crooked house

Babies in Literature: Karl Ove Knausgard in A Death in the Family

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a 46-year-old Norwegian writer who has written an unusual six-volume autobiography called My Struggle. It's getting a lot of attention -- apparently one in 10 Norwegians have read at least some of it and he is both adored in that country and abhorred (for revealing so much about the private lives of his friends and family). Critic James Wood has written admiringly about his work and apparently Zadie Smith said, on twitter, that it was "like crack." (That offhand remark is quoted on the Amazon pages for the kindle books. No wonder people as famous and as "serious" as Zadie Smith tend not to use twitter.) The books are weirdly compelling (at the least the two I've read so far) -- they contain long, unadorned yet extremely detailed descriptions of Knausgaard's everyday life that, somehow, still have relentless narrative drive. You want to keep reading to find out what happens next, even though what generally happens next is just more of the same. I enjoy the second book, A Man in Love, more than the first, and this is probably because Knausgaard devotes a large part of it to his family life with three small children, and he happens to be an active parent, like a lot of men of his generation in Europe and North America (although some part of me wonders if his wife Linda would agree with his assessment of his involvement). I also wonder if Knausgaard's work would get as much attention if he looked like, say, Rush Limbaugh, instead of a brooding rock star. Yet that's probably unfair -- it's difficult to put your finger on just why, but his work is really good. Here is an example of his writing about his children, from the first book, A Death in the Family :

As I write, I am filled with tenderness for her. But this is on paper. In reality, when it really counts, and she is standing there in front of me, so early in the morning that the streets outside are still and not a sound can be heard in the house, she, raring to start a new day, I, summoning the will to get to my feet, putting on yesterday's clothes and following her into the kitchen where the promised blueberry-flavoured milk and the sugar-free muesli await her, it is not tenderness I feel, and if she goes beyond my limits, such as when she pesters and pesters me for a film, or tries to get into the room where John is sleeping -- in short, every time she refuses to take no for an answer but drags things out ad infinitum -- it is not uncommon for my irritation to mutate into anger, and when then I speak harshly to her, and her tears flow, and she bows her head and slinks off with slumped shoulders, I feel it serves her right. Not until the evening when they are asleep and I am sitting wondering what I am really doing is there any room for the insight that she is only two years old. But by then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don't have a chance. Inside, it is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of nappies that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into, before I, with the collapsible double pushchair in one hand and nudging the two small girls forward with the other, step into the lift, which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting on its descent, and into the hall, where I ease them into the pushchair, put on their hats and mittens and emerge into the street already crowded with people heading for work and deliver them to the nursery ten minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume.

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swaths of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost paniched, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I... do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be; at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality there is involved. And there is quite a bit of that here. When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother's in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination. And these matters were not made any easier when Heidi was born. I wish I could say I took everything in my stride but sad to say such was not the case because my anger and my feelings too were aroused in these situations, which then escalated, frequently in full public view: it was not unknown for me in my fury to snatch her up from the floor in one of the Stockholm malls, sling her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her through town kicking and punching and howling as if possessed.

And so on and so on and so on. Sound familiar?

Beckett's Fail Better

Although this is the finished print, if I were still teaching the first grade, I think I'd make up similar work sheets for my class to complete. They'd make a fun display. (See also Beckett for Babies, one of my own failure, of which there are many.)

Babies in Literature: Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography

According to Alexandra Popoff, author of Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, Leo Tolstoy's wife has been maligned by history. Popoff, who had access to a great deal of previously inaccessible archival materials, explains that it all stems from Tolstoy's final years, when he experienced a religious conversion that led him to renounce his marriage, his family, and his property (or try to). However much Tolstoy may have believed in his principles of poverty and chastity, this renunciation put his wife in a completely untenable position. Sophia was left to look after the couple's eight surviving children pretty much on her own. Clearly Tolstoy felt some responsibility to his family, because he kept waffling on property and money matters. Admittedly, Sophia kept fighting him on these -- who wouldn't, when she had eight children to feed, clothe, and educate? He also kept waffling on the matter of sex -- he kept sleeping with Sophia and then blaming the matronly woman for being a seductress. Tolstoy's most famous follower, Vladimir Chertkoff, managed to insinuate himself between the couple in Tolstoy's final years and ended up controlling his literary works after his death. Popoff argues that it is he who is most responsible for discrediting Sophia Tolstoy's character. This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Tolstoy, and really, anyone who is interested in the concept of marriage and women's historical role within it.

