”’The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read/ You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.’ He almost moaned, he ached, fr”’The women one meets--what are they but books one has already read/ You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.’ He almost moaned, he ached, from the depth of his content.
‘Upon my word I’ve a subscription.’”
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There is a 1997 movie starring Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, and Alison Elliott.
Merton Densher is in love with Kate Croy. Their circumstances, though seemingly impossible, are not unusual in a class bound society like Edwardian England. Kate’s future is held hostage by her Aunt Maude, who is attempting to save her from the ruinous circumstances of her father. ”’If you hear anything against her father--anything I mean except that he’s odious and vile--remember it’s perfectly false.’” Doesn’t he sound like an interesting chap? Kate does feel compelled by her father and his circumstances. To accept her father and his way of life would allow her to escape the life her Aunt is so determined to thrust upon her.
She will be ruined of course, but a certain level of freedom does come with being socially wrecked.
Does she love Merton Densher?
That is a good question, and if you ask me that question at different times in the book, I might give you a different answer. He is a journalist, wonderfully knowledgeable about a great number of things. He is pleasant and charming and would make any woman a wonderful companion, but he is lacking one very important thing that nullifies all of his best traits…money.
Kate could ruin herself with Densher as easily as she could with her father, but she hesitates to do so. The longer she takes to accept one of the gold rings her aunt has arranged, the more time she gains for circumstances to change. She is, in other words, more practical about their relationship than Merton.
Kate and Merton both meet the American heiress Milly Theale, separately under different circumstances, but eventually they all become fast friends. Milly, after all, is in need of friends. ”She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and in particular was strange.”
Milly is rather strange in the sense that she has no pretensions. She is who she is all the time, in contrast to her British friends who were raised in a society of so many rules governing their actions that they are often contorted into distorted versions of themselves. ”In The Wings of the Dove James was to return to an earlier interest--the clash between the American and British attitudes--which put ‘crudely and briefly,’ might be described as the conflict between innocence and experience.”
Henry James loves to spend a lot of time pulling apart everything anyone says or thinks to find the nuggets of meaning. His writing reflects this obsession, and at times his speculative archaeological digging into the various emotions and thoughts surrounding a conversation can be mind numbing to a reader. Ponderous is a word that comes to mind. I keep thinking of him writing a scene like a Picasso cubist portrait, showing all sides at once and in the process revealing the true nature of the speaker or the listener.
His writing, despite the ponderous tendencies, is superb. I would read this book every morning before venturing into my office to write. I don’t write in a style even close to James, but his style elevated my awareness of my own writing. He is a grand master of the English language.
Milly is diagnosed with an illness that will certainly shorten her life. Kate can see a way that this misfortune could eliminate the stumbling blocks between Kate and Merton’s future happiness. He simply has to marry Milly and inherit her fortune. Merton is appalled at the thought, but his gentlemanly morality is hampered by his love for Kate. ”There were moments again--we know that from the first they had been numerous--when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way of putting things. There was something in it that bent him at once to conviction and to reaction.”
We’ve all known persuasive people like Kate. They are people so convinced that they are right that their certainty overcomes our objections. I am always beset with doubts as to the right decision. I can weigh and argue any side of an argument. There is generally more than one right solution to life’s trials and tribulations. The answer is A & B, or maybe it is D, all the above, but for people like Kate, it is emphatically C.
Merton and Kate both adore Milly, but that British upper class practicality lends a bit of callousness to how Kate perceives the situation. Milly has a crush on Merton so the acorn with which a tree can grow has been sown. Milly has no heirs, so why shouldn’t she marry Merton? She would make him a man of means. It would just be a matter of time before Kate and Merton can be together.
”She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way.”
Of course, there is a delicious twist at the end.
This is considered the first of his final three masterpieces, followed by The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). My plans are, when I next feel that niggling desire to read James, that I will be proceeding to The Ambassadors. The Portrait of a Lady still remains my favorite James, so we will see if one of these other masterpieces can displace Isabel Archer in my heart.
I’ve fallen in love with the Schlegel sisters twice now in separate decades. I plan to keep falling in love with them for many decades to come. They are vibrant defenders of knowledge, of books, of art, of travel, of feeling life in the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and spleen on a daily basis. Margaret and Helen have a brother, Tibby, poor lad, who is plenty bright while at Oxford, but in the family Schlegel home, he is struggling to keep up with the thoughts expressed that keep expanding past him.
