeling of "waiting for the next thing". And though I felt I spent most of the time walking in the open, I could never see what was ahead. And then, I saw a fleeting glimpse of a mounted figure on a large white charger, and yes, that figure had no head.



For a delightful recounting of the rest of our day in the village of Sleepy Hollow, as told by Mr. S.D., click here.

For information and tickets to Horseman's Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, click here.

For train schedules to Sleepy Hollow (the Philipse Manor stop on the Hudson River Line) click here.