RECOGNIZED, YES. FAMOUS, NO

This column by Elinore Standard appeared in the September 02, 2005 Record Review as another in the ongoing series "My Reading Life."

Works mentioned: Excellent Women and Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym, The Great Fire, The Transit of Venus, The Bay of Noon, and The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard, Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning by Evan Connell, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, The Enforced Return by Neil Corcoran, In Country by Bobby Ann Mason.

RECOGNIZED, YES. FAMOUS, NO.

I just finished a 1978 reprint of "Excellent Women," an early (1952) novel by Barbara Pym and as I turned to the back flap, I read that Barbara Pym in 1977 was acclaimed “the most underrated writer of the century.” My goodness. Such a comment was probably meant to encourage prospective readers but it does seem rather dim. Is it an honor to be labeled the most underrated writer? Can it be that any accolade is better than no accolade? Perhaps back then, but I can’t imagine an agent or a publishing house or even a writer allowing this to be said in this day of Hype and Spin.

Then I go on to read another Pym novel, "Less Than Angels" (1955), reprinted by Dutton in 1977. Sure enough, another disconcerting blurb on the back flap: “…shunned by British publishers for fourteen years, she was rediscovered in England in 1977…” Shunned? What can this possibly mean? Is it that publishers were afraid of stories about the British middle class, specifically Anglican spinsters drinking innumerable cups of tea and a high percentage of clergymen per novel? Pym’s work was always well-reviewed, so what is this “shunned” which seems strong language when applied to books about church jumbles and altar guilds?

Pym’s work is quiet and it seems even quieter today than it must have seemed back in the ‘50’s when Britons were emerging from post-war austerity and still carried ration books. I find reading Pym’s graceful prose soothing and oddly gripping. I know nothing much is going to happen, but nevertheless I read on.

Shirley Hazzard is a writer I always knew about but somehow never read until recently. Her wonderful, fine though it is, never reached blockbuster proportions. I got her latest, “The Great Fire” (Viking, 2003) from the local library, attracted, perhaps, by the flame-colored cover and by the sense it was high time I read her, and then I was hooked. Hazzard is a stylish and sophisticated writer and her work must be read attentively. The characters are complicated and they often take unexpected turns.

After “Great Fire”, I went on to earlier books and devoured them in a two-week period: “The Transit of Venus”(Viking, 1980), and two novels set in Italy: “The Bay Of Noon” (1970) and “The Evening of the Holiday (1966). Hazzard is perhaps undervalued but not unheralded. She has won an O. Henry Short Story award, was nominated for the (U.S.) National Book Award three times and won it in 2003 for “The Great Fire”. She recently got the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in recognition of the most distinguished American novel published in the last five years. So recognized, yes. Famous, no.

Evan Connell, is often thought of as another one of those WASP American writers who creates spent and repressed characters who have little to say to each other. He is likely to be grouped with Louis Auchincloss, and Walker Percy, although such pigeon-holing is usually wrong. Connell is the writer of two American classics: “Mrs. Bridge” (1959), and “Mr. Bridge” (1969). “Mrs. Bridge” was made into a Merchant/Ivory film and an adaptation titled “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” became the 1990 film with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Writing in the February, 2005, Believer magazine, Mark Oppenheimer discusses Connell’s work at length. He says he read “Mrs. Bridge” three times and not long after a reading, he couldn’t remember any of the plot. He says each chapter is “a brief, dense moment of awkwardness among two or three characters…”

Oppenheimer says Connell’s short chapters are “…perfectly composed. None wastes a word. By the end of the book we have only a portrait, one of the truest in modern literature.” Mrs. Bridge, he says, “is a decent woman, hopefully naïve, willfully unliberated, cursed with a brain she is afraid to use and time that she cannot manage to fill.”

That’s pretty devastating right there, but “Mr. Bridge” is even sadder. Somehow, the ten years that separated the novels took Connell through the 1960’s when everything was coming apart, anyway, and you see the lives of the Bridges more and more in contrast to the world around them. The old gentility is irrelevant; Walter Bridge, a decent man with an icy heart and weird inner longings, is like the Dodo.

Connell, born in 1924, has written other books besides the “Bridge” novels, including ”Son of the Morning” (1984) about Custer at Little Big Horn, the best seller of his eighteen, and we can assume he is still writing. I agree with Oppenheimer who says Connell’s work “accepts the premise that the Wasp heritage lacks vitality yet it insists that good literature can still be made of that desiccated condition.”

Of all the novels I’ve ever read, which do I think is best? Naturally, this answer changes with the time of day, month, and year and yet I keep Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Death of the Heart” high up there on my list of greats. Bowen, who wrote 28 books, was always under-appreciated as I think all writers of serious literature usually are -- and, sorry to say, she is read less today than she was during her lifetime (1899-1973).

In a recent New York Times Book Review, Stacey D’Erasmo reviews a new biography of Bowen titled “The Enforced Return” by Neil Corcoran (Oxford, 2005). D’Erasmo describes Bowen as a “writer who bears down so hard on intimacy – among not only men and women, but men and women and their country, their houses, their pasts and themselves…” Not easy reading, ever, but I find I can’t get Bowen’s novels out of my head and I think of them, as A.S. Byatt says describing a Bowen work, as “one of those books that grow in the mind, in time.” Haunting is the word I would use -- haunting and bitter and painful. In the case of reading Bowen, I must decide if I want to feel good or if I want to think.

I always liked the work of Bobbie Ann Mason, an American from Kentucky who got her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the work of Vladimir Nobokov. She got tired, she says, of writing about the alienated Middle-European hero, so she thought she’d write about the opposite. (www.writersalmanac.org -- May 1, 2005).

When I taught writing, I introduced my students to passages from Mason’s “In Country” (1985) a novel narrated by the young sister of a Vietnam veteran who had been poisoned by agent orange. The book is set in a rural town, far from Washington where the family travels at the end of the story to visit the Vietnam Memorial. Mason writes about poor rural Americans, people who haven’t been to college, who drive rusty old beaters and work at Wal-Mart. Mason says, “I’ve always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that’s being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.”