Compared to most people, they are rich. Compared to most rich people, they are poor. Their ancestors left them with enough capital to insure that they don’t have to work for the rest of their lives, can travel a bit, can go to the theatre, and can buy books as they need them. They are very attuned to their privileged position and are frequently tempted to reduce their capital by helping those in need. How much money do they really need or, for that matter, really deserve to have?
Improbably, the Schlegel sisters become friends with the Wilcoxes, a capitalistic family who have a different idea of money. Is there ever enough? Helen forms a temporary attachment to the younger Wilcox which throws each family into a tizzy as to the suitability of the match. Margaret begins a friendship with the wife, Ruth, that proves so strong that it throws a few wrinkles into the plot regarding Ruth’s family and the inheritance of Howards End.
Ruth passes away suddenly. ”How easily she slipped out of life?” Her insignificance in life becomes even more pronounced in her death.
E. M. Forster based Howards End on his childhood home, The Rooks Nest, which had been owned by a family named Howard and referred to as the Howard house. Thus, the name Howards End is a not too subtle reference to that family home. I have to believe that it might have represented a lifetime longing he had for those childhood years he spent in that home. In the novel, Howards End goes beyond being an estate and becomes almost a character, a Shangri-La that I began to pine for from the very beginning of the novel. The Sisters have only brief contact with Howards End through the early part of the novel, and my trepidation grows as the plot progresses. Will they ever have a chance to consider the house a home?
The Schlegel’s befriend the Basts, who are certainly in much reduced circumstances compared to their own. By mere chance they are discussing the Basts situation with Henry Wilcox, who promptly puts doubt into their mind about the future validity of the company Leonard is working for. This sets off a chain of events that cause a series of ripples that change the course of several lives. There certainly is a word of caution in meddling in others’ affairs. Sometimes we can think we are helping, only to cause even more problems.
Improbably, Margaret and Henry Wilcox form a friendship that becomes romantic. The eldest Wilcox son, Charles, is not happy about the attachment. He and Margaret are so far apart in their views of how the world works or should work that they have difficulty communicating well enough to reach a point of mutual respect. ”They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.”
Margaret’s odd relationship with Henry causes a rift between the sisters that is, frankly, painful to experience. Forster makes sure that I, as a reader, at this point can no longer be objective. The relationship between these siblings is a precious thing and to think of it torn asunder is impossible to accept. They know so well how to entertain each other, to finish each other’s thoughts, and share a general agreement on most things that other people who bump around in the orbit of their reality feel like intruders.
So the marriage between Margaret and Henry is unsettling to Helen and me for numerous reasons, but this statement might sum up how we feel pretty well: ”How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be.” There is probably someone we could feel is good enough for Margaret, but not just Margaret but Helen and this reader as well (see how invested I am?); for whomever either girl would marry would have to slip seamlessly into the state of euphoria that already exists in the Schlegel household.
Henry is not that person. ”He misliked the word ‘interesting’, connoting it with wasted energy and even with morbidity.”
It is becoming impossible to think that Howards End will remain nothing more than a shimmering presence in another reality.
The Schlegel sisters are really the best friends any reader could hope for. We would be so enriched by the opportunity to know them and practically giddy to be able to call them friends. It is unnerving that something so strong, like this relationship between sisters, can be so fragile. I haven’t discussed the fascinating nuances of plot that will add further weight to the interactions between the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts, for I want everyone to read this book and marvel at the words and thoughts that Forster tosses in the air for you to catch. I want you all to be as haunted as I have been, to the point that you, too, will have to go back to the place you first met these characters, these ghostly beings, and read and read again turning these phantoms into tangible beings you can almost touch.
”Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
”Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remem”Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen. What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.”
I’m sure everyone has woken in the middle of the night and had a fright from something that in uncertain light and various shades of shadows looked like a creature or person was in the room with you. I remember waking up during those most uncertain hours between midnight and 2AM, and I saw a man, rather large, striding across the room towards me. I was caught in that crucial, but nebulous moment of fight or flight, which left me paralyzed. My mouth dropped open to scream, but nothing came out except a squeak, which was far from the roar that my brain had sent scurrying down my nervous system to deploy. Lightning flashed, and it was only then that I noticed it was a shirt swaying on a hanger on the back of my bedroom door.
I was living in Tucson at the time and frequently left windows open at night to take advantage of the cool breezes that would come off the desert. It was the beginning of monsoon season, and a storm had come in with a stiffer breeze than normal that gave the shirt life. Despite alerting all the various parts of my body that we were not in mortal danger anymore, it took several long seconds for my muscles to let go. When I could move, I shut the window and hung that shirt in the closet, where it damn well belonged.