Tolstoy was a literary genius, to be sure, but he also must have been infuriating to be married to. Sophia was not only Tolstoy's muse, she was a  tireless worker who devoted all her efforts to creating the proper environment for her husband to write in. She was Tolstoy's copyist and later his publisher. She managed his home and often his estate and related business matters. She made most of the childrearing and educational decisions on her own. (At one point, when she asked about appropriate education for one of their teenage sons, her husband brushed her off with a comment that he should become a street sweeper or the like because of his own religious beliefs against taking part in a money-based economy.) Sophia gave birth to thirteen children, although she wanted to stop after seven or so -- but Tolstoy wouldn't allow birth control. She breastfed all these babies herself at Tolstoy's insistence even though it never became easy for her (she often developed mastitis) and most women of her position employed wet nurses. And she watched six of her children die. Exhausted and completely emotionally and physically spent, at times Sophia wanted to end these pregnancies:

By now, she was certain of her [twelfth] pregnancy. As she wrote her sister, she felt like "screaming of despair and rage."

Told the news, Tolstoy wrote he was glad they would have a child; Sophia's unhappiness came from her revolté. It would be easier for her and people around her if she assumed a more accepting attitude: "Why can't you surrender?" Sophia thought his position was morally superior and felt crushed. "If I were bad before, now I am loathsome! And if you were good, you have become so much better!" Her pregnancy explained her abnormal state, Tolstoy replied: "I know, I've heard, that it's terribly oppressive for the soul."

Meanwhile, Sophia attempted to induce a miscarriage: she took scalding baths and jumped from a dresser. To a nanny who tried to talk her out of it, she said that Tolstoy considered leaving her and their children. When her attempts failed, she approached a midwife in Tula, asking for an abortion. The midwife, afraid of exposure, refused: she would perform an abortion for someone else, but not for Countess Tolstoy.

At times, Sophia Tolstoy wanted to end her own life.

You can read a brief excerpt from the biography here.

Books Take a Long Time to Write

Luke: Books take a long time to write you know, Mommy.

Steph: Yes, I know.

Luke: We started this one yesterday and we didn't finish it until today!

Babies in Literature: More from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

 

Image courtesy of The Graphics Fairy.

Anna Karenina's husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, is a contradictory character I can't quite figure out. I can't decide if he isn't particularly well-drawn or if he's actually so well-drawn that he's as difficult to put in a box as a real human being would be -- but I suspect it's the latter. Poor Karenin is a dull fellow, deeply concerned with appearances, who can sometimes be very unpleasant. And yet he's got some endearing qualities, too, like the way he responds to Anna's plea for forgiveness when she thinks she is dying from puerperal fever after giving birth to little Annie, her lover Vronsky's child, and especially the way he responds to the newborn:

He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and repentance. He forgave Vronsky and pitied him, especially after rumours reached him of his desperate act. He also pitied his son more than before, and now reproached himself for having been too little concerned with him. But for the newborn little girl he had some special feeling, not only of pity but also of tenderness. At first it was only out of compassion that he concerned himself with the newborn, weak little girl, who was not his daughter and who was neglected during her mother's illness and would probably have died if he had not looked after her -- and he did not notice how he came to love her. He went to the nursery several times a day and sat there for a long while, so that the wet nurse and the nanny, who were intimidated at first, became used to him. He would sometimes spend half an hour silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy and wrinkled little face of the sleeping baby, watching the movements of her scowling forehead and plump little hands with curled fingers that rubbed her little eyes and nose with their backs. At such moments especially Alexei Alexandrovich felt utterly at peace and in harmony with himself, and saw nothing extraordinary in his situation, nothing that needed to be changed.

