crooked house

Babies in Literature: Audrey Thomas's Tattycoram

I have no idea if the actual Charles Dickens ever had an exchange like the following one that his fictional version has with his maid in Audrey Thomas's novel Tattycoram:

One afternoon [Mr. Dickens] said to me... "Hattie, how do you feel about children?"

"How do I feel about them, sir?"

"Yes. Do you like them?"

"I like them well enough. I'm particularly fond of the babies."

"I, too. I'm particularly fond of the babies. What a pity they can't be shot and stuffed before the age of five."

 I'm not familiar enough with Dickens's work to know if he ever really said anything like that or, perhaps, put those words into the mouth of one of his nastier characters. All a quick google would reveal about his thoughts on infants is that he said, "Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last." That seems more in keeping with his reputation for sentiment. (Interestingly, from that same quick google I learned that Queen Victoria was supposed to have said, "An ugly baby is a very nasty object - and the prettiest is frightful." She had nine of her own. It's hard to tell from pictures whether they were ugly or pretty. They were certainly snugly buttoned into a lot of clothing. And surely she could have handed them off to a myriad of nursemaids before they'd started to seem too unattractive.)

Tattycoram is a beautifully written, deceptively light novel, almost a piece of Victoriana, centered on one of Dickens's characters, a maid in Little Dorrit. Thomas's version of the maid, Harriet Coram, was abandoned at the Foundling Hospital as a baby and later hired by the fictional Dickens to look after his growing family and then to teach in the home for fallen women he helped set up. After Harriet's marriage, she is dismayed to learn that Dickens has made her a character in his novel -- and an unpleasant one at that. This twist gives Thomas's novel a nice postmodern edge and leaves me wondering how much of her fictional Dickens is based on historical fact. Thanks to Sara O'Leary for suggesting the book in the comments to my post about the foundling tokens.

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.

Things Dorothy Parker Might Have Said, Had She Been A Mother

My little brother Den and I have a list on McSweeney's today called Things Dorothy Parker Might Have Said, Had She Been A Mother. Here it is, if you can't be bothered to click the link:

"If you can't say anything nice about anyone else's children, come sit by me."

"She knows her letters from A to B! Isn't she amazing?!"

"Brevity is the soul of high school musical productions."

"That child is learning eighteen languages but doesn't understand No in any of them."

"If you want to know what God thinks of children, just look at the people he gave them to."

"Money is no object; I want only enough to keep a nanny between me and my kids."

"Men seldom make passes at lactating lasses."

"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'nap time'."

"I require only three things of a man. He must get up at for night feedings and change diapers. Is that only two? Okay, I require only two things of a man."

"Childbirth pains you; diapers are damp,
Spit-up stains you and little feet stamp.
Abandonment's unlawful;
the pediatrician says he's hyperactive,
I'm going to commit suicide if you don't come home early tonight,
I mean it, I'm totally not kidding."

"Hi, I'm Dorothy... Timmy's mom. "

Here are some of the things she really did say. Our list isn't very amusing at all if you aren't familiar with her bon mots. And we owe a big shout-out to Sean Carman for the "lactating lasses" bit. I'd originally put "girls who are lactating." Sean makes everything better.

Keeping a Poinsettia Alive

On a somewhat cheerier, more Christmassy note, from Jean Kerr's Penny Candy:

My next-door neighbor believes in an after-life for poinsettias. According to her, when the blossoms have wilted you must pinch them off. Next you place the pot containing the remains in a warm, dark place in the attic, where you water it every five days. Then in May you take it out and plant it in the garden. In September, you dig up the shoots and move them to a sunny window indoors. Eventually, if you have been constant in your ministrations, the plant should bloom again.

Listen, I would do all that for a friend but not for a three-dollar poinsettia.

I'm not even sure I would do that for a friend. (Just kidding, friends. I would totally dig up your shoots if you needed me to.)

Doris Lessing: On Why Autobiography Is Inevitably Untrue

I have dog-eared about fifty pages in Doris Lessing's excellent autobiography Under My Skin -- there's the passage about the time that, as a child, she deliberately set fire to one of the thatched buildings on her parents' farm, those devoted to her pregnancies and the births of her first two children, her thoughts on how modern music is responsible for the rise of crime. Okay, that particular passage is one of the kookiest in the book but this one, about how we experience time throughout our lives, rings true to me. It's about something I've noticed frequently lately, how the older I get, the more quickly time seems to pass:

   The main reason, the real one, why an autobiography must be untrue is the subjective experience of time. The book is written, chapter one to the end, in regular progress through the years. Even in you go in for sleights of hand like flashbacks or Tristam Shandy, there is no way of conveying in words the difference between child time and grown-up time -- and the different pace of time in the different stages of an adult's life. A year before you are thirty is a very different year from the sixty-year-old's year.
   When scientists try to get us to understand the real importance of the human race, they say something like, "If the story of the earth is twenty-four hours long, then humanity's part in it occupies the last minute of that day." Similarly, in the story of a life, if it is being told true to time as actually experienced, then I'd say seventy per cent of the book would take you to age ten. At eighty per cent you would have reached fifteen. At ninety-five per cent, you get to about thirty. The rest is a rush -- towards eternity.
   It occurs to me to wonder about the infant in the womb. The foetus repeats evolution: fish, bird, beast, then human. Does it experience the time of evolution? Is it possible that poor creature is submerged in near eternities? A nightmare. This is so terrible a thought it can scarcely be borne.

Sentences: A Series of Aoyama Hina's Intricate Paper Cuttings

Artist Aoyama Hina's paper cuts are as intricate as lace. This one is from her series called "Sentences." You can see more of her incredible work on her myspace page. Via Paper Forest.

This is one of Voltaire's letters:

In the Middle of a Terrifying Distance

"From a five-year-old to a fifty-year-old is only a step, but from a newborn to a five-year-old is a terrifying distance." Tolstoy, according to Joan Aiken's The Way to Write for Children.

Keep Calm and Carry On Onesie

I just bought this onesie on Etsy. Maybe if I have this slogan emblazoned on enough surfaces in my home, I won't need to be medicated this time. I'm even contemplating a tattoo. For me, not the baby. Silly.

Randall Jarrell's Definition of The Novel

Randall Jarrell on the novel: 

...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

From his introduction to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, one of the books on my list of classics not of but about childhood. Here's the context:

There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

But The Man Who Loved Children has been a queer exception. I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see there were things wrong with it -- a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it -- but they felt that, somehow, the things didn't matter.

To have this happen with a book that was a failure to begin with, and that after twenty-five years is still unknown, is strange. Having it happen has helped me to believe that it is one of those books that their own age neither reads nor praises, but that the next age thinks is a masterpiece.

But I suppose I'd believe this even if every borrower had told me it was bad. As Wordsworth and Proust say, a good enough book in the long run makes its own readers, people who believe in it because they can't help themselves. Where The Man Who Loved Children is concerned, I can't help myself; it seems to me as plainly good as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past are plainly great. A few of its less important parts are bad and all of its more important parts are good: it is a masterpiece with some plain, and plainly negligible, faults.

I call it a good book, but it is a better book, I think, than most of the novels people call great; perhaps it would be fairer to call it  great. It has one quality that, ordinarily, only a great book has: it does a single thing better than any other book has ever done it. The Man Who Loved Children makes you a part of one family's immediate existence as no other book does.