The lingering embarrassment of being so fooled kept me company for a few days.
Professor Parkins of St. James College in Cambridge doesn’t believe in ghosts or anything else associated with the supernatural. He is a serious man of biology, and though he is leaving for a short break on the coast at Burnstow to sharpen up his golf game, he has also brought along a pile of books to continue his studies in the evenings, hopefully uninterrupted. Then, one of the other professors jests that he would come along and stay with him for a couple of days later in the week. ” I promise not to interrupt your work; don’t you disturb yourself about that. No, I won’t come if you don’t want me; but I thought I should do so nicely to keep the ghosts off.”
Of course, Parkins does not want the company, but he is also offended at the mention of ghosts. They don’t exist after all, so there is no need for any consideration to be given to them. Professor Disney asks him if he could step off the size of a potential dig site of the Templar ruins of interest to the department near the Globe Inn where he will be staying. Parkins begrudgingly agrees to help. He plays golf and bridge once in Burnstow, but it is easy to see that those are the things he does an obligation to being on vacation, when if the truth were known, he’d just rather be locked up alone with his books.
He does take some time to go scout this Templar ruin, mainly because he had a bad day of golf and needed to clear his head. In the course of his wandering about the site, he finds a bronze whistle. He takes it back to his room and cleans all the caked mud out of the stem. There are Latin inscriptions on the side. "Quis est iste, qui venit?" which Parkins translates as "Who is it that comes?".
The second inscription meaning eludes him.
Of course, once a man cleans out a whistle he has...to...blow...it.
”He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain.”
Little did he know he was summoning something he doesn’t believe can exist.
This is my first M. R. James and certainly will not be my last. This is a gothic, atmospheric piece, so the plot is moving at a slow burn pace, but as Parkins starts to access and process the odd things that are happening around him, he begins to understand that the real world might extend into realms he is unwilling to believe in. I was fooled by movement in uncertain light, but Parkins is in for something rather more alarming.
Sebastian is nineteen years old, dashingly handsome, and the heir to a vast and beautiful country estate called Chevron. Edward the Caresser, eldest son of Victoria, is on the throne of England. It is 1905, and the grim days of World War One are still unrealized. As a member of the Upper Classes and a regular at any gala event in Edwardian high society, Sebastian is the perfect age in the perfect era.
His role in life has been preordained.
Sebastian takes as his lover a friend of his mother, the Lady Sylvia Roehampton. She is, despite her age, still considered the most beautiful jewel in English society. ”Sebastian was intensely aware of her quality as she strolled beside him; her quality of a beautiful woman exquisitely finished, with a perfect grasp on life, untroubled, shrewd, mature, secret, betraying her real self to none.”To be seen with the most dashing young man in London enhances her already glittering reputation, and for him to be seen with Sylvia only makes the most eligible bachelor more entrancing. You would think that if anyone would be appalled at this spectacle it would be his mother Lucy, but she takes a very practical view of the matter. ”She was quite content that Sebastian should become tanned in the rays of Sylvia’s Indian summer.”
She expects Sylvia to keep her head and advance the bedsheet knowledge of her son and not do something as insane as to fall in love with him. He could fall in love with her, but she could not do the same. The balances are teetering in the relationship, but the final blow to this “suitable” arrangement comes from Lord Roehampton, who doesn’t find it...well... suitable at all.
It turns into a sticky wicket.
Sebastian meets a man at one of his mother’s parties by the name of Leonard Anquetil, who is invited as a peculiar person of personal accomplishment. He is a famous explorer who has conquered jungles and lived to tell about it. ”There was no mistaking that strange countenance, pitted with the blue gunpowder, scarred by the sword-cut; a countenance sallow and sarcastic between the two black puffs of hair.” Anquetil has no title or inherited money. He is a self-made man in the best possible fashion. Sebastian had never met anyone like him.
Anquetil is the temptation. He is the father figure who could make a better man of Sebastian, but he would have to give up his life at Chevron to go adventuring with Anquetil. Despite his superficial existence, I can’t help liking Sebastian because of his love for the family estate. It is real. He doesn’t weigh it to see what it is worth. He looks upon the beauty and the people with true love and affection. This is certainly Vita Sackville-West peering through her character’s eyes for a moment. She never inherited her family estate at Knole House, and for the rest of her life she pined for the person she was when she lived there.
