Stalwarts of wintertime reading
WINTERTIME gives extra hours of darkness in which to reread trustworthy books. Steadfast sturdy stalwarts!
Persuasion
Jane Austen’s last completed novel is distinctly autumnal. Its heroine resembles Fanny Price more than Emma or Elizabeth Bennet, in having little power or initiative. Anne Elliot’s worth is measured by fortitude and compassion. She’s almost a trapped spectator of her own fate; almost but not quite. She never laughs. But therefore the relief and release of the ending become greater. How poorly fathers show in the big six novels! (Mothers ditto.) Absent, wimpish, or selfabsorbed like Anne’s awful father, Sir Thomas Elliot (Bart).
Snippet
Anne doesn’t laugh even at the comment made about her father’s dressingroom by his new tenant, Admiral Croft: I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life. Such a number of lookingglasses! Oh Lord! There was no getting away from oneself! That’s Sir Thomas (Bart) in a brilliant nutshell: he doesn’t,
he can’t, he won’t ‘‘get away from himself’’.
Gilbert White (1788)
Every page of the Natural History of Selborne is filled with thoughtladen observation. Q.
Which birds sing on the wing? A. Skylark, Titlark, Woodlark, Blackbird, Whitethroat, Swallow, and Wren. And ‘‘All birds that continue in full song till after Midsummer appear to me to breed more than once’’. Discuss!
Eve Palmer
Similarly dense, but interested in many more lifeforms, is Eve Palmer in the
Plains of Camdeboo, about her family’s farm in the Karoo region of South Africa. In the chapter ‘‘Bones and Stones’’ she observes: ‘‘I do not believe there is such a thing as a mild interest in fossilhunting. It is all or nothing.’’ Like the scientist (Broom) who burst into the lab of the discoverer of
Australopithecus (‘‘Southern Ape’’), and dropped to his knees before the skull, ‘‘in adoration of our ancestor’’. His definition of a bad day’s fossilhunting was finding ‘‘Nothing but bloody diamonds’’. The splendid stories come thick and fast.
Orwell’s essays
An essay is a piece of writing which ‘‘essays’’ (tries) to think something out. My copy of eight such attempts by George Orwell
(Penguin 2000) gathers up The Common Toad, P.G. Wodehouse, The Vicar of Bray, Gulliver’s Travels, Tolstoy on King Lear, Shooting an Elephant, English
Cooking, and Salvador Dali.
What on earth connects the toad essay with those on books, politics, and the rest? A sense of truth mislaid or suppressed. English cooking is not all awful. Colonial rule, in which Orwell took a role in Burma, falsifies human relations: he does a thing which disgusts him, for the sake of appearances. Tolstoy detested King Lear because his own driving energy made him a Lear in his own family (‘‘spiritual tyranny’’). The renewal of life in the starving springtime toad joins everything else in nature’s renewal which makes us look forward to life, despite evidence that the future will be worse than the past. Cheerfulness will break out . . .
Friday the Thirteenth
. . . even in the highly serious essays of Atul Gawande. Rational as doctors are trained to be, some still tread warily on Friday the thirteenth, he says, because Things Happen Then. He heedlessly put his name down for emergency night duty on Friday 13, also a full moon, and found himself far busier than usual. How come? Medics of Otago, what happens here on such days of ill omen?