But the more time that passed, the more clearly he saw that, natural as this situation was for him now, he would not be allowed to remain in it. He felt that, besides the good spiritual force that guided his soul, there was another force, crude and equally powerful, if not more so, that guided his life, and that this force would not give him the humble peace he desired. He felt that everybody looked at him with questioning surprise, not understanding him and expecting something from him. In particular, he felt the precariousness and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.

Kelly Link's Blog Tour

Okay, here's something you really shouldn't miss. One of my favourite writers, Kelly Link, author of the critically acclaimed -- and very fabulous -- story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, is doing a blog tour for her Young Adult collection Pretty Monsters. She is doing guest posts for a number of blogs and they are riveting. Link recently had a baby girl, Ursula*, who was born at 24 weeks and therefore had a long and harrowing stay in the NICU. Start here:

I could hardly stand being in the NICU at first. We knew that Ursula’s situation was precarious. Almost half of babies born at 24 weeks don’t survive. (Before my pregnancy became high risk, I didn’t know that any babies could be born so early, so small, and go on to thrive.) A majority of those babies that do survive end up with serious complications of one kind or another due to the therapies that keep them alive as well as due, simply, to their extreme prematurity. The gregarious nurse assigned to Ursula that first day told us immediately, well, it’s good that she’s a girl. Girls have a better chance of survival. The next day when we went up, he said, well, she’s still alive. The first twenty-four hours are really crucial. The next day he said, she’s still alive — that’s good. The first 48 hours are crucial. After a week had passed, when a nurse told us that the first week was the period of greatest danger — and so it was a good sign that she had made it through — we weren’t surprised.

Then go here:

I didn’t write any stories during this period. Maybe this is because the kinds of stories that I write don’t have the kind of happy, conclusive ending that I longed for, so badly, for so many months, in my own life. Maybe I didn’t write because it was always going to be hard to write while you are a new parent.

Then here:

I was never the girl the vampire fell in love with. Or the girl who discovered her destiny was to kick vampire ass. For that matter, for a long time I was sure that I would never find love. I was fairly sure I would end up an old maid, living in a house full of cats. Except even cats were never as smitten with me as I with them. I would have been the old maid living in a house full of iguanas. I’ve had a pet iguana: it doesn’t break your heart that your iguana doesn’t love you. You don’t expect love from an iguana. But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that many of my characters are faint of heart, like me. They aren’t especially heroic. If they get involved in dramatic situations, let’s say, with werewolves, it tends to be a terrible mistake: maybe they did something stupid. Or maybe someone else dragged them in. Me, I’ve always been concerned about the fact that I can’t drive stick shift. Come the zombie apocalypse, or the werewolf attack, I’ll be the one sitting in the driver’s seat of the getaway car, crying hysterically while I flood the clutch.

And here Kelly provides lists of her favourite romance and paranormal romance novels and favourite paranormal romance in other media. I'm bookmarking those, so I can work my way through them.

*Kelly's baby daughter's name, Ursula, means "Little Bear." The Little Dipper is also known as Ursa Minor or Little Bear and it contains within its constellation Polaris, the North Star, which is the most well-known and widely used directional star. Clearly Ursula is a very good name.

             

Shirley Jackson's Daughter Joanne, On Her Mother's Writing About Their Family

I've just finished a binge on Shirley Jackson's stuff. I love both her lighthearted family memoirs and her short stories and novels. She does creepy extraordinarily well -- I do most of my reading in bed, next to the sleeping Sylvie and Luke, and I finally had to restrict The Haunting of Hill House to daylight hours. I was starting to imagine that our house was haunted, especially the other night when I got up at 4am to feed Sylvie and heard disturbing crooning and radio-static noises coming from somewhere downstairs. I roused David and we both crept through the eerie dark looking for the source. It turned out to be a musical birthday candle we'd had on David's birthday cake earlier that day -- it was singing its death throes in the garbage can.