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Portrait of Vita Sackville-West by William Strang.
Sebastian knows he will never find another to match Sylvia, so he tries romancing a series of very different women. There is Theresa, the Doctor’s wife, whom he is sure he can woo with the glamor of his life that she admits to be so enamored with, but despite his most charming efforts, she proves obstinate in maintaining her faithfulness to her husband. There is a pretty estate girl who is ushered off stage by his mother once things start to look serious. He finds a bohemian girl by the name of Phil ,who sees the world and her place in it with clearer eyes than Sebastian. ”With her black hair cut square; her red, generous mouth; her thick white throat; and brilliant colours; especially when she crouched gipsy-like, over her guitar.”
He asks her if she would marry him. She laughs at his naivete. As crazy as it seems to even consider marrying a coarse girl several class rungs below him, he is just trying desperately to escape his predestination. He can’t help but ask himself, isn’t there more than this?
And then Anquetil reappears.
So who is this Vita Sackville-West?
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Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West in 1933.
Vita Sackville-West had an open marriage with the writer and politician Harold Nicolson. They were both bi-sexual and had numerous affairs during their marriage. The most famous of these affairs was between Vita and Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrote the book Orlando and based the main character on Vita. This book was what Vita’s son Nigel called ”The longest and most charming love letter in the history of literature.”
This book, The Edwardians, came out in 1930 and was published by the Woolf owned Hogarth Press. It was a smashing success. The world was mired in a recession, and the book hearkened back to better days. It was selling 800 copies a day and by the end of six months had sold over 20,000 copies. The Edwardian age was long passed, and people were looking back at that last extravagant age as a time that would never come again. It might seem odd that the lower classes were so fascinated with the upper classes during a time of economic struggle, but if we don’t know about such people and the lives they lead, how can we dream?
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Part of the restored gardens at Sissinghurst.
Sackville-West never did recover her family estate, but she did buy the moldering remains of Sissinghurst, an estate that used to belong to another ancestor long before. The money from the success of this book helped to restore it to better than its former glory.
I have recently read a biography of Edward the VII called The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince so there was certainly some added enjoyment for me when Edward, known as Bertie, would be seen loitering at one of these high society events. The people reading this book in 1930 would have recognized many of the thinly disguised, real life people used as characters in this novel. In the front of the book, Sackville-West states: ”No character in this book is wholly fictitious.”
”The accession of an overweight fifty-nine-year-old philanderer hardly thrilled the imagination. ‘We grovel before fat Edward---Edward the Caresser as”The accession of an overweight fifty-nine-year-old philanderer hardly thrilled the imagination. ‘We grovel before fat Edward---Edward the Caresser as he is privately named,’ wrote Henry James, who thought the new King was ‘quite particularly vulgar!’ Rudyard Kipling referred to him as a ‘corpulent voluptuary.’
Few kings have come to the throne amid lower expectations.”
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It wasn’t that he was getting bigger. It was that his uniforms were shrinking.
The expectations on Edward, or Bertie as the family called him, were high. His father, Albert, hired a succession of tutors who kept him studying from early in the morning until late at night. He did not do well at his studies, which could have something to do with the insane hours he was supposed to be assimilating new information, or it could have had a lot to do with the brilliance of his older sister, Victoria or Vicky, who excelled at her studies. His best did not compete with hers. I don’t need a psychology degree to understand how easily it would be for a decent student to become a bad student if all he meets is perceived failure.
Victoria and Albert had a very close relationship, although early in the marriage there was a power struggle that almost swamped the marriage. Albert asserted himself and believed that he was more powerful than what the Queen was willing to let him be. It was eventually worked out to mutual satisfaction. A similar circumstance existed between Elizabeth and Philip early in their marriage. In both cases, some of the issues existed more with people surrounding the circumstances who believed that it was better to have a man in control than a woman.
Bertie went on maneuvers with the military in Ireland to gain some experience, and while there, he decided that he also needed to gain some experience in another area of maneuvers called wrestling with an actress/prostitute.
Albert and Victoria were informed. Now, what kind of squinty-eyed, arse kisser turned the lad in? Regardless, Albert rushed to Ireland to give this twenty-year-old “boy” a tongue lashing. When he got back, he sickened and died at the tender age of 42. Victoria was inconsolable and blamed Bertie for his father’s death for the rest of her life. ”This book has revealed the angry feelings---at times murderous---of Victoria toward her eldest son. It sometimes seemed that she could never forgive Bertie for his ‘Fall’, which, she believed, had caused Albert’s illness and death.”
