April 17, 2019 Re-Covered Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The New Yorker, “in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.” Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a “steady stream” of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. “There was no need to look for ideas,” she explains in About Time Too (1993), her second volume of memoirs. “I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.” Mortimer—who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism—drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. “None of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,” she goes on to confess in About Time Too; “the moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience The New Yorker regretfully turned it down.” During the late fifties, when she wrote the twelve stories included in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer. Profiles of the writerly couple ran in magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping through Tatler, by way of Books and Bookmen. There were often photographs of them with their six picture-perfect children. Wife and mother were the identities that defined Mortimer, even as a writer. She had a regular parenting column, “Five Girls and a Boy,” in the Evening Standard newspaper, and her fiction dealt predominantly with the subjects of marriage and motherhood. She wasn’t writing twee, cosy tales of domestic bliss though; instead she penned sharp, shrewd portraits of marital infidelity, strained, unhappy housewives and their insensitive husbands, impotently railing against the draining demands of parenthood. Much of this material she drew from her own life: namely the cracks in her and John’s marriage, and the conflicts associated with finding much of her worth and value in the role of caregiver, while feeling stifled by domesticity. Her fourth novel, for example, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1958), the book that precedes Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, depicts a suburban mother’s attempts to procure an abortion for her student daughter (the situation Mortimer had found herself in the previous year when her eldest daughter, then at university, fell pregnant). It was a daring topic for its day, not least because of the resistance and disgust with which Mortimer’s protagonist Ruth’s attempts are met: “You would really advise her to do this thing? Your own daughter? Good God Ruth, I’m sorry. You make me sick,” expostulates the family doctor when she turns to him for help. The reviews, however, were excellent. “A remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement,” declared one. By the time Saturday Lunch with the Brownings was published, Mortimer had quite the reputation for dismantling the domestic idyll. Read More
April 16, 2019 Redux Redux: Everything Is a Machine By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. In this week’s Redux, we’re in a reflective mood. Read Wallace Stegner’s 1990 Art of Fiction interview, Joy Williams’s short story “Jefferson’s Beauty,” and Mary Jo Bang’s poem “Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Wallace Stegner, The Art of Fiction No. 118 Issue no. 115 (Summer 1990) I don’t think straitjackets are the way to get at fiction. I would rather define the novel as Stendhal did, as a mirror in the roadway. Whatever happens in the road is going to happen in the mirror too. Read More
April 16, 2019 Arts & Culture So What If Lincoln Was Gay? By Louis Bayard “Why do you need him to be gay?” This is how a friend (urban, liberal, male) responded when I told him I was working on a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed. The implication of his question was clear. If I was going to go there, if I was going to plant my rainbow flag on the Great Emancipator’s grave, I would have to account for my private agenda. Now that I type it out, that phrase sounds an awful lot like “gay agenda” and peels away to reveal the same fear at its base—that our received notions about historical figures might crumble under too close an inspection. And yet, in many cases, the evidence is often hiding in plain sight. Queen Anne, as the recent movie The Favourite underscored, wrote passionate letters to the Duchess of Marlborough. Michelangelo composed love poems for his male models. King James addressed his beloved Duke of Buckingham as “my sweet child and wife,” and Shakespeare publicly directed his first 126 sonnets to a “Fair Youth,” theorized by some scholars to be Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Lincoln may look like he played things closer to the vest, but even his contemporaries, pondering his youthful aversion to girls, his lack of female conquests, and his relatively late marriage, struggled to come up with face-saving explanations. Judge David Davis, a friend of Lincoln’s from his circuit-riding days, insisted it was only the great man’s conscience that “kept him from seduction” and “saved many—many a woman.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s biographer and law partner, spread rumors (almost certainly unfounded) that Lincoln had caught syphilis from a girl in Beardstown, and went so far as to resurrect a long-dead New Salem maiden named Ann Rutledge, who emerged under Herndon’s burnishing as the love of Abe’s life. Read More
April 15, 2019 Arts & Culture The Royally Radical Life of Margaret Cavendish By Michael Robbins Peter Lely, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1665. Public domain. To Virginia Woolf, she was “a giant cucumber” choking the roses and carnations in an otherwise orderly garden of seventeenth-century literature. Several of her contemporaries felt similarly. Samuel Pepys found her “dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all.” Dorothy Osborne said of her that “there were many soberer People in Bedlam,” while Mary Evelyn was “surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.” This was the Margaret Cavendish I first encountered, through Woolf’s exquisitely savage portrait in The Common Reader: Nevertheless, though her philosophies are futile, and her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull, the vast bulk of the Duchess is leavened by a vein of authentic fire. One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some nonhuman creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And, later, in A Room of One’s Own: “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!” Read More
April 15, 2019 Arts & Culture As Certain as Death and Taxes By Souvankham Thammavongsa Norman Rockwell, The Accountant, 1924 I lost my job of fifteen years, and as I was filling out my tax return to explain this loss, I thought, Well, this was the one constant that had never changed. Taxes were always there. Every April, the forms explained what had happened to me that year, where I was living and what I was doing. There was a box for every loss and every gain, and there was a box for the things that would always remain the same. There was a record of everything. I signed up for classes at a tax-prep company. In the first session, we went around the room to introduce ourselves. Many of the other students had been accountants in other countries, others had degrees in economics, some had MBAs or owned their own businesses. All said they didn’t know how to prepare a Canadian tax return and just wanted to learn. The job I had before was for an investment advice publisher, where I learned that I liked numbers. I liked that the number four was always four and no one could argue with you about that. Every number had its own narrative power, even if you couldn’t see it right away. When a number changed, or when you expected it to and it didn’t change, that meant someone out there in the world had done something to make that happen. People made big decisions because of a little number. Everyone had a theory and a prediction about it. I had been an English major, but I didn’t feel out of place in the class. The theories we read and studied were really about people, and the tax return was a way of telling their stories. Read More
April 12, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Horses, Heaney, and Hypebeasts By The Paris Review Still from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies. Courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music. You’ve probably seen Daisies, Věra Chytilová’s dizzying 1966 masterpiece, especially if you were a young woman in the early aughts browsing LiveJournal or Tumblr, where screenshots of its two heroines dancing, throwing food, and declaring themselves “spoiled” abounded. But it’s difficult to find the rest of Chytilová’s films. Over the years, I’ve seen only two: the aforementioned Daisies and 1963’s Something Different, available via the Criterion Collection. That’s why I’m excited to spend the next few days essentially living inside the Brooklyn Academy of Music for their series “The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová.” What does a teen horror movie–meets–metaphor for authoritarian repression look like under a director like Chytilová? Or a comedic critique of the aging male libido? I guess I’m going to find out this weekend—and maybe you will, too. —Rhian Sasseen Read More