Book #64: Mixed Feelings

"To tell you the truth," he said, running his hand through his hair, "I've always had mixed feelings about you."  His smile was rueful.  "I think you've aroused more mixed feelings in me than anybody else I know."                                                                         -Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather

Over the past couple weeks while I've been off work, taking time off to finish my novel (fingers crossed), I've indulged in some reading as well.  One of the novels I read was Elizabeth Hay’s first novel, A Student of Weather.  After reading and loving Hay’s Giller-winning Late Nights on Air a few years ago, I was curious about how her writing evolved (I often find myself drawn to reading first novels of authors I admire, perhaps because I’m working on my first novel).  Here, in Hay’s first novel, we get a smaller cast than in Late Nights on Air, but one that is comprised of characters no less eccentric and fascinating.  The novel opens in 1930s Saskatchewan, where two sisters living on a farm in the sultry prairies fall for the same newcomer, Maurice Dove, a meteorologist from Ontario, or student of weather, who is doing research in the region.  While Lucinda is the fair, beautiful, older sister who is good to a fault, it is the younger sister, Norma Joyce, who is secretive and deceptive and dark, almost foreign looking, that will go to no ends to snare him.

What is disturbing and riveting about Norma Joyce’s desire is that she feels it at such a young age.  She is only nine the summer she becomes besotted with Maurice, while he is well into his twenties: "She memorizes every inch of him.  Every inch of floppy, thick, brown hair, blue eyes and milky neckline, slender hips and slippered feet, and long, flat, clever fingers.  No matter whether riffling through papers or pulling things out of his knapsack, he holds his fingers the way a piano player isn't supposed to."  While the novel appears at first glance to be a classic love story centred on a love triangle, it ends up veering into much more interesting territory by turning into a kind of love story in reverse.  Neither sister ends up with Maurice, but as their entanglements with him continue over some forty years – through Norma Joyce’s birth of their child out of wedlock, his rise to fame as a writer of popular books about weather, and his marriage to two other women – Maurice Dove’s character is gradually revealed to be anything other than good husband material.  But what I found most compelling about the novel’s portrayal of this relationship is the way that despite seeing all his foibles, Norma Joyce’s desire persists – stubborn and irrational as desire is, like the weather itself.  And when she confronts Maurice about the genuine nature of his feelings for her, years later, when they run into each other at an art gallery in Ottawa, he responds that no one has ever evoked in him more mixed feelings.  Mixed feelings, rather than the more straightforward polarities of love and hatred, are what Hay seems to most enjoy putting under the microscope in this novel no less than in Late Nights on Air.

As I was thinking about how mixed feelings play out in A Student of Weather, I came to realize that many of the novels that stay with me and continually tease my mind are centred on love relationships similarly stymied.  Lily Bart’s and Selden Lawrence’s interminable mind games in The House of Mirth, for instance.  In the end, it isn’t getting together that matters, for they recognize they would be miserable together (Lily craves a level of luxury that he can’t offer her, while Selden treasures his independence), and yet, until the very end, their desire for each other persists, mixed with something bleaker because they know their feelings will always be thwarted.  Mixed feelings, indeed.  In a way, aren’t these the relationships that linger most vividly in our memories, whether we like it or not?  As those of you who have read my memoir will know, I’ve had a few mixed feelings myself over the years and, like Elizabeth Hay, I seem to find them more creatively productive to write about than the simple feeling of being in love. 

Photo from: here

Addicted to House Hunting

Over the past six weeks, my boyfriend and I have been shopping for a house.  I’ve come to realize that I take a strange pleasure in wandering through these houses of varying styles and levels of decrepitude – some still inhabited, others hauntingly empty, others carefully accented with generic furniture brought in by a stager giving the house the feel of a theatrical stage set.  The houses that still shows signs of authentic habitation are by far the most interesting.  There’s something quite delicious about running my fingertips over a stranger’s bookshelf and pulling down a novel I’ve been longing to read and finding a hand-written message inside, or opening a closet and finding a pair of beat-up ballet slippers or a tangled bathrobe.