I gather from Jackson's biography that much of her supposed non-fiction writing about her real life was fictionalized. I suppose it's hard for a good storyteller not to embellish. But those who do likewise when they write about their kids should take note of this, from Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson:

   Respect for privacy, in fact, was one of the basic tenets of the Hyman household. The angriest Sally and Joanne ever saw their father was the time they sneaked down during a party to tape-record him doing one of his wilder songs. "It was very dramatic," said Joanne. "He dragged us out, took the tape and flung it. It was a point of honor. The lesson wasn't 'Don't mess with your parents'; it was 'You invaded my civil freedom.'"
   Yet at the same time, Shirley was violating her family's privacy all along, in one way -- by writing about them. Perhaps because she sensed this, she often involved her daughters in the writing process, particularly when she was planning a family story. She would sit on her stool in the corner of the large kitchen, by the stove, her ashtray filled with Pall Mall butts, her giant coffee cup or her glass next to her on the counter, occasionally stirring a pot, and run ideas by them. She listened carefully to their suggestions, often incorporating them. As a result, they have a certain fondness for these stories that is not shared by their brothers. But even Joanne has some ambivalence:
   "Do you have any idea what it's like being nine years old and not knowing what you remember, what you were told, and what you read? I had no trouble disassociating myself from the stuff that wasn't about us. But the stuff about us -- I sort of knew it wasn't the official family version and sort of knew some of that wasn't what I actually remembered. It turned on an automatic narrative voice in my head that I haven't gotten rid of yet."

Hermione Lee on Biography (And An Extremely Short Shirley Jackson Anecdote)

For the past five or six months I've been reading a lot of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Every few years I tend to go through a stage when I binge on them. Just this past week, for instance, I finished Private Demons, Judy Oppenheimer's biography of Shirley Jackson. It left me telling everyone, only half tongue-in-cheek, that I wish I could take amphetamines like Jackson did in order to stave off exhaustion. If I could only get my hands on some speed, I aver, I could probably toss off a literary masterpiece in the intervals between Sylvie's night feedings. Jackson's family doctor prescribed them to her -- a lot of busy housewives in the 1950s took them as a matter of course and Jackson not only had four children, she also was one of the few mothers in her small town who worked at something else. Unfortunately, the amphetamines meant she had to take tranquilizers in order to sleep and the drugs are now thought to have contributed to her early death at age 48.

Anyway, my fascination with the genre means I am very much looking forward to reading Hermione Lee's Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Here she is discussing the book (via Maud):

Shirley Jackson Might Have Been a Mommy-Blogger

Shirley Jackson might have been a part-time mommy-blogger, had she lived in the internet age. I think I was looking for We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the library and, as so often happens, they didn't have it, so I scooped up something else by the writer instead. In this case, it was Life Among the Savages, a memoir of her life raising three small children in Vermont. It is a direct ancestor of the current crop of mothering memoirs -- someone should put together a history of the genre -- and it shares their frequently jokey "if I didn't laugh, I'd cry" tone, a tone so different from that used in "The Lottery" that I had to check to make sure this was the same Shirley Jackson. The beginning sucked me in completely:

   Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without  children and without books, going on soundlessly in an apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch -- and as I say, I cannot think of a preferable life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told.
   I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living -- sandwich bags, typewriters, little wheels off things -- and marvel at the complexities of civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder, at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then -- this happening usually in the springtime -- I begin throwing things away, and it turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things, new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They can make new little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least faster than I can throw them away.

Very modern, isn't it, in its arch breeziness about wanting simplicity -- and not having it? The book was published in 1953.

Mothers and Fathers and Lovers, Oh My.

From Sherill Tippins' February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America:

Chester [Kallman, W. H. Auden's young lover] once described ... a time when he and Auden were riding the subway to Chester's grandmother's house and began to argue over which psychological roles they played with each other. As the other passengers looked on in disbelief, Auden shouted over the roar of the train, "I am not your father, I'm your mother!" and Chester yelled back, "You're not my mother! I'm your mother...You're my father!" "But you've got a father!" Auden countered. "I'm your bloody mother and that's that, darling! You've been looking for a mother since the age of four!"