There were other issues, like the fact that he didn’t look like or act like his father. She had expected a carbon copy of Albert, and she got someone who was quite different from herself or from her husband. He was Bertie, all original, and by hereditary right, despite his mother’s feelings, he was going to be the next King of England. The Prince of Wales, knowing that he could never please his mother or ever really receive her forgiveness, concentrated instead on pleasing and forgiving himself.
He married the beautiful Alexandra (Alix) of Denmark. Even as she got older, she retained her loveliness, and even her three daughters, obviously much younger than her, could not rival her in any of the photographs that they took together. ”Alix developed her own distinctive style--not cutting edge, but always right for every occasion. Conscious of her beauty---how could she not be?---she thrived on the admiring glances she attracted in glittering ballrooms.”
Bertie loved her, but he couldn’t be faithful to her. He, after all, was…
Edward the Caresser.
There are women, 55 by someone’s count, with whom he had some type of improper relationship. For the most part, they were married women, which makes me think, the author Jane Ridley did not assert this, that his attraction to Dames instead of Lasses might have something to do with receiving affection that he never received from his mother. Not an excuse mind you, but he was in constant need of comfort and reassurance. How could one woman give a man in need of that much ego enough of either? He also sought comfort in food. His appetite was monstrous, and soon he became that rotund individual that Henry James (who was not exactly a stringbean) and Rudyard Kipling made fun of in print.
Did his mistresses lie back, close their eyes, and think of England?
I do feel bad for Bertie because his life was never easy, but I feel worse for Alix, who did everything that was expected of her, including giving him an heir but also a spare who turned out to be necessary. Despite all his failings, and she was well aware of them, she always loved him. In a world where spouses routinely condemn one another for any failings, I found her stoicism, her loyalty, and her grace something to admire.
Sometimes it is good to start out with everyone having such extremely low expectations. Strangely enough, Bertie turned out to be pretty good at the King business. His mother had retired from public life, becoming almost a recluse, and he and Alix had filled in the role of Royalty whenever they could. When he became King, he brought back the pageantry of the position that had not been seen in a long time. He issued more commemorative medals and made sure he was publicly available for special events. He had a vision of creating a more liberal Europe. (The death of Rudolf in Austria was a huge blow to his efforts. He felt, like many do, that the Germans had a hand in that “suicide.”) He built on what his parents began by fostering alliances through the marriages of his siblings and children. He negotiated peace, which was admirable, but through those assurances he enlisted from various countries, he may have actually laid the groundwork for WW1.
That is called a swift kick in the old buttocks
Doesn’t it always seem like when someone tries to change the direction of history for the better that, ultimately, the world shrugs its shoulders, and things manage to align themselves back in the same groove or actually make things worse? Things going wrong have a much bigger impact on us, and all we can think about are those WHAT IFS that would have made things better. When things go right, we don’t think about how things could have went very, very badly.
When Edward the VII died, I was shocked that my eyes actually teared up. I would like to blame the horseradish sauce that was on my cheeseburger, but all I can really think is that I’d spent so many hours with Bertie that I actually felt like I knew him. Well written biographies do that for readers.
Alix, of course, did her final duty for Bertie. ”When the coffin was lowered into the vault, she knelt down and covered her face with both her hands, and everyone wept. Margot watched from her seat in the choir nearby: ‘That single mourning figure kneeling under the faded banners and coloured light, will always remain among the most beautiful memories of my life.’”
”A good cook will always find work, even without a character, and can get a new character in twelve months, and better herself, which, God helping me,”A good cook will always find work, even without a character, and can get a new character in twelve months, and better herself, which, God helping me, I shall do, and keep a more watchful eye, next time, on my flesh, now I know it better.”
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The Dell paperback cover. The poor lass will catch a chill.
Sara will be known by many names in her lifetime, but the one that seems to stick is Mrs. Sara Monday. She is writing her story from a prison cell, and though she admits some fault in her circumstances, she will make the case that her intentions are always almost innocent. You will also learn, as you navigate the uncertain waters of her life, that she is an unreliable narrator.
When she takes a position in a well to do household, she is just there to enjoy the work and has no designs on finding a husband, but soon Matthew Monday, the son and heir, is pursuing her relentlessly. She insists that she tries to dissuade him, but she did meet him on the back stairs a time or two, so it is no wonder that Matthew was not dissuaded.