Yes, I could imagine myself living here.

Back in my moribund grad student days, I wrote a good deal of my dissertation on the relationship between novels and houses.  Although I no longer speak that academic language (thank God!), there’s a part of me that remains fascinated by how novels use houses to tell the story of a protagonist’s state of mind, status and relationship to place.  It’s a sad fate indeed for those characters who can’t find a home – think of Lily Bart, the wayward heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, for instance.  An impoverished socialite, Lily sponges off her wealthy friends who have decadent country houses, yet it’s the comfort of Selden Lawrence’s more modest home that catches her fancy, the bookshelves in particular: “She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke.  Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure of agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities.”  As Lily sinks down the social hierarchy, the novel charts her decline in terms of her increasingly tasteless and dreary surroundings, until she is finally left in a sparsely furnished tenement room: “The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray with tortoise-shell hair-pins….  These were the only traces of luxury.” 

In light of my love of this novel, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the most evocative houses I toured during our house hunt were places that I wouldn’t want to live in.  They’re places that give me glimpses into other people’s lives – lives on the “other side of the social tapestry,” as Wharton puts it.  On a whim, we visited a dilapidated white clapboard house at Bloor and Lansdowne that turned out to be an illegal rooming house.  I know from my father that after the war, my grandparents ran a boarding house in this part of Toronto, and so I felt that in a curious way, I was getting a glimpse of that other world and time while peering into these cramped, dingy quarters and gingerly walking up precarious staircases and knocking on bedroom doors (or at least, the real estate agent did, while I cowered behind).  Many of the boarders didn’t want to let us in, and it made me sad to think about how this was their last-ditch effort to claim a kind of squatter’s sovereignty.  Yet even as they shut the door in our faces, I found myself peering over their shoulders, entranced by the curious shrines some of these people had set up on their dressers, candles and incense burning all round, the hint of earthier substances in the air, and one woman had a string strung around the entire perimeter of her room, from which dangled hundreds of pairs of colourful sunglasses.

Although we weren’t serious about buying houses of this sort, I remained eager to keep touring them as a kind of research for my historical novel, part of which takes place in the Bloor Lansdowne neighbourhood in the 1950s, in a boarding house similar to my grandparents’….  So for me, the house hunt was doubling as a sort of field expedition, but I think our real estate agent was getting tired of our dithering.  Alas.

Yesterday evening, we purchased a fairly decrepit, but structurally sound Victorian house full of architectural possibilities (Chris is an architect, so we are looking to take on a “project” house).  The house is at the slightly more gentrified end of the Lansdowne neighbourhood, but close enough that I will be able to walk past my grandparents’ old house every day, communing with ghosts of my family past.

Photo from: here

Am I Addicted to Tragedy?

"And besides, what was there to go home to? Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room - that silence of the night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral on her bed." -Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

The other day I got into a discussion with a new friend on Goodreads (this great site where readers from all walks of life talk about the books they can't put down. Also an excellent place for moral support and pure distraction). Anyway, this friend, this e-friend, this woman I'll never meet but instinctively like, broached an interesting discussion about Thomas Hardy, noting his tendency to favour tragic endings and heroines who remain trapped in their own circumstances. She was somewhat critical of Hardy for condemning poor Tess to sexual violation, backbreaking labour, lost love, and a fate too horrible to fathom. I saw what she was saying... and yet, what could I say? "The most memorable heroines for me," I confessed, "tend to be women like Lily Bart, Tess and Isabel Archer.... Am I addicted to tragedy?"

