Notes from my Bookshelf

Nora Webster

I am redecorating the back bedroom where my older son used to sleep and which I’d like to use for writing. It faces west, so it will be too hot on late summer afternoons, and probably too cold in winter, but it will be perfect in the morning for many months of the year. Or that is how I imagine it.

Contractors have come and gone. One replaced the crumbling ceiling plaster with drywall, another mended the crumbling walls, and I am left to paint. It took me three coats of white primer just to cover the dark blue baseboards and the next step is the new ceiling. I have never painted a ceiling before and though this is a small room and the job should be manageable, I am daunted and pause.

It can sometimes seem as though every life event has its counterpart in literature and here I am reminded of Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín (2014).

It’s a quiet novel. Tóibín has a light touch but while his writing can be sparse, everything important is given its due. The pacing is controlled and leisurely yet compelling. And because it is all so beautifully handled, it can take the reader awhile to realize that nothing is actually happening.

(Surely that’s wrong. After all, Nora’s life happens. But there is no discernible plot or rising tension or obvious conflict or story arc.)

When the novel begins, Nora’s husband has died. The parade of well-meaning family, friends and neighbours, bearing their casseroles and cakes, repeating the same words of condolence – the parade is slowing to a trickle and Nora is glad for it. She needs to settle in with her children, to the life she has to live without her husband. She has decisions to make but mostly she has to learn how to be in this different world.

I fall back on the word “quiet” to describe the interactions (the conflict?) when differences arise between Nora and others, her siblings and in-laws, her children, or between Nora and her small town’s norms and expectations. These are the times when Nora stands her ground, when she insists – quietly – on a right to make her own decisions and to make her own life.

So subtle, so quiet, is her insistence that the people around her often don’t recognize it; they may even mistake it for compliance. But the reader gets it. We can see what she’s doing and how she is, slowly, changing.

You only know that you are approaching the novel’s end because the pages left-to-be-read dwindle in number. This is when Nora decides to redecorate a room. I love this exchange with the man sent over from Dan Bolger’s shop to take measurements:

“Can you hang curtains?” she asks him.

“We don’t normally do that. We’ll fit the carpet all right,” he said. “But we’ll just have the curtains made up for you.”

She left silence and did not move, as though what he was saying was causing her anxiety.

She could almost feel him wondering how he was going to get out of her house without having to offer to hang the curtains for her. For a second, she wished she knew his name or something about him so she could soften his determination.

“I can’t think who would hang curtains,” she finally said.

“Ah, well,” he said, “I wouldn’t leave you stuck.” (pages 333-4)

Unlike me, when faced with a ceiling to be painted, Nora doesn’t pause:

She began one day when Fiona and Conor had gone back to school. If she stood on the top rung of the ladder and put the pot of paint resting on the flat top of the ladder, then she could reach the ceiling. The paint was thin and it dripped on her hair, so she had to find a shower-cap to cover her head. . . . Each stroke of the brush took work and concentration as she had to balance herself carefully and spread the paint evenly. The ceiling would be the hardest part, she told herself; the walls would be much easier.

The work gave her a strange happiness . . . It was only when the weekend came that the pains in her arms and chest began. (page 335)

The pain persists and she visits her doctor who prescribes pain-killers. What follows is a turning point in the novel as in Nora’s life. A quiet turning point, of course. There is no drama. Perhaps it is the novel’s dénouement.

Soon, you turn a page not knowing it’s the last page, not suspecting that the novel is over. Not suspecting, because the story is not finished.

It’s time to paint that bedroom ceiling of mine.

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Bleak House

Autumn. There is no better time of year to read Charles Dickens and no better novel than Bleak House.

Outside my four walls, there is a frost or a west wind or a cold rain but I don’t mind. My curtains are drawn, the lights are low except for a lamp to read by. I am wrapped in a blanket, steeped in foreboding, anticipating the winter to come. 

Enter Dickens.

I sink into the pages, one after the other, and am not disappointed. The complicated stories with their plots and sub-plots. The innumerable, memorable characters, heroes and villains alike. The interweaving relationships, the astounding coincidences. The author’s biting anger at the evil that people do, his bemusement at the mere foibles of others. (He can tell the difference, Mr. Dickens.)

I know, I know:  Dickens’ women are his greatest failure. The bit players he creates can be marvellous but the female protagonists are saintly or silly or both. Universally unbelievable. There is no Pip or Copperfield among them.

But in Bleak House, Esther Summerson is who she needs to be. She is quietly strong, the product of her culture and upbringing, her place and time. We understand her humility. Understand that she prefers to stay in the background.  That she believes herself undeserving of whatever love and affection and good fortune come her way. In the novel’s best chapters, she is the unreliable narrator of her story, revealing more – in her understated way – than she ever intended.

I love Esther Summerson.  But.

Couldn’t Esther change – even just a little – over the course of 914 pages? Reveal a hidden complexity, express a hidden desire? Speak up for herself, demand her rights?

Then I remind myself that it’s pointless to have twenty-first century expectations of a nineteenth century novel – or novelist.

I settle in and turn another page.

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What is to be Done?

Raise your hand if you knew that Mavis Gallant had written a play. (I didn’t.)

What is to be Done? (a play) by Mavis Gallant. Premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in 1982, published in 1983. Re-issued by Linda Leith Publishing, with an introduction by Linda Leith, in 2017.

Like Gallant's Linnet Muir stories, What is to be Done? is set in Montreal in the 1940s. It features Molly and Jenny who are comrades as well as friends. They are young, one is married and the other is single. They are living in a country at war -- though the war is in some respects distant -- at a time when opportunities seemed to be opening up for women. Both of them, or each in their particular way, has the certainties and the insistence and the optimism of youth.

Molly and Jenny attend demonstrations and take informal instruction in Marxism. After Hitler turns his troops east in 1941, and voids the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they join the call for the Allies to open a Second Front. They trust that the defeat of Nazism will result in a better world. (For one thing, surely Franco would no longer rule Spain.)

Gallant was a little cagey in interviews when asked about her own politics during those years but we can read between the lines.  She described herself as “an intensely left-wing political romantic” and “passionately anti-fascist”.[1]  As are these characters. Passionately anti-fascist, but also naïve, romantic, idealistic.

And yet. The young know a thing or two that the writer, looking back from thirty or forty years, will struggle to portray without condescension.

In one exchange, Molly and Jenny reflect on the difference between love and friendship:

Molly:  . . . nothing is owed in friendship. You can close the account without publishing a statement. No one can claim a right to examine the books. There are no mortgages.

Jenny: And love?

Molly: Just one foreclosure after another.[2]

How great is that?

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[1] From Mavis Gallant’s 1977 interview with Geoff Hancock, Canadian Fiction Magazine 39, reprinted in Canadian Writers at Work, Interviews with Geoff Hancock (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987). Also cited by Linda Leith, in the introduction to What is to be Done? (2017) and by John Metcalf in “My Heart is Broken: In Memoriam Mavis Gallant, 1922-2014,” Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ), Winter 2016

[2] What is to be Done?, scene 2, page 52 in the Linda Leith edition (2017)

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971). 

Not that Elizabeth Taylor. . . .

Continued at The New Quarterly in an on-line exclusive, March 2023.