She is not as pretty as some, nor as ugly as others. She is a well built woman, maybe heavier than what is thought to be fashionable. She is not a petite dove by any means. She knows that she has her share of flaws to overcome, so being a bit aggressive just really levels the playing field. Matthew may have thought it was his idea to marry Sara, but there is something whispering in the background of this whole situation that makes me believe that Sara may have protested her innocence as she was panting on his neck.
”So it was every night. I even made it seem welcome to please the man, for I thought, if I must give him his pleasure, it was waste not to give him all that I could.”
And that is a philosophy she follows her whole life.
Sara has a bit of a misunderstanding regarding a rich, married man in the neighborhood. It is all smoothed over, but it was a close thing, falling just short of open scandal. She didn’t mean to tickle such a desire in the man. She only wanted him to help her husband advance in society.
*Raised Eyebrow*
When Matthew decides to move an artist by the name of Gulley Jimson into the household to allow Jimson the freedom to advance his art unfettered by the distractions of bills or the want of food, I hear the first rumbles of thunder of an approaching storm. Jimson is a notorious womanizer, as are any painters worthy of the name artist. He talks Sara into letting him draw her hand or arm or face and asks to see her legs, but given that Sara is a “pious woman,” she doesn’t allow that. Putting Jimson and Sara together in the same room is like mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter together.
BOOM!
In a few years, Sara is known as Mrs. Jimson, though she is not really Mrs. Jimson, but then that is a whole other story for you to read about. Let’s just say that she and Jimson have a long relationship that spans many years and becomes one of the main reasons why she is telling her tale from behind iron bars.
After her husband dies and she has froliced around a bit with Mr. Jimson, she eventually finds herself working as a domestic again. There was a bit of a misunderstanding about some checks that were written that were not properly covered in a timely fashion. It is, as she says, a brush with the law. She takes a job working for Mr. Tom Wilcher. The agency that finds her the job cautions her that Wilcher has had a few issues. ”Mr. Wilcher had sometimes squeezed one of the maids a little or pinched her, or perhaps shown her something that he had better have kept to himself, and that he had been warned by the police, more than once.”
Goodness, that sounds like a place that a “pious” woman, like Sara Monday/Jimson, should avoid.
She takes the job.
Difficult situations sometimes create opportunities for a woman on the verge of desperate financial ruin.
Jimson continues to hound her, not so much wanting her back as wanting her to help support him. She pays him the extorted amount every week, basically to keep him away. She is happy in her new position, and Mr. Tom Wilcher, a lifetime bachelor, is, after all, very lonely.
I was putting the John Franklin Bardin book I’d just finished reading back on the shelf in my library when my eye caught the dust jacket of First Trilogyby Joyce Cary. I remembered reading something years ago that had prompted me to buy this book. I just couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. I started reading the first few pages of the first novel and sat down on the stairs (my library is in the basement) to be more comfortable. Next thing I knew, I’d read 50 pages. The book managed to jump in front of the pile of books I have upstairs on my bedroom dresser that constitutes my MUST READ IMMEDIATELY PILE.
Gully Jimson is a character in all three books. The second book, To Be a Pilgrim, focuses on the life of Tom Wilcher, otherwise known as the maid pincher. The third book, The Horse’s Mouth is Joyce Cary’s most well regarded and most well loved book and focuses on Gully Jimson. I will definitely be reading the other two books, as well.
The interesting thing is the book has a personalized bookplate, a rather disturbing image actually, from a Cincinnati lawyer who owned his own law firm. Thank you, google. He died in 1980. Books are so portable and, during their lifetimes, sometimes move all over the countryside. They acquire a history with each new set of hands who own them. I wonder who owned this book between Mr. Strauss and myself, or did this book languish in a bookstore until I bought it over the internet? The book, if ever it was purposeless, has achieved a new purpose bringing the prose of Joyce Cary to the mind of a reader in Dodge City, Kansas.
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Book plate. There is a sticker of Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books Cincinnati on the inside cover as well.
The book is a bit bawdy, but never thunderously so. The reader is expected to read much into the sometimes cryptic or elusive facts that Sara chooses to share. There is a jauntiness to the book that brought a smile to my lips at several points. I couldn’t help liking Sara and her views of the world. She seems like the type of gal, in a different period of my life, I would have loved to share a pint with and maybe steal an afternoon of her time.
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