Recently, I'd re-read the ending of The House of Mirth, and found myself enjoying a good cry, lingering on the pages where poor Lily ends up addicted to this drug called chloral. It's her only escape from the drudgery of her job at the hat shop and the bleakness of the tenement house - a far cry from the ornate ballrooms and late nights dancing that consumed her youth. At the same time, I was finishing Shanghai Girls (I always like to have more than one book on the go), and this story is no more uplifting. Forced to flee their beloved homeland in Shanghai during the Second World War, Pearl and May survive rape, imprisonment and interrogation, before immigrating to America and eking a living in L.A. One thing after another goes wrong. Pearl's miscarriage. Persecution at the hands of U.S. immigration authorities. Tragedy compounds tragedy.

I wonder what draws me to literature that celebrates life as a constant drumbeat of sorrow. Ever since I was a kid, I was aware that something powerful - drug-like, almost - beckoned to me from within the pages of a good depressing book and a box of kleenex. Whenever something went wrong in my life - a friend made fun of me at school, or I didn't get invited to someone's party - there was something very comforting about losing myself in three hundred pages of someone else's turmoil. As I got older and acquired real problems - health problems, career blues, a slew of crappy relationships - I came to depend on tragic literature as my shelter from the world, my sacrosanct retreat from My Own Problems.

It was interesting that some readers wrote on Goodreads that they liked reading about characters pushed to deeper insights at their breaking points. Even though it's too late for them to save themselves, the reader is rewarded with an epiphany. I agree, but I also think there's something more primal at play. Back in grad school, I recall reading the anthropologist Mary Douglas. She writes about how in primitive society, people use ritual and art as a means of representing - and thereby holding at bay - the things that they most fear about themselves. In other words, there's something reassuring about exploring and making concrete the potential crises lurking at the back of your mind.

Lily, Tess, Pearl, Isabel.... If these tragic women embody elements of myself, perhaps getting it out in the open, through literature, holds the key to moving on....

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Book #2: Going the Way of Lily Bart?

Day by day, as I sat at my childhood desk, I could feel myself slipping. I couldn’t bring myself to return emails from old friends – smart, practical friends who’d seen the writing on the wall and baled on English literature after one degree and gone on to law school and HR certificates. Their career prospects appeared to be soaring – job offers in New York, business trips to Frankfurt – while I languished in this dead-end profession.

Maybe that was why Edith Wharton spoke to me. She knew how to make beauty of the mess that misguided, bleary-eyed girls make of their lives.

Wandering through a used bookstore, I found a dog-eared copy of The House of Mirth, and re-reading the opening paragraph was like rediscovering an old perfume, the smell of Chanel No. 5 as it first smelt at age eleven: “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.” From there, the intriguing images unfold before you, from Lily’s “desultory air” to her “air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose” to Selden’s fascination with “the modeling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair.” Everything about this woman – from her unpredictable moods to the minute details of her appearance – catches Selden’s fancy. Yet thanks to her aspirations to marry the biggest Sugar Daddy in New York, Selden is all too aware that he’s “far out of her orbit.” He’s like the nice, nerdy guy in high school who befriends the beautiful, popular girl by flirting when she’s had a bad day and offering to do her homework.

The thrall and mystery of female beauty. What woman doesn’t secretly desire such power? A guilty pleasure, no doubt. As modern women, we’ve transcended such nonsense – the vanity, the narcissism, the endless desire to be desired. Long evolved beyond all that, we’re supposed to be rushing off to meetings dressed in boxy suits, staying up late to write the Long-Term Plan, kicking butt at the Curriculum Committee Meeting. Yet Wharton’s brilliance is that she can awaken flutters in even the most liberated of readers by showing what it would feel like to possess, vicariously, Lily Bart’s power and vulnerability – to be immersed in the milky, mesmerized gaze of some idealized admirer.

I remember that when I first started really enjoying sex (by this point, I was on my third boyfriend), it had everything to do with seeing that look on his face, as he shoved a firm pillow beneath my butt and his eyes swept over my flesh. I reveled in the feeling of relinquishing control, and the sense of suspense was irresistible.

Photo from: here